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University of Wisconsin-Madison NewsPoverty may have direct implications for important, early steps in the development of the brain, saddling children of low-income families with slower rates of growth in two key brain structures, according to researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
By age 4, children in families living with incomes under 200 percent of the federal poverty line have less gray matter -- brain tissue critical for processing of information and execution of actions -- than kids growing up in families with higher incomes.
"This is an important link between poverty and biology. We're watching how poverty gets under the skin," says Barbara Wolfe, professor of economics, population health sciences and public affairs and one of the authors of the study, published today in the journal PLOS ONE.
The differences among children of the poor became apparent through analysis of hundreds of brain scans from children beginning soon after birth and repeated every few months until 4 years of age. Children in poor families lagged behind in the development of the parietal and frontal regions of the brain -- deficits that help explain behavioral, learning and attention problems more common among disadvantaged children.
The parietal lobe works as the network hub of the brain, connecting disparate parts to make use of stored or incoming information. The frontal lobe, according to UW-Madison psychology professor Seth Pollak, is one of the last parts of the brain to develop.
"It's the executive. It's the part of the brain we use to control our attention and regulate our behavior," Pollak says. "Those are difficulties children have when transitioning to kindergarten, when educational disparities begin: Are you able to pay attention? Can you avoid a tantrum and stay in your seat? Can you make yourself work on a project?"
The maturation gap of children in poor families is more startling for the lack of difference at birth among the children studied.
"One of the things that is important here is that the infants' brains look very similar at birth," says Pollak, whose work is funded by the National Institutes of Health. "You start seeing the separation in brain growth between the children living in poverty and the more affluent children increase over time, which really implicates the postnatal environment."
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Nicholas KristofAs readers know, one of my hobby horses is the need for early childhood education as the most cost-effective way to break the cycles of poverty in America. But the issue never gets much traction, and one reason is the perception that it's politically hopeless: Republicans would never go for such a program. My Sunday column tries to push back at the assumption that it's hopeless and notes that one of the leaders in providing pre-K in America is-not Massachusetts, not New York, not some other blue state, but reliably red Oklahoma. It's all the more surprising because Oklahoma spends less per pupil on education than almost any other state, and pays its teachers near the bottom. This is not a state that believes in lavish spending on schooling. Yet, quite remarkably, it provides universal high-quality pre-K, with a ratio of no more than 10 students per staff member, and all teachers have a college degree.
My own take is that even earlier interventions may get even more bang for the buck than pre-K for 4-year-olds, and sure enough Oklahoma also invests in those, including home visitation programs to coach parents on reading to toddlers and talking more to them. It also has some programs for kids 0 to 3 if they're from disadvantaged families. These are no silver bullet to defeat poverty-there isn't one-but there seems a recognition in Oklahoma that they work in improving school performance and life outcomes and reduce the risk that poverty will be transmitted from generation to generation. So if Oklahoma can do it, why not the rest of the country?
Bipartisan legislation is expected to be introduced this coming week in Congress to establish national support for pre-K programs, and polling shows the idea has broad support. It'll be an uphill struggle, but I'm hoping that Congress will, like Oklahoma, see that this isn't a social welfare program exactly, but an investment in our children and our future. Read the column and help spread the word about the need for this legislation!
The column: "Oklahoma! Where the Kids Learn Early"
"The aim is to break the cycle of poverty, which is about so much more than a lack of money."
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Exposure to poverty in early childhood negatively affects brain development, but good-quality caregiving may help offset this effect, new research suggests. A longitudinal imaging study shows that young children exposed to poverty have smaller white and cortical gray matter as well as hippocampal and amygdala volumes, as measured during school age and early adolescence.
"These findings extend the substantial body of behavioral data demonstrating the deleterious effects of poverty on child developmental outcomes into the neurodevelopmental domain and are consistent with prior results," the investigators, with lead author Joan Luby, MD, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, write.
However, the investigators also found that the effects of poverty on hippocampal volume were influenced by caregiving and stressful life events.
The study was published online October 28 in JAMA Pediatrics.
Powerful Risk Factor
Poverty is one of the most powerful risk factors for poor developmental outcomes; a large body of research shows that children exposed to poverty have poorer cognitive outcomes and school performance and are at greater risk for antisocial behaviors and mental disorders. However, the researchers note, there are few neurobiological data in humans to inform the mechanism of these relationships.
"This represents a critical gap in the literature and an urgent national and global public health problem based on statistics that more than 1 in 5 children are now living below the poverty line in the United States alone," the authors write.
To examine the effects of poverty on childhood brain development and to understand what factors might mediate its negative impact, the researchers used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to examine total white and cortical gray matter as well as hippocampal and amygdala volumes in 145 children aged 6 to 12 years who had been followed since preschool.
The researchers looked at caregiver support/hostility, measured observationally during the preschool period, and stressful life events, measured prospectively. The children underwent annual behavioral assessments for 3 to 6 years prior to MRI scanning and were annually assessed for 5 to 10 years following brain imaging. Household poverty was measured using the federal income-to-needs ratio.
"Toxic" Effect
The researchers found that poverty was associated with lower hippocampal volumes, but they also found that caregiving behaviors and stressful life events could fully mediate this negative effect.
"The finding that the effects of poverty on hippocampal development are mediated through caregiving and stressful life events further underscores the importance of high-quality early childhood caregiving, a task that can be achieved through parenting education and support, as well as through preschool programs that provide high-quality supplementary caregiving and safe haven to vulnerable young children," the investigators write.
In an accompanying editorial, Charles A. Nelson, PhD, Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, in Massachusetts, notes that the findings show that early experience "weaves its way into the neural and biological infrastructure of the child in such a way as to impact development trajectories and outcomes."
"Exposure to early life adversity should be considered no less toxic than exposure to lead, alcohol or cocaine, and, as such it merits similar attention from health authorities," Dr. Nelson writes.
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Motoko Rich (NYT)Nearly two decades ago, a landmark study found that by age 3, the children of wealthier professionals have heard words millions more times than those of less educated parents, giving them a distinct advantage in school and suggesting the need for increased investment in prekindergarten programs.
Now a follow-up study has found a language gap as early as 18 months, heightening the policy debate.
The new research by Anne Fernald, a psychologist at Stanford University, which was published in Developmental Science this year, showed that at 18 months children from wealthier homes could identify pictures of simple words they knew -- "dog" or "ball" -- much faster than children from low-income families. By age 2, the study found, affluent children had learned 30 percent more words in the intervening months than the children from low-income homes.
The new findings, although based on a small sample, reinforced the earlier research showing that because professional parents speak so much more to their children, the children hear 30 million more words by age 3 than children from low-income households, early literacy experts, preschool directors and pediatricians said. In the new study, the children of affluent households came from communities where the median income per capita was $69,000; the low-income children came from communities with a median income per capita of $23,900.
Since oral language and vocabulary are so connected to reading comprehension, the most disadvantaged children face increased challenges once they enter school and start learning to read.
"That gap just gets bigger and bigger," said Kris Perry, executive director of the First Five Years Fund, an advocate of early education for low-income children. "That gap is very real and very hard to undo."
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Alison Gopnik
Changes in our environment can actually transform the relation between our traits and the outside world.
We all notice that some people are smarter than others. You might naturally wonder how much these differences in intelligence depend on genes or upbringing. But that question, it turns out, is impossible to answer. That's because changes in our environment can actually transform the relationship among our traits, our upbringing and our genes.
The textbook illustration of this is a dreadful disease called PKU. Some babies have a genetic mutation that makes them unable to process an amino acid in their food, and it leads to severe mental retardation. For centuries, PKU was incurable. Genetics determined whether someone suffered from the syndrome, which gave them a low IQ. Then scientists discovered how PKU works. Now, we can immediately put babies with the mutation on a special diet. Whether a baby with PKU has a low IQ is now determined by the food they eat--by their environment.
We humans can figure out how our environment works and act to change it, as we did with PKU. So if you're trying to measure the relative influence of human nature and nurture, you have to consider not just the current environment but also all the possible environments that we can create. This doesn't just apply to obscure diseases. In the latest issue of Psychological Science, Timothy C. Bates of the University of Edinburgh and colleagues report a study of the relationship among genes, SES (socio-economic status, or how rich and educated you are) and IQ. They used statistics to analyze the differences between identical twins, who share all DNA, and fraternal twins, who share only some.
When psychologists first started studying twins, they found identical twins much more likely to have similar IQs than fraternal ones. They concluded that IQ was highly "heritable"--that is, due to genetic differences. But those were all high SES twins. Erik Turkheimer of the University of Virginia and his colleagues discovered that the picture was very different for poor, low-SES twins. For these children, there was very little difference between identical and fraternal twins: IQ was hardly heritable at all. Differences in the environment, like whether you lucked out with a good teacher, seemed to be much more important.
In the new study, the Bates team found this was even true when those children grew up. IQ was much less heritable for people who had grown up poor. This might seem paradoxical: After all, your DNA stays the same no matter how you are raised. The explanation is that IQ is influenced by education. Historically, absolute IQ scores have risen substantially as we've changed our environment so that more people go to school longer.
Richer children have similarly good educational opportunities, so genetic differences among them become more apparent. And since richer children have more educational choice, they (or their parents) can choose environments that accentuate and amplify their particular skills. A child who has genetic abilities that make her just slightly better at math may be more likely to take a math class, so she becomes even better at math.
But for poor children, haphazard differences in educational opportunity swamp genetic differences. Ending up in a terrible school or one a bit better can make a big difference. And poor children have fewer opportunities to tailor their education to their particular strengths. How your genes shape your intelligence depends on whether you live in a world with no schooling at all, a world where you need good luck to get a good education or a world with rich educational possibilities. If we could change the world for the PKU babies, we can change it for the next generation of poor children, too.
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Wisconsin State Journal editorial
About a third of kindergartners in Madison schools miss 10 or more days of classes. And a fifth are "chronically absent," meaning they miss 18 or more days, which is at least 10 percent of the school year.Attendance improves by fifth grade and into middle school, then falls when students reach high school.
That's why the United Way of Dane County this fall plans to emphasize in new ways the need for young parents to establish strong habits for children going to school every day (barring illness).
The effort -- dubbed "Here!" -- will stress the correlation between good attendance and academic success. It will include promotional materials at schools, follow-up calls to parents and encouragement from community leaders such as church pastors who will include the message in their sermons.
"We shouldn't be surprised that the (high school) graduation rate is about the same as the attendance rate," said Deedra Atkinson, the United Way's senior vice president of community impact and marketing.
The nonprofit, as it launches its annual fundraiser today, also is committing more attention and resources to helping high school dropouts earn diplomas and find work.
The United Way does so much good work for our community that it deserves your financial support and time. The public is welcome at today's lunch and launch of the United Way's annual Days of Caring. So far, the number of volunteers is up about 400 people from last year, to 3,500.
The group's annual fundraising goal is $18.1 million, up 3 percent from last year's total collected, said campaign chairman Doug Nelson, regional president of BMO Harris Bank.
The United Way of Dane County will host its annual Days of Caring this week, starting today with a lunch and campaign kickoff at Willow Island at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. The public is welcome. To donate to the nonprofit's fundraising effort go to www.unitedwaydanecounty.org or call 608-246-4350. To volunteer, visit www.volunteeryourtime.org or call 608-246-4357. Donate your time; donate your money.
Please help if you can.
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I AM a proud member of a small, emerging class of minority women with careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics -- the STEM fields for short. As a professor at Yale University and a scientist in the field of tissue engineering, or regenerative medicine, I'm often asked how I got to where I am. I usually respond with stories of my early interest in problem-solving and puzzles.
But if I really reflect on how I, a Latina from Las Vegas, was able to become a scientist at an elite university, it wasn't my own curiosity. It was the influence of a blackjack dealer who also happens to be my mother.
My mother may not know the ins and outs of academia, but she taught me the essential ingredients needed to make it as a scientist in a white, male-dominated field.
A blackjack dealer works for tips. As you can imagine, a stodgy personality will not do well in a profession where you have to entertain a diverse clientele. My mother can interact with wealthy families from faraway continents as capably as she does with the locals.
As a professor and researcher, I interact with students and colleagues from all over the world, and I must communicate with each of them in an intellectual yet relatable manner. If I fail to do so, the far-reaching implications of my work are lost on the audience.
My mother's most powerful weapon is her sense of humor. Her smile draws customers to the table, and once they are there she can gently tease a shy person into conversation or draw guffaws from an abrasive personality with a crude joke.
Likewise, whether dealing with an egotistic colleague or an insecure or disengaged student, the ability to find common ground and laugh together is the closest thing that we in academia have to a magic bullet.
My students can easily become bored or distracted when I discuss the chemistry behind metal oxidation. However, when I relate the science to descriptions of "bling-blinging rims" on car wheels, I am guaranteed a look of shock, an outburst of laughter and enough attention to relate the basics of the oxidative process. These kinds of interactions have led to the most professionally and personally rewarding experiences I've had as a professor.
My mother never gave up. She raised my brother and me on her own. I cannot recall a time in my life when she did not work. As a single mother, she provided the only source of income to our small family. I know there were days that she wanted to walk out of the casino and never return. Anyone who has worked in the service industry for over 30 years, as she has, knows the feeling. But an overriding sense of responsibility stopped my mom from doing so. I recall asking her, after she had spent a long night bent over the blackjack table, "How do you deal with all of those personalities every day?"
"What choice do we have?" she answered, referring to our family.
Even though I love my work, there are days when I want to run out of the lab or classroom, too. While not every day at work is the best, I stay for the "we," just like my mom. I've made a commitment to myself, my employers, my students, my own family, and anyone else who relies on my accomplishments. I don't have the choice to give up because I'm not really an "I" after all.
My mother was the first innovator I knew. Considered by her friends and family to be a creative genius, she can sew, crochet, paint, cook, sculpture, and do woodworking and metalworking. As fashion trends came and went, it was impractical for my mother to purchase name-brand designer clothes that I would outgrow within a season. She made me some harem pants that would have made MC Hammer jealous!
THE ingenuity and imagination behind this talent have become extremely valuable in my approach to engineering tissues and biomedical tools. In a field where inventiveness and innovation are keys to success, reallocating existing technologies and developing highly effective, yet low-cost, solutions to biomedical problems is what I have come to do best. It's a little embarrassing now to think back on those harem pants, but I'll never regret witnessing my mom's ingenuity growing up.
Though she is not college educated and has been a blue-collar worker all of her life, my mom provided a model for much of my professional development. What are the odds?
This piece brings to mind Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's memoir, My Beloved World.
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Here's a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion.Whether you think it deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic, this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the question and had sufficient data to verify the answer.
What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.
One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.
To make this trend concrete, consider two children, one from a family with income of $165,000 and one from a family with income of $15,000. These incomes are at the 90th and 10th percentiles of the income distribution nationally, meaning that 10 percent of children today grow up in families with incomes below $15,000 and 10 percent grow up in families with incomes above $165,000.
In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children's success in school than race.
...
In San Francisco this week, more than 14,000 educators and education scholars have gathered for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. The theme this year is familiar: Can schools provide children a way out of poverty?
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If not the usual suspects, what's going on? It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.
...
But we need to do much more than expand and improve preschool and child care. There is a lot of discussion these days about investing in teachers and "improving teacher quality," but improving the quality of our parenting and of our children's earliest environments may be even more important. Let's invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.
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Tina Rosenberg, NYT
By the time a poor child is 1 year old, she has most likely already fallen behind middle-class children in her ability to talk, understand and learn. The gap between poor children and wealthier ones widens each year, and by high school it has become a chasm. American attempts to close this gap in schools have largely failed, and a consensus is starting to build that these attempts must start long before school -- before preschool, perhaps even before birth.
There is no consensus, however, about what form these attempts should take, because there is no consensus about the problem itself. What is it about poverty that limits a child's ability to learn? Researchers have answered the question in different ways: Is it exposure to lead? Character issues like a lack of self-control or failure to think of future consequences? The effects of high levels of stress hormones? The lack of a culture of reading?
Another idea, however, is creeping into the policy debate: that the key to early learning is talking -- specifically, a child's exposure to language spoken by parents and caretakers from birth to age 3, the more the better. It turns out, evidence is showing, that the much-ridiculed stream of parent-to-child baby talk -- Feel Teddy's nose! It's so soft! Cars make noise -- look, there's a yellow one! Baby feels hungry? Now Mommy is opening the refrigerator! -- is very, very important. (So put those smartphones away!)
The idea has been successfully put into practice a few times on a small scale, but it is about to get its first large-scale test, in Providence, R.I., which last month won the $5 million grand prize in Bloomberg Philanthropies' Mayors Challenge, beating 300 other cities for best new idea. In Providence, only one in three children enter school ready for kindergarten reading. The city already has a network of successful programs in which nurses, mentors, therapists and social workers regularly visit pregnant women, new parents and children in their homes, providing medical attention and advice, therapy, counseling and other services. Now Providence will train these home visitors to add a new service: creating family conversation.
The Providence Talks program will be based on research by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley at the University of Kansas, who in 1995 published a book, "Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children." (see here for a summary.) Hart and Risley were studying how parents of different socioeconomic backgrounds talked to their babies. Every month, the researchers visited the 42 families in the study and recorded an hour of parent-child interaction. They were looking for things like how much parents praised their children, what they talked about, whether the conversational tone was positive or negative. Then they waited till the children were 9, and examined how they were doing in school. In the meantime, they transcribed and analyzed every word on the tapes -- a process that took six years. "It wasn't until we'd collected our data that we realized that the important variable was how much talking the parents were doing," Risley told an interviewer later.
This is important stuff. Read the entire article here.
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t's college touring season, and many parents are on the road with their teenagers, driving from school to school and thinking about the college application -- and financial aid -- process that looms ahead.
Many baby boomers have already been through this stage with their kids, but because the generation spans about 20 years, others still have kids at home. So how should boomers plan to pay for school when, on average, students graduate from college in the U.S. with $25,000 in debt?
Ron Lieber, who writes about personal finance for The New York Times, tells Morning Edition's David Greene about planning strategies and pitfalls to avoid. Go to npr.org to read or listen to the rest of the story
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Educators and researchers have long recognized the importance of mastering reading by the end of third grade. Students who fail to reach this critical milestone often falter in the later grades and drop out before earning a high school diploma. Now, researchers have confirmed this link in the first national study to calculate high school graduation rates for children at different reading skill levels and with different poverty rates. Results of a longitudinal study of nearly 4,000 students find that those who don't read proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to leave school without a diploma than proficient readers. For the worst readers, those who couldn't master even the basic skills by third grade, the rate is nearly six times greater. While these struggling readers account for about a third of the students, they represent more than three fifths of those who eventually drop out or fail to graduate on time. What's more, the study shows that poverty has a powerful influence on graduation rates. The combined effect of reading poorly and living in poverty puts these children in double jeopardy.
The study relies on a unique national database of 3,975 students born between 1979 and 1989. The children's parents were surveyed every two years to determine the family's eco- nomic status and other factors, while the children's reading progress was tracked using the Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT) Reading Recognition subtest. The database re- ports whether students have finished high school by age 19, but does not indicate whether they actually dropped out.
For purposes of this study, the researchers divided the children into three reading groups which correspond roughly to the skill levels used in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP): proficient, basic and below basic. The children were also separated into three income categories: those who have never been poor, those who spent some time in poverty and those who have lived more than half the years surveyed in poverty.
The findings include:
-- One in six children who are not reading proficiently in third grade do not graduate from high school on time, a rate four times greater than that for proficient readers.
-- The rates are highest for the low, below-basic readers: 23 percent of these children drop out or fail to finish high school on time, compared to 9 percent of children with basic reading skills and 4 percent of proficient readers.
-- Overall, 22 percent of children who have lived in poverty do not graduate from high school, compared to 6 percent of those who have never been poor. This rises to 32 percent for students spending more than half of their childhood in poverty.
-- For children who were poor for at least a year and were not reading proficiently in third grade, the proportion that don't finish school rose to 26 percent. That's more than six times the rate for all proficient readers.
-- The rate was highest for poor Black and Hispanic students, at 31 and 33 percent respectively--or about eight times the rate for all proficient readers.
-- Even among poor children who were proficient readers in third grade, 11 percent still didn't finish high school. That compares to 9 percent of subpar third grade readers who have never been poor.
-- Among children who never lived in poverty, all but 2 percent of the best third- grade readers graduated from high school on time.
-- Graduation rates for Black and Hispanic students who were not proficient readers in third grade lagged far behind those for White students with the same reading skills.
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Alan Schwarz and Sarah CohenNearly one in five high school age boys in the United States and 11 percent of school-age children over all have received a medical diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to new data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
These rates reflect a marked rise over the last decade and could fuel growing concern among many doctors that the A.D.H.D. diagnosis and its medication are overused in American children.
The figures showed that an estimated 6.4 million children ages 4 through 17 had received an A.D.H.D. diagnosis at some point in their lives, a 16 percent increase since 2007 and a 41 percent rise in the past decade. About two-thirds of those with a current diagnosis receive prescriptions for stimulants like Ritalin or Adderall, which can drastically improve the lives of those with A.D.H.D. but can also lead to addiction, anxiety and occasionally psychosis.
"Those are astronomical numbers. I'm floored," said Dr. William Graf, a pediatric neurologist in New Haven and a professor at the Yale School of Medicine. He added, "Mild symptoms are being diagnosed so readily, which goes well beyond the disorder and beyond the zone of ambiguity to pure enhancement of children who are otherwise healthy."
Read more here.
A thoughtful (and personal) commentary here.
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Providence Journal
PROVIDENCE, R. I. -- Bloomberg Philanthropies has chosen Providence as the top winner of its Mayor Challenge.The $5 million prize will be used to implement Mayor Angel Taveras' initiative, Providence Talks, to increase the vocabulary of young students living in low-income homes before their fourth birthday. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg previously said the challenge was launched in the fall of 2012 to inspire innovation in local government, and spread the very best ideas. Three hundred and five cities competed, and Providence was awarded the top prize because it had "the best potential to take root and spread," read challenge rules. The initiative coincides with the mayor's goal to increase reading proficiency to 70 percent for entering fourth graders by 2015. In Providence, less than half of the district's fourth-grade students scored at or above proficiency on the state reading assessment in 2011.
More about "Providence Talks" here and here.
This initiative is based on the research done by Hart and Risley, as described in their book "Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Life of Young American Children."
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Roger Cohen
THIS is America's college town par excellence. Kids from all over the world flock to Boston to learn. I have a son who is a freshman here. Last autumn, as he entered school, I listened to warnings about the dangers of binge drinking. I think they missed the point. The real epidemic involves so-called smart drugs, particularly Adderall, an amphetamine prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (A.D.H.D.) but so freely available as to be the pill to take whenever academic pressure requires pulling an all-nighter with zero procrastination to get a paper done.
"Just popped an Addie, so I'm good to go" -- this sort of pretest attitude has become pervasive. Conversations with several students suggested Adderall was always available, costing from $2 to $5 a pill. Adderall has become to college what steroids are to baseball: an illicit performance enhancer for a fiercely competitive environment. What to say to doctors to get a prescription is now so widely known among students -- "It's like my thoughts are channel-surfing and I can't stop" -- as to have become a kind of joke.
"If there are no A.D.H.D. symptoms prior to college I have a very hard time writing a prescription," Jill Kasper, a pediatrician, told me. "But if somebody wants a prescription for Adderall, they can find someone to give it to them." The problem is that Adderall is dangerous, a Class 2 controlled substance like cocaine. While it has helped countless A.D.H.D. sufferers, it can also lead down a dark road of dependency, ever higher doses, fight-or-flight anxiety levels, sleeplessness and depression.
Here, in his own words, is the Adderall story of Steven Roderick, 24, a smart, soft-spoken, lost senior studying health science at the University of Massachusetts Boston:
I started taking it my first year in college. My performance had always fluctuated a lot. It was hard to pay attention, even in classes I was interested in. I was getting D's. I felt something had to change. Adderall flies around campus. The first time I took it I wrote a paper for an astronomy class that was out of this world. I could not believe it -- I was so inspired it made me want to be a doctor! I thought -- oh my God! -- this is the whole problem. You have the ability. You are intelligent. You just don't have the link between intelligence and the capacity to be productive. The pill is the link. I felt literally unstoppable.I went to the doctor, said I'd like to give Adderall a try. There were no diagnostic procedures. Doctors give in too easily. I did not think there could be a risk later on. I started on 20 milligrams. I went from D's and F's to straight A's. But your brain adapts, you have to increase the dose, and by 2011 I was up to 45 milligrams. In the spring of that year I started to feel Adderall was my best friend and my worst enemy at the same time. Because I could not sleep I went to see my psychopharm, and she prescribed me Ativan to sleep. That worked O.K. for a while. But I really ran into trouble last year. I was up to 65 milligrams, and then during finals went to 80, even 120, milligrams, and I was just locked into this Adderall-Ativan cycle. My doctor seemed scatterbrained. She'd prescribe something but not follow up.
It's a complicated dependency. I mean I never took Adderall to get high, never took it in a way that was not academically oriented; and I think there's a distinction between dependency and addiction, taking something for a purpose or for a rush. But I feel awful. My baseline anxiety level would be most people's highest anxiety level. The drop of a pin makes me spin around. I am living at home. My parents are clueless, and it is hard to discuss with them, although my Mom helps me now. I alternate between 'on' and 'off' states -- I come off the Adderall, take Ativan and sleep for days. I miss appointments. I know I need to go to the appointments, but I wonder if I will be functional enough.
Adderall suddenly turned its back on me. It enabled me to focus, got me to a higher place academically. But then I could no longer rely on it. I was on my own. And although I have less than three credits to go, I may have to withdraw from school because I have not been able to make it to enough classes. "Look, I am in a culture that constantly justifies the means to an end. So how do we persuade people not to take it? All you hear is how impossible it will be to get a job when you get out, and you are going more and more into debt, and you think without this I won't be top of the class. With other drugs you know you are ruining your life. But Adderall manipulates you into thinking you are doing what is needed to have a great life.
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Deborah Brauser
So-called "Internet addiction" is associated with increased depression and even druglike withdrawal symptoms, new research suggests.
A study of 60 adults in the United Kingdom showed that those who were classified as high Internet users had a significantly greater decrease in positive mood after logging off their computers than the participants classified as low Internet users.
"Internet addiction was [also] associated with long-standing depression, impulsive nonconformity, and autism traits," report the investigators, adding that the latter is "a novel finding."
"We were actually expecting that people who used the net a lot would display enhanced moods after use -- reflecting the positive reinforcing properties of the net," coinvestigator Phil Reed, DPhil, professor and chair in the Department of Psychology at Swansea University in the United Kingdom, told Medscape Medical News.
"So the key finding of an immediate increased negative mood, the withdrawal effect, was something of a surprise. But the more we looked into the literature, the more it seemed to fit the notion of an addictive disorder," added Dr. Reed.
He noted that the main takeaway message for clinicians is that some people may experience disruptions to their lives from excessive Internet use -- and that this can affect both their psychological and physical health.
In addition, patients "may need help exploring the reasons for this excessive use and what functions it serves in their lives."
The study was published online February 7 in PLoS One.
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The Daily BeastRecently, the Huffington Post published an article titled "I am Adam Lanza's mother" by a woman named Liza Long. The article presents a picture of a 13-year-old boy who threatened his mother, sometimes going so far as to pull a knife on her, scream obscenities at her, and leap out of cars as they're driving down the highway.
The rest of the world has reacted to the idea of such a child with horror and incomprehension. I sympathize with the horror. I can only wish that I shared the incomprehension. I understand, intimately, how Liza Long's son feels. I was like him.
Like the author of that piece, Liza Long, my mother had no idea what to do about my sudden transformation (in my case, around 16) into a borderline homicidal maniac. Like her son, I used knives to try and make my threats of violence seem more real. Like her son, I would leap out of our car in the middle of the road just to get away from my mother, over the most trivial of offenses. Like her son, I screamed obscenities at my mother shortly after moments of relative peace. And worse than this poor woman's son, whose mindset toward his peers we can only guess, I will admit that I fantasized multiple times about taking ordnance to my classmates.
By the logic which leads Liza Long to say, "I am Adam Lanza's mother," I have to say: "I was Adam Lanza."
This is a very honest, generous, and thought-provoking piece ... and one from an important source.
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Not long ago few doctors - not even pediatricians - concerned themselves much with nutrition. This has changed, and dramatically: As childhood obesity gains recognition as a true health crisis, more and more doctors are publicly expressing alarm at the impact the standard American diet is having on health."I never saw Type 2 diabetes during my training, 20 years ago," David Ludwig, a pediatrician, told me the other day, referring to what was once called "adult-onset" diabetes, the form that is often caused by obesity. "Never. Now about a quarter of the new diabetes cases we're seeing are Type 2."
Ludwig, who is director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center in Boston, is one of three authors, all medical doctors of an essay ("Viewpoint") in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association titled "Opportunities to Reduce Childhood Hunger and Obesity."
That title that would once have been impossible, but now it's merely paradoxical. Because the situation is this: 17 percent of children in the United States are obese, 16 percent are food-insecure (this means they have inconsistent access to food), and some number, which is impossible to nail down, are both. Seven times as many poor children are obese as those who are underweight, an indication that government aid in the form of food stamps, now officially called SNAP, does a good job of addressing hunger but encourages the consumption of unhealthy calories.
Given the role that nutrition plays -- from conception onward -- in brain development, learning, etc., clearly this is an achievement gap issue.
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A new study of elementary and middle school students has found that those who are the youngest in their grades score worse on standardized tests than their older classmates and are more likely to be prescribed stimulants for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
The findings suggest that in a given grade, students born at the end of the calendar year may be at a distinct disadvantage. Those perceived as having academic or behavioral problems may in fact be lagging simply as a result of being forced to compete with classmates almost a full year older than them. For a child as young as 5, a span of one year can account for 20 percent of the child's age, potentially making him or her appear significantly less mature than older classmates.
The new study found that the lower the grade, the greater the disparity. For children in the fourth grade, the researchers found that those in the youngest third of their class had an 80 to 90 percent increased risk of scoring in the lowest decile on standardized tests. They were also 50 percent more likely than the oldest third of their classmates to be prescribed stimulants for A.D.H.D. The differences diminished somewhat over time, the researchers found, but continued at least through the seventh grade.
The new study, published in the journal Pediatrics, used data from Iceland, where health and academic measures are tracked nationally and stimulant prescription rates are high and on par with rates in the United States. Previous studies carried out there and in other countries have shown similar patterns, even among college students.
Helga Zoega, the lead author of the study, said she had expected there would be performance differences between students in the youngest grades, but she did not know that the differences, including the disparity in stimulant prescribing rates, would continue over time.
"We were surprised to see that," said Dr. Zoega, a postdoctoral fellow at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and an assistant professor at the University of Iceland. "It may be that the youngest kids in class are just acting according to their age. But their behavior is thought of as symptoms of something else, rather than maturity."
In the study, Dr. Zoega and her colleagues tracked over 10,000 students born in Iceland in the mid-1990s, following them from fourth through seventh grade, or roughly ages 9 to 12. Iceland has detailed national registries containing health and academic information, so the researchers were able to compare students' scores on standardized tests and look at the medications prescribed to them.
The researchers then divided the subjects based on the months in which they were born. In Iceland, children start school in September of the calendar year in which they turn 6, and the nationwide birthday cutoff in schools is Jan. 1. So the oldest third in any grade are born between January and April. The middle third are born between May and August, and the youngest third are born between September and December.
The study showed that average test scores in mathematics and language arts, which covers grammar, literature and writing, were lowest among the youngest students in each class. On standardized tests at age 9, the children that made up the youngest third ranked, on average, about 11 percentile points lower in math and roughly 10 percentile points lower in language arts than their classmates who made up the oldest third. Compared to the oldest students, the younger ones were 90 percent more likely to earn low test scores in math and 80 percent more likely to receive low test scores in language arts. By the seventh grade, the risk had diminished somewhat, but the younger children were still 60 percent more likely to receive low test scores in both subjects.
A similar pattern was seen with A.D.H.D. medication, with students in the youngest third of their grade significantly more likely to receive stimulant prescriptions than their classmates in the oldest third. Dr. Zoega found that gender had some influence as well. Over all, girls scored higher than boys on tests, and had lower rates of stimulant prescriptions. But ultimately there was still an age effect among girls for both academic performance and the use of A.D.H.D. medication.
The findings dovetail with research carried out by two economists, Kelly Bedard and Elizabeth Dhuey. In looking at fourth graders around the world, the two found that the oldest children scored up to 12 percentile points higher than the youngest children. Their work, which was described in the best-selling 2008 book "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell, has shown a similar pattern among college students.
"At four-year colleges in the United States," Mr. Gladwell wrote, "students belonging to the relatively youngest group in their class are underrepresented by about 11.6 percent. That initial difference in maturity doesn't go away with time. It persists. And for thousands of students, that initial disadvantage is the difference between going to college -- and having a real shot at the middle class -- and not."
Dr. Zoega said she did not want her study to be seen as an indictment against stimulants. Instead, parents and educators should consider a child's age relative to his or her classmates when looking at poor grades and at any behavioral problems.
"Don't jump to conclusions when deciding whether a child has A.D.H.D.," she said. "It could be the maturity level. Keep in mind that he or she might not be performing as well as the older kids in the class, and that should not be a surprise."
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Betty Hart, whose research documenting how poor, working-class and professional parents speak to their young children helped establish the critical role that communicating with babies and toddlers has in their later development, died on Sept. 28 in Tucson. She was 85. The cause was lung cancer, said Dale Walker, a colleague and longtime friend. Dr. Hart was a graduate student at the University of Kansas in the 1960s when she began trying to help poor preschool children overcome speech and vocabulary deficits. But she and her colleagues later concluded that they had started too late in the children's lives -- that the ones they were trying to help could not simply "catch up" with extra intervention.
At the time, a prevalent view was that poor children were essentially beyond help, victims of circumstances and genetics. But Dr. Hart and some of her colleagues suspected otherwise and revisited the issue in the early 1980s, beginning research that would continue for a decade. "Rather than concede to the unmalleable forces of heredity, we decided that we would undertake research that would allow us to understand the disparate developmental trajectories we saw," she and her former graduate supervisor, Todd R. Risley, wrote in 1995 in "Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children," a book about their findings, which were reported in 1992. "We realized that if we were to understand how and when differences in developmental trajectories began, we needed to see what was happening to children at home at the very beginning of their vocabulary growth."
They began a two-and-a-half-year study of 42 families of various socioeconomic levels who had very young children. Starting when the children were between 7 and 9 months old, they recorded every word and utterance spoken to them and by them, as well as every parent-child interaction, over the course of one hour every month. It took many more years to transcribe and analyze the data, and the researchers were astonished by what they eventually found. "Simply in words heard, the average child on welfare was having half as much experience per hour (616 words per hour) as the average working-class child (1,251 words per hour) and less than one-third that of the average child in a professional family (2,153 words per hour)," Drs. Hart and Risley wrote.
"By age 4, the average child in a welfare family might have 13 million fewer words of cumulative experience than the average child in a working-class family," they added. They also found disparities in tone, in positive and negative feedback, and in other areas -- and that the disparities in speech and vocabulary acquisition persisted into school years and affected overall educational development.
"People kept thinking, 'Oh, we can catch kids up later,' and her big message was to start young and make sure the environment for young children is really rich in language," said Dr. Walker, an associate research professor at Kansas who worked with Dr. Hart and followed many of the children into their school years.
The work has become a touchstone in debates over education policy, including what kind of investments governments should make in early intervention programs. One nonprofit program whose goals are rooted in the findings is Reach Out and Read, which uses pediatric exam rooms to promote literacy for lower-income children beginning at 6 months old.
Prompted by the success of Reach Out and Read, Dr. Alan L. Mendelsohn, a developmental-behavioral pediatrician at Bellevue Hospital and New York University Langone Medical Center, pushed intervention even further. He created a program through Bellevue in which lower-income parents visiting doctors are filmed interacting and reading with their children and then given suggestions on how they can expand their speaking and interactions. "Hart and Risley's work really informed for me and many others the idea that maybe you could bridge the gap," Dr. Mendelsohn said, "or in jargon terms -- address the disparities."
Bettie Mackenzie Farnsworth was born on July 15, 1927, in Kerr County, Tex. (She spelled her name Betty even though it was Bettie on her birth certificate.) Her family moved to South Dakota when she was a girl, and her mother died when she was quite young, Dr. Walker said. Dr. Hart, who lived in Kansas City, Kan., graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1949, and later taught in a preschool laboratory at the University of Washington directed by Sidney W. Bijou, a psychologist who helped establish modern behavioral therapy for childhood disorders. She accepted a research position at the University of Kansas in the mid-1960s, and received her master's degree and Ph.D. there. She married John Hart in 1949; they divorced in 1961. Her three siblings are deceased, Dr. Walker said.
"Today, much of her research is being applied in many different ways," said Dr. Andrew Garner, the chairman of a work group on early brain and child development for the American Academy of Pediatrics. "I think you could also argue that the current interest in brain development and epigenetics reinforces at almost a molecular level what she had identified 20 years ago."
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Not too long ago, I witnessed a child, about two months shy of 3, welcome the return of some furniture to his family's apartment with the enthusiastic declaration "Ottoman is back!" The child understood that the stout cylindrical object from which he liked to jump had a name and that its absence had been caused by a visit to someone called "an upholsterer." The upholsterer, he realized, was responsible for converting the ottoman from one color or texture to another. Here was a child whose mother had prepared him, at the very least, for a future of reading World of Interiors.
Though conceivably much more as well. Despite the Manhattan parody to which a scene like this so easily gives rise, it is difficult to overstate the advantages arrogated to a child whose parent proceeds in a near constant mode of annotation. Reflexively, the affluent, ambitious parent is always talking, pointing out, explaining: Mommy is looking for her laptop; let's put on your rain boots; that's a pigeon, a sand dune, skyscraper, a pomegranate. The child, in essence, exists in continuous receipt of dictation.
Things are very different elsewhere on the class spectrum. Earlier in the year when I met Steven F. Wilson, founder of a network of charter schools that serve poor and largely black communities in Brooklyn, I asked him what he considered the greatest challenge on the first day of kindergarten each year. He answered, without a second's hesitation: "Word deficit." As it happens, in the '80s, the psychologists Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley spent years cataloging the number of words spoken to young children in dozens of families from different socioeconomic groups, and what they found was not only a disparity in the complexity of words used, but also astonishing differences in sheer number. Children of professionals were, on average, exposed to approximately 1,500 more words hourly than children growing up in poverty. This resulted in a gap of more than 32 million words by the time the children reached the age of 4.
This issue, though seemingly crucial, has been obscured in the recently intensified debate over the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test, the multiple-choice exam used as the sole metric for entrance into some of New York City's elite public high schools, including Stuyvesant and Bronx Science.
Thousands of students in the city are in the throes of preparing for the test to be administered the last weekend of this month. Two weeks ago, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, along with other organizations, filed a federal civil rights complaint challenging the single-score admissions process as perilously narrow and arguing that it negatively affected black and Hispanic children, who are grossly underrepresented in these schools, so long considered forceful agents of mobility.
As the complaint makes note, of the 967 eighth-grade students offered admission to Stuyvesant for the current school year, only 19 were black and 32 Hispanic. During the previous school year, only 3.5 percent of students at Bronx Science were black and 7.2 percent Hispanic. At Staten Island Tech, the figures were even lower. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg quickly defended the process, contending that it was so free of subjectivity that it must inherently be regarded as fair.
Others called the system Darwinian. The Education Department, required by state law to rely exclusively on the test, volunteered defensively that it offered free exam preparation to low-income students. The fact that so many children of means take costly tutorials to ready themselves for testing has always been a matter of concern to anyone hoping to see the racial imbalances redressed.
And yet, all of this focus on the test -- which examines reading comprehension, math skills, the ability to reason logically -- suggests a myopia of its own. Expanding the ranks of poor black and Hispanic children in the top high schools would seem to require infinitely more backtracking. Consider that Christa McAuliffe Middle School in Brooklyn, one of the major pipelines to top public high schools, last year had a student population that was 0.52 percent black.
As the education theorist E. D. Hirsch recently wrote in a review of Paul Tough's new book, "How Children Succeed," there is strong evidence that increasing the general knowledge and vocabulary of a child before age 6 is the single highest correlate with later success. Schools have an enormously hard time pushing through the deficiencies with which many children arrive.
According to state education data, a far higher percentage of children in New York City charter and district schools in grades three through eight score at the highest level (a four) in math than they do in what is known as English Language Arts. In the 2011-12 school year, only 3.2 percent of children in district schools scored at the four level on the end-of-year statewide English exam. (For charter schools, the figure was 1.9 percent.)
All of this would seem to argue for a system in which we spent ever more of our energies and money on early, preschool education rather than less. The city has taken the right direction with the announcement of a new preschool in Brownsville, Brooklyn, scheduled to open next year, that will start with children as young as 6 weeks old. But that's one program in a city where 7,500 children reached kindergarten this year without preschool preparation. Obviously we want equal opportunity; we also want children to know what words like "equal" and "opportunity" mean.
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In the 1990s, the term "digital divide" emerged to describe technology's haves and have-nots. It inspired many efforts to get the latest computing tools into the hands of all Americans, particularly low-income families. Those efforts have indeed shrunk the divide. But they have created an unintended side effect, one that is surprising and troubling to researchers and policy makers and that the government now wants to fix.
As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show. This growing time-wasting gap, policy makers and researchers say, is more a reflection of the ability of parents to monitor and limit how children use technology than of access to it.
"I'm not antitechnology at home, but it's not a savior," said Laura Robell, the principal at Elmhurst Community Prep, a public middle school in East Oakland, Calif., who has long doubted the value of putting a computer in every home without proper oversight. "So often we have parents come up to us and say, 'I have no idea how to monitor Facebook,' " she said.
The new divide is such a cause of concern for the Federal Communications Commission that it is considering a proposal to spend $200 million to create a digital literacy corps. This group of hundreds, even thousands, of trainers would fan out to schools and libraries to teach productive uses of computers for parents, students and job seekers. Separately, the commission will help send digital literacy trainers this fall to organizations like the Boys and Girls Club, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Some of the financial support for this program, part of a broader initiative called Connect2Compete, comes from private companies like Best Buy and Microsoft.
These efforts complement a handful of private and state projects aimed at paying for digital trainers to teach everything from basic keyboard use and word processing to how to apply for jobs online or use filters to block children from seeing online pornography. "Digital literacy is so important," said Julius Genachowski, chairman of the commission, adding that bridging the digital divide now also means "giving parents and students the tools and know-how to use technology for education and job-skills training."
F.C.C. officials and other policy makers say they still want to get computing devices into the hands of every American. That gaps remains wide -- according to the commission, about 65 percent of all Americans have broadband access at home, but that figure is 40 percent in households with less than $20,000 in annual income. Half of all Hispanics and 41 percent of African-American homes lack broadband.
But "access is not a panacea," said Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft. "Not only does it not solve problems, it mirrors and magnifies existing problems we've been ignoring." Like other researchers and policy makers, Ms. Boyd said the initial push to close the digital divide did not anticipate how computers would be used for entertainment. "We failed to account for this ahead of the curve," she said.
A study published in 2010 by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that children and teenagers whose parents do not have a college degree spent 90 minutes more per day exposed to media than children from higher socioeconomic families. In 1999, the difference was just 16 minutes.
The study found that children of parents who do not have a college degree spend 11.5 hours each day exposed to media from a variety of sources, including television, computer and other gadgets. That is an increase of 4 hours and 40 minutes per day since 1999. Children of more educated parents, generally understood as a proxy for higher socioeconomic status, also largely use their devices for entertainment. In families in which a parent has a college education or an advanced degree, Kaiser found, children use 10 hours of multimedia a day, a 3.5-hour jump since 1999. (Kaiser double counts time spent multitasking. If a child spends an hour simultaneously watching TV and surfing the Internet, the researchers counted two hours.)
"Despite the educational potential of computers, the reality is that their use for education or meaningful content creation is minuscule compared to their use for pure entertainment," said Vicky Rideout, author of the decade-long Kaiser study. "Instead of closing the achievement gap, they're widening the time-wasting gap." Policy makers and researchers say the challenges are heightened for parents and children with fewer resources -- the very people who were supposed to be helped by closing the digital divide.
The concerns are brought to life in families like those of Markiy Cook, a thoughtful 12-year-old in Oakland who loves technology. At home, where money is tight, his family has two laptops, an Xbox 360 and a Nintendo Wii, and he has his own phone. He uses them mostly for Facebook, YouTube, texting and playing games. He particularly likes playing them on the weekends. "I stay up all night, until like 7 in the morning," he said, laughing sheepishly. "It's why I'm so tired on Monday." His grades are suffering. His grade-point average is barely over 1.0, putting him at the bottom of his class. He wants to be a biologist when he grows up, he said. Markiy attends Elmhurst Community Prep, located in a rough area (the school has a tribute hanging in its hallway to a 15-year-old girl recently stabbed to death by the father of her baby). Thirty-five percent of the students, like Markiy, are black, and most of the rest are Hispanic.
Alejandro Zamora, 13, an eighth grader, calls himself "a Facebook freak." His mother, Olivia Montesdeoca, said she liked the idea of him using the computer (until it recently broke) but did not have much luck getting him to use it for homework. "He'd have a fit. He'd have a tantrum," she said, adding that she really did not understand some of what he did online. "I have no idea about YouTube. I've never even heard of a webcam." Ms. Robell, the principal, said children needed to know how to use technology to compete, but her priorities for her students were more basic: "Breakfast, lunch and dinner."
Many lower-income families take great pains to manage how their children use their devices. In Boston, Amy and Randolph Ross, neither of them a college graduate -- she works in a hospital and he at a bookstore -- recently bought their twin 15-year-old girls laptop computers as a reward for good grades. The parents make sure the computers are used mostly for homework or for the girls to explore their interest as budding musicians. "If you just buy the computer and don't guide them on the computer, of course it's going to be misused," Ms. Ross said.
Her mother-in-law, Edna Ross, the matriarch of their African-American family who lives nearby in Dorchester, Mass., feels the same way. She got a new Hewlett-Packard computer last year through a project funded by the National Institutes of Health intended to provide both access and nine months of digital literacy training.
Edna Ross is strict about how her grandchildren use the computer when they visit. One of her grandsons once sneaked onto the computer and put a picture of himself on his Facebook page making an obscene gesture. She told him if he could not control himself, he could not use the computer. Training, she said, is crucial. "If you already have a child who feels like anything goes and you put a computer in his hand," she said, "he's going to do the first negative thing he can find to do when he gets on the computer."
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You are cordially invited to attend the graduation ceremony for students of the UW-Madison Odyssey Project Class of 2011-2012. Project Director Emily Auerbach and Writing Coach Marshall Cook will present certificates attesting to students' successful completion of six introductory UW credits in English. UW-Madison Interim Chancellor David Ward will make congratulatory remarks.
From September to May, students in this rigorous humanities course have discussed great works of literature, American history, philosophy, and art history while developing skills in critical thinking and persuasive writing. The evening will include brief remarks or performances by each graduating student; recognition of supplemental teachers Jean Feraca, Gene Phillips, and Craig Werner; acknowledgment of Odyssey Project donors and supporters; and music and refreshments.
Web site: www.odyssey.wisc.edu
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Amy and Mark Denicore are headed to a full-blown trial to defend themselves against charges that they violated Virginia law by making their kids late to elementary school too often.The Loudoun County couple was arraigned Monday morning in juvenile and domestic relations court. Judge Pamela L. Brooks set a trial date of March 14.
The Denicores are each charged with three Class 3 misdemeanors, each of which carries a maximum fine of $500. Their three children, ages 6, 7 and 9, have been late to school almost 30 times since September. Most of their tardies were three minutes or less.
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How would you like to go to MIT - for free? You can now. Starting this spring, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will be offering free online courses to anyone, anywhere in the world, through its new digital arm, MITx. These courses will be much more than lectures on videotape. Students will be able to interact with other students online and have access to online labs and self-assessment tools. And here's the really revolutionary part: If you can show you've learned the material, for a small fee, MITx will give you a credential to prove it. No, it's not a full-blown MIT degree. But employers will probably be impressed.
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Madison school superintendent Dan Nerad unveiled his long awaited, and much anticipated plan (mp3 audio) to close the district's more than 40-year-old racial achievement gap Monday night before the full school board and around 75 citizens who packed into a room inside the Fitchburg library.Ideally, substantive program review in necessities such as reading and math would occur prior to the addition of new spending.The 109-page plan, titled "Building Our Future: The Preliminary Plan for Eliminating Gaps in MMSD Student Achievement," makes about 40 recommendations at a cost of $60.3 million over the next five years.
Several recommendations called for building on existing programs, like AVID/TOPS, an acclaimed program that focuses on students in the academic middle.
Others, like a "parent university," a model school for culturally relevant teaching, career academies within the high schools and a student-run youth court, would be new to the district.
Matthew DeFour helpfully puts dollars ($105,600,000 over 5 years, about 5.6% of the roughly $1,860,000,000 that the District will spend over the same period) to the proposal. How does that compare with current programs and the proposed the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school?
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I think going to university is now too expensive, time consuming, restrictive and potentially soul-destroying for people with talent to bother with anymore.University has become a terrible deal, and most ambitious people shouldn't go.
There, I said it.
I don't know why it's taken me so long to admit to myself that tuition fees, student loans, and the fact that any muppet who can write his or her own name now goes to university means it's a waste of time to do so.
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When my daughter was 18 months old, my husband and I decided to take her on a little summer holiday. We picked a coastal town that's a few hours by train from Paris, where we were living (I'm American, he's British), and booked a hotel room with a crib. Bean, as we call her, was our only child at this point, so forgive us for thinking: How hard could it be?We ate breakfast at the hotel, but we had to eat lunch and dinner at the little seafood restaurants around the old port. We quickly discovered that having two restaurant meals a day with a toddler deserved to be its own circle of hell.
Bean would take a brief interest in the food, but within a few minutes she was spilling salt shakers and tearing apart sugar packets. Then she demanded to be sprung from her high chair so she could dash around the restaurant and bolt dangerously toward the docks.
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This is my third and (I hope) last column in a series on education. If things work as planned this is where I'll make some broad generalizations that piss-off a lot of people, incite a small riot in the comments section, after which we'll all feel better and switch to discussing the Facebook IPO. So let's get to it. I believe that education is broken in the U.S. and probably everywhere else, that it is incapable of fixing itself, and our only significant hope is to be found in the wisdom of Sharon Osbourne.These conclusions are based on my experiences as a teacher, a parent, on the content of those two previous columns, one visit to OzzFest, and on my having this week read a couple books:
The Learning Edge: what technology can do to educate all children, by Alan Bain and Mark E. Weston.
Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools, by Roger Schank.
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Mary Battaglia kindly forwarded this email sent to the Madison School Board:
The high school graduation racial gap has been in the Madison news as though it only affects our fair city. It does not require much research, something the local media has failed to do, to see this is a national concern. According to an analysis called "Schott 50 State Report on Black Males in Public Education," nationally only 47% of black males graduated from high school in 2007. (1) It has been reported that Madison's graduation rate for black males is 50%. Obviously a pathetic rate compared to the 87% for whites, but what has not been a part of the local conversation is how Madison compares in relationship to the rest of the nation, and perhaps figure out where black males are graduating at a higher rate, and why. The Schott's report, revealed two communities with large minority populations with much better graduation outcomes than the rest of the nation, Baltimore and Fort Bend, Texas. What MMSD should be looking into is what are these cities doing, and what curricula or community effort has made them successful? One interesting part of the gap for Madison and the state of Wisconsin is the high rate of whites graduating. While Wisconsin is the worst defender in the racial gap, the states total graduation rate is one the highest in the nation.Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.When you read various assessments of the "reason" for the gap nationally, the theories include the lack of financial investment, lack of good teachers, and the lack of community structure. While I find these proposals reasonable, I fail to understand how in this community they are relevant. MMSD spends well over $13,000 per student, lack the overwhelming urban problems of Milwaukee and Chicago, and have many fine teachers that somehow get non-minority students educated. These excuses ring hallow as to why MMSD has such a poor rate. What does ring true is we are not educating the population as it exist today. In the last 25 years the MMSD's minority rate has increased from 20% to one closer to 48%. (2) In the last 25 years MMSD has changed from a district of less than 25% free and reduced lunch to one that is closer to 50%. (3)Madison is still teaching to the population of 25 years ago, the students have changed, but the curriculum has not.
Perhaps, MMSD could improve the graduation rate for all students, with a significant change of focus. For example, MMSD's high school's emphasize 4 year college candidates when many of the students would do better in a 2 year or technology school focus. There has been an increased coordination with MATC, but what would be beneficial is to offer a dual graduation for students, so as they graduate from MMSD, they also have a 2 year degree or a certificate from MATC. This is a system that has been successful in a high school in North Carolina. (4) A student that wants to head to college still has that opportunity and perhaps a chance to make some money to support the effort. Perhaps, another way to improve graduation outcomes would include an overhaul of the summer school program. Currently, MMSD summer school staff are paid poorly, the programs focus is mostly on students that have flunked their classes and need a recovery grade, and the programs poor reputation have lead many staff to discourage students from participating. (5) Why not invest in a comprehensive retooling of the summer program that provides a better salary for staff, and includes enrichment, regular classes, as well as recovery options. Let's find a creative summer program with smaller class sizes and build a program that is the envy of the country and one that works. If summer school is going to be provided, then make it an awesome program, not just a warehouse for failing kids. Perhaps, as most research reveals, early education is a key component to better graduation outcomes, and the district finally is getting a 4K program up and running after a decade long battle with the union.
Madison Prep was an idea, but it is a unique group of students that would select to participate in such a rigorous program, which means an already motivated student or parents with very high expectations, both factors that frequently mean a student would do well anyway. MMSD needs to look at students that may not be that motivated or academically talented and assess what works to keep them engaged. The one thing MMSD has no control over is probably the most important issue for a students outcome. Research concludes the number one predictor of a students academic success is parental expectations. (6) Our schools cannot change parental expectations, however, they can change what a student expects. MMSD students need to expect a positive future, a purpose and a reason to stay in school. Not all kids will succeed but more than half of the black male students should. Let's develop a district that gives all the students the opportunity to succeed.
blackboysreport.org
http://legistar.cityofmadison.com/attachments/3b609f41-9099-4e75-b894-06f56ab57ca5.pdf
DPI.wi.gov Public school data
http://www.durhamtech.edu/admissions/highschoolstudent.htm
This statement is based on personal experience of having many staff, from middle school up to high school, discourage my daughter who struggles in math from attending summer school. I have also spoke to many parents with the same experience.
http://www.childtrendsdatabank.org/?q=node/366*** Of note the data of graduation rate is debated in academic circles as the data is not always standardized. Some data includes GED and 5 year rates others include only 4 year rates.
Thanks,
Mary Kay Battaglia
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Metro Denver Promotion of Letters:
We envision a writing community for students in Denver where they can enjoy writing. More often than not, schools cannot provide a place in which creativity and discovery receive one-on-one attention. Students too often view writing as yet another task for which they will be assessed and graded. We hope to help them understand that writing is a vehicle for expression and communication, for publication and storytelling.Great.
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When Christopher Chamness entered the third grade last year, he began to get stomach aches before school. His mother, Edy, said the fire had gone out of a child who she said had previously gone joyfully to his classes.One day, when he was bored in class, Christopher broke a pencil eraser off in his ear canal. It was the tipping point for Ms. Chamness, a former teacher, and she asked to observe his Austin elementary school classroom. What she saw was a "work sheet distribution center" aimed at preparing students for the yearly assessments that they begin in third grade and that school districts depend upon for their accountability ratings.
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Arizonans cannot afford to wait for better education. Although Arizona is one of the fastest improving states in education, at the current rate, it would take decades for our students to catch up with those in the number one state in the country, Massachusetts.Pearl Chang Esau is President/CEO of Expect More Arizona.Arizona students continue to lag their national and international peers in academic performance, high school graduation rates and degree attainment. With 74 percent of Arizona fourth graders below proficient in reading and 69 percent of our eighth graders below proficient in math, the gap is only widening between the preparedness of our graduates and the skills and knowledge Arizona employers require.
Fortunately, Tucson has many examples of bright spots that show all of us the potential for Arizona education. Tucson Unified School District's University High School was recently named a 2011 Higher Performing School by the National Center for Education Achievement; Vail Unified School District is nationally recognized for its use of technology to engage students and raise student achievement; BASIS Charter School, which started in Tucson and has grown to other parts of the state, was named a top high school by Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report; and the University of Arizona is ranked among the top public research universities in the nation. All of them embrace a culture of high expectations and are working to ensure all students graduate ready to compete and succeed in the 21st century global economy.
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A state law that allows school districts to deny enrollment to students expelled by other districts is unconstitutional, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Dane County Circuit Court.The suit was filed against the Oregon School District, which denied enrollment to a middle school student after the Janesville School District expelled him in November.
The student was expelled after serving suspensions last October for an alleged sexual assault and possession of tobacco on campus, according to the complaint. The student denied both charges, the complaint states.
Jeffrey Spitzer-Resnick, an attorney with Disability Rights Wisconsin. said his organization disapproves of the expulsion law, which has been on the books since 1997. The state constitution guarantees a free education to all students between the ages of 4 and 20.
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The eighth-graders sat hunched over photos of European art, looking for a single painting to emulate for a class project.But only one student cracked open an actual art history book; the rest slid their thumbs across vivid photos on iPod Touches, or clicked through Google image files on laptops or netbooks they'd brought from home.
In an attempt to bring more technology into the classroom without investing in school-funded 1-to-1 laptop initiatives, more school districts like Erin are experimenting with "bring your own device" opportunities, in which teachers adjust curriculum to leverage whatever hand-held or portable computing device children's parents allow them to bring to school.
The first "BYOD" day at Erin School was an experiment undertaken in honor of Wisconsin's Digital Learning Day, part of a national initiative Wednesday spearheaded by the nonprofit Alliance for Excellent Education marked by real-life activities in 39 states and virtual participation in online forums.
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Andrew Gelman, via a kind reader's email:
Last year my commenters and I discussed Ed Glaeser's claim that the way to create a great city is to "create a great university and wait 200 years."I passed this on to urbanist Richard Florida and received the following response:
This is a tough one with lots of causality issues. Generally speaking universities make places stronger. But this is mainly the case for smaller, college towws. Boulder, Ann Arbor and so on, which also have very high human capital levels and high levels of creative, knowledge and professional workers.I responded: Another factor in the interaction is: how good does the university have to be? Glaeser cited UW and Seattle, but that's kind of a funny example, because I don't think UW was such a great university 30 years ago. On the other hand, given the existence of Boeing and Microsoft, UW is good enough to do the job of providing a center for the creative class. Perhaps Ohio State (another good but not great university) has played a similar role in Columbus.For big cities the issue is mixed. Take Pittsburgh with CMU and Pitt or Baltimore with Hopkins, or St Louis. The list goes on and on.
Kevin Stolarick and I framed this very crudely as a transmitter reciever issue. The university in a city like this can generate a lot of signal, in terms of innovation or even human capital and the city may not receive it or push it away. A long ago paper by Mike Fogarty showed how innovations in Pittsburgh and Cleveland, by universities in these communities, tended to be picked up in Silicon Valley or even Tokyo.
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The dangers which Peter Wilby points out (Does Gove realise he is empowering future dictators?, 31 January) were recognised 70 years ago. Unfortunately secretaries of state know very little history. The Oxford historian Dr Marjorie Reeves, when invited to be on the Central Advisory Council For Education (England) in 1946, was told by the permanent secretary, John Redcliffe-Maud, that the main duty of council members was "to be prepared to die at the first ditch as soon as politicians try to get their hands on education".A war had been fought to prevent the consequences of such concentrated power. The 1944 Education Act, hammered out during the war years, created a "maintained system" of education as a balance of power between central government, local government responsibility, the voluntary bodies (mainly the churches) and the teachers. That balance is now disappearing fast, without the public debate it needs and with hardly a squeak from Labour. The existing education legislation refers to the fast-disappearing "maintained schools", leaving academies and free schools exposed, without the protection of the law, to whatever whimsical ideas are dreamt up by the present or future secretaries of state, to whom they are contracted with minimal accountability to parliament.
Professor Richard Pring
Green Templeton College, Oxford• The removal of 3,100 vocational subjects from the school performance tables from 2014 (Report, 31 January) has major implications. It is certainly the case that "perverse incentives" were created by the league tables to use soft options to boost school league table positions - the phenomenon known as gaming. However, the cull to 70 accepted vocational subjects, with 55 allowed on the margins, essentially destroys vocational and technical education. Given that the old basis is the one for the current (2012 and 2013) tables, a whole raft of students are on worthless courses.
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I am running for the Madison School Board because I care about the state of our public schools and this community.The 2012 Madison School Board Contest:The facts are: I am employed at the Urban League of Greater Madison and spoke in support of Madison Prep as a parent and citizen. Am I running because Madison Prep was voted down? No. My focus is broader than the charter school proposal, but the Madison Prep vote was a defining moment in my decision to declare candidacy.
It became apparent to me as I sat in the auditorium that night that we can no longer afford to wait for our district to take the casual approach to the urgent matter of minority under-achievement. Our entire community is affected by the failure to do so.
Every child in this district -- from the at-risk, the middle-of-the-road student, to the most academically talented -- should have an equal opportunity to thrive in our school system. And here's the reality, Madison -- we are not delivering.
It's been hard for us to accept that we are a different community than we were 10 years ago, but we are. If we move beyond politically correct conversations about race and poverty, we'd readily realize that we cannot go about "business as usual."
Seat 1 Candidates:
Nichele Nichols
www.nichols4schoolboard.org
email: nnichols4mmsd@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira (incumbent)
www.arleneforschoolboard.com
email: arlene_Silveira@yahoo.com
Seat 2 Candidates:
Mary Burke
www.maryburkeforschoolboard.net
email: maryburkewi@gmail.com
Michael Flores
www.floresforschoolboard.org
email: floresm1977@gmail.com
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They raise chickens. They grow vegetables. They knit. Now a new generation of urban parents is even teaching their own kids.In the beginning, your kids need you--a lot. They're attached to your hip, all the time. It might be a month. It might be five years. Then suddenly you are expected to send them off to school for seven hours a day, where they'll have to cope with life in ways they never had to before. You no longer control what they learn, or how, or with whom.
Unless you decide, like an emerging population of parents in cities across the country, to forgo that age-old rite of passage entirely.
When Tera and Eric Schreiber's oldest child was about to start kindergarten, the couple toured the high-achieving public elementary school a block away from their home in an affluent Seattle neighborhood near the University of Washington. It was "a great neighborhood school," Tera says. They also applied to a private school, and Daisy was accepted. But in the end they chose a third path: no school at all.
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The parents of 4-year-olds with fall birthdays -- not yet in the public school system -- have already come face to face with the topsy-turvy ways of Sacramento.Take the parents of kids born in November 2007. Since 2010, they've been told their children will be too young for kindergarten in 2012 under the new cutoff date, but that they will be entitled to a spot in a new grade-level, transitional kindergarten.
Now, about seven months before the first day of school, they learn that the governor is proposing to cut the program to save $223 million.
The final decision is up to the state Legislature, but -- as we all know -- that's likely months away. So, depending on where the families live, their school district might enroll them in transitional kinder anyway, hoping for the best, or inform them the class is being canceled. My colleague at the Mercury News, Sharon Noguchi, wrote about it this week.
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In a recent essay in The Times, Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard University, wrote about preparing American students for the future. In the essay, he said that international experience was essential, arguing that English's emergence as the global language makes the investment in other languages less essential.
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lot is riding on Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad's upcoming plan for improving low-income, minority student achievement.Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.The plan is billed as a blueprint for addressing an intractable, divisive issue in Madison, and it could also factor into the upcoming School Board discussion of Nerad's future in Madison.
The United Way of Dane County has made closing the achievement gap one of its primary issues for more than 15 years through the Schools of Hope tutoring program. But president Leslie Howard said the recent debate over the proposed Madison Prepatory Academy charter school has drawn more public attention to the issue than ever before.
"I don't want to say something so grandiose that everything's at stake, but in some ways it feels like that," Howard said.
Related links:
"They're all rich, white kids and they'll do just fine" -- NOT!
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Wisconsin is fortunate to have many fine K-12 schools educating our young people. The quality of this state's educational system is among the best in the United States, and the same can be said for Wisconsin teachers.Wisconsin 25th in 2011 NAEP Reading, Comparing Rhetoric Regarding Texas (10th) & Wisconsin NAEP Scores: Texas Hispanic and African-American students rank second on eighth-grade NAEP math test.Those accolades notwithstanding, there is one area in which Wisconsin schools should consider focusing some of their educational muscle: personal financial literacy.
More than ever before, our children -- by the time they graduate from high school -- need to be able to cope in the increasingly fast-paced world of financial services.
Today, many young people rarely handle cash, opting instead for the use of debit cards, credit cards and smartphones to make purchases. Those who have jobs probably never see a paycheck because most employers use direct deposit for their payrolls. And, most teens probably have never read the fine print of the contract for their mobile telecommunications devices.
Fascinating. Tony Evers is Superintendent of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. Much more at www.wisconsin2.org.
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My son says his teacher shouts a lot, especially at the naughty members of the class. Although this does not include him, he is quite sensitive and does not like this type of discipline. It is putting him off going to school. Can I broach this with the teacher, or should I just accept that this is her style of teaching?Different teachers have different teaching styles. Some like to use a loud voice for effect or to make a particular impact. They may actually need to raise their voices on some occasions, depending on the classroom location and the environment. But if this style of interaction or discipline with the children is constant and consistent, it is usually not appropriate.
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Sales manager Eric Wong Yiu-wai began to monitor the online activities of his younger son two years ago. The software he installed on his computer tracks the websites his son visits, instant messaging between him and his buddies, and the updates he posts on social networks. His phone will get instant alerts if his son uses offensive language in his posts or visits an unsavoury website. Wong says rising online perils make electronic surveillance of his 15-year-old son necessary."He spends a lot of time online every day. As I am working most of the time, I don't know what he is doing on the computer."
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Patrick A. Hope, a 39-year-old health-care attorney and member of the Virginia House of Delegates, recently observed his daughter learning to read at Barrett Elementary School in Arlington County.It was just an hour, he said, but "I found it incredibly rewarding to watch my child in this environment, and it gave me ideas and techniques to continue advancement at home."
So when he saw my columns about school districts discouraging such observations, he decided to do something. He added this sentence to his House Bill No. 400 on education:
"Local school boards shall adopt and implement policies to ensure that the parent or legal guardian of a student or prospective student enrolled in the school division may, subject to reasonable notice and with minimized disruption, act as an observer in the child's classroom."
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THREE million children in this country take drugs for problems in focusing. Toward the end of last year, many of their parents were deeply alarmed because there was a shortage of drugs like Ritalin and Adderall that they considered absolutely essential to their children's functioning.But are these drugs really helping children? Should we really keep expanding the number of prescriptions filled?
In 30 years there has been a twentyfold increase in the consumption of drugs for attention-deficit disorder.
As a psychologist who has been studying the development of troubled children for more than 40 years, I believe we should be asking why we rely so heavily on these drugs.
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Graeme Culliford and Nick Owens:
It was Jamie Oliver's toughest challenge... getting US youngsters to ditch junk food and eat a healthier diet.But six months after he convinced an LA school to swap fattening burgers for low-calorie salads, his revamped menu is - literally - being binned.
Hundreds of students at West Adams Preparatory High School, where his hit show Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution was filmed, are refusing to eat his cuisine.
Instead, bins are overflowing with the TV chef's veg curries, quinoa salads, Thai noodles and wheatbread burgers.
Many youngsters even go without lunch altogether.
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Are you and your partner graduates and prepared to answer a few online questions about your children? If so, Simon Baron-Cohen would like to hear from you.One of the country's foremost researchers into the causes of autism, Professor Baron-Cohen wants to know what kind of degree you hold. If you are both graduates in the so-called hard sciences, such as engineering and computer science, then you may end up being of particular interest. The reason is that parents who are both "systemisers", as he describes them, appear more likely to have autistic children.
Systemisers are lovers of precision, people who are good at analysing how things work and discerning patterns. Ideal material for code-breaking activities. Current thinking suggests we all sit somewhere on a scale of systemising. At one end are people who have little or no drive to be precise when confronted with structured information - political spin doctors might be an example - and at the other are hyper-systemisers, those whose obsession with analysis and dissection borders on the autistic.
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A few weeks ago, my colleague Paul Schwartzman introduced readers to a group of Prince George's County residents known as "the Seat Pleasant 59." They were promised in 1988, when they were in elementary school, that their tuition would be paid if they worked hard and got into college. More than two decades later, only 11 have four-year degrees, a consequence of many bad turns, most of them related to growing up in poverty.Some readers may conclude that most of these children were doomed from the start. Many lacked the parental support, teacher encouragement and personal resilience needed to take advantage of the offer from philanthropists Abe Pollin and Melvin Cohen. Is a tuition promise wasted on such children?
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While my daughter was sitting the first exam of her life, I didn't know what to do with myself. I hovered outside the building in the same way I have done when loved ones are undergoing surgery, transferring my weight from one foot to another - cursing that I have only two - nursing the strange delusion that feeling extreme discomfort myself might just be comforting to another, through the ether. All that kept coming into my mind were her parting words to me: "'All at once' is a good alternative to 'suddenly'. And also 'without warning.'" It cannot be denied.My anxiety was really surpassing itself. It was citrus-hued and neon-bright. All at once my ring of worries had little multi-faceted briolettes of worries suspended from them and these, in turn, had matching ear and toe rings, necklaces and bracelets. I could almost hear my nerves jangling and looked about myself anxiously as though I were an unwelcome morris dancer about to be shooed from a sophisticated urban setting. I have dispatched such rustic groovers myself with cutting remarks in my time. I regret it now, obviously.
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Madison Preparatory Academy doesn't have the money to open as a private school next fall and its future is in the hands of the Madison School Board, according to a lead supporter of the charter school proposal.Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.Supporters still want to open Madison Prep in the fall but haven't been able to raise about $1.2 million needed to run the school because its future beyond next year remains uncertain, Madison Prep board chairman David Cagigal said last week; moreover, a key donor said her support is contingent on School Board backing.
Cagigal said the private school option was never intended to be more than an interim plan before the school opened as a public charter school. One of the most common reasons charter schools fail is lack of funding, he added.
"We can't approach these donors unless we mitigate the risk," Cagigal said. "The only way we can do that is seek a 2013 vote."
Cagigal acknowledged that if the School Board doesn't vote on opening Madison Prep as a charter school in 2013, "then we may have to wait."
The fate of Madison Prep was discussed at a recent school board candidate forum.
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A secret to widespread educational success - to borrow a football metaphor (indulge me: the World Financial Capital just beat the World Tech Capital for a rematch against Marcia & the Bradys) - is a narrow playing field. For example, certificate-based vocational schools don't grant degrees. They, nevertheless, have consistently higher rates of retention and graduation than four-year colleges or even two-year community colleges.The logic is clear. Those on limited incomes, with domestic duties (children, a sick parent or spouse), or a full-time job, struggle to get a four-year degree. Circumstances often conspire to prevent the leisurely focus required for sustained study over long periods across many disciplines (many of which are not one's career focus, but are deemed necessary to "Civic Learning and Democratic Education," as this week's AAC&U conference makes clear). In an ideal Republic, every American would get a broad-based, four-year, liberal arts education rooted in great books shared inquiry, as offered at schools like my graduate alma mater of St. John's College Santa Fe. However, most Americans, especially in today's rough economy, just need a low-cost way to obtain the skills that will get them a fulfilling job or at least a better-paying one.
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The "disruption" of the higher-ed market is a popular refrain these days. Rising tuition prices and student debt have left many wondering if the current model is indeed broken and whether those like Harvard's Clay Christensen are right when they say that innovations in course delivery will eventually displace established players.What exactly those innovations will look like remains a matter of debate. One view from Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, envisions a future in which every industry will be disrupted and "rebuilt with people at the center."
In this recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Sandberg talked specifically about the gaming industry, which has been upended by the popularity of social-gaming venues, such as Words With Friends and Farmville.
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"What was he thinking?" It's the familiar cry of bewildered parents trying to understand why their teenagers act the way they do.How does the boy who can thoughtfully explain the reasons never to drink and drive end up in a drunken crash? Why does the girl who knows all about birth control find herself pregnant by a boy she doesn't even like? What happened to the gifted, imaginative child who excelled through high school but then dropped out of college, drifted from job to job and now lives in his parents' basement?
If you think of the teenage brain as a car, today's adolescents acquire an accelerator a long time before they can steer and brake.
Adolescence has always been troubled, but for reasons that are somewhat mysterious, puberty is now kicking in at an earlier and earlier age. A leading theory points to changes in energy balance as children eat more and move less.
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The current version of The New Yorker has a wonderful article by Jonah Lehrer called "Groupthink" (you can see the abstract here). It does a great job of showing how creativity is a social process, cites wonderful research by Brian Uzzi showing that when people have experience working together in the past they produce more successful Broadway musicals (up to a point, too many old friends is as bad as too few), and offers research showing that groups where members engage in constructive conflict are more creative -- all themes I have talked about at various times on this blog.I do however have a major quibble. At one point, Lehrer states flatly that brainstorming doesn't work. He later quotes creativity researcher Keith Sawyer as saying that people are more efficient at generating ideas when they work alone than in groups, something that is well-established. But that is not the same as saying there is conclusive evidence they don't work.
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Hartford Business, via a kind Doug Newman email:
First Niagara Bank has pledged $3 million to support a nonprofit group that is representing business interests in Connecticut's education reform debate.The money will go to Hartford's Connecticut Council for Education Reform (CCER), which is led by a group of prominent Connecticut business leaders including former Hartford Financial Services Group CEO Ramani Ayer, and Peyton Patterson, the former chief executive of NewAllinace Bank, which was acquired by First Niagara Bank last year.
The Connecticut Council for Education Reform also unveiled Thursday its education agenda for the upcoming legislative session, which includes urging the state to adopt:
--Teacher and leader employment and retention policies that attract the highest quality professionals and insist upon effectiveness as defined by their ability to demonstrate improvement in student performance, not seniority, as the measure of success defined by redesigned evaluation systems.
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That is a new paper of mine, you will find the link here. Here is the abstract:This paper considers an economic approach to autistic individuals, as a window for understanding autism, as a new and growing branch of neuroeconomics (how does behavior vary with neurology?), and as a foil for better understanding non-autistics and their cognitive biases. The relevant economic predictions for autistics involve greater specialization in production and consumption, lower price elasticities of supply and demand, a higher return from choosing features of their environment, less effective use of social focal points, and higher relative returns as economic growth and specialization proceed. There is also evidence that autistics are less subject to framing effects and more rational on the receiving end of ultimatum games. Considering autistics modifies some of the standard results from economic theories of the family and the economics of discrimination. Although there are likely more than seventy million autistic individuals worldwide, the topic has been understudied by economists. An economic approach also helps us see shortcomings in the "pure disorder" models of autism.
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The most important domestic subject that I FAIL to adequately cover is K-12 education. It's potentially the most effective tool we have for increasing vertical mobility in our society -- and hence is currently misused as the best single method to repress disadvantaged minorities.
What the education unions and their bought-and-paid-for Democrat allies have done to inner city black and Hispanic kids would warm the cockles of any KKK Grand Dragon. The Progressives' steadfast opposition to improving education angers me every time I think about it.
Thus I include intact below an excellent op-ed on the topic from the LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS. It's upbeat -- giving the growing success of the school choice movement in all its many flavors.
Sadly, California is one of the least successful states in this effort to improve education. All we hear from CA liberals is that we don't spend enough. But the growing popularity and acceptance of school choice in other states is going to make it more and more difficult for our voters to ignore this innovation.
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Listen to the event via this 77MB mp3 audio file.
The event was sponsored by the Dane County Council of Public Affairs.
Seat 1 Candidates:
Nichele Nichols
www.nichols4schoolboard.org
email: nnichols4mmsd@gmail.com
Arlene Silveira (incumbent)
www.arleneforschoolboard.com
email: arlene_Silveira@yahoo.com
Seat 2 Candidates:
Mary Burke
www.maryburkeforschoolboard.net
email: maryburkewi@gmail.com
Michael Flores
www.floresforschoolboard.org
email: floresm1977@gmail.com
via a kind reader. It is great to see competitive races.
UPDATE 2.8.2012: A transcript is now available.
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This evening, my family will sit down on the couch together to enjoy the opening episode of America's favorite spectacle of poor metacognition. Along with millions of others, including some of you, we will marvel at the sight of so many human beings eager to put their deficient cognitive skills on display for the world.I'm talking, of course, about the season premiere of American Idol, where lousy metacognition will join lousy singing for two cringeworthy hours tonight and another hour tomorrow night, as amateur musicians audition for the opportunity to win fame, fortune, and a recording contract. The opening two episodes of each season have become notorious for featuring the worst singers who auditioned for the show, encouraging viewers to engage in some gentle schadenfreude as Idol participants make fools of themselves on national television.
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Miss Dekker, who is 16 years and four months old, has cut six months off the unofficial record set in 2010 by Australian teenager Jessica Watson, who was days away from her 17th birthday when she completed her own non-stop voyage.
Dozens of people jumped and cheered as Miss Dekker stepped aboard a dock in St. Maarten and waved."There were moments where I was like, 'What the hell am I doing out here?,' but I never wanted to stop," she told reporters.
"It's a dream, and I wanted to do it."
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The ideal of an 'American way of life' is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what's cleaving America, and why.
America is coming apart. For most of our nation's history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world--for whites, anyway. "The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. "On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day."Americans love to see themselves this way. But there's a problem: It's not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.
People are starting to notice the great divide. The tea party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line. The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets. Each is right about an aspect of the problem, but that problem is more pervasive than either political or economic inequality. What we now face is a problem of cultural inequality.
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Laurie Rogers, via a kind email:
Last week, I went to a Spokane Public Schools math presentation at Indian Trail Elementary School. It was billed as a forum in the school newsletter and on the reader board outside of the school. It was not, in any way, a forum. It was a tightly controlled 20-minute presentation that offered no data, little information, allowed for no parent input and was patronizing in tone.Related: Math Forum audio & video.At one point, parents were asked to define math to the person next to us. (The principal said he would not offer his definition.) We also were told to describe to our neighbor a math experience we'd had. These conversations ended right there, thus being pointless. We watched a video of several small children talking about the importance of math. The kids were cute, but the video was long. It was made clear to us that math is hard, parents don't get it (see slide 7 of the presentation), "traditional math" is no longer useful, and math is intimidating to all. Printed materials reinforced the idea of parent incompetence, with students supposedly "taking the lead" and teaching their parents.
Parents were warned to stay positive about math, however, despite our supposed fear and lack of skill, and we also were told what a "balanced" program looks like - as if that's what Spokane actually has.
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Proposed changes in the definition of autism would sharply reduce the skyrocketing rate at which the disorder is diagnosed and might make it harder for many people who would no longer meet the criteria to get health, educational and social services, a new analysis suggests.The definition is now being reassessed by an expert panel appointed by the American Psychiatric Association, which is completing work on the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the first major revision in 17 years. The D.S.M., as the manual is known, is the standard reference for mental disorders, driving research, treatment and insurance decisions. Most experts expect that the new manual will narrow the criteria for autism; the question is how sharply.
The results of the new analysis are preliminary, but they offer the most drastic estimate of how tightening the criteria for autism could affect the rate of diagnosis. For years, many experts have privately contended that the vagueness of the current criteria for autism and related disorders like Asperger syndrome was contributing to the increase in the rate of diagnoses -- which has ballooned to one child in 100, according to some estimates.
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Kai Ryssdal: However students get their textbooks -- on an iPad or the old-fashioned way -- those books don't do any good unless they're actually used.There are 37 million people in this country who've started college, who have some credits -- but never finished. When they do that, when they drop out, there are costs -- to them, and to the rest of us, in the billions of dollars, in wasted loans and grants and lost opportunities. Those costs are one reason college dropouts are starting to get more attention from the Obama administration on down.
But finding ways for people to finish their degrees might mean rethinking the way Americans go to college. Emily Hanford of American RadioWorks reports.
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An extensive review of relevant research has demonstrated that the more physically active schoolchildren are, the better they do academically. Researchers analyzed 14 studies, ranging in size from as few as 50 participants to as many as 12,000.All of the studies involved children between the ages of 6 and 18.
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The most important decision you will make about your children's education is picking their school, right? That's the conventional wisdom, but it's actually wrong -- or at best it's only half-correct. Teacher effectiveness varies a lot within schools, even within good schools, which means that just choosing the right school for your kid is not a proxy for choosing great teachers. So while "school choice" is hotly debated (next week is National School Choice Week, complete with Bill Cosby's blessing and events galore,) there are few rallies being held for giving parents the right to choose a particular teacher. That's because the whole system is stacked against empowering families in this way. In fact, because of how seniority rules generally work, it's a lot more common for teachers to choose their students than for students to choose their teachers.Just how much individual teachers matter is the big implication of an analysis of 2.5 million students and their instructors that was released in December and highlighted recently in the New York Times. The long-term, large-scale study by economists at Columbia and Harvard used two decades of data to examine differences in student outcomes (including such categories as teen pregnancy and college enrollment) and link those differences with how effective their teachers were at improving student scores on achievement tests. The headline-grabbing finding was that replacing an ineffective teacher with one of average quality would boost a single classroom's lifetime earnings by a quarter-million dollars. And that's just from one year of assigning that group of kids to an average teacher instead of a lousy one. A second study, released January 12 by the Education Trust-West, an education advocacy group in California, examined three years of data on teachers from the Los Angeles public school system and noted that low-income and minority students are twice as likely to have teachers in the bottom 25% of effectiveness. The Ed Trust study did not get as much attention as the one by the Ivy League economists, but it reached the same obvious conclusion: more effective teachers boost learning for students
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There used to be a time when Milwaukee was considered one of the most active education reform cities in the country. The City's private school choice program, the oldest and largest in the country, was our ticket to fame (or infamy, depending on who you ask) through most of the 1990's. The choice program was supposed to be a game changer to public education. It was supposed to set off a chain reaction of innovation and competition that would not only improve the lives of children, but change the way we configured our education policy for the City of Milwaukee. In short, we were going to be the hotbed of the reform movement for decades to come.Sadly, the game changing education movement we expected didn't come to pass. There is no doubt, however, that the existence of parent choice in Milwaukee has changed the lives of thousands of kids. The movement that created and protected the choice program fostered the development of two of the City's best charter schools and promoted a small sector of independent charters authorizers and schools. Unfortunately, aside from these developments there has been little large-scale reform in Milwaukee since the mid-1990's. Instead of a catalyst, the choice program became a scapegoat for both political parties and many status quo stakeholders. The failing public school district in Milwaukee has been allowed to sink deeper and deeper into the quicksand while union interests and their status quo Democrats blamed the choice program for all the public schools considerable ills. The GOP used the choice program as the be-all-end-all urban education solution, and was happy to let thoughtful public school policy and funding fall by the way side. The independent charter school community put their heads down and tried to stay out of the political fray - they served small pockets of kids very well, but without the ability or the will to take their model to scale. As a result, Milwaukee, not only fell behind, we fell off the map entirely.
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Keith Bradsher & Charles Duhigg:
Companies like Apple "say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force," said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor's degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. "They're good jobs, but the country doesn't have enough to feed the demand," Mr. Schmidt said.Well worth considering from a curricular, finance and social perspective.Some aspects of the iPhone are uniquely American. The device's software, for instance, and its innovative marketing campaigns were largely created in the United States. Apple recently built a $500 million data center in North Carolina. Crucial semiconductors inside the iPhone 4 and 4S are manufactured in an Austin, Tex., factory by Samsung, of South Korea.
But even those facilities are not enormous sources of jobs. Apple's North Carolina center, for instance, has only 100 full-time employees. The Samsung plant has an estimated 2,400 workers.
....
"We shouldn't be criticized for using Chinese workers," a current Apple executive said. "The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need."
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"Student responsibility is the third rail of the accountability movement." Walt Gardner
If Mr. Gardner is correct, then is that why have we decided to leave student effort and their responsibility for their own learning and academic achievement out of our considerations of the reasons for such results as the 2010 NAEP history exam, which found that fifty-five percent of our high school seniors scored Below Basic?
Japan, South Korea and Singapore are quite forthright in their views that students must work hard, even very hard, in order to do well in their studies. (see Surpassing Shanghai, Harvard 2011, edited by Marc Tucker).
For our part, just about everyone, from journalists to legislators to edupundits of all sorts and degrees, holds everyone else responsible for student academic failure here. They blame legislation, governors, school boards, superintendents, unions, teachers and all other adults working in education, but they never seem to include student responsibility and effort into their calculations.
Anyone who suggests students may have a part to play in whether they learn anything or not risk being called racists, or supporters of poverty, or prejudiced against immigrants and those whose primary language is other than English.
Immigrants have been coming to this country, learning English, and doing well since the earliest days of our country, but lately we seem to enjoy pretending that these tasks are something new and the burden must be place on all the adults in our educational systems to make things easier. They may not realize that Albert Shanker spoke only Yiddish when he entered the New York public schools, and they conveniently ignore the children of Vietnamese boat people, and many others, some of whom come to this country knowing no English and before long are valedictorians of their high school graduating classes.
Of course it is nearly impossible to create educators without compassion, sympathy, even pity as part of their make-up, but at some point making excuses for students who are not trying and making an effort to lift all responsibility from their shoulders turns out to be cruelty of another kind.
Martin Luther King never said that minority children should not be asked to take their share of the load in becoming educated citizens, just that they have a fair chance, and perhaps some extra help.
In fact, some of those who once believed that discrimination and racism could account for the failure of African-American children in our schools began before too long to have difficulty reconciling those notions with the manifest academic success of too many Asian-American children, some of whose parents had been interned in this country, some of whom came here with no knowledge of the country or the language, and often from an even longer history of oppression and discrimination behind them (e.g. the Japanese Burakumin immigrants).
It is interesting that when American black athletes achieve unprecedented success and achievement and multi-million-dollar salaries, no one rushes to explain that result as the outcome of centuries of unpaid labor, rampant racism and discrimination. For some reason it is acceptable to expect, and common to find, outstanding effort and achievement among black athletes, but it is not thought suitable to expect serious academic effort from black students in our schools.
If coaches thought all the effort in sports was their job, and expected nearly nothing from their athletes, we might see the same failure in sports that we have in academics. And we would find that most athletes were less inclined to try their hardest and to take responsibility for their effort and success in sports.
As long as we put all the onus on adults in our education systems, we deprive our students of all kinds of the challenges they need, as we try to disguise from them the fact that their achievement will always in life depend mostly on their own efforts for which they alone have to take the responsibility.
Call me names, if that makes you feel better, but all our students are waiting to be treated more like the responsible human beings they, in fact, are.
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
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Throughout my years of being an educator in a traditional school setting, the most challenging aspect has been dealing with the adults, not the students. My views were often those of the minority and consistently clashed with the culture of failure that had been developed over the decades.One opinion of mine in particular that seldom receives little to no kudos, and is often met with anger and opposition, is that our children do not need sympathy. And when it came to school work, believe me, I gave very little sympathy, if any at all.
"So harsh," one might say. Well, I have been regularly accused of being unfeeling, insensitive and even heartless. Nevertheless, my students were successful for the most part.
They passed because they knew the material, not because I felt sorry for them. In my classroom, I refused to allow feelings of sympathy to override my charge as an educator. It was my duty to educate students to the best of my ability, regardless of their race, culture, socioeconomic status or family or living situation. My standards were high, and I expected my students to rise to the occasion.
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Over the past three decades the world has come to witness an ominous and entirely new form of gender discrimination: sex-selective feticide, implemented through the practice of surgical abortion with the assistance of information gained through prenatal gender determination technology. All around the world, the victims of this new practice are overwhelmingly female -- in fact, almost universally female. The practice has become so ruthlessly routine in many contemporary societies that it has impacted their very population structures, warping the balance between male and female births and consequently skewing the sex ratios for the rising generation toward a biologically unnatural excess of males. This still-growing international predilection for sex-selective abortion is by now evident in the demographic contours of dozens of countries around the globe -- and it is sufficiently severe that it has come to alter the overall sex ratio at birth of the entire planet, resulting in millions upon millions of new "missing baby girls" each year. In terms of its sheer toll in human numbers, sex-selective abortion has assumed a scale tantamount to a global war against baby girls.
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In recent decades, key sectors of the American economy have experienced huge and disruptive transformations -- shifts that have ultimately yielded beneficial changes to the way producers and customers do business together. From the deregulation that brought about the end of AT&T's "Ma Bell" system, to the way entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs forever changed the computer world once dominated by IBM, to the way the internet and bloggers have upended the business model of traditional newspapers, we have seen industries completely remade -- often in wholly unexpected ways. In hindsight, such transformations seem to have been inevitable; at the time, however, most leaders in these fields never saw the changes coming.The higher-education industry is on the verge of such a transformative re-alignment. Many Americans agree that a four-year degree is vastly overpriced -- keeping many people out of the market -- and are increasingly questioning the value of what many colleges teach. Nevertheless, for those who seek a certain level of economic security or advancement, a four-year degree is absolutely necessary. Clearly, this is a situation primed for change. In as little as a decade, most colleges and universities could look very different from their present forms -- with the cost of a college credential plummeting even as the quality of instruction rises.
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When Gov. Bobby Jindal pushed through New Orleans' school voucher program four years ago, political interest in using taxpayer money to send students to private schools had waned across the country. School choice advocates had suffered several stinging defeats, causing some to throw their weight behind charter schools, which generally receive more bipartisan support.In 2009, St. Joan of Arc School in New Orleans had more than 80 students receiving vouchers.
Now, as officials expect Jindal to begin an effort to expand Louisiana's voucher program, the national landscape has changed dramatically.
Although charter schools continue to dwarf vouchers in terms of overall growth, voucher programs have rebounded on the national political and educational scene in the past year. In 2011, more than 30 states introduced bills that would use taxpayer dollars to send children to privately run schools, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. That's up more than 300% from the previous year, when only nine voucher bills were introduced.
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Wolfram has long been a trusted name in education--as the makers of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, we've created some of the most dynamic teaching and learning tools available. We are pleased to offer the best of all of our technologies to you here in the Wolfram Education Portal, organized by course. In the portal you'll find a dynamic textbook, lesson plans, widgets, interactive Demonstrations, and more built by Wolfram education experts. You can take a look at the types of materials we offer below, but to get full access to all materials, you need to sign up for a free account.
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For decades, the prevailing wisdom in education was that high self-esteem would lead to high achievement. The theory led to an avalanche of daily affirmations, awards ceremonies and attendance certificates -- but few, if any, academic gains.Now, an increasing number of teachers are weaning themselves from what some call empty praise. Drawing on psychology and brain research, these educators aim to articulate a more precise, and scientific, vocabulary for praise that will push children to work through mistakes and take on more challenging assignments. Consider teacher Shar Hellie's new approach in Montgomery County.
To get students through the shaky first steps of Spanish grammar, Hellie spent many years trying to boost their confidence. If someone couldn't answer a question easily, she would coach him, whisper the first few words, then follow up with a booming "¡Muy bien!"
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Demand for remedial instruction in colleges is on the rise. About 75 percent of New York City freshmen attending community college last year needed remedial math, reading or writing courses. The organization that administers the ACT found that only one in four of 2010 high school graduates who took the ACT exam were college-ready in four key subjects areas: English, math, reading and science. Statistics like these are startling, as they not only reveal serious flaws in our educational system, but also raise questions as to how these students will fare in the future if they are lacking the knowledge and critical skills needed to succeed in college and beyond.In her new book, "The Republic of Noise," New York City public school educator and curriculum advisor Diana Senechal argues that one reason for this problem is the students' loss of solitude: the ability to think and reflect independently on a given topic. Schools have become more concerned with the business of keeping students busy in what Senechal deems is a flawed attempt to ensure student engagement. But as a result, students are not given the time and space to devote themselves completely to the study and understanding of one specific thing. It's a need she finds reflected in our culture as a whole: We are a nation glued to smartphones and computer screens, checking email and Twitter feeds in our need to stay in some loop by reading and responding to rolling updates. Senechal is not advocating that we toss out our iPhones or unplug from social media, but rather that we think more slowly, give ourselves time for reflection -- as such practice would only serve to enhance the very conversations new media and technology make possible.
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Should an engineering degree cost more than a degree in English? Or a degree in education?The question was posed at a House Education Committee meeting Friday.
On hand for the discussion: University of Florida President Bernie Machen, Florida State University President Eric Barron and state University System Chancellor Frank Brogan.
The topic is timely. Gov. Rick Scott has called on universities to produce more majors in science, technology, engineering and mathematics -- but without extra dollars from the state. Scott's proposed budget does not boost funding for public colleges and universities.
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Almost all of us say that as a nation we should work out our differences and unite to solve our problems. But we don't mean it.Exhibit A is the bad blood between the National Education Association, the nation's largest teacher's union, and Teach for America, the most popular public-service option for graduates of selective colleges.
The NEA has been at odds with TFA since the teacher recruitment program began. NEA leaders dislike the idea, conceived in 1989 by 22-year-old Princeton undergraduate Wendy Kopp, of giving young people selected for academic achievement and ambition just five weeks of summer training before having them teach in some of our lowest-performing urban and rural public schools. TFA's steady growth and rising status at prestigious universities has not soothed NEA's distress.
This is both a national and a local issue. The NEA's national headquarters is in the District. One of the largest contingents of TFA teachers works in the District and Prince George's County.
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ON NOVEMBER 10th South Korea went silent. Aircraft were grounded. Offices opened late. Commuters stayed off the roads. The police stood by to deal with emergencies among the students who were taking their university entrance exams that day.Every year the country comes to a halt on the day of the exams, for it is the most important day in most South Koreans' lives. The single set of multiple-choice tests that students take that day determines their future. Those who score well can enter one of Korea's best universities, which has traditionally guaranteed them a job-for-life as a high-flying bureaucrat or desk warrior at a chaebol (conglomerate). Those who score poorly are doomed to attend a lesser university, or no university at all. They will then have to join a less prestigious firm and, since switching employers is frowned upon, may be stuck there for the rest of their lives. Ticking a few wrong boxes, then, may mean that they are permanently locked out of the upper tier of Korean society.
Making so much depend on an exam has several advantages for Korea. It is efficient: a single set of tests identifies intelligent and diligent teenagers, and launches them into society's fast stream. It is meritocratic: poor but clever Koreans can rise to the top by studying very, very hard. The exam's importance prompts children to pay attention in class and parents to hound them about their homework; and that, in turn, ensures that Korea's educational results are the envy of the world. The country is pretty much the leading nation in the scoring system run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In 2009 it came fourth after Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong, but those are cities rather than full-sized countries.
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In my last post, I argued that software will take over many of the tasks doctors do today. And what of education? We find a very similar story of what the popular - and incredibly funny! - TED speaker Sir Ken Robinson calls "a crisis of human resources" (Click here for the RSA talk from the same speaker which has been animated in a highly educational fashion). At the TED 2010 conference, he stated that "we make poor use of our talents." Indeed, in the same way that we misuse the talents and training of doctors, I believe we misuse the talents and training of teachers.Well worth reading.I want to comment on what I consider a far greater misuse of talent and training: that of our children/students, mostly here talking about high school education. We have focused so much of our education system on children attending primary school, then middle school, then high school, all with the objective of attending university. This is a progression that still remains unchanged and largely unchallenged. Yet, this system is completely linear and, most tragically, unwaveringly standardized not only through instruction methods, but also through testing. Worse, it is mostly what I call "fixed time, variable learning" (the four-year high school) instead of "fixed learning, variable time" to account for individual students' capabilities and status.
Identifying Emerging Trends In Education
There are new key trends that I see emerging in education enabled by advancing technology: namely decentralization and gamification. By understanding these trends, it is much easier to imagine why we won't need teachers or why we can free up today's teachers to be mentors and coaches. Software can free teachers to have more human relationships by giving them the time to be guidance counselors and friends to young kids instead of being lecturers who talk at them. This last possibility is very important--in addition to learning, schools enable critical social development for children through teacher student relationships and interacting with other children--classrooms of peers and teachers provide much more than math lessons. And by freeing up teachers' time, technology can lead to increased social development rather than less as many assume.
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Peter Arcidiaconoy, Esteban M. Aucejoz & Ken Spennerx:
If affirmative action results in minority students at elite schools having much potential but weak preparation, then we may expect minority students to start off behind their majority counterparts and then catch up over time. Indeed, at the private university we analyze, the gap between white and black grade point averages falls by half between the students' freshmen and senior year. However, this convergence masks two effects. First, the variance of grades given falls across time. Hence, shrinkage in the level of the gap may not imply shrinkage in the class rank gap. Second, grading standards differ across courses in different majors. We show that controlling for these two features virtually eliminates any convergence of black/white grades. In fact, black/white gpa convergence is symptomatic of dramatic shifts by blacks from initial interest in the natural sciences, engineering, and economics to majors in the humanities and social sciences. We show that natural science, engineering, and economics courses are more difficult, associated with higher study times, and have harsher grading standards; all of which translate into students with weaker academic backgrounds being less likely to choose these majors. Indeed, we show that accounting for academic background can fully account for differences in switching behaviors across blacks and whites.
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When asked why he didn't second Ed Hughes' motion at the Dec. 19 meeting to delay the schools' opening until 2013, Howard replied, "We had not discussed the implications of what that means. I think we have time if we're talking about 2013, to make sure we do it correctly, because we don't know what the rules of the game will be in 2013."Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.Superintendent Dan Nerad said, "Whether it will move forward I don't know. That depends on whether the motion gets on the floor. I don't have a read on it at this point."
Others aren't as diplomatic. "This is a waste of time and money for all involved," said TJ Mertz, an Edgewood College professor and district watchdog who is among Madison Prep's most ardent critics.
"The votes are not there and will not be there," he continued. "It distracts from the essential work of addressing the real issues of the district, including issues of achievement for students in poverty."
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Cecelia Thornton sets up a makeshift classroom at her kitchen table every day after school to tutor her grandchildren in reading and writing with materials she buys at the local thrift store in the Mojave Desert town of Adelanto (San Bernardino County).The 5- and 6-year-olds, she said, just aren't learning enough in their classes at Desert Trails Elementary School.
That's the key reason why she and a band of other parents and guardians filed a petition Thursday under California's "parent trigger" law to demand reforms at the K-6 school where just 35 percent of pupils last year tested proficient in reading and 46 percent in math.
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Our faltering education system may be the most important threat to our economy and well-being, writes Nicholas D. Kristof, so it's frustrating that the presidential campaign is mostly ignoring the issue. The obvious policy solution is more pay for good teachers, more dismissals for weak teachers.Suppose your child is about to enter the fourth grade and has been assigned to an excellent teacher. Then the teacher decides to quit. What should you do?
The correct answer? Panic!
Well, not exactly. But a landmark new research paper underscores that the difference between a strong teacher and a weak teacher lasts a lifetime. Having a good fourth-grade teacher makes a student 1.25 percent more likely to go to college, the research suggests, and 1.25 percent less likely to get pregnant as a teenager. Each of the students will go on as an adult to earn, on average, $25,000 more over a lifetime -- or about $700,000 in gains for an average size class -- all attributable to that ace teacher back in the fourth grade. That's right: A great teacher is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to each year's students, just in the extra income they will earn
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Nicholas Kristof
Perhaps the most widespread peril children face isn't guns, swimming pools or speeding cars. Rather, scientists are suggesting that it may be "toxic stress" early in life, or even before birth.
This month, the American Academy of Pediatrics is issuing a landmark warning that this toxic stress can harm children for life. I'm as skeptical as anyone of headlines from new medical studies (Coffee is good for you! Coffee is bad for you!), but that's not what this is.
Rather, this is a "policy statement" from the premier association of pediatricians, based on two decades of scientific research. This has revolutionary implications for medicine and for how we can more effectively chip away at poverty and crime.
Toxic stress might arise from parental abuse of alcohol or drugs. It could occur in a home where children are threatened and beaten. It might derive from chronic neglect -- a child cries without being cuddled. Affection seems to defuse toxic stress -- keep those hugs and lullabies coming! -- suggesting that the stress emerges when a child senses persistent threats but no protector.
Cues of a hostile or indifferent environment flood an infant, or even a fetus, with stress hormones like cortisol in ways that can disrupt the body's metabolism or the architecture of the brain.
The upshot is that children are sometimes permanently undermined. Even many years later, as adults, they are more likely to suffer heart disease, obesity, diabetes and other physical ailments. They are also more likely to struggle in school, have short tempers and tangle with the law.
The crucial period seems to be from conception through early childhood. After that, the brain is less pliable and has trouble being remolded.
"You can modify behavior later, but you can't rewire disrupted brain circuits," notes Jack P. Shonkoff, a Harvard pediatrician who has been a leader in this field. "We're beginning to get a pretty compelling biological model of why kids who have experienced adversity have trouble learning."
This new research addresses an uncomfortable truth: Poverty is difficult to overcome partly because of self-destructive behaviors. Children from poor homes often shine, but others may skip school, abuse narcotics, break the law, and have trouble settling down in a marriage and a job. Then their children may replicate this pattern.
Liberals sometimes ignore these self-destructive pathologies. Conservatives sometimes rely on them to blame poverty on the poor.
The research suggests that the roots of impairment and underachievement are biologically embedded, but preventable. "This is the biology of social class disparities," Shonkoff said. "Early experiences are literally built into our bodies."
The implication is that the most cost-effective window to bring about change isn't high school or even kindergarten --although much greater efforts are needed in schools as well -- but in the early years of life, or even before birth.
"Protecting young children from adversity is a promising, science-based strategy to address many of the most persistent and costly problems facing contemporary society, including limited educational achievement, diminished economic productivity, criminality, and disparities in health," the pediatrics academy said in its policy statement.
One successful example of early intervention is home visitation by childcare experts, like those from the Nurse-Family Partnership. This organization sends nurses to visit poor, vulnerable women who are pregnant for the first time. The nurse warns against smoking and alcohol and drug abuse, and later encourages breast-feeding and good nutrition, while coaxing mothers to cuddle their children and read to them. This program continues until the child is 2.
At age 6, studies have found, these children are only one-third as likely to have behavioral or intellectual problems as others who weren't enrolled. At age 15, the children are less than half as likely to have been arrested.
Evidence of the importance of early experiences has been mounting like snowflakes in a blizzard. For example, several studies examined Dutch men and women who had been in utero during a brief famine at the end of World War II. Decades later, those "famine babies" had more trouble concentrating and more heart disease than those born before or after.
Other scholars examined children who had been badly neglected in Romanian orphanages. Those who spent more time in the orphanages had shorter telomeres, a change in chromosomes that's a marker of accelerated aging. Their brain scans also looked different.
The science is still accumulating. But a compelling message from biology is that if we want to chip away at poverty and improve educational and health outcomes, we have to start earlier. For many children, damage has been suffered before the first day of school.
As Frederick Douglass noted, "It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."
Nicholas Kristof is a columnist for The New York Times.
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Fed-up parents of students attending a low-performing school in Southern California aim to use the power given to them by the state to take an unusual step: fire the school.This power, called a Parent Trigger, was passed into law in California in 2010, but parents are attempting for only the second time to use it at Desert Trails Elementary outside Los Angeles. Their effort to force Adelanto Elementary School District to overhaul the school, or turn it into a charter school run by the parents themselves, is expected to be closely watched across the nation.
Similar legislation passed in Texas and Mississippi last year and is under consideration in Florida, Pennsylvania and Indiana this year.
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First there were the Little Emperors, the often chubby and spoiled first generation of children born under China's one-child policy. Now the Precious Snowflakes have emerged - a generation so coddled some cannot even tie their own shoelaces.They are 'Precious Snowflakes', wrapped in cotton wool from day one," said Paul French, the founder of Access Asia, a China-based research company.
"Nothing is ever quite right for them. It is always either too hot or too cold and they are all hypochondriacs. They get immediately stressed out if they ever have to lift a finger," he said.
In a world of smog, toxic food and unsure medical care, middle-class Chinese parents are spending ever-larger sums of money to insulate their children from harm.
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The quest to harness the power of DNA to develop personalized medicine is on the threshold of a major milestone: the $1,000 genome sequencing.Life Technologies Corp., a Carlsbad, Calif., genomics company, plans to introduce Tuesday a machine it says will be able to map an individual's entire genetic makeup for $1,000 by the end of this year. Moreover, the machine and accompanying microchip technology, both developed by the company's Ion Torrent unit, will deliver the information in a day, the company says.
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Eighteen-year-old Kayla Perkins explains the organizational system she uses in her bedroom: "I throw something on the ground and I know right where it is."Funny, her parents, Steve and Deborah Perkins of McKinney, Texas, haven't caught on. They see only mountains of clothing on the floor, empty snack bowls under the bed and soda cups littering the tabletops. Even Kayla acknowledges that, at its worst, her room is "a mess."
The Battle of the Bedroom: Many parents can relate to this picture. Most families at some point have at least one teen or pre-teen whose room resembles a landfill. The mess can disrupt the whole household. Dirty clothes pile up, triggering early morning crises when there is nothing to wear. Soiled dishes get lost in the mess, smell bad and attract critters. Homework is lost, and valuables are ruined.
Some parents let it go, reasoning that a bedroom is private space for children to manage as they wish. Others lecture their children, offer rewards for cleaning or impose consequences when they don't. What doesn't work, parenting experts say, is relentless nagging, hollow threats or getting very angry.
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Instant messages are ubiquitous and convenient, but something primal may be lost in translation.When girls stressed by a test talked with their moms, stress hormones dropped and comfort hormones rose. When they used IM, nothing happened. By the study's neurophysiological measures, IM was barely different than not communicating at all.
"IM isn't really a substitute for in-person or over-the-phone interaction in terms of the hormones released," said anthropologist Leslie Seltzer of the University of Wisconsin, lead author of the new study. "People still need to interact the way we evolved to interact."
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Parents are willing to help out, or bail out, their adult children in many circumstances.But don't expect help if you run up your credit-card bill or want to buy a house.
A survey released by MetLife's Mature Market Institute today found that nearly half of the parents surveyed feel they have a "strong responsibility" to provide financial support for their children's higher education. They do stop short of paying 100% of college tuition if the cost is particularly high.
Only 11% feel they would have the same obligation to help their children financially if they get into debt due to overspending. About 2,100 Americans ages 21 to 65 with at least $40,000 in household income were surveyed online in June and July by Mathew Greenwald & Associates.
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They have the same piercing eyes. The same color hair. One may be shy, while the other loves meeting new people. Discovering why identical twins differ--despite having the same DNA--could reveal a great deal about all of us.Every summer, on the first weekend in August, thousands of twins converge on Twinsburg, Ohio, a small town southeast of Cleveland named by identical twin brothers nearly two centuries ago.
They come, two by two, for the Twins Days Festival, a three-day marathon of picnics, talent shows, and look-alike contests that has grown into one of the world's largest gatherings of twins.
Dave and Don Wolf of Fenton, Michigan, have been coming to the festival for years. Like most twins who attend, they enjoy spending time with each other. In fact, during the past 18 years, the 53-year-old truckers, whose identical beards reach down to their chests, have driven more than three million miles together, hauling everything from diapers to canned soup from places like Seattle, Washington, to Camden, New Jersey. While one sits at the wheel of their diesel Freightliner, the other snoozes in the bunk behind him. They listen to the same country gospel stations on satellite radio, share the same Tea Party gripes about big government, and munch on the same road diet of pepperoni, apples, and mild cheddar cheese. On their days off they go hunting or fishing together. It's a way of life that suits them.
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This year, 2007, marks the marks the eighth year at which I ceased to be a tenured lecturer in the UK, what is called I think, a tenured professor in the USA. I've never worked out whether I was, in American terms, an assistant professor or an associate professor. But it really doesn't matter, because today I am neither. You see I simply walked out and quit the job. And this is my story. If there is a greater significance to it than the personal fortunes of one man, it is because my story is also the story of the decline and fall of the British university and the corruption of the academic ideal . That is why this essay carries two titles - a personal one and a social one. This is because I was privileged to be part of an historical drama. As the Chinese say, I have lived in interesting times.Universities are extraordinary institutions. They are in fact, the last bastions of mediaevalism left in modern society outside, perhaps, the church. Like churches they attracted a certain type of person who did not share the values of the commercial world. The oldest universities date from the eleventh and twelfth centuries - hundreds of years before the invention of the printing press. In an age where books were scarce, communication was difficult and people who could read and write were almost as rare as the books, it made sense to centralise the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge. If you wanted to learn, you headed towards where the books were and the people who could read them and that meant the great universities like Paris and Oxford. Poor communication, expensive reading materials and illiteracy were the foundation blocks for the universities. If today we have excellent communications, free online information and general literacy, we also have an environment in which the universities are struggling to maintain their position. That, of course, is not an accident.
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Thomas Kuhn wouldn't be impressed with the hordes of MBAs departing from top tier business schools to start new media companies, build the next big mobile gaming company, or launch another clone daily-deal site. But that's not where Kuhn's disappointment would end. Kuhn would probably be disheartened by the slew of intelligent students learning to code in computer science programs instead of pursuing degrees in electrical engineering or computer engineering degrees. In short, despite the fact that technology is one of the last bright spots in an otherwise stagnating economy, Kuhn would argue that we're encouraging the wrong types of innovation in the sector. Kuhn would push the best and brightest in our society away from building Birchbox for Baby Products and ask them to start innovating to enable less qualified builders.
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Former Glades Central football coach Jessie Hester resigned Thursday as coach at Suncoast after just 10 months at the school.Hester, 48, said the job at one of Palm Beach County's top academic public schools "wasn't the right fit" for him. The academic pressures the students faced made it difficult for the football team to practice and prepare for games, Hester said, adding that his team would go weeks without a full practice because his players had other school obligations.
The Chargers finished 4-6, missing the playoffs and tying for third in a five-team district.
"There are great, great people at the school, and great kids," Hester said, "but it was just not a good fit for me. It was too difficult to do the things I wanted to do in that situation."
It was no secret that Suncoast, with its nationally ranked academic programs and rigorous academic requirements, would be a more challenging job than Hester's previous job at his alma mater.
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New York Times news service, via a kind reader:
In Madison, the influx of poor people from Chicago is testing the city's historical liberalism. About one-quarter of the 3,300 Madison families receiving welfare are former Illinois residents.my correspondent notes:Even Mayor Paul Soglin, who earned his liberal stripes in the anti-establishment politics of the 1960s as a Vietnam War protester, now talks of "finite limits of resources" for the poor.
"We're like a lifeboat that holds 12 people comfortably," Mr. Soglin said. "We've got about 16 in it now, and there's a dozen more waiting in the water. Since we're already in danger of going under, what can our community be expected to do?"
A vibrant economy in Wisconsin accounts for much of the migration among poor people, most of them looking for jobs. The state's unemployment rate has dipped below 4 percent while that in Illinois is 4.4 percent.
Here is an interesting article from 1995. Worth revisiting with Soglin back in office (just because he is the mayor quoted at the time), but mostly as it pertains to our discussions around Madison Prep. What are the unique attributes and qualities that make up both our white population and our minority population?
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Among the "open courseware" projects at elite U.S. institutions, MITx will be the first to offer an institutional credential -- albeit not from MIT proper but from MITx, which will exist as a nonprofit apart from the university. (The Stanford professors who offered an interactive open course in artificial intelligence to all comers in the fall plan to send each non-enrolled student a certifying letter with their cumulative grade and class rank, but Stanford itself is not recognizing them.)But MIT stamp or no, that is still a big step, says Kevin Carey, policy director at Education Sector, a D.C. think tank.
"I think this is the future," says Carey, who has written on the emerging relevance of nontraditional credentials. "It's just the logical next step for the ethic behind the [open educational resources] movement," he says.
In interviews, MIT officials took care to emphasize that MITx is not meant to supplant the traditional "residential education" that the university cultivates in its Cambridge, Mass., enclave.
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Kimberly Lynch, a redhead with freckles, had a keen interest in sunblock. So much so that she spent the past year developing a new method to test the effectiveness of sunscreens and recently submitted the results to a medical journal.View Bloomberg Business Week's "great schools" state by state rankings, here.The 17-year-old senior at Bergen Academies in Hackensack, N.J., is quite a bit younger than most scientists submitting papers to accredited medical journals. Then again, Lynch doesn't go to a typical public high school.
Bergen Academies, a four-year high school, offers students seven concentrations including science, medicine, culinary arts, business and finance, and engineering. It even has its own stem-cell laboratory, where Lynch completed her experiments under the guidance of biology teacher Robert Pergolizzi, a former assistant professor of genetic medicine at Cornell University.
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The first night they slept entwined on his futon, Jack Robison, 19, who had since childhood thought of himself as "not like the other humans," regarded Kirsten Lindsmith with undisguised tenderness.She was the only girl to have ever asked questions about his obsessive interests -- chemistry, libertarian politics, the small drone aircraft he was building in his kitchen -- as though she actually cared to hear his answer. To Jack, who has a form of autism called Asperger syndrome, her mind was uncannily like his. She was also, he thought, beautiful.
So far they had only cuddled; Jack, who had dropped out of high school but was acing organic chemistry in continuing education classes, had hopes for something more. Yet when she smiled at him the next morning, her lips seeking his, he turned away.
"I don't really like kissing," he said.
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We're meeting for lunch at a restaurant in Canary Wharf, where many of the major global banks are located. He is a man in his late 40s, inconspicuously dressed, and in possession of a firm handshake. He orders a Coke, and then a pasta dish he will dig in with great relish. In his volunteer email he said he was with a software firm (working in investment banking). When asked for a job description, he simply says he is a "quant"."My parents discovered that I was of a mathematical bent aged three when I was apparently lining up my toys in order of size and then colour. I was one of these terrible, precocious kids who did their mathematics O-level aged 12. After a long academic career I ended up doing theoretical physics for my PhD, and spent a couple of years at Cern in Geneva. Many people I know from back then are still at universities, doing research and climbing the slippery slope to professorships and fellowships. They work the same astonishing long hours as I do, yet get paid a fraction and, from a purely scientific perspective, get to do some really, really interesting science. I often say (only half jokingly) that I "sold my soul" - I make a little over £200,000 a year, including my bonus.
"I am in a world of data, and I build all sorts of models for banks. For instance, one that helps a bank decide whom to lend a mortgage to. You have all this data about the person who is applying, and then the model works out the risk of lending to that person. You look at both the probability of this happening, and at the size of the loss in such an event.
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Truly involving parents and communities in our public schools, and the decisions that affect them, is essential to improving our school system.While parent involvement is crucial to a child's educational success, the reality is that such involvement is not always present for various reasons. However, the larger communities in which a student's school and home are located also play an instrumental role in nurturing educational achievement, as expressed by the African proverb, "It takes a village to raise a child."
Unfortunately over the past several years, the Department of Education has consistently failed to meaningfully empower and involve these important stakeholders in its decisions about schools. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the Education Department's decisions and proposals regarding closing or phasing out schools, and opening new ones.
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The Plains Art Museum announced plans Thursday to open a "Center for Creativity" that will teach art to thousands of local elementary school students.The $2.8 million center will open next fall near the museum in downtown Fargo.
Museum Director Colleen Sheehy said in the first year the center will serve 5,000 Fargo elementary students. Schools will pay a fee for the classes.
Ultimately, Sheehy said the new center will teach art education to the 12,000 K-5 students in the Fargo-Moorhead area. Programs offered at the center will replace some existing art education programs in the schools.
The center will significantly increase the number of people who use the museum, she said.
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Lower marriage rates among black women have less to do with the character of black men, and more to do with specific social characteristics that are associated with lower marriage rates among all men and women, but are more common among black people. A black woman with a postsecondary degree is more likely to be married than a white woman who dropped out of high school. A black woman with a personal annual income of more than $75,000 is more than twice as likely to be married as white women who live in poverty. White women living in New York and Los Angeles have much lower marriage rates than most black women who live in small towns.Black and white women who are younger than 40 have higher college graduation rates, lower incarceration rates and lower mortality rates when compared to their male counterparts. However, black men on average have higher incomes than black women, and there are hundreds of thousands more black men earning $75,000 a year or more than black women. Eighty-eight percent of all married black men are married to black women, a figure that changes less than five percentage points with more education and income.
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Walter Hamilton and Stuart Pfeifer:
Sherri and Cliff Nitschke thought they were planning wisely for their children's college educations when they opened a 529 savings account in 1998.The Fresno couple saved diligently over the years in hopes of avoiding costly student loans. But their timing couldn't have been worse.
When they needed the money a decade later, their 529 account had plunged in value during the global financial crisis. Their portfolio sank 30% in 2008, forcing the Nitschkes to borrow heavily to send their two sons to UCLA.
"529s were no friend to us," Cliff Nitschke said. "Honestly, it's probably one of the worst things we did. I could have made more money putting it in a mayonnaise jar and burying it in the backyard."
Over the last decade, 529 savings plans have surged in popularity as parents scramble to keep up with rapidly escalating college costs.
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Yun Xiang, Michael Dahlin, John Cronin, Robert Theaker, Sarah Durant:
Fordham's latest study, "Do High Flyers Maintain Their Altitude? Performance Trends of Top Students," is the first to examine the performance of America's highest-achieving children over time at the individual-student level. Produced in partnership with the Northwest Evaluation Association, it finds that many high-achieving students struggle to maintain their elite performance over the years and often fail to improve their reading ability at the same rate as their average and below-average classmates. The study raises troubling questions: Is our obsession with closing achievement gaps and "leaving no child behind" coming at the expense of our "talented tenth"--and America's future international competitiveness? Read on to learn more.
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African-American students whose primary language is English perform significantly worse in math and reading than black students who speak another language at home -- typically immigrants or refugees -- according to new numbers released by Seattle Public Schools.District officials, who presented the finding at a recent community meeting at Rainier Beach High School, noted the results come with caveats, but called the potential trend troubling and pledged to study what might be causing it.
Michael Tolley, an executive director overseeing Southeast Seattle schools, said at the meeting that the data exposed a new achievement gap that is "extremely, extremely alarming."
The administration has for years analyzed test scores by race. It has never before broken down student-achievement data by specific home language or country of origin -- it is rare for school districts to examine test scores at that level -- but it is unlikely that the phenomenon the data suggest is actually new.
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VIEWED superficially, the part of youth that the psychologist Jean Piaget called middle childhood looks tame and uneventful, a quiet patch of road on the otherwise hairpin highway to adulthood.Said to begin around 5 or 6, when toddlerhood has ended and even the most protractedly breast-fed children have been weaned, and to end when the teen years commence, middle childhood certainly lacks the physical flamboyance of the epochs fore and aft: no gotcha cuteness of babydom, no secondary sexual billboards of pubescence.
Yet as new findings from neuroscience, evolutionary biology, paleontology and anthropology make clear, middle childhood is anything but a bland placeholder. To the contrary, it is a time of great cognitive creativity and ambition, when the brain has pretty much reached its adult size and can focus on threading together its private intranet service -- on forging, organizing, amplifying and annotating the tens of billions of synaptic connections that allow brain cells and brain domains to communicate.
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An increasingly cozy alliance between companies that manufacture processed foods and companies that serve the meals is making students -- a captive market -- fat and sick while pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. At a time of fiscal austerity, these companies are seducing school administrators with promises to cut costs through privatization. Parents who want healthier meals, meanwhile, are outgunned.Each day, 32 million children in the United States get lunch at schools that participate in the National School Lunch Program, which uses agricultural surplus to feed children. About 21 million of these students eat free or reduced-price meals, a number that has surged since the recession. The program, which also provides breakfast, costs $13.3 billion a year.
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Milwaukee Public Policy Forum:
In June 2010, Wisconsin's Joint Committee on Finance approved YoungStar, a new quality rating and improvement system (QRIS) for the state's nearly 8,500 child care providers. YoungStar supporters believe the new system will improve the overall quality of childcare in Wisconsin by motivating and supporting providers to make quality improvements and by providing parents with the information they need to choose high-quality child care options.In the Forum's latest Research Brief, we examine several issues and challenges that have arisen in other states or jurisdictions with QRIS policies, how those entities have tackled those challenges, and the lessons their experiences might yield for Wisconsin. We found five common implementation challenges that have confronted other states and that have the potential to occur in Wisconsin, as well.
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A year after Luiz Munoz-Rivera School shut its doors as the public school system dealt with a budget shortfall, the district has opted to reopen it for nearly the same reason.Rebranded as the Rivera Learning Community, the school has become the flagship for the district's efforts to invest in in-house special education programs rather than send students to expensive out-of-district institutions.
The rising cost of out-of-district placement for special education students has dogged the district for years and drawn heavy criticism from the state Department of Education.
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AFRICAN-American students are lagging behind other students, including other black ethnic students whose home language is not English, according to new numbers released by Seattle Public Schools. ["'Alarming' new test-score gap discovered in Seattle schools," page one, Dec. 19.]This is an important problem that other cities have confronted head-on. First, they have admitted they really don't know how to solve the problem. Second, they acknowledge that the normal remedies school districts use to solve achievement problems are too weak to work.
These admissions have led other cities to open themselves up to experimentation in schools serving the most disadvantaged: longer school days and years; no-excuses instructional models; new sources of teachers; partnerships with businesses and cultural institutions that can provide enrichment and role models; use of online instruction to teach subjects like science where school staff are often not qualified; new schools run by national institutions with track records of improving achievement for the most disadvantaged.
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There is something truly disturbing about a society that seeks to control the behavior of schoolchildren through fear and violence, a tactic that harkens back to an era of paddle-bruised behinds and ruler-slapped wrists. Yet, some American school districts are pushing the boundaries of corporal punishment even further with the use of Tasers against unruly schoolchildren.The deployment of Tasers against "problem" students coincides with the introduction of police officers on school campuses, also known as School Resource Officers (SROs). According to the Los Angeles Times, as of 2009, the number of SROs carrying Tasers was well over 4,000.
As far back as 1988, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, National Congress of Parents and Teachers, American Medical Association, National Education Association, American Bar Association, and American Academy of Pediatrics recognized that inflicting pain and fear upon disobedient children is far more harmful than helpful. Yet, we continue to do it with disturbing results, despite mountains of evidence of more effective methods of discipline.
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Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:
I can't shake the feeling that something important was going on at our School Board meeting last Monday night to consider the Madison Prep charter school proposal, and that the actual School Board vote wasn't it.Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.The bare-bone facts are that, after about 90 public speakers, the Board voted 2-5 to reject the Madison Prep proposal. I reluctantly voted against the motion because I was unwilling to violate the terms of our collective bargaining agreement with our teachers.
After the motion failed, I moved that the Board approve Madison Prep, but delay its opening until the fall of 2013. My motion failed for lack of a second. (And no, I don't have an explanation for why neither James Howard nor Lucy Mathiak, who voted in favor of the first motion, was willing to second my motion.)
Probably like most who attended Monday night's meeting, I have thought a lot about it since. People who know I voted against the proposal have come up to me and congratulated me for what they say was the right decision. I have felt like shaking them and saying, "No, you don't understand. We blew it Monday night, we blew it big time. I just hope that we only crippled Madison Prep and didn't kill it."
I appreciate that that's an odd and surprising place for me to have ended up. To echo the Talking Heads, "Well, how did I get here?" I'll try to explain.
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In a bold move that is generating controversy within its own ranks, the California Charter School Association is urging that 10 of the 145 charter schools up for renewal this year be denied their charters because they failed to meet academic performance benchmarks set by the association.U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan hailed the association for its "courageous leadership" in attempting to "hold schools accountable." "This is an important conversation for California to have, and one that we need to have across the country," Duncan said, echoing remarks made by several charter school leaders.
But the association's action has also provoked fierce criticism from schools it has recommended for closure, as well as from some long-time supporters of the charter movement.
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Robert DeCock, via email:
Parents work very hard to get their children into college, and when that work pays off, they breathe a sigh of relief. After enduring mountains of paperwork, ruthless deadlines and constant second-guessing, the elusive acceptance letter suddenly makes it all worthwhile.Robert recently contacted me via the Madison Chamber of Commerce. I've met him once and found the conversation interesting. Contact him if you'd like to attend a Pre-College workshop or have questions.But then come the really hard questions. How are we going to pay for this? What if, after all this work, my kid doesn't do well in school? What if he doesn't graduate? What if he can't get a decent job?
The key to college success is asking all of those questions much earlier. And that means starting the planning process itself much earlier.
How early? Think middle school. Seriously.
Starting early achieves a number of significant things:
As parents, you take control of the admissions and financial aid processes, rather than those processes taking control of you.
Your child develops an early sense of purpose as it relates to college - what areas of study interest him, what colleges fit his interests and his personality, and what careers might await
You turn the tables in the admissions process. Instead of hoping that a college says "yes" to your child, the college ends up hoping that your child will say "yes" to themThat last point is important. Colleges are in search of special students - those who stand the greatest chance of success during school and after graduation. Establishing early relationships with potential colleges can put your family in the position of "seller" instead of "buyer," giving you financial leverage and negotiating power. And when that happens, aid packages can go up dramatically - sometimes by $2,000...$5,000...even $10,000 per year.
For parents, an early start in college planning often results in significant tuition savings. For students, starting early greatly improves the chances of success during the college years and the post-graduation job market.
For both of you, there's an added benefit - less stress and a more enjoyable, rewarding experience.
Robert DeCock is a Certified College Planning Specialist (CCPS) with the National Institute of Certified College Planning Specialists. DeCock runs the Quest Pre-College Planning and Financial Aid Workshops, which provide hands-on, step-by-step, proven best practices for parents who want to minimize costs and maximize their child's opportunity for success. Visit www.qcollegeprogram.com or call 608.438.2941 for more information.
Robert is holding a Pre-College Workshop is on Thursday, January 12, 5-8:00. Contact him for details.
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Academic Questions, the journal of the
National Association of Scholars: 90K PDF:
As concerns mount over the costs and benefits of higher education, it may be worthwhile to glance at the benefits of high school education at present as well. Of course, high school costs, while high, are borne by the taxpayers in general, but it is reasonable to hope that there are sufficient benefits for such an outlay.
In fact, 30 percent of ninth-grade students do not graduate with their class, so there is a major loss right there. In addition, it appears that a large fraction of our high school graduates who go on to college leave without taking any credential or degree within eight years. On November 17, 2008, the Boston Globe reported, "About two-thirds of the city's high school graduates in 2000 who enrolled in college have failed to earn degrees, according to a first-of- its-kind study being released today."1 The fact that this is a new study shows that the days of taking not just college, but high school education for granted may be ending as well. If public high schools were preparing their graduates (the 70 percent) adequately, they should be able to read and write in college.
Alternatives to high school are coming only slowly. Charter schools, some good and some bad, are being tried. Homeschooling serves some 1.5 million students, and some edupundits (and computer salesmen) are pushing for ever more use of virtual distance learning at the high school level.
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At Dugsi Academy, a public school in St. Paul, Minnesota, girls wearing traditional Muslim headscarves and flowing ankle-length skirts study Arabic and Somali. The charter school educates "East African children in the Twin Cities," its website says. Every student is black.At Twin Cities German Immersion School, another St. Paul charter, children gather under a map of "Deutschland," study with interns from Germany, Austria and Switzerland and learn to dance the waltz. Ninety percent of its students are white.
Six decades after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down "separate but equal" schools for blacks and whites, segregation is growing because of charter schools, privately run public schools that educate 1.8 million U.S. children. While charter-school leaders say programs targeting ethnic groups enrich education, they are isolating low-achievers and damaging diversity, said Myron Orfield, a lawyer and demographer.
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The most straightforward, clear and dispassionate vote taken on the Madison Preparatory Academy charter school proposal at last Monday's Madison Metropolitan School District Board meeting didn't even count. It was the advisory vote cast by the student representative, Philippo Bulgarelli.Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.The School Board turned down the controversial proposal on a 5-2 vote, and after nearly five hours of public testimony, all the school board members gave speeches explaining how they arrived at their decisions. In addition to being the most succinct, Bulgarelli's statement penetrated all of the intense emotions and wildly divergent interpretations of data and personal anecdotes used to argue both for and against the proposal. Bulgarelli said that the students for whom he speaks did not have enough information to make a reasonably good decision, so he voted to abstain.
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Geoff Decker, via a kind reader's email:
Students in Democracy Prep High School's Korean classes typically learn words that boost their vocabulary and develop basic grammar -- standard fare for introductory foreign language instruction. But this week the lessons took a turn for the geopolitical.Youngjae Hur greeted his students yesterday with an unusual pop quiz in English and asked them to define words such as "despotism," "denuclearize," and "repressive."
For Hur, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il's abrupt death over the weekend offered the school a unique opportunity to infuse what students learn about the South Korean language and culture every day with the politics that have shaped life on the Korean Peninsula for decades.
"It's important to let them know not just the skills to understand the language, but also the culture, the history, the politics," said Hur, a first-year teacher who moved to the United States from South Korea three years ago. "Especially at this special moment."
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I am ambivalent. My state, Tennessee, is the first state that has implemented the annual teacher and principal evaluations as required by Race to the Top (RTT). In 2010, I was involved with writing Tennessee's successful RTT application, especially the section on "great teachers and leaders." In my state role, I celebrated the RTT requirement for annual teacher and principal evaluations based substantially on student growth as one of the most important levers to accelerate student achievement.Now, in 2011, I am at the local level watching the fall-out. Although I still support annual teacher evaluations that include student achievement growth and regular teacher observation scores, it is clear that the initiative is off to a rocky start. And this has implications for more than just the educators and students in Tennessee. As noted in Education Week, many policymakers are concerned that the rocky implementation of Tennessee's new teacher evaluation system may hinder efforts in other states.
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Some readers mentioned, after a recent Admissions 101 discussion of using the average SAT score of the incoming class to pick the school best for you, that this method might be ruined by the growing number of colleges that do not require SAT or ACT tests. Some even suggested that these test-optional colleges might look better than they are on some measures, like the ranked U.S. News college list, because the lowest scorers in their freshmen classes are the ones most likely not to reveal their scores, and thus by not revealing, raising the freshman class SAT or ACT average that forms part of the U.S. News formula.
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Kaleem Caire, via email:
Dear Madison Prep,Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.First, thank you to all of you who have supported the Madison Prep effort to this point. Your volunteer hours, work on Design Teams, attendance at meetings, letters to the district and media, and many other acts of support have not gone unnoticed by the Urban League and Madison Prep.
In earlier morning hours today, the MMSD Board of Education voted 5-2 AGAINST Madison Prep. This outcome came after hours of testimony by members of the public, with Madison Prep supporters outnumbering opponents 2:1. Lucy Mathiak and James Howard voted YES for Madison Prep; Ed Hughes, Arlene Silviera, Beth Moss, Maya Cole, and Marj Passman voted NO. After the vote was taken, Ed Hughes made an amendment to the motion to establish Madison Prep in 2013 (rather than 2012) in order to avoid what some see as a conflict between Madison Prep and the teachers' union contract. Mr. Hughes' motion was not seconded; therefore there was no vote on establishing Madison Prep one year later.
While the Urban League and Madison Prep are shocked by last night's outcome, both organizations are committed to ensuring that Madison Prep becomes a reality for children in Madison. We will continue to press for change and innovation in the Madison Metropolitan School District and Dane County to ensure that the racial achievement gap is eliminated and that all children receive a high quality education that adequately prepares them for their future.
We will advance a number of next steps:
1.We will pursue different avenues, both public and private, to launch Madison Prep. We are still hopeful for an opening in 2012. There will be much the community will learn from Madison Prep and our children need this option now.
2.We will continue to coordinate community support and action to ensure that the Madison Metropolitan School District is accountable for eliminating the racial achievement gap. We will consider several strategies, such as implementing a Citizen Review Board that will hold the school board and district administration accountable for good governance, planning, implementation, execution, community engagement and student achievement results. We will also consider legal avenues to ensure MMSD understands and responds to the community's sense of urgency to address the sizable and decades-long failure rates of Black and Latino children.
3.We must also address the leadership vacuum in K-12 education in Madison. Because of this, we will ensure that parents, students and community members are informed of their rights and responsibilities, and have a better understanding of promising educational strategies to close the achievement gap. We will also work to ensure that they have opportunities to be fully engaged in planning, working and deciding what's best for the children educated in our public schools.
4.We will continue to work in collaboration with MMSD through our existing partnerships, and hope to grow these partnerships in the future.
Thank you for everything you have done and continue to do to ensure that children in our schools and families in our community have hope, inspiration, support and opportunity to manifest their dreams and make a difference in their own lives and the lives of others.
Onward.
Kaleem
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Q. What were some early management challenges for you?A. At a school in Massachusetts where I once worked, we managed early on through consensus. Which sounds wonderful, but it was just a very, very difficult way to sort of manage anything, because convincing everybody to do one particular thing, especially if it was hard, was almost impossible.
Q. How big a group was this?
A. There were about 25 teachers and instructors and others. And very quickly I went from being this wonderful person, "Geoff is just so nice, he's just such a great guy," to: "I cannot stand that guy. He just thinks he's in charge and he wants to do things his way." And it was a real eye-opener for me because I was trying to change something that everybody was comfortable with. I don't think we were doing a great job with the kids, and I thought we could perform at a higher level.
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The Madison School Board voted early Tuesday morning against a charter school geared toward low-income minority students.Nathan Comp:Moments later, Urban League of Greater Madison President Kaleem Caire announced to a crowd of emotional supporters that he planned to file a racial discrimination lawsuit with the U.S. Justice Department. He also urged the supporters to run for School Board.
"We are going to challenge this school district like they've never been challenged before, I swear to God," Caire said.
The School Board voted against the plan 5-2, as expected, just after midnight. In the hours leading up to the vote, however, hundreds of Madison Preparatory Academy supporters urged them to change their minds.
More than 450 people gathered at Memorial High School for public comments, which lasted more than four hours.
It was the first School Board meeting moved to Memorial since a 2001 debate over the Pledge of Allegiance in schools.
But the night's harshest criticism was leveled not at the proposal but at the board itself, over a perceived lack of leadership "from the superintendent on down."Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here."You meet every need of the unions, but keep minority student achievement a low priority," said one parent.
Others suggested the same.
"This vote is not about Madison Prep," said Jan O'Neill, a citizen who came out to speak. "It's about this community, who we are and what we stand for -- and who we stand up for."
Among the issues raised by opponents, the one that seemed to weigh heaviest on the minds of board members was the non-instrumentality issue, which would've allowed Madison Prep to hire non-union staff.
A work preservation clause in the district's collective bargaining agreement with the teacher's union requires the district to hire union staff. Board member Ed Hughes said he wanted to approve Madison Prep, but feared that approving a non-instrumentality school would put the district in breach of its contract with Madison Teachers, Inc.
"It's undeniable that Madison school district hasn't done very well by its African American students," he said. "But I think it's incumbent upon us to honor the contract."
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Elisabeth Krents loves eating hot fudge sundaes, reading Wilkie Collins novels and trying, often unsuccessfully, to grow tomatoes. Yet in certain living rooms, in coffee shops and on Web sites, Ms. Krents, 61, incites the kind of fear and fascination usually reserved for a head of state or an over-covered celebrity.
"When sending thank you to Babby, address envelope to 'Elisabeth Krents,' correct? And leave off 'PhD'?" one anxious parent asked on the online forum Urban Baby. "It's like Santa Claus," responded a more experienced anxious parent. "Just send it to the Babster, UES. She'll get it."
Ms. Krents, called Babby by intimates and hopeful applicants alike, is a singularly powerful New Yorker whose name inspires endless opinion -- some informed, much unsubstantiated.
As admissions director since 1996 at the Dalton School on the Upper East Side, Ms. Krents decides each year which of the city's supply of high-achieving 4-year-olds get the privilege of attending one of the nation's best-regarded kindergartens, which costs $36,970 a year. Because many people believe admission to be a golden ticket leading to the Ivy League and a successful life beyond, and because of the increasingly bad math of private-school admissions in Manhattan, a kind of Babby Krents mythology has developed in certain precincts.
Admissions directors are a feared lot in a city where 10 children often apply for a single seat. Ms. Krents is, to some extent, the queen bee, if only because she has been doing it longer than most and is doing it at Dalton. The school is among the most selective in the city, in part because many parents believe it has perfected the balance between progressive education (learning matters) and results (graduates get into top colleges).
Power brokers fear her, well-heeled mothers seek advice on how to dress for her, wads of money are spent on preparing small children to impress her -- and people, it seems, are unwilling to share their names along with their thoughts about her.
"I lived in fear of her because of all the rumors," said one Dalton mother, speaking, like more than a dozen others interviewed, on the condition of anonymity out of concern that it could affect her children, one of whom has yet to face the admissions gantlet.
Conventional wisdom has it that not scoring a face-to-face meeting with Ms. Krents is tantamount to rejection. (Not true, she said in a recent interview; it is merely a matter of scheduling.)
Some posit that calling her "Elisabeth" in the parent or child interview will alienate her. (Nonsense, she said, though only her mother, now deceased, called her that.) Summer birthdays need not apply. ("No!" she said excitedly. "The school is filled with summer birthdays!") Being rich helps. ("We look at the full pie, and that's not part of the decision.")
Ms. Krents turns out to be warm and easy to talk to; "she was perfectly lovely" is how the aforementioned fearful mother put it. She loves meeting people and hearing their stories, and she does not seem burned out from the drone of similar questions, anxieties and attempted bribes. (Recalling a vat of fudge offered by one parent, she said, "I had to turn that away with tears in my eyes.")
She is famous for remembering details about every child. Another mother recalled Ms. Krents's suggesting that her 5-year-old meet another boy with common interests; years later, they are best friends. "It's weird," the mother said. "She could see it."
For her part, Ms. Krents said of applicants, "I feel it's my role to hold their hand." Her goal in interviewing parents, as she asks them to describe their precious little ones, is to see them settle back in their seats and relax their hunched shoulders. "That's what I'm about," she said. "I want to know as much as I can about their child."
Perhaps it is her affability that feeds the "Babby" divide. Those who meet her like her. But most of their children will inevitably be rejected, so the warmth is often clouded, if not replaced, by feelings of resentment -- hence the not-nice things that proliferate on the Web and in certain kaffeeklatsches.
"It's upsetting," Ms. Krents said. "People get very disappointed when they can't have what they want."
Ms. Krents and Ellen Stein, Dalton's head of school, declined to disclose how many applications pour in each year, for fear of elevating the already-elevated anxiety.
In recent years, Ms. Krents, like many of her counterparts across the city, has been on a mission to diversify Dalton, which has only exacerbated the unfortunate odds and the attendant anxiety. Forty-seven percent of Dalton's 97 kindergartners this year are members of minority groups, a fact that has upset some families in which a parent attended the school and perhaps donated to its endowment as a kind of down payment on that golden ticket.
"It's creating resentment in the community," said one alumna, who has refused to give any more money to the school until her child is accepted. "The whole point of a legacy is that it creates a sense of longevity and community."
Victoria Goldman, an admissions consultant, put it this way: "Babby feels she's doing right by the school, but families with siblings feel outraged."
Ms. Krents, for her part, disputes the notion that legacies or siblings of current students have been disadvantaged by the push for diversity. "This is a misconception," she said, adding that siblings make up a third to a half of each class, a portion that has not changed. "First and foremost, the spots go to siblings and alumni and faculty."
The drive to diversify, Ms. Krents said, started as far back as she did, 15 years ago. She defines diversity broadly -- "racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, socioeconomic, geographic, family background, family style, gender orientation, children with physical challenges, diversity of thought, co-ed" -- and personally, having had a brother, Harold, who was blind and who became the inspiration for the Broadway play "Butterflies Are Free."
"I saw families with a lack of understanding hurt him by not letting their children play with him," she said of Harold, who died in 1987 of a brain tumor. "It's instilled in you early on."
Dalton is hardly alone in its push to look more like New York City: half of this year's kindergarten students at Ethical Culture Fieldston's lower school in the Bronx are members of minority groups, as are 65 percent of the school's pre-K students. At Trinity School, on the Upper West Side, more than 40 percent of kindergartners are nonwhite.
But Felicia Washington, an African-American mother of two Dalton graduates whose name was provided by Ms. Krents, said hers was "the only school that talked about diversity up front."
"They wanted children of color and other kids to have a more well-rounded education," recalled Ms. Washington, who also sat on Dalton's board.
Financial aid is increasing as well. Last year, Dalton granted a total of $6.5 million to about 20 percent of the student body, school officials said. That amounted to 16 percent of tuition dollars, up from 13 percent in 2005-6.
Ms. Krents herself is a Dalton legacy: she graduated in the class of 1968, though she went to Scarsdale public schools, in Westchester County, through 10th grade. Her children followed her to Dalton -- in the classes of 1997 and 2000 -- and she is currently trying to teach her months-old grandson the school song.
"He's not doing well," she said.
She studied English and fine arts at Harvard and earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. at Columbia, with a dissertation on humor development in children, including the hearing-impaired, that she defended the day she delivered her second daughter.
Ms. Krents went to work in Dalton's development office in 1990. By the time she became admissions director, Ms. Stein was running the elementary school, and they became fast friends. Today the two women swap books, interrupt each other's thoughts and frequently finish each other's sentences.
Both women said they empathized with the anxiety that parents might feel in the admissions rush -- which, for many, does not abate even after they have scored one golden ticket.
"I think I fear her more now than I did before," another Dalton mother said. "She holds my kids in the palm of her hand."
Indeed, as this reporter left her office, Ms. Krents's parting words were, "Will we see you when your daughter turns 4?"
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The main principle of the Harlem Children's Zone is simple: When failure is not allowed, success prevails."Are your kids graduating high school? No. Are your kids going to college? No. That's not success," Geoffrey Canada, president and chief executive officer of the Harlem Children's Zone, asked a Buffalo audience Friday.
Canada, nationally recognized as an advocate for education reform, was the keynote speaker at the first Education Summit presented by the Community Action Organization of Erie County's Education Task Force.
Entitled "Power of Education -- Children First," the summit was held at the Adam's Mark Hotel in downtown Buffalo. The purpose was to advance the cause of educational reform in the interests of children across Western New York and explore how to create those opportunities. About 300 people attended.
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A Conversation with Charles A. Czeisler by Bronwyn Fryer:
At 12:30 am on June 10, 2002, Israel Lane Joubert and his family of seven set out for a long drive home following a family reunion in Beaumont, Texas. Joubert, who had hoped to reach home in faraway Fort Worth in time to get to work by 8 am, fell asleep at the wheel, plowing the family's Chevy Suburban into the rear of a parked 18-wheeler. He survived, but his wife and five of his six children were killed.The Joubert tragedy underscores a problem of epidemic proportions among workers who get too little sleep. In the past five years, driver fatigue has accounted for more than 1.35 million automobile accidents in the United States alone, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The general effect of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance is well-known: Stay awake longer than 18 consecutive hours, and your reaction speed, short-term and long-term memory, ability to focus, decision-making capacity, math processing, cognitive speed, and spatial orientation all start to suffer. Cut sleep back to five or six hours a night for several days in a row, and the accumulated sleep deficit magnifies these negative effects. (Sleep deprivation is implicated in all kinds of physical maladies, too, from high blood pressure to obesity.)
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One out of every 15 high school students smokes marijuana on a near daily basis, a figure that has reached a 30-year peak even as use of alcohol, cigarettes and cocaine among teenagers continues a slow decline, according to a new government report.The popularity of marijuana, which is now more prevalent among 10th graders than cigarette smoking, reflects what researchers and drug officials say is a growing perception among teenagers that habitual marijuana use carries little risk of harm. That perception, experts say, is fueled in part by wider familiarity with medicinal marijuana and greater ease in obtaining it.
Although it is difficult to track the numbers, "we're clearly seeing an increase in teenage marijuana use that corresponds pretty clearly in time with the increase in medical marijuana use," said Dr. Christian Thurstone, medical director of the adolescent substance abuse treatment program at Denver Health and Hospital Authority, who was not involved in the study. Medical marijuana is legal in 16 states, including Colorado, and the District of Columbia.
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One drive back from Dallas on Interstate 30 is indelibly etched into my memory. I was in the center lane. And just forward of me in the right lane, a soft-top Jeep slowly started drifting across all three lanes of traffic, never slowing down. I honked my horn to alert the driver, but the Jeep left the highway and slammed into the first wooden pike in a crash barrier, throwing the vehicle's rear end so high that I thought it might flip over.Pulling onto the shoulder 50 or so feet ahead of the Jeep, I ran back, expecting the worst. But, while the driver was certainly going to be bruised, she was actually all right. So was her dog, in the front passenger floorboard. When I asked what had happened, she said she'd leaned over to pour some water into her dog's bowl on the floorboard and just wasn't paying attention. But I'd watched this accident unfold over five to seven seconds: She didn't just lean over for a second, she was completely oblivious to her loss of control of her vehicle until it crashed. I couldn't help but notice all the prescription bottles littering the Jeep's interior; one, filled the day before, was for Valium.
Because I had my cell phone with me, I had called Arlington 911 before I ever made it to her wreck.
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The Michigan House of Representatives voted Wednesday night to approve Senate Bill 618, which will lift the state's various caps on charter schools, House sources have confirmed. If and when the bill is signed by Governor Rick Snyder, it will go into law. The bill was passed 58-49, according to the Michigan Information & Resource Service (MIRS).SB 618 had been tie-barred to a group of other Senate bills in the so-called "parent empowerment package," which means they all would've had to pass for any to take effect. But that tie-bar was broken when the House Education Committee approved SB 618 at its Nov. 30 meeting.
Some 35 amendments were offered, according to a House source. Several were approved. Perhaps the most consequential among the amendments phases in the lifting of the cap on charter schools, allowing up to 300 to be established through the end of 2012, 500 through 2014, and starting in 2015, no cap at all.
State Rep. Jeff Irwin, who represents Ann Arbor in Lansing, said that the "huge, gaping problem" in the bill, lifting the cap all at once, was addressed but he still wasn't happy with the way the bill turned out. None of the amendments proposed by Democrats passed, Irwin said; they weren't even brought to a vote.
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As students gain access to sophisticated gadgets both at school and at home, educators are on the lookout for new kinds of cheating. From digitally inserting answers into soft drink labels to texting each other test answers and photos of exams, kids are finding new ways to get ahead when they haven't studied.YouTube alone has dozens of videos that lay out step-by-step instructions: One three-minute segment shows how to digitally scan the wrapper of a soft drink bottle, then use photo editing software to erase the nutrition information and replace it with test answers or handy formulas. The video has gotten nearly 7 million hits.
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Marriage rates in the US have hit an all-time low, as economic forces and social shifts have pushed couples to delay or avoid matrimony, according to an analysis of census data by the Pew Research Center.Just 51 per cent of people over age 18 are married today, compared to 57 per cent in 2000 and 72 per cent in 1960, with trends pointing toward wedded couples becoming a social minority within a few years.
"Public attitudes about the institution of marriage are mixed," the report said. "Nearly four-in-10 Americans say marriage is becoming obsolete," yet most people who have never married say they would like to some day.
A sharp drop in marriages occurred between 2009 and 2010 when the US economy was in recession, with new nuptials declining 5 per cent. Young people, in particular, drove the rates down, as marriage rates fell 13 per cent among 18 to 24 year olds.
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Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:
Here's a quote from an on-line comment of a Madison Prep opponent responding to one of the several op-ed pieces posted in the Cap Times in recent days: "There are barriers to students with special education needs, barriers to students with behavioral needs, and barriers to kids who rely on public transportation. These children are simply not the 'right fit'. It is Madison Prep's proposal to leave these kids in their neighborhood schools."Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.The notion seems to be that Madison Prep may not be welcoming for students from all points along the spectrum of educational needs, even though our neighborhood schools are obligated to serve everyone.
I think the self-selection process for Madison Prep should be taken into account in assessing how its students perform. But it does not trouble me that the school is not designed to meet the needs of all our students. No one need apply to attend and no student will be denied current services or programs if Madison Prep is authorized.
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Chad Terhune & Matthew Heimer:
It's the kind of calculation that ruffles the robes of administrators at the most prestigious universities in the country. It's a blunt bottom-line approach to a postsecondary education, a show-me-the-money college survey. And it's one academic contest that the Ivies don't win.For decades, the best-known college rankings have tried to encompass everything from alumni giving and "academic reputation" to dorm amenities. But a few years ago, SmartMoney stripped all that away in favor of a simpler benchmark. With help from PayScale, a Seattle-based compensation-data company that maintains salary profiles of 29 million workers, we collected median pay figures for two pools of each school's alums: recent grads (who've been out of school for an average of two years) and midcareer types (an average of 15 years out). For each class, we divided the median alumnus salary by tuition and fees (assuming they paid full price at then-current rates), averaged the results and, finally, converted that result to a percentage figure. The outcome: a measure of return on (tuition) investment that we've dubbed the Payback Score. For example, a hypothetical grad who spent $100,000 to attend college and now earns $150,000 a year would score 150. The higher the score, obviously, the better.
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Lucy Mathiak:
The Urban League's proposal to create a Madison Preparatory charter school is, at its heart, a proposal about public education in our community. Although the discussions often boil down to overly simplistic assertions about whether one position or the other is supportive of or hostile toward public education, it is not that simple. What we are facing is a larger and more fundamental question about our values when it comes to the purpose of public education and who it is supposed to serve.Also posted at the Capital Times.I am voting "yes" because I believe that strong public education for all is the foundation for a strong society. While our schools do a very good job with many students who are white and/or living above the poverty line, the same cannot be said for students of color and/or students living in poverty. The record is most dismal for African American students.
The Madison Prep proposal is born of over 40 years of advocacy for schools that engage and hold high academic expectations for African American and other students of color. That advocacy has produced minor changes in rhetoric without changes in culture, practice, or outcome. Yes, some African American students are succeeding. But for the overwhelming majority, there are two Madison public school systems. The one where the students have a great experience and go on to top colleges, and the one that graduates only 48% of African American males.
The individual stories are heartbreaking, but the numbers underscore that individual cases add up to data that is not in keeping with our self-image as a cutting edge modern community. We ALL play a role in the problem, and we ALL must be part creating a sound, systemic, solution to our failure to educate ALL of our public school students. In the meantime, the African American community cannot wait, and the Madison Prep proposal came from that urgent, dire, need.
Our track record with students and families of color is not improving and, in some cases, is going backward rather than forward as we create more plans and PR campaigns designed to dismiss concerns about academic equality as misunderstandings. To be sure, there are excellent principals, teachers, and staff who do make a difference every day; some African American students excel each year. But overall, when presented with opportunities to change and to find the academic potential in each student, the district has failed to act and has been allowed to do so by the complicit silence of board members and the community at large.A few turning points from the past year alone:
The single most serious issue this year, however, came in May when MMSD administration was informed that we are a District Identified for Improvement (DIFI) due to test scores for African American students along with students from low income families and those with learning disabilities. This puts Madison on an elite list with Madison (Milwaukee?) and Racine. The superintendent mentioned DIFI status in passing to the board, and the WI State Journal reported on the possible sanctions without using the term DIFI.
- The Urban League - not MMSD administration or the board - pointed out the dismal graduation rates for African American students (48% for males)
- Less than 5% of African American students are college ready.
- AVID/TOPs does a terrific job with underrepresented students IF they can get in. AVID/TOPs serves 134 (2.6%) of MMSD's 4,977 African American secondary students.
- The number of African American students entering AVID/TOPs is lower this year after MMSD administration changed the criteria for participation away from the original focus on students of color, low income, and first generation college students.
- Of almost 300 teachers hired in 2011-12, less than 10 are African American. There are fewer African American teachers in MMSD today than there were five years ago.
- Over 50 African Americans applied for custodian positions since January 1, 2011. 1 was hired; close to 30 custodians were hired in that time.
- 4K - which is presented as a means to address the achievement gap - is predominantly attended by students who are not African American or low-income.
- In June, the board approved a Parent Engagement Coordinator to help the district improve its relations with African American families. That position remains unfilled. The district has engagement coordinators working with Hmong and Latino families.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with NCLB, DIFI status is a serious matter because of the ladder of increasing sanctions that come with poor performance. In an ideal world, the district would have articulated the improvement plan required by DPI over the summer for implementation on the first day of school. Such a plan would include clear action steps, goals, and timelines to improve African American achievement. Such a plan does not exist as of mid-December 2011, and in the most recent discussion it was asserted that the improvement plan is "just paper that doesn't mean much." I would argue that, to the African American community, such a plan would mean a great deal if it was sincerely formulated and implemented.
At the same time, we have been able to come up with task forces and reports - with goals and timelines - that are devoted to Talented and Gifted Programing, Direct Language Instruction, Fine Arts Programing, and Mathematics Education to name a few.Under the circumstances, it is hard to see why the African American community would believe that the outcomes will improve if they are 'just patient' and 'work within the existing public school structures to make things better.' Perhaps more accurately, I cannot look people in the face and ask them to hope that we will do a better job if they just give up on the vision of a school structure that does what the MMSD has failed to do for the African American community since the advocacy began some 40 years ago.
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750K PDF - Kaleem Caire, via email
December 11, 2011Related: Who Runs the Madison Schools?Mr. Ed Hughes
Board of Education
Madison Metropolitan School District 545 West Dayton Street
Madison, WI 53713
Dear Mr. Hughes:This letter is intended to respond to your December 4, 2011 blog post regarding the Madison Preparatory Academy initiative. Specifically, this letter is intended to address what you referred as "a fairly half-hearted argument [advanced by the Urban League] that the state statute authorizing school districts to enter into contracts for non-instrumentality charter schools trumps or pre-empts any language in collective bargaining agreements that restricts school districts along these lines." Continuing on, you wrote the following:
I say the argument is half-hearted because no authority is cited in support and itjust isn't much ofan argument. School districts aren't required to authorize non-instrumentality charter schools, and so there is no conflict with state statutesfor a school district to, in effect, agree that it would not do so. Without that kind of a direct conflict, there is no basis for arguing that the CBA language is somehow pre-empted.We respectfully disagree with your assessment. The intent of this letter is to provide you with the authority for this position and to more fully explain the nature of our concern regarding a contract provision that appears to be illegal in this situation and in direct conflict with public policy.Background
As you are aware, the collective bargaining agreement (the "CBA") between MMSD and MTI Iprovides "that instructional duties where the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction requires that such be performed by a certificated teacher, shall be performed only by 'teachers."' See Article I, Section B.3.a. In addition, "the term 'teacher' refers to anyone in the collective bargaining unit." See Article I, Section B.2. You have previously suggested that "all teachers in MMSD schools-- including non-instrumentality charter schools- must be members of the MTI bargaining unit." As we indicated in our December 3, 2011 correspondence to you, under a non-instrumentality charter, the school board may not be the employer of the charter school's staff. See§ 118.40(7)(a).
Under Wisconsin's charter school law, the MMSD School Board (the "Board") has the exclusive authority to determine whether a school is an instrumentality or not an instrumentality of the school district. See§ 118.40(7)(a). That decisio n is an important decision reserved to the Board alone. The effect of that decision drives whether teachers and staff must be, or cannot be, employees of the Board. The language of the CBA deprives the Board ofthe decision reserved to it under the statute and that language cannot be harmonized to give effect to both the statute and the CBA. Alternatively, the CBA language creates a situation whereby the Board may exercise its statutory authority to approve a non- instrumentality charter, but it must staff the school with school district employees, a result clearly prohibited under the statute. For reasons that will be explained below, in our view, the law trumps the CBA in either of these situations.Analysis
Under Wisconsin law, "[a]labor contract may not violate the law." Glendale Professional Policeman's Ass'n v. City ofGlendale, 83 Wis. 2d 90, 102 (Wis. 1978). City ofGlendale addressed the tension that can arise between bargained for provisions in a collective bargaining agreement and statutory language. In City of Glendale, the City argued that a provision dealing with job promotions was unenforceable because it could not be harmonized with statutory language. Specifically, the agreement in question set forth parameters for promoting employees and stated in part that openings "shall be filled by the applicant with the greatest department seniority..." City of Glendale, 83 Wis. 2d at 94. Wisconsin law provided the following:
The chiefs shall appoint subordinates subject to approval by the board. Such appointments shall be made by promotion when this can be done with advantage, otherwise from an eligible list provided by examination and approval by the board and kept on file with the clerk.Wis. Stat.§ 62.13(4)(a).The City contended that "the contract term governing promotions is void and unenforceable because it is contrary to sec. 62.13(4)(a), Stats." City ofGlendale, 83 Wis. 2d at 98. Ultimately, the court ruled against the City based on the following rationale:
Although sec. 62.13(4)(a), Stats., requires all subordinates to be appointed by the chief with the approval of the board, it does not, at least expressly, prohibit the chief or the board from exercising the power of promotion of a qualified person according to a set of rules for selecting one among several qualified applicants.The factual scenario in City ofGlendale differs significantly from the present situation. In City of Glendale, the terms of the agreement did not remove the ability of the chief, with the approval of the board, to make promotions. They could still carry out their statutory duties. The agreement language simply set forth parameters that had to be followed when making promotions. Accordingly, the discretion of the chief was limited, but not eliminated. In the present scenario, the discretion of the Board to decide whether a charter school should be an instrumentality or a non-instrumentality has been effectively eliminated by the CBA language.There is nothing in the CBA that explicitly prohibits the Board from voting for a non-instrumentality charter school. This discretion clearly lies with the Board. Pursuant to state law, instrumentality charter schools are staffed by District teachers. However, non-instrumentality charter schools cannot be staffed by District teachers. See Wis. Stat.§ 118.40. Based on your recent comments, you have taken the position that the Board cannot vote for a non-instrumentality charter school because this would conflict with the work preservation clause of the CBA. Specifically, you wrote that "given the CBA complications, I don't see how the school board can authorize a non-instrumentality Madison Prep to open its doors next fall, and I say that as one who has come to be sympathetic to the proposal." While we appreciate your sympathy, what we would like is your support. Additionally, this position creates at least two direct conflicts with the law.
First, under Wisconsin law, "the school board of the school district in which a charter school is located shall determine whether or not the charter school is an instrumentality of the school district." Wis. Stat. § 118.40(7)(a) (emphasis added.) The Board is required to make this determination. If the Board is precluded from making this decision on December 19"' based on an agreement previously reached with MTI, the Board will be unable to comply with the law. Effectively, the instrumentality/non- instrumentality decision will have been made by the Board and MTI pursuant to the terms and conditions of the CBA. However, MTI has no authority to make this determination, which creates a direct conflict with the law. Furthermore, the Board will be unable to comply with its statutory obligation due to the CBA. Based on your stated concerns regarding the alleged inability to vote for a non-instrumentality charter school, it appears highly unlikely that the Board ever intentionally ceded this level ofauthority to MTI.
Second, if the Board chose to exercise its statutorily granted authority on December 19th and voted for a non-instrumentality charter school, this would not be a violation of the CBA. Nothing in the CBA explicitly prohibits the Board from voting for a non-instrumentality charter school. At that point, to the extent that MTI chose to challenge that decision, and remember that MTI would have to choose to grieve or litigate this issue, MTI would have to try to attack the law, not the decision made by the Board. Pursuant to the law, "[i] f the school board determines that the charter school is not an instrumentality of the school district, the school board may not employ any personnel for the charter school." Wis. Stat.§ 118.40(7)(a) (emphasis added). While it has been suggested that the Board could choose to avoid the legal impasse by voting down the non-instrumentality proposal, doing so would not cure this conflict. This is particularly true if some Board members were to vote against a non-instrumentality option solely based on the CBA. In such a case, the particular Board Member's obligation to make this decision is essentially blocked. Making a decision consistent with an illegal contract provision for the purposes of minimizing the conflict does not make the provision any less illegal. "A labor contract term whereby parties agree to violate the law is void." WERC v. Teamsters Local No. 563, 75 Wis. 2d 602, 612 (Wis. 1977) (citation omitted).
Conclusion
In Wisconsin, "a labor contract term that violates public policy or a statute is void as a matter of law." Board of Education v. WERC, 52 Wis. 2d 625, 635 (Wis. 1971). Wisconsin law demonstrates that there is a public policy that promotes the creation of charter schools. Within that public policy, there is an additional public policy that promotes case-by-case decision making by a school board regarding whether a charter school will be an instrumentality or a non-instrumentality. The work preservation clause in the CBA cannot be harmonized with these underlying public policies and should not stop the creation of Madison Preparatory Academy.The Madison Prep initiative has put between a rock and a hard place. Instrumentality status lost support because of the costs associated with employing members of MTI. Yet, we are being told that non-instrumentality status will be in conflict with the CBA and therefore cannot be approved. As discussed above, the work preservation clause is irreconcilable with Wisconsin law, and would likely be found void by acourt of law.
Accordingly, I call on you, and the rest of the Board to vote for non- instrumentality status on December 19th. In the words of Langston Hughes, "a dream deferred is a dream denied." Too many children in this district have been denied for far too long. On behalf of Madison children, families and the Boards of the Urban League and Madison Prep, I respectfully request your support.
Respectfully,
Kaleem Caire
President & CEOcc: Dan Nerad, Superintendent
Dylan Pauly, Legal Counsel
MMSD Board ofEducation Members
ULGMand Madison Prep Board Members and Staff
Godfrey & Kahn, S.C.
Howard Blume: New teacher contract could shut down school choice program
As schools across California bemoan increasing class sizes, the Alliance Technology and Math Science High School has boosted class size -- on purpose -- to an astonishing 48. The students work at computers most of the school day.Next door in an identical building containing a different school, digital imaging -- in the form of animation, short films and graphics -- is used for class projects in English, math and science.
At a third school on the same Glassell Park campus, long known as Taylor Yards, high-schoolers get hands-on experience with a working solar panel.
These schools and two others coexist at the Sotomayor Learning Academies, which opened this fall under a Los Angeles school district policy called Public School Choice. The 2009 initiative, the first of its kind in the nation, has allowed groups from inside and outside the Los Angeles Unified School District to compete for the right to run dozens of new or low-performing schools.
Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School, here.
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What does the Hillsborough County, Fla., school district have that Milwaukee Public Schools doesn't? What about Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina?Much better overall scores in reading and math, for one thing. They were at the top of the list of 21 urban school districts in results released last week as part of the National Assessment of Education Progress, or NAEP. Milwaukee was near the bottom.
But here's something else Hillsborough County - which is the Tampa school district - has: Among its 193,000 students, 57% are from low-income homes. For Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the percentage of low-income students among its 136,000 students is 52%.
For MPS, with 80,000-plus students, the low-income rate is 83%.
Each of the four urban districts that scored the best in fourth-grade reading had a low-income rate of 61% or less. Among the four with the worst results, MPS was the lowest with its 83% rate. Detroit, with the worst scores, was listed in the NAEP report at 87%, Cleveland at 100%, and Fresno, Calif., at 93%.
Two other things:
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Amber Dias couldn't be sure what was wrong with her little boy.Chase was a bright, loving 2 1/2-year-old. But he didn't talk much and rarely responded to his own name. He hated crowds and had a strange fascination with the underside of the family tractor.
Searching the Internet, Amber found stories about other children like Chase -- on websites devoted to autism.
"He wasn't the kid rocking in the corner, but it was just enough to scare me," recalled Dias, who lives with her husband and three children on a dairy farm in the Central Valley town of Kingsburg.
She took Chase to a psychologist in Los Angeles, who said the boy indeed had autism and urged the family to seek immediate treatment.
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And no matter which way the Dec. 19 vote goes, there's no way to know now whether the school will be entirely effective.Two School Board seats will be on the Spring, 2012 ballot. They are currently occupied by Lucy Mathiak, who is not running again and Arlene Silveira. I suspect the outcome of this vote will drive new candidates, and perhaps, even recalls."This is the most difficult decision I will ever make on the School Board," said Marj Passman, who plans to vote against the proposal. "It has the potential for polarizing our community, and that's the last thing I want to happen."
The vote comes more than a year after the charter was proposed and in the wake of a School District report outlining its opposition to Madison Prep. The school would violate the district's contract with its teachers and preclude sufficient oversight of the $17.5 million in district funds the school would receive over five years, the report said.
District opposition likely will lead the board to reject the proposal, said School Board president James Howard.
"I don't see how it can pass," said Howard. He and Lucy Mathiak are the only two board members who said they will vote to approve the school.
In interviews last week, Passman, Maya Cole and Ed Hughes said they expect to vote against the proposal. Arlene Silveira and Beth Moss declined to disclose how they plan to vote.
Urban League of Greater Madison president Kaleem Caire, the lead proponent of the charter, acknowledged he doesn't have the votes. But he's engaged in a full-court press to generate public support for the proposal.
"We have a moral obligation to do whatever it takes to support our children and special interest of adults should not come before that," Caire said last week.
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Richard P. Phelps, via a kind email:
Every year, the education magazine Phi Delta Kappan hires the Gallup Organization to survey American opinion on the public schools. Though Gallup conducts the poll, education grandees selected by the editors of the Kappan write the questions. In 2007 the poll asked, "Will the current emphasis on standardized tests encourage teachers to 'teach to the tests,' that is, concentrate on teaching their students to pass the tests rather than teaching the subject, or don't you think it will have this effect?"The key to the question, of course, is the "rather than"--the assumption by many critics that test preparation and good teaching are mutually exclusive. In their hands, "teach to the test" has become an epithet. The very existence of content standards linked to standardized tests, in this view, narrows the curriculum and restricts the creativity of teachers--which of course it does, in the sense that teachers in standards-based systems cannot organize their instructional time in any fashion they prefer.
A more subtle critique is that teaching to the test can be good or bad. If curricula are carefully developed by educators and the test is written with curricula in mind, then teaching to the test means teaching students the knowledge and skills we agree they ought to learn--exactly what our teachers are legally and ethically obligated to do.
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There's a very disturbing tendency among academics -- though many people in policy fights do it -- to dodge substantive debate by declaring, basically, "the other side is full of garbage so just ignore them." You probably see it most glaringly about climate change -- no one credible disagrees with Al Gore! -- but I see it far too frequently regarding the possibility that government student aid, the bulk of which comes from Washington, is a significant factor behind college price inflation.Today, we are treated to this lame dodge in a letter to the Washington Post from Terry Hartle, Senior Vice President at the American Council on Education, arguably the most powerful of Ivory Tower advocacy groups. He writes:
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It is simply time to be honest. If you are sincerely concerned about the educational problems in Milwaukee and want to see real solutions implemented, then it is time to take a look at the truth. The desire to be politically correct for some and the reluctance to accept reality for others is what has delayed real progress in Milwaukee.So, here it is point blank:
Wisconsin - not just Milwaukee - has a problem educating African-American youths.
According to the recent test scores reported by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the achievement gap continues to widen. In other words, white students continue to outperform minority students, especially African-Americans. In fact, Wisconsin has the largest white-black achievement gap in the nation and continues to be the only state with a gap well above the national average.
Basically, white students have an 86% high school graduation rate, while African-American students graduate at a rate of 49%. So, quality education is not difficult to find in Wisconsin, but for some reason African-American youths are not getting it.
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Kaleem Caire, via email:
December 10, 2011Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school, here.
Dear Friends & Colleagues.
For the last 16 months, we have been on an arduous journey to develop a public school that would effectively address the educational needs of children who have under-performed or failed to succeed in Madison's public schools for at least the last 40 years. If you have followed the news stories, it's not hard to see how many mountains have been erected in our way during the process.
Some days, it has felt like we're desperately looking at our children standing dangerously close to the edge of a cliff, some already fallen over while others dangling by their thumbs waiting to be rescued; but before we can get close enough to save them, we have to walk across one million razor blades and through thousands of rose bushes with our bare feet. As we make our way to them and get closer, the razor blades get sharper and the rose bushes grow more dense.
Fortunately, our Board members and team at the Urban League and Madison Preparatory Academy, and the scores of supporters who've been plowing through the fields with us for the last year believe that our children's education, their emotional, social and personal development, and their futures are far more important than any pain we might endure.
Our proposal for Madison Prep has certainly touched a nerve in Madison. But why? When we launched our efforts on the steps of West High School on August 29, 2010, we thought Madison and its school officials would heartily embrace Madison Prep.We thought they would see the school as:
(1) a promising solution to the racial achievement gap that has persisted in our city for at least 40 years;(2) a learning laboratory for teachers and administrators who admittedly need new strategies for addressing the growing rate of underachievement, poverty and parental disengagement in our schools, and
(3) a clear sign to communities of color and the broader Greater Madison community that it was prepared to do whatever it takes to help move children forward - children for whom failure has become too commonplace and tolerated in our capital city.
Initially, the majority of Board of Education members told us they liked the idea and at the time, had no problems with us establishing Madison Prep as a non-instrumentality - and therefore, non-union, public school. At the same time, all of them asked us for help and advice on how to eliminate the achievement gap, more effectively engage parents and stimulate parent involvement, and better serve children and families of color.
Then, over the next several months as the political climate and collective bargaining in the state changed and opponents to charter schools and Madison Prep ramped up their misinformation and personal attack campaign, the focus on Madison Prep got mired in these issues.
The concern of whether or not a single-gender school would be legal under state and federal law was raised. We answered that both with a legal briefing and by modifying our proposal to establish a common girls school now rather than two years from now.
The concern of budget was raised and how much the school would cost the school district. We answered that through a $2.5 million private gift to lower the per pupil request to the district and by modifying our budget proposal to ensure Madison Prep would be as close to cost-neutral as possible. The District Administration first said they would support the school if it didn't cost the District more than $5 million above what it initially said it could spend; Madison Prep will only cost them $2.7 million.
Board of Education members also asked in March 2011 if we would consider establishing Madison Prep as an instrumentality of MMSD, where all of the staff would be employed by the district and be members of the teacher's union. We decided to work towards doing this, so long as Madison Prep could retain autonomy of governance, management and budget. Significant progress was made until the last day of negotiations when MMSD's administration informed us that they would present a counter-budget to ours in their analysis of our proposal that factored in personnel costs for an existing school versus establishing a modest budget more common to new charter schools.
We expressed our disagreement with the administration and requested that they stick with our budget for teacher salaries, which was set using MMSD's teacher salary scale for a teacher with 7 years experience and a masters degree and bench-marked against several successful charter schools. Nevertheless, MMSD argued that they were going to use the average years of experience of teachers in the district, which is 14 years with a master's degree. This drove up the costs significantly, taking teacher salaries from $47,000 to $80,000 per year and benefits from $13,500 to $25,000 per year per teacher. The administration's budget plan therefore made starting Madison Prep as an instrumentality impossible.
To resolve the issue, the Urban League and Board of Madison Prep met in November to consider the options. In doing so, we consulted with every member of MMSD's Board of Education. We also talked with parents, stakeholders and other community members as well. It was then decided that we would pursue Madison Prep as a non-instrumentality of the school district because we simply believe that our children cannot and should not have to wait.
Now, Board of Education members are saying that Madison Prep should be implemented in "a more familiar, Madison Way", as a "private school", and that we should not have autonomy even though state laws and MMSD's own charter school policy expressly allow for non-instrumentality schools to exist. There are presently more than 20 such schools in Wisconsin.
What Next?
As the mountains keep growing, the goal posts keep moving, and the razor blades and rose bushes are replenished with each step we take, we are forced to ask the question: Why has this effort, which has been more inclusive, transparent and well-planned, been made so complicated? Why have the barriers been erected when our proposal is specifically focused on what Madison needs, a school designed to eliminate the achievement gap, increase parent engagement and prepare young people for college who might not otherwise get there? Why does liberal Madison, which prides itself on racial tolerance and opposition to bigotry, have such a difficult time empowering and including people of color, particularly African Americans?
As the member of a Black family that has been in Madison since 1908, I wonder aloud why there are fewer black-owned businesses in Madison today than there were 25 years ago? There are only two known black-owned businesses with 10 or more employees in Dane County. Two!
Why can I walk into 90 percent of businesses in Madison in 2011 and struggle to find Black professionals, managers and executives or look at the boards of local companies and not see anyone who looks like me?
How should we respond when Board of Education members tell us they can't vote for Madison Prep while knowing that they have no other solutions in place to address the issues our children face? How can they say they have the answers and develop plans for our children without consulting and including us in the process? How can they have 51 black applicants for teaching positions and hire only one, and then claim that they can't find any black people to apply for jobs? How can they say, "We need more conversations" about the education of our children when we've been talking for four decades?
I have to ask the question, as uncomfortable as it may be for some to hear, "Would we have to work this hard and endure so much resistance if just 48% of white children in Madison's public schools were graduating, only 1% of white high school seniors were academically ready for college, and nearly 50% of white males between the ages of 25-29 were incarcerated, on probation or under some form of court supervision?
Is this 2011 or 1960? Should the black community, which has been in Madison for more than 100 years, not expect more?
How will the Board of Education's vote on December 19th help our children move forward? How will their decision impact systemic reform and seed strategies that show promise in improving on the following?
Half of Black and Latino children are not completing high school. Just 59% of Black and 61% of Latino students graduated on-time in 2008-09. One year later, in 2009-10, the graduation rate declined to 48% of Black and 56% of Latino students compared to 89% of white students. We are going backwards, not forwards. (Source: MMSD 2010, 2011)
Black and Latino children are not ready for college. According to makers of the ACT college entrance exam, just 20% of Madison's 378 Black seniors and 37% of 191 Latino seniors in MMSD in 2009-10 completed the ACT. Only 7% of Black and 18% of Latino seniors completing test showed they had the knowledge and skills necessary to be "ready for college". Among all MMSD seniors (those completing and not completing the test), just 1% of Black and 7% of Latino seniors were college ready
Too few Black and Latino graduates are planning to go to college. Of the 159 Latino and 288 Black students that actually graduated and received their diplomas in 2009-10, just 28% of Black and 21% of Latino students planned to attend a four-year college compared to 53% of White students. While another 25% of Black and 33% of graduates planned to attend a two-year college or vocation program (compared to 17% of White students), almost half of all of all Black and Latino graduates had no plans for continuing their education beyond high school compared to 27% of White students. (Source: DPI 2011)
Half of Black males in their formative adult years are a part of the criminal justice system. Dane County has the highest incarceration rate among young Black men in the United States: 47% between the ages of 25-29 are incarcerated, on probation or under some form of court supervision. The incarceration phenomena starts early. In 2009-10, Black youth comprised 62% of all young people held in Wisconsin's correctional system. Of the 437 total inmates held, 89% were between the ages of 15-17. In Dane County, in which Madison is situated, 49% of 549 young people held in detention by the County in 2010 were Black males, 26% were white males, 12% were black females, 6% were white females and 6% were Latino males and the average age of young people detained was 15. Additionally, Black youth comprised 54% of all 888 young people referred to the Juvenile Court System. White students comprised 31% of all referrals and Latino comprised 6%.
More importantly, will the Board of Education demonstrate the type of courage it took our elders and ancestors to challenge and change laws and contracts that enabled Jim Crow, prohibited civil rights, fair employment and Women's right to vote, and made it hard for some groups to escape the permanence of America's underclass? We know this is not an easy vote, and we appreciate their struggle, but there is a difference between what is right and what is politically convenient.
Will the Board have the courage to look in the faces of Black and Latino families in the audience, who have been waiting for solutions for so long, and tell them with their vote that they must wait that much longer?
We hope our Board of Education members recognize and utilize the tremendous power they have to give our children a hand-up. We hope they hear the collective force and harmony of our pleas, engage with our pain and optimism, and do whatever it takes to ensure that the proposal we have put before them, which comes with exceptional input and widespread support, is approved on December 19, 2011.
Madison Prep is a solution we can learn from and will benefit the hundreds of young men and women who will eventually attend.
If not Madison Prep, then what? If not now, then when?
JOIN US
SCHOOL BOARD VOTE ON MADISON PREP
Monday, December 19, 2011 at 5:00pm
Madison Metropolitan School District
Doyle Administration Building Auditorium
545 West Dayton Street
Madison, WI 53703
Contact: Laura DeRoche Perez, Lderoche@ulgm.org
Phone: 608-729-1230
CLICK HERE TO RSVP: TELL US YOU'LL BE THERE
Write the School Board and Tell Them to "Say 'Yes', to Madison Prep!"
Madison Prep 2012!
Onward!
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
Phone: 608-729-1200
Fax: 608-729-1205
www.ulgm.org
OUR RESPONSE TO MMSD'S NEW CONCERNS
Autonomy: MMSD now says they are concerned that Madison Prep will not be accountable to the public for the education it provides students and the resources it receives. Yet, they don't specify what they mean by "accountability." We would like to know how accountability works in MMSD and how this is producing high achievement among the children it serves. Further, we would like to know why Madison Prep is being treated differently than the 30 early childhood centers that are participating in the district's 4 year old kindergarten program. They all operate similar to non-instrumentality schools, have their own governing boards, operate via a renewable contract, can hire their own teachers "at their discretion" and make their own policy decisions, and have little to no oversight by the MMSD Board of Education. All 30 do not employ union teachers. Accountability in the case of 4K sites is governed by "the contract." MMSD Board members should be aware that, as with their approval of Badger Rock Middle School, the contract is supposed to be developed "after" the concept is approved on December 19. In essence, this conversation is occurring to soon, if we keep with current district practices.
Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA): MMSD and Madison Teachers, Incorporated have rejected our attorney's reading of ACT 65, which could provide a path to approval of Madison Prep without violating the CBA. Also, MTI and MMSD could approve Madison Prep per state law and decide not to pursue litigation, if they so desired. There are still avenues to pursue here and we hope MMSD's Board of Education will consider all of them before making their final decision.
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We were not able to get to all the audience questions at the SchoolBook community event in Brooklyn on Thursday night. Here is a sampling of 10 of them. Keep the conversation going on your school pages and with SchoolBook editors. We will do our best to get some answers for you.Meanwhile, the video above was shown during the event at the Pratt Institute. See what the students have to say about the choice process.
What happens to students that schools don't "compete" for?
Why do all the kids have to be tutored to get into the specialized schools?
I just moved to Harlem and found out I'm in District 5 with almost no choice for middle schools. Why is this?
Why were the neighborhood schools discontinued? MetroCards and buses are very expensive.
Why don't you see which principals have success and copy their idea and fire the incompetent ones?
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A nice analytic giblet from a Times profile of new Nobel economists Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims:Because of his father's College Board connections, Mr. Sims got hold of an old SAT exam, which he and Mr. Willoughby used to conduct a statistical analysis. They found that on multiple-choice questions in English and social studies, the "longer answers tended to be correct." In math, they determined that the number that was "closest to all of the other numerical choices" was probably the right one.
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Andrew Rotherham: Newt Gingrich has a penchant for saying provocative and often downright crazy things. When the former House Speaker gave a lecture at Harvard last month, calling child labor laws "truly stupid" and suggesting that low-income kids should be required to do some manual labor in their schools, it was a classic Gingrich proposal: over-the-top, totally tone-deaf, and way too broad in scope. But it also was not entirely wrong. Although his specifics are often bewildering, it's hard to deny that Gingrich has a knack for spotting trends in education.
In 1994, when Gingrich was the leader of House Republicans, he suggested a radical welfare reform: to break the cycle of poverty, take poor kids away from their unwed teen mothers and put them in state-run facilities. His orphanage idea was designed to free up single parents for job training while simultaneously instilling better work habits in their children. Not surprisingly, the proposal quickly died on Capitol Hill. But in the 17 years since then, hundreds of schools have sprung up across the country that are designed to get students to spend more time on school-related activities and less time exposed to adverse influences in their neighborhoods and, yes, sometimes in their homes. These schools also have clear nonacademic curricula that focus on behavior, self-management and life skills. The goal, as described by journalist David Whitman, the current speechwriter for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, in Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism, is to use school as an anti-poverty tool by deliberately fostering a strong work ethic in students.
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John Matthews, Executive Director of Madison Teachers, Inc., via email:
The Urban League proposes that Madison Prep be operated as a non-instrumentality of the Madison Metropolitan School District. The Urban League's proposal is unacceptable to Madison Teachers, because it would effectively eliminate supervision and accountability of the school to the Madison School Board regarding the expenditure of millions of dollars in taxpayer money, and because it would also violate long-standing terms and conditions of the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the Madison Metropolitan School District and MTI.Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school, here.The Urban League proposes to use District funds to hire non-District teaching staff at lower salaries and benefits than called for in the Collective Bargaining Agreement. It was recently stated in a meeting between representatives of Madison Prep, the School District and MTI that the Urban League plans to hire young African-American males and asks that MTI and the District enable them to pay the teachers they hire less than their counterparts, who are employed by the District. MTI cannot agree to enable that. We believe that such is discriminatory, based both on race and gender. The MTI/MMSD Contract calls for teachers to be compensated based upon their educational achievement and their years of service. MTI and MMSD agreed in the early 1970's that the District would not enable such undermining of employment standards. The costing of the Contract salary placement was explained by both Superintendent Nerad and John Matthews. Those explanations were ignored by the Urban League in their budgeting, causing a shortfall in the proposed operational budget, according to Superintendent Nerad.
It is also distasteful to MTI that the Urban League proposes to NOT ADDITIONALLY pay their proposed new hires for working a longer day and a longer school year. Most employees in the United States receive overtime pay when working longer hours. The Urban League proposes NO additional compensation for employees working longer hours, or for the 10 additional school days in their plan.
Finally, the Urban League is incorrect in asserting that MTI and the District could modify the MMSD/MTI Contract without triggering Act 10, Governor Walker's draconian attack on teachers and other public employees. The Contract would be destroyed if MTI and the District agreed to amend it. Such is caused by Walker's Law, Act 10. MTI is not willing to inflict the devastating effects of Act 10 on its members. The Urban League states that Walker's Act 65 would enable the Contract to be amended without the horrible impact cause by Act 10. That claim is unfounded and in error.
The Madison Prep proposal could easily be implemented if it followed the Charter Plan of Wright School, Nuestro Mundo, and Badger Rock School, all of which operate as instrumentalities of the District, under its supervision and the MMSD/MTI Collective Bargaining Agreement.
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I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. - Mark TwainDisclaimer: I write this as a university student. Some of my points may or may not be applicable in a high school environment.
The grading system in schools and universities has a long history of opponents and criticism. I won't go into the arguments here because, quite frankly, I don't have anything new to say about it. In short: the system sucks. It encourages memorization and frenzied, last-minute studying, can be played in a variety of ways, etc. Educators can debate the alternatives and run pilot projects, and that's all well and good. But what can we - the students - do about it?
My answer: Don't Worry About It.
Of course, this could easily be interpreted as a call to rebel against the system, forget grades entirely, and party night and day. So let me expand on that:
Pick courses that interest you, and focus on learning. And don't worry about the grades - they will come with the territory.
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Lanya Olmstead was born in Florida to a mother who emigrated from Taiwan and an American father of Norwegian ancestry. Ethnically, she considers herself half Taiwanese and half Norwegian. But when applying to Harvard, Olmstead checked only one box for her race: white."I didn't want to put 'Asian' down," Olmstead said, "because my mom told me there's discrimination against Asians in the application process."
For years, many Asian-Americans have been convinced that it's harder for them to gain admission to the nation's top colleges.
Studies show that Asian-Americans meet these colleges' admissions standards far out of proportion to their 6 percent representation in the U.S. population and that they often need test scores hundreds of points higher than applicants from other ethnic groups to have an equal chance of admission. Critics say these numbers, along with the fact that some top colleges with race-blind admissions have double the Asian percentage of Ivy League schools, prove the existence of discrimination.
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Kaleem Caire, via email:
Fails to address core issues impacting racial achievement gap and middle class flightRelated: "They're all rich, white kids and they'll do just fine" -- NOT!.WHAT: The Urban League of Greater Madison and the founding Board of Madison Preparatory Academy will share their response to the Madison Metropolitan School District Administration's recommendation that the Board of Education not Support Madison Prep, and will call for immediate and wider education reforms within the Madison Metropolitan School District to address the racial achievement gap and middle-class flight and crises.
WHEN: 12:00 pm, Thursday, December 8, 2011
WHERE: Urban League of Greater Madison, 2222 S. Park St., Suite 200, Madison, WI 53713
WHO: Kaleem Caire, Urban League President & CEO Urban League of Greater Madison Board of Directors Madison Preparatory Academy Board of Directors Community Leaders and Parents
For more information, contact Laura DeRoche Perez, Director of School Development, Urban League of Greater Madison, at lderoche@ulgm.org or 608-729-1235.
Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school, here.
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Fellow members of the Electronic Educational Entertainment Association. My remarks will be brief, as I realize you all have texts to read, messages to tweet, and you will of course want to take photos of those around you to post on your blog.
I only want to remind you that the book is our enemy. Every minute a student spends reading a book is time taken away from purchasing and using the software and hardware the sale of which we depend on for our livelihoods.
You should keep in mind the story C.S. Lewis told of Wormwood, the sales rep for his uncle Screwtape, a district manager Below, who was panicked when his target client joined a church. What was he to do? Did this mean a lost account? Screwtape reassured him with a story from his own early days. One of his accounts went into a library, and Screwtape was not worried, but then the client picked up a book and began reading. However, then he began to think! And, in an instant, the Enemy Above was at his elbow. But Screwtape did not panic--fortunately it was lunchtime, and he managed to get his prospect up and at the door of the library. There was traffic and busyiness, and the client thought to himself, "This is real life!" And Screwtape was able to close the account.
In the early days, Progressive Educators would sometimes say to students, in effect, "step away from those books and no one gets hurt!" because they wanted students to put down their books, go out, work for social justice, and otherwise take part in "real life" rather than get into those dangerous books and start thinking for themselves, for goodness' sake!
But now we have more effective means of keeping our children in school and at home away from those books. We have Grand Theft Auto and hundreds of other games for them to play at escaping all moral codes. We have smartphones, with which they can while away the hours and the days texting and talking about themselves with their friends.
We even have "educational software" and lots of gear, like video recorders, so that students can maintain their focus on themselves, and stay away from the risks posed by books, which could very possibly lead them to think about something besides themselves. And remember, people who read books and think about something besides themselves do not make good customers. And more than anything, we want and need good customers, young people who buy our hardware and software, and who can be encouraged to stay away from the books in libraries, which are not only free, for goodness's sake, but may even lead them to think. And that will be no help at all to our bottom line. Andrew Carnegie may have been a philanthropist, but by providing free libraries he did nothing to help us sell electronic entertainment products. We must never let down our guard or reduce our advertising. Just remember every young person reading a book is a lost customer! Verbum Sap.
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
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200K PDF File, via a kind reader.
Madison Teacher's Inc. Twitter feed can be found here.
Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school, here.
* Please see TJ Mertz's comment below. A link to the document was forwarded to me via a kind reader from Madison Teachers, Inc. Twitter Feed (a "retweet" of Karen Vieth's "tweet"). Note that I enjoyed visiting with Karen during several Madison School District strategic planning meetings.
A screenshot of the link:
The outcome of the Madison Prep "question" will surely reverberate for some time.
Finally, I suspect we'll see more teacher unions thinking different, as The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers has done: Minneapolis teacher's union approved to authorize charter schools.
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IF you want to see the direction that education reform is taking the country, pay a visit to my leafy, majority-black neighborhood in Washington. While we have lived in the same house since our 11-year-old son was born, he's been assigned to three different elementary schools as one after the other has been shuttered. Now it's time for middle school, and there's been no neighborhood option available.Meanwhile, across Rock Creek Park in a wealthy, majority-white community, there is a sparkling new neighborhood middle school, with rugby, fencing, an international baccalaureate curriculum and all the other amenities that make people pay top dollar to live there.
Such inequities are the perverse result of a "reform" process intended to bring choice and accountability to the school system. Instead, it has destroyed community-based education for working-class families, even as it has funneled resources toward a few better-off, exclusive, institutions.
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Jesse Roe, a ninth-grade math teacher at a charter school here called Summit, has a peephole into the brains of each of his 38 students.He can see that a girl sitting against the wall is zipping through geometry exercises; that a boy with long curls over his eyes is stuck on a lesson on long equations; and that another boy in the front row is getting a handle on probability.
Each student's math journey shows up instantly on the laptop Mr. Roe carries as he wanders the room. He stops at each desk, cajoles, offers tips, reassures. For an hour, this crowded, dimly lighted classroom in the hardscrabble shadow of Silicon Valley hums with the sound of fingers clicking on keyboards, pencils scratching on paper and an occasional whoop when a student scores a streak of right answers.
The software program unleashed in this classroom is the brainchild of Salman Khan, an Ivy League-trained math whiz and the son of an immigrant single mother. Mr. Khan, 35, has become something of an online sensation with his Khan Academy math and science lessons on YouTube, which has attracted up to 3.5 million viewers a month.
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Chris Cronas, Principal, Wedgwood Elementary
Prior to the Thanksgiving break, we administered a survey asking for feedback from families about their knowledge and thoughts on the changes we are making to the curriculum delivery model at Wedgwood. Thank you to the 259 families who responded to the survey. We have 449 students currently enrolled at Wedgwood, 185 of whom are siblings. If respondents only completed one survey per family, as requested, our sample is quite accurate.Charlie Mas has more:Overall, families want more information about what cluster grouping is. This was expressed in a variety of ways by families of general education, spectrum and special education students. I will attempt to clarify what it is here and how Wedgwood staff is using this information to move forward.
For those who do not know, cluster grouping is a method of grouping gifted students (gifted being identified as students who score in the 98th - 99th percentile on a cognitive ability test) into clusters of 6 students in one classroom that also include high achievers and above average students. The remaining students would be clustered so that the highest achieving students and lowest achieving students are not in the same classroom. With that as a guide, Wedgwood is developing plans to move from having self-contained spectrum classrooms to integrated classrooms using an interpretation of this model. We are already doing this in 1st grade, albeit more heterogeneously than what the research we based our 1st grade model on suggests.
Are you confused about what Wedgwood is doing with their Spectrum program? Join the club. Everyone is confused about what Wedgwood is doing with their Spectrum program. The president of the confusion club appears to be the school's principal, Chris Cronas.
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In a New York Times op-ed article on Monday, Natalie Hopkinson writes that school choice in her neighborhood in Washington has destroyed community-based education for working-class families. With New York ranked No. 1 in the nation in giving parents and students choices, according to one study last week, Amy Stuart Wells, a parent of an eighth grader and a professor at Teachers College, has her own take on New York's system.When my son's high school choice process began last spring, I already had a full-time job. I was not looking for a second one. But as the summer turned to fall, and the high school touring and test-taking kicked into full gear, I watched as many 8th grade parents (myself included) became increasingly bleary eyed and overwhelmed.
We sought each other's empathy and commented that orchestrating our children's school choices was like a full-time job -- a second one for many of us.
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Presidents at 36 private colleges earned more than $1 million in 2009, up from 33 the previous year, according to a study by The Chronicle of Higher Education.The annual study, using data from federal tax documents, found that the median compensation -- including salary and benefits -- was $385,909, a 2.2 percent increase from the previous year. The median base salary increased by 2.8 percent to $294,489.
The highest-paid president in 2009 was Constantine Papadakis of Drexel University. Mr. Papadakis, who died in April that year, earned $4,912,127, most of it from life insurance and previously accrued compensation paid to his widow. His base salary was $195,726.
The next three top earners -- William R. Brody of Johns Hopkins University ($3,821,886); Donald V. DeRosa of University of the Pacific ($2,357,540); and Henry S. Bienen of Northwestern University ($2,240,775) -- also left their presidencies.
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How much is a good school system worth?The Virginia Beach, Va., school district believes its own system is worth about $1.53 for every $1 spent from the 70,000-student district's operating fund.
Not content with making an argument that good schools have an economic value that is unmeasurable, the district asked a university economist to calculate just what it brings both to the city and the Hampton Roads region in southeastern Virginia.
The report generated for the district, the third-largest in the state, is more than an academic exercise for James G. Merrill, the Virginia Beach superintendent. The district is one of the few in the state that receive money from local taxpayers based on a revenue-sharing formula, which is currently under fire. As the city and the school district head into budget season, Mr. Merrill said he wanted to make an argument for school funding based on business principles.
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Paula Prosper worried that her son was not ready for the differences between his private Montessori school and the public Fairfax County seventh grade she planned to transfer him to next year.Prosper, a teacher, asked if he and she could sit for a few hours at Longfellow Middle School "to see what happens in classes and to get a feel for the school in general." The answer was no, with explanations that made little sense.
Prosper said Longfellow's director of student services, Gail Bigio, told her "it had to do with privacy issues for the teachers -- the public employees whose salaries are paid by my tax dollars. Then she brought up immunization and likened it to the students attending the school who wish to have a visiting cousin shadow them." Longfellow Principal Carole Kihm told me Bigio did not mention teacher privacy.
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Michael Greenstone, Adam Looney:
The labor market continued to expand at a modest pace last month, according to today's employment report. Payroll employment increased by 120,000 jobs in November, and the fraction of Americans with a job ticked up. Including revisions to previous months, total employment was 192,000 higher in November. Private employment increased by 140,000 jobs last month while governments continued to shed jobs. While the unemployment rate jumped down to 8.6 percent, some of the reduction reflected lower labor force participation rather than increases in employment.While overall job creation has improved slightly, many American workers continue to face serious difficulties in the labor market. These workers tend to have less formal education and/or fewer job-relevant skills. For less-educated workers, the Great Recession has only exacerbated a longer-term trend of diminished earnings and job opportunities.
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Recommendations:Matthew DeFour:
We are in agreement that the achievement gaps for low-income students, students of color, students with disabilities, and English Language Learners must be eliminated. The Administration agrees that bolder steps must be taken to address these gaps. We also know that closing these gaps is not a simple task and change will not come overnight, but, the District's commitment to doing so will not waiver. We also know that to be successful in the long run, we must employ multiple strategies both within our schools and within our community. This is why the District has held interest in many of the educational strategies included in the Madison Prep's proposal like longer school days and a longer school year at an appropriately compensated level for staff, mentoring support, the proposed culture of the school and the International Baccalaureate Program.While enthusiastic about these educational strategies, the Administration has also been clear throughout this conversation about its concern with a non-instrumentality model.
Autonomy is a notion inherent in all charter school proposals. Freedom and flexibility to do things differently are the very reasons charter schools exist. However, the non-instrumentality charter school model goes beyond freedom and flexibility to a level of separateness that the Administration cannot support.
In essence, Madison Prep's current proposal calls for the exclusion of the elected Board of Education and the District's Administration from the day-to-day operations of the school. It prevents the Board, and therefore the public, from having direct oversight of student learning conditions and teacher working conditions in a publicly-funded charter school. From our perspective, the use of public funds calls for a higher level of oversight than found in the Madison Prep proposal and for that matter in any non-instrumentality proposal.
In addition, based on the District's analysis, there is significant legal risk in entering into a non- instrumentality charter contract under our collective bargaining agreement with our teachers.In our analysis of Madison Prep's initial instrumentality proposal, the Administration expressed concerns over the cost of the program to the District and ultimately could not recommend funding at the level proposed. Rather, the Administration proposed a funding formula tied to the District's per pupil revenues. We also offered to continue to work with Madison Prep to find ways to lower these costs. Without having those conversations, the current proposal reduces Madison Prep's costs by changing from an instrumentality to a non-instrumentality model. This means that the savings are realized directly through reductions in staff compensation and benefits to levels lower than MMSD employees. The Administration has been willing to have conversations to determine how to make an instrumentality proposal work.
In summary, this administrative analysis finds concerns with Madison Prep's non-instrumentality proposal due to the level of governance autonomy called for in the plan and due to our collective bargaining agreement with our teachers. Based on these issues, we cannot recommend to the Board that Madison Prep be approved as a non-instrumentality charter school.
We know more needs to be done as a district and a community to eliminate our achievement gaps. We must continue to identify strategies both within our schools and our larger community to eliminate achievement gaps. These discussions, with the Urban League and with our entire community, need to continue on behalf of all of our students.
In anticipation of the recommendation, Caire sent out an email Friday night to School Board members with a letter responding to concerns about the union contract issue.Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.The problem concerns a "work preservation" clause in the Madison Teachers Inc. contract that requires all teaching duties in the district be performed by union teachers.
Exceptions to the clause have been made in the past, such as having private day-care centers offer 4-year-old kindergarten, but those resulted from agreements with the union. Such an agreement would nullify the current union contract under the state's new collective bargaining law, according to the district.
Caire said a recent law signed by Gov. Scott Walker could allow the district to amend its union contract. However, School Board member Ed Hughes, who is a lawyer, disagreed with Caire's interpretation.
Nerad said even if the union issue can be resolved, he still objects to the school seeking autonomy from all district policies except those related to health and safety of students.
.....
Caire said Madison Prep's specific policies could be ironed out as part of the charter contract after the School Board approves the proposal. He plans to hold a press conference Tuesday to respond to the district's review.
"The purpose of a charter school is to free you from red tape -- not to adopt the same red tape that they have," Caire said. "We hope the board will stop looking at all of those details and start looking at why we are doing this in the first place."
The fate of Madison Prep, yea or nea, will resonate locally for years. A decisive moment for our local $372M schools.
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Over the last several months it's been a pleasure to witness the easing of ill will between the leadership of NJ's primary teachers' union, NJEA, and members of Gov. Christie's educational team. After several years of bitter recrimination from both sides of the table, everyone seems to have moved on from the trauma of our botched Race To The Top application and former Comm. Bret Schundler's resignation. Sure, the sting of last Spring's health and benefits reform bills, championed by Gov. Christie, must be a sore spot for union leadership, but there appears to be a shared recognition that we should recalibrate the balance between the needs of schoolchildren and the needs of teachers. Suddenly NJ's 100-year old tenure law is on the table - a boon for both student and professionals - and Ed. Comm. Cerf 's speech at NJEA's Annual Convention earlier this month and was courteously received (except for a few nasty tweets).So we'll hold onto the progress and roll our eyes at the retro and reactive press release just out from NJEA President Barbara Keshishian, in which she claims, in outraged tones, that NJ's alleged achievement gap among black, white, Hispanic, and poor kids is a "classic strawman" on the part of Gov. Christie and "based on a deliberate misuse of the data."
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Fewer than one-third of California students who took a statewide physical fitness test this year managed to pass all six areas assessed, new results show.State Supt. of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, a longtime cross-country coach who has made physical fitness a signature issue, announced the results this week as he launched a program to improve children's health. The campaign will use such celebrity athletes as NBA all-star Bill Walton and others to visit schools to urge students to drink more water, eat more fruits and vegetables and increase their exercise.
"When only 31% of children are physically fit, that's a public health challenge we can't wait to address," Torlakson said in a statement.
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When the end finally came, it came fast. Spotting Steve's red BMW convertible parked in the driveway, Culver City police in tactical vests and armed with assault weapons quickly deployed, swarming the front and rear entrances. Wearing a green nylon jacket with RAID splashed across the shoulders, Sergeant Jason Sims knocked on the front door, then ordered his men to break it down with a battering ram. Inside, kids screamed, cried, or just stood there trying to wrap their heads around what they were witnessing--and what their parents were witnessing. Because this was a Thursday, this was Family Night. Expecting to endure an evening of candor with impunity--Guess what, Mother? The world doesn't revolve around you!--parents had their bean dip and decaf upended by an armed raid. Tilling the big wayward ship of their children's adolescence had left them chronically alert to trouble, but not like this.
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Madison schools aren't failing, by any stretch of the imagination, for many students.Remarkable. Are there some excellent teachers in Madison? Certainly. Does Madison's Administration seek best in the world results? A look at the math task force, seemingly on hold for years, is informative. The long one size fits all battle and the talented and gifted complaint are worth contemplating.In fact, if you're a white, middle-class family sending your children to public school here, your kids are likely getting an education that's on a par with Singapore or Finland -- among the best in the world.
However, if you're black or Latino and poor, it's an unquestionable fact that Madison schools don't as good a job helping you with your grade-point average, high school graduation, college readiness or test scores. By all these measures, the district's achievement gap between white and minority students is awful.
These facts have informed the stern (and legitimate) criticisms leveled by Urban League President Kaleem Caire and Madison Prep backers.
But they doesn't take into account some recent glimmers of hope that shouldn't be discounted or overlooked. Programs like AVID/TOPS support first-generation college-bound students in Madison public schools and are showing some successes. Four-year-old kindergarten is likely to even the playing field for the district's youngest students, giving them a leg up as they enter school. And, the data surrounding increasing numbers of kids of color participating in Advanced Placement classes is encouraging.
Stepping back from the local district and looking at education through a broader lens, it's easy to see that No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have aimed to legislate, bribe and punish their way toward an unrealistic Lake Wobegon world where all the students are above average.
Could Madison be the best? Certainly. The infrastructure is present, from current spending of $14,963/student to the nearby UW-Madison, Madison College and Edgewood College backed by a supportive community.
Ideally, Madison (and Wisconsin) should have the courage to participate in global examinations (Florida Students Take Global Examinations, Wisconsin's Don't). Taxpayers and parents would then know if Troller's assertions are fact based.
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Kaleem Caire, via email
December 2, 2011PDF letter:Greetings Madison Prep.
Tomorrow afternoon, we are expecting to learn that MMSD's Administration will inform the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education that Madison Prep should not be approved. A possible reason we expect will be MMSD's concern that the current collective bargaining agreement between the District and Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI) has a "work preservation clause" which the teacher's union advocated for long ago to ensure that it was the only game in town to represent public school teachers in Madison.
Below, is the cover note that I forwarded to Ed Hughes of the Board of Education and copied to a number of others, who had asked a thoughtful question about our proposal to establish Madison Prep as a non-instrumentality charter school, we hope, in fall 2012. Also see the letter attached to this email.
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December 2, 2011Greetings Ed.
Attached, please find a letter that contains the answer to your question referenced in your email below. The letter contains the explanation of a path to which Madison Prep could be established as a non-instrumentality public charter school, under Wisconsin law, and in a way that would not violate the current collective bargaining agreement between MMSD and Madison Teachers Inc.
We look forward to answering any questions you or other members of the Board of Education may have.
Thank you so much and Many blessings to you and your family this holiday season.
Onward.
cc: Daniel Nerad, MMSD Superintendent
Dylan Pauly, MMSD Legal Counsel
MMSD Board of Education Members
ULGM Board of Directors
Madison Prep Board of Directors
Godfrey & Kahn, S.C.
Steve Goldberg, CUNA Mutual Foundation
This letter is intended to respond to your November 78,207I email and to suggest that there is a viable option for moving forward with Urban League's proposal for the Madison Preparatory Academy ("Madison Prep") that: [i) will reduce cost; and (ii) will not sacrifice the union security provisions of the Collective Bargaining Agreement "Agreement" or "Contract") between the Madison Metropolitan School District ("MMSD" or "District") and Madison Teachers, Inc. ("MTI").Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.Your email asks for a response to a question concerning how the school district could authorize Madison Prep as a non-instrumentality charter without thereby violating the terms of the District's Agreement with MTI. Your email references a provision in the MTI Agreement that provides "that instructional duties where the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction requires that such be performed by a certifìcated teacher, shall be performed only by'teachers."' .See Article I, Section 8.3.a. In addition you note that "the term 'teacher' refers to anyone in the collective bargaining unit." See Article I, Section 8.2. You conclude your email by stating that "it appears that all teachers in MMSD schools -- including non-instrumentality charter schools - must be members of the MTI bargaining unit."
The Urban League is aware of the Agreement's language and concedes that the language, if enforceable, poses an obstacle as we look for School Board approval of the plan to open and operate a "non-instrumentality" school. Under an instrumentality charter, the employees of the charter school must be employed by the school board. Under a non-instrumentality charter, the school board may not be the employer of the charter school's staff. See S 118.40(7)(a). Thus, the statement in your email that all teachers, including those in a non-instrumentality charter school - "must be members of the MTI bargaining unit" and, presumably, employed by the school board is not permitted under Wisconsin law.
Under Wisconsin's charter school law the School Board has the exclusive authority to determine whether a school is an instrumentality or not an instrumentality of the school district. .See S 118.40(7)(a). That decision is an important decision reserved to the School Board alone. The effect of that decision drives whether teachers and staff must be, or cannot be, employees of the School Board. The language of the Contract deprives the School Board of the decision reserved to it under the statute and that language cannot be harmonized to give effect to both the statute and the Agreement. Alternatively the Contract language creates a situation whereby the School Board may exercise its statutory authority to approve a non-instrumentality charter but it must staff the school with school district employees, a result clearly prohibited under the statute. In our view the law trumps the Contract in either of these situations.
The situation described above could likely only be resolved in a court of law. The Contract includes a "savings clause" that contemplates that where a court invalidates a provision in the Agreement, the invalid provision is deleted and the remainder of the contract remains intact. See Article VIII, Section E.
The Urban League is, however, mindful that litigation is both expensive and time consuming. Moreover it is clear that the Contract language will become a prohibited subject of bargaining in the near future when the current Agreement expires. Unfortunately, the children we seek to serve, do not have the time to wait for that day.
Our second purpose in writing is to make you aware of a possible solution to a major obstacle here. One of the major obstacles in moving forward has been the cost associated with an instrumentality school coupled with MTI's reluctance to work with the District in modifying the Contract to reduce costs associated with staffing and certain essential features of Madison Prep, like an extended school day, As we understand it MTI does not want to modify the Contract because such a modification would result in an earlier application of 2077 Wisconsin Act L0 to the District, members of the bargaining unit and to MTI itself.
We understand MTI's reluctance to do anything that would hasten the application of Act 10 in the school district, With the passage of 2011. Wisconsin Act 65, that concern is no longer an obstacle.
Act 65 allows the parties to a collective bargaining agreement to enter into a memorandum of understanding that would run for the remaining term of the collective bargaining agreement, for the purpose of reducing the cost of compensation or fringe benefits in the collective bargaining agreement,
The Act also provides that entering into such a memorandum would not be considered a "modification" of the collective bargaining agreement for the purposes of Act 10. Act 65 was published on November 23,2077 and took effect the following day. The law allows the parties to a collective bargaining agreement to enter into such a memorandum no later than 90 days after the effective date of the law.
The Urban League believes that Act 65 gives the Board and MTI the opportunity to make changes that will facilitate cost reductions, based in compensation and fringe benefits, to help Madison Prep move forward. And, the law allows the parties to do so in a way that does not adversely impact the teachers represented by MTI or the union security provisions of the Collective Bargaining Agreement.
For example, the parties could agree to reduce the staffing costs for Madison Prep, The parties could also agree that a longer school day would not have to cost more. And, the parties could agree that the work preservation clause referenced in the first part of this letter does not apply where the School Board has determined a charter school willbe a non-instrumentality of the District, a move that would also most certainly reduce costs. These changes would not be forced upon any existing MTI represented teacher as teachers would apply for vacancies in the school.
We hope that the School Board will give serious consideration to the opportunity presented by Act 65. 0n behalf of the Urban League of Greater Madison and Madison Preparatory Academy, we thank you for your support of Madison Prep.
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The Obama administration issued new guidance Friday advising schools and colleges on how they can make race-based enrollment decisions to promote campus diversity, shortly before the Supreme Court is set to consider whether to re-examine a 2003 case holding that universities could sometimes use race in admissions decisions."Diverse learning environments promote development of analytical skills, dismantle stereotypes and prepare students to succeed in an increasingly interconnected world," Attorney General Eric Holder said in a joint release by the Justice and Education departments.
The departments withdrew prior guidance from the Bush administration, which officials said was too vague to assist school administrators seeking to promote diverse student enrollment. The new guidance parses the Supreme Court's most recent rulings on student diversity to suggest policies the administration believes would not violate the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection of the laws.
Like the former Bush administration guidance, the new documents advise schools to use race-neutral policies if possible. If those prove insufficient, however, the new guidance states that a school "may consider a student's race as a 'plus factor' (among other, nonracial considerations) to achieve its compelling interests" in diversity.
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It would have been understandable if President Barack Obama had ignored education in his first speech to Congress. There were other things to worry about in February 2009: an economy in free fall, health care costs threatening to bankrupt the federal government, a nation bleeding in two protracted foreign wars. Obama had said little about education on the campaign trail. Yet when he took the podium, he made a bold declaration: By 2020, America would regain its historical international lead in college attainment.Months earlier, Bill Gates had announced a similar priority for his charitable foundation, the richest on the planet. After years of focusing on improving education for students in kindergarten through 12th grade, the Microsoft billionaire had set his sights on college. As would Obama, he called for a major increase in the number of adults with college degrees. Together, the most powerful man in the world and one of the richest created a rare moment of purpose and clarity in American education policy.
But effecting a major increase in college attainment is a daunting task. The percentage of American working-age adults who have graduated from college has hovered around 40 percent for years, with roughly 30 percent holding four-year degrees and another 10 percent associate's degrees. Obama and Gates were calling for a rise in the college attainment rate to nearly 60 percent in less than a generation, even though many public colleges and universities were already bursting at the seams, and cash-strapped state legislatures were handing down further punishing budget cuts.
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Many people think of IQ as a genetic trait, like brown eyes or short legs: You're born with it and you're stuck with it. Now, a growing body of research is showing that a person's IQ can rise--and even fall--over the years.Scores can change gradually or quickly, after as little as a few weeks of cognitive training, research shows. The increases are usually so incremental that they're not immediately perceptible to individuals, and the intelligence-boosting effects of cognitive training can fade after a few months.
In the latest study, 33 British students were given IQ tests and brain scans at ages 12 to 16 and again about four years later by researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London; 9% of the students showed a significant change of 15 points or more in IQ scores.
On a scale where 90 to 110 is considered average, one student's IQ rose 21 points to 128 from 107, lifting the student from the 68th percentile to the 97th compared with others the same age, says Cathy Price, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the center and co-author of the study, published last month in Nature. Another student's score skidded out of the "high average" category, to 96 from 114.
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The new Brookings index on school choice is interesting and worth a look but as I go through it two things seem to jump out. First, despite the rhetoric in the public square there still isn't a great deal of real choice in education. And second, the index seems to reward places (relatively speaking) that have limited choices but still do all the things you should do (information, transportation etc...nonetheless). That's like having an incredible restaurant with easy valet parking, wonderful fresh food, great service, and lovely ambiance - but that can only seat four people a night. Nice but limited.
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Lately David Foster Wallace seems to be in the air: Is his style still influencing bloggers? Is Jeffrey Eugenides' bandana-wearing depressed character in The Marriage Plot based on him? My own reasons for thinking about him are less high-flown. Like lots of other professors, I am just now sitting down to write the syllabus for a class next semester, and the extraordinary syllabuses of David Foster Wallace are in my head.I am not generally into the reverential hush that seems to surround any mention of David Foster Wallace's name by most writers of my generation or remotely proximate to it; I am not enchanted by some fundamental childlike innocence people seem to find in him. I am suspicious generally of those sorts of hushes and enchantments, and yet I do feel in the presence of his careful crazy syllabuses something like reverence.
Wallace doesn't accept the silent social contract between students and professors: He takes apart and analyzes and makes explicit, in a way that is almost painful, all of the tiny conventional unspoken agreements usually made between professors and their students. "Even in a seminar class," his syllabus states, "it seems a little silly to require participation. Some students who are cripplingly shy, or who can't always formulate their best thoughts and questions in the rapid back-and-forth of a group discussion, are nevertheless good and serious students. On the other hand, as Prof --- points out supra, our class can't really function if there isn't student participation--it will become just me giving a half-assed ad-lib lecture for 90 minutes, which (trust me) will be horrible in all kinds of ways."
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More parents are opting out of school shots for their children. In eight states now, more than one in 20 public school kindergartners aren't getting all the vaccines required for attendance, an Associated Press analysis found.That growing trend among parents seeking vaccine exemptions has health officials worried about outbreaks of diseases that once were all but stamped out.
Take measles, for example. It can lead to pneumonia, encephalitis and death. Since 2000, one in every 250 Americans who got measles died.
The measles vaccine is so effective, 99.9% of those who get vaccinated gain immunity, said Geoffrey Swain, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and chief medical officer for the Milwaukee Health Department.
Many children cannot get the measles vaccine, though, because they aren't old enough - the first dose of vaccine is recommended between 12 and 15 months. Or, they have medical issues or families with religious beliefs that leave them unprotected and susceptible to measles through no fault of their own, Swain said.
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Parents gathered in the auditorium of the Talented and Gifted School for Young Scholars on Tuesday morning were not happy.Their school, one of only three citywide gifted and talented programs in Manhattan, shares space in an East Harlem building with three middle schools. They learned recently that one of the schools, Esperanza Preparatory Academy, wants to expand to a high school, and they are concerned that the expansion will cause overcrowding and bring other problems.
Tuesday's meeting was called by the Education Department last week after parents flooded the office with calls and e-mails expressing concern about the addition of high school grades when their school has children as young as kindergarten.
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Chicago Public Schools officials plan to overhaul 10 schools next year, six of which will be managed by a private organization in the latest move by Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration to turn to the private sector to aid poorly performing public schools.The proposed overhauls--commonly called turnarounds--involve the firing of existing staff and improvements to school curriculum and culture. Turnarounds are the first step in a series of school actions that include consolidating and closing underperforming schools.
A new state law requires CPS to announce all school closings and turnarounds by Thursday. There was vociferous opposition to any proposed closings at recent public hearings, which were also required by the law, even though though the list of targeted schools had not yet been released.
The elementary schools slated for turnaround are: Pablo Casals, 3501 W. Potomac Ave.; Melville W. Fuller, 4214 S. Saint Lawrence Ave.; Theodore Herzl, 3711 W. Douglas Blvd.; Marquette, 6550 S Richmond St.; Brian Piccolo, 1040 N Keeler Ave.; Amos Alonzo Stagg, 7424 S Morgan St.; Wendell Smith, 744 E 103rd St. and Carter G. Woodson South Elementary Schools, 4414 S Evans. The Chicago Vocational Career Academy, at 2100 E 87th St., and Tilden Career Community Academy, 4747 S Union Ave., high schools also are targeted for turnaround.
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Jesse Yeh uses the University of California-Berkeley library instead of buying textbooks. He scrounges for free food at campus events and occasionally skips meals. He's stopped exercising and sleeps five to six hours per night so he can take 21 credits -- a course load so heavy he had to get special permission from a dean.The only thing he won't do: take out a student loan.
"I see a lot of my friends who took out student loans, then they graduated and because of the economy right now they still couldn't find a job," said the third-year student, whose parents both lost their jobs in 2009 and who grew up in the boom-and-bust town of Victorville, Calif., on a block with several houses in foreclosure. "The debt burden is really heavy on them."
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Christian Oliver and Song Jung-a:
South Korean police have detained a teenager suspected of murdering his mother after she allegedly beat him with a golf club to get better school grades, in a case that has raised questions about the high-pressure nature of the country's education system.The macabre incident has shocked the nation, with younger mothers questioning the values of previous generations who have been pushing children hard to improve their school performance.
"Children are being driven to the limit ... so many of them suffer from depression, kill themselves or commit impulsive crimes out of desperation," says Oh Sung-sook, head of the Citizens' Council for Educational Reform, an activist group.
Psychologists argue that the educational rat-race - children are routinely forced to study late into the night seven days a week and corporal punishment is still permitted - is stunting social development.
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English class is about to start, and Taneli Nordberg introduces the day's guests: a row of fresh-faced university students sitting in the back of the classroom. They're training to be teachers at the University of Helsinki.Nordberg, 31, wants the eighth-graders to become teachers for a moment.
"I want you to tell the teacher trainees something you would like them to do when teaching and something you want them to avoid doing," he explains. "In English, please."
The students tumble up to the chalkboards and start writing. Some of the advice is predictable - "not too much homework" - but much of it is insightful.
The exercise, though short and light, is something of a microcosm of the Finnish educational approach - engagement and collaboration between teacher and student, a comfortable atmosphere, and the expectation of quality in how students express themselves.
Over the past decade, students in Finland have soared on international measures of achievement. They've continued to post some of the best scores in the developed world in reading, math and science, according to a respected international exam. The country has one of the narrowest gaps in achievement between its highest and lowest-performing schools, and on average spends less per pupil than the United States.
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Among the extended family I saw over the holiday was a young relative who is working as a substitute teacher in the Northeast since he can't find a full-time teaching post. He shared a story that surprised me, and I wanted to run it by folks here.He was subbing at a low-performing high school that recently had a well-publicized stabbing. A student in his class pulled what he thought was a real gun on him, and they had a standoff for several minutes until the teen put the "gun" away and the teacher tackled him to the floor. It turned out the gun was a toy, and the student received a three-day suspension for the incident.
The substitute teacher was disappointed with the punishment, but said the school wanted to prevent another round of negative press.
Would such an incident be kept quiet in Georgia? Could it go so easily unreported under zero tolerance policies in which students can get suspended for Tweety Bird key chains?
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I have been taking an Under-Graduate Course in Computer Science and Engineering(in short B.Tech CSE) in a reputed Private Engineering in India for one and half years.My college has given me 7.5 grades till now. I would rate them 5/10. I wanted to give them 2 or 3 but presence of Infrastructure and some encouraging professors saved them.Every day when I go to college I expect to learn something new that would encourage me for research and thinking. And after coming back to my hostel room, I do have something new that make me thinking. But mind you its not because of the college or their intensive study program that I'm paying high fees for; but it is the Internet, the articles at Hacker News and Reddit and other sites that does this. Whenever I get time I tend to open these sites on my not so good Nokia touchscreen phone. It doesn't have much of features that i can boost of but it does my work. That is the state of our private Universities.
Well I agree with my college friends that most of the students that come to private universities don't want education but a degree, a campus life and guys they can hook up with. They have their contacts and their Dad's business after that. Most of the students that come here want spoon feeding. Tell them what is important and coming in exam and they will cram it, cram it so much they can recite it word to word. But still it doesn't mean professors also does spoon feeding for them and come here for high salaries, comfort and increasing their teaching experience so that later on can go to some Top Government College.
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At first glance, Guo Yilei looks like a Chinese success story. Born to a poor peasant family in China's remote Gansu province, he's now a 26-year-old computer programmer in the Big Cabbage (as some call Beijing nowadays). By Chinese standards he makes decent money, more than $70 a week. When he has work, that is. It can take months to find the next job. And meanwhile, he's living in Tangjialing, a reeking slum on the city's edge where he and his girlfriend rent a 100-square-foot studio apartment for $90 a month. "When I was at school, I believed in the saying, 'Knowledge can help you turn over a new leaf,'" says Guo. "But since I've started working, I only half-believe it."Guo and an estimated million others like him represent an unprecedented and troublesome development in China: a fast-growing white-collar underclass. Since the '90s, Chinese universities have doubled their admissions, far outpacing the job market for college grads. This year China's universities and tech institutes churned out roughly 6.3 million graduates. Many grew up in impoverished rural towns and villages and attended second- or third-tier schools in the provinces, trusting that studying hard would bring them better lives than their parents had. But when they move on and apply for jobs in Beijing or Shanghai or any of China's other booming metropolises, they get a nasty shock.
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A Pivot (someone who works for Pivotal Labs) gave an excellent presentation on observational astronomy the other day. The presentation was so well done that I think it could easily inspire people to learn more about astronomy.This is one of the questions I think about a lot. I truly believe that for education to be effective you need to tap in to intrinsic motivation. You can't rely on extrinsic motivators like grades otherwise you run the risk of losing all motivation once the extrinsic motivators are removed.
Passion is a vague term, but it's often to used to identify some subject or activity that people are strongly intrinsically motivated to do. You never hear people talk about passions rooted in the desire to get a good grade or a big bonus or the chance of promotion. People talk about being passionate about something because of the importance it plays in the world or how it makes them feel at fundamental level.
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As the superintendent of the Perth Amboy school district, I am responsible for the education of more than 10,000 children.We are fortunate to have the dedication of hundreds of committed and talented teachers and administrators who focus on education every day. But for 15 to 20 percent of each week, I shift focus from our students, who should be at the center of all we do, to certain adults who no longer have a place in our education system, yet simply can't be dismissed.
There has been much discussion about teacher evaluation and its potential to improve learning in our classrooms. This issue focuses on things like linking teacher tenure and pay to student test scores, and so-called value-added data. There are many disagreements about these measures, but I believe we can agree on the fact that there are certain teachers who just should not be working with children. We don't want teachers in our classrooms who talk explicitly about sexual acts, or who hit children, put soap in their mouths or curse at them. We certainly don't want teachers who make repeated sexual advances to other teachers, do drugs at school or fly into rages for no apparent reason. I have active cases like these, and have returned almost all of these teachers to their positions.
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When the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released their 2011 results, things seemed to be working out well for Wisconsin's public schools. The state posted above average numbers in key subjects like reading and mathematics in fourth and eighth grade.Related: Updating the 2009 Scholastic Bowl Longhorns 17 - Badgers 1; Thrive's "Advance Now Competitive Assessment Report"However, a deeper look into those numbers exposes some troubling trends. Namely, Wisconsin's Hispanic students are regressing when it comes to reading in the state's classrooms.
The state's 2011 results held steady at 202 points for fourth-grade reading amongst Hispanic pupils. This was down from a score of 208 in 2007 and less than the state's score of 209 in 1992, the first iteration of the test. In eighth grade, the average score dropped from 250 to 248. This is a decrease from 1998's average of 256 - the first year the test was recorded for the group.
These results highlight a grim trend. Over the past two decades, reading achievement amongst the state's Hispanic students has regressed. While national averages have seen a growth of 5.7 percent in fourth grade reading and 5.5 percent in eighth grade reading amongst Hispanic test takers, Wisconsin has posted losses. The state's scores dropped by 3.4 percent and 2.8 percent in the two grades, respectively.
Earlier this year Wisconsin teachers and their supporters compared Wisconsin and Texas academically and claimed that Wisconsin had better achievement because it ranked higher on ACT/SAT scores. The fact that this claim ignored the ethnic composition of the states, prompted David Burge to use the National Assessment of Educational Progress(NAEP) to compare educational achievement within the same ethnic groups. His conclusion, based on the 2009 NAEP in Reading, Mathematics, and Science (3 subject areas times 2 grades, 4th and 8th, times 3 ethnicities, white, black, and hispanic equals 18 comparisons), was Longhorns 17 - Badgers 1.
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-badgers-1.htmlThe 2011 NAEP results are now available for Reading and
Mathematics. The updated conclusion (2 subject areas times 2 grades, 4th and 8th, times 3 ethnicities, white, black, and hispanic equals 12 comparisons) is Longhorns 12 - Badgers 0. Not only did Texas students outperform Wisconsin students in every one of the twelve ethnicity-controlled comparisons, but Texas students exceeded the national average in all 12 comparisons. Wisconsin students were above the average 3 times, below the average 8 times, and tied the average once.
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[well, at least these guys don't have students reading history books, writing history papers--stuff like that!!]
What is it about academics and Lady Gaga? Last year it was a freshman writing course at the University of Virginia titled "GaGa for Gaga: Sex, Gender, and Identity." This fall there's an upper-division sociology course at the University of South Carolina titled "Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame." Meghan Vicks, a graduate student in comparative literature at the University of Colorado, co-edits a postmodernist online journal, "Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art About Lady Gaga," in which the names "Judith Butler" and "Jean Baudrillard" drip as thickly as summer rain and the tongue-tripping sentences read like this: "And her project?--To deconstruct the very pop culture that creates and worships her, and to explore and make problematic the hackneyed image of the pop icon while flourishing in the clichéd role itself."And now Gaga has reached the very pinnacle of academic recognition: a Harvard affiliation. On Nov. 2 she announced that she and Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet Society will launch a nonprofit foundation, to be called Born This Way (after one of Gaga's songs), which will focus on mentoring teenagers and combating bullying.
What is fascinating is how, well, gaga the tenured scholars and highly placed academic administrators are for the 25-year-old singer whose main claim to fame is her rise from unknown to superstar and multiple Grammy winner in just three years. She managed this feat mostly on the basis of outré costumes and transgressive dancing--plus her world-class flair for self-promotion--rather than her ho-hum musical ability. Mathieu Deflem, the sociology professor who is teaching the Gaga course at South Carolina, for example, owns more than 300 of her records, maintains a fan website called gagafrontrow.net, and (according to a 2010 New York Times article) has attended more than 28 of her live concerts, following her from city to city around the world. Similarly, Harvard's Berkman Center is a well-funded interdisciplinary think tank whose faculty consists of prestigious professors of law, engineering, and business at Harvard (two of the biggest names are Lawrence Lessig and Charles Ogletree). But when the forthcoming Gaga-Berkman partnership went public last week, the center's mental heavyweights sounded as besotted as the teen-age girls and starstruck gays who hang onto every Gaga Twitter tweet. In an interview with the Harvard Crimson John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor who is the Berkman Center's co-director, praised as "impressive" the "research" that Gaga had done and hailed the forthcoming partnership as "a good chance for Harvard to be one University."
Gaga's faculty fans like to clothe their obsessive interest in her with a dense coat of academic-speak. Christa Romanosky, the graduate student at U.Va. who made Gaga the centerpiece of her freshman writing course last year, told the student newspaper, the Daily Cavalier, "We're exploring how identity is challenged by gender and sexuality and how Lady Gaga confronts this challenge." The reading list for Deflem's course at South Carolina includes several articles about Gaga by Victor Corona, a postdoctoral fellow in sociology at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. Corona's writing is a kudzu-like tangle of po-mo jargon: "Gaga's hypermodern gospel of liberation hints at the irrelevance of truth or, rather, the creation of one's own truth, a performance that is relentlessly enacted until some version of it becomes true."
Yet Corona has nothing on Judith "Jack" Halberstam, English professor and director of the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California. In an essay analyzing Gaga's Grammy-nominated 2010 music video "Telephone" for Gaga Stigmata, Halberstam drops trendy poststructuralist surnames like coins into a wishing well: "[I]t is a [Michel] Foucaultian take on prison and 'technological entrapment'; here... it has been read as the channeling of [Judith] Butler's 'Lesbian Phallus'; it is obscene, murderous, cruel to animals, misogynist, man-hating, homophobic and heterophobic; and I think you could safely place it as a [Gilles] Deleuzian exploration of flow and affect not to mention an episode in Object Oriented Philosophy. So whether the philosophy in question is drawn from [Slavoj] Zizek on speed, [Avital] Ronell on crack or [Quentin] Meillassoux on ecstasy, this video obviously chains a few good ideas to a few very good bodies and puts thought into motion." Neither Halberstam nor Corona permit any negative assessments of their idol. Corona characterized a recent critical biography, Poker Face: The Rise and Rise of Lady Gaga, as "embittered."
Since Gaga's academic fan base indulges heavily in "theory," as the po-mo types like to call it, allow me to indulge in my own "theory" about why college professors and other self-proclaimed avant-garde intellectuals have taken her to their bosoms. Take note of the academic fields represented by the scholars I have quoted above: sociology (Deflem and Corona), English (Halberstam), comparative literature (Vicks), and creative writing (Romanosky). Once those were real fields, with genuine bodies of knowledge to be studied and then enlarged by their scholarly practitioners. English professors taught and wrote about the literature of English-speaking nations. Sociologists studied the writings of Emil Durkheim and C. Wright Mills and built upon their paradigms for understanding how human beings function in social groups. Instructors of freshman writing focused on teaching their students how to write, often using models of particularly effective rhetoric and style.
Now, it seems, professors and their graduate students want to do anything but teach or do research in the fields with which they are supposedly affiliated. Sociologists want to devote class time to their record collections. English professors want to gush on about music videos. Writing instructors want to immerse their students in "gender and sexuality," not the mechanics of constructing a coherent term paper. In short, professors want to teach pop culture and nothing but pop culture. Christa Romanosky, for example, was hardly unusual in turning her freshman writing class into a class about something else besides writing. The freshman writing course list for this fall at U.Va. includes sections titled "Gender in Film," "Graffiti and Remix Culture," "Cinematic Shakespeare," "Queer Studies," "Race Matters," "Pirates," and "Female Robots." Fortunately for themselves, those professors who have turned the humanities and social sciences into vehicles for indulging their hobbies have the vast and unintelligible apparatus of postmodern theory to give their fanboy preoccupations intellectual respectability. Or at least to make it look that way to outsiders--such as parents--who might wonder why they are spending up to $6,000 per course so that little Johnny or Jenna can write an essay about "Telephone."I admit that I'm not much of a fan of Lady Gaga. I find her music monotonous, although she cleverly camouflages that defect with histrionic visuals and shocking costumes. I give her an A+, however, for brains, a sure market sense, and an entrepreneurial spirit worthy of Henry A. Ford. She has also snookered an entire generation of academics into deeming her profound. The Harvard Business School has just added Lady Gaga to its curriculum, with a case study of the decisions she and her manager made that catapulted her to fame. Now that's where Lady Gaga belongs as an object of scholarly study.
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The swelling ranks of unemployed young college graduates are left with a diploma, stacks of student-loan bills and lingering questions about just how much that degree is worth.A million dollars? Sorry, say economists, but that widely reported figure significantly overstates the boost a bachelor's degree gives to earnings over a career. The estimate isn't baseless, but it doesn't account for the cost of college, nor the opportunity cost of forgoing income during school.
Another complication: Even before stepping foot on campus, students who attend college generally have better earnings prospects than their high-school classmates who go straight to work. So any estimate of college's monetary value needs to separate out those factors.
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Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:
As my previous post described, things are looking up at Leopold Elementary School. Leopold, the largest elementary school in Madison, has strong leadership and a talented and hard-working staff. Their efforts are paying positive dividends for the school's 700+ young students.While many criticize the Ted Kennedy / Bush No Child Left Behind initiative, we parents certainly have a great deal more information on our publicly financed schools than before. For that, I am thankful. I am also thankful that NCLB has, to some extent, increased attention on our schools, including curricular issues.There's a millstone around Leopold's neck, however, and it's called No Child Left Behind. According to that much-maligned federal law, Leopold is a "School Identified for Improvement" (SIFI).
What gives? If so many signs point toward Leopold succeeding, why do the feds consider that it is falling short.
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Chaos and confusion broke out early on Saturday morning as hundreds of parents knocked on the doors of the Rajagiri International School in Al Warqaa demanding a meeting with the school's management.With more than a thousand students studying at the school, an alleged change of management has left the parents furious.
"We really don't know what's happening at the school. There is a new management and an old management and both of them are at loggerheads over the school's ownership," said a parent who did not wish to be named.
By afternoon, the number of parents had swelled up to more than 200 as the school staff hosted a parent-teacher discussion to inform parents of the developments. In a letter issued to the Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA), the school's management alleged that the school premises had been sold by the landlord to another group. "The new group has come to the school asking the senior academic and administrative staff to hand over the school documents to them. According to them, it's their school and we need to get out of the school," read the letter issued on November 10.
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Washington state education officials know a lot more about your kids than they ever knew about you.They can now track a child from kindergarten through college enrollment and soon will be able to tell you everything about every kid who has gone to school in Washington from preschool through their first job.
Everything includes every school they attended, every achievement test they passed or failed, their ethnic identity, whether they qualified for free lunch, what college they chose, if they had to take remedial courses, when they started college, and more.
Of course this information is anonymous to outside viewers, including researchers and the public, but it gives local school officials a lot to comb through to find ways to improve their preparation of students for college and the world.
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Michael Winerip, via a kind Doug Newman email:
There is rarely a minute when Nathaly Lopera, a high school senior, isn't working to improve herself.Since second grade, she has taken advantage of a voluntary integration program here, leaving her home in one of the city's poorer sections before 6:30 a.m. and riding a bus over an hour to Newton, a well-to-do suburb with top-quality schools. Some nights, she has so many activities that she does not get home until 10 p.m.; often she's up past midnight studying.
"Nathaly gets so mad if she doesn't make the honor roll," says Stephanie Serrata, a classmate.
Last Wednesday, Nathaly did it again, with 5 A's and 2 B's for the first marking period.
She has excelled at Newton North High, a school with enormous resources, in part by figuring out whom to ask for help.
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Of Milwaukee's 187 elementary schools, only a dozen exceeded the statewide average in reading on Wisconsin's standardized test last year, according to statistics compiled on the whole range of schools in the city by the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce. When it comes to math, only 22 of those schools made that grade.Shouldn't parents have easy access to this information? Shouldn't they know which schools didn't make the grade?
We think so, and so does the MMAC.
MMAC and an array of education experts, including Howard Fuller of Marquette's Institute for the Transformation of Learning, and UW-Madison's Value-Added Research Center, are developing a community "report card" for all city schools. The "report card" would include schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools system but also voucher and charter schools outside of the traditional district. While a wealth of data is available for all public schools on the state Department of Public Instruction website, creating an easily accessible, easily digestible common report makes sense to us. Look for that new "report card" sometime after the first of the year.
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Life expectancy is a very important measure when we compare the health of different countries. However, students often misunderstand some of the characteristics of life expectancy. This PowerPoint presentation focuses on two of these characteristics:
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Late last week I got an email from Kaleem Caire, Urban League CEO and champion of the Madison Preparatory Academy charter school proposal.I wonder if other Madison School District programs, many spending far larger sums, receive similar substantive scrutiny compared with the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school? The District's math (related math task force) and reading programs come to mind.Caire was unhappy with the way I had characterized the latest version of the charter school proposal.
In a blog post following the Madison Prep board's decision late Wednesday to develop the proposed school as what's known as a "non-instrumentality" of the school district, I described this type of school as being "free from district oversight."
While it's true that the entire point of establishing a non-instrumentality charter school is to give the organization maximum freedom and flexibility in the way it operates on a day-to-day basis, I agree it would be more accurate to describe it as "largely free of district oversight," or "free of routine oversight by the School Board."
In his message, Caire asked me, and my fellow reporter, Matt DeFour from the Wisconsin State Journal, to correct our descriptions of the proposed school, which will be approved or denied by the Madison School Board in the coming weeks.
In his message, Caire writes, "Madison Prep will be governed by MMSD's Board of Education. In your stories today, you (or the quotes you provide) say we will not be. This continues to be a subject of public conversation and it is just not true."
Ideally, the local media might dig into curricular performance across the spectrum, over time along with related expenditures and staffing.
From a governance perspective, it is clear that other regions and states have set the bar much higher.
In my view, the widely used (at least around the world) IB approach is a good start for Madison Prep.
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With college costs skyrocketing and the number of jobs for new grads on the decline, it's no wonder that students are questioning whether a degree is worth the investment. But given that the jobs of the future are projected to require some form of post-secondary education, a key question is how to provide academic knowledge and industry-specific training that will prepare students for the future. The answer might come from a throwback to the Middle Ages: apprenticeships.Traditionally, we think of interning as the way for students to get on-the-job experience. But internships vary in quality and often aren't paid, which means that students from low-income backgrounds are unable to take advantage of the opportunity. Apprenticeships offer a new model, combining paid on-the-job training with college or trade school classes.
The demand for apprenticeships is particularly acute in the United Kingdom, where a recent BBC survey of high schoolers revealed that two-thirds say they'd forgo attending college in favor of entering an apprenticeship. Businesses there also support the apprenticeship revival. Adrian Thomas, head of resourcing for Network Rail, a company that maintains the U.K.'s rail infrastructure told The Independent that "the investment that we make in our apprentices is driven by needing people with the right skills coming in to support our maintenance teams." Thomas says organizing an apprenticeship program makes "both economic and safety sense," because without the trainees, his company would be in the position of having to look outside the country for employees, or retrain workers from other industries.
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Education is as close to a secular religion as we have in the United States. In a time when Americans have lost faith in their government and economic institutions, millions of us still believe in its saving grace. National leaders, from Benjamin Rush on, oversaw plans for extending its benefits more broadly. In the 19th century, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie famously conceived of schools as ladders on which the industrious poor would ascend to a better life, and he spent a good bit of his fortune laying the foundations for such an education society. After World War II, policy makers who believed in the education gospel grew numerous enough to fill stadiums. One by one, the G.I. Bill, the Truman Commission report, and the War on Poverty singled out education as the way of national and personal advance. "The answer to all of our national problems," as Lyndon Johnson put it in 1965, "comes down to one single word: education."The American education gospel is built around four core beliefs. First, it teaches that access to higher levels of education should be available to everyone, regardless of their background or previous academic performance. Every educational sinner should have a path to redemption. (Most of these paths now run through community colleges.) Second, the gospel teaches that opportunity for a better life is the goal of everyone and that education is the primary -- and perhaps the only -- road to opportunity. Third, it teaches that the country can solve its social problems -- drugs, crime, poverty, and the rest -- by providing more education to the poor. Education instills the knowledge, discipline, and the habits of life that lead to personal renewal and social mobility. And, finally, it teaches that higher levels of education for all will reduce social inequalities, as they will put everyone on a more equal footing. No wonder President Obama and Bill Gates want the country to double its college graduation rate over the next 10 years.
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Backers of the Madison Preparatory Academy are now recommending establishing the proposed single-sex public charter school as what's known as a "non-instrumentality" of the district.Related: Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes provides his perspective on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school.Ultimately, that means the school's staff would be non-union, and the Urban League-backed charter school would have an unprecedented degree of autonomy in its operations, free from district oversight.
With the recommendation, made at a meeting Wednesday, Madison Prep supporters, the school district and the local School Board wade into uncharted waters.
Because of the change, school officials will need to revise their administrative analysis of the charter school proposal in advance of a School Board vote on whether to approve the Madison Prep plan.
Much more on Madison Prep, here.
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A decade ago, a neuroscientist named Charles Nelson traveled to Bucharest to visit Romania's infamous orphanages. There, he saw a child whose brain had swelled to the size of a basketball because of an untreated infection and a malnourished one-year-old no bigger than a newborn. But what has stayed with him ever since was the eerie quiet of the infant wards. "It would be dead silent, all of [the babies] sitting on their backs and staring at the ceiling," says Nelson, who is now at Harvard. "Why cry when nobody is going to pay attention to you?"Nelson had traveled to Romania to take part in a cutting-edge experiment. It was ten years after the fall of the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, whose scheme for increasing the country's population through bans on birth control and abortion had filled state-run institutions with children their parents couldn't support. Images from the orphanages had prompted an outpouring of international aid and a rush from parents around the world to adopt the children. But ten years later, the new government remained convinced that the institutions were a good idea--and was still warehousing at least 60,000 kids, some of them born after the old regime's fall, in facilities where many received almost no meaningful human interaction. With backing from the MacArthur Foundation, and help from a sympathetic Romanian official, Nelson and colleagues from Harvard, Tulane, and the University of Maryland prevailed upon the government to allow them to remove some of the children from the orphanages and place them with foster families. Then, the researchers would observe how they fared over time in comparison with the children still in the orphanages. They would also track a third set of children, who were with their original parents, as a control group.
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If you're late on your mortgage payment, you risk losing your flat. Default on your bank loan and scary collectors pay you a visit. But if you're a university graduate and bail on your student loan, you get letters in the mailbox. If you move, the government administrator may lose track of you and you'll no longer get bothersome mail.The government has been excessively lenient in collecting student loans given by the Student Financial Assistance Agency. Up to the past academic year, about 13,000 students had failed to repay loans totalling HK$213 million. This sends a bad message to the young: be irresponsible; don't pay back money you owe.
Now officials want to take action by transferring a student defaulter's credit history to a credit reference agency. But the proposal has generated howls of protest from the usual suspects.
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We're often told that young people tend to be the most tech-savvy among us. But just how savvy are they? A group of researchers led by College of Charleston business professor Bing Pan tried to find out. Specifically, Pan wanted to know how skillful young folks are at online search. His team gathered a group of college students and asked them to look up the answers to a handful of questions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the students generally relied on the web pages at the top of Google's results list.But Pan pulled a trick: He changed the order of the results for some students. More often than not, those kids went for the bait and also used the (falsely) top-ranked pages. Pan grimly concluded that students aren't assessing information sources on their own merit--they're putting too much trust in the machine.
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U.S. Senate staff members are gathering a trove of information about legal education in the U.S., including figures on law school job placement and student-loan debt, in response to questions about whether the nation's law schools have been luring students with bogus data.The information could serve as a backdrop to hearings on legal education that U.S. senators are "strongly considering," according to a congressional staffer.
So far this year, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), has sent three letters to the American Bar Association, a section of which accredits law schools, urging the organization to do more "to increase its efforts to protect current and prospective law school students from misleading information."
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In general, I agree entirely with the many commentators who have argued that the United States needs to produce more STEM graduates. But I also take note of the many people who have written to me to argue that the only truly employable STEM fields at the moment are engineering and computer science, and only certain disciplines within those. (I.e., I take the point made by many commenters that STEM graduates are not doing all that well in this economy either -- when we say STEM = employment, so commenters point out, we don't mean scientists or mathematicians as such, we mean particular fields of engineering and computer science. I can't vouch for that but do accept it.)It's also worth keeping in mind that the United States could easily produce an excess of engineers -- yes, even engineers. The labor market of a complicated, division-of-labor society means many, many specializations, and most of them are not STEM. We need lawyers, human resources staff, janitors, communications specialists, and many things that too-reductionist a view might lead one to believe are purely frivolous intermediary occupations. Maybe they are parasitical, and maybe they will get squeezed out of existence over time. But there is a sometimes incorrect tendency these days to believe that since innovation is the heart of all increases in productivity and hence in long run growth and wealth, STEM must be responsible for it and that because STEM is the root of innovation, only STEM jobs are truly value added. I exaggerate for effect, but you see the point.
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A major breakthrough in Michael Gove's education revolution will be heralded tomorrow with the launch of the first-ever 'free schools' for special needs children.pecial needs children Read more: http://www.dailymAnd two of Britain's oldest football clubs, Everton and Derby County, are to open free schools for children from difficult backgrounds.
Education Secretary Mr Gove believes the latest batch of establishments will silence critics who claim they are designed to be the elitist preserve of pupils of sharp-elbowed, middle-class parents.
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Parent-teacher conferences for elementary-school children are scheduled for Tuesday afternoon and evening, and for middle-school children on Wednesday. One teacher explains how his school has been able to draw parents in.Many teachers and schools are wondering how to get more parents to come to parent-teacher meetings. At my school, the Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science, where over 90 percent of parents come to the meetings, something seems to be working well.
What is the school doing to make them want to come? First it expends serious effort. A.M.S., as we call it, took responsibility for reaching out to the parents by making visits to the home of every new student before school started. So, come parent meetings, it is the parents' turn to go out of their way to meet the teachers.
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A new analysis (PDF) by the Madison school district shows that the budget submitted by the Urban League of Greater Madison for a pair of sex-segregated charter schools could potentially cost the district an additional $13 million over the schools' first five years.Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.The new numbers came as a shock to Urban League president Kaleem Caire, who says that Madison Prep may pull out of a tentative agreement with Madison Teachers, Inc., that would require Madison Prep to hire mostly union staff.
"It's become clear to us that the most reasonable path to ensure the success of these kids is as a non-instrumentality," says Caire. "Others on our board want to look at a couple of other options, so we're looking at those before we make that final determination."
One of those options would be to scale back the program, including the proposed longer school days and extended school year.
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A plan to move hundreds of pupils at a top international school to temporary premises inside a public housing estate has angered their well-off parents.The Hong Kong International School proposes to demolish its lower primary school building in Repulse Bay and redevelop it into what it says will be a first-class facility.
During the three-year project - the first major redevelopment of the Repulse Bay campus since the school started in 1966 - about 500 pupils aged five to eight would be taught in a disused school building in Chai Wan, a 25-minute drive away.
The plan has ignited debate ahead of a meeting today of the Town Planning Board, which will be asked to approve it.
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The Star article, "Poverty tightens its grip in cities," described a recent Brookings Institution study on the increasing concentration of poverty in cities, including Kansas City.Educational diversity is essential to progress.Poor public schools, such as the Kansas City School District, are a major factor in creating pockets of poverty. Those with enough resources move out of underperforming districts leaving the poorest of the poor behind.
Reversing this trend requires, among other things, fixing the school district problem. A number of solutions have been proposed, most of which will be as effective as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Real change requires something more fundamental: What the left calls giving "power to the people" and what the right calls being "free to choose."
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More than six million children in the U.S. fall into the "special needs" category, and their ranks are expanding. The number of those affected by one developmental disability alone--autism--grew more than 70% between 2005 and 2010.The tax code can help--if you know where to look.
There are numerous tax breaks for education, but the most important one for many special-needs students isn't an education break per se. Instead, it falls under the medical-expense category.
Although students with disabilities have a right to a "free and appropriate" public education by law, some families opt out and others pay for a range of supplemental therapies.
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The growing popularity of online public schools lets states and local school districts effectively outsource some teaching functions--to parents.Students enrolled in an online school full-time are required to work closely with a "learning coach," usually mom or dad, to ensure that they are staying on track in their studies.
For younger students, the learning coach becomes the primary teacher. A typical first-grade language arts lesson, for instance, asks the student to brainstorm a list of words about her favorite place, then write three complete sentences. Parents go online to certify that their child has done the work and to answer questions about its quality--for instance, did the child use proper punctuation?
"It's not about just putting them in front of a computer and saying, 'Here, get this work done,'" says Allison Brown, who has three young children attending Georgia Cyber Academy, a statewide online charter school run by the private firm K12 Inc.
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Wisconsin (and just about every other state) is involved in developing new state tests. That work is one of the requirements of getting a waiver and, if a bill ever emerges form Congress, it will almost certainly continue to require every state to do testing.The oft-criticized WKCE often provides grist for "successes". Sometimes, rarely, the truth about its low standards is quietly mentioned.But the new tests aren't scheduled to be in place for three years - in the fall of 2014. So this fall and for at least the next two, Wisconsin's school children and schools will go through the elaborate process of taking a test that still gets lots of attention but seems to be less useful each year it lives on.
I remember a conversation with a well educated Madison parent earlier this year. "My child is doing well, the WKCE reports him scoring in the 95th percentile in math"......
www.wisconsin2.org is worth a visit.
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Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad:
Critique of the District (MMSD)
Page # 23: MPA - No College Going Culture among Madison's New Student Population
The data on student performance and course-taking patterns among students in MMSD paint a clear picture. There is not a prevalent college going culture among Black, Hispanic and some Asian student populations enrolled in MMSD. In fact, the opposite appears to be true. The majority of these students are failing to complete a rigorous curriculum that would adequately prepare them for college and 21st century jobs. Far too many are also failing to complete college requirements, such as the ACT, or failing to graduate from high school.Page # 23: No College Going Culture among Madison's New Student Population -
MMSD Response
MMSD has taken many steps towards ensuring college attendance eligibility and readiness for our students of color. Efforts include:AVID/TOPS
East High School became the first MMSD school to implement AVID in the 2007-2008 school year. Teens of Promise or TOPS became synonymous with AVID as the Boys and Girls Club committed to an active partnership to support our program. AVID/TOPS students are defined as:
"AVID targets students in the academic middle - B, C, and even D students - who have the desire to go to college and the willingness to work hard. These are students who are capable of completing rigorous curriculum but are falling short of their
potential. Typically, they will be the first in their families to attend college, and many are from low-income or minority families. AVID pulls these students out of their unchallenging courses and puts them on the college track: acceleration instead of remediation."Source: http://www.avid.org/abo_whatisavid.html
The MMSD has 491 students currently enrolled in AVID/TOPS. Of that total, 380 or 77% of students are minority students (27% African-American, 30% Latino, 10% Asian, 10% Multiracial). 67% of MMSD AVID/TOPS students qualify for free and reduced lunch. The 2010- 2011 school year marked an important step in the District's implementation of AVID/TOPS. East High School celebrated its first cohort of AVID/TOPS graduates. East Highs AVID/TOPS class of 2011 had a 100% graduation rate and all of the students are enrolled in a 2-year or 4- year college. East High is also in the beginning stages of planning to become a national demonstration site based on the success of their program. This distinction, determined by the AVID regional site team, would allow high schools from around the country to visit East High School and learn how to plan and implement AVID programs in their schools.
MMSD has a partnership with the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education (WISCAPE) and they are conducting a controlled study of the effects of AVID/TOPS students when compared to a comparison groups of students. Early analysis of the study reveals positive gains in nearly every category studied.
AVID pilot studies are underway at two MMSD middle schools and support staff has been allocated in all eleven middle schools to begin building capacity towards a 2012-2013 AVID Middle School experience. The program design is still underway and will take form this summer when school based site teams participate in the AVID Summer Institute training.
I found this commentary on the oft criticized WKCE exams fascinating (one day, wkce results are useful, another day - this document - WKCE's low benchmark is a problem)" (page 7):
Page # 28: MPA - Student Performance Measures:
85% of Madison Prep's Scholars will score at proficient or advanced levels in reading, math, and science on criterion referenced achievement tests after three years of enrollment.90% of Scholars will graduate on time.
100% of students will complete the SAT and ACT assessments before graduation with 75% achieving a composite score of 22 or higher on the ACT and 1100 on the SAT (composite verbal and math).
100% of students will complete a Destination Plan before graduation.
100% of graduates will qualify for admissions to a four-year college after graduation.
100% of graduates will enroll in postsecondary education after graduation.Page # 28: Student Performance Measures - MMSD Response:
WKCE scores of proficient are not adequate to predict success for college and career readiness. Cut scores equated with advanced are needed due to the low benchmark of Wisconsin's current state assessment system. What specific steps or actions will be provided for students that are far below proficiency and/or require specialized support services to meet the rigorous requirements of IB?Recommendation:
No Child Left Behind requires 100% proficiency by 2014. Madison Prep must be held to the same accountability standards as MMSD.
Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school, here.
Madison School District links & notes on Madison Prep.
TJ Mertz comments, here.
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Ron Winslow & Jennifer Corbett Dooren:
Government health experts recommended Friday that all children be tested for high cholesterol before they reach puberty, in an effort to get an early start in preventing cardiovascular disease.The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute said a child's first cholesterol check should occur between ages 9 and 11 and the test should be repeated between ages 17 and 21. The American Academy of Pediatrics endorsed the guideline.
The recommendation reflects growing evidence the biological processes that underlie heart attacks and other consequences of cardiovascular disease begin in childhood, even though manifestations of the diseases generally don't strike until middle age or later.
The guidelines also come amid broad concern about growing numbers of American children who are overweight or obese and thus potentially on course for diabetes, high blood pressure and other abnormalities. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 17% of American children are obese, triple the level three decades ago.
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Tired of the constraints of the 40-hour workweek, my father, in 1972, quit his job in publishing. My parents were in their early 30s, and they had four children under 7. "But we still wanted to explore the world," my father recalled recently. They bought six one-way tickets to Europe, leaving only a laughable $3,000 to subsist on. Young and idealistic, they thought they could easily educate us along the way. "Life itself would become a portable classroom."For the next four years, my parents embarked on an uncharted "free-form existence." We traipsed to Nerja, Spain; Dorset, England; a Midwestern farm; and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, before settling in St. Louis. My father worked on his novel. The task of teaching the children -- Mary, James, John and me -- fell to my mother.
For much of this time, I was an educational tag-along. Yet I clearly remember San Miguel, where we spent six months in 1975, when I was 4. Art class was held outside in the jardin. When we giggled and chatted among ourselves, Mom never shushed us, but calmly told us to pick a subject. Why not draw idling mariachis, or the dog drooling at a vendor's feet? she'd suggest. Or maybe the kids our age who sold gum to make ends meet? I'd invariably copy what my brothers drew, usually just a car.
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Many young adults find themselves still tethered to the Bank of Mom and Dad, and that dependence is taking a toll.Kevin Davis moved back home last December after receiving a business finance degree from the University of North Carolina. He has yet to land a full-time job.
The 25-year-old often commiserates with his father, John, an information-technology professional who was laid off as a project manager in October 2010 for the second time since 2007. "At times, it's hard for me to keep up my own spirits as well as Kevin's," admits John Davis, a resident of Winston-Salem, N.C., who currently receives unemployment insurance.
As recent college graduates scramble to find full-time jobs, numerous parents are helping their children pay bills or letting them live at home again. About 59% of parents provide or recently provided financial assistance to children aged 18 to 39 who weren't students, concluded a May survey of nearly 1,100 people by the National Endowment for Financial Education.
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It's time to restructure all of our schools to become inclusive of all of our children.Cheryl M. Jorgensen, Ph.D., is a member of the affiliate faculty with the National Center on Inclusive Education at the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire. In 2008 she received the National Down Syndrome Congress Education Award for her leadership and pioneering research supporting the inclusion of students with Down syndrome. She has written this open letter to Shael Polakow-Suransky, the chief academic officer for New York City schools.We have reached the tipping point where it is no longer educationally or morally defensible to continue to segregate students with disabilities. We shouldn't be striving to educate children in the least restrictive environment but rather in the most inclusive one.
Inclusion is founded on social justice principles in which all students are presumed competent and welcomed as valued members of all general education classes and extra-curricular activities in their local schools -- participating and learning alongside their same-age peers in general education instruction based on the general curriculum, and experiencing meaningful social relationships.
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Forget everything you may have read about coping with children's temper tantrums. Time-outs, sticker charts, television denial--for many, none of these measures will actually result in long-term behavior change, according to researchers at two academic institutions.Instead, a set of techniques known as "parent management training" is proving so helpful to families struggling with a child's unmanageable behavior that clinicians in the U.S. and the U.K. are starting to adopt them.
Aimed at teaching parents to encourage sustained behavior change, it was developed in part at parenting research clinics at Yale University and King's College London.
Even violent tantrums, or clinging to the point of riding on a parent's leg, can be curbed, researchers say.
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Peter Theron via a kind Don Severson email:
Earlier this year Wisconsin teachers and their supporters compared Wisconsin and Texas academically and claimed that Wisconsin had better achievement because it ranked higher on ACT/SAT scores. The fact that this claim ignored the ethnic composition of the states, prompted David Burge to use the National Assessment of Educational Progress(NAEP) to compare educational achievement within the same ethnic groups. His conclusion, based on the 2009 NAEP in Reading, Mathematics, and Science (3 subject areas times 2 grades, 4th and 8th, times 3 ethnicities, white, black, and hispanic equals 18 comparisons), was Longhorns 17 - Badgers 1.Related: Comparing Madison, Wisconsin & College Station, Texas.http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-badgers-1.html
The 2011 NAEP results are now available for Reading and
Mathematics. The updated conclusion (2 subject areas times 2 grades, 4th and 8th, times 3 ethnicities, white, black, and hispanic equals 12 comparisons) is Longhorns 12 - Badgers 0. Not only did Texas students outperform Wisconsin students in every one of the twelve ethnicity-controlled comparisons, but Texas students exceeded the national average in all 12 comparisons. Wisconsin students were above the average 3 times, below the average 8 times, and tied the average once.
Again, as in 2009, the achievement gaps were smaller in Texas than in Wisconsin.2011 Data from http://nationsreportcard.gov/
2011 4th Grade MathWhite students: Texas 253, Wisconsin 251 (national average 249)
Black students: Texas 232, Wisconsin 217 (national 224)
Hispanic students: Texas 235, Wisconsin 228 (national 229)2011 8th Grade Math
White students: Texas 304, Wisconsin 295 (national 293)
Black students: Texas 277, Wisconsin 256 (national 262)
Hispanic students: Texas 283, Wisconsin 270 (national 269)2011 4th Grade Reading
White students: Texas 233, Wisconsin 227 (national 230)
Black students: Texas 210, Wisconsin 196 (national 205)
Hispanic students: Texas 210, Wisconsin 202 (national 205)2011 8th Grade Reading
White students: Texas 274, Wisconsin 272 (national 272)
Black students: Texas 252, Wisconsin 240 (national 248)
Hispanic students: Texas 254, Wisconsin 248 (national 251)2009 data compiled by David Burge from NAEP
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-badgers-1.html
2009 4th Grade MathWhite students: Texas 254, Wisconsin 250 (national average 248)
Black students: Texas 231, Wisconsin 217 (national 222)
Hispanic students: Texas 233, Wisconsin 228 (national 227)2009 8th Grade Math
White students: Texas 301, Wisconsin 294 (national 294)
Black students: Texas 272, Wisconsin 254 (national 260)
Hispanic students: Texas 277, Wisconsin 268 (national 260)2009 4th Grade Reading
White students: Texas 232, Wisconsin 227 (national 229)
Black students: Texas 213, Wisconsin 192 (national 204)
Hispanic students: Texas 210, Wisconsin 202 (national 204)2009 8th Grade Reading
White students: Texas 273, Wisconsin 271 (national 271)
Black students: Texas 249, Wisconsin 238 (national 245)
Hispanic students: Texas 251, Wisconsin 250 (national 248)2009 4th Grade Science
White students: Texas 168, Wisconsin 164 (national 162)
Black students: Texas 139, Wisconsin 121 (national 127)
Hispanic students: Wisconsin 138, Texas 136 (national 130)2009 8th Grade Science
White students: Texas 167, Wisconsin 165 (national 161)
Black students: Texas 133, Wisconsin 120 (national 125)
Hispanic students: Texas 141, Wisconsin 134 (national 131)
Thrive released its "Advance Now Competitive Assessment Report," which compares the Madison Region to competitors Austin, TX, Des Moines, IA, and Lincoln, NE, across the major areas of People, Prosperity and Place, 3MB PDF via a kind Kaleem Caire email.
Finally, www.wisconsin2.org is worth a visit.
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On a weekday evening in early spring, about 40 parents crammed into a classroom at Larchmont Charter elementary school. They perched on kindergarten chairs, or sat on the floor, or stood in the hallway, craning their necks.Larchmont is one of the most desirable schools in Los Angeles. It's also nearly impossible to get into. At that moment, 500 kids were on the waiting list. Admission is by lottery, so it comes down to luck.
Unless you can find a way around the lottery.
That's why these parents came to Larchmont. They were looking for a way to cut to the front of the line.
School officials explained how it would work. Parents who agreed up front to make an extraordinary volunteer commitment to the school could get admissions priority. They would be called "founding parents."
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Lots of kids have tried lentils. But what about Ethiopian-style lentils, accompanied by injera bread, couscous and cucumber salad?Fourth graders in Santa Fe, N.M. prepared this lunch feast themselves as part of a nutrition education program called Cooking with Kids. And nutrition experts say programs like this one are not just about expanding timid kids' palates.
Even as home economics classes have been phased out in recent years, some schools are bringing cooking back. And a new study that evaluates cooking curriculum says these hands-on classes do more than just prepare students to cook a decent meal.
"Teachers and principals are seeing how the classroom cooking experience helps support critical thinking, collaboration, and problem-solving skills," says study author Leslie Cunningham-Sabo, a nutrition researcher at Colorado State University. The study appears this week in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior.
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As president of the Student Congress, Jennifer Fox knew in advance that the University of Texas at Arlington was going to propose a tuition freeze for the 2012-13 academic year.When Ms. Fox, a senior accounting major, was told of the plan by the university's president, James Spaniolo, a couple of weeks ago, "my initial reaction was shock," she says. Student leaders had assumed tuition would go up, Ms. Fox says, especially in light of state budget cuts.
Ms. Fox was not alone in her response. On Tuesday, Mr. Spaniolo presented the plan to the Tuition Review Committee, which includes students representing each of the university's colleges, as well as representatives of other groups, like faculty and alumni, and is chaired by Ms. Fox. "I think there was a little bit of surprise," Mr. Spaniolo says.
Under the plan, UT-Arlington would not raise undergraduate or graduate tuition and fees, or the price of room and board, for the coming year. Currently, undergraduate tuition and fees average $9,292 for full-time students (the price varies depending on which college students are in), and room and board costs $7,554. Nearly all of the university's students are Texas residents.
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Joe Light & Rachel Emma Silverman:
Biyan Zhou wanted to major in engineering. Her mother and her academic adviser also wanted her to major in it, given the apparent career opportunities for engineers in a tough job market.Robert Pizzo
But during her sophomore year at Carnegie Mellon University, Ms. Zhou switched her major from electrical and computer engineering to a double major in psychology and policy management. Workers who majored in psychology have median earnings that are $38,000 below those of computer engineering majors, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data by Georgetown University."My ability level was just not there," says Ms. Zhou of her decision. She now plans to look for jobs in public relations or human resources.
Ms. Zhou's dilemma is one that educators, politicians and companies have been trying to solve for decades amid fears that U.S. science and technology training may be trailing other countries. The weak economy is putting those fears into deeper relief.
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Today, I walked my first-grade son to our neighborhood public school before joining over 500 leaders converging on New York City to make tangible commitments to promote economic mobility in America at the Opportunity Nation summit. I told Matthew that people were coming virtually every sector -- business, education, non-profit and community organizations, religious institutions and the military -- to focus on how to provide him and his peers from every background a great education and a shot at the American dream. When I dropped Matthew off at his school's front door, he looked at me and warned me with a big smile not to follow him inside -- something I occasionally do partly to make him laugh and partly out of that desire to support him wherever he goes.I didn't follow my son inside that schoolhouse door. But I have been working hard to determine what commitments I can personally make to provide our kids and all of America's children with tools they can use to create opportunity once they walk as young adults out of our sight-line into America's future.
One must know where one is in order to determine where to go and how to get there, but today's parents face significant challenges in that regard.
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Crystal Phend, via a kind Larry Winkler email:
Children with autism appear to have bigger brains with more neurons than normal for their age, a small preliminary study affirmed.Postmortem examinations of seven boys with autism showed 67% more neurons in the prefrontal cortex (1.94 billion), which controls social and emotional development as well as communication, compared with six controls (1.16 billion, P=0.002), Eric Courchesne, PhD, of the University of California San Diego, and colleagues found.
Autistic brains also weighed 17.6% above normal for age (P=0.001), the group reported in the Nov. 9 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Point out that the brains from autistic boys in this study were 17.6% above what is considered normal brain weight based on age.
Neuron counts in the autistic children should have been accompanied by brain weights of 29.4% versus the observed 17.6% enlargement, they said. "Thus, the size of the autistic brain, overlarge though it is, might actually underestimate the pathology of excess neuron numbers," the group explained.
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Banning sugar-filled sodas from American schools as an effort to combat childhood obesity doesn't reduce overall consumption levels of sweetened beverages, research found.In U.S. states that banned only soda, about 30 percent of middle-school students still purchased sugary drinks like sports and fruit beverages at school, similar to states that had no policy, according to a study released online today in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. In states that banned all sugar-sweetened beverages, students still consumed the drinks outside of school, the researchers said.
Over the past 25 years, children have gotten more of their calories from sugary beverages and consumption of the drinks has been associated with childhood obesity and weight gain, the authors said. Today's study is the first to look at whether efforts by states to curb these drinks really works, said Daniel Taber, the lead study author.
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Daniel Schwartz could have attended an Ivy League school if he wanted to. He just doesn't see the value.Mr. Schwartz, 18 years old, was accepted at Cornell University but enrolled instead at City University of New York's Macaulay Honors College, which is free.
Mr. Schwartz says his family could have afforded Cornell's tuition, with help from scholarships and loans. But he wants to be a doctor and thinks medical school, which could easily cost upward of $45,000 a year for a private institution, is a more important investment. It wasn't "worth it to spend $50,000-plus a year for a bachelor's degree," he says.
As student-loan default rates climb and college graduates fail to land jobs, an increasing number of students are betting they can get just as far with a degree from a less-expensive school as they can with a diploma from an elite school--without having to take on debt.
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One of the priorities of the Department is to provide a challenging, yet customized education for Florida's students and families. To deliver this type of education system for our individual students, the Department is able to showcase a variety of school choice options offered statewide.Florida's public schools offer a wide variety of curriculum options. Some of these aim to strengthen the availability, accessibility, and equity of educational options for parents including Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, dual enrollment and Advanced International Certification of Education, just to name a few.
While many gifted students may enroll in these options, I want to stress that any qualified student can take advantage of these options. These school choice options have demanding, personalized curriculum. I have heard many stories about students who struggled in traditional classes but excelled when they entered a more challenging program that focused on their needs and strengths.
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In the opening scene of The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg portrays a cold Mark Zuckerberg getting dumped by his girlfriend, who is exasperated by the future Facebook founder's socially oblivious and obsessive personality. Eisenberg's Zuckerberg is the stereotypical Silicon Valley geek -- brilliant with technology, pathologically bereft of social graces. Or, in the parlance of the Valley: 'on the spectrum'.Few scientists think that the leaders of the tech world actually have an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which can range from the profound social, language and behavioural problems that are characteristic of autistic disorder, to the milder Asperger's syndrome. But according to an idea that is creeping into the popular psyche, they and many others in professions such as science and engineering may display some of the characteristics of autism, and have an increased risk of having children with the full-blown disorder.
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Design Team Report & Recommendation:
1. Guiding PrinciplesRelated: Wisconsin 25th in 2011 NAEP Reading, Comparing Rhetoric Regarding Texas (10th) & Wisconsin NAEP Scores: Texas Hispanic and African-American students rank second on eighth-grade NAEP math test, Wisconsin, Mississippi Have "Easy State K-12 Exams" - NY Times and Seidenberg endorses using the Massachusetts model exam for teachers of reading (MTEL 90), which was developed with input from reading scientists. He also supports universal assessment to identify students who are at risk, and he mentioned the Minnesota Reading Corps as a model of reading tutoring that would be good to bring to Wisconsin.The Design Team believes that the successful development and implementation of the new performance-based evaluation system is dependent upon the following guiding principles,
which define the central focus of the entire evaluation system. The guiding principles of the educator evaluation system are:The ultimate goal of education is student learning. Effective educators are essential to achieving that goal for all students. We believe it is imperative that students have highly effective teams of educators to support them throughout their public education. We further believe that effective practice leading to better educational achievement requires continuous improvement and monitoring.
A strong evaluation system for educators is designed to provide information that supports decisions intended to ensure continuous individual and system effectiveness. The system must be well-articulated, manageable
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Among the many new program integrity rules the U.S. Education Department issued a little over a year ago was one that went relatively unnoticed at the time: a rule that defines the "last date of attendance" for students who withdraw from online programs more stringently than in the past, and differently than for students in a traditional classroom.At the time, the rule was lost in the hubbub over state authorization rules, the definition of a "credit hour," and other, more controversial, regulations, some of which colleges challenged in Congress or in court. But before the program integrity rules took effect in July 2011 -- and even before they were published publicly, in October 2010 -- the Education Department was already using the new definition of "last date of attendance," which varied considerably from the previous version, to begin investigations and, in some cases, collect financial aid refunds for students who dropped out.
When the Education Department began using the "last day of attendance" rule to evaluate colleges in audits, it had never been publicly announced. In effect, a group of higher education associations has argued, the department was expecting institutions to play a game without knowing the rules.
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American universities crowd the tops of many world rankings, and though these ratings are basically entertainment for university administrators and alumni, they do reflect certain facts. A number of American universities offer their faculty salaries and working conditions, laboratories and libraries that few institutions elsewhere can match. They spend more not only on their staff, but also on their graduate and undergraduate students, than their peers overseas. Though their fees seem enormous by European or Asian standards, they have worked hard in recent years to keep them from deterring poor students by offering more generous aid for undergraduates and by paying full fees for all doctoral students. At every level of the system, dedicated professors are setting students on fire with enthusiasm for everything from the structure of crystals to the structure of poems.Yet American universities also attract ferocious criticism, much of it from professors and from journalists who know them well, and that's entirely reasonable too. Every coin has its other side, every virtue its corresponding vice--and practically every university its festering sores. At the most prestigious medical schools, professors publish the work of paid flacks for pharmaceutical companies under their own names. At many state universities and more than a few private ones, head football and basketball coaches earn millions and their assistants hundreds of thousands for running semiprofessional teams. Few of these teams earn much money for the universities that sponsor them, and some brutally exploit their players.
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Inequality is inevitable; life is a bell curve. Such are the brute facts of biology, which can only evolve because some living things are better at reproducing than others. But not all inequality is created equal. In recent years, it's become clear that many kinds of wealth disparity are perfectly acceptable -- capitalism could not exist otherwise -- while alternate forms make us unhappy and angry.The bad news is that American society seems to be developing the wrong kind of inequality. There is, for instance, this recent study published in Psychological Science, which found that, since the 1970s, the kind of inequality experienced by most Americans has undermined perceptions of fairness and trust, which in turn reduced self-reports of life satisfaction:
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In 1932, the entire population of Scottish 11-year olds (87, 498 children) took an IQ test. Over 60 years later, psychologists Ian Deary and Lawrence Whalley tracked down about 500 of them and gave them the same test to take again. Here are the results:Some things to note here. Firstly, the correlation is pretty high-- .66, to be exact. Those who were at the top of the pack at age 11 also tended to be at the top of the pack at age 80, and those who were at the bottom also tended to stay at the bottom. Secondly, the correlation is not perfect. A few outliers can be found. One person had an IQ of over 100 at age 11, but scored just over 60 at age 80. There are many possible reasons for this outlier, including dementia. Other folks showed IQ increases as they aged. In fact, on average, people's individual (or absolute) scores on the test taken again at age 80 was much higher (over 1 standard deviation) than their scores had been at age 11, even though the rank ordering among people stayed roughly the same.
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With only 24 days remaining till the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education will vote on the Madison Preparatory Academy charter and only 9 days until the MMSD administration is required to issue an analysis of their proposal (and that is assuming the analysis is issued on a Sunday, otherwise we are talking only one week), there are still many, many unanswered questions concerning the school. Too many unanswered questions.Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school, here.Where to start?
All officially submitted information (and more) can be found on the district web site (scroll down for the latest iterations, and thanks to the district public info team for doing this).
The issues around instrumentality/non instrumentality and the status of staff in relation to existing union contracts have rightfully been given much attention. It is my understanding that there has been some progress, but things seem to be somewhat stalled on those matters.
Do current schools face the same scrutiny as the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter?
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Is the education bubble about to explode? Some bloggers, like Mish, tend to think so, while others, like Catherine Rampellof Economix, still see value in education. Even entrepreneurs, like Peter Thiel, recently joined in the discussion, as some entrepreneurs are offering alternatives outside of education and trying to change the current zeitgeist of "college degrees are absolutely necessary." One thing many of these individuals agree on: the cost of education is growing and it's placing an enormous burden on students.In order to assess the value of education and its future, three areas come into immediate focus: the current attitudes about education among the Millennial generation (most of whom are being educated), the warning signs of an education bubble, and the changing attitudes toward education.
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Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad 15MB PDF
1. Develop or Revise a District Improvement PlanClusty Search: District Identified for Improvement (DIFI)Address the fundamental teaching and learning needs of schools in the Local Education Agency (LEA), especially the academic problems o f low-achieving students.
MMSD has been identified by the State of Wisconsin as a District Identified for Improvement, or DIFI. We entered into this status based on District WKCE assessment scores. The data indicates that sub-groups of students-African American students, English Language Learner Students with Disabilities or Economically Disadvantaged -did not score high enough on the WKCE in one or more areas of reading, math or test participation to meet state criteria.
Under No Child Left Behind, 100% of students are expected to achieve proficient or advanced on the WKCE in four areas by 2014. Student performance goals have been raised every year on a regular schedule since 2001, making targets more and more difficult to reach each year. In addition to the curriculum changes being implemented, the following assessments are also new or being implemented during the 2011-12 school year (see Attachment 1):
Attached are six documents describing programs being implemented for the 2011-12 school year to address the needs of all students.
- The Measures of Academic Progress (MAP): Grades 3-7. MAP is incorporated into the MMSD Balanced Assessment Plan as a computer adaptive benchmark assessment tool for grades 3-7. Administration of the assessment was implemented in spring, 2011.
- Cognitive Ability Test (CogAT): Grades 2 and 5. As proposed in the Talented and Gifted Plan approved by the Board of Education in August, 2009, the district requested approval of funds to purchase and score the Cognitive Ability Test (CogAT) which was administered in February, 2011, to all second and fifth graders.
- The EPAS System: Explore Grades 8-9, Plan Grade 10, ACT Grade 11. The EPAS system provides a longitudinal, systematic approach to educational and career planning, assessment, instructional support, and evaluation. The system focuses on the integrated, higher-order thinking skills students develop in grades K-12 that are important for success both during and after high school. The EPAS system is linked to the College and Career Readiness standards so that the information gained about student performance can be used to inform instruction around those standards.
1. Strategic Plan Document: Year Three (Attachment 2)
2. Strategic Plan Summary of Three Main Focus Areas (Attachment 3)
3. Addressing the Needs of All Learners and Closing the Achievement Gap Through K-12 Alignment (Attachment 4)
4. Scope and Sequence (Attachment 5)
5. The Ideal Graduate from MMSD (Attachment 6)
6. 4K Update to BOE- Program and Sites- (Attachment 7)
Madison School District administrators aren't keeping track of the best classroom instruction. Not all principals create a culture of high expectations for all students. And teachers aren't using the same research-based methods.Such inconsistencies across the district and within schools -- stemming from Madison's tradition of school and teacher autonomy -- are hurting student achievement, according to a district analysis required under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
"There are problems within the entire system," Superintendent Dan Nerad said. "We do have good practice, but we need to be more consistent and have more fidelity to our practices."
Inconsistencies in teaching and building culture can affect low-income students, who are more likely to move from school to school, and make teacher training less effective, Nerad said.
The analysis is contained in an improvement plan the district is scheduled to discuss with the School Board on Monday and to deliver next week to the state Department of Public Instruction.
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Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, via a kind Senn Brown email:
In 2010-11, a record number of students took advantage of Wisconsin's open enrollment program to attend school elsewhere than in their own district. The 34,498 participants was 8.1% higher than in 2010 and nearly five times higher than in 2001. Open enrollment numbers varied widely, with 13 districts experiencing net outflows of more than 10% of their student populations and 34 with net inflows of similar magnitude. These findings are detailed in SchoolFacts11, the annual reference book from the Wisconsin Tax- payers Alliance (WISTAX) that provides, for every school district in the state, a wide range of information on enrollment, finance, staffing, and test scores.Related: Madison School District 2009 outbound open enrollment survey. Much more, here.In 2010-11, 4.0% of Wisconsin's public school students attended a district other than their own. Dover (26.2%) and South Shore (23.0%) both had net outflows (students leaving less those coming) of more than 20%. Eleven other districts (Florence, Mercer, Neosho, Palmyra-Eagle, Richfield, Stockbridge, Twin Lakes, Washington-Caldwell, Wheatland, Winter, and Wonewoc-Union Center) had net outflows of over 10%.
Student counts drive a District's tax and spending authority.
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But today, I want to talk about higher education, where the long and steep upward climb of tuition offers at least prima facie evidence of yet another bubble. We've been willing to pay more and more for our "higher" education because it was supposed to be the guarantee of a good job upon graduation (hence a good investment of time and money) and because the government's willingness to subsidize it (thorough grants and guaranteed loans) would help insulate us from the real costs.The Occupiers aren't the only ones wondering about the former. There are lots of reasons to ask about the value of a college education, not just in terms of the connection between credentials and the marketplace, but even in terms of the more intangible relationship between higher education and a life well-led. That latter relationship is, for me, the central concern, but in terms of the economics of higher education, it's a luxury good.
Properly understood, of course, it's a relatively cheap luxury good. You need students, professors, and great (or at least good) books. Unfortunately, however, we've lost our focus on that time-honored nexus (the first discussion of it that I can think of is in Xenophon's Memorabilia). Instead, we have professors who have science envy and need to do ground-breaking research (which means studying things that have in the past, for better or worse, been neglected and inventing new ways of looking at things, as if novelty were always a good thing). And we have students who wish to be entertained and coddled in country club-like surroundings. Finally, although I'm leaping ahead of myself a bit here, the fact that so much of this already bloated enterprise is financed by the federal government means that there are significant costs connected with regulatory compliance.
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The two most common criticisms about charter schools are that A) many of them aren't that good and B) the good ones can't be replicated to serve enough kids to really make a difference. TIME got an exclusive first look at the most comprehensive evaluation of charter school networks ever, and although the study, which will be released on Nov. 4, underscores the challenge of creating quality schools, it also makes clear that it is indeed possible to build a lot of schools that are game-changers for a lot of students.The study, conducted by Mathematica Policy Research and the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education, examined networks of affiliated charter schools, which in the education world are referred to as charter school management organizations (CMOs). There are more than 130 of these non-profit networks serving about 250,000 students nationwide. I was on an advisory board for the early conception and design of this study, the goal of which was to better understand how CMOs operate and how effective they are. The study is filled with valuable data about how CMOs manage their teachers, how much funding they get and how they use it and what kinds of students they serve. But I'm focusing here on student achievement, which is, of course, the most contentious issue in the national debate about charter schools.
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Winnie Hu, via a kind Carla McDonald email:
Charter schools, publicly financed but independently operated, have encountered fierce resistance in many suburban communities, criticized by parents and traditional educators who view them as a drain on resources.But since the Amani Public Charter School won state approval to open this year, officials at the Mount Vernon City School District have taken that opposition to a new level.
The district, in Westchester County, sued the State Education Department and the Amani school this year, calling the approval an "arbitrary and capricious" decision, and sought to block Amani from moving forward. It has refused to turn over state, federal and local aid money to Amani, so the state has begun paying the charter directly. During the summer, district workers were sent to knock on the doors of Amani students to check that they lived in the district, a tactic that angered some parents. And in recent weeks, the district has delayed providing special education services to Amani students.
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Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind Chan Stroman-Roll email:
Guest Speaker Mark Seidenberg (Donald O. Hebb and Hilldale Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, UW-Madison): Professor Seidenberg gave an excellent presentation on the science of reading and why it is important to incorporate the findings of that science in teaching. Right now there is a huge disconnect between the vast, converged body of science worldwide and instructional practice. Prospective teachers are not learning about reading science in IHE's, and relying on intuition about how to teach reading is biased and can mislead. Teaching older students to read is expensive and difficult. Up-front prevention of reading failure is important, and research shows us it is possible, even for dyslexic students. This will save money, and make the road easier for students to learn and teachers to teach. Seidenberg endorses using the Massachusetts model exam for teachers of reading (MTEL 90), which was developed with input from reading scientists. He also supports universal assessment to identify students who are at risk, and he mentioned the Minnesota Reading Corps as a model of reading tutoring that would be good to bring to Wisconsin.Much more on the Read to Lead Task Force, here.
Lander: Can Seidenberg provide a few examples of things on which the Task Force could reach consensus?Seidenberg: There is a window for teaching basic reading skills that then will allow the child to move on to comprehension. The balanced literacy concept is in conflict with best practices. Classrooms in Wisconsin are too laissez-faire, and the spiraling approach to learning does not align with science.
Michael Brickman: Brickman, the Governor's aide, cut off the discussion with Professor Seidenberg, and said he would be in touch with him later.
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Nicole is a teacher's dream student. Bright, curious and hard-working, she has high expectations for herself and isn't satisfied with anything less than A grades. In fact, her mother says, she sometimes has to be told not to take school too seriously.Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school, here.But when Nicole was tested in seventh grade to see if she'd qualify for an eighth-grade algebra course that would put her on track for advanced math courses in high school, her score wasn't top-notch. She assured the teacher she wanted to tackle the course anyway. He turned her down.
In fact, her score could not predict whether she'd succeed. Neither could the color of her skin.
As an African-American girl, Nicole didn't look much like the high-flying students her teacher was accustomed to teaching in his accelerated math classes at a Madison middle school. But instead of backing off, Nicole and her family challenged the recommendation. Somewhat grudgingly, her teacher allowed her in the class.
Fast forward a year: Nicole and one other student, the two top performers in the eighth-grade algebra class, were recommended for advanced math classes in high school.
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It was report card pickup day at Walsh Elementary School on Wednesday, and Principal Krish Mohip was feeling a little exposed.In addition to their children's report cards, Walsh parents were among the first in Chicago Public Schools to receive a progress report on the school itself, showing precisely how well, and in many cases how poorly, that school is keeping students on track for college.
At Walsh, a modern brick building in the city's Pilsen neighborhood, parents learned that math and reading proficiency was good in the early grades but fell off when the curriculum became more difficult in eighth grade.
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But there's another culprit at work: the college admissions process itself. If you want to buy shares of stock, bid on antiques, search for a job, or look for Mr. Right in 2011, you will likely go to a marketplace driven by the electronic exchange of information. There will be quick, flexible transactions, broad access to buyers and sellers, and powerful algorithms that efficiently match supply and demand. If you are a student looking for a college or a college looking for a student, by contrast, you're stuck with an archaic, over-complicated, under-managed system that still relies on things like bus trips to airport convention centers and the physical transmission of pieces of paper. That's why under-matching is so pervasive. The higher education market only works for students who have the resources to overcome its terrible inefficiency. Everyone else is out of luck.As a result, the odds appear to be against Jameel, who attends a 1,600-student public high school where the large majority of children qualify for the federal free and reduced-price lunch program and the staff of three guidance counselors was cut to two last year. Determination can take you only so far if there's no one to help you find your way.
But Jameel's local school system has made one recent move that might work significantly in his favor. A few days after returning from the college fair, Jameel logged on to a new Web site that is the result of a contract between the Miami-Dade County school system and a Boston-based company called ConnectEDU. The site offered Jameel loads of information about different colleges and universities, along with strategies for filling out college applications and getting scholarships and financial aid. It was also a vessel for information about Jameel himself--his grades, courses, and activities, along with short animated quizzes designed to identify his strengths and goals. There were checklists and schedules and friendly reminders, all tailored to the personal aspirations the site had gleaned from Jameel, all focused on identifying the colleges that might meet them.
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One of the great things about America, President Obama told students at the University of Colorado, is that no matter how humble your roots, you still have a shot at a great education. He also told students that his goal is to "make college more affordable." Alas, the president's prescription for making higher education affordable seems likely to yield the same results as his plan for curbing health care costs - that is, it is likely to drive prices higher than inflation.The nation's next fiscal nightmare may well be a higher-education bubble.
Americans now owe more on student loans than on credit cards. As USA Today reported, America's student loan debt is expected to exceed $1 trillion this year. Rising costs have left many graduates in a deep hole. Many of last year's graduates walked away with a diploma and, on average, $24,000 in student loans. The default rate on student loans rose to 8.8 percent in 2009.
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Yet I am surprised--surprised and disappointed. This is a very dangerous level of immunization--the level where herd immunity gets lost, disease reservoirs are established, and children emerge from their school to infect infants, immunocrompromised adults, and people whose vaccinations didn't take or have waned, with potentially fatal diseases.
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*Note start required*I am a parent of one of the kids at the Lantau International School in Pui O and I have the strong urge to comment on the ridiculous ruling by the High Court judge (The Standard, November 1).First does it take only one person to complain - in September 2008 - for the government to send an officer from the Environmental Protection Department to measure noise levels?
That's an absolute joke and this person must have had a "nightmare" over the past three years spending time in their bedroom waiting for the kids to make a noise during their few minutes break in the morning and at lunch time.
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Editor's Note: Scroll down to the bottom to view OnlineCollege.org's infographic about rising costs and the $10,000 degree.The latest news on Wall Street is that the occupiers want forgiveness of student debt. And while President Obama didn't meet their demands in his recent speech, he is still focusing on the same side of the equation: more money for higher education.
But down the road, the best way to deal with the high cost of college education is to reduce it! And Texas governor Rick Perry has thrown out the gauntlet by demanding that his regents come up with a plan for a $10,000 degree--not $10,000 per year but $10,000 for a full degree.
Is such a price possible? At the Pope Center, we've looked at affordability--and the innovation that will be required to get prices to that level--from many angles. My view is that extreme reductions are possible, but they may be far in the future. Meanwhile, however, you can save a lot of money if you take care.
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IN LATE 1965, President Lyndon Johnson stood in the modest gymnasium of what had once been the tiny teaching college he attended in Texas and announced a programme to promote education. It was an initiative that exemplified the "Great Society" agenda of his administration: social advancement financed by a little hard cash, lots of leverage and potentially vast implicit government commitments. Those commitments are now coming due."Economists tell us that improvement of education has been responsible for one-fourth to one-half of the growth in our nation's economy over the past half-century," Johnson said. "We must be sure that there will be no gap between the number of jobs available and the ability of our people to perform those jobs."
To fill this gap Johnson pledged an amount that now seems trivial, $1.9m, sent from the federal government to states which could then leverage it ten-to-one to back student loans of up to $1,000 for 25,000 people. "This act", he promised, "will help young people enter business, trade, and technical schools--institutions which play a vital role in providing the skills our citizens must have to compete and contribute in our society."
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Sophia Hollander & Melanie Grayce West:
Some New York City children take after-school classes in dance, pottery or softball. Once a week, Gillian and Hunter Randall add an unusual activity to the list: lessons on how to shake hands.It's a class taught by SocialSklz:-), a company founded in 2009 to address deteriorating social skills in the age of iPhones, Twitter and Facebook friends.
"It's hard to have a real conversation anymore. And you know what? I'm guilty of it too," said the Randalls' mother, Lisa LaBarbera, noting that her 10-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son both have iPod touches and handheld videogame devices. "You get carpal tunnel, but you're not building those communication
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Sophia Hollander & Melanie Grayce West:
Some New York City children take after-school classes in dance, pottery or softball. Once a week, Gillian and Hunter Randall add an unusual activity to the list: lessons on how to shake hands.It's a class taught by SocialSklz:-), a company founded in 2009 to address deteriorating social skills in the age of iPhones, Twitter and Facebook friends.
"It's hard to have a real conversation anymore. And you know what? I'm guilty of it too," said the Randalls' mother, Lisa LaBarbera, noting that her 10-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son both have iPod touches and handheld videogame devices. "You get carpal tunnel, but you're not building those communication
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The parents of three 15-year-olds who were strip-searched and jailed for three days after a trespassing charge expressed outrage Thursday during a press conference and called for the removal of Tate County Youth Court referee Leigh Ann Darby."If we don't stand up for our rights, no one else will," Dexter Burton of Senatobia, father of Lakiya Burton, told reporters at the Church of Christ at 401 W. Gilmore.
The three youths, who had not previously been identified because of their ages, were at the gathering with their parents and the families' attorney, J. Cliff Johnson II of Jackson. They are Larandra Wright of Southaven, and Lakiya Burton and Kevonta Mack, both of Senatobia.
Burton and Mack are 10th-graders at Senatobia High School; Wright is a 10th-grader at Southaven High. None had prior brushes with the law before they crossed a renter's yard at a duplex that faces Morgan Drive in Senatobia this summer.
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Recently there has been a significant move among Chinese educators to provide better sex education to students in college, primary schools and even kindergartens.The Ministry of Education recently issued a circular requiring colleges to make courses on reproductive physiology and sex psychology part of the standard curriculum.
This kind of education as a rule is included in courses known as physiology and hygiene in middle schools, but in actual practice some more sensitive topics are either not addressed or glossed over by instructors who consider them embarrassing and not essential.
In the past, this kind of information about sexuality was generally passed on informally outside the schools, by young people.
One of the many stated reasons for offering formal, medically accurate instruction is to protect children from sex abuse, and to prevent teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
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Last year, the United States reached a troubling new milestone in higher education: for the first time, total student loan debt in the United States exceeded total credit card debt. It's a development that should have come as no surprise. Over the past 15 years, the amount that students borrow to finance their postsecondary education has grown by every available measure: between 1993 and 2008, the percentage of bachelor's degree recipients who borrowed for their educations jumped from 49 percent to 66 percent, with average total debt at graduation increasing over 50 percent, from $15,149 to $24,700. Borrowing money to go to college, like borrowing money to buy houses and cars, is fast becoming a fact of American life--and so, it is turning out, is the struggle to pay it back.
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Education Plan (PDF) via a kind Kaleem Caire email:
Madison Preparatory Academy's educational program has been designed to be different. The eight features of the educational program will serve as a powerful mix of strategies that allow Madison Prep to fulfill its mission: to prepare students for success at a four-year college or university by instilling Excellence, Pride, Leadership and Service. By fulfilling this mission, Madison Prep will serve as a catalyst of change and opportunity for young men and women who live in a city where only 48% of African American students and 56% of Latino students graduate from high school. Madison Prep's educational program will produce students who are ready for college; who think, read, and write critically; who are culturally aware and embrace differences among all people; who give back to their communities; and who know how to work hard.Business Plan (PDF), via a kind Kaleem Caire email:One of the most unique features of Madison Prep is the single gender approach. While single gender education has a long, successful history, there are currently no schools - public or private - in Dane County that offer single gender education. While single gender education is not right for every student, the demand demonstrated thus far by families who are interested in enrolling their children in Madison Prep shows that a significant number of parents believe their children would benefit from a single gender secondary school experience.
Madison Prep will operate two schools - a boys' school and a girls' school - in order to meet this demand as well as ensure compliance with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The schools will be virtually identical in all aspects, from culture to curriculum, because the founders of Madison Prep know that both boys and girls need and will benefit from the other educational features of Madison Prep.
The International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum is one of those strategies that Madison Prep's founders know will positively impact all the students the schools serve. IB is widely considered to be the highest quality curricular framework available. What makes IB particularly suitable for Madison Prep is that it can be designed around local learning standards (the Wisconsin Model Academic Standards and the Common Core State Standards) and it is inherently college preparatory. For students at Madison Prep who have special learning needs or speak English as a second language, IB is fully adaptable to their needs. Madison Prep will offer both the Middle Years Programme (MYP) and the Diploma Programme (DP) to all its students.
Because IB is designed to be college preparatory, this curricular framework is an ideal foundation for the other aspects of Madison Prep's college preparatory program. Madison Prep is aiming to serve a student population of which at least 65% qualify for free or reduced lunch. This means that many of the parents of Madison Prep students will not be college educated themselves and will need the school to provide considerable support as their students embark on their journey through Madison Prep and to college.
College exposure, Destination Planning, and graduation requirements that mirror admissions requirements are some of the ways in which Madison Prep will ensure students are headed to college. Furthermore, parents' pursuit of an international education for their children is increasing rapidly around the world as they seek to foster in their children a global outlook that also expands their awareness, competence and comfort level with communicating, living, working and problem solving with and among cultures different than their own.
Harkness Teaching, the cornerstone instructional strategy for Madison Prep, will serve as an effective avenue through which students will develop the critical thinking and communication skills that IB emphasizes. Harkness Teaching, which puts teacher and students around a table rather than in theater-style classrooms, promotes student-centered learning and rigorous exchange of ideas. Disciplinary Apprenticeship, Madison Prep's approach to literacy across the curriculum, will ensure that students have the literacy skills to glean ideas and information from a variety of texts, ideas and information that they can then bring to the Harkness Table for critical analysis.
Yet to ensure that students are on track for college readiness and learning the standards set out in the curriculum, teachers will have to take a disciplined approach to data-driven instruction. Frequent, high quality assessments - aligned to the standards when possible - will serve as the basis for instructional practices. Madison Prep teachers will consistently be analyzing new data to adjust their practice as needed.
Based on current education and social conditions, the fate of young men and women of color is uncertain.Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School, here.Black and Hispanic boys are grossly over-represented among youth failing to achieve academic success, are at grave risk of dropping out of school before they reach 10th grade, are disproportionately represented among adjudicated and incarcerated youth, and are far less likely than their peers in other subgroups to achieve their dreams and aspirations. Likewise, boys in general lag behind girls in most indicators of student achievement.
Research indicates that although boys of color have high aspirations for academic and career success, their underperformance in school and lack of educational attainment undermine their career pursuits and the success they desire. This misalignment of aspirations and achievement is fueled by and perpetuates a set of social conditions wherein men of color find themselves disproportionately represented among the unemployed and incarcerated. Without meaningful, targeted, and sustainable interventions and support systems, hundreds of thousands of young men of color will never realize their true potential and the cycle of high unemployment, fatherless homes, overcrowded jails, incarcerated talent, deferred dreams, and high rates of school failure will continue.
Likewise, girls of color are failing to graduate high school on-time, underperform on standardized achievement and college entrance exams and are under-enrolled in college preparatory classes in secondary school. The situation is particularly pronounced in the Madison Metropolitan School District where Black and Hispanic girls are far less likely than Asian and White girls to take a rigorous college preparatory curriculum in high school or successfully complete such courses with a grade of C or better when they do. In this regard, they mimic the course taking patterns of boys of color.
Additionally, data on ACT college entrance exam completion, graduation rates and standardized achievement tests scores provided to the Urban League of Greater Madison by the Madison Metropolitan School District show a significant gap in ACT completion, graduation rates and standardized achievement scores between students of color and their White peers.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men and Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Women will be established to serve as catalysts for change and opportunity among young men and women in the Greater Madison, Wisconsin area, particularly young men and women of color. It will also serve the interests of parents who desire a nurturing, college preparatory educational experience for their child.
Both schools will be administratively separate and operated by Madison Preparatory Academy, Inc. (Madison Prep), an independent 501(c)(3) established by the Urban League of Greater Madison and members of Madison Prep's inaugural board of directors.
The Urban League of Greater Madison, the "founder" of Madison Prep, understands that poverty, isolation, structural discrimination, limited access to schools and classrooms that provide academic rigor, lack of access to positive male and female role models in different career fields, limited exposure to academically successful and achievement-oriented peer groups, and limited exposure to opportunity and culture experiences outside their neighborhoods contribute to reasons why so many young men and women fail to achieve their full potential. At the same time, the Urban League and its supporters understand that these issues can be addressed by directly countering each issue with a positive, exciting, engaging, enriching, challenging, affirming and structured learning community designed to specifically address these issues.Madison Prep will consist of two independent public charter schools - authorized by the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education - designed to serve adolescent males and females in grades 6-12 in two separate schools. Both will be open to all students residing within the boundaries of the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) who apply, regardless of their previous academic performance.
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Earlier this year, Dropout Nation argued that one way that school reformers -- including school choice activists and Parent Power groups -- could advance reform and expand school choice was to file lawsuits similar to school funding torts filed for the past four decades by school funding advocates. But now, it looks like Parent Power activists may be filing a lawsuit in Los Angeles on a different front: Overhauling teacher evaluations. And the Los Angeles Unified School District may be the place where the first suit is filed.In a letter sent on behalf of some families Wednesday to L.A. Unified Superintendent John Deasy and the school board -- and just before the district begins negotiations with the American Federation of Teachers' City of Angels unit over a new contract -- Barnes & Thornburg's Kyle Kirwan demanded that the district "implement a comprehensive system" of evaluating teachers that ties "pupil progress" data to teacher evaluations. Kirwan and the group he represents are also asking for the district to begin evaluating all teachers "regardless of tenure status" and to reject any contract with the American Federation of Teachers local that allows for any veteran teacher with more than a decade on the job to go longer than two years without an evaluation if they haven't had one in the first place.
We represent minor-students currently residing within the boundaries of the Los Angeles Unified School District (the "District" or "LAUSD"), the parents of these students, and other adults who have paid taxes for a school system that has chronically failed to comply with California law.Our clients seek to have the District immediately meet its obligations under the Stull Act, a forty year old law that is codified at California Education Code section 44660 et seq. (the "Stull Act").
In relevant part, the Stull Act requires that "[t]he governing board of each school district establish standards of expected pupil achievement at each grade level in each area of study."
Cal. Educ. Code § 44662(a). The Stull Act requires further that "[t]he governing board of each school district ... evaluate and assess certificated employee performance as it reasonably relates to ... [t]he progress of pupils toward the standards established pursuant to subdivision (a) and, if applicable, the state adopted academic content standards as measured by state adopted criterion referenced assessments ...." Cal. Educ. Code§ 44662(b)(l).
In the forty years since the California Legislature passed the Stull Act, the District has never evaluated its certificated personnel based upon the progress of pupils towards the standards established pursuant to Education Code section 44662(a) and, if applicable, the state adopted academic content standards as measured by the state adopted criterion referenced assessments; never reduced such evaluations to writing or added the evaluations to part of the permanent records of its certificated personnel; never reviewed with its certificated personnel the results of pupil progress as they relate to Stull Act evaluations; and never made specific recommendations on how certificated personnel with unsatisfactory ratings could improve their performance in order to achieve a higher level of pupil progress toward meeting established standards of expected pupil achievement.
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I attended the talk last night by Dr. Dina Bulles put on by Wedgwood Elementary (and held at Nathan Hale High). (FYI, her name is pronounced Bree-yays.) The other SPS staff represented were the principal of Wedgwood, Chris Cronas, Ex. Director, Phil Brockman, and head of Advanced Learning, Bob Vaughn. Mr. Cronas pointed out that several Wedgwood teachers were in attendance as well. There were a large number of seats put out but the room wasn't full. My guess is it was about 60 people.Dr. Bulles explained that in her district, Paradise Valley School district (which is just outside of Phoenix, Arizona), all of their elementary schools use cluster grouping. (Her district is about 35,000 students and there are 31 elementary schools.) She said out of those 35,000, about 5,000 student received gifted classes/services. (Help me out anyone else who attended; I thought she said towards the end that this was included high school students taking AP/IB. Is that what you heard?) She also made a startling statement that 68% of her teachers (and I believe this is in elementary) had 3 years or less of teaching experience. Wow.
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I attended the talk last night by Dr. Dina Bulles put on by Wedgwood Elementary (and held at Nathan Hale High). (FYI, her name is pronounced Bree-yays.) The other SPS staff represented were the principal of Wedgwood, Chris Cronas, Ex. Director, Phil Brockman, and head of Advanced Learning, Bob Vaughn. Mr. Cronas pointed out that several Wedgwood teachers were in attendance as well. There were a large number of seats put out but the room wasn't full. My guess is it was about 60 people.Paradise Valley School District's website.Dr. Bulles explained that in her district, Paradise Valley School district (which is just outside of Phoenix, Arizona), all of their elementary schools use cluster grouping. (Her district is about 35,000 students and there are 31 elementary schools.) She said out of those 35,000, about 5,000 student received gifted classes/services. (Help me out anyone else who attended; I thought she said towards the end that this was included high school students taking AP/IB. Is that what you heard?) She also made a startling statement that 68% of her teachers (and I believe this is in elementary) had 3 years or less of teaching experience. Wow.
What was most fascinating to me and an absolute pleasure is that here was a educator who made no apologies for wanting to serve gifted students. She gave a PowerPoint and several times talked about the need to serve these students needs as a district would any other student with a special need like ELL or Special Education. It was very refreshing and I have never, in all my years in SPS, heard any SPS principal or Board member or staff member or Superintendent speak in this manner.
She started out by showing a list from J. Skabos about differences between gifted children and bright children (and I note that she believes both groups need to be served). I couldn't find the exact list but here is link to one that is quite similar.
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Scientists think they can prove that free will is an illusion. Philosophers are urging them to think again.The experiment helped to change John-Dylan Haynes's outlook on life. In 2007, Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, put people into a brain scanner in which a display screen flashed a succession of random letters1. He told them to press a button with either their right or left index fingers whenever they felt the urge, and to remember the letter that was showing on the screen when they made the decision. The experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal brain activity in real time as the volunteers chose to use their right or left hands. The results were quite a surprise.
"The first thought we had was 'we have to check if this is real'," says Haynes. "We came up with more sanity checks than I've ever seen in any other study before."
The conscious decision to push the button was made about a second before the actual act, but the team discovered that a pattern of brain activity seemed to predict that decision by as many as seven seconds. Long before the subjects were even aware of making a choice, it seems, their brains had already decided.
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The State of California enrolls about 10 percent of the country's full-time students attending public four-year colleges, and about 15 percent of those at public two-year colleges. So when the state's public colleges have a big tuition hike--as they did this year--it has a big impact on the average tuition increase at public colleges across the country, says a new report from the College Board.For the fifth year in a row, the percentage increase in average published tuition and fees at public four-year colleges was higher than it was at private ones, according to the report, "Trends in College Pricing 2011." The report, released on Wednesday, examines annual changes in colleges' sticker prices, as well as the net prices students pay after grant aid and tax benefits are considered. A companion report, "Trends in Student Aid 2011," looks at the money that helps students meet those growing prices. (The pricing report looks at data through this academic year, while the student-aid report has information through 2010-11.)
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For the many parents who are reeling from recent losses to their college-savings plans, insurers are pitching another option they claim can help: life insurance.Last week, Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company launched a "Kids Take Charge" marketing campaign that promotes life insurance as a way to pay for college. Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America will roll out its latest campaign on life insurance as a college savings vehicle next month. Both firms join Illinois-based insurer Mutual Trust Financial Group, which this year has been promoting college savings as one of the main reasons to buy life insurance. In addition, insurance companies like National Life Group and Aviva USA have been encouraging their agents to talk about college planning and insurance with their clients.
While insurance companies have long touted whole life and universal polices as a back door way to finance college, experts say rarely have so many companies made such targeted pitches directly to parents. Why now? College savings plans have been hit hard by market losses over the past few months and low interest rates, say financial advisers, while tuition costs continue their steady rise. Insurers, they say, see a ready market in panicked parents.
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Thoughts of a Student Entrepreneur:
This jumped out to me after watching Steve Job's 2005 Stanford graduation speech; the biggest thing to make sure not to take for granted at college is how easy it is to meet so many different & amazing people. You get 4 years to live on a student campus full of dots waiting to be connected ( in the words of Steve ) you must take advantage of every possible moment to connect dots. Especially if you want to start a startup. Looking back I wish I would have hung out a ton more in the C.S. Lab instead of doing my comp sci hw in my dorm room lounge in between switching off games of call of duty with my roommates.I'm dying for an awesome co-founder right now!! More than anything, and it would have been awesome to be able to go to a college buddy with the same interests as I have. A college campus represents the easiest and most abundant source for finding a Co-Founder. Everything I've done until now I've done alone out of necessity b/c it's been extremely hard to find a good co-founder.
Don't take that barrier free access to tons of new friends & potential co-founders for granted!! That's my single most important advice to any college student that wants to start their own company. I took it for granted and it's making my startup career 100 times more difficult, trust me.
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Only one in four students who enter high school in New York City are ready for college after four years, and less than half enroll, according to the A-through-F high school report cards released on Monday.Those numbers, included for the first time in the report cards, confirmed what the state suggested several months ago: the city still has a long way to go to prepare students for successful experiences in college and beyond. And they were a signal that graduation rates, long used by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg as a validation of his education policies, were not as meaningful as they seemed.
"There's a huge change in life chances for kids who are successful in post-secondary education," the city's chief academic officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky, said. "We really have a task to prepare kids for that, and the data is one of the most motivating tools."
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I will not be working in the office Thursday. I have to care for my kids, two of whom, like lots of other Wisconsin public school students, have the day off.Why, you ask, are classes canceled on this entirely unremarkable Thursday the week before Halloween? On a day not set aside for any national holiday, nor part of any traditionally recognized vacation season, nor beset by record-breaking snowfall or some other natural cataclysm?
Well, because historically, a couple of consecutive weekdays in October have been something of a Wisconsin public schools-recognized holiday -- the traditional time for the annual convention of the statewide teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council.
I know what you're saying: "Don't be ridiculous. Teachers have two and a half months in the summer to hold their convention! Why wouldn't they have it then?"
And I hear you; an October teachers convention does defy logic. Yet, that's been the case until this year, when things managed to get even more illogical.
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via a kind Larry Winkler email.
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It was the kind of memo that high school students would dream of getting, if they dreamed in memos.Lisa Waller, director of the high school at Dalton, a famously rigorous private school on the Upper East Side, sent a letter to parents this summer announcing that tests and papers would be staggered to make sure students did not become overloaded. January midterms would be pushed back two weeks so students would not have to study during vacation.
Across town at the Trinity School, another of Manhattan's elite academies, the administration has formed a task force to examine workload, and the upper school, grades 9 to 12, has been trying ways to coordinate test-taking with papers, labs and other projects.
Horace Mann School, in the Bronx, opened a tutoring center this year to help students manage their work. Hunter College High School, which has a tough admissions exam, is for the first time this year offering homework holidays, on Halloween, the Chinese New Year (Jan. 23) and a day nearer spring, March 14.
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I get a ton of mail because of this blog, for the most part it is lots of fun and I really enjoy it. The thing that I don't enjoy is when people ask me if they should drop out of school or university to 'start their own business', typically accompanied by some minimal description of their circumstances.Of course it's my own fault, putting up a guide on how to run a small software consultancy business makes it look fairly easy and exciting compared to being in school or secondary education. Another reason is that I've documented that I (successfully) dropped out of school but circumstances have changed dramatically since then.
I landed on my feet but that's absolutely no guarantee. It was blood, sweat and tears and an uncommon dose of luck. At first I worked a crappy physical job, and from there I somehow found my way into being a professional programmer which in turn led to my first business. At the time anybody that could hold a keyboard without dropping it was making money hand over fist (because microcomputers were so new there was hardly any software for it, and there were hardly any people that knew how to write such software) but it was *still* hard work.
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Here's a pop quiz: What foods are best to eat before a high-stakes test? When is the best time to review the toughest material? A growing body of research on the best study techniques offers some answers.Chiefly, testing yourself repeatedly before an exam teaches the brain to retrieve and apply knowledge from memory. The method is more effective than re-reading a textbook, says Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University. If you are facing a test on the digestive system, he says, practice explaining how it works from start to finish, rather than studying a list of its parts.
In his junior year of high school in Cary, N.C., Keenan Harrell bought test-prep books and subjected himself to a "relentless and repetitive" series of nearly 30 practice SAT college-entrance exams. "I just took it over and over again, until it became almost aggravating," he says.
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An independent charter school program would expand to medium and large school districts around Wisconsin, under a bill passed Wednesday by Republicans on the Legislature's budget committee.The proposal passed 12-3 on a party-line vote, with Republicans voting in favor and Democrats voting against.
The bill would take an independent charter school program currently operating in only Milwaukee and Racine and extend it statewide to districts with more than 2,000 students. That would apply to roughly a quarter of the state's districts.
Republicans said it would help provide another options for students whose schools are failing them.
"The bill we are taking up today is truly something that is going to help the long-term prospects of Wisconsin," said Rep. Robin Vos (R-Burlington), a co-chairman of the committee.
But Democrats said that the program would undermine local control of schools by elected officials in favor of an unelected board. They said the proposal could also prove another financial blow to regular public schools that are losing nearly $800 million in state aid over two years as part of the state budget and having tight state caps placed on their property tax levies.
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Charter schools provide plenty of compelling news. Often the coverage is of great schools producing amazing outcomes for kids. But too often the stories are more tragic or sordid. A school's governing board becomes mired in dysfunctional arguments; a school's students are performing badly on state tests for several years running; somebody absconds with money; or a student with disabilities is discouraged from enrolling in a school.Facing these unfortunate circumstances, a person is likely to shout, "Somebody should do something!" The outraged observer is correct. Generally, the "somebody" that ought to act is a charter school authorizer. Strong charter school authorizers screen initial applicants to avoid future failures. They also implement practices that respect each school's autonomy while also protecting against abuses and ensuring that floundering schools close. Twenty years into the charter school movement, it appears that it will be difficult to hold all charter schools accountable unless we start to hold authorizers accountable for fulfilling their responsibilities.
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UNESCO Institute for Statistics, via a kind Kris Olds email:
Two out of three children in Africa are left out of secondary schoolThe complete report is available here (PDF).
Governments are struggling to meet the rising demand for secondary education, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where there are enough school places for just 36% of children of age to enrol, according the latest edition of the Global Education Digest.
Globally, secondary schools have been accommodating almost one hundred million more students each decade, with the total number growing by 60% between 1990 and 2009. But the supply is dwarfed by demand as more countries approach universal primary education.
In 2009, 88% of children enrolled in primary school reached the last grade of this level of education, compared to 81%. Yet, in 20 countries -- mostly in sub-Saharan Africa -- a child in the last grade of primary school has a 75% chance at best of making the transition to lower secondary school.
The path to prosperity
"There can be no escape from poverty without a vast expansion of secondary education. This is a minimum entitlement for equipping youth with the knowledge and skills they need to secure decent livelihoods in today's globalized world. It is going to take ambition and commitment to meet this challenge. But it is the only path towards prosperity," said UNESCO's Director-General Irina Bokova.
"An educated population is a country's greatest wealth," she added. "The inequalities signalled in this Report, especially in relation to girls' exclusion from secondary education in many countries, have enormous implications for the achievement of all the internationally agreed development goals, from child and maternal health and HIV prevention to environmental security."
In terms of enrolment, sub-Saharan Africa has made the greatest gains of all regions, with gross enrolment ratios rising from 28% to 43% for lower secondary and from 20% to 27% for upper secondary education between 1999 and 2009. Nevertheless, more than 21.6 million children of lower secondary school age remain excluded from education across the region and many will never spend a day in school.
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The annual state teachers union convention that has traditionally meant a two-day school holiday at the end of October is off this year, leaving public school districts with decisions about how to schedule students and teachers.The Wisconsin Education Association Council canceled the convention, which would have been Thursday and Friday this week, after changes in state law weakened the union and its local affiliates.
Without the certainty of having input into school calendars through the negotiations process, members could not guarantee that they could all get the days off from school, said WEAC President Mary Bell, who added that the convention was "the flagship piece of professional development that we provided for members."
Some school districts, with their calendars already set before the convention was called off, are keeping the school holiday for students but bringing teachers in for training or other activities. Others, such as Waukesha, are keeping the holiday and treating it as two unpaid days for teachers.
The Brown Deer School District scheduled classes.
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The Pacific Collegiate School in Santa Cruz, Calif., is a public charter school. It must hold a random lottery when it has more applicants than vacancies. It is not supposed to be selective.Yet somehow its average SAT score has risen to the top 10th of 1 percent nationally. Less than 10 percent of its students are from low-income families, compared with 40 percent in its city. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that the school is allowed to ask (not require, it emphasizes) that every family donate $3,000 and 40 hours of volunteer time a year.
As a supporter of the charter school movement, I get grief from people who say that charters -- independent public schools using tax dollars -- are private schools in disguise. They are almost always wrong about that, but there are enough Pacific Collegiate situations to make me wonder whether the rules need revision.
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Armed with tote bags for the handouts awaiting them, thousands of Chicago parents shuffled through display tables adorned with brightly colored posters as they faced the daunting task of selecting schools for their children.For many parents, the school fair, put on by the Neighborhood Parents Network, is their first encounter with the public school system. It is timed to coincide with the opening of the district's admissions process, which ends in December. Many parents hope to place their children in the growing number of charter, magnet and selective-enrollment elementary schools."If you hang out with parents of 4-year-olds, the conversation never stops," said Christine Whitley, a Chicago Public Schools parent. "That's all they talk about: 'Where are you sending your child to school?' "
As choosing a school becomes increasingly complicated, some entrepreneurial parents, including Ms. Whitley, have started small consulting businesses aimed at helping parents navigate the admission process. But some observers have raised concerns about the potential for parents to game the system.
The district has 482 elementary schools, multiple application forms and five specialty school options in addition to the neighborhood elementary schools: gifted, classical, magnet, magnet cluster and charter. Magnet, magnet cluster and charter schools select students largely through a computerized lottery, but gifted and classical require admission tests for children at age 4 because the schools offer an accelerated curriculum.
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Echo Lau drove to Whitney High School on a recent Monday evening to pick up her kids. She left with dinner.The student parking lot at the Cerritos campus is transformed every week into a congested food truck stop as eight mobile eateries attract the business of loyal followers, parents and students.
But this isn't a typical stop for these catering trucks; this is a school fundraiser, in which a portion of the proceeds go directly to Whitney to help pay for a new multi-media center.
Outdoor food courts are popping up in the parking lots of at least a dozen high schools across Southern California with more on the way. Financially strapped public schools -- hit hard by budget cuts, new fundraising guidelines, and fewer donors -- have found a way to capitalize on the food truck craze.
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The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.But the school's chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.
Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don't mix.
This is the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, one of around 160 Waldorf schools in the country that subscribe to a teaching philosophy focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.
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Terra Snider, via a kind JH Snider email:
Considerable research confirms the relationship between school start times, sleep deprivation, and student performance, truancy, and absenteeism, as well as depression, mood swings, impulse control, tobacco and alcohol use, impaired cognitive function and decision-making, obesity, stimulant abuse, automobile accidents, and suicide. Mounting evidence about the biology of adolescent sleep, and about the impact of later start times, shows that starting school before 8 a.m. not only undermines academic achievement but endangers health and safety. Because logistical and financial issues prevent local school systems from establishing safe and educationally defensible hours, however, federal legislation mandating start times consistent with student health and educational well-being is essential.Terra Snider:
As the parent of two former and one current Severna Park High School student, I've been living with the issue of early high school start times for years. Although the consensus of scientific opinion is that teenagers (and young adults) would be better off if school hours were better aligned with their biological clocks, the possibility of changing school hours inevitably sparks raging controversy, both here and across the country.Changing school hours costs money, and we all know school systems don't have a lot of that on hand. It also means changing the way we do things, and most of us don't like doing that much either. On the other hand, Moses didn't come down from Mount Sinai with commandments that schools must start at 7:17 a.m. and end at 2:05 p.m.
Surely if we know students learn better, and are healthier and safer, with different hours, we should make that our number one priority. Shouldn't we?
The Severna Park High School CAC (and the now defunct countywide CAC) have been working on the issue of high school start time for years, decades even - to no avail. Many of us have become convinced that the only solution to the problem is a national mandate. That's why I created a petition on We the People on WhiteHouse.gov, a new platform that allows anyone to create and sign petitions asking the Obama Administration to take action on a range of issues.
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I TYPED these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen.And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook -- invented, among others, by the college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by the degreeless Sean Parker.
American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees. But we don't have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren't traditional professionals, but start-up entrepreneurs.
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Parents of infants and toddlers should limit the time their children spend in front of televisions, computers, self-described educational games and even grown-up shows playing in the background, the American Academy of Pediatrics warned on Tuesday. Video screen time provides no educational benefits for children under age 2 and leaves less room for activities that do, like interacting with other people and playing, the group said.The recommendation, announced at the group's annual convention in Boston, is less stringent than its first such warning, in 1999, which called on parents of young children to all but ban television watching for children under 2 and to fill out a "media history" for doctor's office visits. But it also makes clear that there is no such thing as an educational program for such young children, and that leaving the TV on as background noise, as many households do, distracts both children and adults.
"We felt it was time to revisit this issue because video screens are everywhere now, and the message is much more relevant today that it was a decade ago," said Dr. Ari Brown, a pediatrician in Austin, Tex., and the lead author of the academy's policy, which appears in the current issue of the journal Pediatrics.
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This summer I moved back to my boyhood house in San Mateo, California, after 48 years living elsewhere, mostly on the east coast and in China. My California-born wife and I are Golden State chauvinists of the sentimental kind. We have framed orange crate labels on our walls. We choke up when we hear "California Dreamin'" on the radio.San Mateo looked pretty much the same. But I found I wasn't recapturing the simpler days of my youth. When I started reconnecting with favorite spots like my old high school, I encountered complexities and advances I had not expected, particularly after the many headlines about California in decline.
The little house where I grew up on Voelker Drive still has no garbage disposal, no dishwasher, and no air-conditioning. But my brother Jim, the computer teacher at Baywood Elementary School, set up a Wi-Fi system and satellite TV. I felt up-to-date until I visited my alma mater, Hillsdale High School, a sprawling campus two blocks away on Alameda de las Pulgas.
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I notice that last summer Karl Smith asked "Why Are There Short People?" His logic is pretty good, except for the fact that the fitness variation seems to be much starker in males than females (there is some evidence I've seen that shorter women can be more fertile, though that's balanced by the fact that larger women seem to be able to manage gestation better). In any case, height seems to be a fitness enhancing trait which is highly heritable, and yet the variation in height remains!
Karl's readers offered some reasons. What do you think? Mind you, something which immediately comes to mind is that the logic presented for why everyone should be tall and vary only a touch is logic. Not all the assumptions need to hold. For example, has the advantage to height been invariant at all times and places? I have posited for example that the fact that humans became smaller after the Ice Age may have something to do with increased morbidity and declining mortality, where agricultural settlements "hugged" the Malthusian boundary more consistently than hunter-gatherers. In this sort of environment smaller individuals may have gained a fitness advantage because they required fewer resources to make it through the inevitable "starving times."*
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Excerpt from Mikhail Zinshteyn's article:As the Senate moves forward with Sen. Tom Harkin's (D-Iowa) bill to overhaul U.S. K-12 education, with a greater emphasis coming on the side of local control and funding flexibility, states are still shouldering federal expectations that aren't expected to go away any time soon.
Here are two education funding obligations states have to the federal government -- even as the country moves beyond NCLB -- and one way for states to increase its funding flexibility.
One obligation to have persistently earned the ire of education advocates is test funding, with repeated critiques coming down on "billions" spent on assessments and test preparation. Sure, billions are being allocated, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to overall education spending.
Before NCLB, most states already had some form of student assessment in place. The 2002 law mandated no fewer than nine grades be monitored for student proficiency and improvement -- a six grade jump from what was required previously. The costs of implementing, issuing, grading, and analyzing those assessments makes up a soupcon of total education spending.
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To note; again, not hugely comprehensive but a look at what the basic history is of charter schools. I think the history can best be summed up by saying the charter schools idea started as one thing and spread, like cracks on a windshield, in all directions. This is not to say that there are not some charters that are innovative. (I still need to do research to see if I can find even one charter that reflects the earliest thinking.)Like NCLB, where we have 50 different tests and no real way to prove how American students are doing as a whole, there is charter law in 41 states and the District of Columbia and every single law is different, the numbers of allowed charters is different, the accountability is different and yet, the movement grows. When I get to the Landscape Today, I have some thoughts on why that is (and it's not because charters do well).
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2011-2012 Revised Budget 1.3MB PDF (Budget amendments document). District spending remains largely flat at $369,394,753, yet "Fund Equity", or the District's reserves, has increased to $48,324,862 from $22,769,831 in 2007 (page 24). The District's property tax "underlevy" (increases allowed under Wisconsin school revenue limits which are based on student population changes, successful referendums along with carve-outs such as Fund 80, among others) will be $13,084,310. It also appears that property taxes will be flat (page 19) after a significant 9% increase last year. Interestingly, MSCR spending is up 7.97% (page 28).
2011-2012 enrollment is 24,861. $369,394,753 planned expenditures results in per student spending of $14,858.40.
I welcome clarifications and updates to these numbers, which are interesting. We've seen a doubling of District reserves over the past few years while spending has remained relatively flat as has enrollment.
Finally, this is worth reading in light of the District's 2011-2012 numbers: Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad Advocates Additional Federal Tax Dollar Spending & Borrowing via President Obama's Proposed Jobs Bill.
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Wisconsin Association of School Boards & The Madison School District PDF Document.
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Let's see:Related: Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Acdemy IB Charter school.If the Madison Preparatory Academy can pull off all of that, how could it not improve the academic success of its largely black and Latino students?
- A longer school day and year, with July classes.
- Higher standards, expectations and school uniforms.
- Mandated extracurricular activities.
- Grades for parents based on their involvement at the school.
- More minority teachers as role models.
- More connections and internships with local employers.
- Millions in private fundraising.
That's the big picture view Madison should adopt as it considers the Urban League of Greater Madison's intriguing charter school request. Instead, a disproportionate amount of time and concern has been spent on a final part of the proposal:
Same-sex classrooms.
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Like making a bad bet in Vegas, taxpayers gamble hundreds of millions of dollars a year on community college students who quit as freshmen - many in California.A new study shows that from 2004 to 2009, Americans spent nearly $4 billion on full-time students who dropped out after one year and didn't transfer.
California's first-year dropouts benefited from $480 million in tax-funded grants and allocations in that time - more than any other state - says the study, "The Hidden Costs of Community Colleges," from the nonpartisan American Institutes for Research in Washington, D.C.
"I'm not in favor of pumping more money into the existing system where so many students don't succeed," said Mark Schneider, author of the report and vice president of the research group.
The 17-page report doesn't advocate cutting off dollars to schools. Instead, it urges colleges to do a better job of retaining students: making it easier for them to get the classes they need, rewarding colleges for reducing dropouts or penalizing them for failing to do so. It also encourages officials to gather better information about what's actually happening on their campuses.
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California Charter Schools Association, via a kind reader's email:
Chartering and Choice as an Achievement Gap-Closing ReformOne of the greatest public education challenges in California--and the nation--is the achievement and opportunity gaps between African American students and their White and Asian peers.
The California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) has an interest in understanding how the state's charter public schools can accelerate closing achievement gaps for African American students, while at the same time advancing educational innovation that improves teaching and learning for all public school students.
The Chartering and Choice as an Achievement Gap-Closing Reform report, released by CCSA in October 2011, details the performance and enrollment trends of African American students in both charter public and traditional public schools. The results show that California charter public schools are effectively accelerating the performance of African American students, and that African American students are enrolled at higher percentage in the state's charters, among other findings.Since the inception of the Charter Schools Act in California in 1992, charter schools have become an important part of the public education system, opening their doors in both urban and rural areas, in order to provide quality educational options for families. Chartering and Choice as an Achievement Gap-Closing Reform demonstrates that as laboratories of innovation, California's highly effective charter public schools can demonstrate proven paths to success that should be replicated nationally.
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"The next twenty-five years offer an opportunity to transform the way students have learned for centuries. We will be able to deliver education to students where they are, based on their specific needs, desires, and backgrounds."--Andrew S. RosenImagine a university where programs are tailored to the needs of each student, the best professors are available to everyone, curriculum is relevant to the workplace - and the value of the education is demonstrable. In Change.edu, Andrew S. Rosen shows how that future is possible but in danger of being stifled by a system of incentives that emphasize prestige and tradition, rather than access and outcomes.
The U.S. higher education system has historically been considered one of the best in the world. This thought-provoking story presents the imperative for transforming that system for the 21st century and beyond. Rosen takes on the sacred cows of traditional higher education models, and calls on the country to demand the changes we need to build a qualified workforce and compete in a global economy. Change.edu is sure to open minds -- and open doors to a wealth of opportunities.
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New York University pulled out of the National Merit scholarships, becoming at least the ninth school to stop funding one of the largest U.S. merit-based aid programs, because it doesn't want to reward students based on a standardized test.Related: 2011 National Merit Cut ScoresThe National Merit Scholarship Corp. distributed more than $50 million to students in the 2009-2010 year based on the PSAT college entry practice exam. Most of the money comes from almost 200 colleges, including Northwestern University and University of Chicago, to fund awards of as much as $8,000 over four years. Companies such as Boeing Co. and Pfizer Inc. also sponsor the program, primarily to benefit their employees' children.
NYU's withdrawal is another blow to National Merit, already ignored by many elite colleges and a subject of a critical report by a Harvard College-chaired commission. Schools are debating how to allocate scarce financial-aid dollars as tuition costs rise and the economy remains sluggish. While high schools trumpet National Merit winners, relying heavily on a standardized test is a flawed way to evaluate students, said Shawn Abbott, assistant vice president of admissions at NYU.
..........
National Merit hasn't collected any fees from the PSAT for the past 14 years, though it is entitled to a "nominal percent" of revenue under their contract, Kauffmann said. Instead, it has reinvested the funds into the program to keep test fees low and expand access to fee waivers, he said.
The College Board gains a marketing benefit from its association with National Merit when school districts or states consider using public funds to pay for the PSAT in 11th grade or ACT Inc.'s 10th-grade test known as PLAN, according to Bob Schaeffer, a spokesman for FairTest, a nonprofit group in Boston that works to end the misuses of standardized testing. Almost 1.3 million 10th-graders nationally took the PLAN test in the 2010-2011 academic year, according to the nonprofit ACT.
Illinois 214Minnesota 213
Iowa 209
Massachusetts 223
Michigan 209
Texas 215
Wisconsin 209
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High School Students--please study less, if you can. As you should know, jobs and our economy depend on consumers buying goods and services, and the time you spend reading and writing, doing math and science problems, and the like, is simply time spent out of the economy and contributes nothing to the effort to sell products and provide jobs for the American people.
You could consider your time away from studying as part of your community service, putting the needs of the economy ahead of your own selfish desire to learn and grow by doing homework for yourself alone. By spending more time buying and using goods produced by America's workers, you are making a contribution to the community in which you live.
If you have to do three or four hours of homework a week, at least do it using a computer and software which you or your family have purchased. If you do it that way, naturally you will find it easier to play the games you have bought, spend time with social media, and to listen to the songs you paid for at the same time, and you can also surf the Web for products on which you may wish to spend more money in the future.
While in the short term you may do less well in school by combining your schoolwork with your commercial obligations, at least you will be helping to keep our economy going and providing jobs for our unemployed workers.
It is possible that when it comes time for you to look for a job, you may not have the knowledge, skills, and general educational background to qualify for the ones on offer, but that is not your problem in the present.
If you need to learn something in the future, there will always be digital learning and online classes for you to buy. There will be no need to go to the library or read on your own. We expect young people to make sacrifices and to do community service, and refraining from studying is one painless and very useful way for you to work on behalf of those in your country who need jobs now, so that our economy can get help in its recovery on the backs of those of our students who have decided to study even less than they usually do.
The main thing is not to let your schoolwork interfere with your own purchases or with influencing as much as possible the purchases of your parents and friends.
As our President has told us, we need more jobs right now, and if you spend too much time on reading books, writing term papers, and stuff like that, you will be basically just more of a drag on our economy than you should be, so please study less, or if possible, not at all, and help keep our economy growing. You will learn less, but someone somewhere in our economy will thank you for spending more time away from those old printed school books and term papers!
------------------------------
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
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Lucy Mathiak, via a kind email:
Dear Friends,I am appreciative of Lucy's tireless and often thankless work on behalf of our students.I am writing to thank you for your encouragement and support in my decision to seek election to the MMSD Board of Education in late fall 2005. Your help in getting elected, your support during tough times, and your help in finding solutions to problems, have made a great difference to my service on the board.
I am writing to let you know that I will not seek re-election in 2012. I continue to believe that the Board of Education is one of the most important elected positions for our community and its schools, and encourage others to step forward to serve in this capacity. MMSD is facing significant challenges, and it is more important than ever that thoughtful citizens engage in the work that will be needed to preserve the traditional strengths of our public schools while helping those schools to change in keeping with the times and the families that they serve.
At the same time, I do not view school board service as a career, and believe that turnover in membership is healthy for the organization and for the district. I have been fortunate to have had an opportunity to serve on this board, and to work with many fine community organizations in that capacity. For that I am grateful.
Again, thank you for your interest, support, and collegiality.
Lucy J. Mathiak
716 Orton Ct.
Madison, WI 53703Madison School Board
Seat #2
Every organization - public or private, deteriorates. It is often easier to spend more (raise taxes), raise fees on consumers - or a "rate base", reduce curricular quality and in general go along and get along than to seek substantive improvements. Change is hard.
Citizens who seek facts, ask difficult and uncomfortable questions are essential for strong institutions - public or private. Progress requires conflict.
Yet, very few of us are willing to step into the theatre, spend time, dig deep and raise such questions. I am thankful for those, like Lucy, who do.
Her years of activism and governance have touched numerous issues, from the lack of Superintendent oversight (related: Ruth Robarts) (that's what a board does), the District's $372M+ budget priorities and transparency to substantive questions about Math, reading and the endless battle for increased rigor in the Madison Schools.
In closing, I had an opportunity to hear Peter Schneider speak during a recent Madison visit. Schneider discussed cultural differences and similarities between America and Germany. He specifically discussed the recent financial crisis. I paraphrase: "If I do not understand a financial vehicle, I buy it". "I create a financial product that no one, including me, understands, I sell it". This is "collective ignorance".
Schneider's talk reminded me of a wonderful Madison teacher's comments some years ago: "if we are doing such a great job, why do so few people vote and/or understand civic and business issues"?
What, then, is the payoff of increased rigor and the pursuit of high standards throughout an organization? Opportunity.
I recently met a technical professional who works throughout the United States from a suburban Madison home. This person is the product of a very poor single parent household. Yet, high parental standards and rigorous academic opportunities at a somewhat rural Wisconsin high school and UW-Madison led to an advanced degree and professional opportunities.
It also led to a successful citizen and taxpayer. The alternative, as discussed in my recent conversation with Madison Mayor Paul Soglin is growth in those who don't contribute, but rather increase costs on society.
Lucy will be missed.
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Erin Richards, via a kind Chan Stroman-Roll email:
A young and tech-savvy charter school network that's gotten attention for reducing the achievement gap in San Jose, Calif., got the green light from a Common Council committee Tuesday to bring the model to Milwaukee.Rocketship Education, a nonprofit management company, has applied for a charter from the City of Milwaukee that would allow it to open a publicly funded school in the fall of 2013, with the eventual intent to serve up to 4,000 children in eight K-5 schools by 2017. Each school would have to show measurable progress before subsequent schools could open.
The organization, started in 2006, currently serves about 2,500 students in five San Jose area elementary schools.
A majority of members on the Steering and Rules Committee on Tuesday approved sending Rocketship's application to the full council for consideration.
Rocketship CEO and co-founder John Danner explained the organization's three areas of emphasis: engaging parents through teacher-led home visits and training them to advocate for their children; developing talent by growing a pipeline of teachers who can become school leaders; and giving all students individualized learning plans that blend six hours a day of face-to-face instruction with two hours of lab time spent working with online computer programs and low-cost tutors.
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A teenager's IQ can rise or fall as many as 20 points in just a few years, a brain-scanning team found in a study published Wednesday that suggests the intelligence measure isn't as fixed as once thought.The researchers also found that shifts in IQ scores corresponded to small physical changes in brain areas related to intellectual skills, though they weren't able to show a clear cause and effect.
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Shannon Maloney had already earned a degree in mechanical engineering, but she returned to Lehigh University for a fifth year to complete a second major she knows will make her more employable:Philosophy.
Yep, philosophy.
Though philosophy is routinely dismissed and disparaged - as useless as English, as dead as Latin, as diminished as library science - more college students are getting degrees in that field than ever before.
Though the overall figures remain small, the number of four-year graduates has grown 46 percent in a decade, surpassing the growth rates of much bigger programs such as psychology and history.
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When you're up for $150,000 in fees and extras for a child's private-school education, it'd be nice to know it's a good investment.After all, a year 7 student starting next year will cost $215,000 by year 12 if school fees keep rising at an annual rate of 6 per cent.
Advertisement: Story continues below.Could that be better spent on tutors and extensive travel to other cultures to broaden a young mind? Certainly it would be cheaper.
They might put a value on everything else but economists have a problem working out the worth of private schools, even though that's probably where many of them went.
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It has become fashionable for our most selective colleges to worry about becoming as representative of American diversity as suburban country clubs.College admissions experts conferring at the University of Southern California this year were so alarmed that they suggested our most prestigious campuses add space for another 100 students in each class and fill those slots with low-income kids.
Why are our choosiest colleges so dominated by affluent white or Asian students? The explanations are many: not enough financial aid, inadequate preparation in inner-city high schools, poor students' discomfort mixing with rich kids.
But a new study by researchers from the University of Michigan and the University of Arizona suggests something different. Great high schools and families like those in the Washington area may be at fault, at least in part. In the last 32 years, low-income students have significantly raised the grades and test scores that affect college admissions, but have made little headway because students from affluent families have improved even more.
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The president of a conservative group that claims the University of Wisconsin-Madison discriminates against prospective white and Asian students called on Republican Gov. Scott Walker or state lawmakers Monday to step in to end the practice.Republicans have balked for years at what UW-Madison calls a holistic admissions policy, which calls for admissions officers to take a number of factors into consideration, including academic performance and race. GOP lawmakers believe the policy permits reverse discrimination.
The Center for Equal Opportunity in Falls Church, Va., reviewed UW-Madison admissions data from 2007 to 2008 and found black and Hispanic applicants had a better a chance of getting in than whites or Asians. Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, chairman of the Assembly's higher education committee, had the center's president, Mark Clegg, walk the panel through the report -- a move that indicates Republicans are looking at the UW System's admission policies again.
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MY son, Ronan, looks at me and raises one eyebrow. His eyes are bright and focused. Ronan means "little seal" in Irish and it suits him.I want to stop here, before the dreadful hitch: my son is 18 months old and will likely die before his third birthday. Ronan was born with Tay-Sachs, a rare genetic disorder. He is slowly regressing into a vegetative state. He'll become paralyzed, experience seizures, lose all of his senses before he dies. There is no treatment and no cure.
How do you parent without a net, without a future, knowing that you will lose your child, bit by torturous bit?
Depressing? Sure. But not without wisdom, not without a profound understanding of the human experience or without hard-won lessons, forged through grief and helplessness and deeply committed love about how to be not just a mother or a father but how to be human.
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Roll call is a thing of the past in Washington County Schools. Students now check in with finger scanning devices.Wow....School Superintendent Sandra Cook said the old method just wasn't cutting it.
"We got to talking about attendance in our district and how it was inconsistent," said Cook.
The systems have been up and running for two months inside the schools, but since the majority of students ride the bus every day, district officials decided to move the devices there.
But the transition hasn't been easy. One of the biggest challenges they've faced is where to put the devices on the buses. State safety codes require the isles to be kept completely clear, so one of the ideas they've discussed is to put a laptop on one side of the steering wheel and the finger scan system on the other.
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There is remarkably little good poetry about very small children. Maybe it's the lack of sleep that does it; for the first few months it's hard to remember to put out the bins, let alone write poems. Perhaps the first writer to make a serious attempt to evoke the world of earliest childhood was the Latin poet Statius, a contemporary of the Roman emperor Domitian (ad 81-96). In one of his most remarkable poems, Statius describes taking a newborn baby boy in his arms, "as he demanded the novel air with trembling wails". Bit by bit, he learned to interpret the child's inarticulate complaints and to soothe his "hidden wounds" (vulnera caeca). Later still, once the baby had learned to crawl, Statius would pick him up and kiss him, until bit by bit, cradled in the poet's arms, he would drop off to sleep. Statius's name was the toddler's first word, and Statius's face served as "his first plaything". How many other poets, in any language, have described the experience of having their face yanked around by a fascinated baby?
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A 3-year-old is handed six sets of colorful stickers."You can keep all of them," he is told. "Or you can give some to a child you don't know. He doesn't have any stickers. Do you want to keep all of your stickers? Or do you want to give some to a child you don't know?"
That was the basic script for a study that took place recently in an Israeli playroom which doubled as a social-science laboratory. A child-care-professional-turned-researcher asked 136 children, aged 3 and 4 years old, to step one at a time into the playroom to shed light unwittingly on a hot topic in behavioral science: Are children altruistic?
It seems they are, and part of the explanation may be genetic, according to the study, published last month in the online scientific journal PLoS One. About two-thirds of the children chose to give one or more sets of stickers to an unknown recipient, described to them only as a child who had no stickers. There were no significant differences in generosity between boys and girls.
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These days everyone is for education reform. The question is which approach is best. I favor the Steve Jobs model.In 1984 Steve introduced the Mac with a Super Bowl ad. It ran only once. It ran for only one minute. And it shows a female athlete being chased by the helmeted police of some totalitarian regime.
At the climax, the woman rushes up to a large screen where Big Brother is giving a speech. Just as he announces, "We shall prevail," she hurls her hammer through the screen.
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The modern fashion is for piling degree upon degree: MA upon BA and PhD upon MBA. And it is not easy to argue against it. If education is a good thing, more education should be an even better thing. And academic wisdom maintains that, as economies become more sophisticated and knowledge more advanced, people will have to spend longer studying. Just as industrial countries introduced universal secondary education in the 20th century, so post-industrial economies will introduce universal higher education in the 21st--followed by universal PhDs.It is doubly hard to argue for parsimony when the economy is in recession, giving all too many people a choice between further education and the dole queue, and when the person making the case has gorged on the fruits of higher education himself. But are we to wait for the good times to return before pointing out that higher degrees are not all they are cracked up to be? And is anybody better equipped to expose the credentials racket than one who has accumulated more than enough of them?
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1. Read: Any thing and Everything.2. Write: Use new words that your learn in your writings.
3. Listen: When someone uses a word you don't understand, ask them what it means or look it up later.
4. Carry a Dictionary.
5. Watch Frasier: Get your hands on Frasier Dvds. An entertaining way to Improve Your Vocabulary.
6. Make sticky notes of new words and post them in strategic places.
7. Download a words and definitions screensaver.
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I've prescribed Ritalin type drugs to children for 33 years. In the early 1990s I began feeling ethically uneasy about my professional role. I went public with my concerns in a book called "Running on Ritalin." In the process I was involuntarily enlisted into what has been called, "The Ritalin Wars," an often-polemical public debate about whether psychiatric drugs are good or bad for children.Recently I published an article on The Huffington Post called "The United States of Adderall." I mentioned that we are 4 percent of the world's population but produce 88 percent of the world's legal amphetamine (Ritalin, Adderall, Concerta, etc.) virtually all for the treatment of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children and adults. I tried to maintain a balanced view on ADHD and medication. The article generated over 200 mostly extreme comments from my point of view.
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We founded the American Center for School Choice because we believe a focus on parental empowerment can contribute to a broadening and coalescing of the coalition that seeks to provide the best possible education for children. Simultaneously, empowering parents creates a common good--for the child, the parent, the family, and society.Clusty Search: John Coons.We begin with the delicate subject of authority--that of parent or of government over the mind of the young. In our culture, authority over thought (or even behavior) has never been a popular premise for argument. But no other way exists; some adult will in fact select a preferred set of skills and values and will attempt, through schooling, to convince Johnny, Susie, Jamal, or Juanita of their truth. Authority is simply a fact.
Whether one is Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or the National Education Association, we must proceed by asking which big person will decide this issue for some little person. The fact of authority is no exit, but it is instead the necessary entrance to the debate of educators and society about content, values, money, liberty, the best interest of the child, and the common good.
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Florida's unpopular tea party governor, Rick Scott, wants more of the state's youths to pick up college degrees... but only if the degrees are useful to corporations and don't teach students to question social norms. "You know what? They need to get education in areas where they can get jobs," Scott told a right-wing radio host Monday morning. He continued:"You know, we don't need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It's a great degree if people want to get it, but we don't need them here. I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, math degrees. That's what our kids need to focus all their time and attention on. Those type of degrees. So when they get out of school, they can get a job."
It's no idle sound bite. The governor, an ex-corporate CEO with a checkered business past, is pushing a plan that would all but kill liberal arts and social sciences at the Sunshine State's public universities--and he's got support from the Legislature's psychology-hatin' GOP majority. He explained the strategy Monday in a separate interview with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune:
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University fees are set to rise in England. But do the neighbours fare any better? Jasper Rees goes on a European tour and meets the students of Generation Skint ...From the hilltop castle which looms over Heidelberg the view is captivating. The river Neckar thrusts through forested hills. On the north side looms the Heiligenberg, up whose flank slithers the so-called Philosopher's Walk, sylvan haunt of many a strolling professor. At its foot are free-standing villas which speak discreetly of shockproof wealth. A gated bridge tiptoes over the gliding waters and leads to the old town with its elegant streets and important churches. What a gorgeous place to study.
Germany's oldest university doesn't come cheap. The cost of living is roughly €10,000 a year, not including tuition fees. Stefanie Schmidt (not her real name), a 25-year-old student with thin-framed specs and long auburn hair, is nearing the end of her studies in biology and English. Such is her parents' income that she did not qualify for a BAfÖG, or student loan, but her parents have been unable to give her further financial support, and so she has had to work. A lot.
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The outbreak of scarlet fever in Hong Kong earlier this year caught the attention of specialists at the World Health Organisation. We think of scarlet fever in developed societies as a disease that was pretty well vanquished decades ago. So the emergence of a scarlet fever outbreak in a modern city like Hong Kong and in mainland China was something of an unexpected event. But more disquieting was the suggestion that the bacteria causing the disease had become resistant to certain antibiotics. Happily, the worst of the outbreak is over, but the global problem of drug resistance is definitely not.The discovery early last century of penicillin and antimicrobial drugs changed the course of history. Science began to gain the upper hand in the war on disease, and, at last, scourges such as leprosy, tuberculosis, gonorrhoea, syphilis and many more could be mastered. But now many of those miracle drugs and the generations of others that followed could finish up in the rubbish bin as increasing levels of drug resistance threaten their effectiveness.
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The University of Wisconsin System is trying to help transfer students get a degree quicker and cheaper as part of its effort to increase the number of college graduates in the state.Transferring credits from one school to another often means wasted time and money because course requirements don't match. With some 17,000 students - the equivalent of two small UW universities - transferring into and within the UW system each year, making the process more efficient could have a dramatic effect on retention and graduation rates.
Such a step might not seem like an economic driver, but boosting the percentage of Wisconsin residents who have a college degree could help lure companies to the state, system officials reason. That, in turn, could stimulate the economy.
Many college students today aren't dropped off at one school as freshmen and picked up at the same school four years later with a degree, said UW System President Kevin Reilly. It's more of a "swirl," he said, with students leaving college for a number of reasons, then returning to school somewhere else with credits to transfer.
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Get ready law schools: A Senate hearing on the ABA regulation of law schools might be coming. That is the subtext of Senator Boxer's most recent letter to the ABA. It's overdue.Law schools have demonstrated time and again that we are incapable of regulating ourselves. It started a century ago, when AALS and ABA wrote accreditation standards to keep out competition from lower cost urban law schools that educated immigrants and working class people. It was on display in 1995, when the Department of Justice filed a civil antitrust suit against the ABA, charging that legal educators had captured the accreditation process and were using it to ratchet up their wages and reduce their teaching loads. And it is happening again now--as highlighted by two recent examples.
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Arnaud Chevalier, Joanne Lindley:
During the early Nineties the proportion of UK graduates doubled over a very short period of time. This paper investigates the effect of the expansion on early labour market attainment, focusing on over-education. We define over-education by combining occupation codes and a self-reported measure for the appropriateness of the match between qualification and the job. We therefore define three groups of graduates: matched, apparently over-educated and genuinely over-educated; to compare pre- and post-expansion cohorts of graduates. We find the proportion of over-educated graduates has doubled, even though over-education wage penalties have remained stable. This suggests that the labour market accommodated most of the large expansion of university graduates. Apparently over-educated graduates are mostly undistinguishable from matched graduates, while genuinely over-educated graduates principally lack non-academic skills such as management and leadership. Additionally, genuine over-education increases unemployment by three months but has no impact of the number of jobs held. Individual unobserved heterogeneity differs between the three groups of graduates but controlling for it, does not alter these conclusions.
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"[People] like themselves just as they are," says Marvin Minsky. "Perhaps they are not selfish enough, or imaginative or ambitious. Myself, I don't much like how people are now. We're too shallow, slow, and ignorant. I hope that our future will lead us to ideas that we can use to improve ourselves."Marvin believes that it is important that we "understand how our minds are built, and how they support the modes of thought that we like to call emotions. Then we'll be better able to decide what we like about them, and what we don't-and bit by bit we'll rebuild ourselves."
Marvin Minsky is the leading light of AI-that is, artificial intelligence. He sees the brain as a myriad of structures. Scientists who, like Minsky, take the strong AI view believe that a computer model of the brain will be able to explain what we know of the brain's cognitive abilities. Minsky identifies consciousness with high-level, abstract thought, and believes that in principle machines can do everything a conscious human being can do.
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Reclamations, a journal published by University of California students, has published a special, timely pamphlet called "Generation of Debt," on the trap of student debt in America. Young people in America are bombarded with the message that they won't find meaningful employment without a degree (and sometimes a graduate degree).Meanwhile, universities have increased their fees to astronomical levels, far ahead of inflation, and lenders (including the universities themselves) offer easy credit to students as a means of paying these sums (for all the money they're charging, universities are also slashing wages for their staff, mostly by sticking grad students and desperate "adjuncts" into positions that used to pay professorial wages; naturally, the austerity doesn't extend to the CEO-class administrators, who draw CEO-grade pay).
The loans are backed by the government, and constitute a special form of debt that can't be discharged in bankruptcy, and that can be doubled, tripled, or increased tenfold through usury penalties for missed payments (the lenders themselves have a deplorable habit of applying these penalties even when payments are made, through "bureaucratic error" that is nearly impossible to correct).
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According to statistics provided by the Oakland school district (and crunched by your devoted education reporter):TOTAL SUSPENSIONS in 2010-11: 6,137
TOTAL DAYS OF SCHOOL MISSED: 14,533
DEFIANCE ("disruption/defy authority") was the basis for 43 percent of all suspensions.
BLACK MALES made up less than 20 percent of all students in OUSD, but received about half of the suspensions.
At least two of the schools had more suspensions than students: Barack Obama Academy and Youth Empowerment School. YES (on the King Estates campus) closed in June, and Barack Obama Academy, an alternative middle school that opened on the Toler Heights campus in 2007, is slated to merge with Community Day.
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At John McDonough High School in this city's Esplanade Ridge district, the new superintendent points to a broken window boarded up with plastic. Nobody thought to fix it properly. "Why? Because these are the poor kids," says John White, who arrived in New Orleans this spring. "The message is: 'We don't care.'"John Mac is one of the worst schools in New Orleans, which makes it one of the worst in America. It scored 30 out of 200 on a statewide performance scale when 75 counts as "failing." In a school built for 800 students, 340 are enrolled. Virtually all are African-American. A couple years ago, an armed gang burst into the cafeteria and assassinated a student.
Mr. White looks in on classrooms. In one, groups of seniors chat loudly and puzzle over a basic algebra problem. In another the teacher struggles to start a conversation about a USA Today article that few students had read. A girl in the corner sits with a jacket over her head, headphones in both ears.
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Backers of the Madison Preparatory Academy and Madison School Board members appear to have ironed out some of the major wrinkles in the plans for the controversial new charter school aimed at improving the academic performance of minority students.But the devil remains in the details, board members say. Bringing several issues into clearer focus and then getting agreement will be essential to move the project forward. A final vote by the School Board will take place before the end of the year.
Details to be examined include the fine print on a broad agreement announced last week between the Madison teachers union and organizers of the Urban League-sponsored charter school.
"There are still some tremendously big questions that haven't been answered about how this agreement would actually work," says Marj Passman, School Board vice president. "It's not clear to me that all the parties are on the same page on all the issues, large and small."
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How do geniuses come up with ideas? What is common to the thinking style that produced "Mona Lisa," as well as the one that spawned the theory of relativity? What characterizes the thinking strategies of the Einsteins, Edisons, daVincis, Darwins, Picassos, Michelangelos, Galileos, Freuds, and Mozarts of history? What can we learn from them?For years, scholars and researchers have tried to study genius by giving its vital statistics, as if piles of data somehow illuminated genius. In his 1904 study of genius, Havelock Ellis noted that most geniuses are fathered by men older than 30; had mothers younger than 25 and were usually sickly as children. Other scholars reported that many were celibate (Descartes), others were fatherless (Dickens) or motherless (Darwin). In the end, the piles of data illuminated nothing.
Academics also tried to measure the links between intelligence and genius. But intelligence is not enough. Marilyn vos Savant, whose IQ of 228 is the highest ever recorded, has not exactly contributed much to science or art. She is, instead, a question-and-answer columnist for Parade magazine. Run-of-the-mill physicists have IQs much higher than Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, who many acknowledge to be the last great American genius (his IQ was a merely respectable 122).
Genius is not about scoring 1600 on the SATs, mastering fourteen languages at the age of seven, finishing Mensa exercises in record time, having an extraordinarily high I.Q., or even about being smart. After considerable debate initiated by J. P. Guilford, a leading psychologist who called for a scientific focus on creativity in the sixties, psychologists reached the conclusion that creativity is not the same as intelligence. An individual can be far more creative than he or she is intelligent, or far more intelligent than creative.
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At the time, Julie Fitzgerald didn't know much about standardized testing or the laws in place that promote it. She just saw her young child crying."He was trying to do his math homework, which is a subject he usually enjoyed," she recalled. "He was really struggling, and he put his head down on the counter and started to cry. He said, 'I'm stupid.'"
Fitzgerald learned that her son, then in the second grade, had taken an assessment test that day in school and had become overwhelmed by it. A year later, she has informed Portland school officials in writing that she's opting both of her kids, students at Hall Elementary School, out of standardized testing.
She's one of few parents in Portland to take that step, but represents a local tie to a growing nationwide movement of parents dissatisfied with assessment tests mandated by state and federal education laws.
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The Top 400 outcomes will and should be debated, and people will be curious about the relative place of their universities in the ranked list, as well as about the welcome improvements evident in the THE/Thomson Reuters methodology. But don't be invited into distraction and only focus on some of these questions, especially those dealing with outcomes, methods, and reactions.Rather, we also need to ask more hard questions about power, governance, and context, not to mention interests, outcomes, and potential collateral damage to the sector (when these rankings are released and then circulate into national media outlets, and ministerial desktops). There is a political economy to world university rankings, and these schemes (all of them, not just the THE World University Rankings) are laden with power and generative of substantial impacts; impacts that the rankers themselves often do not hear about, nor feel (e.g., via the reallocation of resources).
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The Chicago Teachers Union's closed-door "policy briefings" for aldermen Monday were as much about public relations as they were about school policy, Mayor Rahm Emanuel's unofficial City Council floor leader, Ald. Patrick O'Connor (40th Ward) said after attending one of the three sessions.For weeks, the union and Emanuel have been locked in a war of words over the mayor's push to immediately extend the school day by 90 minutes. On Monday, the union's leaders made their case instead to 25 of the council's 50 members, with eight other aldermen sending aides to the meetings.
"They're trying to win a little more sympathy from the public and the City Council, and this was their effort to do that," O'Connor said. "I think today was an attempt by the Chicago Teachers Union to basically say, 'We don't like to be vilified. We don't want to be in a position when people are upset with us as being an obstruction to a longer school day.'"
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To attract students and families turned off by the potential for six-figure tuition bills, a growing number of private colleges are taking a page out of the retail playbook: They are cutting their prices.Most recently, Seton Hall University announced that it would offer tuition discounts of up to 66% for academically qualified students, joining more than a dozen schools across the country that have announced similar programs in the last few months. Some schools, like Seton Hall, are offering straight-up tuition discounts for qualified students. Others are rolling out three-year degree programs that allow students to, effectively, cut their tuition bills by 25%. Still others are guaranteeing tuition won't rise while a student is in school. The most generous of the programs can whittle the price of private college -- $27,000 per year -- to less than $10,000.
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Don Severson, via email:
DATE: October 3, 2011PDF Version.
TO: MMSD Board of Education
FROM: Don Severson, President, 577-0851, donleader@aol.com RE: Madison Preparatory Academy Hearing
Notes: For public appearanceThe actions of the past few days are stunning, but not necessarily surprising ULGM (Madison Prep) and MTI have made working 'arrangements' regarding employment of teachers and staff and working conditions, the details of which have yet to be made public.
Major issue: 'negotiations/arrangements' have been made between MP & MTI without MMSD BOE nor administration at the table--both observed and verified by parties not involved.
In other words, MTI is the de facto negotiator for the Board and NOT the elected BOE, nor specified as its representative
ACE has publicly stated its support of MP. We must now withhold affirmation of that support until and unless major, systemic changes occur in how the proposal process and plans (both academic and business) play out.By design, default, benign neglect or/and collusion the BOE has abdicated the authority vested in it by law and the electorate of the District with regards to its fiduciary irresponsibility and lack of control for policy-making.
Lest you are OK with your past and current operating methods; have forgotten how you are demonstrating your operating methods; or don't care, you have been elected to be the leader and be in charge of this District, not MTI.
By whatever BOE action or in-action has thus far been demonstrated, the proposed operational direction of MP has been reduced to appearing and acting in the mirror image of the District. This is inappropriate to say the least. The entire purpose of a charter school is to be different and to get different results.
How is forcing MP to operate in essentially the same fashion as the District and at a cost of more money....any different from....operating the District's nearly 30 current alternative/innovative programs and services for 800 students, at millions of dollars, taking away from other students in the District? And, you can't even produce data to show what differences, if any, are being made with these students.
This current Board, and past Boards of Education have proven over and over again that spending more money and doing essentially the same things, don't get different results (speaking here essentially about the 'achievement gap' issue)
Continuing to speak bluntly, the Board's financial and academic philosophies, policies and actions are inconsistent, phony and discriminatory.Let us be clear...
The process for consideration of the Madison Prep charter school proposal must
- be open and public
- be under the leadership of the BOE
- be accountable to the BOE and the public
- have ALL stakeholders at the same table at ALL times
Thank you.
Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school, here.
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At this time of year there is always talk of education. The autumn term has started; some children are entering school for the first time; others are making the transition from primary to secondary; young adults are being driven, with bulging bags and cases, to halls of residence by parents who may be more traumatised than they are. And this year, at least in the UK, there is more talk than ever, because education is being "shaken up" by Michael Gove, a notably driven and idealistic, and ideological, education secretary; and also by a universities minister, David Willetts, of legendary intellectual firepower. A new class of "free schools" has been created; the whole system of university education has been rethought, or at least put on a different financial footing.Of course the idea of free schools sounds grand - but free from what? Or, more importantly, free for what? Trying to get some perspective on what this idea of freedom might mean, I found myself looking back to two inspiring experiments in education, both of which were conducted in Madrid before the Spanish Civil War.
The more famous of the two was the Residencia de Estudiantes - the arty version of an Oxbridge college at which Lorca, Buñuel, Dalí, Falla and others spent time in the 1920s and 1930s, and which served as a seedbed for much of the burgeoning artistic creativity of that brilliant, short-lived time.
But the less well-known Institución Libre de Enseñanza, or Free Institute of Education, founded in 1876 by Francisco Giner de los Ríos, is possibly more relevant to my theme. In this case the word "free" meant very specifically free from the dead hand of state and religious control. The Spanish "Glorious Revolution" of 1868 had promised a more modern, secular, scientific model of education; but the Restoration of 1874 brought back not only the Bourbons but a repressive, state-controlled education system in which the minister dictated the choice of textbooks and curriculum, and forbade the teaching of non-Catholic religious doctrine or critical political ideas.
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If the FDA won't go after diet sodas for all the dangerous chemicals they contain, maybe the FTC can take action for false advertising.There's nothing "diet" about diet sodas. After all, studies have linked them to metabolic syndrome, diabetes, heart problems, and more.
And now, yet another study confirms that people who drink the most diet soda have the biggest bellies.
Researchers from the University of Texas medical school examined data on 474 seniors who took part in the San Antonio Longitudinal Study of Aging, and found that the waistlines of those who drank diet soda grew 70 percent more than those who didn't drink the stuff during the average follow-up of nearly 10 years.
And the more they drank, the more they grew: The researchers say those who drank two or more diet sodas a day had five times the increase in belly size than those who drank no soda, according to the study presented at a recent American Diabetes Association meeting.
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One hundred fifty-three thousand words per week. That's the difference between the 215,000 words per week that the average child in a privileged home hears and the 62,000 words per week that the average child in a family on welfare hears. I'll explain the research behind these numbers later; for now, just consider how staggering the differ- ence is. And consider the implications. Hearing language is the first step in learning to read and write and make sense of the world.The language gap that results in the achievement gap begins at home. Schools can and should do their part to close this gap, but parents, by reading to their children and interacting with them in positive and encouraging ways, need to do their part, too.
The idea that families need to provide enriching educational activities is not new. In 1908, Edmund Burke Huey, regarded as "one of the foremost leaders" in educating children with learning disabilities,1 wrote, "The school of the future will have as one of its important duties the instruction of parents in the means of assist- ing the child's natural learning in the home."2 This insight was just one of many in his classic work The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading, a 500-page book so highly regarded that it was reprinted by the MIT Press in 1968 and again by the International Reading Association in 2009.
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Since January 2007, I've attempted repeatedly and in myriad ways to persuade Spokane Public Schools' leadership to provide teachers with good math materials so that our children will gain sufficient basic math skills. It's an effort you'd think would be welcome, respected, and relatively painless. Alas.In 2008, after repeated failed efforts to get a conversation going with the district or with the daily newspaper, I decided to take that conversation public. Thus was born my blog, Betrayed. Shortly after that, I began writing my book, Betrayed: How the Education Establishment Has Betrayed America and What You Can Do about it. The book was published in January 2011, and shortly thereafter, I worked with two professionals to hold public forums in Spokane and talk directly with the people. The district leadership does not appear to appreciate my efforts to inform the people and try to get the children the mathematics they need.
A school district's activities should be an open book to the community that pays for them. My blog, book and advocacy all required thorough and accurate information. Therefore, over these nearly five years of effort, I've had to file public records requests with the district in order to obtain pertinent information that wasn't available in any other venue. For records other than internal district communications, my searches usually went like this:
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I've been something of a pessimist when it comes to the general state of public education.But I'm coming around. I'm coming around to the view that big, important, disruptive -- and positive -- changes are coming; and they're coming faster than many might think. I've concluded that those who see online learning as a part of the solution to crumbling school budgets and lackluster student performance are right. I now believe that the education world is on the brink of a revolution that will come about not because of politics and policy, but despite them.
The potential is so compelling that if the education establishment does not encourage the move to smart online learning, parents, students, teachers and innovative administrators will lead the charge. They will engineer the shift. And they'll do it in a matter of years, not decades.
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James E. Rosenbaum and Kelly Iwanaga Becker:
In her senior year of high school, the low-income student with the C-minus average--the one who almost dropped out--is not only looking forward to graduation, but plans to attend college. Her college counselor, her teachers, her parents, and her peers have all told her that a college degree will land her a good-paying job.No one has told her that she must pass a college placement test before she can take college classes. No one has told her that if she fails, she must pay for remedial courses for which she will receive no credit. No one has told her that she probably lacks the aca- demic preparation to do well in remedial courses, much less col- lege courses. No one has told her that most students like her never earn a college degree.
What if, instead of hoping poorly prepared students will catch up in college, we supported them in taking rigorous courses-- even college-level courses--before they graduate from high school? What if, instead of lamenting the fact that many students struggle in transitioning from high school to college, our high school and college educators worked together to create a clear path from high school graduation to college graduation? What if:
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It's 9 a.m., and the rush is on.Buses disgorge hundreds of students at one side of Bailey Elementary School in Woodbury. On the other side, parents line up in SUVs to drop off their kids.
"Bye-bye," says Silva Theis of Woodbury, kissing her fourth-grade daughter.
In the hubbub, no one notices what's missing - the dying practice of walking to school. Of 620 students at Bailey, not one walks - not even those who live one block away.
Managers of a 6-year-old federal program think they know why.
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In case you needed further proof of the American education system's failings, especially in poor and minority communities, consider the latest crime to spread across the country: educational theft. That's the charge that has landed several parents, such as Ohio's Kelley Williams-Bolar, in jail this year.An African-American mother of two, Ms. Williams-Bolar last year used her father's address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood. After spending nine days behind bars charged with grand theft, the single mother was convicted of two felony counts. Not only did this stain her spotless record, but it threatened her ability to earn the teacher's license she had been working on.
Ms. Williams-Bolar caught a break last month when Ohio Gov. John Kasich granted her clemency, reducing her charges to misdemeanors from felonies. His decision allows her to pursue her teacher's license, and it may provide hope to parents beyond the Buckeye State. In the last year, parents in Connecticut, Kentucky and Missouri have all been arrested--and await sentencing--for enrolling their children in better public schools outside of their districts.
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You can buy a pair of jeans at Wal-Mart for $29 and one from Ralph Lauren for $98. While both cover your backside, one comes with a label of status that appeals to some and not to others. Customers -- and let's not forget that students are customers of academic services -- like choices and they usually make selections based on more than one factor, price being only one.When my son checked into his freshman dorm, there were no lights in his room - nothing on the ceiling, walls or desk. There were two outlets: if you wanted light, Yale required you to bring your own lamp. I thought this took the parable of Plato's Cave a bit too far.
Applicants to GW look for more than overhead lights: they want living and dining choices, places to study and swim, comfortable desks and chairs, and tennis and basketball courts. Yes, they are looking for great professors but they want more than classroom life. The only way to provide more books in the library, more theaters for performances, laboratories for experiments, coffee shops for study breaks is to have the dollars to build and maintain all these things - and dollars come from tuition.
At the same time as the demand for quality services increased, so too did the cost for basic utilities: electricity, water, security, oil, insurance, personnel health and other employee benefits have all risen over the past 40 years.
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Many Americans, having grown accustomed to Caesarism, probably see magnanimity in that front-page headline. Others, however, read it as redundant evidence of how distorted American governance has become. A president "gives" states a "voice" in education policy concerning kindergarten through 12th grade? How did this quintessential state and local responsibility become tethered to presidential discretion? Here is how federal power expands, even in the guise of decentralization:Ohio Sen. Robert Taft (1889-1953) was "Mr. Republican," revered by conservatives chafing under the domination of the GOP by Eastern money that preferred moderates such as New York Gov. Tom Dewey, the GOP's 1944 and 1948 presidential nominee. In "The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party," Michael Bowen, historian at Pennsylvania's Westminster College, recounts how Taft leavened his small-government orthodoxy with deviations, including federal aid to primary and secondary education.
In the 79th Congress (1945-47), Taft sponsored legislation to provide such education more than $8 billion over 25 years. The sum was huge (the 1947 federal budget was $34.5 billion), and the 25-year horizon said that federal intervention would not be temporary. Taft drafted his bill with help from the National Education Association (NEA), the teachers union that today is an appendage of the Democratic Party, except when the relationship is the other way around.
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There are few sure investments in this chaotic economic climate, but on a national level, education has proven to pay off big down the road. As tight economic times have put the squeeze on education budgets here in the U.S., a new report shows the big benefits of even small investments in early education worldwide.For every dollar invested in boosting preschool enrollment, middle- and low-income countries would see a return of some $6.40 to $17.60, according to a new analysis published September 22 in The Lancet. "Early childhood is the most effective and cost-effective time to ensure that all children develop to their full potential," noted the authors, led by Patrice Engle, of California Polytechnic State University. "The returns on investment in early child development are substantial."
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John V. Lombardi , Elizabeth D. Capaldi and Craig W. Abbey:
Those of us who inhabit the core of the university's academic environment share the enthusiasm for measuring and evaluating the quality of our institutions, although we have less enthusiasm for the endless ranked lists that appear in popular publications.While some dote on the U.S. News rankings, which like their BCS counterpart rely on hugely unreliable opinion surveys, we, however, prefer our own system for evaluating the Top American Research Universities that recognizes the importance of successful performance among highly competitive institutions without requiring a simple top to bottom ranking that often distorts more than it informs.
For over ten years, The Center for Measuring University Performance, now located at Arizona State University, has produced an annual report on the Top American Research Universities that uses objective data on nine measures to put universities into categories according to their performance.
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Your co-signer could do you more harm than good.Before they will lend thousands of dollars to a college-bound 18-year-old, around 80% of private lenders require a co-signer, according to the Consumer Bankers Association. Typically, that's a parent or another relative, but it can be anyone willing to take responsibility for paying back the loan. Private lenders often tout the benefit of an adult cosigner, saying that because students don't have much of a credit history, the a co-signer's good standing can help secure a lower interest rate. That's true, but it also puts the student at the mercy of the parent's credit history, which may not be so stable these days.
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David Crane, the former economic adviser--at that moment rapidly receding into the distance--could itemize the result: a long list of depressing government financial statistics. The pensions of state employees ate up twice as much of the budget when Schwarzenegger left office as they had when he arrived, for instance. The officially recognized gap between what the state would owe its workers and what it had on hand to pay them was roughly $105 billion, but that, thanks to accounting gimmicks, was probably only about half the real number. "This year the state will directly spend $32 billion on employee pay and benefits, up 65 percent over the past 10 years," says Crane later. "Compare that to state spending on higher education [down 5 percent], health and human services [up just 5 percent], and parks and recreation [flat], all crowded out in large part by fast-rising employment costs." Crane is a lifelong Democrat with no particular hostility to government. But the more he looked into the details, the more shocking he found them to be. In 2010, for instance, the state spent $6 billion on fewer than 30,000 guards and other prison-system employees. A prison guard who started his career at the age of 45 could retire after five years with a pension that very nearly equaled his former salary. The head parole psychiatrist for the California prison system was the state's highest-paid public employee; in 2010 he'd made $838,706. The same fiscal year that the state spent $6 billion on prisons, it had invested just $4.7 billion in its higher education--that is, 33 campuses with 670,000 students. Over the past 30 years the state's share of the budget for the University of California has fallen from 30 percent to 11 percent, and it is about to fall a lot more. In 1980 a Cal student paid $776 a year in tuition; in 2011 he pays $13,218. Everywhere you turn, the long-term future of the state is being sacrificed.wikipedia on bread and circuses.This same set of facts, and the narrative it suggested, would throw an ordinary man into depression. He might conclude that he lived in a society that was ungovernable. After seven years of trying and mostly failing to run California, Schwarzenegger is persuasively not depressed. "You have to realize the thing was so much fun!" he says. "We had a great time! There were times of frustration. There were times of disappointment. But if you want to live rather than just exist, you want the drama." As we roll to a stop very near the place on the beach where he began his American bodybuilding career, he says, "You have to step back and say, 'I was elected under odd circumstances. And I'm going out in odd circumstances.' You can't have it both ways. You can't be a spoiled brat."
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Ten Wisconsin senators, from both parties, have joined forces to propose legislation that would require any further expansion of voucher schools to receive a full public debate.The state's voucher program provides taxpayer funds for families to send their children to private schools. It has served low-income students in Milwaukee for about 20 years, but was expanded by Gov. Scott Walker in the state budget passed in June without public debate or other legislative action.
Also included was language allowing automatic expansion of the voucher program in the future to any school district in Wisconsin that meets certain financial and demographic criteria.
That mechanism isn't sitting well with some senators, including Senate President Mike Ellis, R-Neenah. He introduced SB 174, which ensures that any further expansion of the voucher program would include full public debate and legislative action.
"Sen. Ellis is not an enthusiastic advocate nor is he an opponent of voucher programs. But he's long argued that policy issues should not be added into the budget process and this legislation addresses concerns about automatic expansion without proper debate," says Michael Boerger, an aide to Ellis.
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For students with their sights set on a private college, the anxiety comes as a one-two punch: first from competing with thousands of others for a precious few spots, then from trying to scrape together up to $50,000 a year to foot the bill.Starting next year, Seton Hall University will try to ease that follow-up blow for early applicants with strong academic credentials, giving them two-thirds off the regular sticker price for tuition, a discount of some $21,000. For New Jersey residents, who constitute about 70 percent of Seton Hall's undergraduates, that would make the cost equivalent to that of Rutgers University, the state's flagship public institution; for those from out of state, the private school would be much cheaper than the public one.
National experts on admissions and financial aid said the policy was the first of its kind. Seton Hall officials said they hoped it would provide clarity and certainty up front to the most desirable applicants, easing the weeks and months of stress that admitted students face as they wait to hear how much financial aid they might get from different campuses.
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When Debbie Sumner Mahle, an Atlanta mother, wants to know what her sons, ages 6, 7 and 10, are working on in school, she turns on her computer and logs into NetClassroom. The portal lets her see not just their school assignments but also their attendance and grades.More public and private school systems are wiring up data-management systems, and school work is just the tip of the iceberg. Parent-accessible websites and "learning community management systems"--or LCMSs, in the age of no jargon left behind--are increasingly handling schools' scheduling, emergency contacts, immunizations, academic assessments and even meals, with some offering a daily nutritional breakdown of lunch.
Ms. Sumner Mahle receives email reminders to place her sons' requests at orderlunches.com, which manages the meal program at their school, the Davis Academy. If she wants to work a shift as a cafeteria monitor, or bring cupcakes to a Halloween party, she signs up at volunteerspot.com.
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Growing numbers of college students are in school part time, and they face increasingly long odds of ever graduating, according to a report released Tuesday.The report, Time is the Enemy, by the nonprofit group Complete College America, includes data on full- and part-time students at public colleges and universities in 33 states, including California. It was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Lumina Foundation and others.
"There is a new generation of students who are poorer, more likely to be a minority, working and with families," said Stan Jones, the organization's president. "The graduation rates are very low, so that even though more people are going to college looking to better themselves and better their economic circumstances, those goals are not being realized because the system is failing them."
Among the report's key findings:
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The Madison School District now has another justification for killing a charter school aimed at doing what the district hasn't: consistently educate minority students.TJ Mertz:Last week, the state Department of Public Instruction said the first half of a planning grant for Madison Preparatory Academy would be released. Madison Prep would focus on low-income minority students and was originally just for boys but has since been revamped to include girls in separate classrooms.
But DPI had a catch: In order to get the rest of the grant, the school must provide scientific research that single-gender education is effective. If you're going to discriminate by gender, DPI is saying, at least have a good reason for it.
I can't help but wonder: Is this the best DPI can do?
I don't know much more than what I've read in this newspaper about how Madison Prep would organize itself, what kinds of educational approaches it would use or how capable its sponsor, the Urban League of Greater Madison, would be.
ewsletter (as of this writing PD has not taken a position on the Madison Prep proposal). I've only changed minimally for posting here; one thing I have added is some hyperlinks (but I did not link as thoroughly as I usually do), another is a small "For Further Reading" set of links at the end," and of course the song. This is intended to be a broad overview and introduction to what I think are some of the most important issues concerning the decision on the Madison Preparatory Academy presented in the context of related national issues. Issues raised in this post have been and will be treated in more depth -- and with hyperlinks -- in other posts]Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School, here.For decades free market advocates such as the Bradley Foundation, the Walton Foundation and the Koch brothers have a waged a multi-front campaign against the public sector and the idea of the common good. Public education has been one of the key battlegrounds. In the coming weeks the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education will decide whether to approve a proposal for the Madison Prep Charter School. This proposal and the chief advocate for it - Kaleem Caire of the Urban League of Greater Madison - have their roots in the Bradley/Walton/Koch movement, and like much of that movement they offer false promises of educational progress in order to obscure the damage being done to every child in our public schools.
A Public Hearing on the Madison Prep proposal has been scheduled for Monday October 3, at 6:00 PM in the Doyle Building Auditorium; The Madison Prep proposal is on the agenda of the PD General Membership Meeting (Wed , 9/28 , 6:00 p.m, Hawthorne Branch Library, guests welcome).
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It is no secret that top Hong Kong officials have long said "no" to the education system they govern by sending their own children to schools abroad.But now more than half of all Hongkongers say they will follow suit, according to a recent survey.
Fifty-two per cent of parents polled said they planned to send their children abroad, according to the survey conducted by credit card company MasterCard. That contrasts with 13 per cent on the mainland and 34 per cent in Taiwan.
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Norman Augustine, via a kind reader's email:
The very subject of giftedness is fraught with contradiction and controversy. On the one hand, we often encounter misunderstanding, envy, and perceived elitism--and on the other, admiration, dependency, and respect. Little wonder that our K-12 education system has not yet determined how best to nurture extraordinary individuals so that they can become extraordinary contributors to society--and feel rewarded in doing so. Unfortunately, it is not simply the gifted who are underserved by most of our nation's 14,000 public school systems; that group is just more acutely neglected, along with the economically less fortunate, than the nation's student population as a whole.
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In the coming weeks, Madison police dogs will be able to sniff through the halls, bathrooms and parking lots of the city's middle and high schools if school principals suspect there may be illegal drugs there.The School Board voted 5-1 Monday to allow the sweeps, which school officials say will help eliminate drug use and trafficking in schools and decrease violence. Annual evaluations will be conducted to assess the program's effectiveness.
Supporters, including Madison Police Chief Noble Wray, said it could be an effective and color-blind tool as part of a strategy to keep schools safe. The dogs would search for marijuana, heroin and cocaine.
Luis Yudice, coordinator of safety and security for the school district, said one statistic that led officials to consider these searches was the 60 percent increase in student code-of-conduct violations since 2007 occurring because of drugs.
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The Global Report Card, via a kind Chan Stroman-Roll email:
The Global Report Card was developed by Jay P. Greene and Josh B. McGee as part of the George W. Bush Institute's Education Reform Initiative. The Bush Institute works to increase dramatically the number of American students who graduate high school ready for college or prepared for a good career by:The Best United States School Districts (2007 Math data) [PDF].Driven by accountability and data, these initiatives challenge the status quo and lead a wide range of partners to share goals and use clear metrics tied to student achievement.
- cultivating a new generation of principals
- implementing cutting edge research
- advancing accountability
Summary of Methodology
The calculations begin by evaluating the distributions of student achievement at the state, national, and international level. To allow for direct comparisons across state and national borders, and thus testing instruments, we map all testing data to the standard normal curve using the appropriate student level mean and standard deviation. We then calculate at the lowest level of aggregation by estimating average district quality within each state. Each state's average quality is evaluated then using national testing data. And finally, the average national quality is determined using international testing data. Essentially, this re-centers our distribution of district quality based upon the relative performance of the individual state when compared to the nation as a whole as well as the relative performance of the nation when compared to our economic competitors.For example, the average student in Scarsdale School District in Westchester County, New York scored nearly one standard deviation above the mean for New York on the state's math exam. The average student in New York scored six hundredths of a standard deviation above the national average of the NAEP exam given in the same year, and the average student in the United States scored about as far in the negative direction (-.055) from the international average on PISA. Our final index score for Scarsdale in 2007 is equal to the sum of the district, state, and national estimates (1+.06+ -.055 = 1.055). Since the final index score is expired in standard deviation units, it can easily be converted to a percentile for easy interpretation. In our example, Scarsdale would rank at the seventy seventh percentile internationally in math.
Related: www.wisconsin2.org and 1990-2010 US High School & College Graduation Comparison.
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Tests used to be just for evaluating students, but now the testing of students is used to evaluate teachers and, in fact, the entire educational system. On an individual level, some students and parents have noticed a change -- more standardized tests and more classroom and homework time devoted to preparation for them.So what exactly do test scores tell us?
Poor test scores are the initial premises in most current arguments for educational reform. At the end of last year, reading scores that showed American 15-year-olds in the middle of an international pack, led by Asian countries, prompted calls from researchers and educators for immediate action. This year two sociologists, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, showed that 45 percent of students, after two years of college, have made no significant gains on a test of critical thinking. Last week's report of falling SAT scores is the latest example.
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Public and private school teachers will explore the shifting line between "mainstream" students and special education students during a two-day special education summit at The Martin Institute that begins Tuesday, Sept. 27.The session is for special education teachers. The Wednesday session is for teachers outside the specific special education area. Both are on the Presbyterian Day School campus in East Memphis.
The summit and an 18-month focus on special education that follows arose from a series of luncheons and discussions Institute director Clif Mims had last spring with special education teachers.
The teachers and school system administrators cited "inclusion teaching" as both a trend and a challenge for all teachers.
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A 3,000 plus word article by Bill Lueders in the Capital Times today questions the motives behind legislators that support the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). Specifically targeted is Rep. Howard Marklein, a freshman legislator from Spring Green who had the gall to not only support school choice in Milwaukee but also to introduce legislation to improve the program.David Blaska has more.Lueders quotes Rep. Sandy Pope-Roberts as asking: "What's in this for Howard Marklein?...If it isn't for the campaign funds, why is he doing this?"
Perhaps he is doing it because it benefits taxpayers in the 51st Assembly district. As Marklein points out to Lueders, an analysis by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau shows the MPCP is a benefit to his constituents. Without the MPCP, the 15 school districts represented by Rep. Marklein would lose $1.3 million in state aid. The estimate assumes that 90% of students in the MPCP would have no choice but to return to the more expensive Milwaukee Public School (MPS) system if the MPCP was ended. The 90% figure is the number used by the official state evaluators of the MPCP and is based on evidence from choice programs around the country.
This is Take Two in a series. Take One, with a fuller introduction, can be found here. Briefly, the idea of the series is to counter anti-teacher and anti-teachers' union individuals and "reform" groups appropriation of the phrase "it is all about the kids" as a means to heap scorn and ridicule on public education and public education employees by investigating some of the actions of these individuals and groups in light of the question "is it all about the kids?" In each take, national developments are linked to local matters in relation to the Madison Prep charter school proposal.Take Two: A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words: Public Lotteries and the Exploitation of Families and Children
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edweek, via a kind Richard Askey email:
This interactive timeline digs deep into the Education Week archives to tell the story of U.S. education and the changing policies, theories, and perspectives that have influenced it since 1981, the year the publication began.
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THOMAS NAGEL, an American philosopher, wants to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Ian Anderson, a Scot who performs with the band Jethro Tull, sang of a slightly less intractable difficulty: "wise men don't know how it feels to be thick as a brick." In "School Blues" Daniel Pennac, a prize-winning French writer, describes what faces a school dunce when the teacher before him cannot recall what it felt like to be ignorant.Mr Pennac was once such a child (he uses the French cancre, as in Cancer, the crab: a creature that scuttles sideways instead of advancing forwards). But despite becoming a teacher, he can remember what it was like not to understand lessons. The voices in his head remind him of it. They taunt him throughout his semi-autobiographical novel, which partially traces his sorry academic career as the child of high-achieving parents whose three older brothers excelled at school. Luckily for him, his parents did not let him flee the system but instead persisted in finding a teacher who would help him to succeed. The breakthrough came aged 14 when his latest tutor--"no doubt amazed by my increasingly inventive excuses as to why I hadn't done my homework"--commissioned him to write essays and then a novel.
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Texas children are fat -- and getting fatter.It is something state policy makers have known and have struggled to address for years. In the last decade, the Legislature has passed laws that set nutritional standards for school meals, required body mass index screenings for children and adolescents, and instituted physical activity requirements.
The latest effort came during this year's legislative session with a bill passed by Senator Jane Nelson, Republican of Flower Mound, that allows a deeper study of schools' fitness data.
Under the new law, researchers can access unidentified individual student data, which they say will help bolster aggregate analyses that already show correlations between physical fitness and academic performance, gang activity and absenteeism.
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When Steve Jobs introduced the "Think Different" advertising campaign on his return to the helm of Apple, in 1997, the slogan was not just aimed at consumers. It was also meant to inspire those inside the struggling company to innovate for the future.Of course, what followed is now the story of one of the most successful companies in American history: a decade when Apple transformed the music industry with the iPod, the mobile-phone industry with the iPhone, and now the publishing industry with the iPad.
Apple succeed partly because it decided to take a different path than its competitors in the tech industry, and consumers followed. The history of business is filled with similar tales. Just look at what happened to Detroit's Big Three after the arrival of Japanese automakers in the United States.
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Admissions counselors like to talk about finding the right "fit" for applicants -- a great match between a student's educational and other goals and an institution's programs. But a new survey of the senior admissions officials at colleges nationwide finds that this "fit" is, from many colleges' point of view, increasingly about money. As evidence of that pressure, the survey found that:For many colleges, a top goal of admissions directors is recruiting more students who can pay more. Among all four-year institutions, the admissions strategy judged most important over the next two or three years -- driven by high figures in the public sector -- was the recruitment of more out-of-state students (who at public institutions pay significantly more). The runner-up was the strategy of providing more aid for low- and middle-income students.
Among all sectors of higher education, there is a push to recruit more out-of-state students and international students.
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To see past the distracting, dopey teenager and glimpse the adaptive adolescent within, we should look not at specific, sometimes startling, behaviors, such as skateboarding down stairways or dating fast company, but at the broader traits that underlie those acts.Let's start with the teen's love of the thrill. We all like new and exciting things, but we never value them more highly than we do during adolescence. Here we hit a high in what behavioral scientists call sensation seeking: the hunt for the neural buzz, the jolt of the unusual or unexpected.
Seeking sensation isn't necessarily impulsive. You might plan a sensation-seeking experience--a skydive or a fast drive--quite deliberately, as my son did. Impulsivity generally drops throughout life, starting at about age 10, but this love of the thrill peaks at around age 15. And although sensation seeking can lead to dangerous behaviors, it can also generate positive ones: The urge to meet more people, for instance, can create a wider circle of friends, which generally makes us healthier, happier, safer, and more successful.
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A decade ago, the No Child Left Behind Act ushered in an era of federally driven educational accountability focused on narrowing the chasms between the test scores and graduation rates of students of different incomes and races. The result was a whole new way of speaking and thinking about the issue: "Achievement gaps" became reformers' catch phrase, and closing those gaps became the goal of American education policy.Today, the notion of "closing achievement gaps" has become synonymous with education reform. The Education Trust, perhaps the nation's most influential K-12 advocacy group, explains: "Our goal is to close the gaps in opportunity and achievement." The National Education Foundation has launched its own "Closing the Achievement Gaps Initiative." The California Achievement Gap Educational Foundation was launched in 2008 to "eliminate the systemic achievement gap in California K-12 public education." Elite charter-school operator Uncommon Schools says its mission is running "outstanding urban charter public schools that close the achievement gap and prepare low-income students to graduate from college." Education Week, the newspaper of record for American education, ran 63 stories mentioning "achievement gaps" in the first six months of this year.
The No Child Left Behind Act's signal contribution has been this sustained fixation on achievement gaps -- a fixation that has been almost universally hailed as an unmitigated good. Near the end of his presidency, George W. Bush bragged that NCLB "focused the country's attention on the fact that we had an achievement gap that -- you know, white kids were reading better in the 4th grade than Latinos or African-American kids. And that's unacceptable for America." Margaret Spellings, Bush's secretary of education, said last year, "The raging fire in American education is the achievement gap between poor and minority students and their peers."
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State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers said Friday that Wisconsin will seek waivers to avoid having to meet basic elements of the federal No Child Left Behind education law at the "first possible moment."Kevin Helliker:Evers spoke during a conference call with U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan shortly after President Barack Obama announced that he was allowing states to seek the waivers.
"This is absolutely outstanding news," said Evers, who has long advocated for states to be given the ability to get out of meeting some parts of the law.
Obama is allowing states to scrap the hugely unpopular requirement that all children must show they are proficient in reading and math by 2014 if states can meet conditions designed to better prepare and test students.
Education chiefs from more than 20 states gathered at the White House on Friday morning to hear President Barack Obama formally propose relaxing certain tenets of the No Child Left Behind act for states that agree to meet a new set of standards he called more flexible.Much more on No Child Left Behind, hereIn characterizing the nearly 10-year-old act as too rigid, the president appeared to strike a chord with school administrators across the country. How much enthusiasm his solution will generate remains to be seen. It calls for evaluating teachers in a way that wouldn't be legal in California, for example, a state that very much supports amending the No Child Left Behind Act.
"It's problematic," Michael Kirst, president of the California State Board of Education, said of a condition that would require states to set specific policy on teacher evaluation, something that in California currently can be done only at the local level. To comply, he said, "we would need legislation passed."
I spoke with a local mother recently who mentioned that her child was doing great, based on the WKCE math report.
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Despite a decade of technological advances that make it possible to work almost anywhere, many of the nation's most educated people continue to cluster in a handful of dominant metropolitan areas such as Boston, New York and California's Silicon Valley, according to census data released Thursday.Data Source: American Community Survey.The upshot is that regions with the most skilled and highly paid workers continue to widen their advantages over less well-endowed locales.
"In a knowledge economy, success breeds success," said Alan Berube, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
Of the largest 100 metropolitan areas, those with the highest percentage of college graduates in 2000 outpaced in education gains areas with lower percentages of college grads. For instance, the 10 cities with the highest share of their population holding a bachelor's degree or higher saw that share jump by an average of 4.6 percentage points over the decade, while the bottom 10 saw their share grow 3.1 percentage points.
Related: www.wisconsin2.org
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While money does not work miracles (as the saying goes, any problem that money can solve is not a problem), it is a necessary ingredient of many solutions to our problems. Without money, many poor countries and rural communities simply cannot provide basic education to improve literacy and promote life skills, never mind consider the quality of education. Unesco, the UN cultural organisation, calls on all governments to invest in education, to provide "education for all".Having said that, education should not be seen as just an investment business in the sense that we look for money indicators to measure performance - for example, if we invest so much in a law degree student, how much will he or she earn upon graduation - as if justice can be measured by earnings.
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The 18-year-old Drexel University student in Philadelphia buys cheap tickets and takes "mileage runs" solely to build up frequent-flier account balances. Then, he cashes in the miles for expensive, far-flung journeys. Once there, he buys rail passes and catches the first train that comes along--doesn't matter where it's going--just to see some of the city. "It's hard for me to stay home. I just want to go," said Mr. Nguyen, who is from Seattle.Mr. Nguyen is among a growing number of 20-somethings mastering the calculus of frequent-flier miles, making globe-trotting their hobby. It's a generation that has grown up with airline deregulation, discount airlines, global airline alliances and "open skies" treaties that make flying between countries easier. They're also at an age when they have time and flexible schedules. As a result, many have become ferocious travelers.
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Practice makes perfect, and IXL makes math practice fun! IXL allows teachers and parents to monitor the progress of their students and motivate them through interactive games and practice questions. Widely recognized as the Web's most comprehensive math site, IXL offers a dynamic and enjoyable environment for children to practice math. Students who use IXL are succeeding like never before.
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"I have a locker!"
You forget what's important when you're ten.TW and I went to the parents' open house at The Boy's school. Now that he's in fifth grade, he's in a new building that unites the kids from the various elementary schools in the district. And yes, he gets a locker.
The principal greeted the parents, if you want to call his mumble a greeting. Honestly, one of the first principles of public speaking is "try to at least pretend to care." His entire affect conveyed that he'd rather be almost anywhere else. This did not inspire confidence. The only time he seemed to engage was when he mentioned where parents should park.
The library made me sad. TB later reported that his class took a trip there, and he was disappointed in its selection. Luckily we have a good public library in town, and I've lent TB my kindle before. At the rate he blasts through books, electronic delivery may be our only hope of keeping up.
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Single-sex education is ineffective, misguided and may actually increase gender stereotyping, a paper to be published Friday asserts.
The report, "The Pseudoscience of Single Sex Schooling," to be published in Science magazine by eight social scientists who are founders of the nonprofit American Council for CoEducational Schooling, is likely to ignite a new round of debate and legal wrangling about the effects of single-sex education.
It asserts that "sex-segregated education is deeply misguided and often justified by weak, cherry-picked or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence."
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In the spirit of the new school year, here's a quiz for readers: In which of the following subjects is the performance of American 12th-graders the worst? a) science, b) economics, c) history, or d) math?"Teach by Example"With all the talk of America's very real weaknesses in the STEM subjects (science, technology, English and math), you might be surprised to learn that the answer--according to the federal government's National Assessment of Educational Progress--is neither science nor math. And despite what might be suggested by the number of underwater home loans, high-school seniors actually fare best in economics.
Which leaves history as the answer, the subject in which students perform the most poorly. It's a result that puts American employers and America's freedoms in a worrisome spot.
But why should a C grade in history matter to the C-suite? After all, if a leader can make the numbers, does it really matter if he or she can recite the birthdates of all the presidents?
Well, it's not primarily the memorized facts that have current and former CEOs like me concerned. It's the other things that subjects like history impart: critical thinking, research skills, and the ability to communicate clearly and cogently. Such skills are certainly important for those at the top, but in today's economy they are fundamental to performance at nearly every level. A failing grade in history suggests that students are not only failing to comprehend our nation's story and that of our world, but also failing to develop skills that are crucial to employment across sectors. Having traveled in 109 countries in this global economy, I have developed a considerable appreciation for the importance of knowing a country's history and politics.
The good news is that a candidate who demonstrates capabilities in critical thinking, creative problem-solving and communication has a far greater chance of being employed today than his or her counterpart without those skills. The better news is these are not skills that only a graduate education or a stint at McKinsey can confer. They are competencies that our public elementary and high schools can and should be developing through subjects like history.
Far more than simply conveying the story of a country or civilization, an education in history can create critical thinkers who can digest, analyze and synthesize information and articulate their findings. These are skills needed across a broad range of subjects and disciplines.
In fact, students who are exposed to more modern methods of history education--where critical thinking and research are emphasized--tend to perform better in math and science. As a case in point, students who participate in National History Day--actually a year-long program that gets students in grades 6-12 doing historical research--consistently outperform their peers on state standardized tests, not only in social studies but in science and math as well.
In my position as CEO of a firm employing over 80,000 engineers, I can testify that most were excellent engineers--but the factor that most distinguished those who advanced in the organization was the ability to think broadly and read and write clearly.
Now is a time to re-establish history's importance in American education. We need to take this opportunity to ensure that today's history teachers are teaching in a more enlightened fashion, going beyond rote memorization and requiring students to conduct original research, develop a viewpoint and defend it.
If the American economy is to recover from the Great Recession--and I believe it can--it will be because of a ready supply of workers with the critical thinking, creative problem-solving, technological and communications skills needed to fuel productivity and growth. The subject of history is an important part of that foundation.
Mr. Augustine, a former Under Secretary of the Army, is the retired Chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin.
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Daniel Loxton via a kind Larry Winkler email:
Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be took home the national Lane Anderson Award as the best Canadian science book for young readers at an award dinner in Toronto last night. The win was reported today by the National Post, the Vancouver Sun, Quill & Quire, the Canadian Children's Book Center and other media. It was published by Canadian publisher Kids Can Press. But it's not for lack of trying that a Canadian publisher rather than American publisher issued this book.According to author Daniel Loxton, US publishers wouldn't touch it.
"It's important to realize that most of the publishing professionals I dealt with in the US were lovely and encouraging. They all said "no," but some recommended smaller, artier presses they felt might consider Evolution.... [S]ome of America's top children's publishing professionals rejected Evolution, some citing concerns that it was too controversial, too much of "a tough sell," or ("in today's climate") too likely to find needed distribution channels closed.... It was certainly frustrating to knock on cold doors, but I am sympathetic to publishers. [I]t's a tough time for book producers, and they need to work hard to mitigate risk. Publishers face the on the ground reality that almost half of American adults--many of them reviewers, librarians, booksellers, or teachers--believe that evolution did not happen at all.
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As more Chicago public schools cash in on Mayor Rahm Emanuel's longer-day financial incentives by adding 90 minutes to their school day, the previous votes by a dozen schools to add about a half hour to the day by bringing back recess are going unnoticed.Restoring recess is part of a broader health push by parents, advocacy groups and some city officials to bring more exercise and better nutrition to both schoolchildren and preschoolers.
Beginning in November, the city's Department of Public Health will require children who attend preschool or day care centers in Chicago to spend less time in front of television or computer screens -- 60 minutes or less -- and more time, at least an hour a day, participating in physical activity. At snack or meal time, milk cannot have a fat content higher than 1 percent, unless a child has written consent from a doctor. Only 100 percent juice can be served.
In Chicago, 22 percent of children are overweight before they enter school, more than twice the national average, according to research compiled by the Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago Children, a group of organizations and health advocates.
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Tamar Lewin, via a kind reader's email:
Money is talking a bit louder in college admissions these days, according to a survey to be released Wednesday by Inside Higher Ed, an online publication for higher education professionals.More than half of the admissions officers at public research universities, and more than a third at four-year colleges said that they had been working harder in the past year to recruit students who need no financial aid and can pay full price, according to the survey of 462 admissions directors and enrollment managers conducted in August and early September.
Similarly, 22 percent of the admissions officials at four-year institutions said the financial downturn had led them to pay more attention in their decision to applicants' ability to pay.
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Following up on my prior post, Did Illinois Inflate LSAT (168), GPA (3.81) Medians to Goose U.S. News Ranking?: Illinois today dropped this bombshell:The accurate, independently verified data for the class of 2014's Law School Admission Test (LSAT) scores and grade point averages (GPA) are as follows: median LSAT, 163; median GPA, 3.70. Information originally posted on the College of Law website last month inaccurately listed the median LSAT score as 168 and the median GPA as 3.81.
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The struggling Kansas City, Missouri School District was stripped of its accreditation on Tuesday, raising the possibility of student departures and a state takeover. The action follows weeks of tumult that included another round of turnover of top leadership.Former Madison School District Superintendent Art Rainwater formerly worked for the Kansas City School District.Though not entirely unexpected, the move was a painful return to reality for the city after a period of optimism that difficult choices were finally being made to confront longstanding problems in the school district, most notably the closing of nearly half the schools in response to a huge budget deficit.
The Missouri Board of Education cited the continued failure to improve academic performance and the continued instability in district leadership as driving its decision. The district has been provisionally accredited for nearly a decade after a two-year period during which it was unaccredited.
"We've given Kansas City more time than maybe we should have to address the problems," said Chris L. Nicastro, the state education commissioner, who had recommended the move. "Over a sustained period of time, student performance has not met state standards."
Money & School Performance is well worth a read.
It is a rare organization that can reinvent itself, rather than continuing to atrophy.
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It's time for a tuition revolt, and higher taxes aren't the answer. Students and the rest of the public are now paying for decades of mission creep and bureaucratic bloat.The regents of the University of California met this past week to revisit an old issue they've never really dealt with well -- how to cope with erratic (and usually dwindling) state aid.
Sooner or later, they'll probably raise tuition again, as they have in the past. But for now they are quailing at a plan, offered by UC's president, to raise students' costs by at least 8%, and up to 16%, annually for the next four years. "It scares the bejesus out of folks," said one of the regents, California's Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom.
If the past is any guide, that horror will give way to realism. The regents will take a shot at raising more private money from corporations, foundations, rich alumni and the like. They'll come up short, if only because every other academic institution is trying to do the same thing and there's only so much money to go around.
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Middle school and high school students who have not received the required whooping cough vaccine are denied attendance at some California schools. This comes as a result of a law passed last year, after a spike in potentially fatal diseases swept through schools. Last year, there were 70 reported cases for whooping cough.This law, passed in September 2010, required all students entering grades seventh through twelfth grade to be vaccinated by the start of 2011-2012 school year. Even after a 30 day extension period before the law went into effect, students were still unable to meet the deadline for the vaccination.
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The state wants to end its long-running payments for desegregation programs, but three school districts that receive the money say they need it to continue key programs. And a federal judge has accused the schools of delaying desegregation so they can keep receiving an annual infusion of $70 million.A federal appeals court will hear arguments Monday from both sides. The judges are expected to decide eventually whether Arkansas still has to make the payments and whether two of the districts should remain under court supervision.
The schools, which serve about 50,000 students, have come a long way since 1957, when the governor and hundreds of protesters famously tried to stop the Little Rock Nine from entering Central High School. But thousands of white and black children still have to be bused to different neighborhoods every day under one of the nation's largest remaining court-ordered desegregation systems.
Now parents are worried about the schools' future, and some are considering enrolling their children elsewhere.
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Peg Tyre is the author of "The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve."THE school year is in full swing and, if you are the parent of a school-age child, you've probably figured out how to get your children up each weekday morning, dressed and out the door -- toast in hand -- in order to catch the school bus. Good for you.
If you've met and exchanged contact information with your child's homeroom teacher or gone the extra step and volunteered to become the class parent, give yourself a pat on the back. You're on your way to becoming an engaged parent -- the kind of adult, education researchers say, who helps children to be the best they can be in school.
Now, steady yourself. New legislation, called the parent trigger, which is being proposed in more than 20 states, including New York, is about to make your role as an engaged parent a lot more complicated.
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Mary Mahling, Carla Uriona and Ben Wieder:
Student loan defaults are rising fast, according to figures released this week by the U.S. Department of Education. While much of the press coverage focused on defaults by students attending for-profit schools, defaults at state colleges and universities went up, too. The bad job market is a big factor: Unemployment in 2010 was 10.1 percent for people between the age of 25 to 34, and those numbers are even higher when you remove people above the age of 30. At the same time, state budget cuts to higher education have led to big tuition hikes at many public colleges. California students graduated from public colleges with the least debt in the country in 2009, but tuition jumped 18 percent last year for in-state students in California and double-digit increases are projected for the next several years, as well.
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Some interesting comments from reader John Kennedy (no relation, as far as I know) on the recent poll about people's reasons for going to college. He writes:There's another question in this discussion that I didn't address in previous comment. Apparently, kids going to college with no clear goal is somehow thought stupid (that's the implication). But I would ask, how many 17- or 18-year-olds have any idea about the real working world or about their own strengths and limitations? How many can think? What about having a chance to grow up a bit? This is also what college provides. OK, expensive? Do the first two years of general education at a community college, not perhaps a fine intellectual atmosphere, but possible to live at home, listen to the instructors, maybe get a clearer idea about personal and vocational possibilities.
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A group of researchers said that by examining the whole genome of a family of four, they were able to make unusually specific findings, including the daughter's risk of blood clots, and suggestions for preventive care.The study, published Thursday in the journal PLoS Genetics, was led by researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, Calif., but also listed as co-authors John and Anne West, a father and daughter who were researching their own genetic make-up at home in Silicon Valley and met the Stanford team in the process. The research is part of scientists' continuing quest to extract truly useful information from the genome, a person's complete genetic code.
This is the second time a paper has been published about a family's whole genome. In the earlier paper, published last year in Science Express by a different group of researchers, the two children in the family had rare genetic conditions, and researchers were searching for the genes that caused them. The goal in the current study was to better predict the disease risk of a family and how family members might respond to medications.
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Each incoming freshman at Randolph-Macon College this year was eligible to take part in a brief signing ceremony.The new student, along with a parent and the college president, could sign a special agreement that is emerging at some colleges and universities: As long as the student keeps up with academic work and meets regularly with advisers, the college guarantees that earning a degree there will take no more than four years.
If it fails to hold up its end of the bargain -- if required classes are not available, or if advisers give poor counsel -- the college promises to cover the cost of additional tuition until the degree is completed.
Four-year degree guarantees, as they have become known, are being offered at a growing number of smaller private colleges. They work as a marketing tool, giving colleges a way to ease parents' fears that their children might enjoy college enough to stick around for five or six costly years. And they help to focus attention on the task at hand: graduating in four years.
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As many students and parents struggle to make payments on their student loans, many are finding this debt comes with some serious strings attached.After years of economic difficulty and rising college tuition, the recent news that the default rate on federal student loans has risen came as little surprise to many. Nearly one in ten federal student-loan borrowers defaulted during the two years ended Sept. 30, 2010, meaning they failed to make a payment on their loans for more than 270 days, according to the Department of Education. That's up from 7% in 2008. Much of that increase came from for-profit colleges, whose students' default rate jumped to 15% from 11.6%, but the default rate among students at public and private, four-year universities also increased.
What many people may not realize, however, when taking out a student loan is just how different it is from other kinds of debt. Credit-card debt, for example, can be wiped out in bankruptcy. Mortgages can be discharged through foreclosure. For borrowers with crippling student loan debt, financial failure offers no such fresh start. The loan still must be paid off, and often with new collection costs tacked on, making it much more expensive than before. On top of that, up to 25% of a person's wages can be deducted until the loan is paid back in full. (Private lenders must get court approval for wage garnishment and the amount they can take varies.) With federal loans, the government can also keep your federal and state income tax refunds, intercept future lottery winnings and withhold part of your Social Security payments. "Defaulting can be completely devastating to a family's finances and sense of well being," says Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org and Fastweb.com.
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A litany of scandals in recent years have made the corruption of college sports constant front-page news. We profess outrage each time we learn that yet another student-athlete has been taking money under the table. But the real scandal is the very structure of college sports, wherein student-athletes generate billions of dollars for universities and private companies while earning nothing for themselves. Here, a leading civil-rights historian makes the case for paying college athletes--and reveals how a spate of lawsuits working their way through the courts could destroy the NCAA."I'm not hiding," Sonny Vaccaro told a closed hearing at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., in 2001. "We want to put our materials on the bodies of your athletes, and the best way to do that is buy your school. Or buy your coach."
How to Fix College Sports Vaccaro's audience, the members of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, bristled. These were eminent reformers--among them the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, two former heads of the U.S. Olympic Committee, and several university presidents and chancellors. The Knight Foundation, a nonprofit that takes an interest in college athletics as part of its concern with civic life, had tasked them with saving college sports from runaway commercialism as embodied by the likes of Vaccaro, who, since signing his pioneering shoe contract with Michael Jordan in 1984, had built sponsorship empires successively at Nike, Adidas, and Reebok. Not all the members could hide their scorn for the "sneaker pimp" of schoolyard hustle, who boasted of writing checks for millions to everybody in higher education.
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For many middle school students, the words "Phys Ed" are enough to provoke fear--fear of getting dressed in the locker room, of wearing a nerdy uniform, of looking clumsy, of being picked last.Tammy Brant, a gym teacher at Selma Middle School, in Selma, Ind., is rethinking the way schools have taught girls and boys about fitness. Instead of group calisthenics and contests that favor the most athletic kids, Ms. Brant, like many other teachers nationwide, devotes class time to fitness instruction and to games structured so that more kids can play and enjoy.
Instead of pushing everyone to hit specific performance targets, she urges them to progress toward individualized "fitness zones." She teaches the stages of a workout--warm-up, training, cool-down--and straps a heart monitor on each child. The goal is to instill healthy habits for life.
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Joseph Hawkins, senior study director at the Rockville.-based research group Westat, read my recent attack on the Parent Trigger Law in California and issued a challenge:"If we put 10 hot-shot education reporters together in a room and asked this question I think the answer would be zero: 'In the past 10 years of school reform, can you list any schools where a parent revolution took place?'"
Hawkins said he is talking about a successful parent rebellion-- "meaning that the parents were fed up with low performance and they literally took over the school and improved it--demanded that it become better."
He said "I don't think such parent 'revolutions' ever take place at all. We probably could find some schools where a group of fed-up parents started their own charter, but I'm talking about something totally different. I'm pretty sure that both us have been in those low performing schools where many parents when quizzed in depth about their school confessed their frustrations. But mounting a coup d'état? Out of the question."
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The Graduate Management Admission Council's latest report on business-school applications makes for grim reading. According to its 2011 Application Trends Survey (PDF) over two-thirds of schools worldwide say that they have seen applications to their two-year full-time MBA programmes fall over the last year. Meanwhile, 57% also reported a drop in applications to one-year full-time programmes.There may be several contributing factors. With applications at an all time high the year before (generally applications to business schools rise in tough economic times) there is an element of a return to normality. Still, this doesn't account for all of the collapse.
Dave Wilson, GMAC's president, says it may not be that there has been a shocking drop in the number of applicants, rather that each candidate is applying to fewer schools. This is interesting because one explanation could be that more students are only applying for local programmes, where there is a limited choice. If true, this fits neatly with the projections of many of those predicting tough times ahead for business schools.
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A dozen students in uniforms of white-collared shirts and blue slacks looked up attentively at their sixth-grade teachers at the Brennan Rogers School on the first day of school this year."We will never make you do something that doesn't guide you to a purpose, we're not here to waste your time," said second-year teacher Kimberlee Henry. Her students nodded. "Everything you will do this year will prepare you for something else, giving you the skills you need to go on to high school, college, and excel at life."
The school's focus wasn't always as sharp. Brennan Rogers, which has about 360 kindergarten through eighth-graders, spent decades failing its students. Parents commonly campaigned for transfers to other schools that weren't plagued with violence and lagging from inattention.
Now, the school serves as the centerpiece of a sweeping reform effort launched three years ago by New Haven Mayor John DeStefano to turn around this inner-city district, where one in four children drops out every year and test scores have languished for decades.
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Many years ago, I attended a public high school student's graduation ceremony out in what I consider the sticks.I was amazed at the overt Christianity. There was a prayer at the beginning, and again at the end. The commencement speeches were full of references to God.
My own public high school was roughly one-third Jewish, so this wouldn't have flown. Someone would have sued, and rightfully so. A Jewish student should be able to go to his own public high school graduation without being told he needs to pray to Jesus Christ.
But out in the sticks, I guess, that sort of thing was okay.
Being a lawyer, I approached the father of the graduate, knowing he was not religious, and asked if he would like to bring a lawsuit against the school district. He said he found the ceremony offensive, but that he owns a business in that town, and he was certainly not going to bring a lawsuit just because they turned his son's graduation ceremony into a revival meeting. Fair enough. I let the matter drop.
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USA Today, in the persons of reporters Marisol Bello and Greg Toppo, has a new ground-breaking report on the feeble response to standardized test-tampering in America.Bello and former USA Today reporter Jack Gillum exposed test security problems in the D.C. schools. Now, we learn that most states are even worse than D.C. because they don't bother even to look for evidence of unusual numbers of wrong-to-right erasures.
USA Today reports that only 20 states and the District do any erasure analysis. Four others give tests online (a good way to prevent principals from changing answers after the kids go home) and so don't have erasures to check. It said five other states, including Maryland, plan to check erasures next year because of the outbreak of cheating scandals in Atlanta, Baltimore, Philadelphia and the District. New York may do the same.
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Journalists like me get into ruts. We pick one way of describing data and stick with it. I tell myself that I would confuse readers if I made changes. That might be an excuse for laziness and lack of imagination.A habit I share with many education writers is presenting school test results one way: the percentage of students who score proficient or above. I ignore a subset of that proficient group, the percentage who achieve at the higher, advanced level.
The advanced percentages are impressive in the Washington suburbs, because they have some of the highest average family incomes in the country. The District is different. Most of its public school students are from low-income families. But I have been noticing some D.C. schools with impressive percentages of students scoring not just proficient but advanced. What would those schools look like if we reported that higher order of achievement? In the long term, don't we want as many students as possible to be learning at the advanced level?
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Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?
SpongeBob SquarePants!
Rot your kids' brains right there in their heads will he.
SpongeBob SquarePants!There's a lot of hullabaloo on the web today about a newly-published study out of the University of Virginia that shows that preschoolers who watched SpongeBob SquarePants had increased difficulty performing tasks requiring focus and self-control. The study draws the conclusion that watching a fast-paced TV show negatively affects kids' cognitive functioning for a short time after watching it.
The scientists conducting the study, which was published in the journal Pediatrics, took a group of 60 four-year-olds, mostly from white, middle-class families, and randomly separated the kids into three groups: one which watched a part of a SpongeBob episode, one which watched a similar amount of a Caillou episode, and one which simply did some free-drawing and watched no TV. After that phase was over, they gave the children a set of tasks to do which required what's called "executive function," a term which refers to a set of skills related to goal-directed behavior -- including attention, self-regulation, problem-solving, and ability to deal with delayed gratification. They consistently found that the kids who had watched SpongeBob did significantly worse at the tasks than the kids in either of the other groups.
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The number of Arkansas students taking Advance Placements tests in math, science and English has risen 32 percent in the past five years and there has been a nearly 50 percent rise in the number of students receiving qualifying scores, state education officials heard today.Also, the state Board of Education learned of an academic turnaround for a Fort Smith elementary which last year ranked among the lowest performing school in the state.
Tommie Sue Anthony, president of the Arkansas Advanced Initiative for Math and Sciences, which is funded primarily through a grant from the national Math and Science Initiative, told board members that the number of students achieving scores of 3 or better on AP math, science and English scores -- the highest possible score is 5 -- increased in Arkansas by 46 percent from 2007 to 2011.
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Paul Tough, via a kind reader's email:
Dominic Randolph can seem a little out of place at Riverdale Country School -- which is odd, because he's the headmaster. Riverdale is one of New York City's most prestigious private schools, with a 104-year-old campus that looks down grandly on Van Cortlandt Park from the top of a steep hill in the richest part of the Bronx. On the discussion boards of UrbanBaby.com, worked-up moms from the Upper East Side argue over whether Riverdale sends enough seniors to Harvard, Yale and Princeton to be considered truly "TT" (top-tier, in UrbanBabyese), or whether it is more accurately labeled "2T" (second-tier), but it is, certainly, part of the city's private-school elite, a place members of the establishment send their kids to learn to be members of the establishment. Tuition starts at $38,500 a year, and that's for prekindergarten.Randolph, by contrast, comes across as an iconoclast, a disrupter, even a bit of an eccentric. He dresses for work every day in a black suit with a narrow tie, and the outfit, plus his cool demeanor and sweep of graying hair, makes you wonder, when you first meet him, if he might have played sax in a ska band in the '80s. (The English accent helps.) He is a big thinker, always chasing new ideas, and a conversation with him can feel like a one-man TED conference, dotted with references to the latest work by behavioral psychologists and management gurus and design theorists. When he became headmaster in 2007, he swapped offices with his secretary, giving her the reclusive inner sanctum where previous headmasters sat and remodeling the small outer reception area into his own open-concept work space, its walls covered with whiteboard paint on which he sketches ideas and slogans. One day when I visited, one wall was bare except for a white sheet of paper. On it was printed a single black question mark.
For the headmaster of an intensely competitive school, Randolph, who is 49, is surprisingly skeptical about many of the basic elements of a contemporary high-stakes American education. He did away with Advanced Placement classes in the high school soon after he arrived at Riverdale; he encourages his teachers to limit the homework they assign; and he says that the standardized tests that Riverdale and other private schools require for admission to kindergarten and to middle school are "a patently unfair system" because they evaluate students almost entirely by I.Q. "This push on tests," he told me, "is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human."
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Conditioned for Accomplishments:
Recently I interviewed many experts to find out how they got to where they are. They ranged from world champion arm wrestlers to New York Times bestselling authors. I wanted to know what made them tick and if they were really any different from you and I.The first thing I did was to redefine what an expert is. Often we hear the word expert and we think of one person who is unique above any other person. He or she has developed qualities and skill that surpass the average person, but that is not what it means to be an expert.
An expert is someone who has tested or tried, a person who is wise through experience.
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Awesome! Sebastian Thrun of Stanford is absolutely on the right track.Reply to him @sebastianthrun to let him know you'd like that.
And, more Stanford courses may come online in the near future.
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Is your child ready for first grade? Earlier this month, Chicago Now blogger Christine Whitley reprinted a checklist from a 1979 child-rearing series designed to help a parent figure that one out. Ten out of 12 meant readiness. Can your child "draw and color and stay within the lines of the design being colored?" Of course. Can she count "eight to ten pennies correctly?" Heck, yeah, I say for parents of kindergarteners everywhere. "Does your child try to write or copy letters or numbers?" Isn't that what preschool is for?"Can he travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to store, school, playground, or to a friend's home?"
It's amazing what a difference 30 years have made. Academically, that 1979 first grader (who also needed to be "six years, six months" old and "have two to five permanent or second teeth") would have been considered right on target to start preschool. In terms of life skills, she's heading for middle school, riding her two-wheeled bike and finding her own way home. It's not surprising that I came to this link via Lenore Skenazy's Free-Range Kids blog. What is surprising is just how shocking a jolt it is to realize how stark the difference is between then and now.
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The percentage of federal student-loan borrowers who defaulted during the two years ended last Sept. 30 rose to 8.8% from 7%, according to figures that the U.S. Department of Education released Monday.That increase reflects the difficulty graduates are facing finding jobs amid a weak economy, particularly those who attended for-profit schools. The default rate for for-profit schools rose to 15% from 11.6%, compared with a rise to 7.2% from 6% at public institutions and a jump to 4.6% from 4% at private institutions.
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Two studies released today by the Center for Equal Opportunity reveal severe discrimination based on race and ethnicity in undergraduate and law school admissions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with African Americans and Latinos given preference over whites and Asians.Adelaide Blanchard:The studies are based on data supplied by the schools themselves, some of which the university had refused to turn over until a lawsuit was filed by CEO and successfully taken all the way to the state supreme court. The studies were prepared by Dr. Althea Nagai, a research fellow at CEO, and can be viewed on the organization's website, www.ceousa.org.
CEO president Roger Clegg will answer questions about the studies when they are formally released at a press conference today at 11:00 a.m. at the DoubleTree hotel in Madison--525 W. Johnson St.
The odds ratio favoring African Americans and Hispanics over whites was 576-to-1 and 504-to-1, respectively, using the SAT and class rank while controlling for other factors. Thus, the median composite SAT score for black admittees was 150 points lower than for whites and Asians, and the Latino median SAT score was 100 points lower. Using the ACT, the odds ratios climbed to 1330-to-1 and 1494-to-1, respectively, for African Americans and Hispanics over whites.
Two reports released today allege the University of Wisconsin discriminates against whites and Asian applicants and have electrified both UW administration and some student leaders.Todd Finkelmeyer:A crowd of more than 150 students filled the Multicultural Student Center in the Red Gym on Monday after an ominous message from UW Vice Provost for Diversity and Climate Damon Williams claimed a threat had been made against the diversity efforts in the campus community.
The reports were released at midnight on Tuesday from the Center for Equal Opportunity in conjunction with a press conference CEO President Roger Clegg will hold at the Double Tree Inn at 11 a.m. today. Clegg will also be at a debate on the future of Affirmative Action at the UW Law School at 7 p.m. this evening.
Williams said the timing of the events is no coincidence.
In an interview with The Badger Herald, Clegg said the reports show how a heavy preference is given to blacks and Latinos over whites and Asians in the admissions process for undergraduate programs and in the law school.
Whites and Asians aren't getting a fair crack at being admitted to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab:That's what two studies released late Monday night by the Center for Equal Opportunity indicate. The organization states in a press release accompanying the studies that there is "severe discrimination based on race and ethnicity in undergraduate and law school admissions" at Wisconsin's flagship institution of higher education.
The CEO -- a conservative think tank based out of Sterling, Va., that pushes "colorblind public policies" and backs the elimination or curtailment of existing racial preference and affirmative action programs -- reports that UW-Madison gives "African Americans and Latinos preference over whites and Asians" in admissions. The studies, which initially were embargoed until Tuesday morning, were released late Monday on the CEO website.
According to the executive summary of the report examining undergraduate admissions at UW-Madison: "In 2007 and 2008, UW admitted more than 7 out of every 10 black applicants, and more than 8 out of 10 Hispanics, versus roughly 6 in 10 Asians and whites."
The Center for Equal Opportunity and its president and general counsel, Roger Clegg, claim to advance educational opportunity by punishing colleges and universities for attempting to level a highly unequal playing field.The CEO's name is laughable. It is the exact opposite of what the organization does. The misnomer is a deliberate deception. It is a lie so blatant that it would be considered a joke in very poor taste were it not so outrageously fallacious.
The record of CEO's lawsuits has never been in support of equality--it has always been to preserve and protect educational opportunity for those most fortunate social classes and racial/ethnic groups. There is no no record of this organization filing a lawsuit on behalf of newly emerging and underrepresented populations in higher education--it always and only files lawsuits on behalf of the already-advantaged.
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The new school year begins in Seattle today, with the superintendent feeling "excited and hopeful that anything is possible" in the year ahead.I'm not as confident, yet.
My daughter starts her junior year of high school. She's enthusiastic, optimistic and one of those students who always gets a "she's a delight to have in class" comment on her report cards. She has the school system figured out. Today she's on the team who will help incoming, possibly nervous, freshmen. Have a great day sweetie; I know you will.
This is not a routine day for my son. He's making the transition from elementary to middle school. No more bubbly fish tank in the school lobby, little kids' artwork on the walls and shock absorbing wood chips on the playground. Instead, he'll be surrounded by the echoing thud of steel locker doors slamming, the shuffle of grown up-sized tennis shoes tromping through the halls and concrete sidewalks with weeds growing through the gaps. Have a great day son; I don't know how your day will go. I can't wait to find out this afternoon.
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A proposal that Milwaukee taxpayers be told on tax bills exactly how much of their money is going to private schools through the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program is on the fast track for school board consideration.During a special MPS board meeting Saturday morning to discuss the district's long-range master plan for buildings, board member Larry Miller asked that his "voucher tax" transparency proposal be discussed at a school board committee meeting Tuesday, rather than wait to be introduced at the board's next regular meeting Sept. 22, and then be referred to committee for discussion at a later date.
"The urgency of this is there's a huge tax burden on the community and it's important for the community to be educated on this burden," Miller told the board Saturday morning.
The tax that MPS must levy under state law to support low-income Milwaukee students enrolled in private schools under the choice program would have ranked just behind Milwaukee Area Technical College and ahead of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District if it had been broken out, ranked, and displayed under the "Levy by Unit of Government" section of tax information sent to taxpayers in 2010, Miller said.
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The cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants is in hot water from a study suggesting that watching just nine minutes of that program can cause short-term attention and learning problems in 4-year-olds.
The problems were seen in a study of 60 children randomly assigned to either watch "SpongeBob," or the slower-paced PBS cartoon "Caillou" or assigned to draw pictures. Immediately after these nine-minute assignments, the kids took mental function tests; those who had watched "SpongeBob" did measurably worse than the others. Previous research has linked TV-watching with long-term attention problems in children, but the new study suggests more immediate problems can occur after very little exposure -- results that parents of young kids should be alert to, the study authors said.
Kids' cartoon shows typically feature about 22 minutes of action, so watching a full program "could be more detrimental," the researchers speculated, But they said more evidence is needed to confirm that.
The results should be interpreted cautiously because of the study's small size, but the data seem robust and bolster the idea that media exposure is a public health issue, said Dr. Dimitri Christakis. He is a child development specialist at Seattle Children's Hospital who wrote an editorial accompanying the study published online Monday in the journal Pediatrics.
Christakis said parents need to realize that fast-paced programming may not be appropriate for very young children. "What kids watch matters, it's not just how much they watch," he said.
University of Virginia psychology professor Angeline Lillard, the lead author, said Nickelodeon's "SpongeBob" shouldn't be singled out. She found similar problems in kids who watched other fast-paced cartoon programming. She said parents should realize that young children are compromised in their ability to learn and use self-control immediately after watching such shows. "I wouldn't advise watching such shows on the way to school or any time they're expected to pay attention and learn," she said.
Nickelodeon spokesman David Bittler disputed the findings and said "SpongeBob SquarePants" is aimed at kids aged 6-11, not 4-year-olds. "Having 60 non-diverse kids, who are not part of the show's targeted (audience), watch nine minutes of programming is questionable methodology and could not possibly provide the basis for any valid findings that parents could trust," he said.
Lillard said 4-year-olds were chosen because that age "is the heart of the period during which you see the most development" in certain self-control abilities. Whether children of other ages would be similarly affected can't be determined from this study. Most kids were white and from middle-class or wealthy families. They were given common mental function tests after watching cartoons or drawing. The SpongeBob kids scored on average 12 points lower than the other two groups, whose scores were nearly identical.
In another test, measuring self-control and impulsiveness, kids were rated on how long they could wait before eating snacks presented when the researcher left the room. "SpongeBob" kids waited about 2 1/2 minutes on average, versus at least four minutes for the other two groups. The study has several limitations. For one thing, the kids weren't tested before they watched TV. But Lillard said none of the children had diagnosed attention problems and all got similar scores on parent evaluations of their behavior.
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Online: Pediatrics: http://www.pediatrics.org
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At last your time has come. Leaving behind the old world and the deep ruts you carved in the corner of that world that belonged to you, you're off to explore undiscovered countries, to join a new and ever-replenishing society of fascinating people and learned scholars and impassioned artists and driven achievers, off to a place where the world is new and so are you. Whether or not your college years will be "the best years of your life," they will almost certainly be among the most transformative.The question is whether that transformation will be for the better. Unmoored from the people and places that once defined you, you'll feel a fluidity in your identity that's both thrilling and frightening. You may feel as though you can be anyone and become anything. I pray that you will become who you are -- the individual you most truly and deeply are, the one God dreamt of when he made you -- and not the person that you or your parents or your friends think you should be. In service to that end, I thought I would offer seven pieces of advice. Though it feels churlish to say so, I offer this advice on the basis of some personal experience -- more than many and less than some, with four undergraduate years at Stanford, three at Princeton Seminary and seven at Harvard for my Ph.D. I did a fair amount of teaching, came to know many professors well, and spent time too at universities overseas. So, on the basis of those experiences, here are my thoughts:
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[Note from Laurie Rogers: Recently, results from the 2011 state standardized test scores came out, and the general impression given to the public -- for example from the state education agency (OSPI) and from media in Seattle and in Spokane -- was that improvements had been made. It's all in the definitions: How do you define "improvement"? Did some of the numbers go up? Assuredly. Did that mean that real improvments in real academic knowledge had been made? It's best to remain skeptical.Most students in Spokane are as weak in math skill this year as they were last year. Given a proper math test that assesses for basic skills, many high schoolers still test into 4th or 5th-grade math. College remedial rates are still high. Parents are still frantic, and students are still stressed out about math. So ... what do those higher scores actually mean? I've been trying to find out. It's hard to say.
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This summer, I met a principal who was recently named as the administrator of the year in her state. She was loved and adored by all, but she told me she was leaving the profession.I screamed, "You can't leave us," and she quite bluntly replied, "Look, if I get an offer to lead a school system of orphans, I will be all over it, but I just can't deal with parents anymore; they are killing us."
Unfortunately, this sentiment seems to be becoming more and more prevalent. Today, new teachers remain in our profession an average of just 4.5 years, and many of them list "issues with parents" as one of their reasons for throwing in the towel. Word is spreading, and the more negativity teachers receive from parents, the harder it becomes to recruit the best and the brightest out of colleges.
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There is a great deal of debate going on over whether or not you should go to college. Is it worth it? You will enter a difficult job market deeply in college loan debt. Despite your degree, your job prospects will be slim. And nobody can quite figure out what the future really holds for college grads' futures.Here's another question: Why bother graduating from high school?
1. It doesn't matter.
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very principal looks forward to the first day of school when students return with fresh minds eager to learn and ready to work. But as students prepare to hit the books in the next couple weeks, some of them won't have to take the bus to school, wander the halls looking for their classroom or search rows of desks to find their seat.Virtual schooling with Wisconsin Connections Academy (WCA) allows students to receive a top-notch public education online from the comfort of their homes. Virtual education is an increasingly popular alternative to the traditional brick and mortar classroom, but many parents still don't fully understand online learning and how it works.
Virtual public schooling is not homeschooling. In fact, the two are quite different. Virtual public schools deliver public education to a student's home at no cost that combines state-certified teachers and a rigorous curriculum that correlates to state standards. At WCA, students learn at home under the guidance of a Wisconsin certified teacher. A Learning Coach, typically a parent, assists the student in day-to-day activities. Our teachers work directly with both the student and Learning Coach to develop an individual learning plan, provide instruction and evaluate assignments.
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While they say that all politics is local, Colorado seems to be national news, yet again. Our state is featured prominently in Steven Brill's new book, Class Warfare, which is receiving a lot of press from national news outlets.Weaving a narrative around the passage of Senate Bill 10-191 in Colorado, Brill tells a good story, replete with heroic figures like Senator Mike Johnston. I worked closely on SB 191 from its inception to passage, I can tell you that the on the ground details of its success are even more interesting than what's depicted in Brill's account.
Please see DFER's case study on SB 191 here for a close examination of the strategy, the broad coalition, and the bipartisan champions that helped make SB 191 a reality. Without the active support of the sophisticated coalition of political leaders on both sides of the aisle, including House sponsors Rep. Christine Scanlan and Rep. Carole Murray, non-profit organizations such as Stand for Children Colorado, civil rights groups, and business leaders that worked with the media, spoke with legislators, and reached out to their communities, the bill would not have passed. For further reading, Van Schoales, a DFER-CO Advisory Committee member, has written a review of Class Warfare: available here.
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Ohio Governor John Kasich said on Wednesday that an Akron-area mother convicted of felony charges for lying about where she lived to enroll her children in a suburban school district deserves a second chance.Kelley Williams-Bolar, 41, attracted national attention and drew the support of school-choice advocates after she was convicted and jailed for using her father's address to enroll her two daughters in the higher performing Copley Fairlawn School District instead of the Akron Public Schools.
Kasich, a Republican, reduced Williams-Bolar's two felony convictions to misdemeanors, overruling the state's parole board, which last week rejected a pardon in the case.
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The next time your great idea at work elicits silence or eye rolls, you might just pity those co-workers. Fresh research indicates they don't even know what a creative idea looks like and that creativity, hailed as a positive change agent, actually makes people squirm."How is it that people say they want creativity but in reality often reject it?" said Jack Goncalo, ILR School assistant professor of organizational behavior and co-author of research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. The paper reports on two 2010 experiments at the University of Pennsylvania involving more than 200 people.
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The threat of possible litigation has roiled the already turbulent waters surrounding the proposal for a single-sex Urban League charter school.Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school, here.Madison school officials began feeling skittish over recommending a $225,000 planning grant for the Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men after the state Department of Public Instruction raised concerns recently that the school doesn't meet state and federal requirements to provide gender-equal education.
Now, a new legal threat has emerged, this one from Madison Teachers Inc. Together, the two issues could cause the board to pull back from supporting the planning grant, possibly as early as Thursday.
First, some background: After DPI put the planning grant on hold, the Urban League of Greater Madison last week submitted a new proposal to simultaneously establish a separate campus for girls. Kaleem Caire, Urban League president and a driving force behind Madison Prep, wants to see the schools open next year, initially with 60 sixth-grade girls and 60 sixth-grade boys. The proposal calls for adding 120 additional sixth-graders in each of the four subsequent years. Because the proposal now envisions 600 students rather 480 as originally planned, it would require more funding from the Madison Metropolitan School District than originally planned.
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The English Schools Foundation (ESF) has angered parents by introducing a fast-track system for its private school in Discovery Bay, in which parents can get priority on the waiting list by agreeing to pay HK$400,000 if their child is accepted.The ESF started the system for "nomination rights" on Thursday and said it had been introduced for parents seeking to enrol children at Discovery College from the next academic year.
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Going online to get a college degree has been championed as a cost-effective way to educate the masses and challenged as a cheapening of academia. Now, the online classroom is coming to the vaunted University of California system, making it the nation's first top-tier university to offer undergraduate credit for cyberstudies.By dislodging education from its brick-and-mortar moorings, the University of California - short on money and space - hopes to ease the path to a diploma for students who are increasingly forced to wait for a vacant seat in a lecture hall. Especially in high-demand "gateway courses," such as chemistry, calculus and composition.
This summer, UC Berkeley tested its first pilot course: Chemistry 1A. For one student, working as a lifeguard in San Rafael, it accelerated her progress toward a joint degree in biology and economics. Another was able to live at home in Sacramento, because she registered for summer school too late to get dorm space.
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Randy White of the Dallas Cowboys, star defensive tackle of the 1970s, member of both the College Football Hall of Fame and Pro Football Hall of Fame: What a joy it was to watch him play! White was a master of leverage, burst and anticipation. Today, he might not even make an NFL roster. If White got on the field, he'd be crushed.White played defensive tackle at 257 pounds, across from centers weighing 240 or 250 pounds and guards who were considered huge if 265. Last year's Super Bowl featured defensive tackles B.J. Raji (337 pounds) and Casey Hampton (330 pounds) versus guards Chris Kemoeatu (344 pounds) and Josh Sitton (318 pounds). Either guard would have steamrolled Randy White as if he wasn't there.
As for today's biceps: Your Honor, I call to the stand America's leading expert on these matters, Mel Kiper Jr. Everyone assumes today's football players are bigger, faster and stronger than those who came before. But what does the data show? No one is better suited to answer that question than Kiper.
Far, far in the past -- about 1980 -- the United States was not obsessed with the NFL draft. Of course that's hard to imagine today. Once, bread did not come sliced. But I digress.
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Yes, the US Department of Education owns guns. Its Office of the Inspector General has statutory authority to make arrests, conduct warrants, and pound open your front door. Usually if you get involved in some sort of fraud scheme related to federal student loans.Here's a message from a recent victim:
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A meeting Wednesday to discuss the minority achievement gap in the Madison district will be closed to the media, even if that means kicking School Board members out, the organizer said Monday.The Urban League of Greater Madison invited Madison School Board members to its meeting facilitated by an arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, but if four board members attend, it would be considered a quorum of the school board and need to abide by the open meetings law.
Four of the seven school board members confirmed with the State Journal Monday that they plan to attend the meeting.
"We'll have to kick one of them out," said Urban League President Kaleem Caire, laughing. "I'm serious."
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MILLIONS of school-leavers in the rich world are about to bid a tearful goodbye to their parents and start a new life at university. Some are inspired by a pure love of learning. But most also believe that spending three or four years at university--and accumulating huge debts in the process--will boost their chances of landing a well-paid and secure job.Their elders have always told them that education is the best way to equip themselves to thrive in a globalised world. Blue-collar workers will see their jobs offshored and automated, the familiar argument goes. School dropouts will have to cope with a life of cash-strapped insecurity. But the graduate elite will have the world at its feet. There is some evidence to support this view. A recent study from Georgetown University's Centre on Education and the Workforce argues that "obtaining a post-secondary credential is almost always worth it." Educational qualifications are tightly correlated with earnings: an American with a professional degree can expect to pocket $3.6m over a lifetime; one with merely a high-school diploma can expect only $1.3m. The gap between more- and less-educated earners may be widening. A study in 2002 found that someone with a bachelor's degree could expect to earn 75% more over a lifetime than someone with only a high-school diploma. Today the premium is even higher.
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Housing is moving away from the dorms and cracker-box apartments of old as part of a national trend. At USC, tanning beds, hot tubs, HD televisions and a club room are all on the amenities list. But it doesn't come cheaply.Odds are slim that the cast of "Jersey Shore" will ever enroll at USC. But if they could, TV's legendary sybarites would find that gym-tan-laundry is just the beginning at a new luxury apartment complex near campus.
Nearly every detail at West 27th Place is upmarket, from the fountains, landscaping and custom outdoor light fixtures to the granite countertops and big-screen HD television sets in every unit. There are also televisions in the well-appointed gym, along with a professional-grade Sundazzler -- a walk-in tanning booth that resembles a science-fiction movie prop.
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Tara Parker-Pope
Now that children are back in the classroom, are they really learning the lessons that will help them succeed?
Many child development experts worry that the answer may be no. They say the ever-growing emphasis on academic performance and test scores means many children aren't developing life skills like self-control, motivation, focus and resilience, which are far better predictors of long-term success than high grades. And it may be distorting their and their parents' values.
"What are we really trying to do when we think about raising kids?" asked Dr. Kenneth R. Ginsburg, an expert in adolescent medicine at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "We're trying to put in place the ingredients so the child is going to be a successful 35-year-old. It's not really about getting an A in algebra."
Take the question of praising a child's academic achievement. In his new book "Letting Go With Love and Confidence: Raising Responsible, Resilient, Self-Sufficient Teens in the 21st Century" (written with Susan Fitzgerald), Dr. Ginsburg draws a crucial distinction between hard work and simply getting an A or "being smart."
In one set of studies, children who solved math puzzles were praised for their intelligence or for their hard work. The first group actually did worse on subsequent tests, or took an easy way out, shunning difficult problems. The research suggests that praise for a good effort encourages harder work, while children who are consistently told they are smart do not know what to do when confronted with a difficult problem or reading assignment.
"When we focus on performance, when we say 'make sure you get A's,' we have kids who are terrified of B's," Dr. Ginsburg said. "Kids who are praised for effort, those kids learn that intelligence is something that can be built."
Academic achievement can certainly help children succeed, and for parents there can be a fine line between praising effort and praising performance. Words need to be chosen carefully: Instead of saying, "I'm so proud you got an A on your test," a better choice is "I'm so proud of you for studying so hard." Both replies rightly celebrate the A, but the second focuses on the effort that produced it, encouraging the child to keep trying in the future.
Praise outside of academics matters, too. Instead of asking your child how many points she scored on the basketball court, say, "Tell me about the game. Did you have fun? Did you play hard?"
Dr. Ginsburg notes that parents also need to teach their children that they do not have to be good at everything, and there is something to be learned when a child struggles or gets a poor grade despite studying hard.
"One of the feelings people often have is that in order to succeed, a child has to be good at absolutely everything," he said. "Human beings in the adult world are absolutely uneven, but we don't accept that in our children -- which pressures them in a way that's incredibly uncomfortable for them."
One strategy is to teach children that the differences between easy and difficult subjects can provide useful information about their goals and interests. Subjects they enjoy and excel in may become the focus of their careers. Challenging but interesting classes or sports can become hobbies. Subjects that are difficult and uninteresting are just something "you have to get past," Dr. Ginsburg said.
"We need to approach failure and difficulty and struggle as data that teach us what we should do with our lives," he said. "It's when you say to a child, 'I expect you to do well in everything,' that we're preparing them to fail."
Outside of school, parents have many opportunities to teach children about focus, self-control and critical thinking, said Ellen Galinsky, author of "Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs" and president of the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit research group in New York.
When reading to children, for example, ask them what a character is thinking or feeling. That simple exercise helps develop perspective, an important social cognition skill.
In one experiment, children are given a crayon box but discover it really contains paper clips. Then the child is asked what a friend might think is in the box. Children younger than 4 typically respond "paper clips" because that's what they know to be true. But about 4, they begin to see things from others' perspective, understanding that the packaging would mislead another person just as it misled them.
"Perspective taking helps with school readiness and literacy," Ms. Galinsky said. "The child has to understand a teacher has a different perspective, their friends have different perspectives."
In young children, playing board games or games like Simon Says or Red Light, Green Light can help develop focus and self-control.
And in older children, parents willing to put in a little extra effort can help children develop critical thinking skills rather than just answering their questions. Ms. Galinsky recalls the time her son complained about boys being portrayed more negatively than girls on television.
She suggested he conduct an experiment: collect data on positive and negative portrayals by watching different shows and keeping a record. And when her son thought his data proved his point, Ms. Galinsky challenged the television sample, noting that he had watched only shows aimed at boys.
"Rather than dismiss it, I told him it was interesting, let's make a chart," she said. "I kept pushing back and talked about how to design a really good experiment. He got really into it, and it was an example of not answering him too quickly and letting him find out himself in order to help him become a critical thinker."
Of course, parents don't have to help children set up complicated experiments every time they ask a question. But when a question arises, Ms. Galinsky said, resist the temptation to say, "Look it up." Instead, say, "Let's look it up," and guide your child in ways to get the information.
"It's not just knowing the information," she said. "It's knowing how to find the answers to the questions that is the basis of critical thinking."
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Four obese children are on the brink of being permanently removed from their family by social workers after their parents failed to bring their weight under control.In the first case of its kind, their mother and father now face what they call the 'unbearable' likelihood of never seeing them again.
Their three daughters, aged 11, seven and one, and five-year-old son, will either be 'fostered without contact' or adopted.
Torn apart: The parents, far left and right, with six of their children who they fear will be taken away from themTorn apart: The parents, far left and right, with six of their children who they fear will be taken away from them
Either way, the family's only hope of being reunited will be if the children attempt to track down their parents when they become adults.
The couple, who have been married for nearly 20 years and are not being named to protect their children's identities, were given a 'draconian' ultimatum three years ago - as reported at the time by The Mail on Sunday.
Warned that the children must slim or be placed in care, the family spent two years living in a council-funded 'Big Brother' house in which they were constantly supervised and the food they ate monitored.
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This fall more than 19 million students will enroll in the 4,000 or so degree-granting colleges and universities now operating in the United States. College enrollments have grown steadily year by year, more than doubling since 1970 and increasing by nearly one-third since the year 2000. More than 70 percent of high school graduates enroll in a community college, four-year residential college, or in one of the new online universities, though only about half of these students graduate within five years. The steady growth in enrollments is fed by the widespread belief (encouraged by college administrators) that a college degree is a requirement for entry into the world of middle-class employment. A college education is now deemed one of those prizes that, if good for a few, must therefore be good for everyone, even if no one in a position of academic authority can define what such an education is or should be. These conceptions are at the heart of the democratic revolution in higher education.
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The beginning of a freshman's college experience is an exciting time. Dining halls! No bedtime! Taunting your RA! Exorbitantly expensive textbooks!
Wait, that last one is no fun at all. It's hard to make that first trip to the college bookstore for required texts without leaving with a bit of sticker shock. Why are textbooks so astonishingly expensive? Let's take a look.Publishers would explain that textbooks are really expensive to make. Dropping over a hundred bucks for a textbook seems like an outrage when you're used to shelling out $10 or $25 for a novel, but textbooks aren't made on the same budget. Those hundreds of glossy colorful pages, complete with charts, graphs, and illustrations, cost more than putting black words on regular old white paper. The National Association of College Stores has said that roughly 33 cents of every textbook dollar goes to this sort of production cost, with another 11.8 cents of every dollar going to author royalties. Making a textbook isn't cheap.
There's certainly some validity to this explanation. Yes, those charts and diagrams are expensive to produce, and the relatively small print runs of textbooks keep publishers from enjoying the kind of economies of scale they get on a bestselling popular novel. Any economist who has a pulse (and probably some who don't) could poke holes in this argument pretty quickly, though.
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The college class of 2011 just graduated into one of the worst job markets in recent history. Twenty-four percent of 2011 grads had a job offer in hand by graduation, compared with 51 percent of students graduating in the prerecession year of 2007. As these recent college grads move back in with their parents, and as student loan bills come due, many will wonder--was college worth the money?The short answer is: probably. While studies of past recessions suggest that the unlucky Great Recession grads will do less well economically than those graduating during better times, they are still likely to earn more and have better job prospects than their peers who lack college credentials. The June 2011 unemployment rate for those with only a high school diploma, for example, was 10 percent, as opposed to 4.4 percent for those with a college degree. And earnings for college graduates were 66 percent higher in 2010 than for high school graduates. Moreover, the benefits of a college degree are not just financial: college graduates tend to lead healthier lives, have lower divorce rates, and have children who are better prepared for school. On average, a college degree is a worthwhile, if increasingly expensive, investment.
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College football, to put it as charitably as possible, had a less-than-ideal offseason.From the Southeast to the Pacific Northwest, a series of scandals, controversies, academic outrages and incidents of boorish behavior has taken a toll on the good names of several schools.
This weekend's spotlight game, for instance, pits No. 3-ranked Oregon, a school that's under NCAA investigation for possible recruiting violations, against No. 4 LSU, whose top quarterback, Jordan Jefferson, is suspended for his part in a brawl outside a campus watering hole called Shady's.
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Welcome and congratulations: Getting to the first day of college is a major achievement. You're to be commended, and not just you, but the parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts who helped get you here.It's been said that raising a child effectively takes a village: Well, as you may have noticed, our American village is not in very good shape. We've got guns, drugs, two wars, fanatical religions, a slime-based popular culture, and some politicians who--a little restraint here--aren't what they might be. To merely survive in this American village and to win a place in the entering class has taken a lot of grit on your part. So, yes, congratulations to all.
You now may think that you've about got it made. Amidst the impressive college buildings, in company with a high-powered faculty, surrounded by the best of your generation, all you need is to keep doing what you've done before: Work hard, get good grades, listen to your teachers, get along with the people around you, and you'll emerge in four years as an educated young man or woman. Ready for life.
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Today begins school in Ripon and in most of Wisconsin. So parents breathe a sigh of relief that the kids are finally out of the house, until they realize that now they have to get their children to their various after-school activities.This has been an unusual summer for one glaring reason, and yet it hasn't been unusual in the day-to-day things. All three kids went to summer school. All three played baseball (T-ball in Shaena's case). All three went to church camp, Shaena with me. (Which was not how I expected to spend her summer vacation, although those three days were far from summerlike.) All three visited their grandparents, and we got back reports that made us wonder whose children they had. We didn't go on vacation, in part for the aforementioned glaring reason, but I'm not sure the family is up to being locked inside a van for extended periods of time anyway. More than once, in fact, I've wondered how everyone would have gotten to everything had there been two working parents, particularly with the occasional added complication of orthodontist and veterinarian appointments.
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LANGUAGE-learning is fascinating, but not for those who can't take the occasional humiliation.I live in São Paulo and though I'm sure my Portuguese accent is horrible, it's horrible in a recognisably Paulistano way. I say the "e" in duzentos (two hundred) with a twang; and I don't say "sh" for "s", as Cariocas, or residents of Rio, do. Generally people in São Paulo understand what I'm trying to say--and so do taxi drivers and hotel staff in Rio. Indeed, they are usually so delighted to meet a foreigner who speaks any Portuguese at all that they are highly complimentary, which even if it is more to do with Brazilian hospitality and courtesy, is delightfully confidence-inducing.
Not so Cariocas who don't have regular contact with tourists. On holiday in Rio with my family recently, I tried to strike up conversation with some children aged around 11 or 12 on the top of the Pão de Açúcar, or Sugarloaf Mountain, one of Rio's most famous tourist spots. I asked one if they were visiting with their school. (This was an easy guess; they were wearing uniform. But I wanted to practise.) He stared at me, bemused. I repeated: "Vocês estão aqui com sua escola?" No good. He called over a friend. By now I was getting embarrassed, but I tried again. This time he turned to her and said: "Não entendi nada" (I didn't understand a thing). Only when a teacher came over and repeated my sentence to the children did we get anywhere. Very depressing.
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Education, along with health and taxes, is a principal public concern; politicians win elections because of it, and therefore it's vital that newspapers provide good coverage of it.Both The Guardian and The New York Times have launched crowd-sourcing projects on their websites, which intend to provide readers with information relating to the quality of schools.
As it is GCSE results day in the UK, The Guardian has appealed to teachers on its website to fill in a simple online form, which will then allow them to map the exam results of schools across the country.
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www.teamreal.org, via Judy Reed:
TEAM REAL is made up of students from your community that are in-the-know about drugs of abuse. The facts provided will raise awareness of the local drug trends, costs of illicit drugs, ways kids are getting high, and the use of over-the-counter and licit medications as drugs of abuse.A larger version of this image is available here.
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Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
Listen carefully, and you can hear it everywhere:Schoolgirls chattering about clothes and music and, of course, boys. Schoolboys rough-housing on the playground, boasting of touchdowns and soccer goals, and pretending not to notice the girls, who are pretending not to notice the boys.
As summer gives way to fall, the sweet sound of education is back.
From kindergarten classrooms with fears and tears always close, to middle school mixers where "tweens" finally begin to find themselves, to high school hallways where the minds get sharper and the humor gets darker, school is again in session.
For many it was a summer of discontent as recall elections were ripple-effect reminders of the political unrest from last spring, when K-12 educators and other public employees were at the center of a debate that featured much disagreement.
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National Center for Policy Analysis:
The Obama administration recently attempted a pre-emptive strike on Texas Governor Rick Perry by unleashing Education Secretary Arne Duncan to attack Texas' record on education. Duncan's arguments have generated a lot of useful discussion across the web, but Andrew Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, throws some rudimentary data analysis into the picture.If you look at Texas' simple average test scores in reading and math for fourth and eighth grade students, they're about average. But Texas' schools serve a population with several challenges, in particular many low-income and Spanish speaking children.
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Diane Rado, Jodi S. Cohen and Joe Germuska, via a kind Chan Stroman-Roll email:
Ariana Taylor thought she was ready for college after taking Advanced Placement physics and English at her Chicago public high school and graduating with a 3.2 GPA.First-year performance at Illinois public universities and collegesInstead, at Illinois State University, she was overwhelmed by her course load and the demands of college. Her GPA freshman year dropped to 2.7 -- and that was significantly better than other graduates from Morgan Park High School, who averaged a 1.75 at Illinois State.
"It was really a big culture shock," said Taylor, 20, now a junior who has started a mentorship program for incoming freshmen. "I had no idea what it would be like."
A Tribune analysis of data available to Illinois citizens for the first time raises fundamental questions about how well the state's public high schools are preparing their students for college. The data show these students struggle to get a B average as freshmen at the state's universities and community colleges, even after leaving top-performing high schools with good grades. In fact, public school graduates at 10 of the state's 11 four-year universities averaged less than a 3.0 GPA their freshman year.
The newly-released High School-to-College Success Report shows how Illinois public school graduates fared when they became freshmen at the state's universities and community colleges. The ACT company tracked more than 90,000 students who graduated from public high schools between 2006 and 2008, and then enrolled full-time at an Illinois university or community college that fall. The data do not include students who went to a private college or out-of-state. For each high school, families can look up average high school GPAs and grade point averages earned at each public university and community college that students attended.
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Wisconsin Reading Coaltion, via a kind Chan Stroman-Roll email:
Summary of the August 25, 2011 Read to Lead Task Force MeetingRelated: A Capitol Conversation on Wisconsin's Reading Challenges and Excellence in Education explains Florida's reading reforms and compares Florida's NAEP progress with Wisconsin's at the July 29th Read to Lead task force meeting and www.wisconsin2.org.
Green Bay, WIThe fifth meeting of the Read to Lead task force was held on August 25, 2011, at Lambeau Field in Green Bay. Governor Walker was delayed, so State Superintendent Tony Evers opened the meeting. The main topic of discussion was accountability for reading outcomes, including the strategy of mandatory grade retention. Troy Couillard from DPI also presented an overview of reading reform in Milwaukee Public Schools.
Accountability
Superintendent Evers said that Wisconsin will seek a waiver from the No Child Left Behind proficiency requirements by instituting a new system of accountability. His Educator Effectiveness and Accountability Design teams are working on this, with the goal of a new accountability system being in place by late 2011.Accountability at the educator level:
The concept of using student achievement or growth data in teacher and principal evaluations is not without controversy, but Wisconsin is including student data in its evaluation model, keeping in mind fairness and validity. The current thought is to base 50% of the educator evaluation on qualitative considerations, using the Danielson Framework http://www.danielsongroup.org ("promoting professional learning through self assessment, reflection on practice, and professional conversations"), and 50% on student data, including multiple measures of performance. 10% of the student data portion of the evaluation (5% of the total evaluation) would be based on whole-school performance. This 5% would be based on a proficiency standard as opposed to a value-added measurement. The 5% is thought to be small enough that it will not affect an individual teacher adversely, but large enough to send a message that all teachers need to work together to raise achievement in a school. The task force was asked if it could endorse whole-school performance as part of teacher evaluation. The task force members seemed to have some support for that notion, especially at the principal level, but had some reservations at the level of the individual teacher.Kathy Champeau was concerned that some schools do not have the resources to serve some children. She also felt it might not be fair to teachers, as they have no control over other teachers in the school or the principal.
Steve Dykstra said it is important to make sure any value-added system is designed to be fair.Rachel Lander felt it would be better to use value-added data for whole-school performance rather than a proficiency standard, but supported the importance of schoolwide standards.
Rep. Steve Kestell supported the 5% requirement, and questioned what the qualitative half of the evaluation would be based on. He felt perhaps there could be some schoolwide standards to be met in that part of the evaluation, also.
Tony Evers responded that the Danielson Framework was research-based observations, and that the evaluators would need to be highly trained and consistent in their evaluations.
Tony Pedriana had questions about the type of research on which the Danielson Framework is based.
Evers said he would provide further information to the task force.
Mara Brown said she cannot control what the teacher down the hall does, and that the 5% should apply only to principals.Linda Pils agreed with the 5%, but felt principals need to be watching and guiding new teachers. She agreed with Dykstra's comments on measuring growth.
Sen. Luther Olsen was concerned that the 5% portion of a teacher's evaluation may be the part that tips the balance on job retention for an individual, yet that individual has no control over whole-school performance. He understood the principle of getting everyone involved and committed to a goal, but was concerned with possible consequences.
Mandatory Retention:
The task force was asked to consider whether Wisconsin should implement a mandatory retention policy. If so, what would it look like, and if not, what can be done to make sure students are reading at grade level?After a guest presentation and discussion, the consensus of the task force was that Wisconsin should not have mandatory retention. Reasons cited were negative effects on later achievement, graduation, self esteem, and psychological well-being. Third grade was felt to be far too late to start intervention, and there needs to be more emphasis on developing teacher expertise and focusing on the responsibility of teachers, principals, and higher education as opposed to threatening the students with retention. Retention without changing the curriculum for the student the following year is pointless.
Dr. Elaine Allensworth, a director at the Consortium on Chicago School Research, joined the task force by telephone to summarize the outcomes of a mandatory retention project in Chicago. Students more than 1 year below the cut-off level on certain tested skills were retained unless they passed the test after a summer bridge program. Students identified as at-risk were given after-school tutoring during the year. Retention was thought to have three primary mechanisms that would affect student performance: motivation for students, families, and teachers to work harder, supplemental instruction after school and during the summer, and an additional year in the grade for failing students. All students in the school could be affected by the motivation and the supplemental instruction, but only the retained students by the extra year of instruction. The study found that the threat of retention worked as a positive motivator for teachers, parents, and some older students. However, there were also negatives in terms of higher-achieving students receiving less attention, more time on test preparation, and an instructional shift to focus on tested skills. The supplemental instruction, especially the summer bridge program, was the biggest positive of the retention project. There was high participation, increased personal attention, and higher-quality instruction. Retention itself had more negative effects than positive. Academic gains were either non-existent or rapidly-disappearing. Multiple year retentions resulted in a problematic mix of ages in classrooms, students unable to finish high school by age 18, and a negative overall attitude toward school.
Dykstra said it appeared that the impetus to do things differently because of the threat of retention had some benefit, but the actual retention had either no effect or a negative effect. He wondered if there was some way to provide the motivation without retention.
Allensworth agreed that the challenge was to provide a motivation without having a threat.
Pils asked if third graders could even understand the threat of retention.
Allensworth replied that they understood if teachers helped them. She also said that some schools with low-quality instruction had no way to improve student learning even with the threat of retention.Rep. Jason Fields asked how you could avoid teaching to the test.
Allensworth replied that teaching the skills on the test was productive, but not the excessive time that was spent on test-taking strategies. She also said the tendency to teach more narrowly could cause problems later in high school where students needed to be able to participate in broader learning.
Marcia Henry inquired about students who returned to their old rate of learning when they returned to the regular classroom after successfully completing the summer bridge.
Allensworth replied that the summer program used higher quality curriculum and teachers, there was more time provided with students, and the students were more highly motivated.
Dykstra asked if it was possible to determine how much of the summer gain was due to student motivation, and how much due to teachers or parents.
Allensworth said those factors could not be pulled apart.Champeau questioned whether the summer bridge program taught to the test.
Allensworth replied that it taught in a good way to the skills that the test assessed.Brown asked if intervention was provided for the first time in third grade.
Allensworth replied that some schools began providing intervention and retaining in first or second grade.Dykstra asked if the project created a situation where a majority of the school's resources were concentrated in third grade, leaving other grades short.
Allensworth said they didn't look at that, though some schools appeared to put their better teachers at certain grades.Dykstra thought it was the wrong approach to tie services and supports to a specific grade rather than a specific student.
Are some types of consequences necessary to achieve the urgency and intensity necessary for performance improvement? Should there be mandatory summer school or other motivators? The task force did not seem to arrive at a consensus on this.
Lander said schools need the resources to do early intervention, plus information on what should be done in early intervention, and this is not currently the case in Wisconsin.
Pils questioned where teachers would find the time to provide intervention. She liked the idea of after-school and summer programs as well as reading the classics to kids. Providing a model of best instruction is important for teachers who don't have that background.
Mary Read commented on Bill Gates' experience with spending a lot of money for minimal results, and the conclusion that money needs to go into teacher training and proven programs such as the Kipp schools or into a national core curriculum.
Dykstra noted that everyone agrees that teacher training is essential, but there is disagreement as to curriculum and training content. His experience is that teachers are generally unable to pinpoint what is going wrong with a student's reading. We must understand how poor and widespread current teacher training is, apologize to teachers, and then fix the problem, but not at teachers' expense.
The facilitators asked what the policy should be. Is there an alternative to using retention? Should teacher re-training be mandatory for those who need the support?Evers said that a school-by-school response does not work. The reforms in Milwaukee may have some relevance.
Olsen suggested that there are some reading programs that have been proven successful. If a school is not successful, perhaps they should be required to choose from a list of approved instructional methods and assessment tools, show their results, and monitor program fidelity. He feels we have a great resource in successful teachers in Wisconsin and other states, and the biggest issue is agreeing on programs that work for intervention and doing it right the first time.
Kestell said some major problems are teachers with high numbers of failing students, poor teacher preparation, the quality of early childhood education, and over-funding of 4K programs without a mandate on how that money is used. There has been some poor decision-making, and the kids are not responsible for that. We must somehow hold schools, school board, and individual educators accountable.
Champeau said teachers have no control over how money is spent. This accountability must be at the school and district level. More resources need to be available to some schools depending on the needs of their student population.
Lander: We must provide the necessary resources to identified schools.Dykstra: We must develop an excellent system of value-added data so we can determine which schools are actually doing well. Right now we have no way of knowing. High-performing schools may actually be under-performing given their student demographics; projected student growth will not be the same in high and low performing schools.
Pedriana: We have long known how to teach even the most at-risk readers with evidence-based instruction. The truth is that much of our teacher training and classroom instruction is not evidence-based. We need the collective will to identify the evidence base on which we will base our choices, and then apply it consistently across the state. The task force has not yet taken on this critical question.
Pils: In her experience, she feels Wisconsin teachers are among the best in the country. There are some gaps we need to close.
Pedriana: Saying how good we are does not help the kids who are struggling.
Pils: We need to have our best teachers in the inner city, and teachers should not need to purchase their own supplies. We have to be careful with a limited list of approved programs. This may lead to ethics violations.Pedriana: Referring to Pils' mention of Wisconsin's high graduation rates in a previous meeting, what does our poor performance on the NAEP reading test say about our graduation standards?
Michael Brickman (Governor's aide): There is evidence of problems when you do retention, and evidence of problems when you do nothing. We can't reduce the failing readers to zero using task force recommendations, so what should we do with students who leave 3rd grade not reading anywhere near grade level? Should we have mandatory summer school?
Henry: Response to Intervention (RTI) is a perfect model for intervening early in an appropriate way. A summer bridge program is excellent if it has the right focus. We must think more realistically about the budget we will require to do this intervention.
Olsen: If we do early intervention, we should have a very small number of kids who are still behind in 3rd grade. Are we teaching the right, most efficient way? We spend a lot of money on K-12 education in Wisconsin, but we may need to set priorities in reading. There is enough money to do it. Reading should be our mission at each grade level.
Facilitator: What will be the "stick" to make people provide the best instruction?
Dykstra: Accountability needs to start at the top in the state's education system. When the same people continue to make the same mistakes, yet there are no consequences, we need to let some people go. That is what they did in Massachusetts and Florida: start with two or three people in whom you have great confidence, and build from there.
Facilitator: Is there consensus on mandatory summer school for failing students?
Michele Erickson: Summer school is OK if the right resources are available for curriculum and teachers.Kestell: All grades 4K - 3 are gateway grades. They are all important.
Champeau: Summer school is a good idea, but we would need to solve transportation issues.
Dykstra: We should open up the concept of summer school beyond public schools to any agency that offers quality instruction using highly qualified instructors from outside the educational establishment.
Lander: Supports Dykstra's idea. You can't lay summer instruction on schools that can hardly educate during the school year.
Brown: Could support summer school in addition to, but not in place of, early intervention during the school year.
Erickson: Look at the school year first when allocating resources. Summer school is a hard sell to families.
Pedriana: Agrees with Olsen that we probably have sufficient funds for the school year, but we need to spend it more wisely. We cannot expect districts to make the commitment to extra instruction if there is no accountability at the top (including institutions of higher education). We need to resolve the issue of what knowledge and content standards will be taught before we address summer school or other issues.
Milwaukee Public Schools' tiered RTI system was presented by DPI's Troy Couillard as an example of an accountability system. MPS chose a new core reading program for 2010-11 after submitting its research base to DPI. Teachers were provided with some in-service training, and there are some site checks for fidelity of implementation. Tier 2 interventions will begin in 2011-12, and Tier 3 interventions in 2012-13. He felt that the pace of these changes, plus development of a data accountability system, student screening with MAP and other testing, progress monitoring, and professional development, has MPS moving much faster than most districts around the county on implementing RTI. DPI embedded RTI in the district's Comprehensive Literacy Plan. DPI is pushing interventions that are listed on the National RTI site, but teachers are allowed to submit research for things they are using to see if those tools might be used.
Pils: Kids in MPS are already struggling. Reading First would suggest that they have 120 minuets of reading a day instead of the 90 minutes provided in the MPS plan.
Couillard: Tier 2 intervention for struggling students will add onto the 90 minutes of core instruction.
Olsen: Can this system work statewide without DPI monitoring all the districts?
Couillard: Districts are trained to monitor their own programs.
Pils: Veteran schools with proven strategies could be paired with struggling schools as mentors and models.
Pedriana: We have no way of knowing what proven strategies are unless we discuss what scientific evidence says works in reading. The task force must grapple with this question.
Brickman: Read to Lead task force needs to start with larger questions and then move to finer grain; this task force may not be able to do everything.
Pedriana: Is there anything more important for this task force to do than to decide what evidence-based reading instruction is?Brickman: Task force members may submit suggestions for issues to discuss at the final meeting in September. Tony could submit some sample language on "evidence-based instruction" as a starting point for discussion.
Henry: The worst schools should be required to at least have specific guidelines, whether it is a legislative or DPI issue. Teacher retraining (not a 1-day workshop) is a necessity. Teachers are unprepared to teach.
Olsen: Wisconsin has always been a local control state, but one of the outcomes of the task force may be that we have a method for identifying schools that are not doing well, and then intervene with a plan. The state is ultimately responsible for K-12 education. Districts should take the state blueprint or come up with their own for approval by the state.
Erickson: Can we define what will work so districts can just do it?
Evers: MPS experience shows there is a process that works, and districts can do their own monitoring.
Dykstra: Sees value in making a list of things that districts are not allowed to do in reading instruction; also value in making a list of recommended programs based on alignment with the convergence of the science of reading research. That list would not be closed, but it should not include programs based on individual, publisher-funded studies that do not align with the convergence of the science. This could be of benefit to all districts. Even those doing relatively well could be doing better. Right now there is no list, and no learning targets. The MPS plan contains the Wisconsin Model Early Learning Standards, which contain errors. DPI needs to correct that information and distribute it right now. That would be a good example of accountability at the state level.
Couillard: The new statewide data collection system will help districts monitor their own data.
Champeau: School needs change depending on demographics. The goal should be to build decision-making capacity at the local level, not dictation from outside. We should be talking more about people than programs. Have MPS teachers been doing a better job? What will they do if their program goes away? We need to work on the underlying expertise and knowledge base.
Facilitator: There appears to be agreement that the state can intervene in failing districts.
Lander: We might have some consensus as to what teachers need to know, and then go into schools to see if they know it. If not, we need to teach them.
Pedriana: What is so bad about providing a program, with training, of course? It would help people.Facilitator: There is consensus around training of teachers.
Dykstra: Some of the distinction between training and programs is artificial. You need both.
Other things the state could require: weighting of reading in evaluation systems, grading of schools etc.
Dykstra: If giving schools grades, they should get separate grades for how they do in teaching separate content areas. In addition, everything should be reported in the best value-added system we can create, because it's the only way to know if you're doing a good job.
Pils: Doesn't like grading of schools. She has a whole folder on cheating in districts that have grading of schools and high stakes tests.Evers: Do we just want to measure what schools are doing, or do we want to use it to leverage change?
Erickson: Wisconsin has gone from 3rd to 30th on the NAEP, so of course we should be seeking change.
Walker: The idea is not to pick on failing schools, but to help them. We must be able to deploy the resources to the things that work in accordance with science and research to teach reading right.
Dykstra: We should seek small kernels of detailed information about which teachers consistently produce better results in a given type of school for a given type of student. There is a problem with reliability when using MAP data at an individual student level.
Supt. Evers talked about the new state accountability system as being a better alternative to no Child Left Behind. Governor Walker said the state is not just doing this as an alternative to NCLB, but in response to comments from business that our graduates are not well-prepared. Parents want to know what all schools are doing.Olsen: We need a system to monitor reading in Wisconsin before we get into big trouble. Our changing population is leading us to discover challenges that other states have dealt with for years.
Kestell: The accountability design team is an excellent opportunity to discuss priorities in education; a time to set aside personal agendas and look for solutions that work.
Next Meeting/Status of Report
Michael Brickman will try to send out a draft of a report the week of August 29 with his best interpretation of task force consensus items. The final meeting will be Sept. 27, perhaps in Madison, Eau Claire, or Wausau. Some task force issues will need to be passed on to other task forces in the future.
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The grass isn't greener and the teachers aren't really keener at some other school.If you are the parent of an elementary-age school kid, I'm going to offer you some unsolicited advice: the best school for your child is most likely your neighbourhood school.
Not the school across the city with the cool-sounding special program.
Not the school many blocks away where the provincial tests scores for Grade 3 and Grade 6 are higher than those in your own school.
No, the best choice is usually the community school, the one within walking distance, the school of your neighbours and their children, who will soon be your acquaintances and maybe even your very good friends, but only if your children attend that neighbourhood school.
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Such gloom must be placed in context. Doubts about the humanities have been around at least since Aristophanes wrote The Clouds. The playwright claimed that if a man engaged in the "new" Socratic form of teaching and questioning, he could wind up with big genitals (apparently seen as a negative side effect) due to a loss of self-control. But the Socratic humanities survived, in spite of the execution of their founder, through the schools of his intellectual son and grandson -- the Academy of Plato and the Lyceum of Aristotle.I don't think that the humanities are really in a crisis, though perhaps they have a chronic illness. Bachelor's degrees in the humanities have held relatively steady since 1994 at roughly 12-13 percent of all majors. Such figures demonstrate that the health of the humanities is not robust, as measured in terms of student preferences. In contrast, the number of undergraduate business majors is steadily and constantly increasing.
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As Zack Zbar gets ready to apply to colleges this fall, his parents have established one important ground rule. Jeff, a Florida writer, and his wife Robbie, a nurse practitioner, would like to send their son to the best college he can get into, but they don't intend to go into debt to make that happen. They'll look for grants and scholarships, or they'll turn to an in-state option. "If we can't afford it, then we have some reckoning to do," says Jeff, 47.A growing number of parents are rethinking how much they're willing to spend on a child's college tuition. According to a report released last week by student lender Sallie Mae, about 51% of parents "strongly agreed" that they would stretch financially to to send their children to college, down from 64% of parents last year; about the same number said they would go into debt to do so, down from 59%. It marks the first time those numbers have dropped since the firm began the survey in 2007.
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Drawn by the desire to stay on the road and lower auto insurance costs, a growing number of older Americans are signing up for driving school. But some of the fastest-growing classes aren't behind the wheel. They're behind a keyboard.That's right: Adults can now take driver's ed without ever sitting in a car labeled "student driver" or making a single three-point turn. Instead, online classes -- typically four to eight hours in total screen time -- have become the fastest way for adults to brush up before a driving test or secure a discount on auto insurance. The AARP's online driver safety course had more than 60,000 students nationwide in 2010, up 30% from a year earlier. By July of this year, another 40,000 had already enrolled. Participation in the American Automobile Association's national online senior driving course has also increased an average of 20% per year over the last three years. "There's been an increasing level of interest from seniors," says Wade Mezey, president of Professional Driving Associates, which runs an online defensive driving course.
But when it comes to actually being a better driver, experts and driving instructors say online courses might not help. "Research shows that classroom programs don't really impact positively on driving performance," says Normand Teasdale, a professor at the University Laval in Quebec, who studies driving patterns among seniors. "You need to practice and get feedback over and over again to improve performance."
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Weeks after Indiana began the nation's broadest school voucher program, thousands of students have transferred from public to private schools, causing a spike in enrollment at some Catholic institutions that were only recently on the brink of closing for lack of pupils.
It's a scenario public school advocates have long feared: Students fleeing local districts in large numbers, taking with them vital tax dollars that often end up at parochial schools. Opponents say the practice violates the separation of church and state.In at least one district, public school principals have been pleading with parents not to move their children.
"The bottom line from our perspective is, when you cut through all the chaff, nobody can deny that public money is going to be taken from public schools, and they're going to end up in private, mostly religious schools," said Nate Schnellenberger, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association.
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Today's map comes a day late - we've been hard at work getting the data ready. We've updated our interactive State Migration Calculator with the latest IRS data, and it now includes migration in 2008-09. I've used the new data to create a map of interstate movement of income over the past decade. Florida is the big winner - migrants bought a net $70 billion dollars in annual income into the state between 1999 and 2009. New York, on the other hand, lost the most income: $45 billion.
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If you saw Waiting for "Superman," Steven Brill's tale in Class Warfare will be familiar. The founder of Court TV offers another polemic against teacher unions and a paean to self-styled "education reformers." But even for those who follow education policy, he offers an eye-opening read that should not be missed. Where the movie evoked valiant underdogs waging an uphill battle against an ossified behemoth, Brill's briskly written book exposes what critics of the reformers have long suspected but could never before prove: just how insular, coordinated, well-connected, and well-financed the reformers are. Class Warfare reveals their single-minded efforts to suppress any evidence that might challenge their mission to undermine the esteem in which most Americans held their public schools and teachers. These crusaders now are the establishment, as arrogant as any that preceded them.Brill's heroes make a high-profile gallery. They are public-school critics like former New York and Washington, D.C. schools chancellors Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee. They also include charter school operators David Levin (KIPP) and Eva Moskowitz (Harlem Success Academies), as well as alternative teacher and principal recruiters Wendy Kopp (Teach for America) and Jon Schnur (New Leaders for New Schools). Their ranks boast billionaires Bill Gates and Eli Broad, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and President Obama himself. And they don't lack for savvy, richly endowed representation. Democrats for Education Reform, a lobbying, political action, and communications campaign rolled into one, has brought them all together. Lavishly supported by the newfound wealth of young Wall Street hedge fund managers answerable to no one, DFER's troops have been working overtime to radically transform American public education.
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At first glance, the ongoing lawsuit between the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association and Gannett Newspapers might seem like the Iran-Iraq War, or a Bears-Vikings game -- fans of neither side might wonder if both could lose.The WIAA, the sanctioning body for Wisconsin high school athletics, sued Gannett after The Post~Crescent live-streamed several football playoff games in 2008. If a media organization wants to broadcast or stream postseason games, it must get the WIAA's permission, pay a fee, and adhere to various other rules:
Internet blogs, forums, tweets and other text depictions or references are permitted and are not subject to rights fees unless they qualify as play-by-play (see definition below) or are not in compliance with the media policies of the WIAA. Play-by-play accounts of WIAA Tournament Series events via text are subject to text transmission rights fees.
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Like many North American college students, I am an experienced binge drinker. Most weekend nights during my undergraduate years, I would "pregame" with my dorm mates, before moving to local bars, and then one of my college town's crappy dance clubs, before staggering home, and, often, ending up with my head perched above the toilet. As part of my college's crew team, I would celebrate our victories (and losses) by drinking half-liters of vodka straight out of the bottle. And I would often make my way to my morning classes feeling like one of the worms from "Tremors" had just tried to wedge itself into my forehead.In retrospect, all of this sounds both obnoxious and exhausting, but when I was 18 years old, drinking held a real, magical appeal. When drunk, I would feel socially skilled, and wonderfully impulsive, and far more fun than I'd ever been before. I was drawn to alcohol because it allowed me to escape my natural shyness and bond with people I barely even knew.
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While most adults agree with President Obama that a world-class education is the most important factor in the success of America's children and status in the world, most don't think U.S. public schools provide that level of education.The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of American Adults shows that 61% agree with President Obama when he says "a world-class education is the single most important factor in determining not just whether our kids can compete for the best jobs but whether America can out-compete countries around the world." Twenty-five percent (25%) disagree with that statement, while another 14% are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
However, only 26% believe U.S. public schools provide a world-class education. A majority (62%) does not think American public schooling provides that level of education, while another 12% are not sure.
The survey of 1,000 Adults was conducted on August 20-21, 2011 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.
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It's rare to hear the word "education" from Tennessee's leaders without "reform" coming after it.Three years ago, the state began rewriting its curriculum and rethinking the way it dealt with educators. The resulting changes won Tennessee a half-billion-dollar federal grant to attempt to move students from among the lowest-achieving in the nation to the top of the pack.
The state is birthing charter schools at a brisk pace, from none seven years ago to 40 today and, some estimate, up to 20 per year moving forward.
Teachers will be judged routinely on their classroom performance and their students' test scores. Individual districts are rolling out their own reforms, such as Williamson County's invitation for students to bring their own technology and Metro Nashville's dividing of high school students into specific areas of study called academies.
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The Innovative Educator, via a kind James Dias email:
Earlier this year, I shared my disappointment with Fast Company's compilation of "13 Radical Ideas for Spending $100 Million to Overhaul Schools" The problem was that these ideas really just weren't all that radical. Even Will Richardson, who was featured in the article, commented on my blog that he agreed (see comment here). Richardson did feature a radical idea in his own blog a few years back in his post, One Town's Reform...Close the Schools. The article explains how a UK community shut down its 11 schools replacing them with dynamic learning centers that looked very different than traditional compulsory schools. According to their site, they are still going strong.The learning center idea has certainly taken off as more and more people are realizing that the compulsory, oppressive, disconnected, test-driven schools that exist today are not the best option when it comes to preparing children for success in the world.
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Marcia Henry, via a kind Chan Stroman-Roll email:
Fifteen years ago, Wisconsin fourth-graders placed third in the country in state rankings of reading ability known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. By 2009, our fourth-graders' scores plunged to 30th, with a third of the students reading below basic levels. The scores of minority youth were even bleaker, with 65% of African-American and 50% of Hispanic students scoring in the below-basic range.Related: Wisconsin's "Read to Lead" task force and "a Capitol Conversation" on reading.As a member of Gov. Scott Walker's blue ribbon reading task force, I am one of 14 people charged with reversing that drop. And, as a 50-year veteran educator, I have a partial solution. Let me spell it out for you: We need better teacher preparation.
How many of you remember your very best teachers? I remember Miss Hickey at Lincoln School and Miss Brauer at Folwell School in Rochester, Minn. They taught me to read.
I travel throughout the country consulting and providing staff development for school districts and literacy organizations. I've met thousands of dedicated teachers who tell me they are unprepared to teach struggling readers.
This situation is not the teachers' fault. Some teachers in Wisconsin had only one course in reading instruction. Most were never exposed to the latest research regarding early reading acquisition and instruction. In contrast, several states require three or four classes in courses that contain the latest in science-based reading instruction.
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The number of arrests and citations for incidents at Madison's four main high schools dropped last year to the lowest level in more than a decade, according to police data.Related: Madison police calls near local high schools: 1996-2006.But arrests and citations at West and Memorial were twice the number at East and La Follette -- a reversal of the situation 10 years earlier when there were more than twice as many at the city's East Side high schools.
West was the only school with an increase from the previous year.
The Wisconsin State Journal obtained the data from the Madison Police Department amid a debate over whether the Madison School District should use drug-sniffing police dogs in random sweeps of high schools. The School Board was to consider the issue Monday but delayed a vote until late September -- in part to review the arrest and citation data.
District officials say an increase in drug-related disciplinary referrals in recent years, and the use of drug dogs in area school districts, support the use of police dogs. Community surveys also have showed strong support.
Luis Yudice, the School District's security coordinator, who introduced the drug-sniffing dog proposal with the support of Madison police, is concerned drugs in schools can lead to more gang activity, fights and weapons in schools as students arm themselves in self-defense. He views the police dog policy as a possible deterrent that could prevent a crisis.
Gangs & School Violence Forum Audio/Video.
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Recent controversy over one state's use of the funds in its college savings plans has raised new concerns for parents and students across the country with money in 529 plans.In a game of fiscal hot potato, the Nevada legislature re-allocated money from a state scholarship fund to the state's budget gap last year; the state later took $4.2 million worth of accumulated fees from 529 plan reserves to cover the shortfall in the scholarship fund, according to a recent report from the Nevada Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank. The plans' overseers had other intentions -- traditionally, those monies have been used to support the plans -- and critics now say the result could be higher fees and a weaker prepaid tuition plan.
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The start of the school year isn't normally the time for issuing report cards. But it's been an unusual and momentous year, so as the first day of classes approaches for almost every school in the state, here's a report card on what I'll call the war against the triangle.Last winter, before Scott Walker was sworn in as governor, a leading Republican told a group of people (according to a reliable person who was present) that there was a triangle that was blocking the path to educational improvement in Wisconsin and his party was going to take out each leg of the triangle.
What were the legs?
Teachers unions, particularly the Wisconsin Education Association Council. WEAC spent hugely on political campaigns and was pro-Democratic. It also was the largest lobbying force in the Capitol. WEAC represented the unwillingness of teachers organizations to change and the need to get rid of most collective bargaining matters.
The state Department of Public Instruction, which represented the status quo, overregulation of schools and how things couldn't change if they were in the hands of government bureaucrats.
Milwaukee Public Schools, which represented - well, which represented Milwaukee Public Schools. Or, to put it another way, a money pit where there was never any positive change.
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Most parents can safely assume that if their kids are at large, they're also online. What they're doing in cyberspace is another matter. With sexting and cyber-bullying in the headlines, a new set of programs is promising to help parents keep track.Already some 50% of parents have installed software or another monitoring program to keep tabs on their kids' online activities, more than double the parents who had three years ago, according to software company Symantec. But unlike the old offerings, which typically monitor only the home computer, the new programs are specifically aimed at today's hyper-mobile, socially-networked teens. For up to $100 per month, they promise to keep track of online posts and communiqu s that show up on your kid's social networking accounts from wherever a teen sends them -- via a laptop, smartphone or even a friend's iPad. "Parents feel overwhelmed and out-gunned with the level of social media their kids are using," says Caroline Knorr, a spokeswoman for advocacy group Common Sense Media. "These programs can offer a measure of control and supervision."
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Never have there been so many choices in the field of international Higher Education than at present. One is faced with questions of affordability and language, both of which can be tackled with guidance in the right direction. To my mind, USA provides the best all round education I can think of. Buckminster Fuller, one of the best known academic personalities of this time said that in his study of many scientists he found most of them had their first Degrees from a Liberal Arts College. "The Liberal Education offered by the Americans is truly a gift to mankind." A Sri Lankan Professor when speaking in the USA last year at one of the better known Liberal Arts colleges said pretty much the same thing namely that the American Universities offer the finest education in the many disciplines students choose today.The generosity of the American world of Higher Education cannot be bettered. From Ivy League Universities down to the simple Community Colleges, offers of financial aid ranges from 100% downwards depending on the financial standing of the University. Hundres of Sri Lankans have benefitted by this generosity and continue to do so thanks to good advisors like Principals of International schools, alumni from USA and those who work closely with the Admission offices of American Colleges like Mr. and Mrs. P Dissanayake of Scholarships for USA (PVT) Ltd who have partnered Asian International School in many placements.
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The president of the College Board, the nonprofit owner of the SAT entrance exam, has seen his compensation triple since 1999 and now gets more than the head of the American Red Cross, which has more than five times the revenue.The value of Gaston Caperton's compensation was $1.3 million including deferred compensation in 2009, according to tax filings, also surpassing that of the president of Harvard University. Richard Ferguson, the now-retired chief executive officer of rival testing company ACT Inc., got compensation valued at $1.1 million. Nineteen executives at the New York- based College Board got more than $300,000.
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TEACHERS NOT ENOUGH? WHO KNEW?
It is settled wisdom among Funderpundits and those to whom they give their grants that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality.
However, a small number of dissenting voices have begun to speak. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, in Academically Adrift have suggested that (p. 131) "Studying is crucial for strong academic performance..." and "Scholarship on teaching and learning has burgeoned over the past several decades and has emphasized the importance of shifting attention from faculty teaching to student learning..."
This may seem unacceptably heterodox to those in government and the private sector who have committed billions of dollars to focusing on the selection, training, supervision, and control of K-12 teachers, while giving no thought to whether K-12 students are actually doing the academic work which they are assigned.
In 2004, Paul A. Zoch, a teacher from Texas, wrote in Domed to Fail (p. 150) that: "Let there be no doubt about it: the United States looks to its teachers and their efforts, but not to its students and their efforts, for success in education." More recently, and less on the fringe of this new concern, Diane Ravitch wrote in Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010) (p. 162) that "One problem with test-based accountability, as currently defined and used, is that it removes all responsibility from students and their families for the students' academic performance. NCLB neglected to acknowledge that students share in the responsibility for their academic performance and that they are not merely passive recipients of their teachers' influence."
There are necessarily problems in turning attention toward the work of students in judging the effectiveness of schools. First, all the present attention is on teachers, and it is not easy to turn that around. Second, teachers are employees and can be fired, while students can not. It could not be comfortable for the Funderpundits and their beneficiaries to realize that they may have been overlooking the most important variable in student academic achievement all this time.
In February, when the Associated Press reported that Natalie Monroe, a high school English teacher in Pennsylvania, had called her students, on a blog, "disengaged, lazy whiners," and "noisy, crazy, sloppy, lazy LOAFERS," the response of the school system was not to look more closely at the academic efforts of the students, but to suspend the teacher. As one of her students explained, "As far as motivated high school students, she's completely correct. High school kids don't want to do anything...(but) It's a teacher's job...to give students the motivation to learn."
It would seem that no matter who points out that "You can lead a student to learning, but you can't make him drink," our system of schools and Funderpundits sticks with its wisdom that teachers alone are responsible for student academic achievement.
While that is wrong, it is also stupid. Alfred North Whitehead (or someone else) once wrote that; "For education, a man's books and teachers are but a help, the real work is his."
As in the old story about the drunk searching under the lamppost for his keys, those who control funds for education believe that as long as all their money goes to paying attention to what teachers are doing, who they are, how they are trained, and so on, they can't see the point of looking in the darkness at those who have the complete and ultimate control over how much academic achievement there will be--namely the students.
Apart from scores on math and reading tests after all, student academic work is ignored by all those interested in paying to change the schools. What students do in literature, Latin, chemistry, history, and Asian history classes is of no interest to them. Liberal education is not only on the back burner for those focused on basic skills and job readiness as they define them, but that burner is also turned off at present.
This situation will persist as long as those funding programs and projects for reform in education pay no attention to the actual academic work of our students. And students, who see little or no pressure to be other than "disengaged lazy whiners" will continue to pay the price for their lack of education, both in college and at work, and we will continue to draw behind in comparison with those countries who realize that student academic achievement has always been, and will always be, mainly dependent on diligent student academic work.
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics(r)
www.tcr.org/blog
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Textbook pirates have struck again. Nearly three years after publishers shut down a large Web site devoted to illegally trading e-textbooks, a copycat site has sprung up--with its leaders arguing that it is operating overseas in a way that will be more difficult to stop.The new site, LibraryPirate, quietly started operating last year, but it began a public-relations blitz last week, sending letters to the editor to several news sites, including The Chronicle, in which it called on students to make digital scans of their printed textbooks and post them to the site for free online.
Such online trading violates copyright law, but some people have apparently been adding pirated versions of e-textbooks to the site's directory. The site now boasts 1,700 textbooks, organized and searchable. Downloading the textbooks requires a peer-to-peer system called BitTorrent, and the LibraryPirate site hosts a step-by-step guide to using it.
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Angela Gartner and Jean Bonchak:
School districts in they future won't just receive report card ratings from the state, they will be ranked from best to worst in a new system.The mandate in Gov. Kasich's $112 billion executive budget was handed to the Ohio Department of Education to devise the ranking procedure.
The listing may be ready for the beginning of the 2012-2013 school year, according to ODE spokesperson Patrick Gallaway.
The ODE is now required to rank schools within comparable groupings on the basis of student results and cost effectiveness, according to the fifth book of the governor's budget containing selected reforms.
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UW-Madison Professor Mark Seidenberg and I had an informative conversation with two elected officials at the Capitol recently.
I am thankful for Mark's time and the fact that both Luther Olsen and Steve Kestell along with staff members took the time to meet. I also met recently with Brett Hulsey and hope to meet with more elected officials, from both parties.
The topic du jour was education, specifically the Governor's Read to Lead task force.
Mark kindly shared this handout:
My name is Mark Seidenberg, Hilldale Professor and Donald O. Hebb Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, seidenberg@wisc.edu, http://lcnl.wisc.edu. I have studied how reading works, how children learn to read, reading disabilities, and the brain bases of reading for over 30 years. I am a co-author of a forthcoming report from the National Research Council (National Academy of Sciences) on low literacy among older adolescents and adults. I'm writing a general audience book about reading research and educational practices.I am cautiously optimistic that we may see an improvement in Wisconsin's K-12 curricular standards.We have a literacy problem: about 30% of the US (and WI) population reads at a "basic" or "below basic" level. Literacy levels are particularly low among poor and minority individuals. The identification of this problem does not rest on any single test (e.g., NAEP, WKCE, OECD). Our literacy problem arises from many causes, some of which are not easy to address by legislative fiat. However, far more could be done in several important areas.
1. How teachers are taught. In Wisconsin as in much of the US, prospective teachers are not exposed to modern research on how children develop, learn, and think. Instead, they are immersed in the views of educational theorists such as Lev Vygotsky (d. 1934) and John Dewey (d. 1952). Talented, highly motivated prospective teachers are socialized into beliefs about children that are not informed by the past 50 years of basic research in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience.
A vast amount is known about reading in particular, ranging from what your eyes do while reading to how people comprehend documents to what causes reading disabilities. However, there is a gulf between Education and Science, and so this research is largely ignored in teacher training and curriculum development.
2. How children are taught. There continue to be fruitless battles over how beginning readers should be taught, and how to insure that comprehension skills continue to develop through middle and high school. Teachers rely on outdated beliefs about how children learn, and how reading works. As a result, for many children, learning to read is harder than it should be. We lose many children because of how they are taught. This problem does NOT arise from "bad teachers"; there is a general, systematic problem related to teacher education and training in the US.
3. Identification of children at risk for reading failures. Some children are at risk for reading and school failure because of developmental conditions that interfere with learning to read. Such children can be identified at young ages (preschool, kindergarten) using relatively simple behavioral measures. They can also be helped by effective early interventions that target basic components of reading such as vocabulary and letter-sound knowledge. The 30% of the US population that cannot read adequately includes a large number of individuals whose reading/learning impairments were undiagnosed and untreated.
Recommendations: Improve teacher education. Mechanism: change the certification requirements for new teachers, as has been done in several other states. Certification exams must reflect the kinds of knowledge that teachers need, including relevant research findings from cognitive science and neuroscience. Instruction in these areas would then need to be provided by schools of education or via other channels. In-service training courses could be provided for current teachers (e.g., as on-line courses).
Children who are at risk for reading and schooling failures must be identified and supported at young ages. Although it is difficult to definitively confirm a reading/learning disability in children at young ages (e.g., 4-6) using behavioral, neuroimaging, or genetic measures, it is possible to identify children at risk, most of whom will develop reading difficulties unless intervention occurs, via screening that involves simple tests of pre-reading skills and spoken language plus other indicators. Few children just "grow out of" reading impairments; active intervention is required.
Related: Excellence in Education explains Florida's reading reforms and compares Florida's NAEP progress with Wisconsin's at the July 29th Read to Lead task force meeting and www.wisconsin2.org.
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There are two different types of charter schools in the City of Milwaukee, and by at least one measure, those not chartered by the Milwaukee Public Schools are performing better.Milwaukee's ACT scores rose in 2011, but they still weren't able to match the production of the city's non-union charter schools. In the end, the non-district charter schools left their instrumentality counterparts in the dust when it came to college readiness.
The city's non-instrumentality charter schools outperformed the MPS average when it came to the ACT, a selective college readiness test, in the past school year. These schools aren't operated or authorized by local school boards, and have been more successful in preparing students when weighed against the city's average. In the four qualifying high schools, students averaged a score of 18.8.
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There's just so much science, nature, music, arts, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven't seen. It's most likely not stuff that was made for them...But we don't underestimate kids around here.
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I was reminded of this story after reading about the lobbying some parents of Madison elementary school children do to get their kids assigned to teachers who match their "learning styles."What a contrast between a parent who's more or less OK with a school official delivering not only a beating, but an undeserved beating, and parents who seek to intervene in the basic decisions of professional educators.
Such lobbying and the district's willingness to hear it have "been a common thing as long as I can remember," said district public information officer Marcia Standiford, a former teacher and audio/visual specialist who has been with the district for 15 years. Parents of Madison elementary students have long been asked to fill out questionnaires about their kids to help in assigning them to teachers.
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In his rural district, which serves 249 students, the 2011-13 state budget has been nothing to celebrate. In fact, it has accelerated a difficult process of belt-tightening that's been going on for almost 20 years due to revenue controls that have limited the amount districts can increase taxes to keep up with rising costs. The revenue controls hit some schools especially hard, especially those with declining enrollment, high-needs students or high property values. The new state budget's huge reduction in overall aid for schools -- $793 million over the biennium -- accompanied by new limits on how much money districts can raise in property taxes to offset those losses -- has, for many school districts, made a bad situation worse.Related:According to Quinton, Pepin parents are supportive of education, and he credits his School Board and staff for helping run "a tight financial ship." Nonetheless, many of the district's programs and services have been trimmed once again, from transportation to teaching staff, athletics to academic assistance for at-risk students. Paring back has been a way of life in Pepin for many years, Quinton says, but the newest round of losses caused by this budget cut to the bone.
Wisconsin's essential challenge is to grow the economy. We've been falling behind Minnesota for decades.
The U.S. economy will have another big budget deficit in fiscal 2011 and faces at least a couple more years of sluggish growth, as the effects of the recent recession persist, government forecasters said Wednesday.The Congressional Budget Office projected a deficit of almost $1.3 trillion for fiscal 2011. Though that will mark the third straight year of deficits above $1 trillion, the deficit forecast was a slight improvement from the almost $1.4 trillion estimated in an April analysis and reflected higher-than-anticipated revenue from individual income taxes.
The outlook for the U.S. economy also remains challenging, with growth expected to remain too slow this year and next year to make a big dent in the unemployment rate. The jobless rate will fall to 8.9% by the end of calendar 2011 and 8.5% by the end of 2012, the forecast said, as the economy grows by 2.3% this year and 2.7% next year, measured from fourth quarter to fourth quarter.
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Students who take education classes at universities receive significantly higher grades than students who take classes in every other academic discipline. The higher grades cannot be explained by observable differences in student quality between education majors and other students, nor can they be explained by the fact that education classes are typically smaller than classes in other academic departments. The remaining reasonable explanation is that the higher grades in education classes are the result of low grading standards. These low grading standards likely will negatively affect the accumulation of skills for prospective teachers during university training. More generally, they contribute to a larger culture of low standards for educators.Key points in this Outlook:
Grades awarded in university education departments are consistently higher than grades in other disciplines.
Similarly, teachers in K-12 schools receive overwhelmingly positive evaluations.
Grade inflation in education departments should be addressed through administrative directives or external accountability in K-12 schools.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
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AFTER a summer of budget cuts in Washington and state capitals, we have only to look to our schools, when classes begin in the next few weeks, to see who will pay the price.The minimum required school day in West Virginia is already about the length of a "Harry Potter" double feature. In Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Milwaukee, summer school programs are being slashed or eliminated. In Oregon and California this year, students will spend fewer days in the classroom; in rural communities from New Mexico to Idaho, some students will be in school only four days a week.
For all the talk about balancing the budget for the sake of our children, keeping classrooms closed is a perverse way of giving them a brighter future.
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This year's entering college class of 2015 was born just as the Internet took everyone onto the information highway and as Amazon began its relentless flow of books and everything else into their lives. Members of this year's freshman class, most of them born in 1993, are the first generation to grow up taking the word "online" for granted and for whom crossing the digital divide has redefined research, original sources and access to information, changing the central experiences and methods in their lives. They have come of age as women assumed command of U.S. Navy ships, altar girls served routinely at Catholic Mass, and when everything from parents analyzing childhood maladies to their breaking up with boyfriends and girlfriends, sometimes quite publicly, have been accomplished on the Internet.Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List, providing a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall. The creation of Beloit's former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief and Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride, it was originally created as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references, and quickly became a catalog of the rapidly changing worldview of each new generation. Mindset List websites at Beloit College and at mindsetmoment.com, the media site webcast and their Facebook page receive more than a million hits annually.
Nief and McBride recently applied their popular format to 10 generations of Americans over 150 years in their new book, The Mindset Lists of American History: From Typewriters to Text Messages, What Ten Generations of Americans Think Is Normal (Wiley and Sons.).
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So far, this has been the summer of education task forces in Wisconsin.There's one addressing school accountability, another tackling how to help school districts implement new academic standards and a third devoted to improving third-grade reading proficiency. That doesn't even count other groups already in existence that are looking at reforming statewide tests or increasing teacher effectiveness.
"There's so many work groups and task forces operating right now, it's hard to keep track of them," said state Rep. Steve Kestell (R-Elkhart Lake), chairman of the Assembly Education Committee and a member of some of those task forces.
Keeping all of the task forces on track may also prove difficult.
Earlier this month, a member of the group charged with helping school districts implement new reading standards sent an open letter to members of the governor's Read to Lead Task Force expressing concerns about the approach that the state Department of Public Instruction was taking in developing a model reading curriculum. That letter was followed by another that recommended specific approaches that the task force should take. Dan Gustafson, a Madison-based pediatric neuropsychologist, said he wrote the letters because he was concerned that the DPI was moving ahead with a model reading curriculum without input from differing viewpoints on reading instruction.
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Cohen particularly focuses on UCLA and UC Berkeley as examples of the new trend in college admissions:Even colleges that shunned out-of-state students for years are showing a marked receptivity. The University of California's top campuses--Berkeley and UCLA--have doubled and even tripled their rosters of out-of-state kids. At UCLA, the total percentage of out-of-state kids is still relatively low: only about 7 percent of last year's entering class. But at Berkeley, it was a whopping 19 percent and will grow to 20 percent this year, according to Janet Gilmore, a university spokesperson. Five years ago, the percentage of out-of-state students at Berkeley was a mere 5 percent.My daughter was a beneficiary of this; she was accepted to both. I would not have thought she was competitive for either place as a pure out-of-stater even a few years ago. (It probably helps that very few private school kids in DC seem to apply to either UCLA or Cal; my daughter's friends at Sidwell Friends, National Cathedral School, and St. Albans, where my wife teaches, went en masse to Michigan, but very few of them apply to the University of California.) When we visited the two UC schools, the admissions people were explicit in saying they were looking for out-of-state and international admissions, partly to keep their reputations up but mostly for the money.At most of these world-class universities, admission is still very selective. The acceptance rate for out-of-state students at UCLA was only 30 percent last year. But that was still better than what California residents experienced, which was a 21 percent acceptance rate. And it even got a tad easier for out-of-staters compared with previous years. Five years ago, out-of-staters applying to UCLA were admitted only 21 percent of the time, compared with their California counterparts, who saw a 23 percent admit rate.
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Every year I tell students in a journalism seminar I teach about the junior reporter for The American Lawyer - the magazine I founded and edited -who committed a classic error when he submitted a draft of a profile about some lawyer in the news who had made it big. Midway through the article, the young reporter described a showcase this lawyer had in his office that displayed a bunch of combat medals. The reporter declared, matter-of-factly, that our legal hero had won the medals for his heroics in Vietnam, which was relevant, he added, because the lawyer made his war record and his lock-n-load approach to his work part of his pitch to potential clients.In the margin next to the statement about the lawyer having won the medals I wrote, "Who says?" When the reporter came to ask me what I had meant, I told him to check with the Pentagon about the supposed medals. Which the reporter did, and which caused a mini-scandal after we reported in our otherwise positive profile that our hero hadn't won them.
The story has three points. First, that reporters should believe nothing told to them by a biased source, especially when what they are being told is a checkable fact. Second, that while opinions deserve balanced reporting of both sides' views, facts are facts. They are knowable. The guy either got medals or he didn't. Third, the best way to test facts that you think you know is to put them in front of the person with the greatest stake in refuting them. In this case when we confronted the lawyer with the Pentagon's records that he had not won any medals, he produced no evidence to the contrary and, in fact, ultimately confessed his deception. Case closed.
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A municipal vote in Seoul on Wednesday over free school lunches is shaping up as a test of South Koreans' sentiment on government welfare spending, and the outcome is expected to influence races in parliamentary and presidential elections next year.Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon, a member of the conservative Grand National Party that controls the Parliament and presidency, pushed for the referendum as a challenge to the city council's decision to expand a free-lunch program.
The council, which is controlled by the opposition Democratic Party, earlier this year voted to provide free school lunches to all of Seoul's 850,000 elementary and middle-school students, at a cost of about $378 million a year. Supporters of the free-lunches-for-all policy say it removes the stigma that recipients of free lunches face.
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But it is a lesser-known and never-enforced section of the act that has become the center of the education debate in Missouri.This section, a consumer protection law of sorts, states:
"The board of education of each district in this state that does not maintain an accredited school pursuant to the authority of the state board of education ... shall pay the tuition of and provide transportation ... for each pupil resident therein who attends an accredited school in another district of the same or an adjoining county."
The act provides important relief under law for children living in unaccredited school districts by providing them with a mechanism for escaping their failing schools and enrolling in successful ones.
There currently are two unaccredited districts in Missouri, Riverview Gardens and St. Louis City.
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State-budget cuts forced many colleges and universities to make huge tuition hikes. Job losses siphoned money for college savings accounts.When home values nose-dived during the housing bust, students and parents lost the ability to tap home-equity lines for extra cash. The Dow's wild swings have chewed up balances in 529 college-saving accounts, which often include stocks.
"Parents are desperate," said April Osborn, executive director of the Arizona Commission for Postsecondary Education, which administers several federal and state grants that go to Arizona college students.
While college costs rise, there is less grant money to go around. Three state grants that awarded up to $2,000 to college students were suspended last year.
Two federal grants, including one that provided up to $3,000 for awardees, were eliminated and won't be available starting this fall, she said.
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By putting RFIDs on children and monitoring their interactions over a single day, researchers have produced one of the most detailed analyses ever of the roiling, boiling social free-for-all that is school.The findings, published August 16 in Public Library of Science One, document the minute-by-minute interactions and locations of 232 children aged 6 to 12 and 10 teachers.
Reconfigured as pulsing network maps and flows of color are the universal experiences of middle school: the between-class rush, playground cliques, snatched hallway conversation and the fifth-graders who are too cool for everyone else.
"We can compare different types of assumptions or modeling with a model that takes into account all interactions," said Alain Barrat, who studies complex networks at the Institute of Scientific Interchange in Turin, Italy.
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More than ever before, cash-crunched state schools are looking for out-of-state applicants to balance their budgets. Steve Cohen on which schools offer the biggest advantage.Some kids apply to faraway colleges so they can break with their parents and party--er, study--in peace. But choosing a state school that's not where you live isn't just a good way to gain independence; it's a smart admissions tactic, too.
College-admissions season is upon us, and it promises to be just as competitive as last year. And one of best-kept secrets in college admissions this year is that many top state universities will be admitting more out-of-state applicants than ever before.
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If you didn't get the Madison School District's invitation to Thursday's meeting about a controversial proposal to let police bring drug-sniffing dogs into schools, don't take it personally; neither did School Board President James Howard.The meeting was for minority community leaders to ask questions and provide feedback about the proposal, which the School Board is expected to vote on Aug. 29.
School Board members weren't invited, which Howard, who learned about the meeting Wednesday from a television reporter, said is a problem.
"Board members should always be informed of these meetings," Howard said. "I don't know why the ball got dropped."
The School District's revamped communications department organized the meeting at the Urban League on South Park Street as part of a new outreach effort, said Marcia Standiford, the department's new manager.
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Andrew Hacker & Claudia Dreifus:
How do colleges manage it? Kenyon has erected a $70 million sports palace featuring a 20-lane olympic pool. Stanford's professors now get paid sabbaticals every fourth year, handing them $115,000 for not teaching. Vanderbilt pays its president $2.4 million. Alumni gifts and endowment earnings help with the costs. But a major source is tuition payments, which at private schools are breaking the $40,000 barrier, more than many families earn. Sadly, there's more to the story. Most students have to take out loans to remit what colleges demand. At colleges lacking rich endowments, budgeting is based on turning a generation of young people into debtors.As this semester begins, college loans are nearing the $1 trillion mark, more than what all households owe on their credit cards. Fully two-thirds of our undergraduates have gone into debt, many from middle class families, who in the past paid for much of college from savings. The College Board likes to say that the average debt is "only" $27,650. What the Board doesn't say is that when personal circumstances go wrong, as can happen in a recession, interest, late payment penalties, and other charges can bring the tab up to $100,000. Those going on to graduate school, as upwards of half will, can end up facing twice that.
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Half of all women who have graduated from a four-year college give the U.S. higher education system excellent or good marks for the value it provides given the money spent by students and their families; only 37% of male graduates agree. In addition, women who have graduated from college are more likely than men to say their education helped them to grow both personally and intellectually. These results of a nationwide Pew Research Center survey come at a time when women surpass men by record numbers in college enrollment and completion.The survey also found that while a majority of Americans believe that a college education is necessary in order to get ahead in life these days, the public is somewhat more inclined to see this credential as a necessity for a woman than for a man. Some 77% of respondents say this about women, while just 68% say it about men.
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A front-page August 16 Washington Times' headline screamed: "Scores show students aren't ready for college -- 75% may need remedial classes."Seventy-five percent is a number that gets people's attention. It isn't the usual trifling stuff the U.S. Department of Education puts out about math or reading scores being up by two percent one year and down by three percent the next. Add to that another finding reported in the same article: "A 2008 report by the education advocacy group Strong American Schools found that 80 percent of college students taking remedial classes had a high school GPA of 3.0 or better."
So are we saying that even when students score well, they don't know much? Apparently. Readers who have been following this series (see links to other articles below) may recall U.S. Commissioner of Education Statistics' Pascal D. Forgione, Jr., Ph.D., who famously admitted in a speech, "Our idea of 'advanced' is clearly below international standards."
According to the news article, "75 percent [of college freshmen] likely will spend part of their [first] year brushing up on high-school-level course work."
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With thousands of kids starting to pack for their first year at college or preparing to return after the summer break, now is a good time to talk to them about some important health and wellness issues on campus. To help parents figure out what to look for and worry about, School of Thought asked Dr. Drew Pinsky, the best-selling author and TV and radio host who has been dubbed the "surgeon general of youth culture" by the New York Times. On his college radar: prescription drugs, hook-up culture and processed food. As a practicing physician and the father of triplets, Dr. Drew isn't fielding abstract questions -- his own kids are starting university this fall.College isn't always a bastion of healthy living. Late nights, pizza and stress can't be good for you. What should parents talk to their children about when they leave for college?
Start with the easy stuff -- safety. In the [college] age group, accidents are a major cause of morbidity, and alcohol is often involved in some fashion. Remind students that they're on their own and are not invincible.
I've been to hundreds of colleges all over the country, and almost every one has an outstanding health and mental-health service. Tell them to take advantage of the screenings, services and mental-health services that are there if they need them.
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Apply. Visit campus. Complete the financial aid form. Get four years of free textbooks.First-year University of Dayton students can receive up to $4,000 over four years for textbooks by completing three steps of the fall 2012 application process by March 1.
"We want to help parents and students understand that from the very first day, a University of Dayton education is very rewarding," said Kathy McEuen Harmon, assistant vice president and dean of admission and financial aid.
"Through this initiative, we want to underscore that a University of Dayton education is affordable and we are committed to helping families in very tangible ways," she said.
With the economy still difficult, Harmon said the free textbook program will bring families clarity and certainty about one piece of the financial puzzle.
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The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire--we hold history's record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence.Aldous Huxley, The Perennial PhilosophyHuxley is talking about the radio and the newspaper, the carriers of noise at the start of the 20th century, but his words could just as well have been written today. Today, silence is a thing to be shunned, with the social ecosystem of apps and devices ready to help you do just that.
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Thanks to a thriving economy at home, an increasing number of Chinese students are attending U.S. graduate schools, according to a study to be released on Tuesday by a graduate-school industry group.Graduate schools saw a 21% increase in Chinese applicants from the last school year and a 23% increase in admissions offers, for students slated to start this fall, according to a study by the Council of Graduate Schools. It is the sixth year in a row of double-digit percentage increases for Chinese students.
Applications and offers were up sharply for international students overall, jumping 11% compared with 2010, according to the report. The study looked at data for a total of 591,739 applications to U.S. graduate schools by prospective international students for fall 2011.
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State auditors on Wednesday confirmed a report that found little difference in test scores between students in Milwaukee's school voucher program and those in the city's public schools.View the 950K PDF report, here.Wisconsin lawmakers had asked the state Legislative Audit Bureau to evaluate a study, conducted by privately funded education researchers, that analyzed test scores from both groups of students. The study had found no significant difference, a conclusion that state auditors also reached.
The researchers studied the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, a voucher program that allows low-income children in Milwaukee to attend private schools at taxpayers' expense. The two-year budget signed by Gov. Scott Walker in June repealed the enrollment limit for voucher schools in Milwaukee and expanded vouchers to schools in suburban Milwaukee and Racine.
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Dannen Chan Kim-wai vividly recalls the joy he felt when his son - "a lovely and healthy child" - was born in 2005. But there was a problem. As he grew, Rex didn't speak a word, he says."Friends comforted us with the usual words, saying that boys typically start talking later than girls. But when all my boy uttered was a single syllable 'da' at age two, we decided not to wait. We took him to the Child Assessment Centre. There he was diagnosed as having symptoms of autism."
Hong Kong is seeing a big leap in autism cases. Last year, the Health Department diagnosed about 1,500 children under the age of 12 with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) compared with 218 children in 2000. That is a five-fold increase over the past 10 years.
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Jeff Henriques, via email.
Many notes and links, here.
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on the 17th of never, 2011
Senator, please allow me to express my thanks for including me in these vital hearings on the readiness of our high school graduates for college work.
It would be my sad duty to report to you that if high school football coaches no longer ask their athletes to learn to block and tackle, that would fail to prepare them for college teams. Oh--wait, Senator, that is not correct. (Shuffles papers, starts over).
It would be my sad duty to report that if our high school basketball coaches no longer taught their athletes to dribble, pass, and shoot baskets, then they too would fail at basketball in college.
Oh--my apologies, Senator, that is not my testimony--just a little bad joke. Of course our high school coaches take athletics much too seriously to allow that sort of thing to happen to our kids. In fact, The Boston Globe has more than 100 pages a year on high school athletes. No, Senator, there is no coverage for high school academic achievement.
But I am sorry to have to report that our History and English teachers at the high school level no longer ask our students to read complete nonfiction books or to write substantial research papers, and naturally, this unfits them for the nonfiction books they will be asked to read and the substantial research papers they will be asked to write at the postsecondary level, in what we might call Upper Education.
The famous and influential American educator, John Dewey, wrote in 1896 that: "The centrality of reading and writing was 'one of education's great mistakes.'" In following in his footsteps, many of our educators have pushed academic reading and writing so far to the periphery of the curriculum that, for too many of our high school students, they might just as well have fallen off the edge of the flat earth of American secondary education.
The California State College System recently reported that 47% of their Freshmen were required to take remedial reading courses. Of course they can't handle nonfiction books as they have never been assigned one in their whole high school career.
I have had the privilege of publishing 956 serious (average 6,000 words) history research papers by secondary students from all over this country and from 38 other countries, and I have formed the opinion in the process that high school students are fully capable of reading complete nonfiction books and of writing serious research papers.
But it should be no surprise that so long as our educators never assign nonfiction books or ask students for research papers, they will continue to believe that their students may be able somehow to manage Calculus, European history, Latin, Chemistry, British Literature and the like, but they must still not be able, for some unexplained reason, to read a history book or write a real term paper.
While our colleges do complain, persistently, about the poor preparation in reading and writing of the students who come to them, what do they do in setting requirements for admission?
Senator, hard as it may be to believe, all the writing that colleges ask for is a 500-word "college" essay about the life of the applicant. It is hard to conceive of a more nonacademic task than that, or one more likely to retard the assignment of serious reading and writing at the high school level.
When we celebrate athletes and ignore scholars in our high schools, and when we set such low standards for the high school diploma and for college admission, we should not be surprised that more than one million of our high school graduates need to be in remedial courses when they get to college every year, and that more than half of those will never graduate.
Yes, Senator, I believe that until we take reading and writing more seriously at the secondary level, we can continue to push more and more students into college, but more and more of them will be sadly unprepared to take advantage of that academic opportunities there, and more and more of them will drop out before they graduate from college.
Thanks again for the opportunity to discuss these problems.
===============
"Teach by Example"
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The average ACT score among the Madison School District's 2011 graduates dipped to its lowest level in 15 years, while the gap between white and minority student scores shrank for the first time in five years.Amy Hetzner:Though Madison's average score dipped from 24.2 to 23.9, district students still outperformed the state average of 22.2 and national average of 21.1. A perfect score on the college entrance exam is 36.
Madison's average scores in recent years have ranged from 23.5 in 1995 to 24.6 in 2007. The average score was also 23.9 in 2003.
With the highest percent of students taking the ACT in state history, Wisconsin's Class of 2011 posted an average score slightly above that from the previous year's graduates and maintained the state's third-place ranking among states in which the test is widespread.A few somewhat related links:Seventy-one percent of the 2011 graduates from Wisconsin private and public schools took the college admissions test, averaging a 22.2 composite score on the 36-point test, according to information to be publicly released Wednesday. The nationwide average was 21.1 on the ACT Assessment, which includes tests in English, reading, mathematics and science.
State schools superintendent Tony Evers credited the results to more high school students pursuing more demanding coursework.
"The message of using high school as preparation for college and careers is taking hold with our students," Evers said in a news release. "Nearly three-quarters of our kids said they took the rigorous classes recommended for college entry, up from just over half five years ago."
Even so, ACT reported that only 32% of Wisconsin's recently graduated seniors had test results that showed they were ready for college-level courses in all four areas. Results for individual subjects ranged from 39% readiness in science to 75% in English.
When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed...and not before.On November 7 (2005), Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district's student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district's success in closing the academic achievement gap "based on race".
According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, "for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we've reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap". Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level "is the original gap" that the board set out to close.
Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.
"Penelope Trunk": (Adrienne Roston, Adrienne Greenheart(
Notes and links on the recent, successful Madison Talented & Gifted parent complaint.10. Homeschool. Your kids will be screwed if you don't.
The world will not look kindly on people who put their kids into public school. We all know that learning is best when it's customized to the child and we all know that public schools are not able to do that effectively. And the truly game-changing private schools cost $40,000 a year.
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The average ACT score among the Madison School District's 2011 graduates dipped to its lowest level in 15 years, while the gap between white and minority student scores shrank for the first time in five years.Amy Hetzner:Though Madison's average score dipped from 24.2 to 23.9, district students still outperformed the state average of 22.2 and national average of 21.1. A perfect score on the college entrance exam is 36.
Madison's average scores in recent years have ranged from 23.5 in 1995 to 24.6 in 2007. The average score was also 23.9 in 2003.
With the highest percent of students taking the ACT in state history, Wisconsin's Class of 2011 posted an average score slightly above that from the previous year's graduates and maintained the state's third-place ranking among states in which the test is widespread.A few somewhat related links:Seventy-one percent of the 2011 graduates from Wisconsin private and public schools took the college admissions test, averaging a 22.2 composite score on the 36-point test, according to information to be publicly released Wednesday. The nationwide average was 21.1 on the ACT Assessment, which includes tests in English, reading, mathematics and science.
State schools superintendent Tony Evers credited the results to more high school students pursuing more demanding coursework.
"The message of using high school as preparation for college and careers is taking hold with our students," Evers said in a news release. "Nearly three-quarters of our kids said they took the rigorous classes recommended for college entry, up from just over half five years ago."
Even so, ACT reported that only 32% of Wisconsin's recently graduated seniors had test results that showed they were ready for college-level courses in all four areas. Results for individual subjects ranged from 39% readiness in science to 75% in English.
When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed...and not before."Penelope Trunk": (Adrienne Roston, Adrienne Greenheart(On November 7 (2005), Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district's student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district's success in closing the academic achievement gap "based on race".
According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, "for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we've reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap". Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level "is the original gap" that the board set out to close.
Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.
Notes and links on the recent, successful Madison Talented & Gifted parent complaint.10. Homeschool. Your kids will be screwed if you don't.
The world will not look kindly on people who put their kids into public school. We all know that learning is best when it's customized to the child and we all know that public schools are not able to do that effectively. And the truly game-changing private schools cost $40,000 a year.
I'm not surprised more students are taking college-readiness and remedial courses at community and four-year colleges.Video: Madison Mayor Paul Soglin on the Schools.
In the 1990s, I taught introductory composition at a private, career-oriented college and at a public university in Chicago, where it became clear that many of my students still hadn't learned the difference between "it's" and "its," for example, or proper use of a comma. Never mind critical thinking.It was especially evident at the private college that many of these high school graduates were forking over thousands of dollars so some master's level English major with no formal training in education could teach them what they should have learned for free in public school.
The experience puts "Learning to Learn Camp," Madison Area Technical College's nine-week, $478.75 incarnation of the college preparatory class, in something of a darkly comic light.
UPDATE: ACT Trends: National, Wisconsin & Madison by Jeff Henriques.
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Student loans are on the rise, but so is the delinquency rate on them.On Monday Real Time Economics noted that since the depths of the recession the only type of credit to notch growth was student loans. Credit to students also stands out when looking at delinquency rates.
In the second quarter, 11.2% of student loans were more than 90 days past due and the rate was steadily rising, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Only credit cards had a higher rate of delinquency -- 12.2% -- but those numbers have been on a steady decline for the past four quarters.
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At a recent charity dinner to raise funds for the Charles K. Kao Foundation for Alzheimer's disease, my son, Phoebus, and his wife, Danielle, performed an improvised version of the theme to the Japanese movie Departures on piano and flute. The music was synchronised to a video on Professor Kao's achievements, and included a mention of his visit to my home to appraise the music that Phoebus composed for Nancy Koh's Buddhist-themed verse musical, The First Leaf of Dream Song.All that reminded me of the endeavours that my wife Helena and I went to as young parents two decades ago to initiate our children into the world of music.
Our daughter and son, Phoebe and Phoebus, were enrolled in music classes at the age of four, when their ears could develop best. They both eventually achieved perfect pitch. They learned to play the piano, as well as the rudiments of aural, theory, composition and improvisation.
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Michigan's school accreditation system "no longer has relevance" state educators say, as every school in the state has met state criteria despite sliding backward on federal testing goals.The state Education Department released announced Monday that 79 percent of Michigan's public school buildings and 93 percent of the school districts made federal testing goals - called "adequate yearly progress" - for the 2010-11 school year.
That's down from 86 percent of schools and 95 percent of districts making AYP the previous school year.
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According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's quarterly report on debt and credit, U.S. households had $11.42 trillion in debt outstanding in the second quarter. That was down from a peak of $12.5 trillion in the third quarter of 2008, when the financial crisis took hold, and the lowest since the first quarter of 2007. Mortgage debt, home equity loans, credit card debt and auto loans are all down sharply -- partly because people are being more careful, but also because many have defaulted.But student loans are up sharply. There was $550 billion in student debt outstanding in the second quarter, up 25% from $440 billion in the third quarter of 2008.
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Sitting under a parasol to avoid the fierce summer sun, two teenagers at a summer camp in the New Territories debate the criteria for an ideal secondary school. Rosemary and White Cloud - adopting nature-related nicknames is a tradition at the camp - are responding to a Q&A session held earlier, when two secondary school principals were quizzed on topics ranging from the logic of school uniform design to how to prevent teachers from abusing their power."The school must have strict rules so every student will behave and be polite," White Cloud says.
Rosemary has very different ideas: "It is not going to work. Strict rules will only make the disobedient even more disobedient. My ideal school is one with no penalties."
The two friends' contrasting views reflect their exposure to Gaia School, an alternative private primary school in Tuen Mun that emphasises personal responsibility and learning from nature.
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A mysterious child from northern Germany, portrayed by William Kent on the King's Grand Staircase, became one of the sensations of the Georgian age, as Roger Moorhouse explains.In the summer of 1725 a peculiar youth was found in the forest of Hertswold near Hameln in northern Germany. Aged about 12, he walked on all fours and fed on grass and leaves. 'A naked, brownish, blackhaired creature', he would run up trees when approached and could utter no intelligible sound. The latest in a long line of feral children - in turn celebrated, shunned and cursed through the ages - 'The Wild Boy of Hameln' would be the first to achieve real fame.
After a spell in the House of Correction in Celle, the boy was taken to the court of George, Duke of Hanover and King of the United Kingdom, at Herrenhausen. There the young curiosity was initially treated as an honoured guest. Seated at table with the king, dressed in a suit of clothes with a napkin at his neck, he repelled his host with his complete lack of manners. He refused bread, but gorged himself on vegetables, fruit and rare meat, greedily grasping at the dishes and eating noisily from his hands, until he was ordered to be taken away. He was given the name of Peter, but was variously known as 'Wild Peter', 'Peter of Hanover', or, most famously, 'Peter the Wild Boy'.
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Journalist Peg Tyre's new book, The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve ($26, Henry Holt) out Aug. 16, condenses decades of education research to help parents make better choices about selecting schools for their children. Tyre, whose 2008 book The Trouble With Boys helped spark a national conversation, says, "Schools can't reasonably be expected to both educate children and educate parents about education. Parents are going to have to get more sophisticated about what excellent education looks like -- and demand it for their child." Tyre recently spoke to USA TODAY:
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Dear Young, Gifted, Talented, and Black (YGTB),Something has occured within our Black Community which needs to be addressed and I'm going to peel the scab off of it. The chasm has been widened between those in our community who possess knowledge, resources, wisdom, creativity, and determination and those who should be moving into the fold to advance our race. It is a slow death which if prolonged, will choke off any feasible possibility for future survival and success for our people.
YGTB, I sit positioned between you and our elders... not young enough nor mature enough to be in either category. I am transitioning and this is what I want to give you now during my journey (breadcrumbs to follow). Our (some) elders have eaten of the tree of (trick)knowledge bearing the forbidden fruit integration. The false promises of this fruit tantalized those who tasted its flesh with the hope of equality to White People, justice, freedom, legacy, and political power in America (our wilderness).
YGTB, stop!!!!! I am telling you not to follow down their path! Reject this fruit and the lies which flow from its bosom. What you need only to do is observe the plight of our people and judge if the present course (last 2 generations) of our direction produced results that have uplifted the majority of our people? If you see what I do, then you agree that our condition is getting worse. Do not continue to do what has failed us.
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More Hong Kong youngsters are following in the footsteps of Botticelli angels by learning the harp, with parents encouraging this special option as a way to secure a spot in a prestigious school.Demand for harp lessons had steadily increased in the last three years and its appeal was multi-faceted, said professional harpist Joan Lee Wai-ying, who opened a home-based harp school in Sha Tin in 2008.
"Many parents want to widen the musical knowledge of their children but it's also because of the school admission test which requires a basic instrument like the piano but also a very special instrument like the harp," Lee said, with the number of students at her school increasing fivefold since opening.
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I'm not surprised more students are taking college-readiness and remedial courses at community and four-year colleges.In the 1990s, I taught introductory composition at a private, career-oriented college and at a public university in Chicago, where it became clear that many of my students still hadn't learned the difference between "it's" and "its," for example, or proper use of a comma. Never mind critical thinking.
It was especially evident at the private college that many of these high school graduates were forking over thousands of dollars so some master's level English major with no formal training in education could teach them what they should have learned for free in public school.
The experience puts "Learning to Learn Camp," Madison Area Technical College's nine-week, $478.75 incarnation of the college preparatory class, in something of a darkly comic light.
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One might easily see such a thing in a Shanghai alleyway and think nothing of it: a bundle of fabric tied up with a rope. Except that this particular bundle was screaming.I could not tell at first if the squalling child was male or female, but I knew exactly what it was doing there: a desperate mother had swaddled her newborn infant in several layers of clothing and left it alone in the winter darkness - so that it could have a chance to live.
For me, it was an all-too-familiar story: my own two daughters were abandoned at birth, left alone in a Chinese street to the mercy of strangers. But that was more than a decade ago - a decade in which China has become a powerful force in markets from natural resources to sports cars, from luxury goods to aircraft carriers. In a China of diamond iPads and gold-plated limousines were babies still ending up in anonymous alleyways?
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The idea that school choice is automatically better than no choice has recently been reinforced again, with the "Parent Trigger" in California. Under a law passed there last year, parents whose children attend underperforming public schools can get together, and if 51% of them sign a petition, they can demand their district change the school administrators or convert the school to a charter. So far, a parent group from Compton "pulled the trigger," but parents from poor urban schools and well-funded suburban schools have been seeking information on how to use the Parent Trigger law to improve their schools.Similar bills, which are supported by education reformers on both sides of the political aisle, have been passed in Connecticut, Ohio and Mississippi. About a half dozen state legislatures--including New York -- are expected to consider Parent Trigger type bills this year.
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The fall semester hasn't officially started yet, but this week a group of incoming Madison Area Technical College students gathered on campus to study in groups, submit homework, and take notes on lectures.They won't be tested. They're just practicing.
Programs like this one at MATC -- called Learning to Learn Camp -- are increasingly common at colleges and universities as educators try to prepare students for the academic rigor and social stresses of college.
The courses tend to provide basic study skills such as note-taking and time management, as well as information on decidedly squishier topics, such as how to stay motivated or take personal responsibility.
"It all sounds very elementary, but particularly for community college and technical college students who often don't have a college frame of reference, or somebody in their family who went to college, it's really useful information," said Melinda Mechur Karp, a senior research associate at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York.
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The state will launch a Web site Monday that will eventually provide parents -- and everyone else -- a way to gauge how well individual high schools prepare their graduates for college.By the end of September, the site, www.mischooldata.org , will include first-ever information on how many students from each school go to college, how many earn at least a year's worth of college credit within two years of graduation, and how many have to take remedial courses in college.
The information could be used by parents and the public to rate high schools and for administrators to improve curricula.
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The wonderkid who at nine became the city's youngest undergraduate four years ago completed his bachelor's and master's programme this week at the age of 13.March Boedihardjo will now head off to the United States for a research programme and, possibly, a doctorate. The youngster was admitted to Baptist University's double-degree programme in mathematical science in 2007, finishing it in four years - a year early. March said he really enjoyed his university years, despite earlier concerns about how such a young boy would adapt to the life.
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Trimit's a recent $0.99 app for the iOS platform that does one simple thing very well: It boils down longer-form Net content into 1,000-, 500-, or 140-character summaries. The longer summaries are meant to be handy for people pressed for time to read bigger articles, perhaps during a commute, and the shorter summaries make it easy to share the body text of interesting content (more than just a "hey this is good!" introduction to a link in an email or tweet) on the web, with the 140-character limit obviously tailored for Twitter. It's also useful for deciding if you want to, later, read a long-form article.Its design taps into the same thinking as web acryonyms like LOL and TWSS, and there's more than a little nod in the direction of hyper-abbreviated SMS language. Perhaps this thinking was boosted because the chap behind it is just 15.
App creator Nick D'Aloisio tells Fast Company that he came up with the idea for the app during exam studies when he was "required to research a vast amount of webpages." Nick realized that while poring over sites was "browsing a lot of pages that were, in fact, irrelevant to the task and therefore wasting" a lot of his time. Thus the aha moment, where he realized a quick precis of a website could be invaluable in helping you decide if you wanted to browse the rest of it. D'Aloisio stressed that the intention really is to "aid users in consuming content on the web" rather than sharing it socially, though this is a natural benefit of its design.
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Would you rather have someone graduate high school with good computer skills or good character traits?I grant it's a false choice. You ought to have both, and they're not in conflict. But I ask this as a way of asking what our priorities are when it comes to educating children.
It's hard to find a school that doesn't have lots of computers these days. The intense push to load schools up with computers seems to have eased, compared with a decade ago. Money is tighter now, and many schools don't need much more because they have a lot already.
But it's not so easy to find schools that have good character education programs.
Schools are held accountable for teaching reading and math and so on. The pressure is always on for academic records for each student and for a school as a whole. But students' character? Other than attendance and discipline for behavior problems, interest in that is pretty inconsistent.
Of course, many would say, it's not the school's job to civilize children. That's the parents' job. Absolutely correct, and I think more should be done to try to get more parents to do that job.
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Even with all its flaws, I'm a proponent of public education in much the same way I remain committed to the fundamental principles of democracy despite recent events in D.C. having tested this commitment.In terms of public education, there are countless books, articles, and research projects from numerous points of view and it's clear one can find proponents and opponents to whatever perspective you may choose. One recent publication is noteworthy due to the clarity in writing and direct premise -- "Schools Cannot Do It Alone" by Jamie Vollmer, former attorney, businessman, and harsh education critic, now an advocate and consultant to education. I'd like to quote and paraphrase from this book in the following column.
He argues schools need the trust, understanding, permission and support from their communities in order to improve the public education system and increase student success. In tracing his journey from critic to consultant, he weaves an interesting tale as he encounters "blueberries, bell curves, and smelly eighth graders," and comes to two conclusions. First, we have a system problem, not a people problem. We need to modify the system in order to get the graduates we want. And second, we cannot touch the system without touching the culture of the surrounding town because everything that goes on inside a school is tied to local attitudes, values, traditions and beliefs. But in order to improve the system it's vital that we first accurately understand the system that presently exists and how it came to be.
For the first time in history the security, prosperity, and health of our nation depend on our ability to unfold the full creative potential of every child -- not just the easy ones, not just the top 20 percent of the class, and not just those who reflect our preferred values. The problem is that America's public education system was never designed to do this. As Thomas Jefferson imagined it, schools should be designed to select and sort students into two groups: a small handful of thinkers and a great mass of obedient doers. Back then most everyone was a farmer, the pace of change was slow, options were few, and only a small handful of people were paid to think.
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U46 schools won't start class until next week, but already on Thursday, 5-year-old Nicky Moraetes of Elgin leaned forward in his chair at Harriet Gifford Elementary School with a look of intense concentration on his face.Nicky will start dual-language kindergarten Wednesday, Aug. 24, at Gifford, and he'll look good when he does. As he squeezed his eyes shut, a smock wrapped around his shoulders, a Salon Professionals Academy stylist clipped short the back of his blond hair.
The 5-year-old was one of many Gifford students and their siblings who got free haircuts during registration at the elementary school Thursday afternoon.
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If you're the parent of a high-achieving high school student prepared to spend whatever it takes to send your kid to an Ivy League college, authors Claudia Dreifus and Andrew Hacker have some unlikely advice: Don't do it.Dreifus, a New York Times writer and an adjunct professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, and Hacker, a veteran political science professor at Queens College in New York, spent three years interviewing faculty, students, and administrators and crunching statistics for their book, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids -- And What We Can Do About It. Their finding? That many of America's colleges and universities -- especially the elite -- aren't worth their tuition and serve faculty over their undergrads.
More outrageous, they say, is that tuition nationwide has jumped at more than twice the rate of inflation since 1982, so many kids graduate deeply in debt. "Tuition is probably the second-largest item you'll buy in your lifetime, after your home," Dreifus says. Given that, the authors suggest you consider the following as you bear down on the decision of where your child will spend the next four (or more) years.
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Those favored by fortune can educate themselves in all countries: and it is for that reason that the American thinkers did not dedicate their cares to the aristocratic element of society, but rather to the lowest ranks of the great mass of the people, whom they have struggled to enlighten; comprehending that education ought not to be a privilege, but something which belongs to all, as much as the air we breathe; and that every citizen has as imprescriptible a right to the light of the Spirit as he has to the light of the sun which illuminates him.Louis Moreau Gottschalk:
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Madison Mayor Paul Soglin Interview 8.12.2011 from Jim Zellmer.
I am thankful that Madison Mayor Paul Soglin took the time to chat yesterday.Mobile (iPhone, iPad, iPod and Android) visitors, please use this link.
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A state court judge on Friday blocked a suburban school district south of Denver from using public funds to help residents pay for private and religious schools.Much more on the Douglas County voucher program, here.Judge Michael A. Martinez ruled that a voucher program designed by the Douglas County School District violated the state constitution because it sent public funds to schools that infused religion throughout their curriculum, required students and faculty to meet certain standards of faith and required students to attend religious services.
The program "provides no meaningful limitations on the use of taxpayer funds to support or promote religion, and no meaningful protections for the religious liberty of participating students," the judge wrote in a 68-page decision. He also said it amounted to direct public aid to churches and church-sponsored schools, in violation of the Colorado constitution.
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The recent spate of criminal activity involving marauding bands of young people has a lot of greater Milwaukee residents wondering what is going on inside the heads of today's teenagers and young adults.The answer, according to current brain research, is a lot. It turns out that the adolescent brain is not fully mature, as previously believed, but is actually in a period of intense growth until children reach their late teens or early 20s. One of the last areas of the brain to mature is the prefrontal cortex.
In a nutshell, the prefrontal cortex governs impulse control. The hormonal surges of puberty kick up heightened emotional responses at a time when the brain is least equipped to regulate emotional urges, thus creating the perfect storm for poor choices.
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Bullying can affect a student's academic performance, but a school's bullying climate may be linked with lower overall test scores, a study finds.The study, presented recently at the American Psychological Assn.'s recent annual convention in Washington, D.C., surveyed 7,304 ninth-grade students and 2,918 teachers who were randomly chosen from 284 high schools in Virginia. Students and teachers were asked about incidents of bullying and teasing at the school. Ninth-grade students were chosen because researchers felt this first year of high school was a critical adjustment period, and because poor test scores in this grade may be linked with a higher drop-out rate.
In the study, bullying was defined as using strength or popularity to deliberately injure, threaten or embarrass another person, and that harassment can be verbal, physical or social. Two students close in strength who argue are not considered bullies.
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We love robots - tireless, productive workhorses of the modern assembly line. But we also hate robots - sinister mechanical simulacra of the human workers they make redundant.In the latest episode in our complicated relationship with automatons and automation, it is appropriate that Foxconn should have a lead role. The Taiwanese company manufactures the chattering classes' favourite piece of science fiction come true, the Apple iPad, as well as devices for Nokia and Sony. It employs 1m people in China. It was the epicentre last year of concern about pressure on low-paid young workers, following a series of suicides at its Shenzhen factories. It is, in short, iPad users' window on to dilemmas of assembly-line politics and management that the developed world last grappled with on this scale decades ago.
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One of the summer scandals keeping us education wonks amused until school starts is a American Federation of Teachers gaffe in Connecticut. Union officials posted online an analysis of their lobbying against a parent trigger law in that state that revealed too much about their distaste for letting moms and dads decide who should run their schools.A balance of power in school governance is vital to ongoing improvements AND relevance.Bloggers RiShawn Biddle and Alexander Russo exposed the union celebrating its gutting of a Connecticut version of California's parent trigger law. School reform organizations and editorialists were aghast. AFT president Randi Weingarten disowned the Web post. Activists pushing for parent triggers in Texas and New York welcomed the attention.
This idea has already reached the Washington area and may someday inspire legislation here. That would be bad. Despite its worthy proponents and democratic veneer, the parent trigger is a waste of time. Let's toss it into the trash with other once fashionable reform ideas like worksheets for slow students and brief constructed responses on state tests.
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IT BEGAN on August 4th with the metallic clink of a few pots and pans. By nightfall, thousands of people were on the streets of Santiago banging kitchenware, a form of protest last heard under the dictatorship of General Pinochet. This time the cacerolazos, as they are called, are being staged in the name of educational Utopia--and in response to a cack-handed government ban on marches.Chile's school system is the least bad in Latin America, according to the OECD's PISA tests, which compare educational attainment across countries. But that does not make it good. And the overall performance hides huge disparities. Analysis done in Chile of the test results in the 65 countries that took part finds that it ranked 64th in terms of the variance of the results according to social class. Rich pupils get good private education; poor ones are condemned to underfunded, dilapidated state-funded schools.
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I was pleased to see the release of Education Sector's report, "Debt to Degree: A New Way of Measuring College Success," by Kevin Carey and Erin Dillon. They created a new measure, a "borrowing to credential ratio," which divides the total amount of borrowing by the number of degrees or credentials awarded. Their focus on institutional productivity and dedication to methodological transparency (their data are made easily accessible on the Education Sector's website) are certainly commendable.Related: Debt to Degree.That said, I have several concerns with their report. I will focus on two key points, both of which pertain to how this approach would affect the measurement of performance for 2-year and 4-year not-for-profit (public and private) colleges and universities. My comments are based on an analysis in which I merged IPEDS data with the Education Sector data to analyze additional measures; my final sample consists of 2,654 institutions.
Point 1: Use of the suggested "borrowing to credential" ratio has the potential to reduce college access for low-income students.
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A superstar teacher or charismatic principal rides to the rescue! Downtrodden public school children, otherwise destined to fail, are saved! We've all seen that movie--more than once, starting with "Stand and Deliver" and "Lean on Me" in the late 1980s and more recently with documentaries like "Waiting for Superman" and "The Lottery," which brilliantly portray the heroes of the charter-school movement. And we know the villains, too: teachers' union leaders and education bureaucrats who, for four decades, have presided over schools that provide comfortable public jobs for the adults who work there but wretched instruction for the children who are supposed to learn there.65One of the heroes of this familiar tale is Dave Levin, the co-founder of the highly regarded KIPP network of charter schools (KIPP stands for Knowledge Is Power Program). But Mr. Levin would be the first to tell you that heroes aren't enough to turn around an American public school system whose continued failure has become the country's most pressing long-term economic and national security threat.
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Questions about what social networks mean for personal privacy and security have been brought to a head by research at Carnegie Mellon University that shows that Facebook has essentially become a worldwide photo identification database. Paired with related research, we're looking at the prospect where good, bad and ugly actors will be able identify a face in a crowd and know sensitive personal information about that person.These developments mean that we no longer have to worry just about what Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and other social sites do with our data; we have to worry about what they enable others to do, too. And it now seems that others will be able to do a lot.
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I have spent much of my working life studying and promoting student loans. As a good liberal Democrat, I have spent years seeking to expand and then working for the old Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP), which had its roots in Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Currently, I consult to a for-profit student-loan company.I am surprised, therefore, to hear myself saying that it is time to start downsizing the federal student-loan programs.
I am watching to see how the new Federal Direct Student Loan Program (FDLP) works out. I hope that it is successful.
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Public schools in Memphis, Tennessee, will be consolidated with those of the surrounding county beginning in 2013-14, a federal judge ruled Monday. The decision ends for now a yearslong fight over funding that spilled into questions of race and politics.The 146-page ruling from Judge Hardy Mays was prompted by a lawsuit and subsequent voter referendum in March that dissolved the Memphis City Schools charter.
"The Memphis City Schools has been abolished for all purposes except the winding down of its operations and the transfer of administration to the Shelby County Board of Education under the terms of Public Chapter 1 and Tennessee education law," wrote Mays. He said the surrender of the city charter did not affect the validity of the city board's actions up until now.
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Brothers Mike and Matt Wickert arrived at Twins Days here last weekend dressed alike. But their matching blue polo shirts and khaki shorts didn't gain them much attention.The 32-year-old fraternal twins from Cincinnati don't share all that many features. Mike has blue eyes, Matt has brown. Mike's face is angular, and Matt's nose is more rounded. Matt's hair is dark brown; Mike's is blonder.
"I feel shafted here because everybody looks the same," said Matt Wickert who was attending the festival with his brother in the town named for a set of identical twin landowners, Moses and Aaron Wilcox.
Mike Wickert chimed in: "Yeah, we're the redheaded stepchild here, the fraternals."
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Today's parents are paying substantially higher out-of-pocket costs for higher education than their parents did 30 years ago. And the public has noticed. Three out of four Americans say college is unaffordable for most people, according to the widely publicized survey Pew Research Center survey "Is college worth it?"
A four-year degree is becoming increasingly difficult to attain due to several factors:--College costs are rising at nearly three times the rate of inflation, according to FinAid.org.
--More than 1 in 10 students graduate with more than $40,000 in undergraduate student debt, according to the Project on Student Debt.
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Online education is becoming a legitimate and viable option for education systems around the country. Both colleges and secondary schools are offering classes to students. In fact many states and schools are requiring students to take some method of mode of online learning. New York made major changes around seat time and face-to-face contact between student and teacher. The state's intentions are good. They want to move away the focus from seat time, and they want to offer courses that might be hard to offer in certain areas of the state to all students. With all these innovative systemic changes, one might think we are completely on the right track. I offer a word of caution.Online education is in danger of replicating a system that isn't working. Yes, I wrote it. With all the potential for innovation that online education has to offer, we have fallen into the pitfall of replication. The keyword is "danger." There is much that online education can do to innovate the education system, and much that has already been done as a result. Yet most of the actual courses and pedagogical structures that are in place are simply replicating the traditional style of education.
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Public-health officials are shifting tactics in an effort to encourage more women to breast-feed their babies--they are pushing hospitals to change their maternity practices.The percentage of women who breast-feed is well below public-health goals, according to recent reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Hospitals are key to encouraging breast-feeding because the steps taken immediately after birth are essential to help women establish an adequate milk supply and effective nursing practices. If a woman doesn't really try breast-feeding until a week after giving birth, she probably won't be successful, experts say.
"What happens in the first three days can make or break your breast-feeding success," says Jane Morton, a pediatrician at Burgess Pediatrics in Menlo Park, Calif., who helped develop a breast-feeding medicine program at Stanford University.
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Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (Madison Prep) is a tuition-free public charter school that will serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity, particularly young men of color. Our mission is to prepare students for success at a four year college or university by instilling excellence, pride, leadership and service.Notes and links on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy and Kaleem Caire.To achieve this mission, young men will receive an education that:
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We write frequently about the charter-school wars in New York City because the battle touches so many aspects of the effort to give children from poor families the education necessary to escape their circumstances.Today's report has good news: Results released yesterday of test scores in the New York State Assessment Program showed that the most relentlessly attacked charter schools - Eva Moskowitz's Harlem Success academies - have outperformed their public-school peers, often by a wide margin.
At all New York City's public schools, 60% of third, fourth and fifth graders passed the math exam; at Harlem Success, 94% passed. In the state language arts exam, 49% from the city schools passed compared to 78% at the charters. The 94% pass rate for the academies' black and Hispanic students surpassed the 73% pass rate for white students taking the exam in New York state.
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In the spring of that hard year, 1968, the Columbia University crew coach, Bill Stowe, explained to me that there were only two kinds of men on campus, perhaps in the world--Jocks and Pukes. He explained that Jocks, such as his rowers, were brave, manly, ambitious, focused, patriotic and goal-driven, while Pukes were woolly, distractible, girlish and handicapped by their lack of certainty that nothing mattered as much as winning. Pukes could be found among "the cruddy weirdo slobs" such as hippies, pot smokers, protesters and, yes, former English majors like me.I dutifully wrote all this down, although doing so seemed kind of Puke-ish. But Stowe was such an affable ur-Jock, 28 years old, funny and articulate, that I found his condescension merely good copy. He'd won an Olympic gold medal, but how could I take him seriously, this former Navy officer who had spent his Vietnam deployment rowing the Saigon River and running an officers' club? Not surprisingly, he didn't last long at Columbia after helping lead police officers through the underground tunnels to roust the Pukes who had occupied buildings during the antiwar and antiracism demonstrations.
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Epoch-making educational reform is predicted to leave its mark on the Taipei City property market. In 2014, Taiwan's nine-year compulsory education will be extended to 12 years, and junior high school students will no longer have rigid entrance exams for senior high schools - it will all depend on their house address.Instead of test scores in combination with household registration in desirable school districts, only the latter will determine the school that students get into. This, along with the huge faith ambitious parents put in the performance of so-called "star schools", has caused dramatic rises in house prices and rents in the catchment areas of the best schools.
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I would like to tell you about my experience as the mother of a child with dyslexia. According to the Health Department, children with dyslexia have difficulty with word recognition, reading and dictation. Without proper assistance, this may result in a severe disability in acquiring reading skills.A 2008 study by the University of Hong Kong found that dyslexia affects 7 per cent to 9 per cent of children in Hong Kong, and up to 17 per cent of children worldwide.
My first child, a girl, is a "normal" child. As an enthusiastic and committed mother, I read books and took courses to equip myself with appropriate parenting knowledge and skills. My daughter learned to read before kindergarten.
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Diane Rado, Mick Swasko and Jim Jaworski:
On top of hefty charges for textbooks, technology, bus rides, sports and clubs, school districts are hitting up parents to pay fees for hundreds of individual courses, from French I to American literature, history, foods and furniture-making.The so-called course or lab fees can range from $10 or $20 to more than $100 per class, depending on the school, records show, pumping up parents' bills and adding to the rising cost of a public school education in the Chicago region.
"This is like private school," said parent Gio Chavez, who walked out of Oak Lawn Community High School's registration this week shellshocked. The final tally for her sophomore son's classes: $665.
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Critics of public school "reform" say that it looks too much like a business model with education foundations that have big wallets taking control away from local communities.Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, along with his wife, Melinda Gates, founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which had an endowment of $33.5 billion as of 2009. The foundation is "driven by the passions and the interests of the Gates family," with an education goal to expand educational opportunities and access to information technology.
Another notable figure is Los Angeles entrepreneur and philanthropist Eli Broad (rhymes with road). With his wife Edythe, Broad founded The Broad Foundations, which have assets of $2.1 billion with a mission to advance entrepreneurship for the public good in education, science and the arts.
"Priorities of some of these foundations nationally have taken precedence over parents and community members," said Pam Grundy, co-founder of Mecklenburg Acts, the local affiliate of Parents Across America. "They're trying to do a lot of things that have never been proven to work. We feel like our kids are like an experiment."
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A banker, a professor, a hospital administrator, and a pastor are among the members of a newly created board to run Bridgeport's school district and overhaul its finances and student achievement.Acting state Education Commissioner George Coleman announced the six appointments yesterday, saying the new board will start its work immediately in place of the nine-member elected school board being swept out during the state takeover.
State education officials decided this summer that Connecticut needed to assume control of the troubled Bridgeport schools under provisions of a 2007 state law that lets it step in when students' academic performance is in dire need of improvement.
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It is often difficult to feel optimistic about the future of liberty. Those of us who value individual liberty and free markets look only at the encroachment of government in our lives. We often overlook the victories that should give us hope for the future of liberty. The school choice movement is one of the most important fights in the future of liberty, and one that we are starting to win.It is fitting to talk about this now, because July 31 would have been Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman's 99th birthday. Over fifty years ago, Friedman jump-started the school choice movement with an article called "The Role of Government in Education." In it, he laid out a plan for school vouchers that would allow parents to have a choice in where they send their children. In a 2005 interview with Reason Magazine, Friedman said, "I want vouchers to be universal, to be available to everyone. They should contain few or no restrictions on how they can be used."
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Closing arguments in the case challenging the Douglas County School District's voucher program ended three days of hearings that could halt the program in its infancy.More from the Wall Street Journal: Wall Street Journal:A standing-room-only crowd listened in Denver District Court while a legal team from the American Civil Liberties Union faced off against a team that included the Colorado Attorney General's Office to decide the fate of the district's school choice scholarship program.
Both sides agreed that any decision from Denver District Court Judge Michael Martinez will likely face an appeal, regardless of the ruling.
"There will be an appeal either way," said Michael McCarthy, a plaintiff attorney representing the Taxpayers for Public Education. "What (the school district has) done is press the envelope as far as they can. For those interested in preserving public education in this state, they have got in their face as far as they can."
In a bold bid to revamp public education, a suburban district south of Denver has begun handing out vouchers that use public money to help its largely affluent residents send their children to private and church-based schools. The Douglas County School District experiment is noteworthy because nearly all voucher programs nationally aim to help children who are poor, have special needs or are trapped in failing public schools. Douglas County, by contrast, is one of the most affluent in the U.S., with household income nearly double the national median, and has schools ranked among the best in Colorado. What do you think? Should vouchers only be used with lower-income students? Should they never be used? Do they violate the constitution?Chrystia Freeland:
One answer comes from Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political scientist. One of Mr. Krastev's special interests is in the resilience of authoritarian regimes in the 21st century. To understand why they endure, Mr. Krastev has turned to the thinking of the economist Albert O. Hirschman, who was born in Berlin in 1915 and eventually became one of America's seminal thinkers.Related:In 1970, while at Harvard, Mr. Hirschman wrote an influential meditation on how people respond to the decline of firms, organizations and states. He concluded that there are two options: exit -- stop shopping at the store, quit your job, leave your country; and voice -- speak to the manager, complain to your boss, or join the political opposition.
For Mr. Krastev, this idea -- the trade-off between exit and voice -- is the key to understanding what he describes as the "perverse" stability of Vladimir V. Putin's Russia. For all the prime minister's bare-chested public displays of machismo, his version of authoritarianism, in Mr. Krastev's view, is "vegetarian."
"It is fair to say that most Russians today are freer than in any other period of their history," he wrote in an essay published this spring. But Mr. Krastev argues that it is precisely this "user-friendly" character of Mr. Putin's authoritarianism that makes Russia stable. That is because Russia's relatively porous dictatorship effectively encourages those people who dislike the regime most, and have the most capacity to resist it, to leave the country. They choose exit rather than voice, and the result is the death of political opposition: "Leaving the country in which they live is easier than reforming it."
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Faced with an increasing stream of data from the Web and other electronic sources, many companies are seeking managers who can make sense of the numbers through the growing practice of data analytics, also known as business intelligence. Finding qualified candidates has proven difficult, but business schools hope to fill the talent gap.This fall several schools, including Fordham University's Graduate School of Business and Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, are unveiling analytics electives, certificates and degree programs; other courses and programs were launched in the previous school year.
International Business Machines Corp., which has invested more than $14 billion buying analytics industry companies such as Coremetrics and Netezza Corp. since 2005, has teamed up with more than 200 schools, including Fordham, to develop analytics curriculum and training.
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I'm a policy guy, not a daddy blogger. As a general rule, I don't discuss my children in this column or on my Eduwonk blog. But when TIME asked me to write about how my wife (who also works in education) and I chose our kids' elementary school, I figured why not? We are constantly besieged by friends and colleagues who want to know how we went about picking a school, as if there were some secret education-analyst methodology I was privy to. I wish that were true! But even though I don't have access to the secret sauce, I do have a pretty good sense of how to kick a school's tires. Plus, I think it would be a shame not to use all of our parental angst for the greater good. And so, as our kids start a new year at a public school, here are some lessons from our school-hunting experience that might help guide yours.Look beneath the label. "Public" or "private" doesn't really tell you much, so don't scratch a school off your list just because of how it's governed. There are terrific and lousy schools in the public, private and (publicly funded) charter-school sectors, so relying on labels alone is a big risk. Likewise, you should do more than glance at a school's test scores or demographic data. My wife and I, for instance, are both products of public schools. I went to ones in Virginia that on paper were both excellent and diverse. But in practice, there were different tracks for different students, so most of the kids in my gifted or AP classes were like me: Caucasian, middle-class, ruggedly good-looking. Well, two out of three of those anyway. My wife grew up in an Ohio district known for great academics but with no diversity. As our kids approached school age, we hoped to find a good school that was racially, ethnically and economically diverse -- a tall order given today's housing patterns and school boundaries. But most important, we wanted to find the right fit for our kids, so we were not opposed to going private if we couldn't find an option in the public sector that seemed to work for us. (See the 20 best- and worst-paid college majors.)
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According to a new study which will be presented August 4 at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, technology has made it possible to identify and gain the personal information of strangers by using facial recognition and social media profiles like Facebook.The study, led by Alessandro Acquisti from Carnegie Mellon University, combined the use of three different technologies - cloud computing, facial recognition and public information that can be found on various social networking sites.
They used these technologies in three different experiments. In the first experiment, Acquisti and his team were able to identify members of an online dating site where members do not use their real names for identification. The second experiment allowed the research team to identify college students in real life walking on campus based solely on their face and information gathered online.
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Yes, we need to get rid of bad teachers. But we can't demand that teachers be excellent in conditions that preclude excellence.The kid in the back wants me to define "logic." The girl next to him looks bewildered. The boy in front of me dutifully takes notes even though he has severe auditory processing issues and doesn't understand a word I'm saying. Eight kids forgot their essays, but one has a good excuse because she had another epileptic seizure last night. The shy, quiet girl next to me hasn't done homework for weeks, ever since she was jumped by a knife-wielding gangbanger as she walked to school. The boy next to her is asleep with his head on the desk because he works nights at a factory to support his family. Across the room, a girl weeps quietly for reasons I'll never know. I'm trying to explain to a student what I meant when I wrote "clarify your thinking" on his essay, but he's still confused.
It's 8:15 a.m. and already I'm behind my scheduled lesson. A kid with dyslexia, ADD and anger-management problems walks in late, throws his books on the desk and swears at me when I tell him to take off his hood.
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Momentum for business schools to accept the GRE test, mainly used by graduate-school applicants in the social sciences and humanities, is building as those schools aim to attract less traditional applicants.Since April, more than 100 business schools have said they will accept applications with GRE--Graduate Record Examination--scores. In the past, business schools have only accepted the Graduate Management Admission Test, or GMAT, which looks more at reading comprehension and reasoning. The GRE has a stronger focus on vocabulary and straightforward quantitative skills.
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Excellence in Education's PowerPoint presentation: 1MB PDF, via a kind Julie Gocey email.
Related links: Video: Governor's "Read to Lead" Task Force Meeting.
Much more on Wisconsin's Read To Lead Task Force, here.
How does Wisconsin compare? Learn more at www.wisconsin2.org
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When the AFT offers a road map on how to shut down Parent Power efforts, it offers a nice PDF document to do it. Apparently in a fit of celebration during last month's TEACH 2011 conference, the nation's second-largest teachers union offered up a presentation on how its Connecticut affiliate managed to make the state's Parent Trigger law a little less harder for parents to use. (Dropout Nation is doing everyone a courtesy by making it available for public consumption; the orginal is still available at the AFT's Web site. At least, for now.)Rick Green has more.
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François Ortalo-Magné takes the helm of the Wisconsin School of Business next month following Wisconsin's contentious battle over collective bargaining rights for public-employee unions, which has presented challenges for the state university system.Nice pr in the Wall Street Journal...Mr. Ortalo-Magné, however, sees those challenges as opportunities. The business school suffered some loss of funding--a small fraction of the nearly $100 million cut made to parent school University of Wisconsin-Madison. In exchange, the university system wrested some control over hiring and budgets from the state.
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Just under half of British children aged 12 to 15 own a smartphone, with many claiming to be "addicted" to the devices, which they use while eating, at the cinema and in bed.Research published by Ofcom, the communications market regulator, on Thursday found that smartphone ownership was highest among younger teenagers, with 47 per cent owning a device, compared with 27 per cent of British adults.
About 60 per cent of teenagers who owned smartphones described themselves as "addicted" to their handsets and around 71 per cent of smartphone owning teens have their device switched on all the time.
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During the 2011-2012 school year, as MMSD implements Response to Instruction and Intervention (RTI2) and the new district School Support Teams, the plan for delivery of Talented and Gifted Services will continue to be integrated and refined so that it accomplishes the following: 1) is both systemic and systematic in nature; 2) is collaborative; 3) is financially sustainable; 4) is fluid and responsive to student needs; S) offers appropriate opportunities for student growth and talent development; 6) addresses the comprehensive needs (academic, social and personal growth) of students; 7) is aligned with State regulations, professional standards, current research, and effective practice; and 8) provides goals and evaluation procedures to evaluate growth and suggest areas in which change is needed. This Plan for TAG Services describes the following:Much more on the recent complaint regarding the Madison School District's Talent & Gifted Update, here.
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Tax dollars soon could go to schools where teachers aren't required to be certified and where students aren't required to take the same standardized tests as their public school counterparts.That concerns Democrats, who expressed concerns about Republican school-choice measures that were the subject of a House Education Committee public hearing today.
Rep. Jim Christiana, sponsor of one bill in the education reform package, said school choice isn't about turning public schools into private ones; it's about letting parents choose where their children will be best educated.
"We're not saying students shouldn't have to take standardized tests. We're just saying the tests should be based on the curriculum you're offering," said Mr. Christiana, R-Beaver.
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The charts above show the differences in: a) monthly employment levels and b) monthly unemployment rates between 1992 and 2011 for: a) college graduates and b) workers with less than a high school degree. The differences are quite striking and interesting, and might help explain some of the labor market dynamics in the current "jobless recovery."Note that the employment level for college graduates flattened during the 2008-2009 recession, but is now at a record high level. In contrast, the employment level for workers without a high school degree is about 2.5 million below the pre-recession peak. Likewise the jobless rate for college graduates has increased by a few percentage points because of the recession (and is now at 4.4%), but the jobless rate for workers with less than a high school degree has increased by more than six percentage points (now at 14.3%), and was recently almost ten percentage points above its pre-recession level.
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I was recently contacted by AAA California inviting us to participate in their ACE Teen Program.This voluntary program provides a GPS tracking device with cellphone uplink that can be placed in your teenager's car. The device is provided by a third party, who also supports a website for convenient access to tracking information.
The alleged goal of the program is to allow parents to provide feedback on their teen's driving habits, esp. when the parents are not in the car. An additional "feature" is an On-Star-like capability that, in the event your teen's car needs AAA assistance, the parent can allow AAA to determine the vehicle's exact location.
I'll ignore the issue of parent/child privacy, since the program doesn't focus on whether the device is in the car with or without the teen's knowledge. Let's assume the latter.
I had a long discussion with AAA about how this program was badly conceived. The risks include:
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On the surface, Andrew Hsu is a curious fit among the inaugural class of Thiel Fellows.Andrew Hsu says there are some things you can't learn in college. "In the real world it's crazy," he says.
PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel's "20 Under 20" fellowship program awards $100,000 to 20 people under 20 years of age who drop out of college to pursue science and technological innovation. The program officially launched in May and is the first assault in Thiel's war against the "higher-education bubble" - a system he says stymies innovation and burdens youngsters with debt.
Hsu, now 20, graduated with honors and degrees in neurobiology, biochemistry and chemistry and a minor in mathematics from the University of Washington at 16. He was a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Stanford's neuroscience program when he left it earlier this year to launch Airy Labs Inc.
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The American higher education system is plagued by two chronic problems: dropouts and debt. Barely half of the students who start college get a degree within six years, and graduation rates at less-selective colleges often hover at 25 percent or less. At the same time, student loan debt is at an all-time high, recently passing credit card debt in total volume.1 Loan default rates have risen sharply in recent years, consigning a growing number of students to years of financial misery. In combination, drop-outs and debt are a major threat to the nation's ability to help students become productive, well-educated citizens.The federal government has traditionally tracked these issues by calculating, for each college, the total number of degrees awarded, the percentage of students who graduate on time, and the percentage of students who default on their loans. Each of these statistics provides valuable information, but none shows a complete picture. A college could achieve a stellar graduation rate by passing students
along and handing out degrees that have little value in the job market, making it difficult for graduates to earn enough money to pay off their debt. Alternatively, a college could keep tuition and loan default rates low while also providing a terrible education and helping few students earn degrees. Students choosing colleges and policymakers governing higher education need an overall measure of value, one that combines debt and graduation.Education Sector has created such a measure, the "borrowing to credential ratio." For each college, we have taken newly available U.S. Department of Education data showing the total amount of money borrowed by undergraduates and divided that sum by the total number of degrees awarded. The results are revealing:
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It's not often the words imagination and innovation are used in the context of transcripts, or anything related to most registrar offices. I was lucky this past month to attend the Registrar Forum at the AACRAO Technology Conference, and in the closing session, Tom Black, Associate Vice Provost for Student Affairs and University Registrar at Stanford made me remember how powerful thinking outside the box can be, especially for something I take for granted: a student's transcript.Like many Registrars, I came to this profession through a work-study gig. I worked simultaneously in my college IT Help Desk and Registrar's Office, two offices with different orientations to student computing, but also a lot of overlap. When I was a freshman in the late 1990s, online services under one administrative umbrella were rare, and Wesleyan pioneered electronic portfolios as a wrap-around to most student computing services on campus. While I still think of the e-portfolio as a portal with another name, Tom Black's presentation made me realize the synergy between the two concepts, and how portfolios can enhance the academic transcript.
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The seeds of prejudice are being planted in the minds of Hong Kong children as young as three, a study has revealed.Face-to-face questioning of 152 youngsters aged between three and six discovered many hold more negative attitudes towards people with darker skin.
The results of the survey, commissioned by the Equal Opportunities Commission and the first of its kind to be carried out in the city, have prompted calls for better pre-school education and parenting.
The children were asked to describe their attitudes towards different skin colours by rating eight positive and negative qualities, including friendliness, beauty, honesty, courtesy, selfishness and rudeness.
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The student lending industry managed to avoid many of the pitfalls that affected mortgages, auto loans and credit cards during the Great Recession. In fact, volume growth has been steady, if not accelerating, as more individuals sought additional education and training in response to the weak labor market, and as lenders did not tightened standards to anywhere near the degree of other segments. The performance of student loans in recent years has barely changed; delinquency and loss rates on outstanding student loan balances remained steady throughout the recession. While this may sound positive, it is concerning in light of the strong balance and account growth, which would typically push delinquency rates down. In addition, performance of other consumer loan segments has significantly improved as the economy has recovered; performance of student loans has not. In this study, we examine the rapid growth of the student loan industry over the past few years, the weakening per- formance of loan portfolios, and what these trends suggest for future performance and lending volumes.
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Sean Coughlan, via a kind reader's email:
The UK performs poorly in an international league table showing how many disadvantaged pupils succeed "against the odds" at school.The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has studied how pupils from poor backgrounds can succeed academically.
It says that "self-confidence" is a key factor in whether such pupils succeed.
The UK comes behind Mexico and Tunisia in the table - with the top places taken by Asian countries.
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As Internet giants Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. race to expand their facial-recognition abilities, new research shows how powerful, and potentially detrimental to privacy, these tools have become.Armed with nothing but a snapshot, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh successfully identified about one-third of the people they tested, using a powerful facial-recognition technology recently acquired by Google.
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Chance Bell does well academically, has played the piano since he was 5 years old and competes with a local swim team in the summer.But the 12-year-old home-schooled boy from Rupert has hit the age where he wants to be more involved with his peers.
His parents, Jennifer and Mark Bell, are considering enrolling their eldest son in the state-funded Minidoka Virtual Academy that Minidoka County's school district will launch this fall."He wants more friends and he's interested in playing baseball," his mother said.
The district's full-time online program will offer students in grades K-8 core classes in language arts, math and science, along with a variety of electives and access to the district's extracurricular activities and athletic teams. The program, operated with software from the private online education company K12, includes regular testing after lessons and student participation in the Idaho Standards Achievement Test.
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In the comments of this earlier post a father wondered to what extent one can predict adult IQ from measurements at age 5. The answer is that predictive power is fairly weak -- the correlation between a score obtained at 5 and the eventual adult score is probably no more than .5 or so. However, the main limitation seems to be unreliability of any single administration of the test to a child that young. Scores averaged over several administrations are a very good predictor already at a fairly young age. The average of three scores obtained at age 5, 6 and 7 correlates about .85 with adult score. This suggests that while it is difficult to measure a child's IQ in any single sitting, the IQ itself is relatively fixed already by age 7 or so! Of course there are the usual caveats concerning range of environments, etc. I would like to see results from larger sample sizes.
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The Round Rock school district, which earned the state's second-highest academic rating in 2010, this year has two schools that failed to meet state standards, securing "academically unacceptable" labels that will stick for two years.The news comes as schools and districts across Texas see their ratings slide this year despite making academic gains. Figures released by the Texas Education Agency on Friday show that more than half of all Texas schools that had the highest rating in 2010, exemplary, fell in their ratings, and five times as many schools were deemed academically unacceptable, the lowest rating.
Locally, eight of the Austin school district's 112 rated schools missed state academic targets; last year, only one Austin school was rated academically unacceptable. Pflugerville this year has two schools rated unacceptable. Both traditional high schools in Bastrop failed to meet state standards and received the lowest rating. Hutto has two elementary schools that are rated unacceptable.
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Math teacher Antoine Joseph already had been thinking of leaving Miami Norland Senior High School, so when its annual grade from the state dropped from a D to an F nine years ago that just solidified his decision.Joseph said it wasn't just a matter of being stigmatized as a failure - he was just tired of the circumstances behind the failing grade.
"There is a propensity to go to another school where the parents are more involved, the students are more eager to learn and they are more thirsty for knowledge," he said.
Joseph apparently was not alone. A recent study by a trio of economists showed a disproportionate number of Florida teachers left schools that got lower grades in 2002 after the state changed the way it evaluated them.The researchers call it "accountability shock." That's their term for unexpected results from shake-ups in the way students, teachers, administrators or schools are evaluated, graded, rewarded or punished. The study is timely advice because accountability changes are in the works across the nation due to President Barack Obama's "Race to the Top" school initiative. The program is providing $4.35 billion in federal stimulus money to Florida, 10 other states and the District of Columbia for innovative changes aimed at improving student achievement.
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When the fleeing motorcycle hit the curb, scraped past a utility pole and hurled 20-year-old Craig Eney to his death, a bogus South Carolina driver's license was in the hip pocket of his jeans.He spent the final hours of his life trading on that phony license to buy shots for his buddies at two downtown Annapolis bars, places so popular among underage drinkers that bouncers are stationed outside to check everyone's ID.
Yet scores of young people flash fake driver's licenses and waltz on by to the bar.
The days when faking driver's licenses was a cottage industry -- often practiced in college dorm rooms by a computer geek with a laminating machine -- have given way to far more sophisticated and prolific practitioners who operate outside the reach of U.S. law enforcement.
In an era when terrorism and illegal immigration have transformed driver's licenses into sophisticated mini-documents festooned with holograms and bar codes, beating the system has never been easier.
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PBIS is all the rage in school districts across the country. No...Sun Prairie didn't just dream this up all by themselves. What, exactly, is PBIS? PBIS stands for Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports. It's an offshoot of the IDEA program (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act). You may see/hear it as SWPBS (School-wide Positive Behavior Supports). In a nutshell, PBIS is a system of behavior modification, with three stages of intervention.Primary intervention is targeted to all students and is s system designed to clearly identify which behaviors are acceptable and which are not. Exhibiting positive behavior is rewarded in some fashion. In theory, about 80-85% of students respond to this primary level of intervention. The overall target is to develop a system in which positive reinforcements (for "acceptable/desired" behaviors) outnumber negative reinforcements (for unacceptable behaviors) by about 4:1. In this way, kids overwhelmingly see that "being good" is the place to be. You get rewards.
PBIS extends further to the 2nd tier, kids that do not respond well to these primary tactics. These kids represent about 10-15% of the population and are those that potentially are at risk for "failure", or at the very least not realizing their academic potential. This group, however is not in need of individualized attention, but rather is targeted in small groups (a modernized form of "group" therapy). The third tier, which includes about 5-10% of students, covers those students who require individualized attention to develop positive behaviors and squelch those behaviors which are not acceptable.
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Ever have a moment when you realize the thing you always thought you were the best at, is suddenly the thing you're least skilled at doing?I'm there with parenting, and that's why my friend Margit Crane's "10 Commandments of Bad Parenting" strikes me:
I. Be sarcastic
Don't let it bother you at all that the word means "to tear flesh." Kids are plenty sophisticated enough to understand that when you say, "Yes, of course I think you're stupid," you don't in any way mean it. Plus! You'll love it when they reach their teens and start dishing it back to you. Nothing is more lovable than a sarcastic teen!
II. Lecture, yell, nag, and be smug
Dude. Who doesn't love to cuddle up for a good lecture? And yelling just makes it that much easier to be heard. Of course, if you're one of those who (cough) doesn't believe in yelling, acting smug works great too. Saying to your kids "I'm sorry I ever birthed a sinner like you" in a calm voice is totally different than saying it in a loud voice. Besides, listening is so last century.
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Up to now, genetics were thought to account for 90 percent of a child's risk for autism, but a new Stanford University School of Medicine study suggests environmental factors could play a much larger role than previously thought.The largest study of its kind, the research focused on autism in 192 pairs of twins -- 54 identical, 138 fraternal. The surprise came when Stanford researchers found a greater number of fraternal twins shared autism than identical twins. Fraternal twins share only half their genes with each other, thus, when both fraternal twins are autistic, it suggests factors other than genetics are at work.
In fact, "About half of what we see is due to environmental factors, and half of what we see is due to genetic factors," Dr. Joachim Hallmayer tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered. Hallmayer is the lead author of the study.
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Your views on this will guide you as you vote. As the only elected officials in our school district, board directors should be accountable and transparent to the people. They approve expenditures of taxpayer dollars, and they oversee the education of our children. There should be very little about their work that’s closed to public view. When the district pushes something the community doesn’t want, the board should pay attention and be inclined to support the electorate.
- Is the role of a board director accountability and responsiveness to the district -- or to voters?
- Should directors work to support the superintendent and staff? Or, should they work to hold the district accountable for fiscal responsibility and academic outcomes?
- If the district and the voters disagree on what should happen with taxpayer money and our children, to whom should the board listen?
That’s why, on July 27, I asked Spokane board directors to allow the people to vote on whether the district should spend several million tax dollars on a proposed new data system, and on the new federal vision for public education. As directors contemplate these multi-million-dollar expenditures on (unproved) products – they're also contemplating cutting people and programs that parents actually want. So, at the July 27 board meeting, I asked the directors to put the proposed expenditures on a ballot. They were silent. They looked at each other. Then, they went on with their meeting.
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This is an important moment in the history of education in the state of Iowa.Margaret Crocco: Clusty Search argaret CroccoEarlier this week, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, Iowa Education Director Jason Glass and an array of educational experts offered a set of challenges to educators at the two-day Education Summit in Des Moines.
The message was simple: Things need to change if Iowa is to regain its status as one of the strongest educational systems in the nation.
Although the statistics about Iowa students' performances on the National Assessment of Educational Progress can be used to support diverse narratives about how students are performing compared with their peers across the nation, international comparisons tell an unambiguous story: American schools will need to do better if the United States is going to produce a globally competitive work force for the 21st century.
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With Washington focused on a last-minute debt deal, one California congresswoman wants her colleagues to turn their attention to an anti-immigration law that's been off the books for 70 years. Democrat Judy Chu of the 32nd District in Los Angeles County has called on fellow members to join her in a "Resolution of Regret" over the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882--a bill that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi endorsed on Wednesday.Setting aside Ms. Chu's sense of priorities, there's a deep irony in her resolution. Even as she calls public attention to sins committed while Chester A. Arthur was president, Ms. Chu staunchly supports the most harmful form of anti-Asian discrimination in the U.S. today: racial preferences in hiring and university admissions.
Ms. Chu's resolution rightly notes that the Chinese Exclusion Act was "incompatible with the basic founding principles of equality recognized in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution." It goes on to call on Congress to "reaffirm its commitment to preserving the same civil rights and constitutional protections for people of Chinese or other Asian descent in the United States accorded to all others." Yet "the same" rights aren't what Ms. Chu wants for Asians today.
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Last week, the New York Times reported that in 2007, Deutsche Bank entered into an agreement with two German universities, Humboldt University and the Technical University of Berlin, to fund a mathematical laboratory. The problematic parts were the 'secret' terms: according to the article, the Deutsche Bank could not only influence the hiring process, but bank employees could serve as adjunct professors. Perhaps the most disturbing aspects of the agreement were that the bank had veto power over the laboratory's research agenda and, more importantly, "was given the right to review any research produced by members of the Quantitative Products Laboratory 60 days before it was published and could withhold permission for publication for as long as two years."
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Parents fret all the time about protecting their kids on Facebook, but many of the products and services I've seen that aim to help are intrusive, and inject the parents into the child's normal, healthy online social life in a way that's awkward for both.You could co-manage your child's account, or "friend" them on the service, which technically has a minimum age of 13. But those are time-consuming and embarrassing practices, especially when the offspring are teenagers, who generally crave some degree of privacy, even if they don't merit full treatment as adults.
So I've been testing a service called ZoneAlarm SocialGuard that I think strikes a good balance between safety and privacy, between a parent's peace of mind and a teen's sense of freedom. Every five minutes, it monitors kids' Facebook accounts for approaches by potential predators and strangers, cyber-bullying, age fraud, account hacking, and links to inappropriate or malicious websites. It uses algorithms that look for certain types of language, profile data, or other clues that unwanted activity may be under way.
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If you monitor education topics on Twitter you will quickly get the impression that huge numbers of American public schools are being replaced with charter schools. And you will also pick up lot of antipathy toward the schools from some of the most visible promoters of this week's SOS Marches.But the numbers show that, in most places, charter schools are insignificant.
Charters are not allowed in nine states (Alabama, Kentucky, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia) and they make up fewer than 3 percent of all schools in 12 other states. More than 10 percent of schools are charters in only three states--Arizona, Florida, Hawaii. Charters in Washington, D.C. get a lot of attention, as they should, because they constitute 45 percent of the schools. New Orleans, where 70 percent of students attend charters, is another hot spot. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has a handy map that profiles the charter school situation in each state, going back to 1999.
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The new Palm Beach County public schools budget comes with a slight property tax increase, a $500 raise for all teachers, less than 100 employee layoffs, compliance with state class-size limits, and no major school construction projects.The Palm Beach County School District supports 172,664 students and spends $13,320 each, based on a $2,300,000,000 budget. Locally, Madison budget plans to spend about $362,000,000 for 25,000 students; $14,480 per student..Following a 20-minute hearing, the School Board on Wednesday voted 5-1 to tentatively approve a $2.3 billion spending plan for the 2011-12 school year. Major changes are not anticipated before the board's final hearing and vote on Sept. 14.
"I'm not going to support it because we are giving some people raises while laying off others," said board Vice Chairwoman Debra Robinson. Board member Monroe Benaim was absent, and no one from the public commented before the vote.
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Mayor Rahm Emanuel certainly made news over his angry, finger-wagging scolding of NBC Chicago TV reporter Mary Ann Ahern the other day.Ahern dared ask the Rahmfather whether he'd send his kids to the public schools he controls. He reportedly became indignant, took off his microphone and ended the interview.
Later, and with great courtesy, Emanuel revisited the topic with a rival station -- which then reported the big exclusive that the mayor was sending his children to a private school.
Emanuel runs Chicago Public Schools. He's shown grit to stand publicly and admonish the teachers union to improve the product. But he decided his children will not attend the public schools.
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The wealth gap between whites and each of the nation's two largest minorities--Hispanics and blacks--has widened to unprecedented levels amid the housing crisis and the recession, according to new research.The median net worth of white households is 20 times greater than that of black households and 18 times greater than that of Hispanic households, according to an analysis of newly available 2009 government data by the Pew Research Center, an independent think tank.
The disparities are the greatest since the government began tracking such data a quarter-century ago, with the gulf separating whites from other groups twice as wide as it was in the two decades prior to the recession and 2008 financial crisis, according to the study.
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McDonald's Corp. plans to promote more nutritional options, such as automatically including fruit or a low-fat dairy option in every Happy Meal.The fast-food giant said the new Happy Meal, being rolled out in September, will have about 20% fewer calories and less fat.
The company also will promote nutrition in its national kids' advertising and Happy Meal packaging.
Childhood obesity is a growing concern in the U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama has made it her mission to promote environments that support healthy choices through her "Let's Move" initiative.
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The familiar heel prick that newborns receive is revealing more about a baby's health than ever before. But, as technology opens the possibility of screening newborns for hundreds of diseases, there is controversy over how much parents need to know.Within days of an infant being born, a few drops of blood are taken from the baby's heel and tested for signs of more than two dozen different conditions, including congenital hypothyroidism and sickle-cell diseases. In many places, babies also are given tests to identify the likelihood of hearing or vision disorders.
Some states have expanded their checks, including testing for amino-acid and metabolism disorders. Many of the new conditions being looked at have no definitive treatment or it isn't clear whether immediate intervention is necessary. That can present an emotional dilemma for parents who may want to know if anything is wrong with their baby but in many cases have no therapy to pursue.
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Of the million or so kids who drop out of school every year, nearly half are girls. They drop out for the same reasons boys do: they skip school, fall behind academically and they're bored. But the single biggest reason girls drop out is because they get pregnant.Not a day goes by that Lauren Ortega doesn't regret quitting high school. When she turned 15, she got pregnant with her son.
Her pregnancy cut short so many things, Ortega says. A job, a car, her own apartment, college, and just being independent.
Now, at 20 years old, she complains about gaining weight and feeling a little lost. She's studying to get her GED at a school for adults in San Bernardino, Calif.
Ortega remembers she was starved for affection when she met Joseph, her boyfriend. She was only 14.
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Dan Gustafson, PhD 133K PDF, via a kind email from the Wisconsin Reading Coalition:
WRC recommends reading the following open letter from Madison neuropsychologist Dan Gustafson to the Governor's Read to Lead task force. It reflects many of our concerns about the state of reading instruction in Wisconsin and the lack of an effective response from the Department of Public Instruction.View a 133K PDF or Google Docs version.An Open Letter to the Read-To-Lead Task Force
From Dan Gustafson, PhD
State Superintendent Evers, you appointed me to the Common Core Leadership Group. You charged that the Leadership Group would guide Wisconsin's implementation of new reading instruction standards developed by the National Governors' Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).
It is my understanding that I was asked to join the group with the express purpose of bringing different voices to the table. If anything, my experience with the group illustrates how very far we need to go in achieving a transparent and reasoned discussion about the reading crisis in Wisconsin.
DPI Secretly Endorses Plan Created by Poor Performing CESA-7
I have grave concerns about DPI's recent announcement that Wisconsin will follow CESA-7's approach to implementing the Common Core reading standards. DPI is proposing this will be the state's new model reading curriculum.
I can attest that there was absolutely no consensus reached in the Common Core group in support of CESA-7's approach. In point of fact, at the 27th of June Common Core meeting, CESA-7 representative Claire Wick refused to respond to even general questions about her program.
I pointed out that our group, the Common Core Leadership Group, had a right to know about how CESA-7 intended to implement the Common Core Standards. She denied this was the case, citing a "non-disclosure agreement."
The moderator of the discussion, DPI's Emilie Amundson, concurred that Claire didn't need to discuss the program further on the grounds that it was only a CESA-7 program. Our Common Core meeting occurred on the 27th of June. Only two weeks later, on July 14th, DPI released the following statement:
State Superintendent Evers formally adopted the Common Core State Standards in June 2010, making Wisconsin the first state in the country to adopt these rigorous, internationally benchmarked set of expectations for what students should know and are expected to do in English Language Arts and Mathematics. These standards guide both curriculum and assessment development at the state level. Significant work is now underway to determine how training will be advanced for these new standards, and DPI is currently working with CESA 7 to develop a model curriculum aligned to the new standards.
In glaring contrast to the deliberative process that went into creating the Common Core goals, Wisconsin is rushing to implement the goals without being willing to even show their program to their own panel of experts.
What Do We Know About Wisconsin/CESA-7's Model Curriculum?
As an outsider to DPI, I was only able to locate one piece of data regarding CESA-7's elementary school reading performance:
4TH GRADE READING SCORES, 2007-08 WKCE-CRT,
CESA-7 IS AMONG THE WORST PERFORMING DISTRICTS.
CESA-7 RANKED 10TH OF THE 12 WISCONSIN CESA'S.
What Claire did say about her philosophy and the CESA-7 program, before she decided to refuse further comment, was that she did not think significant changes were needed in reading instruction in Wisconsin, as "only three-percent" of children were struggling to read in the state. This is a strikingly low number, one that reflects an arbitrary cutoff for special education. Her view does not reflect the painful experience of the 67% of Wisconsin 4th graders who scored below proficient on the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress.
As people in attendance at the meeting can attest, Claire also said that her approach was "not curriculum neutral" and she was taking a "strong stand" on how to teach reading. Again, when I pressed her on what these statements meant, she would only reference oblique whole language jargon, such as a belief in the principal of release from instruction. When I later asked her about finding a balance that included more phonics instruction, she said "too much emphasis" had been given to balanced literacy. After making her brief statements to the Common Core group, she said she had already disclosed too much, and refused to provide more details about the CESA-7 program.
Disregarding Research and Enormous Gains Made by other States, Wisconsin Continues to Stridently Support Whole Language
During the remainder of the day-long meeting on the 27th, I pressed the group to decide about a mechanism to achieve an expert consensus grounded in research. I suggested ways we could move beyond the clear differences that existed among us regarding how to assess and teach reading.
The end product of the meeting, however, was just a list of aspirational goals. We were told this would likely be the last meeting of the group. There was no substantive discussion about implementation of the goals--even though this had been Superintendent Evers' primary mandate for the group.
I can better understand now why Emilie kept steering the discussion back to aspirational goals. The backroom deal had already been made with Claire and other leaders of the Wisconsin State Reading Association (WSRA). It would have been inconvenient to tell me the truth.
WSRA continues to unapologetically champion a remarkably strident version of whole-language reading instruction. Please take a look at the advocacy section of their website. Their model of reading instruction has been abandoned through most the United States due to lack of research support. It is still alive and well in CESA-7, however.
Our State Motto is "Forward"
After years of failing to identify and recommend model curriculum by passing it off as an issue of local control, the DPI now purports to lead. Unfortunately, Superintendent Evers, you are now leading us backward.
Making CESA-7 your model curriculum is going to cause real harm. DPI is not only rashly and secretly endorsing what appears to be a radical version of whole language, but now school districts who have adopted research validated procedures, such as the Monroe School District, will feel themselves under pressure to fall in line with your recommended curriculum.
By all appearances, CESA-7's program is absolutely out of keeping with new Federal laws addressing Response to Intervention and Wisconsin's own Specific Learning Disability Rule. CESA-7's program will not earn us Race to the Top funding. Most significantly, CESA-7's approach is going to harm children.
In medicine we would call this malpractice. There is clear and compelling data supporting one set of interventions (Monroe), and another set of intervention that are counter-indicated (CESA-7). This is not a matter of opinion, or people taking sides. This is an empirical question. If you don't have them already, I hope you will find trusted advisors who will rise above the WSRA obfuscation and just look at the data. It is my impression that you are moving fast and receiving poor advice.
I am mystified as to why, after years of making little headway on topics related to reading, DPI is now making major decisions at a breakneck pace. Is this an effort to circumvent the Read-To-Lead Task Force by instituting new policies before the group has finished its scheduled meetings? Superintendent Evers, why haven't you shared anything about the CESA-7 curriculum with them? Have you already made your decision, or are you prepared to show the Read-To-Lead that there is a deliberative process underway to find a true model curriculum?
There are senior leaders at DPI who recognize that the reading-related input DPI has received has been substantially unbalanced. For example, there were about five senior WSRA members present at the Common Core meetings, meaning that I was substantially outnumbered. While ultimately unsuccessful due to logistics, an 11th hour effort was made to add researchers and leadership members from the Wisconsin Reading Coalition to the Common Core group.
The Leadership Group could achieve what you asked of it, which is to thoughtfully guide implementation of the Common Core. I am still willing to work with you on this goal.
State Superintendent Evers, I assume that you asked me to be a member of the Leadership Group in good faith, and will be disappointed to learn of what actually transpired with the group. You may have the false impression that CESA-7's approach was vetted at your Common Core Leadership Group. Lastly, and most importantly, I trust you have every desire to see beyond destructive politics and find a way to protect the welfare of the children of Wisconsin.
Sincerely,
Dan Gustafson, PhD, EdM
Neuropsychologist, Dean Clinic
Related:
How does Wisconsin Compare: 2 Big Goals.
Wisconsin Academic Standards
Wisconsin Teacher Content Knowledge Requirement Comparison
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Kevin Johnson, chief executive of Juniper Networks, one of the biggest network equipment makers, talks to the FT's Paul Taylor about cloud computing, innovation, video and his worries about the failure of the US education system to produce home-grown talent
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It is singular that Dickens, who was not only a radical and a social reformer, but one who would have been particularly concerned to maintain the principle of modern popular education, should nevertheless have seen so clearly this potential evil in the mere educationalism of our time -- the fact that merely educating the democracy may easily mean setting to work to despoil it of all the democratic virtues. It is better to be Lizzie Hexam and not know how to read and write than to be Charlie Hexam and not know how to appreciate Lizzie Hexam. It is not only necessary that the democracy should be taught; it is also necessary that the democracy should be taught democracy. Otherwise it will certainly fall a victim to that snobbishness and system of worldly standards which is the most natural and easy of all the forms of human corruption. This is one of the many dangers which Dickens saw before it existed. Dickens was really a prophet; far more of a prophet than Carlyle.
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They're out to show private colleges can be affordable.Weighing the costs of education (iStockPhoto)
KAI RYSSDAL: Here's something to interrupt the relaxing summer of a lot of high schoolers out there. It's usually fall of senior year or so that the college search begins in earnest. But really, why wait?
This week, all 31 private colleges in the state of Indiana are opening their doors to prospective students. A lot of states, in fact, now have some kind of private college week.
From the Marketplace Education Desk at WYPR in Baltimore, Amy Scott explains it's all about perceptions.
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Of all the problems this country faces in education, one of the most complicated, heart-wrenching and urgent is the dropout crisis. Nearly 1 million teenagers stop going to school every year.The impact of that decision is lifelong. And the statistics are stark:
The unemployment rate for people without a high school diploma is nearly twice that of the general population.
Over a lifetime, a high school dropout will earn $200,000 less than a high school graduate and almost $1 million less than a college graduate.
Dropouts are more likely to commit crimes, abuse drugs and alcohol, become teenage parents, live in poverty and commit suicide.
Dropouts cost federal and state governments hundreds of billions of dollars in lost earnings, welfare and medical costs, and billions more for dropouts who end up in prison.
NPR is looking at the dropout crisis through the stories of five people. Three dropped out of school years ago. They talk about why they left school, the forces in their lives that contributed to that decision and its impact in the years since.
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99K PDF, via a TJ Mertz email:
As hundreds of thousands of public school supporters gather in Washington DC the weekend of July 28 to 30, 2011, Wisconsin advocates will hold a rally in support of the Save Our Schools agenda at 3:00 PM on Saturday July 30, near the State St. entrance to the Capitol.For more information, visit: http://www.saveourschoolsmarch.org/ and http://saveourschoolswisconsin.wordpress.com/"Public schools are under attack. There is a need for national, state, and local action in support of our schools. Wisconsin has been ground zero in this; the Save Our Schools demands from the Guiding Principles provide a great framework to build our state movement and work to expand opportunities to learn" said education activist Thomas J. Mertz.
The Save Our Schools demands are:
Doing more with less doesn't work. "The time to act is now. While phony debates revolve around debt ceilings, students and teachers across the country are shortchanged. We need real reform, starting with finally fixing the school funding formula, and putting families and communities first. What child and what teacher don't deserve an excellent school?" said rally organizer Todd Price, former Green Party Candidate for Department of Public Instruction and Professor of Teacher Education National Louis University.
- Equitable funding for all public school communities
- An end to high stakes testing used for the purpose of student, teacher, and school evaluation
- Teacher, family and community leadership in forming public education policies
- Curriculum developed for and by local school communities
The event will feature speeches from educators, students, parents and officials, as well as opportunities for school advocates from throughout Wisconsin to connect and organize around issues of importance in their communities.
Related:
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During the past semester, a time where I constantly felt split between my academic life and my civic life, I became acutely aware of an attitude among undergraduates that perplexed me. I tried writing about it , describing what readers pointed out (in a far more articulate manner than I'd managed) was a notable lack of empathy among some students.Since I've spent the last 10 years trying to make convince higher education institutions to prioritize their students' needs and desires, these realizations about who some of the students seemed to be and especially what they seemed to believe, made me pretty depressed. Don't get me wrong: it's not that I expect students to speak and act in one voice--far from it, given how much I value the democratic process. I don't want them to share my opinions or perspectives, but rather simply want them to formulate opinions and perspectives after asking good questions and gathering and evaluating information. But what I hope for, most of all, is their recognition that they are part of a worldwide community of students, and their strength lies in that community. I hope that such a larger sense of the world will guide them to think of more than themselves, and to act for the greater good.
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A heat dome has settled over much of American education. Is Gov. Scott Walker just going to add to the stifling atmosphere? Or is Walker right that there are cool breezes in his ideas for how to increase school quality overall?First, the national perspective: You would think by now, the heat would have been drained from some of the debate about what works in education, especially when it comes to serving urban kids. People have been working on this for decades. Haven't we figured out answers yet?
In most ways, no. Even a lot of things that seem like answers haven't been brought successfully to wide use. Things that look good on paper (or in a political speech) have often accomplished little in reality. The profoundly troubling march to perpetuating educational failure, for the most part, continues.
As disappointment grows, the debates between "education reformers" and those who think the "reformers" are going in the wrong directions often have been contentious. If you follow the tweets and postings and such, you'll find occasional light but a lot of heated rhetoric. Add in this year's wars over the pay, benefits and unions of public employees, combined with the hyperpartisan nature of the times, and you have an atmosphere that should carry health warnings.
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When I was growing up, there was a special mystique about teachers. They were looked up to and respected. No matter if you liked a teacher or not, you appreciated his or her efforts to educate children and prepare them for their future, no matter what that future would be.Today, teachers are being portrayed as self-centered union lackeys who feel entitled to extraordinary benefits provided by taxpayers. Teachers appear to have suddenly morphed from members of a noble profession to members of the world's oldest profession. What a turnaround.
My teachers over the years left an indelible mark on me and the person I became. They helped shape me, gave me encouragement and taught me to think for myself and question the status quo.
My first-grade teacher was Miss Darling (honestly). She was a sweet lady who I remember for her kindness and her patience as I struggled to master the simple act of tying my shoes. It has been almost 50 years since then, but I remember her clearly, drying my tears of frustration and embarrassment and helping me practice until I could finally tie my shoes.
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One of the foundation's main initial interests was schools with fewer students. In 2004 it announced that it would spend $100 million to open 20 small high schools in San Diego, Denver, New York City and elsewhere. Such schools, says Mr. Gates, were designed to--and did--promote less acting up in the classroom, better attendance and closer interaction with adults.Much more on Small Learning Communities, here."But the overall impact of the intervention, particularly the measure we care most about--whether you go to college--it didn't move the needle much," he says. "Maybe 10% more kids, but it wasn't dramatic. . . . We didn't see a path to having a big impact, so we did a mea culpa on that." Still, he adds, "we think small schools were a better deal for the kids who went to them."
The reality is that the Gates Foundation met the same resistance that other sizeable philanthropic efforts have encountered while trying to transform dysfunctional urban school systems run by powerful labor unions and a top-down government monopoly provider.
In the 1970s, the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, among others, pushed education "equity" lawsuits in California, New Jersey, Texas and elsewhere that led to enormous increases in state expenditures for low-income students. In 1993, the publishing mogul Walter Annenberg, hoping to "startle" educators and policy makers into action, gave a record $500 million to nine large city school systems. Such efforts made headlines but not much of a difference in closing the achievement gap.
Asked to critique these endeavors, Mr. Gates demurs: "I applaud people for coming into this space, but unfortunately it hasn't led to significant improvements." He also warns against overestimating the potential power of philanthropy. "It's worth remembering that $600 billion a year is spent by various government entities on education, and all the philanthropy that's ever been spent on this space is not going to add up to $10 billion. So it's truly a rounding error."
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A new report from the Department of Social and Health Services summarizes a teenager's life and death in eight pages. After bouncing him through 22 foster homes, it concludes that caseworkers and foster parents should have had more information about the boy's history so they could have helped him.Roger Eugene Benson was in state care when he left a group home in January, walked to a freeway overpass, jumped to I-5 below and died after being struck by a van. People who witnessed the suicide were horrified. People who didn't know what was going were angry by the traffic delays caused when the Interstate was shut down during the afternoon commute.
In calling the State Patrol that day, I found out the victim was 15 years old. That struck me because I have a 15-year-old daughter. This kid, the boy who killed himself on I-5 , was somebody's son.
What went wrong in his life?
Benson was born in December of 1995. His history with the state began when he was a toddler. His mother was investigated for abuse or neglect of her children, including Benson, six times. The last time CPS was called, in May of 1998, Benson was placed in protective custody. The boy and his siblings were placed in four foster homes within three years. The longest he was in any one home was two years.
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Iowa has slid from a national leader in elementary and secondary education to an average performer over the past 20 years as other states accelerated past it, according to a state report released today.Wisconsin has slid, as well.The Iowa report card -- the first released under Republican Gov. Terry Branstad -- provides an unvarnished assessment of the state's academic performance and sounds a clarion call to improve. The report, "Rising to Greatness: An Imperative for Improving Iowa's Schools," says performance on various national and state tests show "an alarming slide toward mediocrity."
In some ways, Iowa public schools have improved over years past, but other states have surged ahead, said Jason Glass, director of the Iowa Department of Education, which produced the report.
Restoring the greatness of Iowa schools will require more than "tinkering around the edges," he said.
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Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who strongly supports school reform that centers on standardized test-based accountability for students, schools and teachers, has decided to send his children to a private school that doesn't obsess on standardized tests.Emanuel, who served in the White House as President Obama's chief of staff for a few years, and his wife have chosen, according to a local radio station CBS News 2 in Chicago, to send their three children to the prestigious University of Chicago Laboratory Schools in Hyde Park.
It's the same school that President Obama's daughters attended when they lived in Chicago. Sasha and Malia Obama now attend the private Sidwell Friends School.
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A collaborator pointed out this nice figure (from the paper below), which is pretty self-explanatory, but let me emphasize the fairly wide SES (socioeconomic status) range of families under consideration. If SES were determined solely by household income the four categories in the graph would range from below $20k to above $100k per annum (2003 US income data).
See related posts SES and IQ and Random microworlds.
Note to Tiger Moms and Sociologists: Shared genes make people more alike, but shared family environment does not (very much). Feel free to disregard, though. Who needs data when you have an opinion? :-)
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First, a college education costs too much. Middle-class families can no longer afford tuition that increases faster than inflation, per capita personal income, consumer prices and even health insurance. Total student loan debt in America is $1 trillion and exceeds credit card debt. Taxpayer money stretches only so far, with health care, public safety and K-12 education claiming ever larger shares of state budgets.Second, the higher education industry is undergoing a complete restructuring. Technology is fundamentally altering how courses are created and taught while upending the cost structure of delivery. New entrants - from for-profit white-label degree providers like 2tor to nonprofits like Khan Academy - are bringing disruptive innovation.
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Congratulations to the students, teachers and administrators of the Blackstone Valley Mayoral Academy, in Cumberland, who have achieved something extraordinary. All 152 of the kindergarten and first-grade students in the school who took the state Developmental Reading Assessment this year scored proficient, or better."To my knowledge, this is the first time in Rhode Island that every student at a school scored proficient or better on this early-grade assessment!" wrote Rhode Island Education Commissioner Deborah Gist in a congratulatory letter.
Literacy in the early grades is obviously a crucial foundation for learning throughout one's school years, so this unprecedented achievement is one to celebrate.
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A National Guard school program for at-risk teenagers is scheduled to open in 2012 in eastern Kentucky.
The Appalachian Youth ChalleNGe Academy, to be housed in a renovated former elementary school, will be the second ChalleNGE school in Kentucky. Bluegrass ChalleNGe Academy at Fort Knox opened in 1999."Here in Harlan, we found a county with a school system that was willing to help make a program," said Col. John Wayne Smith, director of the Fort Knox program. "We believe that with an academy here, we will be able to get kids to come who wouldn't come to Fort Knox."
The primary recruiting area for the new program is 23 counties in eastern Kentucky, with any remaining openings being offered to teens in the Appalachian region of neighboring states, Smith said last week in the Harlan Daily Enterprise.
"I was looking at the numbers in our target population. I found that Appalachia has a higher rate of these kids, but we also found that because of positive family connections in the area, youth are hesitant to leave and come to Fort Knox. We have had a few come to us, but nothing like the numbers we should be getting," he said at a community meeting.
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Universities are keen to present themselves as morally upright organisations committed to the very highest standard of conduct.In recent years, a lot of attention has focused on ethics in research. Here, universities have introduced tight rules and approval processes for academics wanting to do research on human subjects.
But one of the most significant ethical issues in university life receives far less attention. This is how universities handle romantic and sexual relationships between faculty and students.
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Update: I originally thought this was from a teacher but it is from a parent. My apologiesBelow is a post from a parent, "No Confidence," from another thread but I read it and said bingo! (Emphasis mine.)
I think that the first change that could make some difference would be for teacher & administrators to understand the limits of their abilities to assess. At least the teacher could say, Sally is learning differently than many other kids I see and we don't know why. Johnny is refusing to do writing assignments and we don't know why.
Next I think that PD should include training about learning & developmental differences, with case studies, to the extent that at least teacher are familiar with the possibilities. (I have spoken with so many SPS teachers & administrators who believe that twice exceptional kids don't exist.) There are signs to look for.
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My son is left-handed, has very messy handwriting and an awkward pencil grip that slows his writing hugely. I've tried to show him a more comfortable grip but find it difficult as I'm right-handed. I've also mentioned it to the teacher but it hasn't made any difference.Handwriting is certainly trickier for left-handers. They are often unable to see what they have just written so it is not unusual for them to develop an awkward grip and an uncomfortable posture, often tilting their paper to severe angles. It's a hard habit to change.
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Alice Wong considered herself an avid reader, but it didn't occur to her that she might have to learn how to read to her two young children. She was even less aware that courses were available to teach this skill."I never used to understand the power of reading," says Wong, who has a four-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter.
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Leung Yuk-yin had enrolled her son in kindergarten in the early 1990s when she saw a television commercial calling for people to sign on as foster families. The recruitment drive rolled out at just the right time. Her boy was settling in nicely in the nursery, so the housewife from Tuen Mun suddenly found herself with time to spare."I like babies, and I enjoy the feeling of being a mother, so I made the call and got started," she says.
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Michael Horn spoke to the National Coalition Public School Options today in Washington DC. NCPSO is an extraordinary network of parents that advocate for educational options for families particularly online learning.
Horn is a coauthor of Disrupting Class and a leading advocate for online learning. He gave the roomful of discerning parents a little history of disruption.
In 1989, Clay Christensen joined the faculty of the Harvard Business School and began studying why successful organization fail. He found that the factors that had promoted success were often cause of the demise. These organizations would add sustaining innovations--think computers and cars--that made models a little better and a little more expensive every year. This cycle of product improvement leaves room for new competitors to fulfill similar needs for substantially less.
These "disruptive innovations" often replace non-consumption for under served consumers. In education non-consumption includes credit recovery, dropout recovery, and home education.
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DEREK BOK, a former president of Harvard, once observed that "universities share one characteristic with compulsive gamblers and exiled royalty: there is never enough money to satisfy their desires." This is a bit hard on compulsive gamblers and exiled royals. America's universities have raised their fees five times as fast as inflation over the past 30 years. Student debt in America exceeds credit-card debt. Yet still the universities keep sending begging letters to alumni and philanthropists.This insatiable appetite for money was bad enough during the boom years. It is truly irritating now that middle-class incomes are stagnant and students are struggling to find good jobs. Hence a flurry of new thinking about higher education. Are universities inevitably expensive? Vance Fried, of Oklahoma State University, recently conducted a fascinating thought experiment, backed up by detailed calculations. Is it possible to provide a first-class undergraduate education for $6,700 a year rather than the $25,900 charged by public research universities or the $51,500 charged by their private peers? He concluded that it is.
Mr Fried shunned easy solutions. He insisted that students should live in residential colleges, just as they do at Harvard and Yale. He did not suggest getting rid of football stadiums (which usually pay for themselves) or scrimping on bed-and-board.
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[ Ed. Note: In the immediate aftermath of the CSU Board of Trustees approving a salary of $400,000 -- 25% more than his predecessor was paid -- for the new President of San Diego State University on July 12, 2011, this piece is particularly appropriate.]Higher education is very important to California -- to the students, to their parents, to the employers who hire the graduates, and to the people and organizations that fund the portion of the costs that is not covered by tuition. Therefore it is extremely important that educational funding be spent as efficiently as possible, and even more so in this time of financial distress.
I have taught at two campuses in the California State University system since 1998. My personal experiences at those schools raised concerns about administrative practices. Further research revealed statistics that all the stakeholders should be aware of, because of their effects on both the cost and quality of the education we provide.
For example, based on data in the California State University Statistical Abstract, the number of full-time faculty in the whole CSU system rose from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, an increase of only 3.5 percent. In the same time period the total number of administrators rose 221 percent, from 3,800 to 12,183. In 1975, there were three full time faculty members per administrator, but now there are actually slightly more administrators than full-time faculty. If this trend continues, there could be two administrators per full-time faculty in another generation.
I currently teach at Cal Poly in Pomona, where the trends for the whole system also are visible. In 1984 we had 90 "Management Personnel Plan" employees, but in 2010 there were 132. Based on data provided by the chief financial officer, the total compensation of those employees, including fringe benefits, was $20.6 million in 2010.
To put this total into perspective, if the administrators were reduced by 42 to return to the same level as in 1984, the university could hire over 50 full-time faculty (who are typically paid less than administrators). These additional faculty could teach over 300 additional classes per year, which would make it easier for students to graduate in a more timely fashion. The additional instructors would also make it unnecessary to eliminate academic programs as is currently being proposed.
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How did more than 160 million women go missing from Asia? The simple answer is sex selection -- typically, an ultrasound scan followed by an abortion if the fetus turns out to be female -- but beyond that, the reasons for a gap half the size of the U.S. population are not widely understood. And when I started researching a book on the topic, I didn't understand them myself.I thought I would focus on how gender discrimination has persisted as countries develop. The reasons couples gave for wanting boys varies: Sons stayed in the family and took care of their parents in old age, or they performed ancestor and funeral rites important in some cultures. Or it was that daughters were a burden, made expensive by skyrocketing dowries.
But that didn't account for why sex selection was spreading across cultural and religious lines. Once found only in East and South Asia, imbalanced sex ratios at birth have recently reached countries as varied as Vietnam, Albania, and Azerbaijan. The problem has fanned out across these countries, moreover, at a time when women are driving many developing economies. In India, where women have achieved political firsts still not reached in the United States, sex selection has become so intense that by 2020 an estimated 15 to 20 percent of men in northwest India will lack female counterparts. I could only explain that epidemic as the cruel sum of technological advances and lingering sexism. I did not think the story of sex selection's spread would lead, in part, to the United States.
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Matthew Stewart believes there is a place for charter schools. Just not in his schoolyard.http://www.hanyuschool.org/. Locally, the Verona School District offers a Mandarin immersion charter school. More, here.Mr. Stewart, a stay-at-home father of three boys, moved to this wealthy township, about 20 miles from Midtown Manhattan, three years ago, filling his life with class activities and soccer practices. But in recent months, he has traded play dates for protests, enlisting more than 200 families in a campaign to block two Mandarin-immersion charter schools from opening in the area.
The group, Millburn Parents Against Charter Schools, argues that the schools would siphon money from its children's education for unnecessarily specialized programs. The schools, to be based in nearby Maplewood and Livingston, would draw students and resources from Millburn and other area districts.
"I'm in favor of a quality education for everyone," Mr. Stewart said. "In suburban areas like Millburn, there's no evidence whatsoever that the local school district is not doing its job. So what's the rationale for a charter school?"
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Fresh out of graduate school, Ann Marie Eckerson is looking for her first full-time teaching job. The 26-year-old Apalachin woman has complied a list of credentials that experts say she will need in her search -- a master's degree from Binghamton University's School of Education; teaching certifications in a number of areas; and two semesters of student-teacher experience in the Union-Endicott Central School District.She also has the enthusiasm to follow in the footsteps of her father and mother, who were both teachers, and her brother and sister, who also went into the profession.
"I believed from a young age there was no better way to make an impact," said the graduate of Seton Catholic Central High School.
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Scott Walker, the governor who set the stage for a burst of educational excellence? The guy who helped teachers make their work more successful and more rewarding (at least intangibly)?Much like our exploding federalism, history will certainly reveal how Walker's big changes played out versus the mostly status quo K-12 world of the past few decades. One thing is certain: the next 10 years will be different, regardless of how the present politics play out.Goodness, turning those question marks into periods is going to be a project. It's hard to imagine how Walker's standing among teachers could be lower.
But Walker thinks that will be the verdict several years from now.
By winning (as of now) the epic battle to cut school spending and erase almost all collective bargaining powers for teachers, as well as other educational battles, Walker has changed the realities of life in just about every school in the state, including many private schools.
The focus through our tumultuous spring was on money, power and politics. Now the focus is shifting to ideas for changing education itself.
So what are Walker's ideas on those scores?
In a 40-minute telephone interview a few days ago, Walker talked about a range of education questions. There will be strong criticism of a lot of what he stands for. Let's deal with that in upcoming columns. For the moment, I'm going to give Walker the floor, since, so far this year, the tune he calls has been the tune that the state ends up playing. Here are some excerpts:
I found the interview comments on the teacher climate interesting. Watching events locally for some time, it seems that there is a good deal more top down curricular (more) and pedagogy (teaching methods) dogma from administrators, ed school grants/research and others.
Other states, such as Minnesota and Massachusetts have raised the bar with respect to teacher content knowledge in certain subjects.
Wisconsin teacher license information.
Related: 2 Big Goals for Wisconsin.
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The eldest of Pamela Fettes' three sons only recently celebrated his 15th birthday, but she is already worrying about the cost of their college education.Ms Fettes, a 46-year-old single mother, lives in Belvidere, a blue-collar town 70 miles north-west of Chicago. She earns $50,000 a year as a regional healthcare co-ordinator, putting her right at the US's median household income - although she also works two nights a week as a hospital clerk and decorates cakes on the side. She took on the extra work after being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008 and getting divorced last year, both of which involved considerable expense.
Ms Fettes says she has about $200 left each month after all her bills are paid, but she is also trying to pay down $8,000 in credit card debt and has little saved up, meaning she will be unable to contribute to the cost of her sons' higher education.
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Only two years ago, Atlanta Public Schools were the toast of the educational establishment. Scores on standardized tests had been rising--skyrocketing, in some cases--for a decade. In February 2009, schools chief Beverly Hall was feted as national superintendent of the year.Two months later, dozens of Ms. Hall's teachers and principals engaged in the annual ritual required to produce such success: They cheated on the state standardized test.
The difference between 2009 and previous years of cheating (dating back at least as far as 2006, and perhaps 2001) was that reporters at my newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, questioned the schools' remarkable scores on Georgia's Criterion-Referenced Competency Test. Those articles prompted an investigation by then-Gov. Sonny Perdue, and this month the devastating final report arrived. It uncovered cheating by adults in 44 schools, covering 1,508 classes--almost all of them serving low-income, minority students.
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A typical school district's reaction to tight budgets is to cut, cut, cut. While cutting education waste can sharpen focus, cutting into innovation leaves your district extremely vulnerable to competition. School districts are no longer just competing against the local private school; rather they are competing with education over the net and the global market place as well. Now more than ever we need contenders.With the right trainers, district leaders or contenders can become innovation champions for kids. Here's four ways you can step into the ring and put on the gloves for the upcoming education fight with the rest of the world.
Complete an Open Education Resource Scan - What are you paying for in your district with educational technology? What outcomes have you realized? Is there an open free alternative? Can this resource be shared among multiple users for multiple purposes? Example: Are you paying for a learning management system and creating your own content? Or, are you using a free engine and wrapping it around content not just for instruction but for professional development as well.
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Last September, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced: "Today is a great day! I have looked forward to this day for a long time-and so have America's teachers, parents, students, and school leaders."Duncan was excited about a new way of testing students, one that goes "beyond the bubble test," the standardized assessments students take every year that have long been criticized as not only useless in measuring any kind of real learning, but actually detrimental to the entire education system.
Ask most teachers, and you'll hear a litany of reasons why they detest these assessments. They contend the current tests have no bearing on student learning. They waste time that could be better spent in class (the former president of United Teachers Los Angeles, "dismisses the weeks before spring testing as 'Bubbling-In 101,'" according to a Los Angeles Times article.) They complain about having to teach to the tests, leaving them little time to try new ways of engaging students. And in some states, teachers are evaluated based on those very scores.
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On June 30th, the Denver Public School Board voted unanimously on nine separate proposals for new charter and innovation schools. That's right, the DPS Board that is notorious for its contentious 4-3 split on nearly every major policy (turnarounds, innovation schools and charters) voted 7-0 in favor of these promising new schools. Here's hoping that this is a sign of the Board's commitment to putting kids first with our new reform minded mayor-elect, Michael Hancock.The new charter schools, which will be located in all quadrants of the city, include: an all-boys K-12 charter modeled after a school in New Orleans and backed by former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, two additional West Denver Prep middle school campuses and a new West Denver Prep high school, a new KIPP elementary school, two new Denver School of Science and Technology campuses, a K-5 performance school being started by a current DPS principal and district educators, and a new preschool-8 charter school started by a Get Smart Schools fellow.
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The list of delays states are encountering in implementing their Race to the Top plans keeps getting longer.Every state but Georgia has now amended its Race to the Top plan in some way, usually to push back a timeline or scale back an initiative. In all, the dozen winners from the $4 billion competition have changed their plans, so far, 25 times, according to the list of amendments approved by the U.S. Department of Education. Remember, the winners were chosen based, at least in part, on their promises in those plans.
The changes includes a 32-page amendment with dozens of changes to New York's plan, including one of the first amendments I've seen that doesn't just push back a timeline, but eliminates a small piece of the state's plan. That particular amendment eliminates a $10 million program to provide competitive grants for charter school facilities in New York, and redistributes the money across a few other programs, including a general "school innovation fund." This may--or may not--be a big deal, but it's at least worth noting.
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The widespread use of search engines and online databases has affected the way people remember information, researchers are reporting.The scientists, led by Betsy Sparrow, an assistant professor of psychology at Columbia, wondered whether people were more likely to remember information that could be easily retrieved from a computer, just as students are more likely to recall facts they believe will be on a test.
Dr. Sparrow and her collaborators, Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard and Jenny Liu of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, staged four different memory experiments. In one, participants typed 40 bits of trivia -- for example, "an ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain" -- into a computer. Half of the subjects believed the information would be saved in the computer; the other half believed the items they typed would be erased.
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Sugary soft drinks, diet sodas, and artery-clogging food will be a thing of the past at Massachusetts public school snack shops, vending machines, and a la carte cafeteria lines under rules unanimously approved yesterday by state health regulators.The nutrition standards adopted by the Public Health Council take effect in the 2012-2013 school year and are believed by advocates to be among the most comprehensive in the country.
But the council - an appointed panel of doctors, consumer advocates, and professors - delayed a ban on sweetened, flavored milk until August 2013 to give schools more time to find other ways to encourage children to drink milk.
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Clay Christensen & Henry Eyring
Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring, building on Christensen's contribution to business, health care and K-12 education, apply Christensen's model of disruptive innovation to higher education. Unlike the many doom-and-gloom books of recent years, this work offers a hopeful analysis of the university and its traditions and how it must find new models for the future.More, here."The Innovative University" builds upon the theory of "disruptive innovation" and applies it to the world of higher education. The concept, originally introduced by Christensen in his best-selling book "The Innovator's Dilemma," holds that sustaining institutions or models exist, until change "disrupts" the traditional or "sustaining" model. In the case of higher education, the disruptor to the traditional university might be a recession, the rise of for-profit schools or the prevalence of high-quality online programs. The authors suggest that to avoid the pitfalls of disruption and turn the scenario into a positive and productive one, universities must change their institutional "DNA."
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As part of Gov. Susana Martínez's education-reform effort, she persuaded the New Mexico Legislature to pass a bill by which our public schools will be given grades.It's an exercise in teacher/administrator accountability, and pretty clearly the public needs more accountability from those folks; our state for years has been at the bottom of national rankings in education, and toward the top when it comes to dropouts.
Education and jobs tend to be a chicken-and-egg proposition -- so, figure the governor and her choice as education secretary, Hanna Skandera, let's begin where we have the chance, and the challenge, of improving the poultry.
But the new school year and the school-grading process are fast approaching. Some superintendents question the state's readiness to apply A's, B's, C's, D's and F's -- especially considering the damage those last two letters might do.
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Some Southern California teachers are finding ways to keep creativity in the lesson plan even as they prepare their students for standardized tests.Even as the annual state testing season bore down on her this spring, fourth-grade teacher Jin Yi barely bothered with test prep materials. The Hobart Boulevard Elementary School teacher used to spend weeks with practice tests but found they bored her students.
Instead, she engages them with hands-on lessons, such as measuring their arms and comparing that data to solve above-grade-level subtraction problems.
"I used to spend time on test prep because I felt pressured to do it," said Yi, who attended Hobart in Koreatown herself and returned a decade ago to teach. "But I think it's kind of a waste of time. The students get bored and don't take it seriously and it defeats the purpose."
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Here is another example of New York charter schools using their greater autonomies to develop innovative practices, in this case achieving operating efficiencies during this time where increasing pension costs are a particular concern for school districts. A recent Fordham Institute study reports that, between 2004 and 2010, district pension costs nationally increased from 12% to over 15% of salaries, amid concern that the public pension plans are underfunded.The study reports that some New York charter schools are opting out of the traditional teacher-pension system, with only 28% of the state's charters participating in the state or city teachers retirement systems (NYSTRS and TRSNYC, respectively) in 2008-9. Those that opt-out cite the high cost of employer contributions. In 2009, the annual employer contribution rate to NYSTRS was 6.19% of an employee's annual salary, and that to TRSNYC was an astonishing 30.8% (by far the highest in this six-state study).
But that doesn't mean that these charter schools are not interested in helping their employees have a more secure future. Schools that choose not to participate in public pension plans most often provide their teachers with defined-contribution plans (401(k) or 403(b)) with employer matches similar to those for private-sector professionals. Although employer contribution rates vary, they generally range up to 6% of the employee's salary. Vesting periods range from immediate vesting to five-year vesting schedules.
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In 2008, when Katherine Sprowal's son, Matthew, was selected in a lottery to attend the Harlem Success Academy 3 charter school, she was thrilled. "I felt like we were getting the best private school, and we didn't have to pay for it," she recalled.Eva Moskowitz responds, via Whitney Tilson:And so, when Eva S. Moskowitz, the former city councilwoman who operates seven Success charter schools in Harlem and the Bronx, asked Ms. Sprowal to be in a promotional video, she was happy to be included.
Matthew is bright but can be disruptive and easily distracted. It was not a natural fit for the Success charters, which are known for discipline and long school days. From Day 1 of kindergarten, Ms. Sprowal said, he was punished for acting out.
"They kept him after school to practice walking in the hallway," she said.
Several times, she was called to pick him up early, she said, and in his third week he was suspended three days for bothering other children.
The facts clearly show that Success Academies' educators are incredibly committed to serving children with special needs, we serve a high percentage, and do not push out children who don't "thrive." The Success Academies' special education population is equal to the citywide average of 12.5%. Our ELL population is 9.6%, and when you factor in children who we have successfully taught English (and are no longer ELL), we clearly educate the same children. As Winerip points out, our student attrition rate is significantly lower than our co-located schools and the citywide average.
As the paper trail examined by Winerip clearly indicates, no one pressured Ms. Sprowal to leave the school. Her son did not have an IEP until 3 years after he left the school. When the family left the school in 2008, Ms. Sprowal wrote effusive emails about how happy she was with how the school handled her situation. Three years later, after coaching from the United Federation of Teachers, his mother is now unhappy. The UFT spent five years hovering over our schools to find hordes of students who were unfairly "pushed" out, and the best they could find was a single story with a happy ending.
Most educators would agree that children are different and don't all excel in the same settings. That's why having choices is so important. Different schools are different in their approaches. Some are strict, some less strict, some have bigger class sizes, some smaller etc.. It is our obligation to advise a parent that there might be a better setting for their child.
Our schools are a work in progress, every day we try to do better for the largest number of children. While I don't believe that the school mishandled the situation, we are always working to improve how we serve children with all types of needs. For next year, we have added a 12:1:1 program at two of our schools and a Director of Special Education at the network-level who comes from the city's District 75.
What is most troubling about several of Winerip's recent columns is the suggestion that low-performing schools can't be expected to do any better. Winerip recently wrote that it wasn't Jamaica High School's fault that only 38% of its kids graduate with regents diplomas, because it gets more of the tough-to-serve kids (2% more homeless children, 6% more children with special needs). What school could possibly do better under those circumstances?
The theme is repeated in this story. 33% of 4th graders passed the state ELA test at PS 75, but public schools like PS 75 get more tough-to-serve children. (PS 75 does not, but schools like it do, he argues) When schools like ours have 86% of 4th graders passing the same test, it must be because we don't have the same kids, because schools can't possibly be expected to do that well.
Winerip also makes the argument that schools like PS 75 care about children and thus have low test scores while schools like Harlem Success Academy don't care about children and thus have high test scores.
Those are both false arguments that we must dispel if we're to improve the quality of public education. Schools with tough-to-serve children can do better and it's possible to care about children AND want them to perform well on tests.
At Success Academies, we want children to achieve at high levels AND we care deeply about their social and emotional development. We aim to create schools that are nurturing, joyful, and compelling AND that prepare children to excel in whatever their chosen field. I tell our principals, our true measure of success is whether children race through the door each morning and are disappointed to leave each day because school is just that compelling. Do we also want our children to score well on tests? Yes. High performance and joy are not mutually exclusive.
Warmly,
Eva Moskowitz
CEO and Founder
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Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn:
America's colleges and universities, for years the envy of the world and still a comfort to citizens concerned with the performance of the country's public elementary and secondary schools, are beginning to lose their relative luster. Surveys of the American public and of more than 1,000 college and university presidents, conducted this past spring by the Pew Research Center in association with the Chronicle of Higher Education, revealed significant concerns not only about the costs of such education, but also about its direction and goals.Despite a long track record of serving increasing numbers of students during the past half-century, graduation rates have stagnated. A higher proportion of America's 55- to 64-year-old citizens hold postsecondary degrees than in any other country--39 percent--but America ranks only tenth in the same category for its citizens aged 25 to 34 (at 40 percent). And none of America's higher-education institutions have ever served a large percentage of its citizens--many from low-income, African-American, and Hispanic families.
Indeed, the quality of America's colleges and universities has been judged historically not by the numbers of people the institutions have been able to educate well, regardless of background, but by their own selectivity, as seen in the quality and preparedness of the students they have admitted. Those institutions that educated the smartest students, as measured by standardized tests, also moved up in the arms race for money, graduate students, and significant research projects, which in turn fueled their prestige still further, as faculty members at such schools are rewarded for the quality of research, not for their teaching.
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How do you sell a school that doesn't exist?If you are Chris Whittle, an educational entrepreneur, you gather well-to-do parents at places like the Harvard Club or the Crosby Hotel in Manhattan, hoping the feeling of accomplishment will rub off. Then you pour wine and offer salmon sandwiches and wow the audience with pictures of the stunning new private school you plan to build in Chelsea. Focus on the bilingual curriculum and the collaborative approach to learning. And take swipes at established competitors that you believe are overly focused on sending students to top-tier colleges. Invoke some Tiger-mom fear by pointing out that 200,000 Americans are learning Chinese, while 300 million Chinese have studied English.
Then watch them come.
As of June 15, more than 1,200 families had applied for early admission to Avenues: The World School, a for-profit private school co-founded by Mr. Whittle that will not open its doors until September 2012. Acceptance letters go out this week. Gardner P. Dunnan, the former head of the Dalton School and academic dean and head of the upper school at Avenues, said he expected 5,000 applicants for the 1,320 spots available from nursery through ninth grade. "You have to see the enthusiasm," Mr. Whittle crowed.
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Conrad Wolfram Video.
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p>Pursuing this topic, here are some of the good or interesting papers I discovered:This UK piece reframes the David Card IV literature in terms of signaling and with UK data estimates that signaling accounts for one-third of the educational wage premium. It uses a “compulsory” instrumental variable from earlier UK schooling reforms.
Here is the Hanming Fang paper (IER): “…productivity enhancement accounts for close to two-thirds of the college wage
premium.” It uses very different techniques, based on simulations, not IV and the like.
This paper shows that rank measure in class doesn’t affect earnings, contrary to what signaling theories should predict. This may be a puzzle for learning theories as well.
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The Indiana Department of Education on Friday unveiled a website to provide information about the newly approved state voucher system.The site includes an initial list of eligible private schools and answers to frequently asked questions.
Lawmakers in April approved vouchers, which will provide state dollars to Hoosier kids who want to attend private or parochial schools.
The amount of money available for a student depends on the household income and the local district's state funding. . A family of four, for example, could make up to $62,000 and still be eligible for a partial voucher.
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Higher education keeps getting lower. And not just in my home state, where the core curriculum at the University of Arkansas' campus at Fayetteville is being hollowed out. It's happening all over. In Britain, the study of the humanities is being diluted, too.Happily, this sad trend has inspired a familiar reaction. Over here, as state universities cut back on required courses that once were considered necessary for a well-rounded education, small liberal arts colleges have taken up the slack. Now comes word from England that A.C. Grayling, the renowned philosopher, has joined with other free-spirited academics to start a new, private College of the Humanities.
These new schools are part of an old tradition. Isn't that how the first universities in Europe began -- as communities of scholars teaching the classical curriculum? They were founded, organized and run by the faculty, not administrators. And out of those universities came a great renaissance, the rebirth of classical education after what we now call the Dark Ages.
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Roger Pascoe, head of music at Hanover primary school in Islington, north London, says 11-year-old Gabriel Millard-Clothier throws himself into everything he does. Gabriel plays the flute, the violin and the bass recorder and has recently been awarded a £1,000 ($1,600) bursary from the London Symphony Orchestra, which means he gets a year's mentoring from a senior orchestra member. He has already played on stage at the Barbican.Gabriel's sister, Phoebe, 13, plays piano (classical and jazz) and the cello. Then comes younger sister, Honey, eight, on piano, flute and descant recorder and finally six-year-old Lucien, who plays classical guitar. Is this a typical family? Is Hanover primary an unusually musical school? Pascoe says the headteacher is keen on music and promotes it. Gabriel thinks Pascoe is an awesome teacher. On the other hand, Gabriel doesn't like to practise. "No child likes to practise," says Pascoe. "That would be strange."
Phoebe has a music scholarship at St Marylebone School in London, a top state school. Competition is intense: for entry in September 2011, the school had more than 200 applicants for eight music places.
The numbers reflect a trend: many children are taking up one, if not two or three musical instruments despite the costs, which can run into thousands of pounds for a family with two or three children and much more for someone such as the writer and broadcaster Rosie Millard, mother of the Millard-Clothier children. While she may be at the extreme end of the spectrum (her children's regime is detailed in her blog, helicoptermum.com), Millard is certainly not alone in her determination. Many parents have a quiet obsession with making their children learn music, even if they are not musical themselves.
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In 1950, when newly-independent India adopted a democratic constitution, it formally abolished the seemingly atavistic institution of caste.Under the Constitution's terms, the age-old practice of 'untouchability', that had helped create and sustain a hierarchical social order with religious sanction, was officially drawn to a close. Subsequently, the Indian state also launched the world's most extensive affirmative action program (referred to as 'positive discrimination') designed to bring redress for more than a millennial-span of discrimination. Later, in 1993, it attempted to implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission Report of 1980 which had called for sweeping reservations in government employment quotas for the socially-disadvantaged castes.
These efforts to bring about social change through constitutional design and enabling legislation did not prove to be a panacea in addressing this social ill. Still, coupled with powerful social movements during the 1960s, in several of India's southern states, most notably in Tamil Nadu, a virtual non-violent social revolution took place, dramatically challenging sacerdotal authority.
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In a corner of the San Fernando Valley, amid auto body shops and Salvadoran pupusa restaurants, a Hawaiian summer is in full swing.At Camp Akela, located at Noble Avenue Elementary School in North Hills, kindergartners read about rainbow fish and draw them. Other students study volcanoes, create travel journals, dance the hula and even play in a portable pool.
But the students, most of them low-income English learners, are also learning literacy, math facts and science and are honing writing skills with "coaches" dressed in leis, tropical shirts and grass skirts.
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Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer:
The New York Times coverage of the recent National Education Association (N.E.A.) convention focused on the inconsequential, while paying little notice to what harbored fundamental significance. It aimed its spotlight and lingered on what it referred to as a shift in position: "... the nation's largest teachers' union on Monday affirmed for the first time that evidence of student learning must be considered in the evaluations of school teachers around the country." (The New York Times, July 5, 2011).In fact, there was little in the way of concessions by N.E.A. on this point, as The New York Times article itself conceded: "But blunting the policy's potential impact, the union also made clear that it continued to oppose the use of existing standardized test scores to judge teachers..." And the Times added that the N.E.A. went on to insist that only those tests that have been shown to be "developmentally appropriate, scientifically valid and reliable for the purpose of measuring both student learning and a teacher's performance" should be used. This qualification eliminates almost, if not all, conventional tests.
The N.E.A. is right to be cautious about basing teacher evaluations and the fate of teachers on the test scores of their students, as the Obama administration has been single-mindedly promoting. We know that students' standardized test scores are correlated above all with their economic standing. As Joe Nocera recently pointed out in an op-ed New York Times article (April 25, 2011): "Going back to the famous Coleman report in the 1960s, social scientists have contended -- and unquestionably proved -- that students' socioeconomic backgrounds vastly outweigh what goes on in the school as factors in determining how much they learn."
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Weary of unreliable public funding, two of the University of Minnesota's premier schools are planning for a future without it.The U Law School and the Carlson School of Management are both looking at trading what little is left of their state funding for private fundraising that could give them more control over how they operate.
The two are poised to join a handful of elite schools nationwide in seeking self-sufficiency instead of state support. It might happen in a year, or longer. But already, the U is assessing the idea's merits. Being self-reliant could accelerate the schools' fundraising. But some university leaders, students and alumni worry that it could also weaken their commitment to Minnesota.
The final word will rest with new President Eric Kaler, who took charge of the U Friday along with its $3.7 billion budget, millions of dollars in budget cuts and public pressure to tamp down tuition increases.
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AMERICA'S obesity epidemic is so called for a reason. Roughly one in three adults is obese. In 2008 close to 25m Americans were diabetic, according to a study published on June 25th. Nevertheless, Americans are living longer than ever. In 2007 the average life expectancy at birth was 78 years. This follows decades of progress. The question is whether obesity might change that.National progress in life expectancy masks wide local disparities, according to a study published on June 15th and written by researchers at the University of Washington and Imperial College London. Men in Holmes County, Mississippi, for example, have a life expectancy of 65.9 years, the same as men in Pakistan and 15.2 years behind men in Fairfax, Virginia. Gaps between America's counties have widened since the early 1980s. Most alarming, 702 counties, or 30% of those studied, saw a statistically significant decline in life expectancy for women from 2000 to 2007; 251 counties saw a statistically significant decline for men.
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Promoters of higher education often point to differences in lifetime earnings to justify the price of higher education. Pay for an education today, and the "investment" will pay for itself over the student's lifetime. Not only will the student make more money, but his or her career will be far more satisfying.But with the cost of higher education skyrocketing, many families are beginning to question whether a college degree is worth the price. The arithmetic is persuasive. At the stock market's historical 9% annual return (nominal return over the past 50 years), $100,000 not invested in a four-year college education would be worth over $3 million in 40 years. That return would handsomely eclipse the nominal lifetime earnings difference of $1 million often quoted for college vs. high school graduates. Put aside the fact that the four-year degree is being slowly replaced by the five-year degree, which bumps the cost of higher education even higher.
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School may be out for the summer, but school choice is in, as states across the nation have moved to expand education opportunities for disadvantaged kids. This year is shaping up as the best for reformers in a very long time.No fewer than 13 states have enacted school choice legislation in 2011, and 28 states have legislation pending. Last month alone, Louisiana enhanced its state income tax break for private school tuition; Ohio tripled the number of students eligible for school vouchers; and North Carolina passed a law letting parents of students with special needs claim a tax credit for expenses related to private school tuition and other educational services.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker made headlines this year for taking on government unions. Less well known is that last month he signed a bill that removes the cap of 22,500 on the number of kids who can participate in Milwaukee's Parental Choice Program, the nation's oldest voucher program, and creates a new school choice initiative for families in Racine County. "We now have 13 programs new or expanded this year alone" in the state, says Susan Meyers of the Wisconsin-based Foundation for Educational Choice.
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A new study of twins suggests that environmental factors, including conditions in the womb, may be at least as important as genes in causing autism.The researchers did not say which environmental influences might be at work. But other experts said the new study, released online on Monday, marked an important shift in thinking about the causes of autism, which is now thought to affect at least 1 percent of the population in the developed world.
"This is a very significant study because it confirms that genetic factors are involved in the cause of the disorder," said Dr. Peter Szatmari, a leading autism researcher who is the head of child psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at McMaster University in Ontario. "But it shifts the focus to the possibility that environmental factors could also be really important."
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U.S. officials defended their schools--blaming poor performance on the relative prevalence of immigrant families in the United States. But Schleicher and his colleagues noted that native-born Americans performed just as unimpressively. In fact, worldwide, the share of children from immigrant backgrounds explains only 3 percent of the variance between countries. A country's wealth does not predict success, either. Gross domestic product per capita predicts only 6 percent of the difference in scores. Schleicher also noticed, however, that in the U.S. in particular, poverty was destiny. Low-income American students did (and still do) much worse than high-income ones on PISA. But poor kids in Finland and Canada do far better relative to their more privileged peers, despite their disadvantages.More, from Steve Hsu.In Germany, the test became a household name and inspired a prime-time TV quiz show, The PISA Show. Even Schleicher's father began taking his work more seriously. Meanwhile, Schleicher visited dozens of schools and pored over the data. He concluded that the best school systems became great after undergoing a series of crucial changes. They made their teacher-training schools much more rigorous and selective; they put developing high-quality principals and teachers above efforts like reducing class size or equipping sports teams; and once they had these well-trained professionals in place, they found ways to hold the teachers accountable for results while allowing creativity in their methods. Notably, in every case, these school systems devoted equal or more resources to the schools with the poorest kids.
These days, Schleicher travels the world with a PowerPoint presentation detailing his findings. It seems to have more data points embedded in its scatter plots than our galaxy has stars. When his audiences get distracted by the tribal disputes that plague education, he returns to the facts with a polite smile, like C-3PO with a slight German accent. He likes to end his presentation with a slide that reads, in a continuously scrolling ticker, "Without data, you are just another person with an opinion ... Without data, you are just another person with an opinion ..."
How does Wisconsin stack up against the world? Learn more, here: www.wisconsin2.org.
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Public schools aren't the only ones divided over the state's new private school voucher program that became law Friday and is supposed to be in place by the time classes start in August.Greater Lafayette private schools are split over the new system -- one that some say will expand educational opportunities but others fear could drag state regulations into the mix and restrict freedoms their classrooms currently enjoy.
A handful of Lafayette area schools will be taking advantage of the program. But with such a short time before the new school year starts, the most basic information about how to use the voucher program created by the General Assembly in April still is not available -- not even the online application form.
The process likely will face even greater delays in light of a lawsuit filed Friday in Marion County Superior Court by the Indiana State Teacher's Association. The lawsuit, which seeks an injunction to prevent the disbursement of funds under the new program, will continue to stall the process as it winds its way through the court system. All the while, private schools hoping to participate wait for answers.
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Brian Slodysko and Tara Malone:
Vice President Joe Biden lambasted what he called an increasingly union-hostile "new" Republican party, during remarks delivered to National Education Association representatives today, raising the specter of high profile labor fights picked by Republican governors with public workers unions across the country.Mike Antonucci"There is an organized effort to place blame for budget shortfalls on educators and other public workers. It is one of the biggest scams in modern American history," Biden said during a speech laden with political red meat, smoothing over past disagreements between teachers unions and the Obama Administration.
"The new Republican party has undertaken the most direct assault on labor, not just in my lifetime ... but literally since the 1920s," he said. "This is not your father's Republican party. This is a different breed of cat."
Biden's remarks to one of the nation's largest teachers unions, a speech that lasted about 30 minutes, came a day before its members are expected to decide whether to cast their support behind the administration in the 2012 presidential election.
The National Education Association Representative Assembly opened this morning in Chicago with 7,321 delegates attending, which is by far the lowest number since I began covering the convention in 1998.Mike Antonucci:The atmosphere still resembles a political party convention, with speeches, confetti and deafening music, including the new NEA theme song, "Standing Strong":
"Standing strong, standing tall. Standing up for what is right and true, NEA is standing up for me and you!"
Coming soon to a Chevy truck commercial near you.
It is customary for the mayor of the host city to welcome the delegates, but since the mayor is Rahm Emanuel, NEA prudently got hold of Illinois Gov. Quinn instead. After the delegates adopted the standing rules for the assembly, it was time for NEA president Dennis Van Roekel's keynote speech.
There were two new business items (NBIs) of note debated this afternoon. The first was NBI C, submitted by the NEA Board of Directors, which directs the NEA president to "communicate aggressively, forcefully, and immediately to President Barack Obama and US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan that NEA is appalled with Secretary Duncan's practice of..." and then lists 13 of Duncan's most heinous crimes, like "Focusing so heavily on charter schools that viable and proven innovative school models (such as magnet schools) have been overlooked, and simultaneously failing to highlight with the same enthusiasm the innovation in our non-charter public schools."Stephanie Banchero:
Widespread unhappiness among teachers about President Barack Obama's education policies is threatening to derail a National Education Association proposal to give him an early endorsement for re-election.Associated Press:The political action committee of the NEA, the nation's largest union, adopted a resolution in May to endorse Mr. Obama. The proposal will come before the NEA's 9,000-member representative assembly on Monday at the union's annual convention here.
The union has never endorsed a presidential candidate this early in the campaign cycle, instead waiting to make the decision during the election year. But union leaders, anticipating a tough re-election campaign, wanted to bolster support for the president early on, a move that has run into opposition from union members.
Vice President Joe Biden says the "new Republican Party" fundamentally doesn't believe in public education the way Democrats do.Much more, here."There is an organized effort to place blame for budget shortfalls on educators and other public workers. It is one of the biggest scams in modern American history," he was quoted as saying by the Chicago Tribune.
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These days tenure for teachers is such a brawl in America's elementary and secondary schools that it's easy to forget that it's more a cornerstone of higher education. When Austan Goolsbee, Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, announced earlier this month that he was leaving the White House to return to the University of Chicago it was a reminder just how strong the ties -- and inducements -- of university tenure can be, and why it has recently come under fire.At colleges and universities, tenure basically bestows a job for life unless an institution runs out of money. Originally intended to shield professors from meddling by college administrators, donors or politicians, tenure has evolved into one of the most coveted perks in higher education. It signals excellence and it confers employment stability.
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Can't decide between that prestigious culinary school or the community college down the street? A new online tool created by the Department of Education could help students make that decision, with detailed price comparisons for colleges and universities of all types across the country.If you're looking to go to school for free, New York's Webb Institute could fit the bill - if you're lucky enough to get in. The naval architecture and engineering school has only 80 undergraduates, all of whom get full scholarships, making the annual tuition price $0.
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Interviewed by George Plimpton and Frank H. Crowther:
In the issue of The New Yorker dated two weeks after E. B. White died, his stepson, Roger Angell, wrote the following in the magazine's "Talk of the Town" section:Last August, a couple of sailors paid an unexpected visit to my summer house in Maine: young sailors--a twelve-year-old-girl and an eleven-year-old boy. They were a crew taking part in a statewide small-boat-racing competition at a local yacht club, and because my wife and I had some vacant beds just then we were willingly dragooned as hosts. They were fine company--tanned and shy and burning with tactics but amenable to blueberry muffins and our exuberant fox terrier. They were also readers, it turned out. On their second night, it came out at the dinner table that E. B. White was a near neighbor of ours, and our visitors reacted to the news with incredulity. "No!" the boy said softly, his eyes traveling back and forth over the older faces at the table. "No-o-o-o!" The girl, being older, tried to keep things in place. "He's my favorite author," she said. "Or at least he was when I was younger." They were both a bit old for Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web, and The Trumpet of the Swan, in fact, but because they knew the books so well, and because they needed cheering up (they had done badly in the racing), arrangements were made for a visit to E. B. White's farm the next morning.
White, who had been ill, was not able to greet our small party that day, but there were other sights and creatures there to make us welcome: two scattered families of bantam hens and chicks on the lawn; the plump, waggly incumbent dog, name of Red; and the geese who came scuttling and hissing up the pasture lane, their wings outspread in wild alarm. It was a glazy, windless morning, with some thin scraps of fog still clinging to the water in Allen Cove, beyond the pasture; later on, I knew, the summer southwest breeze would stir, and then Harriman Point and Blue Hill Bay and the islands would come clear again. What wasn't there this time was Andy White himself: emerging from the woodshed, say, with an egg basket or a length of line in his hand; or walking away (at a mid-slow pace, not a stroll--never a stroll--with the dog just astern) down the grassy lane that turns and then dips to the woods and shore; or perhaps getting into his car for a trip to town, getting aboard, as he got aboard any car, with an air of mild wariness, the way most of us start up on a bicycle. We made do without him, as we had to. We went into the barn and examined the vacant pens and partitions and the old cattle tie-ups; we visited the vegetable garden and the neat stacks of freshly cut stove wood; we saw the cutting beds, and the blackberry patch behind the garage, and the place where the pigpen used to be--the place where Wilbur was born, surely. The children took turns on the old single-rope swing that hung in the barn doorway, hoisting themselves up onto the smoothed seat, made out of a single chunk of birch firewood, and then sailing out into the sunshine and back into barn-shadow again and again, as the crossbeam creaked above them and swallows dipped in and out of an open barn window far overhead. It wasn't much entertainment for them, but perhaps it was all right, because of where they were. The girl asked which doorway might have been the one where Charlotte had spun her web, and she mentioned Templeton, the rat, and Fern, the little girl who befriends Wilbur. She was visiting a museum, I sensed, and she would remember things here to tell her friends about later. The boy, though, was quieter, and for a while I thought that our visit was a disappointment to him. Then I stole another look at him, and I understood. I think I understood. He was taking note of the place, almost checking off corners and shadows and smells to himself as we walked about the old farm, but he wasn't trying to remember them. He looked like someone who had been there before, and indeed he had, for he was a reader. Andy White had given him the place long before he ever set foot on it--not this farm, exactly, but the one in the book, the one now in the boy's mind. Only true writers--the rare few of them--can do this, but their deed to us is in perpetuity. The boy didn't get to meet E. B. White that day, but he already had him by heart. He had him for good.
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Rhythms in the brain that are associated with learning become stronger as the body moves faster, UCLA neurophysicists report in a new study.The research team, led by professor Mayank Mehta, used specialized microelectrodes to monitor an electrical signal known as the gamma rhythm in the brains of mice. This signal is typically produced in a brain region called the hippocampus, which is critical for learning and memory, during periods of concentration and learning.
The researchers found that the strength of the gamma rhythm grew substantially as running speed increased, bringing scientists a step closer to understanding the brain functions essential for learning and navigation.
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Once upon a time, the car was the key to understanding the U.S. economy. Then it was the family home. Nowadays, it is any device created by Steven P. Jobs. Call it the Apple economy, and if you can figure out how it works, you will have a good handle on how technology and globalization are redistributing money and jobs around the world.That was the epiphany of Greg Linden, Jason Dedrick and Kenneth L. Kraemer, a troika of scholars who have made a careful study in a pair of recent papers of how the iPod has created jobs and profits around the world. The latest paper, "Innovation and Job Creation in a Global Economy: The Case of Apple's iPod," was published last month in The Journal of International Commerce and Economics.
One of their findings is that in 2006 the iPod employed nearly twice as many people outside the United States as it did in the country where it was invented -- 13,920 in the United States, and 27,250 abroad.
You probably aren't surprised by that result, but if you are American, you should be a little worried. That is because Apple is the quintessential example of the Yankee magic everyone from Barack Obama to Michele Bachmann insists will pull America out of its job crisis -- the remarkable ability to produce innovators and entrepreneurs. But today those thinkers and tinkerers turn out to be more effective drivers of job growth outside the United States than they are at home.
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In a ceremony this week, Harlem Day Charter School celebrated its 13 fifth-graders who are moving on to middle school. They represent roughly one-third of the class.The other two-thirds will have to repeat fifth grade.
That hard truth is one of many that the teachers, students and parents of Harlem Day have been confronting in recent months as the school prepares to become the city's first attempt at a takeover of a failing charter school.
Only five of 32 teachers will be returning in September. About 100 of all 247 students in the elementary school are being held back. And administrators are having tough conversations with parents about the true state of their children's academic progress. Parents are being told that students, who for years were passed from grade to grade, lack basic skills.
At Harlem Day, no students were held back last year, despite recent state tests that showed only 20% of students were on grade level in English and 25% were in math.
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>Last year, battles over charter schools dominated much of education coverage. This year, the controversy over "teacher evaluations" is poised to be the biggest fight among people with competing visions for improving public schools. For a primer on how these new teacher assessments work, don't miss Sam Dillon's recent piece in the New York Times. Reporting from Washington, D.C., Dillon found that last year the city fired 165 teachers using a new teacher evaluation system; this year, the number will top 200.D.C. relies on a relatively new evaluation system called Impact, a legacy of its former school chief Michelle Rhee, who noticed that, despite the district's low test scores, most teachers were getting nearly perfect evaluations. Rhee and the proponents of this new evaluation system feel that the old system relied too much on the subjective evaluations by the principal or a few experienced teachers. Opponents of the old system say these internal measurements are not data-driven or rigurous enough to allow principals and districts to identify struggling teachers who need assistance or to find the successful ones who deserve to be recognized and empowered.
Impact or other new evaluation systems are currently being implemented in around 20 states. The basic idea to use performance-based evaluations that use external measures such as test scores in addition to the internal measures mentioned above. Sparked by President Obama's Race to the Top grants, these "value-added" evaluations rely heavily on kids' test scores in math and reading. Teachers whose subjects are not measured by test scores are observed in the classroom. For example, D.C. teachers get five yearly classroom observations, three by principals and two by "master educators" from other schools.
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When a child goes missing at a large public event, worried parents and the police would normally search through CCTV footage of the surrounding area. In the future they might try hunting through the photos being taken by smartphone owners instead, using a new system called Theia developed by a team of US researchers.Privacy concerns aside, searching smartphone photos is a clever idea, but constantly querying someone's phone sounds like a great way to drain their battery - not a service that many people are likely to sign up for. That's why Theia is designed to cleverly manage energy usage, while also paying smartphone owners for sharing their photos.
It works like this. People sign up to Theia by downloading a mobile app that can search through photos stored in a folder designated for sharing, while search requests are carried out with a separate piece of software that runs on an ordinary computer. Searchers can select a number of options, such as face and body detection, texture matching, and colour filtering. For example, the system can find pictures of people's faces against a cloudy sky by combining face detection with a search for cloudy textures and the colour blue.
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Gary W. Phillips & Tao Jiang via a Dan McGrath email:
This study describes how the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) was used for internationally benchmarking state performance standards. The process is accomplished in two steps. First, PISA items are embedded in the administration of the state assessment and calibrated on the state scale. The international item calibrations are then used to link the state scale to the PISA scale through common item linking. The second step is to use the statistical linking as part of the state standard setting process to help standard setting panelists determine how high their state standards need to be in order to be internationally competitive. This process was carried out in Delaware, Hawaii, and Oregon, and results are reported here for two of the states: Hawaii and Delaware.Review Wisconsin's position vs Minnesota, Massachusetts and Singapore, here.Key words: Equating, linking, item response theory, international benchmarking.
Introduction
In 2010, the American Institutes for Research obtained permission from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to use secure items from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for purposes of linking state assessments within the United States to the PISA scale. The OECD provided a representative sample of 30 secure PISA items in Reading, Mathematics, and Science. The PISA items covered the 2006 and 2009 PISA assessment cycles. In addition to the PISA items, the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), which is the current vender for the OECD contracted to conduct PISA, provided the international item parameters and their standard errors, as well as the linear transformations needed to link the state assessments to the PISA scale. The administration, security, and scoring of the PISA items were carried out by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) based on a License Agreement between AIR and the OECD and monitored by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
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Years ago, he wore a tweed jacket and smoked a pipe. He was friendly but aloof, a thoughtful fellow toiling in the shade of mystique.Steve Hsu has more.Back then, he was more of a sage than a salesman. It's said that he could judge applicants' potential by reading their essays and absorbing their words in interviews. His college's bottom line was someone else's concern; he was paid to counsel students, not to crunch numbers.
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The state's most powerful political force got rolled in the 2011 Legislature.
Last week, Gov. John Kitzhaber and his allies rammed a dozen education bills through roadblocks erected by the 48,000-member Oregon Education Association.A coalition of Kitzhaber, House Republicans, a few Democrats willing to buck the teachers' union, and newly emboldened interest groups handed the OEA its biggest policy setbacks in years.
"There is a strong desire for real movement forward on education, and people were willing to break a few eggs to get there," says Rep. Chris Garrett (D-Lake Oswego), one of three Democrats who voted "yes" on HB 2301, a controversial online charter-school bill that catalyzed the breakthrough.
To be sure, OEA successfully pushed for a $175 million increase in the K-12 budget over Kitzhaber's opening proposal, and the union helped forestall any significant changes to the Public Employees Retirement System this session. But in terms of educational politics, this session saw substantive bills that have been stymied for many sessions zip through.
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Yesterday, the full court for the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued two simultaneous opinions to resolve how much control grade schools and high schools may exercise over their students' off-campus, online speech. In Layshock v. Hermitage School District and J.S. v. Blue Mountain School District, the 14-judge court delivered two landmark victories for free speech, holding that school officials cannot "reach into a child's home and control his/her actions there to the same extent that it can control that child when he/she participates in school sponsored activities." In the cases, two students had been disciplined for creating parody MySpace profiles mocking their respective principals. The Third Circuit held that schools cannot punish students' online speech simply because it is vulgar, lewd, or offensive. In addition to their impact in the grade school and high school settings, these decisions further solidify the robust free speech rights that must be afforded to college students engaging in online speech.We previously blogged about Layshock and J.S. last year, when separate three-judge panels of the Third Circuit issued contrary decisions despite the very similar facts in the two cases. In Layshock, the Third Circuit had held that a then-senior in high school could not be suspended, placed in a special education class, and banned from extracurricular activities for a parody MySpace profile which described his principal as being a "big steroid freak" and belittled the size of the principal's penis, among other insults. In J.S., a different panel of the Third Circuit had held that a then-middle school honor student could be suspended, without violating the First Amendment, for her MySpace profile. J.S.'s profile parodied her principal as stating, "I love children, sex (any kind), dogs, long walks on the beach, tv, being a dick head, and last but not least my darling wife [a guidance counselor at the school] who looks like a man."
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Even as administrators and legislators push schools to dump printed books in favor of electronic ones, evidence mounts that paper books have important advantages as tools for learning. Last month, I reported on a study out of the University of Washington which showed that students find printed books more flexible than e-books in supporting a wide range of reading and learning styles. Now comes a major study from the University of California system showing that students continue to prefer printed books to e-books and that many undergraduates complain that they have trouble "learning, retaining, and concentrating" when reading from screens.The University of California Libraries began a large e-textbook pilot program in 2008. In late 2010, more than 2,500 students and faculty members were surveyed to assess the results of the program. Overall, 58% of the respondents said they used e-books for their academic work, with the percentage varying from 55% for undergraduates to 57% for faculty to 67% for graduate students. The respondents who used e-books were then asked whether they preferred e-books or printed books for their studies. Overall, 44% said they preferred printed books and 35% said they preferred e-books, with the remainder expressing no preference. The preference for print was strongest among undergraduates, 53% of whom preferred printed books, with only 27% preferring e-books. Graduate students preferred printed books by 45% to 35%, and faculty preferred printed books by 43% to 33%.
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Moments after Mao Dongmei gave birth to her first son, doctors in her hometown of Qidong Lusi in Jiangsu province gave her one piece of advice: get rid of your baby because he is deformed."After I gave birth, the doctors suggested I abandon my son because he would not be able to suck on the breast," 26-year-old Mao said.
Her son, Gu Yanhu, who is now 15 months old, was born with a cleft lip and palate, a congenital deformity that affects one in 600 children born on the mainland.
"But I felt confident that I could look after my baby. I could never abandon him. It was the right choice," Mao said, as she stroked the dozing toddler after his operation at a charity hospital in Hangzhou run by Operation Smile.
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One of the most effective ways students can improve their ability to learn for themselves is through the development of self-evaluative skills.
Self-evaluation is judging the quality of one's performance and planning strategies for self-improvement.This is important, because students learn best when taking responsibility for their own progress.
Students must understand what constitutes quality work. Without an appreciation of quality, it is difficult for students to use feedback to improve their performance. Children can develop such skills by being asked to consider what they are learning, and identify strengths and weaknesses in their work.
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My editor proposed this story about "that's racist" after hearing her young son's friends using it as a joke. Just the night before, it had been a punchline on one of my favorite sitcoms, Parks And Recreation. (Someone calls sorting laundry into whites and darks racist.)Our sense that "that's racist" was evolving into a commonplace catchphrase that only occasionally had to do with racism and race was confirmed by conversations with parents, teachers and a website that tracked how it started as an online meme. A video clip from the cult TV show Wonder Showzen showed an African-American kid with the words "that's racist" underneath. It became a virtual retort on online message boards. People started dropping it into Internet arguments, to quench or inflame them.
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Wisconsin's "Read to Lead" Task Force convened for its second meeting last month to address teacher training and reading interventions. Here's an excellent debrief (via School Information System) from Wisconsin Reading Coalition on the discussion. And here are my notes from the gallery:
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After only about a month as top boss of Detroit Public Schools, Roy Roberts, a 72-year-old former General Motors executive and private equity firm founder, is well aware that some people already want him gone.Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman's speech to the Madison Rotary Club.The district's new financial manager said he's OK with that reality, adding that differing opinions have value. His only request: Stay out of the way as he tries to turn around one of the nation's worst public school systems.
I don't care what people think about me, really ... because I know what parents are going to think," Roberts told The Associated Press during an interview in his Detroit Midtown office. "They're going to love it because I'm trying to do the right thing for their children, and you won't find a parent that doesn't want that. I'm simply going to look at a system and say 'What is the best system we can put in place to educate these kids?' I don't care about the politics."
What concerns him, he said, is a massive budget deficit and students who either don't receive a legitimate education or flee the district in search of one. Those mountainous challenges form the ridge that for decades has left the 74,000-student district on the shadowy side of progress.
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Aaron Pallas, an ed school professor at Teachers College, appears to be unwilling to acknowledge that our public schools are failing to effectively educate huge numbers of our kids, or that there's much we can do about it. He struggles to debunk existing examples of demonstrable success perhaps fearing that we might otherwise ask why do we keep doing so poorly when we have proof that we can do so much better.To that end, last week Pallas penned a piece in this column challenging my assertion in a Washington Post op ed that our "schools can get much better results with th[e] same kids than they're now generally getting." Employing a locution that I never used, and that cannot fairly be inferred from what I said, he tries to portray my view as placing "the emphasis on what schools can extract from kids." (His italics.)
No, Professor Pallas, I don't think knowledge resides in kids and, like iron ore, all we need to do is carefully extract it. What I do think is that our schools, and especially our teachers, need to do a much better job of educating our kids - that is, teaching them the skills and knowledge they will need to be successful in the 21st century. As I put it in my piece, "teachers matter, big time."
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What are the economic returns from a college degree, net of individual ability? Does college add value, or is it mainly a signaling device (e.g., for intelligence and work ethic)?Results from two new studies are discussed here and here in the Times.
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School voucher advocates have had two recent op-eds in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "The story behind school choice study" by John Witte and Patrick Wolf on May 28 and "Special needs students benefit from many choices" by Susan Mitchell on June 19. Both are at best misinformed and at worst deceptive. The facts should matter.State law says voucher schools must accept special education students. Then why are so few special education students (the number hovers near 1%) attending voucher schools? I put this question to a voucher school principal, who said her school has no special education services or students.
I asked her how that was possible. She stated that she simply tells parents of special education students that she cannot provide the services that their children need. Parents then choose another school, she said - most likely in Milwaukee Public Schools.
MPS does receive more money per student than voucher schools receive. But Mitchell claims MPS receives $15,000 per student while voucher students receive $6,442. She somehow arrived at these numbers without doing her homework. One needs to subtract from the total the amount transferred to voucher schools for a variety of programs.
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It didn't dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I'd just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn't have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn't succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. "Ivy retardation," a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn't talk to the man who was standing in my own house.It's not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society's most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.
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The number of overweight kids and adolescents in the U.S. has almost tripled since the 1980s. That's pretty troubling, but the Institute of Medicine says we need to be paying more attention to the littlest kids: those under five.Almost 10 percent of babies and toddlers carry too much weight for their size. And more than 20 percent of children 2 through 5 are already overweight, the IOM says, which could have pretty serious repercussions later in life.
"Contrary to the common perception that chubby babies are healthy babies and will naturally outgrow their baby fat, excess weight tends to persist," Leann Birch, chair of the IOM's childhood obesity prevention committee, said in a statement. The committee's report released today makes some recommendations on what to do about it.
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Yet Holbrooke is no longer around and the diplomatic surge, like so many other good ideas that have been exported to Afghanistan, has floundered. The country remains awash in chaos, violence, and corruption, and the surge of civilians has hardly made a dent. One of the few things that the Americans have done is to assist Afghan officials in preparations for their presentations before other officials; in other words, as Semple says, "better PowerPoints."Related: John Cook:
Wired's Spencer Ackerman reports that Col. Lawrence Sellin, a 61-year-old Army reservist, has been dismissed from his post in headquarters with NATO's International Security Assistance Force less than 48 hours after he published an op-ed, via UPI, complaining that the "war consists largely of the endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information." Sellin clearly anticipated that his tirade, which NATO says he didn't clear for publication in advance, would serve as a resignation letter. It opened with, "Throughout my career I have been known to walk that fine line between good taste and unemployment. I see no reason to change that now. Consider the following therapeutic." He went on to excoriate the meaningless, self-serving, metastasizing military bureaucracy that holds sway in Afghanistan and justifies its existence via PowerPoint slide: "Little of substance is really done here, but that is a task we do well."
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Early statistics are showing that this year's incoming MBA class at the Harvard Business School will have its greater percentage of women.The school said this week that of the 918 students in the MBA class of 2013, 39 percent will be female. Women comprised 36 percent of the enrolled MBA students in the two previous classes.
School spokesman Brian Kenny said the school's admissions strategy has evolved over the last several years on trying to find ways to increase diversityHe said Harvard Business School has no fixed targets when it comes to industry, geographical, or gender representation.
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Understanding the genomeThe sequencing of the 6 billion chemical "letters" of human DNA was completed in draft in 2000 and in final form in 2003. But clinical benefits have arrived more slowly than the initial hype suggested. This is mainly because the human genome actually works in a much more complex way than predicted by the late-20th-century model.
Twenty-first-century research shows that we have only 21,000 genes, one-fifth of the number predicted when the project started, and that just 1.5 per cent of the genome consists of conventional protein-coding genes. Efforts are under way to understand the vital regulatory and other functions of the non-coding regions of the genome, once dismissed wrongly as "junk DNA".
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"My e-mail?" The boy looks at me as if I had just suggested staying in touch by carrier pigeon. "What, you don't have an email?" I ask, insecure now. "Sure I do. But I only use it for my parents and my grandparents," he says. "Aren't you on Facebook?" I am. Phew. Of course I mostly check my Facebook profile when I'm prompted by an e-mail notification, but I don't tell him that. Trevor Dougherty is 19 and to him, I am a geriatric 36-year-old who belongs to that amorphous generation of people-who-don't-really-get-social-networking that stretches all the way back to, well, his grandparents.I met Trevor in January, during a dinner debate on social networking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he was by far the youngest and most eloquent speaker on the subject. I have perhaps 100 people in my life I call friends. Trevor has 1,275. At one point he tried to add someone called Trevor in every capital so he would have friends to visit across the world. He chats, posts, tweets and consults "his community" on important decisions: "I'm going to start producing/DJing electronic music. What should my stage name be? #youtellme."
The encounter made me curious: what does it do to teenagers to be "on" all the time? Are they just doing what we did 20 years ago -- gossiping, dating, escaping pubescent solitude -- and simply channeling those age-old human urges through this new technology? Or is this technology changing humanity in a more fundamental way? What kind of citizens, voters, consumers, leaders will kids like Trevor grow up to be?
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Sir Terry, who stepped down from the helm of Britain's largest private employer earlier this year after 14 years in charge, was addressing an audience of teachers at the Wellington College Festival of Education."Standards in schools vary too widely, more widely than you would find in business," he said.
"The standards in too many schools are simply not good enough.
"The answer is deceptively simple. It is about good leadership in each school, good teachers in each classroom and support in their work by the wider society."
He said this was often hampered by a "myriad" of well-meaning Government initiatives and a tendency to "micromanage" education, with "too much management, and not enough help or trust".
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Based on current educational and social conditions, the fate of boys of color is uncertain. African American and Latino boys are grossly over-represented among young men failing to achieve academic success and are at greater risk of dropping out of school. Boys in general lag behind girls on most indicators of student achievement.Watch a video of the speech, here.Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (Madison Prep) is a public charter school being developed by the Urban League of Greater Madison. Madison Prep will serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity, particularly young men of color. Its mission is to prepare scholars for success at a four year college by instilling excellence, pride, leadership and service. A proposed non-instrumentality charter school located in Madison, Wisconsin and to be authorized by the Madison Metropolitan School District, Madison Prep will serve 420 students in grades 6 through 12 when it reaches full enrollment in 2017-2018.
- In 2009, just 52% of African American boys and 52% of Latino boys graduated on-time from Madison Metropolitan School District compared to 81% of Asian boys and 88% of White boys.
- In the class of 2010, just 7% of African American seniors and 18% of Latino seniors were deemed "college-ready" by ACT, makers of the standardized college entrance exam required for all Wisconsin universities.
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Jamaal Abdul-Alim, via a kind reader's email
While a panel discussion held by The College Board on Capitol Hill this week was meant to highlight a new report on the lagging rates of educational attainment among non-White men, some of the panelists questioned the need for more research on the subject."How much data do we need?" asked panelist Dr. Roy Jones, executive director for the Eugene T. Moore School of Education's Call Me MISTER Program at Clemson University. (MISTER is an acronym for Mentors Instructing Students Toward Effective Role-models).
His remarks came after a discussion of the new report titled "The Educational Experience of Young Men of Color: A Review of Research, Pathways and Progress," co-authored by John Michael Lee Jr., a co-panelist and policy director at the College Board's Advocacy and Policy Center.
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Kristen Mack and Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah:
New Chicago schools chief Jean-Claude Brizard expressed support Thursday for the idea of teachers and staff visiting students at home, even in some of the city's toughest neighborhoods.At an event Thursday held by United Neighborhood Organization, a community organization that runs charter schools, Brizard said he liked some of the charter network's ideas, including home visits.
UNO teachers make two home visits per student during the course of a school year. Brizard said if teachers and administrators at Chicago Public Schools each took on 10 home visits, the public school system with 430,000 students could follow the charter network's lead in some of the city's most challenging communities.
'"Our students go there every day," Brizard said. "Why can't we?''
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A mind is a precious thing to waste, so why are millions of America's students wasting theirs by going to college? All of us who have been there know an undergraduate education is primarily a four year vacation interrupted by periodic bouts of cramming or Google plagiarizing, but at least it used to serve a purpose. It weeded out underachievers and proved at a minimum that you could pass an SAT test. For those who made it to the good schools, it proved that your parents had enough money to either bribe administrators or hire SAT tutors to increase your score by 500 points. And a degree represented that the graduate could "party hearty" for long stretches of time and establish social networking skills that would prove invaluable later on at office cocktail parties or interactively via Facebook. College was great as long as the jobs were there.Now, however, a growing number of skeptics wonder whether it's worth the time or the cost. Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook and head of Clarium Capital, a long-standing hedge fund, has actually established a foundation to give 20 $100,000 grants to teenagers who would drop out of school and become not just tech entrepreneurs but world-changing visionaries. College, in his and the minds of many others, is stultifying and outdated - overpriced and mismanaged - with very little value created despite the bump in earnings power that universities use as their raison d'être in our modern world of money.
Fact: College tuition has increased at a rate 6% higher than the general rate of inflation for the past 25 years, making it four times as expensive relative to other goods and services as it was in 1985. Subjective explanation: University administrators have a talent for increasing top line revenues via tuition, but lack the spine necessary to upgrade academic productivity. Professorial tenure and outdated curricula focusing on liberal arts instead of a more practical global agenda focusing on math and science are primary culprits.
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Kentucky is seeking to become the first state in the nation to use its statewide accountability system to determine whether schools are meeting the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind law.Gov. Steve Beshear sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on Monday, asking for a waiver that would allow Kentucky to replace the current method for determining if schools are making adequate yearly progress under the federal law with a new measuring stick that state officials are still developing.
That would allow Kentucky more control over determining whether schools are making sufficient academic progress each year.
"I believe that federal law should set high expectations for education goals, but grant power and judgment to states and districts with regard to the means of achieving those goals," Beshear said in a statement Monday.
There's a lot at stake for Kentucky schools.
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At a time when it is harder than ever to secure a kindergarten spot in one of New York City's elite private schools, Delaware transplants Jeffrey and Samantha Jasinski decided to jettison any decorum and lie their 5-year-old daughter, Beatrice, into a top-flight institution. The couple had tried the traditional route, attending open houses and informational interviews, only to be summarily dismissed by more than a half dozen schools. So they hired a consultant and concocted a complex fabrication. Jeffrey, a computer programmer, suddenly became a renowned poet with a forthcoming collection culled from sexually explicit text messages. With that, the Jasinskis were granted a rare interview with the headmistress at Coventry Day School.At least, that's how it all happened in the mind of filmmaker Josh Shelov, whose new movie, "The Best and the Brightest," takes a satirical look at the lengths to which parents often go to get their children into the city's private schools.
"I was eager to write something deeply uncensored," said the first-time director, who based the story on his own experiences trying to get his son into kindergarten about five years ago. He succeeded.
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Amid the frantic pace of daily family life, it seems almost comical to try to find time to discuss investing with our kids.Honestly, who really wants to talk about mutual funds in the precious time you have when you're all together?
Yet, many families find a way to share their values about money and investing from generation to generation, whether they're offering tips on being smart shoppers, making the family budget stretch just enough or opening brokerage or savings accounts for youngsters.
In my Getting Going column, in honor of Father's Day, I reflected on the lessons I learned from my father and my grandfather.
They came from very different generations, one influenced by the Great Depression, the other by the growth and prosperity of the 1950s and '60s. One believed in bonds and the other in stocks. Together, they introduced me to the basics of investing--and more importantly, to how to keep the whole process in perspective. While my style is different from either of theirs-( have less tolerance for risk than my dad, but more than my grandfather had-their advice continues to resonate as I plan for my own future.
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Three civil liberties unions plus some Douglas County parents filed a lawsuit this morning against the authorization of funds by the state treasurer to a lottery program created to subsidize scholarships to private schools--many of which are religious schools.The national Americans Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and ACLU of Colorado, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State filed the lawsuit in Denver District Court on behalf of plaintiffs who allege that the Douglas County Pilot Voucher Program disrupts the separation between church and state.
The Douglas County school board-approved Pilot Voucher Program is a scholarship lottery for 500 students to attend one of 19 private schools, but 14 of those schools are religious. In charge of implementing the state's first ever voucher program is Dr. Christian Cutter, assistant superintendent for the Douglas County School District.
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For Kearsley Higgins, raising a baby in San Francisco was idyllic. She and her husband owned a small two-bedroom house in the Castro, she found plenty of activities for her daughter, Maya, and made friends through an 11-member mothers' group.Now as the mother of an almost 4-year-old, with a baby boy due in September, Higgins has left. A year ago, she and her husband, a digital artist, bought a four-bedroom home with a large backyard in San Rafael. Maya easily got into a popular preschool and will be enrolled in a good public elementary school when the time comes.
The other moms in Higgins' group have moved on, too - to the East Bay, the Peninsula, Michigan and Texas. Just one of the 11 still lives in San Francisco.
"Everyone was very committed to the city when we were starting, and then they all left," said Higgins, 36, a stay-at-home mom. "You see tons of strollers in the city and people running around with the little ones, but then the vacuum occurs."
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With $40,000 you could buy a new Lexus or a foreclosed house in a depressed community. Or you could pay for a year at one of the city's top private schools.The Riverdale Country School will charge $40,450 for high school students in the fall, and other schools aren't far behind. The Hewitt School will charge $38,000, and Ethical Culture Fieldston will charge $37,825.
Added costs such as transportation, books and supplies will bring the total annual tab at several schools up to $40,000.
The figures were reported in The Wall Street Journal on Monday.
According to the Washington, D.C.-based National Association of Independent Schools, the median tuition for a high school senior at the association's member schools in New York City was $35,475 in the 2010-11 school year. The comparable national figure was $21,695.
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In an unusually blunt assessment, the board says its academic-performance goals, particularly for disadvantaged students, "are not on track to be met."Charlie Mas has more.Each year about this time Seattle School Board members evaluate their only employee, the district's superintendent. With an interim superintendent on the job only a few months, this year had to be a little different.
In fact, you could say the board did the evaluation three months ago when they fired the previous superintendent, Maria Goodloe-Johnson, following revelations that an employee had spent money on contracts for which the district received little or nothing in return.
With Goodloe-Johnson gone and no need to attach accomplishments or failures to the superintendent or go through the agony of determining whether or not she got a raise, the board in a report at its regular meeting last week focused on what the district itself had or had not accomplished. The result was surprising and refreshingly candid language about where the district stands.
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Steve Rankin, via email:
Mikko Utevsky, 17, of Madison, decided to form a student-led chamber orchestra, so he did. Their premiere was June 17 on the UW-Madison campus, and here's what Mikko had to say to Jacob Stockinger, a classical music blogger from Madison, at the beginning of a week of intensive rehearsal: http://welltempered.wordpress.com/2011/06/15/classical-music-qa-high-school-conductor-mikko-utevsky-discusses-the-madison-area-youth-chamber-orchestra-which-makes-its-debut-this-friday-night-in-vivaldi-beethoven-and-borodin/Obviously, these kids did not arrive at their musical talents without adult teaching and guidance. Many of them began in their school bands and orchestras. They continue to study with their own teachers and with adult-run orchestras such as WYSO (http://wyso.music.wisc.edu/) and school-based bands and orchestras. As school funding continues to be in jeopardy, and arts programming is first on the chopping block (the MMSD strings program has been under threat of elimination a number of times and has been cut twice since most of these students began, (http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2007/01/elementary_stri_3.php, http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2006/05/speak_up_for_st.php, http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/000241.php, http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2006/05/on_wednesday_ma.php, http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2006/05/speak_up_for_st_2.php - many more citations available through SIS), the chances for a student-led ensemble such as MAYCO (Madison Area Youth Chamber Orchestra) to continue to thrive are also in jeopardy.
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WHEN THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION last week released the results of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress -- "the Nation's Report Card" -- the bottom line was depressingly predictable: Not even a quarter of American students is proficient in US history, and the percentage declines as students grow older. Only 20 percent of 6th graders, 17 percent of 8th graders, and 12 percent of high school seniors demonstrate a solid grasp on their nation's history. In fact, American kids are weaker in history than in any of the other subjects tested by the NAEP -- math, reading, science, writing, civics, geography, and economics.How weak are they? The test for 4th-graders asked why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure in US history and a majority of the students didn't know. Among 8th-graders, not even one-third could correctly identify an advantage that American patriots had over the British during the Revolutionary War. And when asked which of four countries -- the Soviet Union, Japan, China, and Vietnam -- was North Korea's ally in fighting US troops during the Korean War, nearly 80 percent of 12th-graders selected the wrong answer.
Historically illiterate American kids typically grow up to be historically illiterate American adults. And Americans' ignorance of history is a familiar tale.
When it administered the official US citizenship test to 1,000 Americans earlier this year, Newsweek discovered that 33 percent of respondents didn't know when the Declaration of Independence was adopted, 65 percent couldn't say what happened at the Constitutional Convention, and 80 percent had no idea who was president during World War I. In a survey of 14,000 college students in 2006, more than half couldn't identify the century when the first American colony was founded at Jamestown, the reason NATO was organized, or the document that says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Numerous other surveys and studies confirm the gloomy truth: Americans don't know much about history.
Somewhere in heaven, it must all make Harry Truman weep.
He never attended college and had no formal intellectual credentials, but Truman was an avid, lifelong student of history. As a boy he had devoured Plutarch's Lives and Charles Horne's four-volume Great Men and Famous Women, developing an intimacy with history that would later become one of his greatest strengths. "When Truman talked of presidents past -- Jackson, Polk, Lincoln -- it was as if he had known them personally," the historian David McCullough wrote in his landmark biography of the 33rd president.
Truman may have been exaggerating in 1947 when he told Clark Clifford and other White House aides that he would rather have been a history teacher than president. Yet imagine how different the NAEP history scores would be if more teachers and schools in America today routinely imparted to their students a Trumanesque love and enthusiasm for learning about the past.
Alas, when it comes to history, as Massachusetts educator Will Fitzhugh observes, the American educational system imparts a very different message.While the most promising high school athletes in this country are publicly acclaimed and profiled in the press and recruited by college coaches and offered lucrative scholarships, there is no comparable lauding of outstanding high school history students. A former public school history teacher, Fitzhugh is the publisher of The Concord Review, a journal he began in 1987 to showcase the writing of just such exceptional student scholars. The review has printed 924 high-caliber research papers by teenagers from 44 states and 39 nations, The New York Times reported in January, winning a few "influential admirers" along the way.
But this celebration of what Fitzhugh calls "Varsity Academics®" amounts to just drops of excellence in the vast sea of mediocrity that is American history education. Another kind of excellence is represented by the National History Club that Fitzhugh launched in 2002 in order to encourage middle and high school students to "read, write, discuss, and enjoy history" outside the classroom. Beginning with a single chapter in Memphis, the club has grown into an independent national organization, with chapters in 43 states and more than 12,000 student members involved in a rich array of history-related activities.
"Our goal," says Robert Nasson, the club's young executive director, "is to create kids who are life-long students of history." He and Fitzhugh have exactly the right idea. But as the latest NAEP results make dismally clear, they are swimming against the tide.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
-- ## --
-----------------------"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
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It's midday, mid-week in Mid-Levels and a group of middle-aged men are enjoying a few beers together. This part of the day is down time for Rob Daniel, Donald Knapp, Edo Fuijkschot and Chris Lee because they aren't employed in traditional jobs.All are stay-at-home dads, full-time fathers, house husbands, Mr Moms or whatever label society has given them. They are meeting when their children are either at school or with the family helper, and their wives have yet to leave work.
The number of men who have quit or scaled back their jobs to take on homemaking duties traditionally ascribed to women forms a miniscule demographic. But their numbers are edging up - at least in the West. According to the United States Census, there were an estimated 160,000 full-time fathers in 2007. That only accounts for about 3 per cent of all stay-at-home parents. Nonetheless, it is triple the 1997 figure. In Britain, a Guardian report estimates there are 250,000 stay-at-home fathers.
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The US salary figure for MBAs from "leading schools" seems too low to me. Is this apples to apples? Still, it's incredible what people are earning in China and India. One private equity guy I know told me they are hiring top talent in Beijing/Shanghai for USD $100k+ these days.
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The 26 young men and women, seated in alphabetical order, were nearly silent as they waited for their high school graduation to start. No giggles. No buzz. No camaraderie. And no wonder: they had met just once before, at the rehearsal two weeks earlier where they got their caps and gowns.They had come on this muggy June evening to the Miami Zoo, past the flamingos and the tiger, for an hourlong ceremony that Gloria Rodriguez, the organizer, proudly called "the very first South Florida home-school graduation ever created."
Ms. Rodriguez's "home-school class of 2011" had no prom, no yearbook, no valedictorian. Still, for these students who had sidestepped a traditional education -- and especially for their parents -- there was "Pomp and Circumstance" and shiny turquoise tassels to shift from one side of a cap to the other.
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A new study shows one in four high school students drink soda every day -- a sign fewer teens are downing the sugary drinks.The study also found teens drink water, milk and fruit juices most often - a pleasant surprise, because researchers weren't certain that was the case.
"We were very pleased to see that," said the study's lead author, Nancy Bener of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Still, a quarter have at least one soda each day. And when other sugary drinks like Gatorade are also counted, the figure is closer to two-thirds of high school students drinking a sweetened beverage every day.
That's less than in the past. In the 1990s and early 2000s, more than three-quarters of teens were having a sugary drink each day, according to earlier research.
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I find myself more and more interested in the growing debate over how much and what to teach high school students. I support the side that thinks all students should be given skills that will make them ready for college because the same abilities---to write, read, do math and manage their time--are necessary if they want good jobs or trade school slots after high school.On the other side are those who think college prep for all is a failed experiment. They say it alienates too many students and must be replaced by vocational programs that get to the heart of what employers want without killing student interest with required essays on the Romance poets and the Federalist papers. A recent report by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which I trashed here, is the best and most complete recent example of this argument.
I hadn't encountered any promising efforts to bring the two sides together until I saw a commentary, "Untangling the Postsecondary Debate," by Mike Rose, professor of social research methodology at UCLA, in the latest Education Week "Diplomas Count" report. He is critical of both sides, but helped me most in understanding where my arguments are weak.
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"¿Qué es esto?" Martha Arriola asks her kindergarten class, holding a picture of a bed."Cama!" the students respond in unison. "Cah ... ahh ... mmm ... ahh," they sound out each letter.
Arriola picks one student to find the letters that make those sounds from a group of cards and place them in the right order to spell the word.
Later, she turns an invisible switch on her head. "Click, click click, English time," she said as the students mimic the gesture.
They repeat the same exercise in English -- this time with "bed."
The class at Coral Mountain Academy is one of about 12 bilingual classes in kindergarten through fourth grade at the Coachella school.
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"It's one thing to talk about these issues on high," says Howard Fuller, who has done that often as one of the nation's most eloquent and best known education activists."But when you get over here on 33rd and Brown . . . " His sentence trails off. That's where CEO Leadership Academy is located, and that's where Fuller has come face to face with how tough it is to achieve high results among exactly the students he most wants to help.
Howard Fuller: Former Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent. Leading advocate for Milwaukee's private school voucher program. Local and national leader in charter school issues.
Howard Fuller: Hands-on chair of the board of a small high school where test scores for 10th-graders last fall were awful and where the record of success has been plainly disappointing.
A couple years ago, Fuller told me that, as much as he thought he knew about how hard it is to achieve educational success in a high-poverty, urban setting, he didn't know how hard it really was until he got involved at CEO.
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In nature, the balance of males and females is maintained by natural selection acting on parents. As Sir Ronald Fisher brilliantly pointed out in 1930, a surplus of one sex will be redressed by selection in favour of rearing the other sex, up to the point where it is no longer the minority. It isn't quite as simple as that. You have to take into account the relative economic costs of rearing one sex rather than the other. If, say, it costs twice as much to rear a son to maturity as a daughter (e.g. because males are bigger than females), the true choice facing a parent is not "Shall I rear a son or a daughter?" but "Shall I rear a son or two daughters?"So, Fisher concluded, what is equlibrated by natural selection is not the total numbers of sons and daughters born in the population, but the total parental expenditure on sons versus daughters. In practice, this usually amounts to an approximately equal ratio of males to females in the population at the end of the period of parental expenditure.
Note that the word 'decision' doesn't mean conscious decision: we employ the usual 'selfish gene' metaphorical reasoning, in which natural selection favours genes that produce behaviour 'as if' decisions are being made.
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Heightening concerns about the value of many of its high school diplomas, the New York State Education Department released new data on Tuesday showing that only 37 percent of students who entered high school in 2006 left four years later adequately prepared for college, with even smaller percentages of minority graduates and those in the largest cities meeting that standard.In New York City, 21 percent of the students who started high school in 2006 graduated last year with high enough scores on state math and English tests to be deemed ready for higher education or well-paying careers. In Rochester, it was 6 percent; in Yonkers, 14.5 percent.
The new calculations, part of a statewide push to realign standards with college readiness, also underscored a racial achievement gap: 13 percent of black students and 15 percent of Hispanic students statewide were deemed college-ready after four years of high school, compared with 51 percent of white graduates and 56 percent of Asian-Americans.
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Yale University's decision last month to punish a fraternity that made pledges chant offensive slogans was heralded by some as a blow against sexual harassment in the college setting. But it may be the beginning of a new wave of campus censorship of politically incorrect speech. The reason lies in the relationship between the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which is in charge of enforcing federal antidiscrimination laws on campus, and the ever-growing ranks of campus bureaucracy.On April 4, 2011, OCR issued a 19-page letter laying out detailed procedures every university in the country must follow in cases involving claims of sexual harassment or sexual assault. A college that fails to follow these guidelines risks an OCR investigation and the loss of federal funding, a devastating blow for many schools. In the case of Yale, for example, OCR has the power to withhold half a billion dollars in federal funds.
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This video has been all over New York-based internet sites in the past few days. But I don't think it has yet been on any of the Atlantic's sites, and it is worth another look for "the way we live now" purposes.It shows a young woman passenger chewing out a train conductor who has asked her to stop talking so loudly on the phone and swearing. OK, I've sometimes gotten exasperated with officialdom, and I am glad that no one had a camera running when I did. But the approach the passenger takes is significant, and stunning.
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Students in schools of education pay a lot of attention to the problems of learning how to learn, lifelong leaning, and the like. In the absence of much knowledge of history, economics, physics, literature, foreign languages, chemistry, calculus and so on, this can degenerate into what Professor E.D. Hirsch, Jr., calls "How-to-ism," an absorption in "pedagogy" without any secure foundation in academic knowledge.
It is also the case that most graduates of our schools of education are shocked by the day-to-day problems of managing youngsters with Twitter, popular music, sports, popularity, and Grand Theft Auto on their minds. But it should be noted that it is very hard to get students interested in academic work, for instance history, if the teacher doesn't know any history herself. This problem causes some number of coaches who teach Social Studies to shy away from the Renaissance in favor of current events, which may seem more approachable both to them and their students. How 'bout those Bruins!
In the meantime, even American students who are Seniors in high school show a pitiful ignorance of the most basic knowledge of the history of their own country, as revealed in the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress report released this month.
In The Knowledge Deficit, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., tried to get across the point that teaching learning skills, for example, which pedagogy graduates are supposed to be good at, does little or nothing for helping students acquire knowledge. He argues that the only way to increase knowledge is to build on a stronger and stronger base of knowledge, not by wasting time on the dubious techniques of "Learning How to Learn."
I am convinced that one of the reasons even some students who do not require remediation in reading and writing when they get to college still fail to gain a degree after six or eight years, in part go under academically because they do not bring enough knowledge to help them understand what the professor is talking about. Their ignorance makes them feel lost. Some become determined to find the knowledge they have not been given in high school, but too many quit instead.
To be more fair to the education schools, even Harvard has had great difficulty in committing its faculty to teach certain basic areas of knowledge. The faculty tried to avoid arguing over what needed to be taught, so they fell back on allowing each department to teach "the skills" of its discipline, which they believed could be taught with any subject matter (such as that which the professor's research happened to focus on at the moment).
The problem, as pointed out in an article by Caleb Nelson in The Atlantic called "Harvard's Hollow Core," is that "One cannot think like a physicist, for example, without actually knowing a great deal of physics." Similarly, it is quite hard to think like a historian if you don't know any history.
So the whole "Learning How to Learn" paradigm collapses of its own emptiness and leads to academic failure for many students who have been offered rubrics, techniques and skills as a substitute for the academic knowledge they would need to survive in college.
The Common Core is offering national goals for knowledge. Others have critiqued their weakness in math, but I would suggest that their goals for reading in history are scarcely challenging for eight graders. Reading The Declaration of Independence and A Letter from the Birmingham Jail is not a waste of time, but for high school students, why not offer Mornings on Horseback, Washington's Crossing, Battle Cry of Freedom and The Path Between the Seas? In other words, actual history books? I cannot find out when it was decided (or by whom) that American high school students can manage European history, calculus, Latin, chemistry and so on, but cannot be expected to read through even one complete history book? How did our expectations for nonfiction reading (and gathering knowledge thereby) get so dramatically dumbed down? Of course STEM is very important, but even engineers and scientists need to read and write.
To demonstrate how far we have slid down the slope of expectations since Thomas Jefferson's day, here is an example from The Knowledge Deficit (p. 9):
"In our pre-romantic days, books were seen as key to education. In a 1786 letter to his nephew, aged fifteen, Jefferson recommended that he read books (in the original languages and in this order) by the following authors: [history] Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Anabasis, Arian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, and Justin. On morality, Jefferson recommended books by Epictetus, Plato, Cicero, Antoninus, Seneca, and Xenophon's Memorabilia, and in poetry Virgil, Terence, Horace, Anacreon, Theocritus, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Milton, Shakespeare, Ossian, Pope and Swift."Will Fitzhugh
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JUDY WOODRUFF: Next, a Health Unit report about a medical mystery, and the questions it's raising about the drug-monitoring system. It involves a class of antibiotic drugs that some people say are making them very ill.Health correspondent Betty Ann Bowser has the story.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: Just a few years ago, Jenne Wilcox was a happily married healthy first-grade teacher in Oroville, Calif., helping husband Rob raise his son Cole from a previous marriage.
But all that changed suddenly after she took a prescription drug called Levaquin to prevent infection following routine sinus surgery. Wilcox developed severe pain in her joints and muscles, and even when she stopped taking the medication, the symptoms grew worse, until she could no longer walk.
JENNE WILCOX, patient: I couldn't even hold my head up. And I was bedridden for over a year. And when I say that, I mean, I couldn't even get myself out of bed to get into my wheelchair to go use the restroom. I had to be picked up out of bed.
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Let's say that instead of taking on huge debts while I was in law school, I had taken up a wicked cocaine habit. Let's say I had done loads and loads of blow from 2000 to 2007 and then went into a 12-step program. If I had been lucky enough to avoid an overdose or jail, you could argue that things would be better for me right now -- even if I had a really serious cocaine problem where I spent my all my disposable income on the drug, and even if I put a good job and a good marriage straight up my nose. If I had been through all that and then wrote an essay about the highs and the lows of doing cocaine throughout my legal career, if I was telling kids that they could overcome a wicked cocaine habit even though the consequences were severe, if I was truthfully telling people that even though I'm trying to stay clean and sober now I'm not "ashamed" of my past life, I'd have nearly everybody in my corner.Instead, I didn't have a cocaine habit in law school and beyond. I defaulted on my student debts.
Really, the smart thing to do would have been to default on all my loans, then blame it on the cocaine that I was "powerless" to stop. But instead of playing the victim, I marshaled what autonomous power I had and chose not to pay back my loans in a timely manner. I decided to go down on my own terms, not the terms set out for me in a promissory note.
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After Donna Cushlanis's son, who was in second grade, kept bursting into tears midway through his math problems, which one night took over an hour, she told him not to do all of his homework."How many times do you have to add seven plus two?" Ms. Cushlanis, 46, said. "I have no problem with doing homework, but that put us both over the edge. I got to the point that this is enough."
Ms. Cushlanis, a secretary for the Galloway school district, complained to her boss, Annette C. Giaquinto, the superintendent. It turned out that the district, which serves 3,500 kindergarten through eighth-grade students, was already re-evaluating its homework practices. The school board will vote this summer on a proposal to limit weeknight homework to 10 minutes for each year of school -- 20 minutes for second graders, and so forth -- and ban assignments on weekends, holidays and school vacations.
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My wife and I have sent five children to college and our youngest just graduated. Like many parents, we encouraged them to study hard and spend time in a country where people don't speak English. Like all parents, we worried about the kind of people they would grow up to be.We may have been a little unusual in thinking it was the college's responsibility to worry about that too. But I believe that intellect and virtue are connected. They influence one another. Some say the intellect is primary. If we know what is good, we will pursue it. Aristotle suggests in the "Nicomachean Ethics" that the influence runs the other way. He says that if you want to listen intelligently to lectures on ethics you "must have been brought up in good habits." The goals we set for ourselves are brought into focus by our moral vision.
"Virtue," Aristotle concludes, "makes us aim at the right mark, and practical wisdom makes us take the right means." If he is right, then colleges and universities should concern themselves with virtue as well as intellect.
I want to mention two places where schools might direct that concern, and a slightly old-fashioned remedy that will improve the practice of virtue. The two most serious ethical challenges college students face are binge drinking and the culture of hooking up.
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Here is the presentation from today's Work Session on the Strategic Plan with survey results.Download the Seattle Strategic Plan update, here.
Highlights:
- 5905 responses - 64% family member, 26% teacher or school staff, 1% principals, 5% community, 4% Central Office
- By zip code - looks like a somewhat even distribution with NE - 98115 with 528 responses, SE - 98118 with 221 responses, SW - 98136 with 118 responses, West Seattle - 98116 with 182 responses and NW - 98117 with 433 responses. (There were more zip codes than those.)
- page 8 has a breakdown of coaches and costs - overall it costs $6.4M for 65.6 coaches (the salary swings are interesting)
- Professional development in math, science and reading helping teachers and students - the big answer was .... no opinion. And, out of the nearly 6,000 responses, only 3443 people answered this question. Effective/somewhat effective (families-27%/teachers-51%). Ineffective/somewhat ineffective (families-22%/teachers-28%)
- MAP test results effectiveness. Effective/Somewhat Effective (families-41%/teachers-33%). Somewhat effective/ineffective (families-45%/teachers50%). Out of 6k responses, only 3682 respondents answered.
- MAP- how many times a year should it be used? 3x- families-30%, teachers-23%, principals-40%. Hmm, looks like principals like it more than teachers. 2x -families-29%,teachers-30%, principals, 40%. That's a lot closer. And hey, they ARE reducing MAP to two times a year for 2011-2013 (winter and spring)
- NSAP. More efficient/somewhat more - families-42%/teachers 23%/principals 55%. Somewhat less/less efficient - families-27%/teachers-29%/principals-31%.
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After dinner at Todd and Jodie Schiermeier's house in O'Fallon, Ill., it is "tackle Dad" time. That's when Mr. Schiermeier gets down on the floor with their three children, Rylee, 7, Kinsey, 4, and Jace, 20 months, for a session of "horseback rides and pillow fights and tackle and wrestle," he says.It is a stark contract to Ms. Schiermeier's playtime with the kids, who says she mostly cuddles them or has "a little tickle fight."
The rough play is already benefiting her older daughter, who is "a little timid," Ms. Schiermeier says. "She has toughened up a little" playing with her dad. "He is teaching her how to take the blows of life, and to get in there and fight." All three kids are learning to take turns and work as a team. For Mr. Schiermeier, that is intentional: "I push them to get outside their comfort zones."
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Stanford Law School grad, Peter Thiel, wants to pay college students to drop out. If typical venture capital odds apply, about 22 of the 24 people who took his $100,000 inducement to drop out and spend two years working in a start-up will fail to build a successful company. For their sake, let's hope the schools will let them back in.And based on research from the country's top-ranked school of entrepreneurship, the world will be better off if those whippersnappers stay in school and get 10 years of experience before launching their start-ups.
Peter Thiel has a mixed investment record but has come out ahead. Thiel made $55 million as a co-founder of online payment service PayPal when he sold his 3.7% stake in the company to eBay (EBAY) shortly after graduating from Stanford Law School. He then became the first major investor, putting $500,000 into Facebook.
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"THERE is no dramatic distinction between the processes of the weather and the workings of the human brain," says Stephen Wolfram, a physicist and the founder of Wolfram Research, a software company. "There isn't anything incredibly special about intelligence, it's just sophisticated computational work that has grown up throughout human history." Dr Wolfram is hardly the first scientist to compare the human brain to a computer. Alan Turing, who helped develop the precursors of today's programmable computers during the second world war, began considering the possibility of thinking machines in the 1940s. The difference is that Dr Wolfram claims to have succeeded in codifying vast areas of human knowledge and even replicating supposedly uniquely human attributes such as creativity."One of my realisations, or maybe it's just a piece of arrogance, is that the amount of knowledge and data in the world is big, but it's not that big," he says. "In astronomy, there's a petabyte--a million gigabytes--of data about what's out there in the universe. There are also swathes of data from digital cameras, Twitter feeds and even road-traffic movements. It's a bit daunting, but I soon realised that the bigger challenge is not the underlying data but the computations that get done on them."
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We're spending our children's money. So goes the refrain from people appalled at the government's deficits. As long as entitlement spending and tax collections continue on their present course, it's an undeniable truth.Instead of wringing your hands, do something about it. Make your children so prosperous that they can withstand the Medicare cutbacks and tax increases that lie ahead. Here are ten tactics for boosting the net worth of your offspring.
1 Don't Overeducate
That master's degree your son or daughter wants to get may be a bad investment. This heretical thought comes from Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economist who studies earning and consumption patterns. An advanced degree confers a higher salary, but it comes at a high cost, too. It includes tuition, often borrowed, plus a year or more of lost earnings.
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I have been trying to find the campaign websites for all the candidates running for Seattle School Board this year (candidate filings closed 5 p.m. Friday), and the final list looks something like this. Two things: there's like a ton of them and only four open seats; not all of them have a website yet.
Most of the new candidates are running because they are tired of the corruption and cronyism in Seattle Public Schools. Some want to focus on closing the achievement gap and raising test scores. Others are just sick of the influence a plethora of foundations have on education these days.
At least one of the candidates is a reluctant one who says he's running because he is tired of mediocrity in our schools and the "business as usual approach" of our school board. Another lists this thing as his campaign website. This one sued the district against its new high school math textbooks in 2009.
The incumbents say they are fed up of the same things their challengers are (of course, I mean there can only be so many problems in one district, right?).
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In a bare-bones basement office in Buffalo, N.Y., Katie Campos, an education activist, is plotting a revolution. She and her minuscule staff of the advocacy group Buffalo ReformED are against incredible odds. In less than a week, they are trying to get a controversial law known as the "parent trigger" through the New York legislature. It's a powerful nickname for game-changing legislation that would enable parents who could gather a majority at any persistently failing school to either fire the principal, fire 50% of the teachers, close the school or turn it into a charter school.Campos and her group are working with some 4,000 frustrated parents like Samuel Radford III, who refuses to accept that as African Americans, his three sons in Buffalo public schools have only a 25% chance of graduating. Radford voiced his concerns for years but saw no improvement, so rather than continue to wait for the district to act, he became vice president of the District Parent Coordinating Council and threw his support behind passing parent-trigger legislation. "This is our chance to not just confront the problem but be part of the solution," Radford says. On June 15, Buffalo ReformED plans to fill a bus of parents like Radford and ride to the state capitol, in Albany, to host an informal hearing on the bill and speak to members of the senate and house education committees.
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Fewer than a quarter of American 12th-graders knew China was North Korea's ally during the Korean War, and only 35% of fourth-graders knew the purpose of the Declaration of Independence, according to national history-test scores released Tuesday.The results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed that U.S. schoolchildren have made little progress since 2006 in their understanding of key historical themes, including the basic principles of democracy and America's role in the world.
Only 20% of U.S. fourth-graders and 17% of eighth-graders who took the 2010 history exam were "proficient" or "advanced," unchanged since the test was last administered in 2006. Proficient means students have a solid understanding of the material.
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The Loudoun Academy of Science, a six-year-old public magnet school in Sterling inspired in part by the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, already matches that famous school in one vital statistic: Like Jefferson, the Academy of Science each year rejects about 85 percent of applicants.
With 240 students, the academy is one-seventh the size of Jefferson and takes only Loudoun County residents (Jefferson draws from most of Northern Virginia), but it has won glowing reviews from students and has created a research curriculum rare in U.S. secondary education.
“It was completely unlike the standard classroom procedure that I was used to, and I absolutely loved it,” said Carter Huffman, an academy graduate now at MIT. “I have yet to hear of another school that so encourages all of its students to pursue major independent research.”
Elizabeth Asai, another academy graduate, said she and a couple of Yale classmates received university funding this year to design biomedical devices, usually a process daunting to undergraduates. Her friends “were astounded by the ease of presenting our proposal and actually receiving a grant,” she said, but, having attended the Academy of Science, to her “this seemed normal.”
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To get to the point of graduation, you've endured an almost endless sequence of measurements of your intelligence and knowledge, in the form of tests. You have taken more tests than you hope to remember. The role of faculty here and other teachers earlier was to define the questions. Your role, as students, was to provide the right answers.Clusty Search: Clayton Christensen.Many in education, however, have overlooked a frightening fact: finding the right answer is
impossible unless we have asked the right question. Unfortunately our teaching system focuses little attention on teaching us how to ask the right questions. As a scholar, father, and advisor, I have slowly realized that asking the right question is the rare and valuable skill. That done, getting the right answer is typically quite straightforward.In my remarks today I'd like to describe three instances where people like us have plunged into implementing an answer, without taking the care to define the salient question to which we need good answers. Two are of national scope; the third is personal. My prayer is for each of you - students, graduates, families and faculty - is to see learning to frame questions as a critical part of your work.
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The caps and gowns haven't changed much. "Pomp and Circumstance" continues to mark the occasion. And many of those valedictorians are bound to quote "The Road Not Taken."Commencement ceremonies have remained virtually unchanged over the years. But don't be fooled. The high school experience leading up to graduation has never looked so different for American teenagers.
Everything from technology to academic innovations to the lagging economy has influenced high schools and the students they serve -- locally and nationwide.
No longer a novelty, independent charter schools will issue a record number of diplomas to students who received a new brand of education -- often in some unlikely venues, including shopping malls, museums and an old Navy boot camp.
More students than ever will graduate this year after taking some of their courses online.
And tough economic times have created a rising population of homeless students -- and programs and schools designed to educate and help them.
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Can we make ourselves smarter? In recent decades, scientists have accumulated increasing evidence that our intelligence, at least as measured by the IQ test, is sharply constrained by genetics. Although estimates vary, most studies place the heritability of intelligence at somewhere between 50% and 80%. It's an uncomfortable fact, but not all brains are created equal.Which is why there's so much buzz about a forthcoming study that complicates this assumption. Researchers at the University of Michigan found that it's possible to boost a core feature of human intelligence through a simple mental training exercise.
In fact, when several dozen elementary- and middle-school kids from the Detroit area used this exercise for 15 minutes a day, many showed significant gains on a widely used intelligence test. Most impressive, perhaps, is that these gains persisted for three months, even though the children had stopped training.
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Not long ago, Bucyrus International Inc. stood out in Milwaukee as a veritable poster child for business opportunity and expansion. Mayor Tom Barrett singled out chief executive Tim Sullivan in his 2005 "state of the city" address: "Thank you for believing and investing in our city."And so it was awkward last week when Sullivan told a packed auditorium of civic leaders that he needed to make a "confession," something he's kept quiet for years. Finding qualified, factory-grade welders in an old-line industrial city such as Milwaukee had become arduous to near impossible. Calling himself a "killjoy," Sullivan said he quietly phoned a few contacts in Texas to see whether the Lone Star State could provide him enough welders who are qualified to piece together the colossal mining machines that Bucyrus ships to India, China and elsewhere around the world.
A delegation of senior Texas government authorities met Sullivan at the airport, including the mayor of the town of Kilgore. In a one-hour lunch, they matched Bucyrus with a ready-to-occupy factory with every possible amenity.
More important, they asked Sullivan exactly what sort of workers he needed. Sullivan said 80 with specific skill. The state gave Sullivan a guarantee that the workers would be waiting when the doors opened at the expansion site in Kilgore. State officials customized a recruitment, training and certification program. One year later, when the expansion site in Kilgore opened its doors, the 80 welders were waiting.
In the two years since then, the Texas site has more than doubled to 184 total workers and plans to keep hiring. And back in Milwaukee, Sullivan has said next to nothing in public about the Kilgore expansion.
"We have a complete disconnect between jobs and education and training," Sullivan said. In Milwaukee, "we're a long way" from replicating the feat in Texas.
"There is no stomach in this state to change the curriculum," he said. "Who is initiating education reform in the state right now? No one."
Although taxpayer-funded MATC probably is the institution best suited to address the skills mismatch, the tech school cannot bear all the blame for its inability to deliver customized workforce training, Sullivan said.
Many Milwaukee-trained welders simply are not mentally prepared by metro Milwaukee's grade schools and high schools, Sullivan said.
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It's located in a grimy and windowless building that it shares with an adult school on the edge of downtown. But to its students and teachers, the Santee Construction Academy is something of an educational utopia.There are small classes with attentive teachers. A curriculum designed to prepare students for the real world with training for in-demand jobs. An atmosphere that students say is akin to a family.
The campus fits the bill of what some educators and others describe as a model with its career training and staff commitment. Yet, in about two weeks, this program will be history.
It turns out that the same factors that have made the academy successful -- despite lukewarm test scores -- also made it vulnerable to the sweeping cuts Los Angeles public schools are being forced to make with a tightening budget. The program costs more than $1.5 million to operate.
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Yale law professor, and mother of two girls, Amy Chua gave the world a new type of mother role model in her memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother: someone who insisted on several hours of music practice every day, banned sleepovers and wasn't happy with anything less than an A+ for schoolwork. Bryan Caplan, economics professor and father-of-three, whose new book says nature will always win over nurture, is an exponent of "serenity parenting", the belief that parents should stop hothousing their children. Can either of them change the other's mind? Emine Saner listens in.Bryan Caplan: I'm wondering why genes play so little part in your story. You mention them a few times, but there isn't much about how your kids are the children of law professors and best-selling authors, and this might have something to do with their success.
Amy Chua: My book isn't about success or biology. It's just a memoir. I was raised by really strict Chinese immigrant parents and I tried to do the same with my two daughters. It worked in some ways, and not in others.
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But after learning of the Madison School District's failure to adequately boost test scores under No Child Left Behind, I had to wonder: Heat or no heat, what cause for picnicking is there in the advent of a nearly three-month long break from formal learning for brains that, in their youth, are veritable sponges for knowledge?Much more on the oft-criticized WKCE, here and "Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum". It certainly is long past time for a new academic benchmark... Wisconsin students should participate in global examinations, such as TIMSS, among others.I'm less worried about my children, who have a standard pair of educated, middle-class parents. They probably won't make major academic strides over the summer, but they won't lose much ground or -- worse -- fill their free time picking up bad habits.
But here's the thing about the Madison district: Increasingly, its students aren't like my kids.
They are like the kids who live in the traditionally lower-income, higher-crime Worthington Park neighborhood. These and the kids from the tonier Schenk-Atwood neighborhood where we live share a school, but they don't necessarily share the same social, educational and financial advantages.
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A school board member shared the following information which was received from a community member, knowing grade inflation is one of SP-EYE's hot buttons. The contributor wasn't identified, but it doesn't matter. It's a great comparison from 20 years ago to today. If these numbers are valid (and we have absolutely no reason to suspect they are not), they represent cause for alarm.Sun Prairie High School.
Class of 2011 Class of 1991 Total Students 485 300 # on Honor Roll 187* (39%) 24 (8%) * This is reportedly the lowest in the past 7-8 years! # new NHS members 80 (16%) 14 (4%)
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According to Malcom Harris writing in n+1:"And while the proportion of tenure-track teaching faculty has dwindled, the number of managers has skyrocketed in both relative and absolute terms. If current trends continue, the Department of Education estimates that by 2014 there will be more administrators than instructors at American four-year nonprofit colleges. A bigger administration also consumes a larger portion of available funds, so it's unsurprising that budget shares for instruction and student services have dipped over the past fifteen years."
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Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:
Here's a confession: I am disappointed to read that Governor Walker's two sons are going to live with their grandparents so that they can continue to attend Wauwatosa East High School next year, rather than move into the Governor's Mansion with their parents and transfer to Madison East High School, the school my children attended.I'm disappointed not because I was looking forward to the hazing those Walker kids would get. Instead, cock-eyed optimist that I am, I was hoping that the Walker kids would have a good experience at East (henceforth "East" refers to Madison East, not Tosa East).
I don't know anything about the Walker boys and I can certainly understand why they wouldn't want to change high schools if they are happy where they are. But East has some fine programs; I expect that East students would quickly be able to relate to the new students on the basis of who they are rather than to whom they are related; and I expect that East teachers would act with the degree of professionalism we'd all expect in helping the new students with their transition. Yes, yes, I know - that may all be too much to hope for in these deeply polarizing times.
Mainly, I'm sorry because the district can always use additional enrollment. Our state funding and our state-imposed spending limit are both dependent upon our student count.
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Education officials are collecting data on Iowa students who earn community college credits while in high school to see how well-prepared those students are for college.According to a new report by the Iowa Department of Education, more than 38,200 high school students in Iowa took classes last year for credit through community colleges, 50 percent more than five years earlier. Those students accounted for more than 25 percent of the enrollment at the state's community colleges.
The Des Moines Register reported Wednesday that the state hasn't tracked passing and failing rates, and officials don't know whether the courses are as tough as those offered at the college level. But state officials are now collecting that information, said Roger Utman, administrator for the Education Department's Division of Community Colleges and Workforce Preparation.
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d an on-again, off-again relationship with Gov. John Kitzhaber. The Oregon Education Association endorsed his opponent in the Democratic primary, largely because of Kitzhaber’s “performance-based funding” proposal. When Kitzhaber won the nomination, OEA and other public sector unions bet the ranch on him.Gov. Kitzhaber’s latest proposal is a merger of the state boards dealing with K-12 and higher education, which has caused OEA some heartburn. “I am surprised and disappointed to hear that OEA has changed course and now opposes Senate Bill 909 and a package of modest education reforms that would deliver better results for students, more resources for teachers and more accountability for taxpayer dollars. For them to cling to the status quo is not in the best interest of Oregonians," said Kitzhaber in a statement.
Meanwhile in California, David Kieffer, the executive director of the state SEIU affiliate announced his opposition to Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan for a special election in September to extend and raise taxes. The state’s public sector unions are interested parties because they would be expected to fund the campaign with dues dollars.
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I love Salt Lake but having grown up in Denver it makes me nervous to have mountains in the east. I’ve also noticed that they may be more conservative here than in my new hometown of Seattle. The newspaper is reporting with some surprise today that a local anthropologist has found evidence that Darwin was on to something with that evolution stuff.
The editorial page explains that the precipitous drop in the Utah high school graduation rate is a result of all those Latino students moving in.
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As I've mentioned before, I graduated from law school over $150,000 in debt. As many of you know, I haven't exactly paid all of that money back. Not making payments that first year was all my fault. I wanted to get married, didn't have a credit card, and was using money that should have been going to my loans to finance my wedding.After that first year, things got a little out of hand. My debt was being sold, the monthly payments were outrageous, and I wasn't really paying a lot of attention to the situation during the few times when I was both awake and not billing hours. Then I quit my law firm job, hilarity ensued, and I woke up one day with a credit rating below 550.
I've been paying the minimum balances to various collection agencies since 2007 or so. Whatever. My hopes for paying it off or owning property pretty much rest on my ability to hit the lotto. Most likely, I'll die still owing money for law school. And that will be the story of me.
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When Madison La Follette High School senior Burnett Reed got into a heated argument with another student during his sophomore year in 2008, he faced a choice.He could take a disorderly conduct ticket that would stay on his court record. Or he could participate in the school's new youth court program in which a jury of fellow students would assess the case. He chose youth court and was sentenced to writing an apology letter, tutoring and four hours with a life coach.
He so liked the option he soon became a juror, and now is helping Madison West High School start its own program next year.
"It's a better way to keep youth out of the system," Reed said.
The approach has so much potential Madison Municipal Judge Dan Koval wants to start a similar program later this year for adult offenders, particularly those with chronic municipal violations such as retail theft, disorderly conduct, trespassing and other non-criminal offenses.
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No sooner do parents proudly watch their children graduate high school than they must begin paying for college. As they write checks for upwards of $40,000 a year, they'll no doubt find themselves complaining loudly about rising college costs--even asking: "Is it worth it?"It's a legitimate question. As college costs have risen wildly, the benefits of the degree seem less and less clear. Larger numbers of college graduates are taking relatively low-paying and low-skilled jobs.
The good news? There are ways to greatly ease the burden and make college more affordable, according to new data from the University of Texas at Austin.
In a study for the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, Christopher Matgouranis, Jonathan Robe and I concluded that tuition fees at the flagship campus of the University of Texas could be cut by as much as half simply by asking the 80% of faculty with the lowest teaching loads to teach about half as much as the 20% of faculty with the highest loads. The top 20% currently handle 57% of all teaching.
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Gov. Scott Walker on Thursday will announce a new policy to disburse hundreds of millions of dollars in federal job training funds each year - and will link the funds to reforms of local education curriculums.The disclosure came Wednesday morning from Tim Sullivan, chief executive officer of Bucyrus International and the chairman of the Governor's Council on Workforce Investment, a state advisory panel. Sullivan spoke at a meeting of the Milwaukee 7 economic development group.
Under the current system, federal job training funds, disbursed by multiple federal agencies, are paid directly to five state agencies, which in turn have established formulas to spend their share.
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Grades shows students what they need to score on their upcoming assignments, tests, and finals in order to get the grade they want. Now with due dates and a handy GPA calculator.Grades 2 won an award at the recent Apple Developer Conference.
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Bill Gates likes Salman Khan a lot, so much so that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is streaming cash to his Khan Academy, an internet silo of over 2,100 free, downloadable video tutorials on Calculus, Physics, Organic Chemistry, et al. Mr. Khan's Academy only has a "faculty of one," but my own students enjoy Mr. Khan's glib teaching style, and they consult his clips on quadratic equations, conic sections, and those hated word problems involving railroad trains. So is the Khan video approach a "disruptive technology" which undermines the existing deathbed educational model by doing it faster, better, and cheaper? Mr. Gates thinks so. "It's a revolution," he enthuses. "Everyone should check it out." (www.khanacademy.org) Wearing his education reformer hat, Mr. Gates declares himself "superhappy."Much more on the Khan Academy, here.
Mr. Khan, then, by all reports, is an entertaining, trustworthy, and helpful tutor of math and science. However, when he essays history, it's a different story and one that exposes something disquieting about a hidden potential of Internet learning, especially if, as some predict, The Khan Academy is the future of education.
Curious about Mr. Khan's take on something non-science, I pulled up his video "U.S. History Overview 3--World War II to Vietnam"
The screen looks like a squashed, two-dimensional schoolroom; you see a combined blackboard and bulletin board with colorful squiggly dates on a scroll down timeline, random photos (Hitler, Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, mushroom cloud), and tiny maps. Mr. Khan remains offscreen but writes or circles things onscreen with his pointer and provides his signature breathless voiceover.
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e are rapidly on course to create a dual-level school system for Wisconsin students. In smaller cities and rural and suburban areas, school systems will continue to spend about $10,000 per pupil. That is a bit less than the national average of $10,499, as a recent Census Bureau report found.But in big cities such as Milwaukee and Racine, and perhaps in Green Bay and Beloit, more and more students will be educated at choice schools that spend about $6,400 per pupil. These school systems tend to have students who are poorer, more likely to have learning disabilities, and they are typically the most challenging to teach. Yet Gov. Scott Walker and Republican legislators propose to spend less than two-thirds of the average per-pupil spending in other schools in the state and nation.
This situation, I might add, is not simply the fault of Republicans. Many Democrats, in hopes of killing school choice, have adamantly opposed spending more on vouchers in the past, so the per-pupil rate has always been absurdly low. On the other side are Republicans who can't lose with school choice: It undercuts public schools and lowers the number of teachers union members in cities such as Milwaukee. And it allows them to portray themselves as reformers trying to do something about failing schools.
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Rhode Island is one of only a handful of states to not have a single school included in the Washington Post's annual High School Challenge, a ranking of more than 1,900 high schools throughout the country.The reason: Rhode Island students are significantly behind the national average when it comes to taking Advanced Placement (AP) exams, and near the bottom of the country when it comes to passing them. In the class of 2010, only 17.9 percent of Ocean State students took an AP exam (compared with 28.3 percent nationally) and just 10.9 passed (compared with 16.9 percent nationally), according to a report issued by the College Board.
According to The Post, the formula used to rank the schools was to "divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or other college-level tests a school gave in 2010 by the number of graduating seniors." The goal wasn't to measure to overall quality of the schools, but simply to track how well they are preparing "average students" for college.
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"They're ready," Matthews said afterward, "to do whatever it takes."Much more on John Matthews, here. Madison Teachers, Inc. website and Twitter feed.After 43 years as executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., Matthews is in the spotlight again after encouraging a four-day sick-out that closed school in February. The action allowed teachers to attend protests at the Capitol over Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to curb collective bargaining by public employees. The matter remains in the courts, but it prompted a hasty contract negotiation between the district and union.
Teachers aren't happy about some of the changes, and Matthews is preparing for a street fight.
"It's going to get down and dirty," Matthews said, alluding to the possibility of more job actions, such as "working the contract" - meaning teachers wouldn't work outside required hours - if the School Board doesn't back off changes in the contract. "You can't continually put people down and do things to control them and hurt them and not have them react."
Moreover, the latest battle over collective bargaining has taken on more personal significance for Matthews, whose life's work has been negotiating contracts.
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In May 1846, a year and a half before gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill, several extended families and quite a few unattached males headed with their caravans from Illinois to California. Due to poor organization, some bad advice, and a huge dose of bad luck, by November the group had foundered in the deep snows of the Sierra Nevada. They came to a halt at what is now known as Donner Pass, and, in an iconic if unpleasant moment in California's history, they sat out winter in makeshift tents buried in snow, the group dwindling as survivors resorted to cannibalism to avert starvation.From an evolutionary point of view, what makes the story interesting is not the cannibalism -- which, in the annals of anthropology, is relatively banal -- but who survived and who did not. Of the 87 pioneers, only 46 came over the pass alive in February and March of the next year. Their story, then, represents a case study of what might be termed catastrophic natural selection. It turns out that, contrary to lay Darwinist expectations, it was not the virile young but those who were embedded in families who had the best odds of survival. The unattached young men, presumably fuller of vigor and capable of withstanding more physical hardship than the others, fared worst, worse even than the older folk and the children.
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The world's most embarrassing father is no more.Over the course of the 180-day school year, Dale Price waved at the school bus carrying his 16-year-old son, Rain, while wearing something different every morning outside their American Fork home.
He started out by donning a San Diego Chargers helmet and jersey, an Anakin Skywalker helmet, and swim trunks and a snorkel mask, the Daily Herald of Provo and Deseret News of Salt Lake City reported.
Among others, he later dressed up as Elvis, Batgirl, the Little Mermaid, the scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz, Princess Leia, Nacho Libre and Santa Claus. He wore spandex, pleather, feathers, wigs, flips flops, suits, boots, fur, Army fatigues and several dresses, including a wedding dress.
Dale Price said it took a lot of effort to keep up, but he did it to have fun and show his son he really cared about him.
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In response, Superintendent Nerad directed West to start providing honors courses in the fall of 2010. West staff protested, however, and Nerad retracted the directive.Much more on the Madison parents complaint to the Wisconsin DPI, here.Community members sent another petition in July, 2010-this time signed by 188 supporters-again calling for multiple measures of identification and advanced levels of core courses for 9th and 10th graders at West. This time there was no response but silence.
In the meantime, Greater Madison Urban League President Kaleem Caire told us: "The law is there for a reason. Use it."
So, after years of trying to work with the system, we filed a formal complaint with the DPI in September, 2010. Little did we know what upheaval the next months would bring. In October, the district administration rolled out its College and Career Readiness Plan; teachers at West agitated, and students staged a sit-in. In February, our new governor issued his reform proposal; protesters massed at the Capitol, and school was called off for four days.
In the meantime, the DPI conducted its investigation. Though our complaint had targeted West for its chronic, blatant, willful violations, the DPI extended its audit to the entire Madison School District.
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Recently I participated in a panel discussion following a showing of the film " Waiting for Superman ." The film is deeply moving. Only a heart of granite would remain unmoved by the plight of the children and caretakers as they learn they would not get into their schools of choice.In the discussion, Jim Johnson, a UNC-Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler Business School professor and founder of the Union Independent School in Durham, made a crucial observation. He noted that the debate around public charter schools versus traditional public schools, or private versus public schools, deflected us from the underlying issue: the plight of children who have no adult advocates.
As Johnson pointed out, despite failing to win a place in their school of choice, the students featured in the film all had a least one adult in their lives who knowledgeably advocated for them and cared deeply about their learning opportunities.
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If Gov. Scott Walker's budget is passed with recommendations approved Thursday by the Joint Committee on Finance, there will be more students in more voucher schools in more Wisconsin communities.Related:But critics of school voucher programs are hoping legislators will look long and hard at actual student achievement benefits before they vote to use tax dollars to send students to private schools. They also suggest that studies that have touted benefits of voucher programs should be viewed with a careful eye, and that claims that graduation rates for voucher schools exceed 90 percent are not just overly optimistic, but misleading.
"The policy decisions we are making today should not be guided by false statistics being propagated by people with a financial interest in the continuation and expansion of vouchers nationwide," wrote state Rep. Sondy Pope-Roberts, D-Middleton, in a news release Friday.
Pope-Roberts is particularly critical of statistics that school choice lobbyists and pro-voucher legislators are using that claim that 94 percent of school voucher students graduated from high school in four years.
It's good news, she says, but it tells a very selective story about a relatively small subset of students who were studied. That graduation rate reflects only the graduation rate for students who actually remained in the voucher program for all four years: Just 318 of the 801 students who began the program stayed with it.
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Instead of playing cricket with the kids in the alleyway outside, four-year-old Sumit Jha sweats in his family's one-room apartment. A power cut has stilled the overhead fan. In the stifling heat, he traces and retraces the image of a goat.In April, he enrolled in the nursery class of Shri Ram School, the most coveted private educational institution in India's capital. Its students include the grandchildren of India's most powerful figures--Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress party President Sonia Gandhi.
Sumit, on the other hand, lives in a slum.
His admission to Shri Ram is part of a grand Indian experiment to narrow the gulf between rich and poor that is widening as India's economy expands. The Right to Education Act, passed in 2009, mandates that private schools set aside 25% of admissions for low-income, underprivileged and disabled students. In Delhi, families earning less than 100,000 rupees (about $2,500 a year) qualify.
Shri Ram, a nontraditional school founded in 1988, would seem well-suited to the experiment. Rather than drill on rote learning, as many Indian schools do, Shri Ram encourages creativity by teaching through stories, songs and art. In a typical class, two teachers supervise 29 students; at public schools nearby, one teacher has more than 50. Three times a day, a gong sounds and teachers and students pause for a moment of contemplation. Above the entrance, a banner reads, "Peace."
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Mr. Educational Landscape Watcher here, with his jaw hanging open while he thinks about a few questions that boil down to this: What next?In January, Gov. Scott Walker told a convention of school board members and administrators from around Wisconsin that he was going to give them new tools to deal with their financial issues. Naïve me - I thought he meant bigger hammers and saws.
It turned out Walker was thinking along the lines of those machines that can strip-mine most of China in a week.
Goodness gracious, look at where things stand less than five months later, with more earth moving and drama ahead. Every public school in Wisconsin will be different in important ways because of what has happened in Madison. The private school enrollment in the Milwaukee and Racine areas will get a boost, maybe a large one. The decisions many people make on schooling for their kids are likely to be changed by what has happened in Madison. And then there's the future of Milwaukee Public Schools (he said with a shudder).
As the Legislature's budget committee wraps up its work, let's venture thoughts on a few questions:
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y first job as a professor was at an Ivy League university. The students were happy to be taught, and we, their teachers, were happy to be teaching them. Whatever portion of their time and energy was being eaten up by social commitments--which may have been huge, but about which I was ignorant--they seemed earnestly and unproblematically engaged with the academic experience. If I was naïve about this, they were gracious enough not to disabuse me. None of us ever questioned the importance of what we were doing.At a certain appointed hour, the university decided to make its way in the world without me, and we parted company. I was assured that there were no hard feelings. I was fortunate to get a position in a public university system, at a college with an overworked faculty, an army of part-time instructors, and sixteen thousand students. Many of these students were the first in their families to attend college, and any distractions they had were not social. Many of them worked, and some had complicated family responsibilities.
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Haya El Nasser & Paul Overberg:
In 1960, the year Helen Cini gave birth to one of her five children, 15 other kids were born on her block here in this quintessential postwar American suburb.The local obstetrician was so busy he often slept in his car.
Kathy Bachman felt like an oddity when her family moved to Cherry Lane in the Crabtree section of Levittown when she was 5. She was an only child, and "everybody had five or six kids in every house."
Fast-forward to 2011.
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Over the past few weeks, America's colleges have sent another class of graduates off into the world. These graduates possess something of inestimable value. Nearly every sensible middle-aged person would give away all their money to be able to go back to age 22 and begin adulthood anew.But, especially this year, one is conscious of the many ways in which this year's graduating class has been ill served by their elders. They enter a bad job market, the hangover from decades of excessive borrowing. They inherit a ruinous federal debt.
More important, their lives have been perversely structured. This year's graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.
Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured. Most of them will not quickly get married, buy a home and have kids, as previous generations did. Instead, they will confront amazingly diverse job markets, social landscapes and lifestyle niches. Most will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role.
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As educators, one of our defining beliefs is the principle that we do not use the students entrusted in our care as a vehicle for promoting and accomplishing our political agendas. We hold to this core value even when the political agendas we are pursuing involves causes that will better the lives of those young people, such as full funding for day care centers and schools. When communities and families send their young to us to be educated, they trust that we will exercise the authority given to us as teachers responsibly: we do not manipulate young people into political action they do not fully understand, but educate them into the skills and knowledge of democratic citizenship, in order that one day they will be prepared to make and act on their own informed choices of political action.So when Eva Moskowitz and her Harlem Success Academies turned out students and parents to support the closing of district schools at the February meetings of the Panel for Educational Policy, many of us present were shocked at the way in which 5 year old and 6 year old children were sent to the microphones to speak words they clearly did not understand, put into their mouths by adults who called themselves educators, even as they ignored our most fundamental professional ethics. But if we were paying attention, we would have seen that this crass political exploitation of children is actually a consistent behavior of Moskowitz and Harlem Success.
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A conservative society and ignorance are behind an alarming number of cases of newborn babies being killed by young Hong Kong mothersIt's a familiar story told too many times, and it has a tragic end.
An unmarried girl secretly gives birth. She is alone; one helpless child burdened with another. In this tale, it is the innocent who perishes, at the hands of the ignorant - a teenage mother.
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Here's a great analysis of the new Chicago school facilities law from Jackie Leavy, retired executive director of the late lamented Neighborhood Capital Budget Group.Jackie and I were members of Paul Vallas's Blue Ribbon Capital Development Panel, which Vallas dissolved around or about 1997 after Jackie and I (mostly Jackie) began to ask too many questions and actually try to get the group to do what this new law will now force CPS to do.
Here's what Jackie says today:
Colleagues, Parent and Community Leaders:
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As the mother of a special needs child and as someone who works professionally with individuals with disabilities, I support Assembly Bill 110, the Special Needs Scholarship Act. The bill would allow the small group of parents whose children's needs cannot be met by their school district to pursue an appropriate education for their children, just as any parent would want to do.It is a sad fact that some school districts across this state fail to provide special needs students with the education they require due to lack of funding/resources, specialized training and sometimes willingness. In these few cases, the scholarships would help move these children into a program that meets their needs and prepares them for success.
Our family lives in the Racine Unified School District. We removed our son from the district when he was 3 due to inappropriate, undocumented, unapproved and sustained restraint by teachers at his school. (In 2007, the Journal Sentinel reported on the case, with the state Department of Public Instruction echoing concerns about the school's use of restraint. Following an investigation, the DPI determined that teachers in the district had improperly used restraint.)
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Tara Parker-Pope:School bullies and children who are disruptive in class are twice as likely to show signs of sleep problems compared with well-behaved children, new research shows.The findings, based on data collected from 341 Michigan elementary school children, suggests a novel approaching to solving school bullying. Currently, most efforts to curb bullying have focused on protecting victims as well as discipline and legal actions against the bullies. The new data suggests that the problem may be better addressed, at least in part, at the source, by paying attention to some of the unique health issues associated with aggressive behavior.
The University of Michigan study, which was published in the journal Sleep Medicine, collected data from parents on each child's sleep habits and asked both parents and teachers to assess behavioral concerns. Among the 341 children studied, about a third were identified by parents or teachers as having problems with disruptive behavior or bullying.
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Divorce is a drag on the academic and emotional development of young children, but only once the breakup is under way, according to a study of elementary school students and their families.
"Children of divorce experience setbacks in math test scores and show problems with interpersonal skills and internalizing behavior during the divorce period," says Hyun Sik Kim, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "They are more prone to feelings of anxiety, loneliness, low self-esteem and sadness."
Kim's work, published in the June issue of American Sociological Review, makes use of data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study describing more than 3,500 U.S. elementary school students who entered kindergarten in 1998. The study, which also made subjects of parents while checking in periodically on the children, gave Kim the opportunity to track the families through divorce -- as well as through periods before and after the divorce.
While the children fell behind their peers in math and certain psychological measures during the period that included the divorce, Kim was surprised by to see those students showing no issues in the time period preceding the divorce.
"I expected that there would be conflict between the parents leading up to their divorce, and that that would be troublesome for their child," Kim says. "But I failed to find a significant effect in the pre-divorce period."
The results add nuance to the long-held assumption that divorce is harmful to children all the way through the process.
"There is also some thinking that children are resilient, and that they would learn how to cope with the situation at some point," Kim says.
To a certain extent the detrimental effect of the divorce period fades, but not to the point that Kim would call it resiliency.
"After the divorce, students return to the same growth rate as their counterparts," he says. "But they remain behind their peers from intact families."
Why divorce would be an anchor on elementary school students is not hard to figure. Stressful new experiences associated with the divorce process include a confusingly adversarial relationship between mom and dad, shuttling between homes, the emotional effect the breakup has on parents and more.
But why there wouldn't be a corresponding effect on children before parents decide to divorce is a trickier question.
"The results here support the idea that not all divorces are plagued by harmful parental conflict in the pre-divorce period," Kim says.
Once the effects of a divorce do begin to erode a child's progress, they do their work on more vulnerable developing skills. Mathematics, in which new concepts often build on recently learned material, is seen as more susceptible to external issues than reading -- a subject in which children of divorce showed no detrimental effects.
Similarly, children of divorce maintain their more robust positive externalizing behaviors -- making friends, resolving conflict without fighting and resisting disruption of quiet times -- while losing their grip on more fragile internal emotional aspects.
The study may be useful to parents and educators, though Kim expected that differing school philosophies and variations from child to child may inform different interpretations.
"If a teacher is aware of a student experiencing a divorce situation, it may be in the student's interest that the teachers intervene by adjusting as early as possible to prevent that student from falling behind," Kim says. "Because if that student falls behind, he or she is unlikely to recover even after the divorce."
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Parents in Fairfax County have proved themselves one of the largest and most powerful forces for innovation in American education. But they have taken a wrong turn in their effort to save the three-track system--basic, honors and AP/IB-- in the county's high schools.Many Fairfax parents actively oppose the elimination of honors courses in upper high school grades. They don't want to leave their children with the choice of just the basic course or the college level Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate version. "Let's keep choices on the table," West Potomac High School parent Kate Van Dyck told me.
They can win this fight and keep the honors courses, but it will take some courage and imagination. Instead of insisting on the old three tracks, tell the schools to keep the honors option and eliminate the basic course.
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Some of New Hampshire's college graduates are questioning the value of their education while they struggle to find jobs in their fields of study and attempt to become independent adults.But while the job market is still tough, a recent study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers says it isn't quite as bad as it was last year and that this year's graduating class is more likely to have a job offer in hand.
That, however, is not the case for Nate Rowe, who graduated this month from Keene State College with a degree in environmental studies. Rowe has sent out about 75 job applications.
"Most people say that I don't have the experience needed. The problem is that I can't get any experience without first getting a job," said the New Durham resident who has moved back in with his parents until he is able to get a steady paycheck.
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Jeff Kirsch knows what it's like to stand on stage at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and for the last few years he has helped teens from Wisconsin, Minnesota and Colorado make it there.This year, Kirsch, director of the Spanish and Portuguese Independent Learning program in the UW-Madison division of continuing studies, is coaching two students and is spending this week in Washington, D.C., cheering them on.
In addition to coaching Waunakee's Parker Dietry this spring, Kirsch has spent about six months tutoring David Phan, a third-time contestant in the national bee from Boulder, Colo.
"Most spellers do have a parent who is actively helping them, but most don't have a parent who is a former spelling champion who knows multiple languages," said Kirsch, who knows six languages and can teach spelling patterns and exceptions in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, German and Latin.
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Madalyn Richmond seems to have little time for competitive spelling.First, there is school. Then there are sports: volleyball, basketball, softball and track. And then there is music: piano, saxophone and choir.
But winning a classroom spelling bee when she was in fifth grade "really inspired me, and I studied a whole lot that year," Maddie, 13, said last week.
She went on to win the Williams County, Ohio, bee in 2009 and finished eighth in The Journal Gazette Regional Spelling Bee. Maddie repeated as county winner as a sixth-grader and finished fifth in the regional bee in 2010.
She captured her third straight county bee this year and won the 17-county regional bee, which is presented by Touchstone Energy Cooperatives and IPFW.
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Let me say this about thatDaughter comes home from school in the usual mood, with a smile and offhand assurances that school was fine and everything's fine and so on and so forth, but: for moment I catch her staring into the Void, a shadow on her features, and it's time for the parental probe: what's the matter? Oh nothing. C'mon. Something's the matter. You know I'll ask until I get it. Nothing's the matter. i can tell. Nothing - well, there was this one thing.
And so it transpired that she did not get the score in Technology class she thought she deserved, at least relative to the other Powerpoints the kids had done. They had do a PP on an animal. As far as she could tell she had the same amount of content, and applied transitions to the bullet points, which no one else did. Then she said that the kids who got higher marks used all kinds of transitions between the slides, and she only used a fade, so maybe that was it, but that was STUPID.
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Foundation for Excellence in Education, via a Kate Walsh email:
Today, the following members of Chiefs for Change, Janet Barresi, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Information; Tony Bennett, Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction; Steve Bowen, Maine Commissioner of Education; Chris Cerf, New Jersey Commissioner of Education; Deborah A. Gist, Rhode Island Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education; Kevin Huffman, Tennessee Commissioner of Education; Eric Smith, Florida Commissioner of Education; and Hanna Skandera, New Mexico Public Education Department Secretary-Designate, released a statement supporting the National Council on Teacher Quality's colleges of education review.Related: Georgia, Wisconsin Education Schools Back Out of NCTQ Review"Great teachers make great students. Preparing teachers with the knowledge and skills to be effective educators is paramount to improving student achievement. Ultimately, colleges of education should be reviewed the same way we propose evaluating teachers - based on student learning."
"Until that data becomes available in every state, Chiefs for Change supports the efforts of the National Council on Teacher Quality to gather research-based data and information about the nation's colleges of education. This research can provide a valuable tool for improving the quality of education for educators."
Public higher education institutions in Wisconsin and Georgia--and possibly as many as five other states--will not participate voluntarily in a review of education schools now being conducted by the National Council for Teacher Quality and U.S. News and World Report, according to recent correspondence between state consortia and the two groups.When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?:In response, NCTQ and U.S. News are moving forward with plans to obtain the information from these institutions through open-records requests.
In letters to the two organizations, the president of the University of Wisconsin system and the chancellor of Georgia's board of regents said their public institutions would opt out of the review, citing a lack of transparency and questionable methodology, among other concerns.
Formally announced in January, the review will rate education schools on up to 18 standards, basing the decisions primarily on examinations of course syllabuses and student-teaching manuals.
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A revolutionary skin patch that may cure thousands of deadly peanut allergy has been developed by paediatricans.Researchers believe it presents one of the best possible ways of finding an effective treatment for a life threatening reaction to peanuts.
Developed by two leading paediatricians the device releases minute doses of peanut oil under the skin.
The aim is to educate the body so it doesnt over-react to peanut exposure.
Human safety trials have started in Europe and the United States and it is hoped that the patch could become become available within 3-4 years.
One of its two French inventors, Dr Pierre-Henri Benhamou, said: We envisage that the patch would be worn daily for several years and would slowly reduce the severity of accidental exposure to peanut.
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Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
What I am suggesting is that we in uniform do not have the luxury anymore of assuming that our fellow citizens understand it the same way. Our work is appreciated. Of that, I am certain. There isn't a town or a city I visit where people do not convey to me their great pride in what we do. Even those who do not support the wars support the troops.But I fear they do not know us. I fear they do not comprehend the full weight of the burden we carry or the price we pay when we return from battle. This is important, because a people uninformed about what they are asking the military to endure is a people inevitably unable to fully grasp the scope of the responsibilities our Constitution levies upon them. Were we more representative of the population, were more American families touched by military service, like that of the Hidalgos or the Huntoon families, perhaps a more advantageous familiarity would ensue. But we are a small force, rightly volunteers, and less than 1 percent of the population, scattered about the country due to base closings, and frequent and lengthy deployments.
We're also fairly insular, speaking our own language of sorts, living within our own unique culture, isolating ourselves either out of fear or from, perhaps, even our own pride. The American people can therefore be forgiven for not possessing an intimate knowledge of our needs or of our deeds. We haven't exactly made it easy for them. And we have been a little busy. But that doesn't excuse us from making the effort. That doesn't excuse us from our own constitutional responsibilities as citizens and soldiers to promote the general welfare, in addition to providing for the common defense. We must help them understand our fellow citizens who so desperately want to help us.
As the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar Bradley once said: "Battles are won by the infantry, the armor, the artillery and air teams, by soldiers living in the rains and huddling in the snow. But wars are won by the great strength of a nation, the soldier and the civilian working together."
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Sleep deprivation can make it hard to concentrate. A possible reason is that neurons in different regions of the brain seem to go "off line," or shut off for brief periods, during forced periods of wakefulness, according to a study of rats published in Nature. U.S. and Italian researchers kept laboratory rats awake for four hours past their normal sleep time by stimulating them with new objects. EEG (electroencephalogram) readings, which test the brain's electrical activity, were typical of an awake state and the rats moved about freely with their eyes open. However, electrodes implanted in the rat brains showed that some neurons went off line briefly in seemingly wide-awake animals while other neurons remained on. Neuronal off periods increased with prolonged sleep deprivation, impairing the rats' performance in the routine task of reaching for a sugar pellet. Researchers said these off periods during wakefulness aren't well understood but they may be a means of conserving energy or part of a restorative process.Caveat: It's not clear if the periods of neuronal off-time reflect the capacity of neurons to exist in two states, a phenomenon known as bistability, researchers said.
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Most parents dream of seeing their kids graduate from a good college. The assumption is that the vaunted degree will guarantee a successful career, the closest thing to being financially stable, and ultimately, a happy, fulfilling life.But a number of authors and high-profile businesspeople and entrepreneurs are debunking the notion that college is the best solution. They're questioning whether paying tens of thousands of dollars and investing four or five years in an institution should be the default for young people when so many more options exist. With free, high-quality education available to anyone, is college necessary? These folks say no.
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Gillian Spolarich's college search played out like a romantic triangle. She was set on American University. But the College of Charleston was set on her. The Southern suitor sweetened its admission offer with a pledge of more than $10,000 in merit aid.In the end, the high school senior from Silver Spring took the better offer from the second-choice school in South Carolina, placing price before prestige.
It is becoming a common scenario post-recession: Affluent applicants, shocked by college sticker prices and leery of debt, are choosing a school not because it is the first choice but because it is the best deal. Students are using their academic credentials to leverage generous merit awards from second- or third-choice schools looking to boost their own academic profiles. Colleges are responding with record sums of merit aid, transforming the admissions process into a polite bidding war.
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Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women's progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn't the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way-- and its vast cultural consequences.Related: The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers.In the 1970s the biologist Ronald Ericsson came up with a way to separate sperm carrying the male-producing Y chromosome from those carrying the X. He sent the two kinds of sperm swimming down a glass tube through ever-thicker albumin barriers. The sperm with the X chromosome had a larger head and a longer tail, and so, he figured, they would get bogged down in the viscous liquid. The sperm with the Y chromosome were leaner and faster and could swim down to the bottom of the tube more efficiently. Ericsson had grown up on a ranch in South Dakota, where he'd developed an Old West, cowboy swagger. The process, he said, was like "cutting out cattle at the gate." The cattle left flailing behind the gate were of course the X's, which seemed to please him. He would sometimes demonstrate the process using cartilage from a bull's penis as a pointer.
In the late 1970s, Ericsson leased the method to clinics around the U.S., calling it the first scientifically proven method for choosing the sex of a child. Instead of a lab coat, he wore cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, and doled out his version of cowboy poetry. (People magazine once suggested a TV miniseries based on his life called Cowboy in the Lab.) The right prescription for life, he would say, was "breakfast at five-thirty, on the saddle by six, no room for Mr. Limp Wrist." In 1979, he loaned out his ranch as the backdrop for the iconic "Marlboro Country" ads because he believed in the campaign's central image--"a guy riding on his horse along the river, no bureaucrats, no lawyers," he recalled when I spoke to him this spring. "He's the boss." (The photographers took some 6,500 pictures, a pictorial record of the frontier that Ericsson still takes great pride in.)
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When Christine Lagarde launched her bid to be the new head of the IMF last week she declared that she would bring to the job all her "experience as a lawyer, a minister, a manager and a woman".The first three strands of her experience are self-explanatory - and formidable. But what did Ms Lagarde mean by the fourth? What exactly is her experience as a woman? And how does it make her a better candidate for a job that involves flying round the world rescuing countries that are going down the financial plughole?
The most obvious thing that sorts out a woman's experience from a man's is that women bear children. On two occasions, Ms Lagarde has spent the best part of a year with a growing lump in her abdomen, and then endured the tricky business of getting it out. For most women this is a very big deal, though it's not obvious how such an experience sets anyone up for running the IMF.
As children grow up, however, a mother (or, in truth, a father) can find herself doling out pocket money. Human nature being what it is, this often gets blown instantly on sweets, leaving nothing to spend on, say, a sibling's birthday present. The mother then faces the tricky decision of whether to bail the child out, and what conditions to impose on any loan extended. I can see that dealing with such dilemmas could be relevant to a future head of the IMF, the only difference being one of degree: rather more countries requiring rather larger sums.
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Stacie Bumgarner is a research scientist in the Biology Department at MIT. She leads school outreach efforts for the Office of Educational Innovation & Technology. She is working with JFY Networks to expand the use of two sophisticated science simulations to high school students in Boston:
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ew Jersey Senate Republicans have been asked to consider taking a unified position on public education, including removing the state Supreme Court from school-funding decisions and granting the Legislature the power to determine what it means to provide a "thorough and efficient" education in public schools.A Republican strategy memo laid out Friday in an e-mail from Senate Minority Leader Tom Kean Jr. to his caucus asked fellow GOP senators for feedback on a three-pronged education plan after Tuesday's Supreme Court order requiring the state to invest $500 million more in 31 poor school districts.
The plan includes supporting a constitutional amendment that would end judicial involvement in school-funding decisions and give the state wiggle room to reduce funding in lean budget years. The resolution, sponsored by Sen. Steven Oroho (R., Sussex) and cosponsored by the other 15 members of the GOP caucus, was introduced in January but hasn't gained traction. It would require voter approval.
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If you are a successful actor, businessman or novelist, you are likely to be famous. If you are a successful school, forget about it. That's why most people have never heard of the two schools at the top of this year's Washington Post High School Challenge rankings of American high schools.Two Dallas public magnet schools -- the School of Science & Engineering and the Gifted & Talented Magnet -- are ranked first and second on the national list, based on participation rates on college-level tests. They share a building with four other small magnets near the middle of the city. They have been at or near the top of the list for several years, but their principals and teachers are rarely if ever seen on national news.
That is probably a good thing. Celebrity gets in the way of serious work. Engineering & Science, Talented & Gifted and the rest of the 1,910 high schools (including more than 140 in the Washington area) recognized on the list have staffs dedicated to raising students to new levels of achievement. At Science & Engineering, 63 percent of students come from families poor enough to qualify for federal lunch subsidies. At Talented & Gifted, the percentage is 33 percent. Most magnets that admit students based on academic credentials have few kids from low-income families, but these two schools work hard to convince disadvantaged students that they will thrive taking Advanced Placement courses as early as ninth grade. Those educators fulfill that promise.
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In December 2009, a rejection letter from Columbia University found its way to the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. It was addressed to Lu Jingyu, a top student and member of her school's student government. As she read the disheartening words, Ms. Lu immediately began to panic. Where had she gone wrong? How could she fix this?For answers, she turned to ThinkTank Learning, a college admission consulting company from California that had recently opened an office in Shenzhen, which is next door to Hong Kong.
"I wanted American professionals to look at my application and shed some new light on how I could make it better," she said.
The price was steep: 100,000 renminbi, or $15,000. But it came with a 100 percent money-back guarantee -- if Ms. Lu was rejected from the nine selective U.S. universities to which she applied, her family would get a full refund.
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Many popular students approach graduation day with bittersweet nostalgia: excitement for the future is tempered by fear of lost status. But as cap-and-gown season nears, let's also stop to consider the outcasts, students for whom finishing high school feels like liberation from a state-imposed sentence.Alexandra Robbins is the author of "The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School."In seven years of reporting from American middle and high schools, I've seen repeatedly that the differences that cause a student to be excluded in high school are often the same traits or skills that will serve him or her well after graduation.
Examples abound: Taylor Swift's classmates left the lunch table as soon as she sat down because they disdained her taste for country music. Last year, the Grammy winner was the nation's top-selling recording artist.
Students mocked Tim Gunn's love of making things; now he is a fashion icon with the recognizable catchphrase "Make it work."
J.K. Rowling, author of the bestselling "Harry Potter" series, has described herself as a bullied child "who lived mostly in books and daydreams." It's no wonder she went on to write books populated with kids she describes as "outcasts and comfortable with being so."
For many, says Sacred Heart University psychology professor Kathryn LaFontana, high school is the "first foray into the adult world where [kids] have to think about their own status." And for teenagers, says LaFontana, who studies adolescent peer relationships and social status, "the worst thing in the world is to be different from other people; that's what makes someone unpopular."
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I could not be more honored than to be awarded this recognition from Teachers College, one of the places of all those I know in the world that holds the tightest grip on my heart and best represents my values and beliefs. Thank you for this recognition--and, more important, thank you, Teachers College faculty, trustees, students and graduates, for who and what you are.My first real glimpse of what Teachers College is and does occurred not in New York City but in a school in Washington, DC, where one of my children had transferred into a first grade classroom to avoid the truly terrible teaching that was literally undermining her health in another school. In her new school, Elena's teacher, Miss Leslie, had created a wonderland of stimulating opportunities for learning: children experimenting and investigating in the classroom and the community, designing and conducting projects, writing and publishing their own little stories (one that my daughter wrote after the birth of her little brother was entitled "Send Him Back"). This teacher--who was in her very first year of practice--not only had created a classroom that any mother would want to send her child to, but she also had the skillful eye and knowledge base to figure out within weeks that Elena was severely dyslexic, to teach her to read without her ever being labeled or stigmatized, and to instill in my daughter a lifelong love of books and learning that has led to her being a literacy teacher working with special needs students today.
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We did not have room for everything I wanted to include in the big package of lists and stories that make up the new Challenge Index rankings of America's high schools. I moved the list this year from Newsweek--where we often called it "America's Best High Schools"-- to washingtonpost.com, where its new title is "The High School Challenge."My editors were right not to jam in too much material. It is not always easy to find the features that are there. Please consider this a short guide to finding the inside stuff that many readers of this blog crave and that will give them more ammo to fire at me. I also provide below the Catching Up list of local schools with low Advanced Placement passing rates, something my editors and I agreed would work better on my blog.
Use this link to get to the main ranked lists, one for national and one for the Washington area. This link will take you to the Public Elites list, the schools that did not make the main lists because they were too selective. Here is the link to the full unabridged Frequently Asked Questions, which I made into a blog post. And here is the national Catching-up list.
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AS DOES much else in the universe, education moves in cycles. The 1960s and 1970s saw a swell of interest in teaching styles that were less authoritarian and hierarchical than the traditional watching of a teacher scribbling on a blackboard. Today, tastes have swung back, and it is fashionable to denigrate those alternatives as so much hippy nonsense.But evidence trumps fashion--at least, it ought to. And a paper just published in Science by Louis Deslauriers and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia suggests that at least one of the newfangled styles is indeed superior to the traditional chalk-and-talk approach.
Dr Deslauriers's lab rats were a group of 850 undergraduate engineering students taking a compulsory physics course. The students were split into groups at the start of their course, and for the first 11 weeks all went to traditionally run lectures given by well-regarded and experienced teachers. In the 12th week, one of the groups was switched to a style of teaching known as deliberate practice, which inverts the traditional university model. Class time is spent on problem-solving, discussion and group work, while the absorption of facts and formulae is left for homework. Students were given reading assignments before classes. Once in the classroom they spent their time in small groups, discussing specific problems, with the teacher roaming between groups to offer advice and respond to questions.
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With few exceptions, Americans spend more on public education than anyone else in the world, but we get some of the worst results. The reason is that most of our public education systems do not properly teach students what they need to know.That's it. There is no magic. And the federal takeovers, the jazzy new technology, Bill Gates' money, the data-gathering, reform, transformation, national initiatives, removal of teacher seniority, blaming of parents, hand-wringing in the media, and budget shifting won't change that simple fact.
In all of the local, state and federal plans for reforming and transforming public education, I see the bureaucracy growing, the taxpayer bill exploding, the people's voice being eliminated, good teachers being threatened with firing or public humiliation, and students not being taught what they need to know.
A May 25 Wall Street Journal article says some schools now charge parents fees for basic academics, as well as for extracurricular activities, graded electives and advanced classes. Those are private-school fees for a public-school education, and that's just wrong.
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English should be taught in Hong Kong by multilingual teachers, not native English speakers, according to a Hong Kong education professor who is organising an international conference on English as a lingua franca, being held in the city."It's a revolutionary shift that we're arguing for, and it's that the multilingual way becomes the linguistic model for teaching kids English here, not that of a native English speaker," says Andy Kirkpatrick, chair professor of English as a professional language at the Hong Kong Institute of Education.
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A university degree in China used to be a ticket to instant success in a country where tertiary education was rare and valued. No longer. Likemany things in China, from exporting shoes to building high-speed trains, there has been a Great Leap Forward in advanced education that leads to doubts about its quality and value in real life.
More than seven million Chinese students are expected to graduate from the country's universities this summer, an astonishing five-fold increase over the number 10 years ago.China has overtaken the United States as the biggest conferrer of PhDs in the world, with 50,000 new ones in 2009, compared to 10,000 just 10 years earlier. In addition, a total of 1.27 million Chinese are studying abroad, according to the Ministry of Education, the largest number of any country worldwide. Last year alone, 285,000 Chinese went abroad to study, 24 per cent more than in 2009. Most popular is the US, followed by Australia, Japan, Britain, South Korea, Canada and Singapore.
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Joel Knudson, Larisa Shambaugh & Jennifer O'Day
Educators have long grappled with the challenge presented by chronically underperforming schools. Environments that consistently fail to prepare students for higher levels of education threaten opportunities for high school graduation, postsecondary education, and career success. The U.S. Department of Education reinforced the urgency of reversing sustained poor performance in early 2009 when it identified intensive supports and effective interventions in our lowest-achieving schools as one of its four pillars of education reform. However, federal and state policies have often situated the cause--and thus the remedies--for persistent low performance at the school level. This brief uses the experience of eight California school districts--all members of the California Collaborative on District Reform--to suggest a more systemic approach to school turnaround.We explore the district perspective on school turnaround by describing several broad themes that emerged across the eight districts in the California Collaborative on District Reform. We also profile three of these districts to illustrate specific strategies that can create a coherent district-wide approach to turnaround. Building on these district perspectives, we explore considerations for turnaround efforts in the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).
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THROUGHOUT history, twins have provoked mixed feelings. Sometimes they were seen as a curse--an unwanted burden on a family's resources. Sometimes they were viewed as a blessing, or even as a sign of their father's superior virility. But if Shannen Robson and Ken Smith, of the University of Utah, are right, twins have more to do with their mother's sturdy constitution than their father's sexual power.At first blush, this sounds an odd idea. After all, bearing and raising twins is taxing, both for the mother and for the children. Any gains from having more than one offspring at a time might be expected to be outweighed by costs like higher infant and maternal mortality rates. On this view, twins are probably an accidental by-product of a natural insurance policy against the risk of losing an embryo early in gestation. That would explain why many more twins are conceived than born, and why those born are so rare (though more common these days, with the rise of IVF). They account for between six and 40 live births per 1,000, depending on where the mother lives.
Dr Robson and Dr Smith, however, think that this account has got things the wrong way round. Although all women face a trade-off between the resources their bodies allocate to reproduction and those reserved for the maintenance of health, robust women can afford more of both than frail ones. And what surer way to signal robustness than by bearing more than one child at a time? In other words, the two researchers conjectured, the mothers of twins will not only display greater overall reproductive success, they will also be healthier than those who give birth only to singletons.
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Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being. By Martin Seligman. Free Press; 368 pages; $26. Nicholas Brealey PublishingThe idea that it is the business of governments to cheer up their citizens has moved in recent years to centre-stage. Academics interested in measures of GDH (gross domestic happiness) were once forced to turn to the esoteric example of Bhutan. Now Britain's Conservative-led government is compiling a national happiness index, and Nicolas Sarkozy, France's president, wants to replace the traditional GDP count with a measure that takes in subjective happiness levels and environmental sustainability.
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John F. Witte and Patrick J. Wolf:
The past few weeks have seen a lively debate surrounding the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and Gov. Scott Walker's various proposals to expand it. It is time for researchers to weigh in.For the past five years, as mandated by state law, we have led a national team in a comprehensive evaluation of the choice program. Our study has applied social science research methods to carefully matched sets of students in the choice program and in Milwaukee Public Schools. Whenever possible, we have used measures that are applied consistently in the public- and private-school sectors, generating true apples-to-apples comparisons.
This is what we have learned:
Competitive pressure from the voucher program has produced modest achievement gains in MPS.
The three-year achievement gains of choice students have been comparable to those of our matched sample of MPS students. The choice students are not showing achievement benefits beyond those of the students left behind in MPS.
High school students in the choice program both graduate and enroll in four-year colleges at a higher rate than do similar students in MPS. Being in the choice program in ninth grade increases by four to seven percentage points a student's prospects of both graduating from high school and enrolling in college. Students who remain in the choice program for their entire four years of high school graduate at a rate of 94%, compared with 75% for similar MPS students.
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via a kind reader's email:
Notice of Commission Meeting
Governor's Read to Lead Task Force
Governor Scott Walker, Chair
Superintendent Tony Evers, Vice-Chair
Members: Mara Brown, Kathy Champeau, Steve Dykstra, Michele Erikson, Representative Jason Fields, Marcia Henry, Representative Steve Kestell, Rachel Lander, Senator Luther Olsen, Tony Pedriana, Linda Pils, and Mary Read.Guests: Professors from UW colleges of education
Tuesday, May 31, 2011 1:00pm
Office of the Governor, Governor's Conference Room 115 East State Capitol Madison, WI 53702
Welcome and opening remarks by Governor Walker and Superintendent Evers.
Introductions from task force members and guest members representing UW colleges of education.
A discussion of teacher training and professional development including current practices and ways to improve.
Short break.
A discussion of reading interventions including current practices and ways to improve.
A discussion of future topics and future meeting dates.
Adjournment.
Governor Scott Walker
Chair
Individuals needing assistance, pursuant to the Americans with Disabilities Act, should contact the Governor's office at (608) 266-1212, 24 hours before this meeting to make necessary arrangements.
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This paper is the answer to a question: What would the education policies and practices of the United States be if they were based on the policies and practices of the countries that now lead the world in student performance? It is adapted from the last two chapters of a book to be published in September 2011 by Harvard Education Press. Other chapters in that book describe the specific strategies pursued by Canada (focusing on Ontario), China (focusing on Shanghai), Finland, Japan and Singapore, all of which are far ahead of the United States. The research on these countries was performed by a team assembled by the National Center on Education and the Economy, at the request of the OECD.Well worth reading. I thought about this topic - benchmarking student progress via the oft-criticized WKCE during this past week's Madison School District Strategic Planning Update. I'll have more on that next week.A century ago, the United States was among the most eager benchmarkers in the world. We took the best ideas in steelmaking, industrial chemicals and many other fields from England and Germany and others and put them to work here on a scale that Europe could not match. At the same time, we were borrowing the best ideas in education, mainly from the Germans and the Scots. It was the period of the most rapid growth our economy had ever seen and it was the time in which we designed the education system that we still have today. It is fair to say that, in many important ways, we owe the current shape of our education system to industrial benchmarking.
But, after World War II, the United States appeared to reign supreme in both the industrial and education arenas and we evidently came to the conclusion that we had little to learn from anyone. As the years went by, one by one, country after country caught up to and then surpassed us in several industries and more or less across the board in precollege education. And still we slept.
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Janie Scull, Amber M. Winkler, Ph.D.:
In this new Fordham Institute paper, analysts examine public data and find that the national proportion of students with disabilities peaked in 2004-05 and has been declining since. This overall trend masks interesting variations; for example, proportions of students with specific learning disabilities, mental retardation, and emotional disturbances have declined, while the proportions of students with autism, developmental delays, and other health impairments have increased notably. Meanwhile, at the state level, Rhode Island, New York, and Massachusetts have the highest rates of disability identification, while Texas, Idaho, and Colorado have the lowest. The ratio of special-education teachers and paraprofessionals to special-education students also varies widely from state to state--so much so that our analysts question the accuracy of the data reported by states to the federal government.
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In a South American jungle, far from traffic circles, city squares and the Pentagon, beats the heart of geometry.Villagers belonging to an Amazonian group called the Mundurucú intuitively grasp abstract geometric principles despite having no formal math education, say psychologist Véronique Izard of Université Paris Descartes and her colleagues.
Mundurucú adults and 7- to 13-year-olds demonstrate as firm an understanding of the properties of points, lines and surfaces as adults and school-age children in the United States and France, Izard's team reports online May 23 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
U.S. children between ages 5 and 7 partially understand geometric space, but not to the same extent as older children and adults, the researchers find.
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Erin Ferrantino rarely has to consult the birthday chart in her kindergarten classroom to pick out the Octobers, Novembers and Decembers. This year, there was the girl who broke down in tears after an hour's work, and the boy who held a pencil with his fist rather than his fingers.Those two, along with another of Ms. Ferrantino's pupils who were 4 when school started, will be repeating kindergarten next year.
"They struggled because they're not developmentally ready," said Ms. Ferrantino, 26, who teaches in Hartford. "It is such a long day and so draining, they have a hard time holding it together."
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In three decades as a news reporter, I've seen hundreds of bullet-riddled bodies in Haiti and in the Middle East, and I've had friends and colleagues killed in both of those places. I lost my father to cancer.But no death transformed me like the death last August of Clyde E. Murphy, my buddy from the Class of '70, my brother in Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, the best man at my wedding as I was at his. Clyde was the confidant with whom I shared deeply held feelings about life and death and--perhaps most of all--about being a black man in America.
Then, six months later, as I was making peace with the sudden loss of Clyde to a pulmonary embolism, word came that yet another brother who'd pledged Alpha with us, Ron Norwood '70, had succumbed to cancer. A few weeks after that we learned that Jeff Palmer '70, another black classmate, had passed, also from cancer.
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It was sheer luck that thugs showed up at Yang Libing's house while he was away. Mr. Yang, if you've had a chance to watch our report (below), is the father whose baby daughter was forcefully taken away from him by corrupt officials looking to profit by handing children over to adoption agencies. He was running late that morning, and what ended up happening was a rather awkward uncertainty as our team and these thugs looked at each other. They knew we were from Al Jazeera. I don't know how they knew that. They had been driving around searching specifically for us. They stood there and sized us up. In the end, the men sauntered away, ambivalent about the situation themselves. Had Mr. Yang been there, I imagine they would have stayed, their very presence meant to unnerve the person we hoped to interview. I must say we are often saved by the fact that many of the "Black Audi" types don't really understand how television newsgathering is conducted. Perhaps they believed we would also saunter off after a time, given the absence of Mr. Yang. We did not walk away, of course, but waited until he returned to speak to him.
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"WE'RE excited to be working with them, and we hope they will help young people everywhere realise that you don't need credentials to launch a company that disrupts the status quo," declared the Thiel Foundation on May 25th as it announced its first batch of "20 Under 20" fellows.The lucky winners were all under 20 when they applied. There are actually 24 fellows, rather than 20, and each will receive $100,000 over two years, along with mentorship from a network of entrepreneurs and innovators selected by the initiative's sponsor, Peter Thiel (pictured above). The only condition set by Mr Thiel, who made his billions first by co-founding PayPal then investing early in Facebook, is that they drop out of college (or high school) to focus full-time on building a business. A few of the new fellows appear to have dropped out--or, as the press release quaintly puts it, "stopped out"--before they were chosen, to launch a start-up or even to climb mountains.
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When the government gathers or analyzes personal information, many people say they're not worried. "I've got nothing to hide," they declare. "Only if you're doing something wrong should you worry, and then you don't deserve to keep it private."The nothing-to-hide argument pervades discussions about privacy. The data-security expert Bruce Schneier calls it the "most common retort against privacy advocates." The legal scholar Geoffrey Stone refers to it as an "all-too-common refrain." In its most compelling form, it is an argument that the privacy interest is generally minimal, thus making the contest with security concerns a foreordained victory for security.
The nothing-to-hide argument is everywhere. In Britain, for example, the government has installed millions of public-surveillance cameras in cities and towns, which are watched by officials via closed-circuit television. In a campaign slogan for the program, the government declares: "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear." Variations of nothing-to-hide arguments frequently appear in blogs, letters to the editor, television news interviews, and other forums. One blogger in the United States, in reference to profiling people for national-security purposes, declares: "I don't mind people wanting to find out things about me, I've got nothing to hide! Which is why I support [the government's] efforts to find terrorists by monitoring our phone calls!"
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The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) produced a comprehensive study of law schools in the late 1950s, sending detailed surveys to 129 law schools, with a 90% response rate. Here are a few interesting tidbits about the cost of attending law school:Median annual tuition and fees at private law schools was $475 (range $50-$1050); adjusted for inflation, that's $3,419 in 2011 dollars. The median for public law schools was $204 (range $50 - $692), or $1,550 in 2011 dollars. [For comparison, in 2009 the private law school median was $36,000; the public (resident) median was $16,546.]
The report expressed concern about cost: "The cost of attending law school at least doubled in the [past] 16 years..., raising the question whether able, but impecunious, students are being directed away from law study."
14% of students received scholarship aid; just over half of this aid was for "scholastic performance" (merit scholarships to attract top students) and the remainder for "economic need."
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Karen Dombi was thrilled when her three oldest children were picked for student government this year--not because she envisioned careers in politics, but because it was one of the few programs at their public high school that didn't charge kids to participate.Budget shortfalls have prompted Medina Senior High to impose fees on students who enroll in many academic classes and extracurricular activities. The Dombis had to pay to register their children for basic courses such as Spanish I and Earth Sciences, to get them into graded electives such as band, and to allow them to run cross-country and track. The family's total tab for a year of public education: $4,446.50.
"I'm wondering, am I going to be paying for my parking spot at the school? Because you're making me pay for just about everything else," says Ms. Dombi, a parent in this middle-class community in northern Ohio.
Public schools across the country, struggling with cuts in state funding, rising personnel costs and lower tax revenues, are shifting costs to students and their parents by imposing or boosting fees for everything from enrolling in honors English to riding the bus.
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The last four presidents of the United States each attended a highly selective college. All nine Supreme Court justices did, too, as did the chief executives of General Electric (Dartmouth), Goldman Sachs (Harvard), Wal-Mart (Georgia Tech), Exxon Mobil (Texas) and Google (Michigan).Like it or not, these colleges have outsize influence on American society. So their admissions policies don't matter just to high school seniors; they're a matter of national interest.
More than seven years ago, a 44-year-old political scientist named Anthony Marx became the president of Amherst College, in western Massachusetts, and set out to change its admissions policies. Mr. Marx argued that elite colleges were neither as good nor as meritocratic as they could be, because they mostly overlooked lower-income students.
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Too many young children in Michigan aren't getting the foundation of learning they need before starting school that would allow them to succeed once their K-12 education begins. Gov. Rick Snyder is on the right track with his proposals for early education, which highlight the importance of lifelong learning.It's a fine line for the state to walk. After all, should the state -- and taxpayer money -- be more wrapped up in making up for the shortcomings of parents? Probably not. But if the Michigan Education Department narrowly targets funding for pre-kindergarten development to the most at-risk youth and families, and offers guidance to other parents in teaching their young children themselves, it could provide a sturdier platform for these kid's futures.
In his speech on education last month, Snyder gave some startling statistics. Michigan kindergarten teachers say that only 65 percent of children enter their classrooms "ready to learn the curriculum."
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The tea partiers are demanding that Congress not raise the debt ceiling but instead avoid default by cutting spending dramatically. Federal spending on education emerges as the discretionary item in the federal budget most available for the knife, and a House bill is being introduced by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., that lists 43 education programs to be cut.We've spent $2 trillion on education since federal aid began in 1965. The specified goals were to improve student achievement, eliminate or narrow the gap between upper-income and low-income students, and increase graduation rates from high school and college.
We have little or nothing to show for the taxpayers' generosity. Even Education Secretary Arne Duncan admitted that 82 percent of public schools should be ranked as failing.
So how will the army of educrats, whose jobs depend on billions of dollars of federal handouts, save their jobs? They've come up with an audacious plan that pretends to be useful in enabling them to discover what works and what doesn't, but it is so large and complicated that it would take years and require a huge computer-savvy payroll and billions of taxpayers' dollars.
And incidentally, it would be illegal because it's based on using executive branch regulations to override federal statutes.
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A judge has tentatively ruled that a petition by a group of Compton parents to force a poorly performing elementary school to convert to a charter school could fail because the signatures on the petition were not dated.Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Anthony Mohr called the failure to document the dates when the McKinley Elementary School parents signed the petition "fatal," according to the Associated Press.
The Compton Unified School District, which governs McKinley, argued that dating each signature was crucial in determining whether a signer's child was enrolled at the school and had legal rights over the child at the time, the AP reported.
Mohr said in his tentative ruling Friday that he understood the "pain, frustration and perhaps education disadvantages" his 14-page decision might cause but added that he needed to follow the law.
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Nearly half of Americans say that they definitely or probably couldn't come up with $2,000 in 30 days, according to new research, raising concerns about the financial fragility of many households.In a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Annamaria Lusardi of the George Washington School of Business, Daniel J. Schneider of Princeton University and Peter Tufano of Harvard Business School used data from the 2009 TNS Global Economic Crisis survey to document widespread financial weakness in the U.S. and other countries.
The survey asked a simple question, "If you were to face a $2,000 unexpected expense in the next month, how would you get the funds you need?" In the U.S., 24.9% of respondents reported being certainly able, 25.1% probably able, 22.2% probably unable and 27.9% certainly unable. The $2,000 figure "reflects the order of magnitude of the cost of an unanticipated major car repair, a large copayment on a medical expense, legal expenses, or a home repair," the authors write. On a more concrete basis, the authors cite $2,000 as the cost of an auto transmission replacement and research that reported low-income families claim to need about $1500 in savings for emergencies.
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Anthony P. Carnevale, Jeff Strohl, Michelle Melton:
We've always been able to say how much a Bachelor's degree is worth in general. Now, we show what each Bachelor's degree major is worth.Peter Whoriskey:The report finds that different undergraduate majors result in very different earnings. At the low end, median earnings for Counseling Psychology majors are $29,000, while Petroleum Engineering majors see median earnings of $120,000.
An old joke in academia gets at the precarious economics of majoring in the humanities.Beckie Supiano:The scientist asks, "Why does it work?
The engineer asks, "How does it work?"
The English major asks, "Would you like fries with that?"
But exactly what an English major makes in a lifetime has never been clear, and some defenders of the humanities have said that their students are endowed with "critical thinking" and other skills that could enable them to catch up to other students in earnings.
Tuition is rising, the job market is weak, and everyone seems to be debating the value of a college degree. But Anthony P. Carnevale thinks these arguments are missing an important point. Mr. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, has argued that talking about the bachelor's degree in general doesn't make a whole lot of sense, because its financial payoff is heavily affected by what that degree is in and which college it is from.Now, new data from the U.S. Census Bureau sheds light on one big piece of Mr. Carnevale's assertion: the importance of the undergraduate major. In 2009, the American Community Survey, the tool the bureau uses to collect annual estimates of population characteristics, included a new question asking respondents with a bachelor's degree to give their undergraduate major.
After combing through the data, Mr. Carnevale says, it's clear: "It does matter what you major in."
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Verbally is an easy-to-use, comprehensive assisted speech solution for the iPad. It is the first free Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) iPad app that enables real conversation. Just tap in your phrase and Verbally speaks for you.Verbally website.
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Private colleges and universities discounted tuition at unprecedented levels during the recession in a way that slowed down or reversed the growth in net revenue from tuition, according to a new report from the National Association of College and University Business Officers.The discount that surveyed colleges and universities offered for full-time, first-year students through grants and other forms of need-based and merit aid hit an all-time high of 42.4 percent in 2010, a jump from about 39 percent in 2007. The report estimates that 88 percent of students at the institutions surveyed received some institutional aid, and those students paid about half of the college or university's sticker price.
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Hundreds of teachers packed the Madison School Board meeting Monday night to protest changes in their contract next year related to planning time for elementary school teachers.Some speakers reminded the board that elementary school planning time was a key issue in the 1976 teachers strike that closed school for two weeks. Tension among teachers is already heightened because of state initiatives to curtail collective bargaining and reduce education funding.
"Compensation has been reduced, morale is low, stress is high," Lowell Elementary teacher Bob Arnold said. "Respect and support us by preserving our already inadequate planning time."
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How do we make schools more relevant to students? Teach them the skills they need in the real world, with tools they use every day. That's exactly what Esther Wojcicki, a teacher of English and journalism at Palo Alto High School in Palo Alto, Calif., is attempting to do with the recent launch of the website 21STcenturylit. I interviewed Esther about the site, and how she hopes it will serve as a useful tool for both students and educators.How do you describe the mission for 21STcenturylit?
Wojcicki: The mission of 21STcenturylit.org is threefold: It is to teach students how to be intelligent consumers of digital media, how to be skillful creators of digital media, and to teach students how to search intelligently. We are living in an age when digital media and new digital tools are revolutionizing the world. Schools need to help students learn these skills, not block and censor the Internet.
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Zac Bissonnette via a kind reader's email:
When Felipe Matos enrolled in the New York Institute of Technology to study graphic design, he never thought that degree would be the very thing that prevented him from pursuing his dream career.But more than $50,000 in student debt later, he has found himself working as an assistant building manager in New York City -- with half his salary going toward debt repayment.
"In order to get into my field, I'd have to intern," says Mr. Matos, adding that his dream job would be at Pixar, the cutting-edge animation studio. But in order to avoid defaulting on his loans, he has had to defer his dreams. "I often get depressed because I always wanted to make cartoons and 3D animations for a living but can't," he says. His debt load also is affecting his life plans beyond his career: "I have a very loving and serious girlfriend, but I'm afraid we can't have kids or get married until we are in our late 30s."
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I attended Mumford High School in Detroit, from the fall of 1964 through June of 1967, the end of a period known to some as the golden age of education, and to others as an utter failure.Raymond
I attended Mumford High School in Detroit, from the fall of 1964 through June of 1967, the end of a period known to some as the golden age of education, and to others as an utter failure. For the record I am in the former camp, a product of an era which in my opinion well-prepared me to major in mathematics. I am soon retiring from a career in environmental protection and will be entering the teaching profession where I will teach math in a manner that has served many others well over many years and which I hope will be tolerated by the people who hire me.
I was in 10th grade, taking Algebra 2. In the study hall period that followed my algebra class I worked the 20 or so homework problems at a double desk which I shared with Raymond, a black student. He would watch me do the day's homework problems which I worked with the ease and alacrity of an expert pinball player.
While I worked, he would ask questions about what I was doing, and I would explain as best I could, after which he would always say "Pretty good, pretty good"--which served both as an expression of appreciation and a signal that he didn't really know much about algebra but wanted to find out more. He said he had taken a class in it. In one assignment the page of my book was open to a diagram entitled "Four ways to express a function". The first was a box with a statement: "To find average blood pressure, add 10 to your age and divide by 2." The second was an equation P = (A+10)/2. The third was a table of values, and the last was a graph. Raymond asked me why you needed different ways to say what was in the box. I wasn't entirely sure myself, but explained that the different ways enabled you to see the how things like blood pressure changed with respect to age. Sometimes a graph was better than a table to see this; sometimes it wasn't. Not a very good explanation, I realized, and over the years I would come back to that question--and Raymond's curiosity about it--as I would analyze equations, graphs, and tables of values.
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WHEN he first introduced cuts at a public meeting last month, Samuel Lee, the superintendent of the Bristol Township School District, was plainspoken and direct. He did not say that everyone would pull together and the children would get the same great education, but, rather, that worthy programs would be dismantled and young teachers would lose jobs. "Everything that is going to be presented tonight is not good for our kids," he said as about 300 teachers, parents and students looked on. "We are heartbroken."I grew up in blue-collar Levittown, and have written about it several times for this newspaper as a window into national sentiment. The community was deeply skeptical of Barack Obama early in 2008, then voted for him in huge numbers in the fall. In 2010, the local Democratic congressman was turned out of office amid a wave of national anger over the economy.
Over the past several weeks, I have watched as local officials and community residents confronted a budget shortfall that threatens to reverse hard-won gains in schools that once performed poorly. But I did not hear much of the polarization, argumentation and point-scoring that the cable news universe reflects as the totality of our civic discourse. In Levittown, this time around, the mood is one of sadness, loss and resignation. "We're all struggling in this community," W. Earl Bruck, an electrician, and chairman of the board's budget committee, told those at the meeting. "I can tell you that I've been out of work for 56 weeks."
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Sam Dillon, via a kind reader's email:
A handful of outspoken teachers helped persuade state lawmakers this spring to eliminate seniority-based layoff policies. They testified before the legislature, wrote briefing papers and published an op-ed article in The Indianapolis Star.The Gates Foundation has funded many initiatives, including the controversial "small learning community" program.They described themselves simply as local teachers who favored school reform -- one sympathetic state representative, Mary Ann Sullivan, said, "They seemed like genuine, real people versus the teachers' union lobbyists." They were, but they were also recruits in a national organization, Teach Plus, financed significantly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
For years, Bill Gates focused his education philanthropy on overhauling large schools and opening small ones. His new strategy is more ambitious: overhauling the nation's education policies. To that end, the foundation is financing educators to pose alternatives to union orthodoxies on issues like the seniority system and the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers.
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Gregory Thornton, Milwaukee Schools' Superintendent:
The Milwaukee School Board and I recently had an unusual conversation. It came at the end of a meeting on our proposed budget. Struck by the sadness of the parents and teachers who had testified on the devastating impacts, and in dismay over the massive cuts to state funding offered by our governor, we came down to a question that summed up the past weeks: What do you do when the facts are not enough?We have made considerable progress academically and financially. The 2009 McKinsey & Co. report listed potential cost savings for Milwaukee Public Schools in six areas. Efforts to trim costs for textbook purchases, food service, transportation, employee benefits and facilities were already underway when this report was released. Since 2009, the district has addressed each area and, as a result, at least $50 million has been or is scheduled to be saved.
Academic achievement is a priority. Fifty-seven percent of our schools increased their reading scores. Forty-three percent improved in math. Data released by the state Department of Public Instruction this spring shows MPS outperformed Milwaukee voucher schools on the state's test, even though the district serves a much higher proportion of students with disabilities.
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Lisa Belkin, via a kind reader's email:
SINCE the subject today is schooling, let's start with a quiz:1. A third grader in Florida is often late for class. She tends to forget her homework and is unprepared for tests. The teacher would like to talk to her parents about this, but they fail to attend parent-teacher conferences. The teacher should:
a) fail the student.
b) fail the parents.
2. A middle-school student in Alaska is regularly absent, and his grades are suffering as a result. The district should:
a) fail the student.
b) fine the parents $500 a day for every day the student is not in school.
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The reading experts and government leaders on Wisconsin's "Read to Lead" task force are taking a close look at student reading achievement in Wisconsin schools. The meetings of the task force are open to the public; my "live tweeted" notes from the April 25, 2011 inaugural meeting are here:Much more on the Wisconsin Read to Lead task force, here.
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The New York Times reports that only half of four-year college grads are landing jobs that require a four-year degree and that starting salaries have fallen from $30,000 in 2006 to 2008 to only $27,000 in 2010-11.And these are the lucky ones. Only 56% of four-year college grads even held a job.
These results makes a Wisconsin technical college education look quite attractive.
The Wisconsin Technical College System's Graduate Follow-up Report indicates that 88 percent of 2009- 2010 technical college graduates were employed within six months of graduation, 71% in fields related to their field of study.
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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has led the world into the future for 150 years with scientific innovations. Its brainwaves keep the US a superpower. But what makes the university such a fertile ground for brilliant ideas?Yo-Yo Ma's cello may not be the obvious starting point for a journey into one of the world's great universities. But, as you quickly realise when you step inside the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), there's precious little about the place that is obvious.
The cello is resting in a corner of MIT's celebrated media lab, a hub of techy creativity. There's a British red telephone kiosk standing in the middle of one of its laboratories, while another room is signposted: "Lego learning lab - Lifelong kindergarten."
The cello is part of the Opera of the Future lab run by the infectiously energetic Tod Machover. A renaissance man for the 21st - or perhaps 22nd - century, Machover is a composer, inventor and teacher rolled into one. He sweeps into the office 10 minutes late, which is odd because his watch is permanently set 20 minutes ahead in a patently vain effort to be punctual. Then, with the urgency of the White Rabbit, he rushes me across the room to show me the cello. It looks like any other electric classical instrument, with a solid wood body and jack socket. But it is much more. Machover calls it a "hyperinstrument", a sort of thinking machine that allows Ma and his cello to interact with one another and make music together.
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Public school officials called vouchers "morally wrong" and potentially "crippling" for Racine at a press conference Thursday.A school choice voucher program in Racine would cost taxpayers money while hurting the academic chances of public school students, officials said during the afternoon press conference at Walden middle and high school, 1012 Center St. The press conference was held in response to a proposal from Gov. Scott Walker to expand Milwaukee's school choice voucher program, which allows low-income Milwaukee students to receive state-funded vouchers to attend participating private schools. Walker has proposed removing the low-income requirement while also expanding the program to other cities.
Public school officials who spoke in Racine Thursday think that's a bad idea.
"School vouchers have been called 'a dagger in the heart of public education' and I think there's some truth to that," Racine Unified Superintendent Jim Shaw said at the conference. He explained vouchers take needed funds away from public schools -- when a child leaves a school with a voucher about $6,000 in per pupil state aid to that school leaves with them to pay for private school tuition.
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John Elder Robison would stand out in a crowd even if he didn't have Asperger syndrome. A gruff, powerfully built, tirelessly curious, blue-eyed bear of a man, he hurtles down a San Diego sidewalk toward a promising Mexican restaurant like an unstoppable force of nature. "What's keepin' you stragglers?" he calls back to the shorter-legged ambulators dawdling in his wake.As they catch up, Robison utters his all-purpose sound of approval -- "Woof!" -- which he utters often, being a man in his middle years who is finally at peace with himself after a difficult coming-of-age. For the acclaimed author of the 2007 New York Times bestseller Look Me in the Eye, a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder in mid-life was liberating, giving a name to the nagging feeling that he was somehow different from nearly everyone around him.
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Omer Ninham was just 14 when he was part of a gang that threw a 13-year-old Hmong boy to his death from the top of a Green Bay parking garage in 1998.On Friday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld his life-without-parole sentence over arguments that recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings and new science about adolescent brain development demand Ninham deserves at least a chance for release later in life.
Justice Annette Ziegler wrote the majority opinion; Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson dissented, joined by Justice Ann Walsh Bradley.
"Under the circumstances of this case, Ninham's punishment is severe, but it is not disproportionately so," Ziegler wrote.
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The end of the school year and the layoffs of tens of thousands of teachers are bringing more attention to reformers' calls to remake public schools. Today's school reform movement conflates the motivations and agendas of politicians seeking reelection, religious figures looking to spread the faith and bureaucrats trying to save a dime. Despite an often earnest desire to help our nation's children, reformers have spread some fundamental misunderstandings about public education.1. Our schools are failing.
It's true that schools with large numbers of low-income and English-as-a-second-language students don't perform as well as those with lots of middle- and upper-middle-class students who speak only English. But the demonization of some schools as "dropout factories" masks an important achievement: The percentage of Americans earning a high school diploma has been rising for 30 years. According to the Department of Education, the percentage of 16-to-24-year-olds who were not enrolled in school and hadn't earned a diploma or its equivalent fell to 8 percent in 2008.
Average SAT and ACT scores are also up, even with many more -- and more diverse -- test-takers. On international exams such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, U.S. elementary and middle school students have improved since 1995 and rank near the top among developed countries. Americans do lag behind students in Asian nations such as Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan on these tests, but so do Europeans. The gap in math and science scores may be an East-West divide.
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According to food revolutionary Alice Waters, what we choose to eat says as much about our values as the way we vote. In an interview with WSJ's Alan Murray, the author and chef outlines her vision for thoughtful eating and sustainable farming, while accusing corporations of having little interest in health and nutrition.
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It's a concept a kindergartner could understand: Children won't learn if they miss too much school.Few would disagree, yet most school districts don't actually monitor the number of days that each child is absent. Schools track truancy (unexcused absences), and they count the number of children who show up each day. But they don't report chronic absenteeism, or the percentage of children who miss at least 10 percent of the school year, excused or unexcused.
"You can have a kid in kindergarten rack up a ton of excused absences, but they're missing a lot of school," said Hedy Chang, director of Attendance Works, a national and state initiative to promote awareness of the issue.
Chang presented her research Friday at an education forum in Sacramento hosted by Tom Torlakson, state superintendent of public instruction.
The Oakland school district became one of the first in the state to actively monitor chronic absenteeism, and the results have been sobering. Chang's analysis showed that 14 percent of all district students and more than 20 percent of African-American students missed at least 18 days of school last year. The report found the highest percentages of chronically absent children to be concentrated in West Oakland, an economically distressed area with high rates of violence, asthma and housing instability.
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We urge the Board of Education to approve and implement the initiatives and budget proposed for the school-wide literacy program [Public Appearance Remarks]. It is deplorable that heretofore there has been no systematic plan to address the reading and writing shortcomings of the District. These shortcomings are the most fundamental causative factor contributing to the poor achievement performance of our students. The proposed design of systemic changes to the curriculum, instructional strategies, engagement of teachers, support staff, students and parents/other adults and the realignment of financial and other resources will result in measurable student growth. Board adoption of the $650,000.00 2011-12 budget considerations is an absolute necessity of the very highest priority.
Our thanks and compliments to the Board and the administration for undertaking the assessment of literacy in the District. However, the Board must take a greatly increased leadership role in demanding the vigorous evaluation and assessment all programs, services and personnel throughout the District. There must be demonstrable commitment and evidence of the systematic implementation of the strategic objective of the five-year District Strategic Plan to address the woefully inadequate and insufficient data upon which to make decisions about curriculum, instruction and performance of students and staff.
The Board must not give any support for an increase in property taxes in finalizing the 2011-12 budget. Nor, is there any justification for using any amount of "under-levy carry-over" if such authorization should be re-instated by the state. There is no evidence to support an increase in taxes. We must be able to prioritize the expenditure of revenues available within the limits established. The Board has already demonstrated it cannot effectively manage its allocations to areas of highest need to strengthen the impact on curriculum, instruction and performance affecting student learning. Until and unless the Board can demonstrate a higher and more effective level of leadership with its decisions and priorities it cannot be trusted with more money that will only get the same results.
We support an increase in allocations for maintenance and electrical infrastructure up-grades conditional upon 1) re-allocation of existing funds to these areas; 2) clear and enumerated priorities, established in advance, for maintenance projects that are specifically related to safety issues; and 3) electrical infrastructure up-grades specifically related to priorities established for improvements and expansion of technology as identified in the Technology Plan for use in student learning, instruction, business services and communications with the public.
The Board must not give approval to the proposed amendment for providing staff with year-end bonuses. This is absolutely the wrong message, for the wrong reasons at the wrong time. It cannot be justified in 'rewarding' those staff who wrongfully abdicated their responsibilities in the classroom to the students; by insulting those staff who did attempt to fulfill their responsibilities; as well as insulting the parents and students harmed by those detrimental actions. It would be far better to allocate the 'savings funds' to resources actively and directly impacting student learning. The Board must make a commitment to providing leadership toward academic improvements and to creating a working culture of mutual trust and collaboration with employees and taxpayers.
For further information contact: Don Severson, donleader@aol.com 577-0851
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There is something horribly fascinating about watching Wisconsin Republicans discuss their plans for our state's school system.Related: Problems in Wisconsin Reading NAEP Scores Task Force and Wisconsin needs two big goals.First, they swing the bloody ax:
Last week, Walker went to Washington, D.C., to give a speech to school-choice advocates at the American Federation for Children. He started off by reading a Dr. Seuss book, and talking about how "every kid deserves to have a great education."
- The biggest budget cuts to our public schools in state history, nearly $900 million. Kerchunk.
- A bill to create a statewide system of charter schools whose authorizing board is appointed by Scott Walker and the Fitzgeralds, and which will funnel resources out of local schools and into cheapo online academies. Kerchunk.
- Lifting income caps on private-school vouchers so taxpayers foot the bill to send middle- and upper-income families' kids to private school. Kerchunk.
- Then comes the really sick part. They candy-coat all this with banal statements about "reforms" that will "empower" parents and students and improve education.
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Paul R. Ehrlich, via a kind reader's email:
Arguably, no challenge faced by humanity is more critical than generating an environmentally literate public. Otherwise the present "business as usual" course of human affairs will lead inevitably to a collapse of civilization. I list obvious topics that should be covered in education from kindergarten through college, and constantly updated by public education and the media. For instance, these include earth science (especially climatology), the importance of biodiversity, basic demogra- phy, the problems of overconsumption, the fact that the current economic system compels producers and consumers to do the wrong thing environmentally, and the I=PAT equation. I also summarize less well-recognized aspects of the environmental situation that are critical but are only rarely taught or discussed, such as the nonlinear effects of continued population growth, the impacts of climate disruption on agricultural production, and the basic issues of human behavior, including economic behavior. Finally, I suggest some of the ways that this material can be made a major focus of all education, ranging from using environmental examples in kindergarten stories and middle school math to establish an international discussion of the behavioral barriers to sustainability.Global human society is challenged in a way never before seen in human history. For the first time, humanity is fundamentally altering global ecosystems in ways that can threaten the continuation of our social order. The struggle to develop appropriate modes of behavior compatible with maintaining vital ecological processes is the great challenge of the twenty-first century. Educational systems are pivotal to meeting this challenge by equipping people with the knowledge and values to understand and address the human predicament. Thus, environmental education needs to be a vital component of all educational processes in developed nations from kindergarten to doctoral studies and continuing through the use of mainstream and social media.
However, in my view, environmental education is given much too little attention in the school systems of the USA and other rich nations, and is often poorly timed and structured when it is delivered. The situation is only marginally better in colleges and universities, despite the good efforts of environmental educators. Perhaps the best evidence for the inadequacy of environmental education is that "out of the classroom, people have failed to make the link between their individual actions and the environmental condition" (Blumstein and Saylan 2007, 2011). A basic problem is educational systems for the young are designed to fill people with various packages of "tailored" knowledge, and then send them "out in the world" to use that knowledge, especially to make a living. There is too little systematic thought given to the ever-changing needs of responsible citizens facing the culture gap--the enormous and growing gulf between the non-genetic information possessed by each individual society and that possessed by society (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 2010).
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Lately it's become fashionable -- especially among the highly credentialed -- to question whether it's really "worth it" to go to college. A recent report from the Harvard Graduate School of Education proposed deemphasizing college as the primary goal of our education system in favor of "multiple pathways" for students. Earlier this month, New York Magazine devoted almost 4,000 words to profiling venture capitalists (and college graduates) James Altucher and Peter Thiel and their efforts convince Americans that they'd be better off skipping college. Thiel is even creating a $100,000 fellowship for young people who agree to delay going to college in favor of an internship.Make no mistake, there is widespread dissatisfaction with higher education. According to a new survey released by the Pew Research Center, only 40 percent of Americans felt that colleges provided an "excellent" or "good" value for the money. At the same time, 86 percent of college graduates still felt the investment was a good one for them.
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More than 41 million Americans over the age of 18 have earned their college degrees, according to 2010 U.S. Census data. But once that hard-earned diploma has been handed over, many grads are faced with the decision of continuing their education with graduate school. Attaining a masters or PhD is an incredible achievement - one that comes with a high cost to a personal life, work experience and the pocketbook.Before you pack up for another degree, consider these scenarios, in which grad school may not be the best choice.
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Hughes is making the proposal [56K PDF Ed Hughes Amendment] as an amendment to the district's budget.Jay Sorgi:Funding would come from the $1.3 million windfall the district will get from docking the pay of 1,769 teachers who were absent without an excuse on one or more days between Feb. 16-18 and 21.
The district closed school during those four days because of the high number of staff members who called in sick to attend protests over Gov. Scott Walker's proposed changes to public sector collective bargaining.
"Under the circumstances it seemed to me the school district shouldn't necessarily profit from that, because the teachers agreed to make up the time in a way that took away planning time for them," said Hughes, who is considering a run for school board president when new officers are elected Monday.
Hughes is also proposing increasing the district's proposed property tax levy for next year by about $2 million to pay for maintenance and technology projects and any costs associated with the district's implementation of a state-imposed talented-and-gifted education plan.
"It seems goofy that we give away $1 million and then raise property taxes [50K PDF Ed Hughes Amendment]," board member Lucy Mathiak said.
If a school board member in Madison gets his way, the district would used money it saved when teachers forced schools to shut down during the budget debate to award end of the year bonuses to teachers.Additional links:WTMJ partner station WIBA Radio in Madison says that teachers in Madison would receive $200 gift cards as year-end bonuses.
"Whenever we can, we need to show some kind of tangible appreciation for the extremely hard work our teachers and staff do," said Ed Hughes, a member of the Madison school board.
"They've had a particularly tough year as you know, given that they kind of became political footballs in the legislature. We're ending up slashing their take home pay by a substantial amount, pretty much because we have to."
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In the late days of March 2010, Congressional negotiators dealt President Obama's community-college reform agenda what seemed like a fatal blow. A year later, it appears that, remarkably, the administration has fashioned the ashes of that defeat into one of the most innovative federal higher-education programs ever conceived. Hardly anyone has noticed.Obama originally called for $12-billion in new spending on community-college infrastructure and degree completion. The money was to come from eliminating public subsidies to for-profit banks that made student loans. But late in the process, some lawmakers insisted that savings that had already occurred, because of colleges' switching into the federal direct-loan program in anticipation of the new law, didn't count as savings. Billions were pulled off the table, and the community-college plan was shelved.
Two days later, negotiators found $2-billion. But they could spend it only on a U.S. Department of Labor program restricted to workers who had lost their jobs because of shifts in global trade. The fit with the president's expansive agenda seemed awkward, and the amount was pennies on the original dollar. Cynical commentators called it a "consolation prize."
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Lisa Foderaro, via a kind reader's email:
A Yale fraternity whose alumni include both President Bushes has been banned from conducting any activities on campus for five years, including recruiting, as punishment for an episode last October in which members led pledges in chants offensive to women, the university announced on Tuesday.Yale's publicizing of its disciplinary actions is highly unusual, but officials said their move followed a remarkably public and far-reaching episode. After the chanting in a residential quadrangle by members of the fraternity chapter, Delta Kappa Epsilon, 16 students and alumnae filed a complaint with the federal Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights accusing the university of failing to eliminate a hostile sexual environment on campus. The department confirmed last month that it had started an investigation.
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Public education has reached a moment of rare consensus: something must be done about the sorry state of our public schools, particularly in urban and low-income areas, and that the solution must deliver better results at scale - and without significant additional resources. Other fields like medicine and communications have embraced innovation - a new approach that achieves a better result - as the best means to this end. But education innovation has not yet lived up to its promise. In this paper, education entrepreneur Kim Smith and innovation writer Julie Petersen chart a path forward for how the public, private and nonprofit sectors can work together to advance education innovation by steering capital toward products, services and approaches that improve educators' productivity and students' learning outcomes.Today, the educational ecosystem is not set up to support meaningful and widespread innovation. The policy and investment context that defines the flow of capital in education can either encourage or inhibit this innovation, and today it does much more of the latter than the former. Public policies and regulations favor compliance over excellence, rarely allow state or district buyers to choose flexibly between a range of high-quality product or service options, inhibit the flow of information that would allow buyers to anticipate or measure performance improvements, and offering few meaningful incentives for these buyers to adopt better products and services. The philanthropic capital market similarly provides few mechanisms for rewarding dramatically improved outcomes (including little funding for the scale-up of successful organizations), instead favoring small doses of funding across many organizations. Private investors shy away from fueling education innovation, intimidated by policies that restrict the work of for-profit providers in education, frequent policy volatility at the local level, market domination by a few large publishers that feel little pressure from competition or from their customers to really innovate, and a slow, relationship-based sales cycle that rarely measures or rewards quality.
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Awhile back, I posted here my "Strange Advice for Bright Kids." Today I offer the same gems again, but tweaked to fit the parents of remarkably bright kids. I am once again calling it "strange" advice because I like to look at things from unusual angles and this advice comes from perspectives others may not consider.1) Ask for help. As you have likely discovered, being the parent of a gifted child isn't always the cakewalk that a lot of teachers, friends, and parents of average intelligence kids sometimes think it is. These bright lil' buggers can be INTENSE, which means keeping up with them can be exhausting. They can debate you into a corner, even at a very young age, rationalizing their way into controlling the conversation. Some gifted children have extremely high energy levels and may not need naps at an age when other kids still do. Their sensitivity can catch you off guard as seemingly nonchalant moments turn out to be the impetus that causes a meltdown. Their keen sense of justice means they're interested in causes beyond their years - and they enlist you to help them save the world. With remarkable focus, they become so immersed in the interesting task at hand that they are impervious to you struggling to tell them it's time for dinner. And your ten-year-old is having a mid-life crisis, exhibiting his existential depression by asking you questions you haven't even considered yourself yet ("Why am I here? Why is the world so cruel? What if I can't make a difference? What's the point if we're all going to die someday anyway?"). Plus you know that if you tell your friends you're worried about your seven-year-old because she's reading four grade levels above but only being given grade-level material and instruction - that their reaction will be a cynical snort.
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Successfully treating a mother with depression isn't just good for the mom; it also can provide long-lasting benefits for her children's mental health, new research shows.About 1 in 8 women can expect to develop depression at some point in her life. Incidences peak in the childbearing years, with as many as 24% of women becoming depressed during or after pregnancy. More than 400,000 infants are born to depressed mothers each year in the U.S.
And decades of research have borne out the old expression "when Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy." About half of kids with depressed mothers develop the condition--three times the typical risk.
Sadness isn't the only symptom. Children of depressed mothers are more likely to be anxious, irritable and disruptive than other kids.
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Parents, teachers and students have been in shock since the Seattle School District's interim Superintendent decided to fire a popular principal for little reason, they thought. They fought. They won.This afternoon Superintendent Susan Enfield reversed her decision about dismissing Ingraham Principal Martin Floe, and sent the high school's staff this letter:
When I was appointed Interim Superintendent, it was with the clear charge to strengthen opportunities for all students to learn. You asked me to bring high levels of transparency and accountability to this effort. The decision I made last Tuesday about the leadership of Ingraham High School Principal Martin Floe reflects my efforts to realize these commitments.However, I also know that a good leader listens. After extensive conversations with Ingraham High School staff and the community, I have decided to renew Mr. Floe's contact for the 2011-12 school year, under the condition that he continue on a plan of improvement, which I, along with his Executive Director, will monitor throughout the year.
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For weeks, Samantha Cormode's friends at Fairfax High School had been racking up invitations to prom, but she hadn't been asked.Samantha, a senior who is headed to Virginia Tech with hopes of earning a spot on the women's soccer team, had been busy studying for finals, preparing for AP exams and making sure she stayed on top of everything she needed to do for college.
She'd been without a steady boyfriend since September, when she and last year's boyfriend/prom date had gone their separate ways. She had opted not to go to this year's event with a group of her friends because last year's boyfriend/prom date would be among the revelers with his new girlfriend.
That would be too weird.
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Responding to an increase in violence, drugs and gang activity in and around schools, the Madison School District is considering a broad effort to improve building security, including the use of drug-sniffing dogs in high schools next year.The district also is proposing to lock the main entrances of middle school buildings during the day. Other recommendations include redesigning main entrances at West and Memorial high schools and adding surveillance cameras to all elementary and middle schools, district security coordinator Luis Yudice said.
"We are not doing this because we believe we have severe problems in our schools (or) because we experienced a tragedy in our schools," Yudice said. "We don't want to wait until there's a crisis. We want to get ahead of the game."
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A rural legislator who received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from out-of-state school choice advocates took flak back home for supporting expansion of a Milwaukee voucher program when his own school district is struggling financially.Related: WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators by Steven Walters:According to a story in the Sauk Prairie Eagle last week, an aide to Rep. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, had to use a gavel to bring order back to a budget listening session at Sauk Prairie Memorial Hospital on May 6.
Marklein, a freshman Republican legislator, was asked if campaign contributions were influencing his support for two pieces of recent school choice legislation which provide public tax dollars for families to spend in private schools in Milwaukee. This, at the same time that the River Valley School District, which Marklein represents, has been forced to cut programs and staff and is facing more cuts in Gov. Scott Walker's budget.
How much do election-year firewalls cost to build? For the state's largest teachers union, $1.57 million.Wisconsin Teachers Union Tops Lobbying Expenditures in 2009, more than Double #2That's how much the Wisconsin Education Association Council said last week it will spend trying to make sure four Democratic state senators are re-elected - enough, WEAC hopes, to keep a Democratic majority in the 33-member state body.
Although there are 15 Democratic candidates running for the state Senate, and 80 Democrats running for the state Assembly, the latest WEAC report shows that the teachers union is placing what amounts to an "all in" bet on saving just four Democratic senators who are finishing their first terms.
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This report is based on findings from a pair of Pew Research Center surveys conducted this spring. One is a telephone survey taken among a nationally representative sample of 2,142 adults ages 18 and older. The other is an online survey, done in association with the Chronicle of Higher Education, among the presidents of 1,055 two-year and four-year private, public and for-profit colleges and universities. (See the our survey methodology for more information.)Valerie Strauss has more.Here is a summary of key findings from the full report:
Survey of the General Public
Cost and Value. A majority of Americans (57%) say the higher education system in the United States fails to provide students with good value for the money they and their families spend. An even larger majority (75%) says college is too expensive for most Americans to afford. At the same time, however, an overwhelming majority of college graduates (86%) say that college has been a good investment for them personally.
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Sean Lanigan's nightmare began in January 2010, when the principal at Centre Ridge Elementary School pulled him out of the physical education class he was teaching and quietly walked him into an interrogation with two Fairfax County police detectives.He had no warning that a 12-year-old girl at the Centreville school had accused him of groping and molesting her in the gym.
The girl, angry at Lanigan about something else entirely, had made the whole thing up. But her accusations launched a soul-sapping rollercoaster ride that still hasn't ended.
"Emotionally, a part of me has died inside," Lanigan said in a recent interview. "I'm physically and mentally exhausted all the time, how the whole process has been dragged out to this date. It certainly has affected the quality of life for me and my family at home."
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Edgewood High School closed Monday as students and parents grieved the unexpected death of a student Sunday, and school officials and police dealt with what they said was an unrelated security concern.The death occurred the same day school officials met with parents to discuss concerns related to graffiti found in a bathroom Friday, according to emails Edgewood High School President Judd Schemmel sent to parents over the weekend.
"We don't have any reason to believe the two are connected," Madison Police Capt. Joe Balles said Monday, referring to the death and the security issue.
School officials did not tell parents that they decided to close school until late Sunday after learning of the student's death, according to emails sent to parents.
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Madison Preparatory Academy, via a Kaleem Caire email:
ased on current educational and social conditions, the fate of boys of color is uncertain. African American and Latino boys are grossly over-represented among young men failing to achieve academic success and are at greater risk of dropping out of school. Boys in general lag behind girls on most indicators of student achievement.In 2009, just 52% of African American boys and 52% of Latino boys graduated on-time from Madison Metropolitan School District compared to 81% of Asian boys and 88% of White boys.
In the class of 2010, just 7% of African American seniors and 18% of Latino seniors were deemed "college-ready" by ACT, makers of the standardized college entrance exam required for all Wisconsin universities.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (Madison Prep) is a public charter school being developed by the Urban League of Greater Madison. Madison Prep will serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity, particularly young men of color. Its mission is to prepare scholars for success at a four year college by instilling excellence, pride, leadership and service. A proposed non-instrumentality charter school located in Madison, Wisconsin and to be authorized by the Madison Metropolitan School District, Madison Prep will serve 420 students in grades 6 through 12 when it reaches full enrollment in 2017-2018.
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A heart charity is calling on the government to include the teaching of life-saving skills in the national curriculum.In a survey carried out by the British Heart Foundation, 73% of schoolchildren wanted to learn how to resuscitate someone and give first aid.
More than 75% of teachers and parents also agreed it should be taught in schools.
The survey questioned 2,000 parents, 1,000 children and 500 teachers.
The BHF wants emergency life support skills (ELS) to be taught as part of personal, social, health and economic education (PSHE) lessons and alongside physical education, citizenship and science.
Life-saving skills include cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), which can help someone who's had a cardiac arrest.
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here's a train coming, folks. And, unlike the proposed Madison-to-Milwaukee rail, this train really is high-speed.If we're not paying attention, it could end up crippling public education in Wisconsin.
Gov. Scott Walker had already included in his 2011-13 budget proposal a plan to change the Milwaukee school voucher program, which allows low-income students to attend private schools on the taxpayers' dime.
It would eliminate the enrollment caps; expand it to include schools in all of Milwaukee County, not just the city; and phase out income limits, opening the program to middle- and high-income families.
The Assembly last week passed a separate bill that eliminated the caps and the Milwaukee-only school requirement.
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ON command, Eze Schupfer reads aloud the numbers on a worksheet in front of her: "42, 43, 12, 13." Then she begins to trace them."Is that how we write a 12?" her instructor, Maria Rivas, asks. "Erase it."
"This is a sloppy 12, Eze," she says. "Go ahead: a one and a two. Smaller. Much better."
Eze moves to 13.
"Neater," Ms. Rivas insists. "Come on, you can do it." Finally, she resorts to the kind of incentive that Eze, her pink glitter sneaker barely grazing the ground, can appreciate: "You'll get an extra sticker if you can do a perfect 13."
Eze is 3. She is neither problem child nor prodigy. And her mother, Gina Goldman, who watches through a glass window from the waiting room, says drilling numbers and letters into the head of a 3-year-old defies all the warmth and coziness of her parenting philosophy -- as well as the ethos of Eze's progressive preschool. But she began bringing Eze and her older brother to these tutoring sessions nearly a year ago on the advice of a friend, and has since become the kind of believer who is fueling a rapid expansion of Junior Kumon preschool enrichment programs like this one, a block from the toddler-swollen playgrounds of Battery Park City.
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1. Why do people hate creative writing programs so much?Well they don't really, not everyone, or there wouldn't be so many of them--hundreds. From modest beginnings in Iowa in the 1930's, MFA programs have spread out across the land, coast to coast, sinking roots in the soil like an improbably invasive species of corn. Now, leaping the oceans, stalks have begun to sprout in countries all around the world, feeding the insatiable desire to be that mythical thing, a writer. Somebody must think they're worth founding, funding, attending, teaching at.
But partly in reaction to their very numerousness, which runs afoul of traditional ideas about the necessary exclusivity of literary achievement, contempt for writing programs is pervasive, at least among the kind of people who think about them at all. In fact, I would say they are objects of their own Derangement Syndrome. Logically, any large-scale human endeavor will be the scene of a certain amount of mediocrity, and creative writing is no different, but here that mediocrity is taken as a sign of some profounder failure, some horrible and scandalous wrong turn in literary history. Under its spell, a set of otherwise fair questions about creative writing are not so much asked as always-already answered. No, writing cannot be taught. Yes, writing programs are a scam--a kind of Ponzi scheme. Yes, writing programs make all writers sound alike. Yes, they turn writers away from the "real world," where the real stories are, fastening their gazes to their navels. No, MFA students do not learn anything truly valuable.
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A "dagger," said the well-meaning man, "in the heart of public education." That man, who superintends Green Bay's public school system, was reacting to word that Gov. Scott Walker proposed letting parents statewide have the same option poor Milwaukeeans now have - to take their state school aid to a private school, if they choose it.Parents with options: That was the violence that Greg Maass, that superintendent, was talking about. I don't mean to single out Maass. He colorfully phrased the apocalyptic view that many others had toward Walker's idea. A writer for The Progressive, the left-wing Madison magazine that figures we peaked in about 1938, tiresomely said it was "war on education."
Right: To increase options is to war on education. Actually, though, that is the heart of the complaint of the public school establishment. Giving families more control over where they can get a publicly funded education necessarily means less control for those in charge of what had been the only place you could get one.
But will Walker's idea kill off public education? Unlikely: Incumbent school systems already live with publicly funded competition.
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Here's a familiar story. Americans had a near-religious belief in the soundness of this investment. Uncle Sam encouraged it with tax breaks and subsidized it with government-backed loans. But then, in the 1990s and especially the 2000s, easy money perverted the market. Prices detached from reality. Suddenly, millions of Americans found themselves holding wildly overvalued assets. They also found themselves without the salaries or jobs necessary to pay off the huge loans they took out to buy the assets.This is not just the story of American real estate. It is also the story of higher education, at least if you believe the dozens of different thinkers and publications that have come to this conclusion in the past few months. They say that higher education is a bubble, just like housing was a bubble, and that it is getting ready to burst. Famed entrepreneur Peter Thiel, for instance, insists that just about every degree is worth little more than the paper it is printed on: Schooling is not education, he says, and ambitious kids should drop out and skip forward to the workplace. New York magazine calls it one of "this year's most fashionable ideas." But is it really true?
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A WEEK ago South Korea observed "Children's Day", an occasion when every school and office is closed, and the nation's families march off in unison to chaebol-owned theme parks like Lotte World or Everland. Cynical expat residents are fond of asking "isn't every day Children's Day?" They mean it sarcastically but their sarcasm is itself ironic. In reality the other 364 days of the year are very tough for Korean youngsters.Results of a survey released last week by the Institute for Social Development Studies at Seoul's Yonsei University show that Korean teenagers are by far the unhappiest in the OECD. This is the result of society's relentless focus on education--or rather, exam results. The average child attends not only regular school, but also a series of hagwons, private after-school "academies" that cram English, maths, and proficiency in the "respectable" musical instruments, ie piano and violin, into tired children's heads. Almost 9% of children are forced to attend such places even later than 11pm, despite tuitions between 10pm and 5am being illegal.
Psychologists blame this culture for all manner of ills, from poor social skills to the nation's unacceptably high rate of youth suicide, which is now the leading cause of death among those aged 15-24. Recently, a spate of suicides at KAIST, a technology-focused university, has drawn national attention. For most students the pinnacle of stress is reached somewhat earlier, in the third year of high school. This is the year in which the suneung (university entrance exam) is taken. Tragic reactions to the stress it creates are all too common.
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The Washington region is a hot zone of student achievement, with leading high schools offering a plethora of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes to prove that theirs is a rigorous path to college.But next year, a public charter school will open in the nation's capital that raises the concept of academic rigor to a new level. Seventh-graders will take Algebra I and Latin. AP courses will not be an option for high school students -- they'll be the heart of the curriculum.
To graduate, students will be required to complete at least eight AP courses and pass six exams.
The school, to be known as Basis DC, replicates a model developed in Arizona and represents a potential turning point for a charter sector in the District that has grown explosively in the past decade but yielded uneven results.
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There are tons of reasons why people don't take the medications they've been prescribed, including side effects, cost and complicated drug regimens.A couple of different approaches to improving adherence are in the news today. The first is Script Your Future, a multi-year public-education campaign spearheaded by the National Consumers League and supported by health-industry companies, government agencies, nonprofits and others.
It's aimed chiefly at patients with diabetes, respiratory diseases including asthma and cardiovascular disease, all of which affect big swaths of the U.S. population and can be particularly troublesome when not treated correctly. The campaign emphasizes the consequences -- such as poor health and quality of life -- that can spring from skipping meds.
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Aphorism: Short, sweet little sayings expressing an idea or opinion are familiar to everyone -- they just don't always know the technical term for them. Dorothy Parker was a particularly adroit user of aphorisms.Apostrophe: Beyond a term for daily punctuation, apostrophe also pulls audiences aside to address a person, place or thing currently not present. O, Shakespeare! Such a sterling example of apostrophe use!
Applicability: The venerable Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien coined this term when badgered one too many times about whether or not his beloved fantasy series was supposed to be a World War II allegory. It wasn't, but he thought readers could easily apply such an interpretation to the text without losing anything.
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Want to avoid raising spoiled kids?Consider the Wellington Burt School of Wealthy Parenting.
Wellington R. Burt was a rich timber baron from Saginaw, MI. He died in 1919 with a multi-million-dollar fortune - one of America's largest at the time.
Yet rather than risk messing up his kids lives with a huge inheritance, he created an unusual will.
He stated that his fortune would be distributed to the family - but only 21 years after his grand-children's death.
His children and grandchildren weren't entirely deprived. Burt gave his "favorite son" $30,000 a year but the rest of his children got allowances roughly equal to those he gave his cook and chauffeur, according to the Saginaw News.
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Once upon a time, May was not so manic. Although admissions officers have long fretted about enrollment outcomes, they used to fret under fewer microscopes. Application totals were more predictable. Enrollment projections were more reliable. And newspapers had yet to turn the admissions cycle into an annual tally of percentages and prestige.These days, "yield" is a familiar term. The proportion of accepted applicants who enroll is a crucial number, wa
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For years now, adults have been grumbling about kids these days and how they have no sense of privacy. Always posting everything to Facebook, sharing their lives on Twitter, bantering with friends on MySpace ... where's their good-ol' sense of self-respect and privacy?If you feel this way ... well, how do I put this gently? You're wrong.
A new study, based on interviews with more than 160 teenagers, found that the young and the restless indeed have a marked sense of privacy. It's just that with the medium - Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, whatever - come different assumptions and expectations of what is public and what is private.
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An Illinois lawmaker says parents who have obese children should lose their state tax deduction."It's the parents' responsibility that have obese kids," said state Sen. Shane Cultra, R-Onarga. "Take the tax deduction away for parents that have obese kids."
Cultra has not introduced legislation to deny parents the $2,000 standard tax deduction, but he floated the idea Tuesday, when lawmakers took a shot at solving the state's obesity epidemic.
With one in five Illinois children classified as obese and 62 percent of the state's adults considered overweight, health advocates are pushing a platter of diet solutions including trans fat bans and restricting junk food purchases on food stamps.
Today, the Senate Public Health Committee considered taxing sugary beverages at a penny-per-ounce, in effect applying the same theory to soda, juices and energy drinks that governs to liquor sales. Health advocates say a sin tax could discourage consumption, but lawmakers are reluctant to target an industry supports the jobs of more than 40,000 Illinoisans.
"It seems like we just, we go after the low-hanging fruit, where its easy to get," said state Sen. Dave Syverson, R-Rockford. He said the state needs to form a comprehensive plan to address physical fitness and disease prevention, rather than taking aim at sugary drinks.
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Patrick Marley and Jason Stein:
Gov. Scott Walker wants to bring voucher schools to urban areas beyond Milwaukee, and predicts lawmakers will approve that expansion by the end of June."I think one of the things between now and the time we finish this (state) budget off at the end of June, we're going to be able to add and go beyond the boundaries of the city of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County. We're actually going to be able to add communities like Racine and Beloit and even Green Bay . . . because every one of those communities deserves a choice as well, and with this budget that's exactly what they're going to get," Walker said in a Monday speech to school choice advocates in Washington, D.C.
The proposal comes at a time when Walker is proposing cutting public schools by $841 million over two years and injects a new campaign issue into attempts to recall nine state senators.
A day after Walker made his comments, the Assembly planned to eliminate the cap on the number of children who can participate in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. The 20-year-old system allows low-income children to use taxpayer-funded vouchers worth $6,442 each to attend private schools in Milwaukee, including religious schools.
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Lab technicians at the Beijing Genomics Institute in Shenzhen, China. Clockwise from upper left: Zhi Wei Luo; Wan Ling Li; Zi Long Zhang; and Yu Zhu Xu.The world's largest genome-mapping facility is in an unlikely corner of China. Hidden away in a gritty neighborhood in Shenzhen's Yantian district, surrounded by truck-repair shops and scrap yards prowled by chickens, Beijing's most ambitious biomedical project is housed in a former shoe factory.
But the modest gray exterior belies the state-of-the-art research inside. In immaculate, glass-walled and neon-lit rooms resembling intensive care units, rows of identical machines emit a busy hum. The Illumina HiSeq 2000 is a top-of-the-line genome-sequencing machine that carries a price tag of $500,000. There are 128 of them here, flanked by rows of similar high-tech equipment, making it possible for the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) to churn out more high quality DNA-sequence data than all U.S. academic facilities put together.
"Genes build the future," announces a poster on the wall, and there is no doubt that China has set its eye on that future. This year, Forbes magazine estimated that the genomics market will reach $100 billion over the next decade, with scientists analyzing vast quantities of data to offer new ways to fight disease, feed the world, and harness microbes for industrial purposes. "The situation in genomics resembles the early days of the Internet," says Harvard geneticist George Church, who advises BGI and a number of American genomics companies. "No one knows what will turn out to be the killer apps." Companies such as Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Intel have already invested in genomics, seeing the field as an extension of their own businesses--data handling and management. "The big realization is that biology has become an information science," says Dr. Yang Huanming, cofounder and president of BGI. "If we accept that [genomics] builds on the digitalization of life, then all kinds of genetic information potentially holds value."
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For the first time, researchers have studied an entire population sample and found that one in 38 children exhibited symptoms of autism. The study was published Monday in the American Journal of Psychiatry."These numbers are really startling" said Geraldine Dawson, chief science officer for Autism Speaks, one of the three organizations that funded the project. Most previous researchers have found that about one in 110 children is autistic.
The NewsHour explored the puzzling condition of autism in the recent Autism Now series, anchored by Robert MacNeil.
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Most parents would certainly agree that ensuring their children get a good education is a top priority.However, recent findings from the Fraser Institute suggest that not all schools are created equally - not even close.
The Fraser Institute, one of Canada's leading public policy think-thanks, released their annual school rankings on May 8, which examine the performance of Ontario high schools over the past five years.
"Our report card is the number one source for objective, reliable information about how Ontario secondary schools stack up in terms of academics," said Michael Thomas, the co-author of the Report Card on Ontario's Secondary Schools 2011.
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STUDENTS are using stun guns in schools to protect themselves against bullies and to threaten fellow classmates.At least one schoolboy has been hospitalised as a result of being attacked with one of the electro-shock weapons, arising from a confrontation in the playground, according to reports obtained under freedom of information laws by The Daily Telegraph.
Serious incident reports show stun guns have been used on three occasions as a weapon against students or as a threat.In the most serious case a Year 10 boy who challenged a boy to a fight at school in southwestern Sydney accosted his victim after school, pulling up in a silver car driven by a stun gun-wielding male of an unknown age.
The driver got out of the car, "pulled a Taser-like device from his pocket" and stabbed a schoolboy with it, the incident report said.
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Joel Klein, via a Rick Kiley email:
THREE YEARS AGO, in a New York Times article detailing her bid to become head of the American Federation of Teachers union, Randi Weingarten boasted that despite my calls for "radical reform" to New York City's school system, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and I had achieved only "incremental" change. It seemed like a strange thing to crow about, but she did have something of a point. New York over the past nine years has experienced what Robert Schwartz, the dean of Harvard's education school, has described as "the most dramatic and thoughtful set of large-scale reforms going on anywhere in the country," resulting in gains such as a nearly 20-point jump in graduation rates. But the city's school system is still not remotely where it needs to be.That story holds more than true for the country at large. Nearly three decades after A Nation at Risk, the groundbreaking report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, warned of "a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people," the gains we have made in improving our schools are negligible--even though we have doubled our spending (in inflation-adjusted dollars) on K-12 public education. On America's latest exams (the National Assessment of Educational Progress), one-third or fewer of eighth-grade students were proficient in math, science, or reading. Our high-school graduation rate continues to hover just shy of 70 percent, according to a 2010 report by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, and many of those students who do graduate aren't prepared for college. ACT, the respected national organization that administers college-admissions tests, recently found that 76 percent of our high-school graduates "were not adequately prepared academically for first-year college courses."
While America's students are stuck in a ditch, the rest of the world is moving ahead. The World Economic Forum ranks us 48th in math and science education. On international math tests, the United States is near the bottom of industrialized countries (the 34 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), and we're in the middle in science and reading. Similarly, although we used to have one of the top percentages of high-school and college graduates among the OECD countries, we're now in the basement for high-school and the middle for college graduates. And these figures don't take into account the leaps in educational attainment in China, Singapore, and many developing countries.
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Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker continues to court national support for an extreme agenda of attacking public employees and public services while diminishing local democracy and shifting public money to private political allies. Despite the fact that Walker's moves have been widely condemned in his home state, the hyper-ambitious career politician has repeatedly suggested that he will not moderate his positions because he wants to shift the tenor of politics and policymaking far beyond Wisconsin.Walker's stance has earned him talk as a possible dark-horse contender for a chance at the 2012 Republican nod, and the governor has not discouraged it.
To that end, Walker was in Washington Monday night to deliver a keynote address at the innocuously named American Federation for Children's "School Choice Now: Empowering America's Children" policy summit. It's actually a key annual gathering of advocates for privatizing public education, and of some of the biggest funders of right-wing political projects nationally.
The appearance comes at a time when education cuts are becoming a front-and-center issue, as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has stirred an outcry in the nation's largest city by proposing to lay off thousands of teachers.
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Republican Gov. Scott Walker will be on a national education stage tonight to tout his efforts to expand charter school and voucher programs, but he is running into obstacles back home, and not just from those you might expect.At an Assembly Education Committee hearing last week, for example, a bill Walker backs that would allow parents of special education students to use state tax dollars to pay for private school tuition hit significant roadblocks. In fact, the Republican chair of the committee, Rep. Steve Kestell of Elkhart Lake, called the funding mechanism for the legislation in its current form a "fatal flaw" in a telephone interview Friday.
"The bill is an intriguing proposal," Kestell says. "Where we have a big challenge is how to pay for it."
Kestell and other representatives grilled the authors of the bill during committee testimony. The language of the proposal appears to be taken fairly literally from generic legislation used in other states that have passed special education voucher programs. Kestell says the legislation would have to be "Wisconsinized" to be acceptable.
The bill was also sharply criticized by disability rights groups, who say it would strip hard-won legal rights from families with special-needs children, and by the state Department of Public Instruction, which faults the bill for demanding no accountability from private schools for actually providing the special education services that would be the basis for the vouchers.
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I begin with a brief review of psychometric results concerning intelligence (sometimes referred to as the g factor, or IQ). The main results concern the stability, validity (predictive power) and heritability of adult IQ. Next, I discuss ongoing Genome Wide Association Studies which investigate the genetic basis of intelligence. Due mainly to the rapidly decreasing cost of sequencing (currently below $5k per genome), it is likely that within the next 5-10 years we will identify genes which account for a significant fraction of total IQ variation. Finally, I end with an analysis of possible near term genetic engineering for intelligence.The slides can be viewed here.This talk is aimed at physicists and should be accessible even to those with no specialized background in psychology or biology.
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Sylvia Holloman's busy world went like this on Friday afternoon: Get off work, drive home, gather up her three youngest sons, haul them and the family's dirty laundry to the laundromat, wash clothes for 90 minutes, drive back home, prepare pork chops and peas -- boys still at her side in the kitchen.For Holloman, a D.C. police officer, it is the best strategy she's found for keeping Rahim, 15, Raphael, 11, and Ryan, 5, out of harm's way in a country where young black men often face peril -- never let them out of her sight.
"I constantly worry," said Holloman, 48, of District Heights.
"I worry because of the way the world is today for young black men," said the mother of six, including a fourth son, Ronnie, 26. "It seems like there are so many ways they can get caught up: discrimination, drugs, not being able to find a job, going to jail, violence. You have to be on the lookout constantly to make sure they are safe."
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They are some of most prestigious and toughest schools to get into - and they only take the best of the best.They also are schools that have long, successful, athletic traditions.
For some getting into the prestigious institutions might mean being set for life when getting out into the real world.
The Ivy Eight, Cornell, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, Penn, Yale, Dartmouth and Brown, are some of the top schools in the country - and some of the toughest schools to crack.
So, when a student-athlete gets a shot to attend one of these fine institutions they usually don't turn them down - even if it means going into debt for a very long time.
You have to remember for presidents, top executives of Fortune 500 companies and others have all roamed the hallow halls.
But, what does it take to get notice or get into these schools?
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Mother's Day is upon us. I'm wondering how it's observed in the Chua-Rubenfeld household and what you think of this Western invention.I always send flowers and a card for my own mother. But it's harder for me to get the same amount of attention from my two daughters. Everyone is so busy. We'll probably go to see a movie and to a Chinese restaurant. In my household, that's the tradition.
The topic is mothering, but you've chosen an illustrated children's classic about a duck, a memoir and three novels. What do you have against parenting manuals?
I have nothing against parenting manuals, although I have been disappointed that people who haven't read my book have portrayed it as a parenting manual. When my daughters were infants, I think I did have the "What to Expect" series. But once my daughters grew out of toddlerhood, I thought I'd just do what my parents did. I learned the hard way that what they did wasn't so easy.
My parents were extremely strict, but also extremely loving, Chinese immigrant parents. While I wasn't always so happy about how strict they were when I was growing up, as an adult I adore my parents. I feel I owe all that I am to my parents and I don't think I turned out that badly.
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The general assumption is that when it comes to educating American kids, more is more. Longer school hours. Saturday school. Summer school. Yet more than 120 school districts across the nation are finding that less can also be more -- less being fewer days spent in school.The four-day school week has been around for decades, according to the National Council of State Legislatures, but it's quietly spreading as a money-saving tactic, especially after several states -- including Montana, Georgia, Missouri and Washington -- passed legislation allowing school districts to make the switch as long as they lengthened each school day so that there was no reduction in instructional hours. Teachers work just as much under the four-day plan, so there are no cost reductions there, but schools have saved from 2% to 9%, according to a 2009 report by the Center for Education Policy at the University of Southern Maine. Utility and transportation costs are lower; there's no need to serve a fifth lunch each week; even the reduced wear and tear on buildings has helped.
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KnowledgeWorks, led for a decade by Chad Wick, a former bank CEO passionate about connecting urban kids to the idea economy, developed a 2020 forecast that outlines five learning priorities:1. Students need the ability to sort, verify, synthesize, and use information to make judgments and take action. These skills have always been important but now that we're all drinking from a fire hose of information they are essential.
2. Students need a working knowledge of market economics and personal finance--most students still leave high school without them. Students will be navigating an increasingly dynamic economy in which technologies will improve and change at exponential rates and market opportunities will be big but competitive. Students need the ability to sell--themselves and an idea. They need to experience and give candid performance feedback and gain appreciation for a quality work product.
Curtis Carlson, the chief executive of SRI International, an independent research institute, told Tom Friedman, "Fortunately, this is the best time ever for innovation," said Carlson, for three reasons: "First, although competition is increasingly intense, our global economy opens up huge new market opportunities. Second, most technologies--since they are increasingly based on ideas and bits and not on atoms and muscle--are improving at rapid, exponential rates. And third, these two forces--huge, competitive markets and rapid technological change--are opening up one major new opportunity after another."
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Millionaires do screw up everything, don't they? They're hovering even now, ghostlike, haunting the working class amid the talk of expanding Milwaukee's school choice program.Right now, if you're poor in Milwaukee - earning $39,000 or less for a family of four - you can take your state aid to any of a selection of superb private schools. Earn any more, as your typical machinist or firefighter would, and it's either endure the Milwaukee Public Schools, see if you can get into a charter school or pay thousands in tuition.
Gov. Scott Walker proposes lifting the income limit, and letting machinists and firefighters in on the deal. Critics are aghast with the thought that millionaires might benefit, too. Your tax dollars, they gasp, could pick up the $6,442 tab for some millionaire's son at some private school.
The horror. Not that a $6,442 voucher will take even a millionaire's kid very far at, say, the University School of Milwaukee, where tuition is $20K a year, should University School decide to take part. Nor will it suddenly relieve any millionaire of the tuition he's now paying at the more humble St. Parsimonious. Walker's reform phases in, and parents currently paying tuition can't get the state aid.
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Among the questions facing parents raising children with autism is this: Could easing the symptoms be as simple as taking away grains and dairy products?Many parents swear the popular gluten-free, casein-free diets being promoted by celebrities help their children be more social and less prone to problematic behaviors such as loud outbursts.
But Lee Anne Owens, a Brownsburg mother of two boys with autism, isn't sure.
"I have a girlfriend who has tried it for her autistic child, and she has seen remarkable improvement," Owens said. "But I just don't see it."
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What's high school for?Perhaps we could endeavor to teach our future the following:
How to focus intently on a problem until it's solved.
The benefit of postponing short-term satisfaction in exchange for long-term success.
How to read critically.The power of being able to lead groups of peers without receiving clear delegated authority.
An understanding of the extraordinary power of the scientific method, in just about any situation or endeavor.
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When I was college student and for a few years afterward, there were certain books -- often books I picked up by accident or for which I had low expectations -- that were so revelatory, so eye-opening, that after finishing them I walked around feeling at if I'd just landed on Earth. Everything looked new and strange, and every incident in the book felt as if it related directly to my own life.It was a giddy sensation, and one that, sadly, comes much less frequently now. Reading William Deresiewicz's "A Jane Austen Education" brought me back to those heady days, when I believed that nothing could possibly be more important than literature.
Deresiewicz, a former English professor at Yale University and now a book critic, is an accidental Austen enthusiast. As a New Yorker and a graduate student at Columbia during the 1990s, he resisted Austen, preferring "modernism, the literature that had formed my identity as a reader and, in many ways, as a person. Joyce, Conrad, Faulkner, Nabokov: complex, difficult, sophisticated works."
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Schoolchildren in Canada sing the national anthem in class everyday. It's also common for US students to recite a pledge of allegiance to their country.
In Hong Kong, most schoolchildren started to learn singing China's national anthem only after Britain returned its most famous colony to Beijing's sovereignty in 1997. Now, the SAR government wants to carry national education further, but is ironically chided for political brainwashing.The criticism is simply strange. During the colonial era, students never had the opportunity to study modern Chinese history. Crucial chapters differentiating between the Republic of China - now Taiwan - and the People's Republic of China were nowhere to be found in textbooks. It was deliberate as this served the colonial regime's interest better for locals not to be identified with China.
Last week, the SAR launched a four- month consultation on moral and national education, proposing that primary and secondary schools devote 50 hours per year, or two lessons a week, for students to learn the national anthem, attend national flag-raising ceremonies, understand the Basic Law, support national sports teams, and appreciate Chinese culture and the development of China via current affairs. Teachers would have a large freedom in teaching. This is overdue. After all, it has been nearly 14 years since the handover.
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I have written many columns about the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County. Some readers have suggested I stop. They ask: Why is one school so important?Here's the situation. I am an education writer who focuses on the best teachers and best schools, as measured by how much value they add to students' educations and lives. Jefferson is the most selective high school in the country. By many benchmarks -- faculty quality, course level, equipment -- it has to be considered among the best.
That is irresistible to me. Now I have found a Jefferson graduate, Chelsea Slade, who has given me a way to drag into my Jefferson obsession everyone who didn't go to Jefferson, which includes me and almost all of mankind.
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There is no doubt that recruiting and retaining excellent teachers in our nation's schools are central components of improving our education system. But it is equally important to acknowledge that a wide range of factors beyond how a teacher conducts his or her classroom significantly affects the success of our students and teachers.Poverty, hunger, homelessness, health issues, exposure to violence and reduced investment in our schools are just a few of the many societal issues that influence the effectiveness of even the most talented teachers.
When a child comes to school hungry or poorly nourished, the student is not as likely to grasp even the most intricately planned and masterfully executed lessons.
When a student is stressed and sleep-deprived due to the foreclosure of his parents' home, the student will not be as capable of thinking critically and reflectively about even the most engaging of classroom activities.
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As I learn more about community colleges, one of the most surprising lessons has been the sloppy and deceptive ways that students are introduced to courses. Placement tests are not well explained to students. Whether you have a passing score or not can depend on which college you attend.At least as unsettling are studies showing that dual enrollment courses -- community college courses given to high school students -- often bar applicants who have less than a B average or fail a placement test, even though they need that taste of college-level work to prepare for the real thing.
Now a troubling new research paper says that the remedial courses given to community college students who do not score high enough on placement tests often do no good. Colleges still swear by the courses, however. Students are further deceived by upbeat guidance to a community college placement test owned by the College Board that tells students, wrongly, that they can't really fail a placement test.
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Andrew Shilcher, via email:
In response to the press release that the DPI put out today, I did some digging to see where Madison and Milwaukee stacked up. You can check out how each district breaks down for yourself by following the links at the bottom, but here are some of the highlights (if you want to call them that)
According to WINSS...
The 4 year graduation rate for Black Not Hispanic students in MMSD for the 2009-2010 school year was 48.3%.The 4 year graduation rate for Black Not Hispanic students in MPS for the 2009-2010 school year was 59.5%.
The 4 year graduation rates for Hispanic students in MMSD and MPS for the 2009-2010 school year are comparable at 56.7% in MMSD and 59% in MPS.
The statewide average 4 year graduation rate for Black Not Hispanic students for the 2009-2010 school year was 60.5%.
The statewide average 4 year graduation rate for Hispanic students for the 2009-2010 school year was 69%.
I won't go into the difference between the 4 year rates and Legacy rates, but you can check those out at the links below too. 4 year rates place students in a cohort beginning in their first year of high school and see where things stand within that cohort 4 years later. Legacy rates are a yearly snapshot of the number of graduates for a year compared to the number of students expected to graduate high school for that given year. For a further explanation of this refer to http://dpi.wi.gov/spr/grad_q&a.html.
Here is the link to the press release:
http://dpi.wi.gov/eis/pdf/dpinr2011_43.pdf
Here is the link to MMSD WINSS statistics:
http://data.dpi.state.wi.us/Data/HSCompletionPage.aspx?GraphFile=HIGHSCHOOLCOMPLETION&S4orALL=1&SRegion=1&SCounty=47&SAthleticConf=45&SCESA=05&FULLKEY=02326903````&SN=None+Chosen&DN=Madison+Metropolitan&OrgLevel=di&Qquad=performance.aspx&Group=RaceEthnicity
Here is the link to MPS WINSS statistics:
http://data.dpi.state.wi.us/data/HSCompletionPage.aspx?GraphFile=HIGHSCHOOLCOMPLETION&S4orALL=1&SRegion=1&SCounty=47&SAthleticConf=45&SCESA=05&FULLKEY=01361903````&SN=None+Chosen&DN=Milwaukee&OrgLevel=di&Qquad=performance.aspx&Group=RaceEthnicity
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Is the school voucher plan just signed into law by Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels going to improve education in his state? It's an ambitious experiment:The plan is based on a sliding income scale, with families of four making more than $60,000 qualifying for some level of scholarship if they switch from public to private schools... Other voucher systems across the country are limited to lower-income households, children with special needs or those in failing schools. Indiana's program would be open to a much larger pool of students, including those already in excellent schools... within three years, there will be no limit on the number of children who could enroll.I have no idea whether or not this is going to work. But I am thrilled that Indiana is trying it. Nationwide, 40 percent of registered voters and almost half of parents with school-aged children favor this policy, and it is one of the few education reform ideas consistently advanced by one of our two political parties. More importantly, two-thirds of Hoosiers supported the idea in a January poll.This is as good as it gets if you believe that states should sometimes function as laboratories of democracy. Indiana voters get what they want, and the rest of us benefit from seeing how it works out on a larger scale than has ever been tried before. It's also heartening that Gov. Daniels is hedging his bets by trying to improve the public school system. His broader education agenda is outlined in this presentation, given at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.
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Something that I think drives at least some of my disagreements with other liberals about education policy is that I think a lot of middle class liberals implicitly underestimate the extent of really bad learning outcomes. Take this report (PDF) from the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund which notes "that 47% of adults (more than 200,000 individuals) in the City of Detroit are functionally illiterate, referring to the inability of an individual to use reading, speaking, writing, and computational skills in everyday life situations" and also that "within the tricounty region, there are a number of municipalities with illiteracy rates rivaling Detroit: Southfield at 24%, Warren at 17%, Inkster at 34%, Pontiac at 34%."
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Alfie Kohn has really pushed the buttons of ed reformers in his Education Week commentary, "How Education Reform Traps Poor Children." He bemoans the educational techniques of charter school teachers whom, he says, perseverate on mechanical drills and rote learning. This results in a pedagogy that is "noticeably different from the questioning, discovering, arguing, and collaborating that is more common (though by no means universal) among students in suburban and private schools." In low-income schools, he charges, "not only is the teaching scripted, but a system of almost militaristic behavior control is common, with public humiliation for noncompliance and an array of rewards for obedience that calls to mind the token-economy programs developed in prisons and psychiatric hospitals."Phew. Strong stuff. This "pedagogy of poverty" (the phrase comes from a 1991 paper by Wisconsin professor Martin Haberman) is racist, charges Kohn, stemming from an over-emphasis on standardized tests. In the end it "serves to simultaneously narrow the test-score gap and widen the learning gap."
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Mitch Kapor knows something about reaching full potential.
When the IBM PC came out in the early 1980s, it was fabulous in concept. A computer that fit on a desk! But available programs were clunky and sales were slow. Kapor went about developing Lotus 1-2-3, a spreadsheet designed for the computer that turned the early PC into a bona fide business machine.It's no different with students who are potentially brilliant at science and math, but are hamstrung by poor schools that are not equipped to prepare them for the 21st century. "It is possible to take a population of students who are failing and whose schools are failing them, who are being written off as not being college material," Kapor says, "and if they have the right support, they can all go to college and succeed."
Kapor is a tech icon, for starting Lotus, for cofounding the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for being the first chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, which supports Firefox and other open source projects. He's a San Francisco-based venture capitalist now and he's done well for himself.
But he has always had a wide progressive advocacy streak. Born in Brooklyn, he worked as a rock disc jockey, taught Transcendental Meditation and worked as a mental health counselor before making his name in the tech field.
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The University of Texas at Austin should boost enrollment by 10 percent a year and cut tuition at UT System campuses in half, the chairman of the system's board of regents suggests.That's according to this story in today's Austin American-Statesman. The Statesman obtained a draft memo written by Gene Powell, chairman of the nine-member board, in early April. The memo outlines several goals, including:
- Make UT-Austin the number 1 public university in the country
- Increase undergraduate enrollment at UT-Austin by 10 percent a year for four years starting in 2013
- Determine the percentage increase for the other UT System campuses, including UT-Arlington and UT-Dallas
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Women who give birth during the fall and winter are twice as likely to suffer from postpartum depression than if they deliver in the spring, according to a study in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology. Seasonal variations in mental disorders are well documented, but few studies have examined seasonal births and postpartum depression. From 2006 to 2007, 2,318 new Swedish mothers, 76% of whom had no previous psychiatric history, completed questionnaires containing a post-natal depression scale five days, six weeks and six months after giving birth. Results showed that women who gave birth from October to December were twice as likely to develop postpartum depression at six weeks and six months than women who delivered from April to June. The risk of postpartum depression was 43% higher for women who gave birth from July to September and 22% higher from January to March. There was no risk associated with deliveries from April to June. Researchers said reduced exposure to daylight may alter the activity of serotonin, causing mood disorders. Mothers giving birth in the fall might benefit from closer postpartum support and follow-up from doctors, they said.
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Just when you thought the Madison School District had enough on its plate -- perennially tight budgets, teachers incensed at Gov. Scott Walker's union-busting, minority achievement gaps -- it's under a gun of a different sort:Much more on the Talented & Gifted Wisconsin DPI complaint, here.Get your program for talented and gifted, or TAG, students in order, the state told the district in March, after a group of parents complained their kids were not being sufficiently challenged in the classroom.
I am dubious of efforts to devote additional time and money to students who already have the advantage of being smart -- and often white and upper-middle class -- and who have similarly situated parents adept at lobbying school officials.
Money, time and effort generally not being unlimited commodities in public school districts, the question over what is to be done about Madison's TAG program strikes me as one of priorities.
Improving TAG offerings would seem to require an equal reduction in something else. And maybe that something else is more important to more students.
Not that it's likely anyone on the School Board would ever acknowledge any trade-offs.
It's a "false dichotomy," said School Board member Ed Hughes, and "not an either/or situation." Can the district be all things to all people? I asked. "Sure," he said. "Why not?"
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During the 1960s, the whole society caved in and gave up the ghost. The education system, such as it was, crashed. I was there, as a teacher, part of that time, and I saw it happen. It foundered on just this point. Repetition. It was as if minds had gone soft and couldn't perform.Broadly speaking, the basics of arithmetic went out the window. So did spelling, grammar, and the ability to write coherent sentences. Poof. The amount of scut work it took to build a basic education became unacceptable.
When I read tracts about the intentional undermining of the American educational system, I sense truth in them, but to me the real crash was all about what I'm discussing here.
You can bring up drugs, horrible junk food, the influence of TV and the Internet, large classes, and so on. You can say they all make education a tougher job. Sure, I don't deny any of that, but the rubber meets the road in REPETITION. The grind. You can either do it or you can't. If you can't, everything you learn is faked. It SEEMS to be real, but it isn't.
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Teachers unions and their political allies argue that market forces can't supply quality education. According to them, only our existing system--politicized and monopolistic--will do the trick. Yet Americans would find that approach ludicrous if applied to other vital goods or services.Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries--"for free"--from its neighborhood public supermarket.
No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket outside of its district. Fortunately, though, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer. Private-supermarket families, however, would receive no reductions in their property taxes.
Of course, the quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in families' choices about where to live. Real-estate agents and chambers of commerce in prosperous neighborhoods would brag about the high quality of public supermarkets to which families in their cities and towns are assigned.
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Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah, via a kind reader's email:
Urban Prep Academy will mark another first this year -- the city's all-male, all-African-American charter high school will be sending its first students to an Ivy League school in the fall.Much more on Chicago's Urban Prep Academy and the proposed Madison Prep IB Charter school here.Urban Prep Academy will mark another first this year -- the city's all-male, all-African-American charter high school will be sending its first students to an Ivy League school in the fall.
Seniors Matthew Williams and Julius Claybron have been accepted into Cornell University. Williams also has been accepted into Dartmouth College and wait-listed at Harvard and Yale, school officials said.
The students and 102 others in the Class of 2011 announced the colleges they will attend at a ceremony Wednesday at U.S. Cellular Field. They put on baseball caps for their college picks, which included Morehouse, Oberlin, Grinnell and the University of Michigan.
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An engineering student likely will make significantly more money after college than an English major.So the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is proposing a new tuition structure to allow it to charge engineering students significantly more for a bachelor's degree than it charges English majors.
UNL Chancellor Harvey Perlman is scheduled to present a "differential tuition" proposal to the NU Board of Regents Friday.
Specific details are being kept under wraps until Friday's meeting. But the proposal is expected to allow UNL, for the first time, to charge more tuition for some undergraduate programs than for others.
It would be a watershed departure from the concept that all Nebraska resident undergraduates should pay the same tuition for their degrees -- currently $198.25 per credit hour -- no matter what they study.
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Disability Rights Wisconsin (78K PDF), via a kind reader's email:
Special interests in Washington DC have hired expensive lobbyists who also represent large corporate interests including, General Motors and Proctor & Gamble to try to pull the wool over the eyes ofparents ofchildren with disabilities. They allege that their interest is, "To advocate for parental options in education that empowers low and middle-income families to make choices in where they send their children to school." (1) These high powered special interests have never approached Disability Rights Wisconsin or any other major Wisconsin disability group to learn from those of us who have been advocating for Wisconsin children with disabilities for over 30 years, to find out what really needs improvement Wisconsin's special education system. Instead, they have set up a Facebook site which fails to tell the whole truth about the bill they promote.Related: Wisconsin Public Hearing on Special Needs Scholarship.This fact sheet tells the whole truth about AB 110 and its effort to dismantle special education as we know it and subsidize middle and upper income families who want to send their kids to private school ai taxpayer expense.
Myth# l-AB 110 allows parents the option to choose any other school they want their child to attend if they are unsatisfied with the special education being provided in their public school.
Fact-AB 110 has no requirement in it that forces any school to accept a child who has a special needs voucher.
Myth# 2-Since only children with Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) can receive a special needs scholarship, private schools who accept them must provide them with special education and implement the child's IEP.
Facts-AB 110 makes no requirement that private schools which accept a special needs scholarship provide any special education or implement any IEP. In fact, AB II 0 does not even require that private schools which accept special needs scholarships have a single special education teacher or therapist on their staff!
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The notion that a college degree is essentially worthless has become one of the year's most fashionable ideas, with two prominent venture capitalists (Cornell '89 and Stanford '89, by the way) leading the charge.Pity the American parent! Already beleaguered by depleted 401(k)s and gutted real-estate values, Ponzi schemes and toxic paper, burst bubbles and bear markets, he is now being asked to contend with a new specter: that college, the perennial hope for the next generation, may not be worth the price of the sheepskin on which it prints its degrees.
As long as there have been colleges, there's been an individualist, anti-college strain in American culture--an affinity for the bootstrap. But it is hard to think of a time when skepticism of the value of higher education has been more prominent than it is right now. Over the past several months, the same sharp and distressing arguments have been popping up in the Times, cable news, the blogosphere, even The Chronicle of Higher Education. The cost of college, as these arguments typically go, has grown far too high, the return far too uncertain, the education far too lax. The specter, it seems, has materialized.
It's no surprise, given how the Great Recession has corroded public faith in other once-unassailable American institutions, that college should come in for a drubbing. But inevitability is just another word for opportunity, and the two most vocal critics are easy to identify and strikingly similar in entrepreneurial self-image. In the past year or so, James Altucher, a New York-based venture capitalist and finance writer, has emerged through frequent media appearances as something of a poster boy, and his column "8 Alternatives to College" something of an essential text, for the anti-college crusade. The father of two young girls, Altucher has a very personal perspective on college: He doesn't think he should pay for it. "What am I going to do?" he asked last March on Tech Ticker, a popular investment show on Yahoo. "When [my daughters are] 18 years old, just hand them $200,000 to go off and have a fun time for four years? Why would I want to do that?" To Altucher, higher education is nothing less than an institutionalized scam--college graduates hire only college graduates, creating a closed system that permits schools to charge exorbitant prices and forces students to take on crippling debt. "The cost of college in the past 30 years has gone up tenfold. Health care has only gone up sixfold, and inflation has only gone up threefold. Not only is it a scam, but the college presidents know it. That's why they keep raising tuition."
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During the second half of the 19th century, the world's biggest economies endured a series of brutal recessions. At the time, most forms of reliable economic knowledge were organized within feudal, patrimonial, and tribal relationships. If you wanted to know who owned land or owed a debt, it was a fact recorded locally--and most likely shielded from outsiders. At the same time, the world was expanding. Travel between cities and countries became more common and global trade increased. The result was a huge rift between the old, fragmented social order and the needs of a rising, globalizing market economy.To prevent the breakdown of industrial and commercial progress, hundreds of creative reformers concluded that the world needed a shared set of facts. Knowledge had to be gathered, organized, standardized, recorded, continually updated, and easily accessible--so that all players in the world's widening markets could, in the words of France's free-banking champion Charles Coquelin, "pick up the thousands of filaments that businesses are creating between themselves."
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Kaleem Caire has spent much of the last year making a passionate, personal and controversial pitch for a publicly funded male-only charter school called Madison Preparatory that would operate independently of the Madison Metropolitan School District. It aims to serve primarily minority boys in grades six through 12 and their families.Some might argue that certain programs within "traditional" public schools are experimental, such as Connected Math and Small Learning Communities among others.Caire, a Madison native and the president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison, has mustered a great deal of community support by highlighting the struggles of and grim statistics surrounding black and Hispanic young boys and men in Dane County, and through telling his own powerful story of underachievement in Madison's public schools.
"I learned about racism and lower expectations for minority kids when I arrived the first day at Cherokee Middle School, and all the black boys and a few other minorities sat at tables in the back. I was assigned to remedial math, and even when I showed the teacher I already knew how to do those worksheets, that's where I was stuck," Caire says.
With its emphasis on discipline, family involvement, preppy-looking uniforms and a non-negotiable stance on being a union-free school, Caire's proposal for the boys-only middle and high school has won hundreds of enthusiastic supporters, including a number of prominent conservatives who, surprisingly, don't seem particularly troubled by the school's price tag.
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Last month we brought you initial news of Mercedes-Benz's plan to open a teen driving program in the United States, and with the annual California State PTA Convention kicking off in Long Beach, the German automaker's American subsidiary has confirmed its plans and revealed a few details along the way.The first such program will open in Los Angeles before similar initiatives are launched across the country. The Mercedes-Benz Driving Academy aims to make new drivers better drivers by integrating their advanced curriculum with the mandated state accreditation process to make for one, all-encompassing program that will take teens from theory through practice and on to their driver's permit.
Other custom-tailored programs will be offered as well, and Mercedes is also teaming up with Impact Teen Drivers, unfortunately named though it is, to deliver free two-hour parent/teen workshops at 20 schools across the city beginning late this summer. MBUSA is in the process of recruiting the best driving instructors it can get its hands on with a plan to officially open the program this coming October. Details in the press release after the jump, with photos in the gallery below.
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Updates on the higher education bubble (see chart above):1. Wikipedia now has an entire entry dedicated to the "Higher Education Bubble."
2. The Harvard Business Review blog has a new post on "The Business School Tuition Bubble."
3. The Pope Center for Higher Education Policy has a new article on "The Cost of the College Bubble."
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India is considering allowing Western universities to plant satellite campuses directly in the subcontinent's fertile soil.There is a bill currently making its way through the Indian parliament -- The Foreign Educational Institutions Bill -- that would open up for universities in the West, particularly in the U.S., a massive English-speaking market. Massive is the key word. We're talking hundreds of thousands of Indian students reaching college age who are interested in an education that would allow them to better participate in a globalizing economy.
At first glance, the passage of the bill, which is being pushed ahead by Human Resources Minister Kapil Sibal and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, benefits Western universities by providing them with a growth opportunity and allowing access to a well-educated student population interested in an education whose brand is recognized across the world.
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The Madison School District is under added pressure to improve how it identifies and educates talented and gifted students after state officials found its program does not comply with state law.Much more on the talented & gifted complaint, here.In revealing shortcomings in the district's offerings for talented and gifted (TAG) students, the Department of Public Instruction challenges the approach some schools, particularly West High School, have used in which all students learn together.
"The district is going to have to face (the question): 'How do they reconcile their policy of inclusion with honors classes?'?" said Carole Trone, director of the Wisconsin Center for Academically Talented Youth at UW-Madison. "If parents see the other districts are challenging their students more, they might send their students there."
Developing a comprehensive system to identify TAG students -- including testing and staff training -- can be expensive, Trone said. Moreover, districts that don't identify students from all socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds open themselves up to discrimination lawsuits, she said.
Superintendent Dan Nerad said it's unclear how much such a revamped program will cost.
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With several new GOP governors taking power, shock if not awe pervades the Midwest, particularly among those of us who are Democratic urban dwellers. Perhaps the wave of corporate tax breaks, service cuts to the needy, and transfer of school aid from poor to wealthy districts will be undone with the next swing of the political pendulum. Yet there is one GOP budget provision in Wisconsin that I hope survives.Clusty Search: John Norquist.For 20 years there's been debate about parental school choice, but only a few places actually have it. Milwaukee has had choice since 1991. At first it was very limited--no religious schools, the program restricted to families with very low incomes, and a cap on total enrollment of 1,000. But parents are now able to choose religious schools, the income limit has been raised to 175% of the federal poverty line ($39,113), and the cap has increased to 22,500 students.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has proposed allowing any Milwaukee parent, regardless of income, to enroll their children in private and parochial schools. This will address two problems with the current choice program. One, the cap on total enrollment has forced parents onto waiting lists and into lotteries. Two, the income limit has the effect of isolating low-income students from other more affluent students.
Other jurisdictions, including Florida, Arizona and Cleveland, have choice programs. In Washington, D.C., choice was implemented under President George W. Bush and frozen under President Barack Obama. But Florida's program requires a public school to fail, with failure measured by the state, not by parents. And all choice programs have limitations that undermine the desire of parents to have their children attend a school in which they have confidence. Yet if you think about it, America already has a school choice program in large metro areas. It's a system that segregates the poor from the rich and works against Americans who want to live in cities. Here's how it works.
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OF all the goals of the education reform movement, none is more elusive than developing an objective method to assess teachers. Studies show that over time, test scores do not provide a consistent means of separating good from bad instructors.Test scores are an inadequate proxy for quality because too many factors outside of the teachers' control can influence student performance from year to year -- or even from classroom to classroom during the same year. Often, more than half of those teachers identified as the poorest performers one year will be judged average or above average the next, and the results are almost as bad for teachers with multiple classes during the same year.
Fortunately, there's a far more direct approach: measuring the amount of time a teacher spends delivering relevant instruction -- in other words, how much teaching a teacher actually gets done in a school day.
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GreatSchools is headquartered in San Francisco, home of the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). And it just so happens that San Francisco Unified is on the vanguard of school choice, allowing and encouraging all parents to make a proactive choice about which of the districts' approximately 160 schools they would like their children to attend.SFUSD recently completed the "first round" of its school selection process for the 2011-12 school year, and released some interesting information about the process.
Like most districts, SFUSD has the concept of an "attendance area" for elementary schools. Perhaps the most interesting piece of data is that only 23 percent of kindergarten applicants listed their attendance-area school as a first choice. The remainder: 24 percent listed a city-wide school, and 53 percent listed another attendance area school as their first choice.
Other findings:
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Brian Pleva Government Affairs Associate: American Federation for Children-Wisconsin, via a kind reader's email:
Does contain the info you need?Good afternoon!Wisconsin Special Needs Scholarship Assembly Bill 110 Summary (PDF).
I am writing to you because you recently expressed an interest in the bipartisan Wisconsin Special Needs Scholarship Act (Assembly Bill 110).
As you may know, the bill would allow parents to enroll their special needs children in the public or private school of their choice with the education dollars following the child to the new school. The bill, introduced by Representatives Michelle Litjens, Jason Fields & Evan Wynn, and Senators Leah Vukmir & Terry Moulton, has impressive momentum:
-AB 110 has attracted Republican, Democrat, and Independent cosponsors
-32 members of the Assembly have signed on to AB 110, which is over one-third of that house's current membership
-5 members of the Assembly Committee on Education have signed-on to AB 110, which is almost half of the 11-member committee
Fortunately, Assembly Education Committee Chair Rep. Steve Kestell decided today to schedule a Public Hearing on the Special Needs Scholarship Act for 10:00 am, next Tuesday, May 3rd.
This opportunity can pave the way toward making Special Needs Scholarships in Wisconsin a reality. It is crucial that as many affected families and school leaders as possible attend this public hearing and tell committee members, in their own words, what these scholarships would mean to them.
Please respond to this email and confirm whether you would be able to advocate for this legislation at the public hearing.
One parent wrote on our Facebook page, "It's so important! Why doesn't EVERYBODY get that???!!" It may be difficult to comprehend, but there are powerful, special interest groups that don't get it and will be working to defeat this bipartisan legislation.
While an impressive list of parents who wish to testify is growing, we know that opponents of education reform are always represented at these hearings. Therefore, please forward this email to friends, family, and colleagues who you think will be supportive. The momentum is encouraging, but we must keep it up!
If you have any questions about the bill or public hearing, please feel free to contact me, and check out our website: http://www.specialneedsscholarshipswi.org/.
Thank you!
Brian Pleva
Government Affairs Associate
American Federation for Children-Wisconsin
(608) 279-9484
Assembly
PUBLIC HEARING
Committee on EducationThe committee will hold a public hearing on the following items at the time specified below:
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
10:00 AM
417 North (GAR Hall)
State Capitol
Assembly Bill 110
Relating to: creating the Special Needs Scholarship Program for disabled pupils, granting rule-making authority, and making an appropriation.
By Representatives Litjens, Fields, Wynn, Knudson, Nass, Pridemore, Thiesfeldt, Vos, Kleefisch, LeMahieu, Nygren, Strachota, Bernier, Bies, Brooks, Endsley, Farrow, Honadel, Jacque, Knilans, Kooyenga, Kramer, Krug, Kuglitsch, T. Larson, Mursau, Petryk, Rivard, Severson, Spanbauer, Tiffany and Ziegelbauer; cosponsored by Senators Vukmir, Moulton, Galloway and Darling.
An Executive Session may be held on AB 71 at the conclusion of the public hearing.
Representative Steve Kestell
Chair
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Members of the younger generation in today's Hong Kong are different from their parents, who grew up watching only television. Technology, in the form of the internet, has given them a more interactive medium, with two-way communication and an ability to have a say in things and express opinions. However, this new environment that young people take completely for granted has hidden dangers in the form of bullying and intimidation.Online, people can persecute or harass others behind a shield of anonymity. It is a world where the bullies may not see the impact of their work; they may think what they are doing is funny, or they may not realise the consequences of their behaviour. Incriminating or embarrassing words or pictures placed online by others may come back to haunt people later when they apply for college or a job.
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On the morning of March 21, shortly after school began, a Berkeley High School student snuck into a bathroom stall with a gun to show it to a friend.Suddenly the weapon fired, the bullet ripping through the bathroom's thin outer wall and across a busy downtown street. Had the boys been facing the other direction, the bullet would have flown into a classroom full of students.
No one was injured, but it was the fifth gun discovered at the district's two high schools since January, a cluster of incidents that has sent parents into a panic and district administrators scrambling to address the new and disturbing trend.
The presence of guns on campus is not just Berkeley's problem.
According to state and national surveys, 6 percent of high school students say they have brought a gun to school at least once. That's the equivalent of at least 210 guns at Berkeley High School with its enrollment of 3,500 students.
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Gov. Chris Christie took his fight with the state's largest teacher's union to Harvard on Friday, repeating his claims that the New Jersey Education Association is the source of most education problems and calling them a "political thuggery operation."Richard Perez-Pena:The governor also acknowledged he has thought about the tough rhetoric he uses when describing the union, but said he would only stop if he is convinced the NJEA is willing to help change "the failed system."
Speaking to about 250 students and professors at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, Christie said his battle with the NJEA "is the only fight worth having," drawing applause.
"They're there to protect the lowest performers, to protect a system of post-production compensation," Christie said of the union. "For you to believe that's for the kids, you have to believe that a child will learn better under the warm comforting knowledge that a teacher pays nothing for their health benefits."
Conservatives may see Harvard as the heart of liberal darkness, but on Friday it gave a warm, even enthusiastic reception to Gov. Chris Christie and his ideas on education overhaul.Speaking to almost 200 students and staff members at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the New Jersey governor drew rounds of applause with his talk of sharply limiting teacher tenure, rigorously evaluating teachers and administrators, curbing the power of teachers' unions and pledging to appoint more-conservative justices to the State Supreme Court.
Mr. Christie's first ovation came when he said, "The reason I'm engaging in this battle with the teachers' union is because it's the only fight worth having."
he ground he covered would be familiar to anyone who has watched the town hall-style forums in New Jersey that have made Mr. Christie a YouTube star. There, at least a few detractors usually show up to question him, and his policies and pugnacious statements can make even some supporters uncomfortable.
But here, during Mr. Christie's 40-minute opening talk and a question-and-answer session of the same length, the response was less equivocal.
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In one corner of the courtyard, green-painted railings enclose the tomb of a saint. In another, a pair of 12-year-old boys in spotless white shirts and neatly pressed trousers politely answer visitors' questions. In Diyarbakir, a city in Turkey's Kurdish south-east where many children work on the streets or land in jail for throwing stones at security forces, these two have come to prepare for high school entrance exams. Asked what they want to do later, one says "doctor" and the other, grinning, declares "police".www.fethullahgulen.org.They are attending a study house run by supporters of Fethullah Gulen - a preacher who has inspired the creation of a vast network of schools and student dormitories that blend academic rigour, especially in the sciences, with a moral education based on Islamic principles.
"It's not just explaining English or maths - it's explaining what it means to be a good or bad person," says the director of Diyarbakir's 20 study houses. "In this system teachers come to school earlier, become friends with students and care about the relationship....In none of our schools do we teach religion. We tell them what's right and wrong. We show them good and bad practice, and they decide."
But in Turkey, opinion is sharply divided between those who see Mr Gulen as a force for social mobility and tolerance, and those who suspect he is insidiously undermining the country's secular foundations. His followers have been described as "Islamic Jesuits" - and as Turkey's equivalent of Opus Dei. Yet there is little doubt that the movement he inspires is now an important force shaping Turkish society, part of a broader evolution in which leaders emerging from a religious, business-minded middle class are gradually eclipsing older, fiercely secular, elites.
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It's not home schooling, but it's not traditional school either: There is a range of arrangements parents can make to enroll kids in public schools while keeping them at home.With help from the Internet and oversight by teachers, parents in many of the so-called Alternative Learning Experiences, or ALEs, have wide authority to chart their children's course. But state officials are taking steps to rein in activities seen as inappropriate for taxpayers to fund.
A rule Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn's office has developed would stop school districts from reimbursing parents of at-home enrolled students for what they buy. Instead, districts would pay directly for equipment and activities.
Reimbursements, also called stipends or parent accounts, can be used to pay for textbooks and basic supplies or for instruction in areas such as fine arts and physical education. A 2005 state audit found it was common for schools to pay for opportunities most students don't have: private gym memberships; music or horseback-riding lessons; ski rentals, lessons and lift tickets.
"Stipends can give the impression that ALE programs are essentially publicly financed home schooling," the superintendent's office said in a February description of concerns about the present rules.
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Many people, including commenters on this blog, say the people running the KIPP charter school network---the best known and most successful in the country---don't explain themselves enough. That may be, but KIPP provides more information about its efforts to raise student achievement than any other charter network, or most school districts for that matter.One example is its report, just released, on how many KIPP graduates have so far graduated from college: "The Promise of College Completion: KIPP's Early Successes and Challenges."
The report is a bit of a stretch in terms of KIPP taking credit or blame, since the students surveyed left KIPP more than a decade ago at the end of eighth grade. But KIPP co-founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg made preparing kids for college their chief goal when they started the first KIPP middle schools in Houston and the South Bronx in 1995. That is still their main target. They say they are determined to report how that effort is going no matter what statistical qualms they may hear from people like me.
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This week Governor McDonnell announced, as part of his "Opportunity to Learn" education reform agenda, an initiative to institute performance-pay at Virginia schools that are designated as "hard to staff."While performance-pay is supported by President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, many Democrats side with teachers unions in opposing performance-pay. I have been critical of many aspects of Governor McDonnell's education policy including his lack of adequate funding and partisan decision not to participate in Race to the Top. This latest initiative however, is worthy of support.
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Indiana will create the nation's broadest private school voucher system and enact other sweeping education changes, making the state a showcase of conservative ideas just as Gov. Mitch Daniels nears an announcement on whether he will make a 2012 presidential run.The Republican-controlled state legislature handed Daniels a huge victory Wednesday when the House voted 55-43 to give final approval to a bill creating the voucher program that would allow even middle-class families to use taxpayer money to send their children to private schools.
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The move to a digital culture is raising a new set of challenges for educators. This study examines the Internet sources that students commonly use and provides educators with ideas to help students develop better citation and writing skills.
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Based on the tweets from today's student conversation with Chancellor Martin, there's a big myth running around campus:No, the average family income of UW-Madison students isn't $90,000.
That number came from reports like these that were discontinued back in 2008. Why were they discontinued? Because the data they are based on is a train wreck. The information comes from students' self-reporting of their parents' income when they were in high school (reporting is done on the ACT questionnaire) and according to UW-Madison's office of academic planning and analysis 30% of UW-Madison students left the question blank (and that percent has been rising over time).
Is it a high estimate? A low one? Well, what we know is that a study done by two La Follette professors using Census blocks to estimate income (better than student self-report most likely) finds that family income at UW-Madison for Wisconsin residents isn't very out-of-whack with Wisconsin family incomes as a whole. For example, families of Wisconsin applicants to Madison have incomes that are 1.2 to 1.3% higher than the state average.
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We just received a tip that Seattle Public School students are using high-tech to steal teacher passwords, hack systems, and alter grades. I am waiting for SPS to confirm this.According to an email sent by the district's Chief Informational Officer Jim Ratchford at 11:15 a.m. today to SPS employees, including Interim Superintendent Susan Enfield, Department of Technology Services has determined that network log-in credentials "are being stolen and used to inappropriately access district systems."
The email, whose subject line reads "Unauthorized Access Warning," says that the incident "appears to have been going on for the last few weeks, possibly longer." "At this point, we are aware of this happening at these schools: Ballard, Ingraham, and Sealth. However, all schools and teachers are at risk," Ratchford says in his email.
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Ever since there have been IQ tests, people have debated what they actually measure. Is it "intelligence", is it an abstract combination of mental abilities, or is it, as Edwin Boring said, "the capacity to do well in an intelligence test"? Regardless of the answer, studies have repeatedly shown that people who achieve higher scores in IQ tests are more likely to do well in school, perform well in their jobs, earn more money, avoid criminal convictions, and even live longer. Say what you like about the tests, but they have predictive power.However, Angela Lee Duckworth from the University of Pennsylvania has found that this power is overrated. The link between our IQs and our fates becomes muddier when we consider motivation - an aspect of test-taking that is often ignored. Simply put, some people try harder in IQ tests than others. If you take this into account, the association between your IQ and your success in life becomes considerably weaker. The tests are not measuring intelligence alone, but also the desire to prove it.
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At a board meeting of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board on Wednesday, Higher Education Commissioner Raymund Paredes said that $10,000 bachelor's degrees -- books included -- as proposed by Gov. Rick Perry are "entirely feasible."He hopes to have concrete proposals and coursework in place to meet the challenge before the start of the next legislative session in 2013.
A repeated theme in the board's discussion about the governor's cost-cutting proposal was that they were not seeking to replace existing degrees or artificially push the costs of those down, but were rather seeking to provide alternative options for low-income students. "We're not talking about every field," Paredes said. "We're not talking about every baccalaureate degree. We're not talking about every student."
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Gov. Rick Snyder said today he wants to retool Michigan's school system so it demands and rewards performance in terms of student achievement.He detailed changes to merit pay and the teacher tenure system; approval for more charter schools; a new state office devoted to early childhood education; tough anti-bullying measures; a greater emphasis on online education; and a more flexible system in which state funding would follow students wherever they go, rather than being assigned to a particular school district.
Further, the governor announced as many as 23 financially distressed school districts could be placed under emergency managers who have beefed-up powers to scrap collective bargaining agreements under controversial legislation he recently signed into law.
Snyder also expanded "Schools of Choice" plans and said residents of a local district will have the first opportunity to enroll there, but schools will no longer be able to refuse out-of-district students. And he called for consolidation and competitive bidding of school district business and administrative functions.
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A novel strategy developed by autism researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, called "The One-Year Well-Baby Check Up Approach," shows promise as a simple way for physicians to detect cases of Autism Syndrome Disorder (ASD), language or developmental delays in babies at an early age.Led by Karen Pierce, PhD, assistant professor in the UC San Diego Department of Neurosciences, researchers at the UC San Diego Autism Center of Excellence (ACE) assembled a network of 137 pediatricians in the San Diego region and initiated a systematic screen program for all infants at their one-year check up. Their study will be published in the April 28 online edition of the Journal of Pediatrics.
"There is extensive evidence that early therapy can have a positive impact on the developing brain," said Pierce. "The opportunity to diagnose and thus begin treatment for autism around a child's first birthday has enormous potential to change outcomes for children affected with the disorder."
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Rasmussen Reports, via a kind reader's email:
Voters overwhelmingly believe that taxpayers are not getting a good return on what they spend on public education, and just one-in-three voters think spending more will make a difference.Nationally, the United States spends an average of about $9,000 per student per year. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 11% of voters think the taxpayers are getting a good return on that investment. Seventy-two percent (72%) disagree and say taxpayers are not getting their money's worth. Sixteen percent (16%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Thirty-four percent (34%) voters believe student performance will improve if more money is spent on funding for schools and educations programs. A plurality (41%) disagrees and thinks that increased spending will not lead to improve student performance. Twenty-five percent (25%) aren't sure.
The survey also found that voters tend to underestimate how much is spent on education. Thirty-nine percent (39%) say the average per student expenditure is less than $9,000 per year while only 12% think it's higher than that. Nine percent (9%) estimate the right amount but a plurality of 40% is not sure. There is a wide range of expenditure on education depending upon the state and region.
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The system of awarding science Ph.D.s needs to be reformed or shut down, given the tough competition for limited jobs in academia, a provocative series of pieces in one of the world's pre-eminent scientific journals said this week.According to the multipart series in the journal Nature, the world is awash in Ph.D.s, most of them being awarded to scholars who will never find work in academia, the traditional goal of those holding a doctorate.
"In some countries, including the United States and Japan, people who have trained at great length and expense to be researchers confront a dwindling number of academic jobs and an industrial sector unable to take up the slack," the cover article said.
Of people who received Ph.D.s in the biological sciences five to six years ago, 13 percent have tenure-track positions leading to a professorship, said Paula Stephan, who studies the economics of science at Georgia State University in Atlanta. For the rest, 10 percent work part time or not at all; 33 percent are in academic positions that don't lead to a professorship; 22 percent are in industry; and 20 percent are at community colleges or in government or non-profit jobs, she said.
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How Portland, Maine Took a Stand Against Childhood Obesity. It Spent $3.7 Million to Rally Schools and Other Sites in the State. More Families Adopted 5-2-1-0 a Day: At Least 5 Servings of Fruits and Vegetables , 2 Hours or Less of Screen Time, at Least 1 Hour of Exercise, and 0 Sugary Drinks. After All That, the Childhood Overweight-and-Obesity Rate for Southern Maine Dipped 1.5 Percentage Points to 31.3%.At first, it seems obvious: Recess and fruit keep kids trimmer and healthier than videogames and cookies. But there isn't much that's obvious about moving the needle on childhood obesity rates in the U.S.
Nine year-old Ayub Mohamud was gaining weight rapidly when he went to see his doctor at a pediatric clinic here in September. At home, Ayub and his four siblings snacked regularly on candy, chips and soda; a younger brother also was overweight. Ayub ate two breakfasts, one at home and one at school, and got little exercise during the long Maine winters. He had a dark skin coloring on the back of his neck called "acanthosis nigricans," which can be a sign of being prediabetic.
By the end of January, after implementing some of Portland's 5-2-1-0 principles, Ayub had lost three pounds. His mother stopped buying a lot of candy, soda, and chips, and Ayub started eating carrots and broccoli. He and his 7-year-old brother were competing to do push-ups and sit-ups or try new foods. "I like it," Ayub says of his healthier new life.
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Madison School District 450K PDF and the DPI Preliminary Audit, via a kind reader's email:
I. Introduction A.Title/topic-Talented and Gifted ComplianceMuch more on the Wisconsin DPI Parent Talented & Gifted complaint.B. Presenter/contact person -Sue Abplanalp, Jennifer Allen, Pam Nash and Dylan Pauly
Background information- On March 24,2011, MMSD received DPI's initial findings in the matter ofthe TAG complaint. DPI found MMSD to be noncompliant on all four counts. The Board has forty-five days from the date of receipt ofthe initial findings to petition the state superintendent for a public hearing. If the Board does not request such a hearing, the findings will become final. Once the findings are final, regardless of whether a hearing is held, if there is a finding of noncompliance, the state superintendent may develop with the Board a plan for compliance. The plan must contain a time line for achievement of compliance that cannot exceed ninety days. An extension of the time period may be requested if extenuating or mitigating circumstances exist.II. Summary of Current Information:
Current Status: Currently, DPI has made an initial finding of noncompliance against MMSD. While the Board is entitled to request a public hearing on the issue of compliance, the administration does not recommend this course of action. Consequently, at this time, the administration is working toward the development ofa response to DPI's findings, which will focus on remedial steps to insure compliance.Proposal: Staff are working on a response to the preliminary findings which we will present to the Board when completed. It is the administration's hope that this response will serve as the foundation to the compliance plan that will be developed once the DPI findings are final. The response will include input from the TAG Advisory Committee, the District's TAG professionals -- our Coordinator and staff. A meeting to begin work one the proposed response is currently scheduled for April28, 2011 from 4:00 p.m.-5:00pm. Subsequent meetings will follow.
Watch Monday evening's Madison School Board discussion of the DPI Talented & Gifted complaint, here (starts at 128:37). and here.
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Connecticut school officials cannot be held liable for their decision to discipline a student for an Internet posting she wrote off school grounds, a federal appeals court ruled Monday as it defended the leeway given school administrators who act reasonably when confronted with dilemmas that test the boundaries of what is Constitutionally protected.The 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan sided with Burlington, Conn., school officials after they punished Avery Doninger by preventing her from serving as class secretary as a senior.
Doninger sued the administrators at Lewis B. Mills High School, saying her free speech and equal protection rights were violated after she distributed the 2007 posting criticizing administrators for canceling a popular school activity. A lower judge had twice ruled school officials were entitled to immunity.
A three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit agreed.
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The Project On Student Debt estimates that the average college senior in 2009 graduated with $24,000 in outstanding loans. Last August, student loans surpassed credit cards as the nation's largest single largest source of debt, edging ever closer to $1 trillion. Yet for all the moralizing about American consumer debt by both parties, no one dares call higher education a bad investment. The nearly axiomatic good of a university degree in American society has allowed a higher education bubble to expand to the point of bursting.Since 1978, the price of tuition at US colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that in number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the US economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But while college applicants' faith in the value of higher education has only increased, employers' has declined. According to Richard Rothstein at The Economic Policy Institute, wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished. Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007 recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.
What kind of incentives motivate lenders to continue awarding six-figure sums to teenagers facing both the worst youth unemployment rate in decades and an increasingly competitive global workforce?
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LEANDRA RAMM (pictured) is a mezzo-soprano with more on her mind than music. Someone--a deranged Singaporean cyber-stalker, she claims--has posted around 4,000 internet messages in the past five years, depicting her as a talentless, sex-crazed swindler. He has also created a blog under her name and has left obscene messages on her own website.Ms Ramm, who lives in New York, has had scant help from the American police, who say the offence is committed in Singapore. But she says the police in Singapore have shown no interest. Ms Ramm says her career, social life and emotional well-being have all suffered. Not only does she get daily death threats, but so do all those associated with her: friends, family, colleagues and boss. She says she feels "humiliated, helpless and abused".
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The Guardian highlights a serious problem both in the United Kingdom and the United States: students aren't comfortable with and sometimes aren't prepared for academic writing.Whether the cause is an unsatisfactory education prior to enrollment or a long layoff since a student last studied formally, writing improvement is a priority.
Daphne Elliston cried the first time she had to write an assignment. She put it bluntly:
"I just didn't know what I was doing."
The Guardian highlights a serious problem both in the United Kingdom and the United States: students aren't comfortable with and sometimes aren't prepared for academic writing.
Hurdles include understanding content and vocabulary unique to academic writing, which can be a stumbling block to understanding the assignment itself. Research, too, is difficult when a student is having trouble with language.
And then they must analyze it, process it and put it into their own words to write the paper. It can be a daunting combination, but colleges and universities are trying to rectify it.
Daphne Ellison said she thought a gap in her education was the reason for her trouble with writing--she continued higher education after many years out of school--but Margi Rawlinson, an academic coordinator at Edge Hill University, says it's an epidemic not confined to non-traditional students:
"We have people with A-levels who are arriving poorly equipped for academic writing," she says.
"I think one of the issues at A-level is that they're not being taught to research independently, and [with essays] it's not just the writing--that's only part of it."
Rawlinson isn't alone in her assessment. Helena Attlee, a writer in residence at Worcester University and a fellow of the Royal Literary Fund echoes Rawlinson's diagnoses:
"It seems to me there's a lack of interface between A-levels and degrees, so the thing that people are required to do to get very good A-levels isn't equipping them to do what is required to get a degree."
A variety of support systems are in place for struggling writers, from one-on-one instruction to more detailed irection on particular assignments from professors themselves. School officials are hopeful that increased attention and support can improve an adult student's poor writing skills. Professor Wayne Martin, when askked whether students can really improve, sums it up:
"Yes, incredibly. And the biggest improvement is generally in the first five weeks," he says.
---------------------------
"Teach by Example"
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The Concord Review [1987]
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National Writing Board [1998]
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Obama had his "Sputnik Moment," when standardized test scores around the world pointed to the mediocrity of American students in reading, math and sciences. There is now a major mantra coming from Washington to all state capitals: the "race to the top" is on, and it doesn't include a continuation of the downward spiral of test scores. The new modus operandi: Leave aside achievement throughout the years in high school, the stream of G.P.As., the difficulty of courses taken during the years in 9 to 12, and any creative projects done by students. Base everything on standardized tests.When career prospects, prestige, and job security are connected to one and only one criteria -- score on a standardized test -- human nature is bound to creep in. Baseball players start taking steroids; Olympic athletes try every means to beat the system. Will it happen to dedicated teachers who are working hard to educate our next generation? Will temptation overtake honesty, integrity and ethical behavior?
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Michigan's public schools need to more rigorously measure students' academic growth, but with fewer state rules to make that happen, Gov. Rick Snyder said today.That means more autonomy for individual schools and teachers, and a system to financially reward outstanding teachers who can mentor others.
Also, state schools superintendent Michael Flanagan called for a virtual deregulation of schools, such as eliminating minimum number of hours or days students must attend each year.
That's a change Snyder hinted he'll include in his special message on education Wednesday. He said the state should give teachers and schools and the state more flexibility to teach and to lift all students to higher academic standards.
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Two to three years ago, I found very little traction when trying to initiate discussions around the potential use of mobile phones in education with many counterparts in education ministries around the world. (And when this *was* discussed, talk usually centered on how to ban them from schools.)This is now changing very quickly! Many factors appear to be behind this change -- including, it is probably worth noting, the strong apparent interest by many companies to get in on the ground floor of what they feel will be very large markets related to 'm-learning' in developing countries in the coming years. (I now get so many cold calls from vendors every week wanting to share information about their 'm-learning solutions' that I let all phone calls ring into voicemail by default.)
With momentum building around 1-to-1 computing initiatives (where every student receives her own laptop) in many countries, many governments are embarking on large-scale roll outs of educational technologies as never before. However one feels about the potential relevance of mobile phones in education (and reasonable people can certainly disagree about this), it appears to me to be a topic that at a minimum merits some discussion in many education systems, given that small, connected computing devices known today as mobile phones are increasingly to be found in the pockets and pocketbook of teachers, and even students, at rates perhaps unimagined only a decade ago. It is worth noting that this large scale roll-out of computing devices in the hands of teachers and students has largely happened without any government subsidy at all. Given this fact, is it worthwhile for governments to consider taking some of the monies dedicated for the purchase of ICT hardware and use it instead for other purposes (more/better education content? more training? better connectivity? something not at all ICT-related?)? Even if you feel that mobile phones are not relevant to discussions of technology use in education, perhaps it is worth considering these sorts of questions before dismissing such use out of hand.
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WWhen David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling. Or so it seemed at the time. His family was living outside Albuquerque, in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. There were only a few other houses around, scattered among the bunchgrass and the cholla cactus, and a new construction site was the Eagleman boys' idea of a perfect playground. David and his older brother, Joel, had ridden their dirt bikes to a half-finished adobe house about a quarter of a mile away. When they'd explored the rooms below, David scrambled up a wooden ladder to the roof. He stood there for a few minutes taking in the view--west across desert and subdivision to the city rising in the distance--then walked over the newly laid tar paper to a ledge above the living room. "It looked stiff," he told me recently. "So I stepped onto the edge of it."In the years since, Eagleman has collected hundreds of stories like his, and they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down. He remembers the feeling clearly, he says. His body stumbles forward as the tar paper tears free at his feet. His hands stretch toward the ledge, but it's out of reach. The brick floor floats upward--some shiny nails are scattered across it--as his body rotates weightlessly above the ground. It's a moment of absolute calm and eerie mental acuity. But the thing he remembers best is the thought that struck him in midair: this must be how Alice felt when she was tumbling down the rabbit hole.
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More students are taking ambitious courses. According to a recent Department of Education study, the percentage of high school graduates who signed up for rigorous-sounding classes nearly tripled over the past two decades.But other studies point to a disconnect: Even though students are getting more credits in more advanced courses, they are not scoring any higher on standardized tests.
The reason, according to a growing body of research, is that the content of these courses is not as high-achieving as their names -- the course-title equivalent of grade inflation. Algebra II is sometimes just Algebra I. And College Preparatory Biology can be just Biology.
Lynn T. Mellor, a researcher in Austin, Tex., who has studied the phenomenon in the state, compares it to a food marketer labeling an orange soda as healthier orange juice.
"Like the misleading drink labels, course titles may bear little relationship to what students have actually learned," said Dr. Mellor, who has analyzed course completion, test records and other student data in Texas. "We see students taking more and more advanced courses, but still not performing well on end-of-course exams."
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California voters want government employees to give up some retirement benefits to help ease the state's financial problems, favoring a cap on pensions and a later age for collecting them, according to a new poll.Jennfer Levitz: Tea Party Heads to SchoolVoter support for rolling back benefits available to few outside the public sector comes as Gov. Jerry Brown and Republicans in the Legislature haggle over changes to the pension system as part of state budget negotiations. Such benefits have been a flashpoint of national debate this year, and the poll shows that Californians are among those who perceive public retirement plans to be too costly.
Voters appear ready to embrace changes not just for future hires but also for current employees who have been promised the benefits under contract.
Seventy percent of respondents said they supported a cap on pensions for current and future public employees. Nearly as many, 68%, approved of raising the amount of money government workers should be required to contribute to their retirement. Increasing the age at which government employees may collect pensions was favored by 52%.
From the York Suburban Citizens for Responsible Government website:Trying to plug a $3.8 million budget gap, the York Suburban School District, in the rolling hills of southern Pennsylvania, is seeking to raise property taxes by 1.4%.
No way, says Nick Pandelidis, founder of the York Suburban Citizens for Responsible Government, a tea-party offshoot, of the plan that would boost the tax on a median-priced home of $157,685 by $44 a year to $3,225.
"No more property-tax increases!" the 52-year-old orthopedic surgeon implored as the group met recently at a local hospital's community room. "If you don't starve the system, you won't make it change."
Fresh from victories on the national stage last year, many local tea-party activist groups took their passion for limited government and less spending back to their hometowns, and to showdowns with teacher unions over pay in some cases. Now, amid school-board elections and local budgeting, they are starting to see results--and resistance.
Higher Spending and Lower Scores: From 2000 to 2009, spending per student (in constant dollars) increased from $11,413 to $15,291 - a 34% increase. Meanwhile 11th grade PSSA reading proficiency remained steady at 71% while math fell from 69% to 62%. This means 29% of students are below acceptable reading levels and 38% are not proficient in math! The York Suburban experience mirrors the national trend where increased spending in the public education system has not resulted in improved student outcomes.
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So often I'm asked, "When does a parent know if his child is gifted?" I think they are surprised when I respond by saying, "I don't know. What does it mean to be gifted?"
After all, I am supposed to be the expert. I am expected to have the answers. But I can't provided any definitive reply.
First of all, what does it mean to be gifted? There are many definitions and many ways of assessing a child's ability. Is one more correct than another? Who should make that determination? You may want to look at some of the previous posts on this blog about this subject, includingConflicts in the Definition and Identification of Giftedness
What Does It Mean to Be Gifted?
Even if there is some consensus about the definition of giftedness, I think most people would agree that students fall somewhere on an extended continuum. There are children who have strong interests or abilities in just one area, which may or may not be a traditional academic subject. There are students who are more globally endowed and may finish high school before they are teenagers and receive graduate degrees by the time others finish high school. Some young people who are very bright have learning disabilities or physical disabilities or emotional problems. Some fit into a traditional school environment and some could care less about school.
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While working on another story this morning, I kept checking Wisconsin Eye's live coverage of the first meeting of Gov. Scott Walker's blue ribbon task force on reading.Related:Sitting next to the Governor at the head of the table was State Superintendent Tony Evers, flanked by Sen. Luther Olsen, chair of the Education Committee and Rep. Steve Kestell. Also on hand were representatives from organizations like the Wisconsin State Reading Association (Kathy Champeau), teachers and various other reading experts, including a former Milwaukee area principal, Anthony Pedriana, who has written an influential book on reading and student achievement called "Leaving Johnny Behind." Also on hand was Steven Dykstra of the Wisconsin Reading Coalition.
Dykstra, in particular, had a lot to say, but the discussion of how well Wisconsin kids are learning to read -- a subject that gets heated among education experts as well as parents and teachers -- struck me as quite engaging and generally cordial.
There seemed to be consensus surrounding the notion that it's vitally important for students to become successful readers in the early grades, and that goal should be an urgent priority in Wisconsin.
But how the state is currently measuring up to its own past performance, and to other states, is subject to some debate. Furthermore, there isn't a single answer or widespread agreement on precisely how to make kids into better readers.
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Hong Kong has escaped the anti-MMR childhood vaccine movement - linking the jab to autism - which spread across many English-speaking countries in the past decade.But despite the overseas movement's dangers and the fraudulent study that inspired it, a prominent paediatrician has nevertheless warned that local parents are too complacent about potential environmental factors that could trigger the onslaught of autism among some young children.
"They just don't know about it. They are just ignorant about it," said Dr Wilson Fung Yee-leung, who is a council member of the Hong Kong Medical Association.
He said it was dangerous not to be concerned about autism and its potential environmental causes.
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Austin Polytechnical Academy, a school established in 2007 to help broaden the West Side community's academic opportunities and retool perceptions of vocational education, is facing harsh realities as it prepares to graduate its first senior class: lagging test scores, diminishing attendance and dismal reading levels.Interactive Map: Where Chicago Schools are on Probation.Last October, Polytech joined the ranks of the 67 percent of Chicago's public neighborhood high schools when it was placed on academic probation. That same week, state-issued report cards showed that the school was not making sufficient yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Having both local and federal education officials label the school as failing is a bitter pill for parents, teachers and students. Yet people with a stake in Austin Polytech have always known they would need to struggle against long odds.
Administrators and teachers at Austin Polytech, which occupies two floors of a massive concrete building that once housed the failed Austin Community High School, have been working for four years to undo decades of neglect and failure.
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A controversial review of America's teacher colleges has met resistance in Wisconsin, where education school leaders in the public and private sector say they will not voluntarily participate.Much more, here.The National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit advocacy group, and U.S. News & World Report, known for its annual rankings of colleges, announced in January they would launch a first-ever review of the nation's roughly 1,400 colleges of education. The recruitment and training of teachers have become a hot-button issue tied to education reform, but university system presidents in Wisconsin as well as New York, Georgia, Oregon and Kentucky have expressed misgivings about the process of assessing and ranking their education schools.
"While we welcome fair assessment and encourage public sharing of our strengths and weaknesses, we believe your survey will not accomplish these goals. We therefore wish to notify you that our entire membership has decided to stand united and not participate further in the survey process," says an April 7 letter by Katy Heyning, president of the Wisconsin Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, and addressed to the National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. News. Heyning also is the dean of the College of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
The council, meanwhile, is filing open-records requests to get information about the public education schools in states that won't provide it voluntarily. Arthur McKee, manager of teacher preparation programs at the NCTQ, said the council had not received the letter from Heyning. But it had received a letter from UW System President Kevin Reilly.
That letter from March 28 says that UW's 13 teacher colleges declined to participate because of "serious concerns" about the survey's methods of data collection, analysis and reporting.
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A few months ago, we moved out of Washington, D.C., to be closer to where we'll be sending our children to school. That decision wasn't just made because it's our parish school or because many DC public schools have serious problems. Prior to getting married, my husband and I separately served on the school board that oversaw the change in our parish school's curriculum to a Classical approach. It was a large undertaking but we couldn't be more pleased with the results.From my experience, I know that the Classical movement is sizable and under-covered by major media. So I was completely delighted to read about a new Classical school in the area in a recent Washington Post. Written by Julia Duin, it begins with an anecdote that shows how Classical education works:
It's 1 p.m. and time for Amy Clayton's fifth grade to show off their memorization skills.Decked out in blue long-sleeved shirts and dark pants for boys and bright yellow blouses and plaid jumpers for girls, the students begin with the words of Patrick Henry's immortal "Give me liberty or give me death" speech first delivered on March 23, 1775, in Richmond. That recitation merges into verses from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride." That morphs into a few phrases from the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution and finally to fragments of speeches by Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.
"Beautifully done," Clayton says at the conclusion. "We just encapsulated 80 years of American history in our recitation." She is engaged, dramatic, and students are nearly jumping out of their seats trying to answer her questions about the beginnings of the Civil War. To her right is a banner containing a quote from Aesop: "No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted." Near that hangs a crucifix.
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I don't know your Year Group cohort, but I think you may not realize how narrow the ROTC's geographic/outreach footprint has become since 1989 (e.g. closure of 4 of New Jersey's 7 Army ROTC programs). Sadly, I have been taking on the "if they want it bad enough they will low crawl to ROTC" argument for almost two decades. I didn't buy that argument as a first year ROTC cadet in 1994 and I buy it even less now.The Army has allocated only a single Army ROTC instructor battalion to the entire state of Connecticut--which has one of the highest educational attainment levels in the United States and an enormous per capita student population. It is also noteworthy that Connecticut's population is LARGER than Mississippi's, over half the size of Alabama's and FOUR TIMES LARGER than South Dakota's. Despite its size and student population, Connecticut has just one Army ROTC battalion, while Mississippi has 5, Alabama has 10 and South Dakota has 3. It is misplaced to blame the Yale students for not seeking out Army ROTC -- particularly when the program HQ and the Professor of Military Science (PMS) sit 70 miles away in Storrs. Sure, there is some instruction available in New Haven, but the core of the ROTC's administrative, logistical and outreach capabilities in the state are 70 miles away from New Haven. This reality can not be discounted.
I challenge anyone to find a university comparable to Yale's size south of the Mason-Dixon line that is 70 miles away from an Army ROTC host institution.
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School reunion time is here and it is all too easy to slip back into a high-school state of mind. The desire to impress mixed with feelings of insecurity can serve up a bad emotional cocktail.Like it or not, clothing is a visual gauge of who has soared and who has stumbled. Pulling together an outfit that sends the message you desire--cool confidence or affluence or even Look-At-Me-Now Revenge on The One Who Dumped You or The Mean Girls Who Made School a Daily Nightmare--has become more daunting. Many high school and college reunions now stretch from an evening of dinner and dancing into rigorously scheduled all-weekend affairs.
"There's usually a Friday evening cocktail event, then a Saturday daytime something where you may bring your children, maybe to a park, a baseball field or a pool, then a Saturday evening gala and then a Sunday farewell brunch," says Mary Fanizzi Krystoff, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based events producer who has put together school reunions for more than 20 years.
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It's a time of high anxiety for high school seniors. Students across the country have been finding out where they got in to college and where they didn't. For many applying to the most selective schools, the news is not good. While the number of applications has shot up, acceptance rates have hit historic lows. It's been called, "application inflation." Michele Norris talks with Bloomberg News' higher education reporter Janet Lorin about college admissions and "application inflation."
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David Cyranoski , Natasha Gilbert , Heidi Ledford , Anjali Nayar & Mohammed Yahia:
Scientists who attain a PhD are rightly proud -- they have gained entry to an academic elite. But it is not as elite as it once was. The number of science doctorates earned each year grew by nearly 40% between 1998 and 2008, to some 34,000, in countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The growth shows no sign of slowing: most countries are building up their higher-education systems because they see educated workers as a key to economic growth (see 'The rise of doctorates'). But in much of the world, science PhD graduates may never get a chance to take full advantage of their qualifications.Steve Hsu has more.In some countries, including the United States and Japan, people who have trained at great length and expense to be researchers confront a dwindling number of academic jobs, and an industrial sector unable to take up the slack. Supply has outstripped demand and, although few PhD holders end up unemployed, it is not clear that spending years securing this high-level qualification is worth it for a job as, for example, a high-school teacher. In other countries, such as China and India, the economies are developing fast enough to use all the PhDs they can crank out, and more -- but the quality of the graduates is not consistent. Only a few nations, including Germany, are successfully tackling the problem by redefining the PhD as training for high-level positions in careers outside academia. Here, Nature examines graduate-education systems in various states of health.
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In the fall of 1984, a 17-year-old freshman at the University of Virginia named Liz Securro was invited to a fraternity party. While there, she was given a tour of the historic house and offered a cup of the dark green cocktail that was its specialty. Within minutes she was incapacitated. She was carried into a bedroom and raped. She woke up wrapped in a bloody sheet (she had been a virgin) and watched as the rapist coldly packed his backpack and told her, "You ought to get out of here before someone sees you."Alone, bruised and bleeding, she walked to the emergency room, waited for hours, was sent to Student Health and began a weeks-long ordeal. One school official suggested she take some time off or perhaps transfer. Many doubted her story. She realized she had no real hope for justice, and so she gave up trying to find it.
But 20 years later, something remarkable happened: Her rapist, who had joined Alcoholics Anonymous, sent her a letter of apology--or, as Liz came to see it, a handwritten confession. The story of his prosecution and ultimate imprisonment is detailed in her riveting new book, "Crash Into Me," which includes a horrifying revelation. She learned during the discovery process of the trial that she had been gang raped.
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It was not easy for me to stand before the state Legislature's Joint Finance Committee and threaten to withdraw my support from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which I have supported for more than 20 years. But if lawmakers approve Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to lift the income requirement that has maintained the program for children from low-income families, that is exactly what I will do.The governor's plan would dramatically change the program's social justice mission and destroy its trailblazing legacy as the first and still one of the few in the nation that uses public dollars to help equalize the academic options for children from low-income and working-class families. I did not join this movement to subsidize families like mine, which may not be rich but have resources and, thus, options.
When I got into this battle in 1989, standardized test scores showed Milwaukee was failing to educate poor black children. That's when state Rep. Annette Polly Williams courageously stepped forth to make sure that poor families were afforded some opportunity to choose schools in the private sector for their children. She shepherded the pioneering voucher program through the Legislature.
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ROBERT MACNEIL: As we've reported, autism now affects one American child in a 110. Last month, a committee convened by public health officials in Washington called it a national health emergency. The dramatic rise in official figures over the last decade has generated a surge of scientific research to find what is causing autism.Among the centers for such research is here, the University of California, Davis MIND Institute in Sacramento. Here and around the country, we've talked to leading researchers about where that effort now stands. Among them is the director of research at the MIND Institute, Dr. David Amaral.
DR. DAVID AMARAL, MIND Institute: Well, I think we're close to finding several causes for autism. But there's -- I don't think there's going to be a single cause.
ROBERT MACNEIL: The science director of the Simons Foundation in New York, Dr. Gerald Fishbach; Dr. Martha Herbert, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School; and Dr. Craig Newschaffer, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Drexel University in Philadelphia. First, I asked, how close are we to discovering the cause of autism?
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via a kind reader's email.
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John Forester and a kind reader, via email
The SAA's launching a last-ditch lobbying effort to try to limit the pending bill that will expand the open enrollment period. My transcription of the video alert:Much more on Wisconsin's Open Enrollment program here.Good afternoon SAA members, this is your lobbyist John Forester coming to you on Thursday afternoon, April the 21st, with a priority legislative alert on Senate Bill 2, having to do with the open enrollment application period. I need you to contact the members of the Assembly Education Committee in support of the SAA's position on Senate Bill 2.
Senate Bill 2 was amended and passed in the Senate earlier this legislative session. The bill had a hearing in the Assembly Education Committee on April the 7th, and could be voted on by the committee as early as next Tuesday, April the 26th. The SAA is seeking to amend the bill. I have provided for you my testimony on the bill, as well as a Legislative Council memo explaining how the bill was amended in the Senate. You can find contact information for the Committee members on the left side of our website.
Now let me tell you this flat and straight. Some version of this bill is going to pass this legislative session. We are simply trying to get the bill amended to make it less objectionable. Now let me give you some information specifically regarding the bill. If adopted, Senate Bill 2 would expand the open enrollment application period from 3 weeks to the 3 full months of February, March and April. As amended, Senate Bill 2 would also create an alternate open enrollment application process that would allow a parent of a pupil wishing to attend a nonresident school district to apply to that school district if the pupil satisfies at least one of seven criteria established in the bill. Now under this alternate process, applications may be submitted outside the 3 month open enrollment window. The primary focus of our opposition to Senate Bill 2 is the last of the seven criteria in the alternate application process and it reads as follows: "The parent of the pupil and the nonresident school board agree that attending school in the nonresident district is in the best interests of the pupil." Now because the nonresident school district, assuming it has room for more students, has a financial incentive to accept new open enrollment students, this provision of the bill essentially creates the potential for year-round open enrollment, and I know that I've received lots of phone calls from SAA members saying that that's exactly what this would do. This provision would also provide difficult students and parents with one more weapon to manipulate school districts into making decisions favorable to the student and the parents.
Now we have requested that the committee solve this problem with that criteria number 7 either by deleting the 7th criteria listed in the alternate application process or by changing "nonresident school board" to "resident school board" in the bill language that was referenced earlier. Now I have been told by Assembly Education Committee members that the only way to get the bill changed to the way that we would like is for local school districts to contact the committee members and make the case. I'm doing all that I can on this bill, folks, I need your help and I need it now. So again I'm asking you, especially if the legislators that are members of the Assembly Education Committee are your legislators, please contact them and contact them as soon as possible and ask for this change in the bill. Again, some version of the bill is going to pass, what we want to do is to make the bill a little bit better for us. Again, what it really comes down to is: our response to this legislative alert is going to determine how successfully we can reshape the bill. Again thank you very much for everything you do on a daily basis for the kids here in this state. Thank you for your support and contact those legislators. This is your lobbyist John Forester signing off and Happy Easter.
[emphasis added]
It's interesting to see the true motivations and conflicts of interest openly expressed. Now who represents the interests of children and their parents, again?
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ROBERT MACNEIL: In New York City schools, there are more than 7,000 students with autism. Seven hundred of them, from preschool age to 21, attend this public school for autism in the Bronx, PS 176.WOMAN: Roll the dice. Oh, boy. What number?
STUDENT: Three.
WOMAN: Good. What are you going to do next?
ROBERT MACNEIL: These children see doctors periodically, but they go to school every day. It's the public school system that bears most of the burden of treating children with autism, because treatment means teaching. And federal law mandates that all children with disabilities are entitled to a free, appropriate education.
RIMA RITHOLTZ: Autism can suck the fun out of life. Having a child with a disability can suck the fun out of life. And we work very hard here to put the fun back in.
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Great art begins with an idea. Sometimes a vague or even bad one. How does that spark of creativity find its way to the canvas, the page, the dinner plate, or the movie screen? How is inspiration refined into the forms that delight or provoke us? We enlisted some of America's foremost artists to discuss the sometimes messy, frequently maddening, and almost always mysterious process of creating something new.
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First there was Amy Chua, the Yale law professor and author of "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," who sent legions of parents into a tizzy with her exacting standards for piano practice and prohibitions against sleepovers.Now comes Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University whose book "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think" was published on Tuesday. In it, he argues that parenting hardly matters, and that we should just let our children watch more television and play video games. With parenting made so easy, he says, we should go ahead and have more children.
It's the age-old nature-or-nurture debate. Ms. Chua clearly favors the nurture side of the equation (if her heavy-handed approach could be described as "nurturing"). Mr. Caplan, who has already been dubbed the "Un-Tiger Mom," writes, "While healthy, smart, happy, successful, virtuous parents tend to have matching offspring, the reason is largely nature, not nurture."
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One by one, the children trooped to our table and put their apples in front of my son. By the fourth apple, I asked Christopher--my date for "Lunch with Your Second Grader" at the local elementary school in Kinnelon, N.J.--what was going on."Oh, they don't like the apples that come with lunch, so they give them to me," he reported, shrugging. "I can't eat them all."
I'm the mother of two boys, now middle-schoolers, one a good eater and one who would live on pizza and root beer if I let him. Christopher eats apples, and Nicholas leaves his on the lunch tray. He's the one who needs his chocolate milk. Yes, chocolate.
And so it was disturbing to hear about the recent chocolate milk ban in the Fairfax County, Va., school system and elsewhere around the country. Ditching chocolate milk to cut down on our children's sugar intake might be the right sentiment, but it's the wrong solution.
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Several readers of the Consults blog recently had questions about the long-term course of autism, including succeeding in college and beyond. Our experts Dr. Fred Volkmar of the Yale Child Study Center and Dr. Lisa Wiesner, co-authors of "A Practical Guide to Autism," respond. For more on this and other topics, see their earlier responses in "Ask the Experts About Autism," and The Times Health Guide: Autism. The authors also teach a free online course on autism at Yale University, which is also available at iTunesU and on YouTube.Q.
Are you aware of any longitudinal studies of occupational outcomes and successful (independent) living for high-functioning autistic adults? Where would I find those? Are there particular strategies that should be pursued in high school or college to enhance the likelihood of success in these areas?
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It seems that the academic expository writing of our public high school students will rise, or fall, to the level of our expectations. Here are excerpts from narrative essays, written by U.S. public high school students, to illustrate that claim--three have been written to the student's own high expectations and the other three to our generally low expectations for National Competitions, civics and otherwise:
Excerpt from a 40-page essay written as an independent study by a Junior in a Massachusetts public high school [endnote notation omitted]:
"At first, the church hierarchy was pleased at this outburst of religious enthusiasm and female piety; it was almost a revival. Hutchinson, after all, was a prominent and devout member of the Boston church, and only the most suspicious churchmen found immediate fault in the meetings. But soon, Hutchinson's soirées became less innocuous. In response to her audience's interest--in fact, their near-adulation--and in keeping with her own brilliance and constant theological introspection, she moved from repeating sermons to commenting on them, and from commenting to formulating her own distinct doctrine. As Winthrop sardonically remarked, 'the pretense was to repeat sermons, but when that was done, she would comment...and she would be sure to make it serve her turn.' What was actually happening, however, was far more radical and far more significant than Hutchinson making the words of others 'serve her turn.' She was not using anyone else's words; she was preaching a new brand of Puritanism, and this is what is now known as Antinomianism."--------------
Excerpt from a Grand Prize-winning 700-word essay written for a National Competition by a Junior from a public high school in Mableton, Georgia:
"Without history, there is no way to learn from mistakes or remember the good times through the bad. History is more than a teacher to me; it's an understanding of why I am who I am. It's a part of my life on which I can never turn back. History is the one thing you can count on never to change; the only thing that changes is people's perception of it.----------------It cannot be denied that every aspect of the past has shaped the present, nor that every aspect of the present is shaping and will continue to shape the future. In a sense, history is me, and I am the history of the future. History does not mean series of events; history means stories and pictures; history means people, and yet, history means much more. History means the people of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. History means me."
Excerpt from a 30-page independent study by a Junior at a public high school in Worthington, Ohio [endnote notation omitted]:
"Opposition to this strictly-planned agricultural system found leadership under Deng Zihui, the director of rural affairs in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CCCPC). This faction believed that peasants engaged in farming should have freedom in management, and advocated a form of private ownership. To them, peasants should have the power to buy, sell, or lease land, and to manage and employ labor. Zihui saw collectivization as a dangerous and detrimental practice to the Chinese economy. The production-team system that was practiced under collective farming did not maximize agricultural output. Production teams were comprised of around 20 to 30 households in the neighborhood, and net income was based on the performance of the production team as a whole. Individual peasants did not see direct returns for their efforts, and therefore the incentive to work hard did not exist under the production-team system. Consequently, agricultural outputs and farmers' per capita net income were significantly low; in 1957, each farmer received an average net income of 73.37 yuan."----------------
Excerpt from a 750-word Grand Prize-Winning essay for a National Competition by a Sophomore from a public high school in Rochester, Michigan:
"Similar to how courage has changed our country, having courage has helped shaped who I am today. When I was in 7th grade, I befriended two boys with autism in my gym class. I fully knew that being friends with them was not going to help me climb any higher on the social ladder, but I did not care. I had the courage to go against what was socially acceptable in order to do what was right. I soon not only played with them in gym but invited them to sit with my friends at lunch too. Someone had to have the courage to say that they deserved to be treated equally.----------------Equality is a civic value that Americans take pride in, and it needs to be defended.
Courageous people stand up for what is right in order to preserve these civic values.
Courageous acts in American history are what have molded us into the great nation we are today. They are, in large part, the reason why we became an independent nation and also an important reason why we have our first African-American president. Social and political movements in the U.S. began with one courageous person willing to stand up and go against the crowd. Every downpour has to start with one drop of rain."
Excerpt from a 25-page essay by a Junior at a public high school in Manchester, Massachusetts [endnote notation omitted]:
"Paris was the center of medicine in the 19th century, an age which witnessed a revolt against dogmatism and a new emphasis on scientific thought. As universities were freed of political and ecclesiastic control, more social classes were able to attend, and true scientific thought was encouraged. A new type of clinical observation emerged that focused on active examination and explainable symptoms. Furthermore, laboratory medicine, meaning research-based medicine, gained a foothold. As medicine became more systematic, scientists moved away from the four humors view of the body and began conducting experiments in chemistry, notably biochemistry. In 1838, Theodor Schwann and Malthais Schleidan formulated the cell theory, and in 1854, Hugo von Mohl, John Goodsir, Robert Remak, and Rudolf Virchow demonstrated that cells arise from other cells. These two discoveries make up the modern cell theory and the foundation of all biological advances. With the discovery of cells came new opinions about the origins of disease, reviving interest in microbiology. The most widely accepted theory about how disease was spread was the "filth theory." According to the filth theory, epidemics were caused by miasmatic hazes rising from decaying organic matter. However, some disagreed with this hypothesis. The idea that epidemic diseases were caused by micro-organisms and transmitted by contagion was not new in the mid-19th century. It had been proclaimed by Fracastorius in the 16th century, Kircher in the 17th, and Lancisi and Linne in the 18th. Opposing the filth theory, Jacob Henle proposed the role of micro-organisms again in 1840. Unfortunately, many of his contemporaries viewed him as old-fashioned until some notable discoveries occurred. Bassi, Donné, Schoelein, and Grubi each proved fungi to be the cause of certain diseases. In 1850, bacteria, discovered earlier by Leeuwenhoek, were also confirmed as sources of disease. Even though micro-organisms as the source of disease was well documented, many did not accept this theory until about 20 years later. Nevertheless, people knew something was causing diseases, igniting a public hygiene movement in Europe and the dawn of the preventive medicine age."-----------------
Excerpt from a First Prize essay by a public high school Sophomore for a National Creative Minds Competition [creative nonfiction writing] organized by the oldest and best-known gifted program in the United States:
"It is summer, one of those elusive, warm days when the world seems at peace. I splash around in the ocean, listening to the voices of the beachgoers mingling with the quiet roar of the waves. When I scoop water into my palm, it is clear, yet all the water together becomes an ocean of blue. Nothing plus nothing equals something; I cannot explain the equation of the ocean. I dip my head under to get my hair wet and to taste the salt once held by ancient rocks. I hold myself up on my hands, imaging I am an astronaut, and explore my newfound weightlessness.------------But water is the opposite of space. Space is cold and lifeless, and water is warm and life giving. Both are alien to my body, though not to my soul.
Underwater, I open my eyes, and there is sunlight filtering through the ceiling of water. As I toss a handful of sand, the rays illuminate every drifting grain in turn. I feel as if I can spend forever here, the endless blue washing over me. Though the water is pure, I can't see very far. There is a feeling of unknown, of infinite depths.
As a little girl, I used to press my face against the glass of my fish tank and pretend I swam with my guppies, our iridescent tails flashing. The world moved so unhurriedly, with such grace. Everything looked so beautiful underwater--so poetic. It was pure magic how the fish stayed together, moving as one in an instant. What was their signal? Could they read minds? how did these tiny, insignificant fish know things I did not?"
The questions suggest themselves: What sort of writing better prepares our students for college and career assignments, and must we leave high standards for high school academic expository writing up to the students who set them for themselves? [The more academic excerpts were taken from papers published in The Concord Review--www.tcr.org]
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
19 April 2011
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Parents offered genetic testing to predict their risks of common, adult-onset health conditions say they would also test their children. That is the finding of a new study published in the May issue of Pediatrics (published online April 18). The study authors note these and other findings should put pediatricians on alert that parents may chose predictive genetic tests for themselves and for their children, and seek guidance from doctors about what to do with the information. Personal genetic tests are available directly to consumers at drug stores and over the Internet. They are controversial, and generally marketed to adults for their own use. However, it might be only a matter of time before parents become the focus of advertising campaigns targeting their children for testing, says Kenneth P. Tercyak, PhD, associate professor of oncology and pediatrics at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, a part of Georgetown University Medical Center."The findings of our study should remind clinicians and policy-makers to consider children when regulating genetic tests," says Tercyak, the study's lead author. "These tests usually don't offer a clean bill of health and can be hard to interpret even in the best scenario. They identify incremental risks for many common diseases. Most people carry some risk based on a combination of their family history, genetics, and lifestyle. A child's unexpected test results could trigger negative reactions among parents and children, and lead to conversations at the pediatrician's office that providers aren't prepared to have."
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It's good that Seattle City Council members, our mayor, and the Seattle School Board are finally calling for needed reform and accountability within our district. While many in our community were stunned at the revelations about the depth of ineptitude, obliviousness, and near criminality within our school district, some parents felt a saddened sense of relief mixed with frustration. This is the part of the story that remains untold.Parents in Seattle Public Schools have never been passive consumers but committed partners. Besides raising millions of dollars each year for our schools, they also get out the vote for our education levies and bonds. Some are watchdogs for our school district.
These "feet on the ground" parents know their schools and neighborhoods well.
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As the call for teacher evaluation and tenure reform intensifies across the country, the hypothetical arguments against holding teachers accountable become frustratingly similar. "How can we hold teachers accountable for students with difficult home lives? What about teachers who have homeless students in their classrooms? What about students whose parents are almost criminally uninvolved in their education? Certainly, it wouldn't be fair to make teachers responsible for those students." So, let's settle this once and for all: making sure that those students get an education is the whole purpose of public education. And the existence of teachers who feel they should only have to worry about the children of involved, employed, and educated parents is part of what drives the fervor for education reform.Public education should be a refuge for those children. It should be the one place where a child can be certain that his parents' actions cannot hurt him, and where he can be sure all of the adults have only his best interests at heart. Public education should ensure that EVERY child graduates with the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in college and in the 21st century job market. It should be the springboard out of generational poverty. Instead of family struggles or background being an excuse to give up on students, it should be the inspiration to work twice as hard to be sure students get the education that could change the course of their lives.
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The U.S. Constitution says nothing about public education, but all the state constitutions have clauses addressing it, and reading through them is a mildly inspiring way to spend half an hour. Arkansas: "Intelligence and virtue being the safeguards of liberty and the bulwark of a free and good government, the State shall ever maintain a general, suitable and efficient system of free public schools." Florida: "The education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida." Idaho: "The stability of a republican form of government depending mainly upon the intelligence of the people, it shall be the duty of the legislature . . ." Massachusetts: "It shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates, in all future periods of this Commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences." Michigan: "Religion, morality and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.The Texas state constitution hits a similar note in Article 7, which states: "A general diffusion of knowledge being essential to the preservation of the liberties and rights of the people, it shall be the duty of the Legislature of the State to establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools." Compared with the other states' fine print, this is pretty good. It isn't quite as ardent as Michigan's declaration, but it has considerably more enthusiasm than Wyoming's ("The right of the citizens to opportunities for education should have practical recognition"). And the idea it articulates, in one long legal sentence, is beautifully straightforward and persuasive: We need a well-educated populace in order to have a functional democracy, so the state should ensure that everyone gets an education. Simple.
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Years after graduating with an English degree, I have a shameful secret: I've never actually read the classics.Mr. White was that stern, older English teacher adored by the bookish nerds and despised by those students accustomed to getting by on entitlement and shouty parental phone calls. Naturally, I was crazy about him, and although I can't say the feeling was entirely mutual, two lines from a college recommendation letter he wrote for me prove that he understood my fundamental nature better than most adults I knew, including my parents: "Kate will never be a cheerleader, but she has a genuine love of learning. She is never without a book; usually not the assigned text."
I love that "assigned text" line all the more for its being sort of affectionately passive-aggressive. It's true that in Mr. White's A.P. Major British Writers, as in every English lit class I took between seventh grade and finishing my B.A., I only did about a third of the reading. Thanks to a finicky nature and what I now recognize as textbook ADHD, reading past Page 3 of a book that didn't immediately hold my interest felt like going to the zoo and being forced to watch the naked mole rats for hours, never being permitted to look in on the giraffes.
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Earl Martin Phalen, via a kind reader's email:
r. Steve Perry is the founder of the phenomenal Capital Preparatory Magnet School in Hartford, Connecticut. Recognized by U.S. News and World Report, 100 percent of the graduating seniors are admitted to four-year colleges. An outspoken and highly successful national leader in education, Dr. Perry is also an Education Correspondent for CNN.I was excited Dr. Perry could share his thoughts on school readiness, the role of community involvement in education, and keys to Capital Preparatory's success.
1. The 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress study noted that two out of three children in the United States are not reading at grade level. School readiness is a major crisis in our country.
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Are you ashamed that you find Facebook boring? Are you angst-ridden by your weak social-networking skills? Do you look with envy on those whose friend-count dwarfs your own? Buck up, my friend. The traits you consider signs of failure may actually be marks of intellectual vigor, according to a new study appearing in the May issue of Computers in Human Behavior.The study, by Bu Zhong and Marie Hardin at Penn State and Tao Sun at the University of Vermont, is one of the first to examine the personalities of social networkers. The researchers looked in particular at connections between social-network use and the personality trait that psychologists refer to as "need for cognition," or NFC. NFC, as Professor Zhong explained in an email to me, "is a recognized indicator for deep or shallow thinking." People who like to challenge their minds have high NFC, while those who avoid deep thinking have low NFC. Whereas, according to the authors, "high NFC individuals possess an intrinsic motivation to think, having a natural motivation to seek knowledge," those with low NFC don't like to grapple with complexity and tend to content themselves with superficial assessments, particularly when faced with difficult intellectual challenges.
The researchers surveyed 436 college students during 2010. Each participant completed a standard psychological assessment measuring NFC as well as a questionnaire measuring social network use. (Given what we know about college students' social networking in 2010, it can be assumed that the bulk of the activity consisted of Facebook use.) The study revealed a significant negative correlation between social network site (SNS) activity and NFC scores. "The key finding," the authors write, "is that NFC played an important role in SNS use. Specifically, high NFC individuals tended to use SNS less often than low NFC people, suggesting that effortful thinking may be associated with less social networking among young people." Moreover, "high NFC participants were significantly less likely to add new friends to their SNS accounts than low or medium NFC individuals."
To put it in layman's terms, the study suggests that if you want to be a big success on Facebook, it helps to be a dullard.
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There are growing protests from teachers and parents across the country over high-stakes standardized testing and other school reform measures -- many of which the Obama administration has encouraged states to undertake -- as well as over huge cuts in public education.The pushback has largely been local, though a national march on Washington is being organized for this summer as states move to enact reforms that call for more charter schools and vouchers and that make standardized testing more important than ever in evaluating schools, students and teachers.
In North Carolina, for example, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools this spring field tested 52 (yes 52) new standardized tests, including four exams each for kindergartners and first-graders, and kids lost as much as a week of instruction. That won't stop the district from adding even more tests next year, for art, music and physical education, and many teachers and parents fear that this is becoming the face of public education.
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I am probably the nation's most devoted reader of real-life high school reform drama, an overlooked literary genre. If there were a Pulitzer Prize in this category, Alexander Russo's new book on the remaking of Locke High in Los Angeles would win. It is a must-read, nerve-jangling thrill ride, at least for those of us who love tales of teachers and students.Readers obsessed with fixing our failing urban schools will learn much from the personal clashes and political twists involved in the effort to save what some people called America's worst school. I remember the many news stories about Locke, and enjoyed discovering the real story was different, and more interesting.
Locke was not really our toughest high school. Russo finds some nice students and kind teachers. But its inner-city blend of occasional mayhem and very low test scores made it famous when its teachers revolted and helped turn it over to a charter school organization that tried to fix it by breaking it into smaller, more manageable pieces.
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Michael Jedlicka, a board member of the Cal Parents committee, answered more financial questions than usual from his booth at Saturday's Cal Day - UC Berkeley's annual open house that attracted 40,000 prospective students and their parents.While most of the high school seniors already have been accepted for admission to Berkeley, many also have acceptances from other colleges and must make a decision on where to enroll by May 1.
The university made its best effort to close the deal. On a sunny day, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau addressed 5,000 incoming students, lab doors swung open to the public - you could take a look at a stem cell or start your own earthquake in the seismology lab - and the Cal marching band trumpeted and drummed their way through campus.
Yet in the wake of steep budget cuts and Gov. Jerry Brown's recent announcement that UC tuition could double to $20,000 in the 2012-13 academic year, Jedlicka said, many visiting parents wanted to know how it would impact their child's college experience - and their own checkbook.
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Grace Wong has felt the sting of intolerance quite literally, in the rocks thrown at her in Australia, where she pursued a PhD after leaving her native China. In the Boston area, where she's lived since 1996, she recalls a fellow customer at the deli counter in a Chestnut Hill supermarket telling her to go back to her own country. When Wong's younger son was born, she took a drastic measure to help protect him, at least on paper, from discrimination: She changed his last name to one that doesn't sound Asian."It's a difficult time to be Chinese," says Wong, a scientist who develops medical therapies. "There's a lot of jealousy out there, because the Chinese do very well. And some people see that as a threat."
Wong had these worries in mind last month as she waited to hear whether her older son, a good student in his senior year at a top suburban high school, would be accepted to the 11 colleges he had applied to, which she had listed neatly on a color-coded spreadsheet.
The odds, strangely, were stacked against him. After all the attention given to the stereotype that Asian-American parents put enormous pressure on their children to succeed - provoked over the winter by Amy Chua's controversial Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - came the indisputable reality this spring that, even if Asian-American students work hard, the doors of top schools were still being slammed shut in many faces.
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A new state law has emboldened the Detroit mayor and schools chief to take a more aggressive stance toward public unions as the city leaders try to mop up hundreds of millions of dollars in red ink.Robert Bobb, the head of the Detroit Public Schools, late last week sent layoff notices to the district's 5,466 salaried employees, including all of its teachers, a preliminary step in seeking broad work-force cuts to deal with lower enrollment.
Earlier last week, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing presented a $3.1 billion annual budget to City Council in which he proposed higher casino taxes and substantial cuts in city workers' health care and pensions to close an estimated $200 million budget gap.
Mr. Bobb, already an emergency financial manager for the struggling and shrinking public school system, is getting further authority under a measure signed into law March 17 that broadens state powers to intervene in the finances and governance of struggling municipalities and school districts. This could enable Mr. Bobb to void union contracts, sideline elected school-board members, close schools and authorize charter schools.
......
Mr. Bobb, appointed in 2009 by Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm and retained by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, pledged last week to use those powers to deal decisively with the district's $327 million shortfall and its educational deficiencies. Mr. Bobb raised the possibility of making unilateral changes to the collective-bargaining agreements signed with teachers less than two years ago.
He is also expected to target seniority rights that protect longtime teachers from layoffs and give them the ability to reject certain school placements.
The Detroit Federation of Teachers will likely fight him on these issues. The union couldn't be reached for comment.
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The local nonprofit Children at Risk has released to the Chronicle its 2011 ranking of public elementary, middle and high schools in the eight-county Houston area. Each year, the list of the area's best and worst campuses generates a great deal of discussion and, in some cases, debate. Talking about schools is a good thing, we think.There is, of course, no one perfect way to grade schools. The Children at Risk methodology is designed to evaluate schools on multiple academic measures and goes beyond the state's accountability system, which is based largely on whether students pass (or are projected to pass) the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. Children at Risk looks at the higher standard of "commended" on the TAKS. At the high school level, the most weight is given to a six-year graduation rate, calculated by Children at Risk. No matter what a school is doing, if students don't graduate, then did it get the job done?
The formula also gives a boost to schools with larger concentrations of low-income children in an attempt to adjust for the impact of poverty. Children at Risk attempted to include as many schools as possible in the rankings, but those with insufficient data or atypical grade-level configurations were excluded. The rankings are based on public data from the Texas Education Agency from 2010 or 2009 (using the most recent year available).
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Clear Water Bay toddler Stella Sipma is back home after spending weeks in a New York hospital having three major brain operations that have changed her life dramatically.The two-year-old, who suffers from a rare genetic disease that has caused major developmental delays, returned home to Sheung Sze Wan on Monday with mum Alison, dad Marcel and older sister Sophie.
Stella has tuberous sclerosis, which causes non-cancerous tumours to grow in vital organs, including the brain.
She was diagnosed at nine months and suffered daily violent seizures until last month when she had three operations to remove the tumours.
Before the operations, Stella was unsteady on her feet and had limited speech but since returning home, she has been full of energy, running around the house and playing with her older sister.
"The girls were really happy to be back and Stella was running around like a maniac," Alison said.
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PAUL M. MASON does not give his business students the same exams he gave 10 or 15 years ago. "Not many of them would pass," he says.Dr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida, believes his students are just as intelligent as they've always been. But many of them don't read their textbooks, or do much of anything else that their parents would have called studying. "We used to complain that K-12 schools didn't hold students to high standards," he says with a sigh. "And here we are doing the same thing ourselves."
That might sound like a kids-these-days lament, but all evidence suggests that student disengagement is at its worst in Dr. Mason's domain: undergraduate business education.
Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field, according to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement: nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. In their new book "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses," the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college on a national test of writing and reasoning skills. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than students in every other major.
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For the first time in more than 15 years, Robert MacNeil is returning to the program he co-founded, with a major series of reports on Autism Now. The subject that drew him back is one that resonates deeply with his own family and many others. Robin's 6-year-old grandson, Nick, has autism.The six-part series, "Autism Now," will air on the PBS NewsHour beginning April 18. It's the most comprehensive look at the disorder and its impact that's aired on American television in at least five years. For more than a year, Robin has been researching and preparing these stories. He and his producer, Caren Zucker, have been criss-crossing the country producing the reports for the past five months.
As Robin told Hari Sreenivasan during a recent visit to our Washington studio, the series is designed to provide viewers with an authoritative, balanced look at the latest scientific research and medical thinking about the disorder. Equally important, it chronicles the growing impact of autism as seen through the eyes of families, children, educators and clinicians.
Since Friday is the beginning of Autism Awareness Month, we are posting Hari's interview with Robin to introduce our audience to the series:
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It's reported that student debt in the USA is approaching a trillion dollars, five times what it was ten years ago.Are those in debt buying more education or are they seeking better branding in the form of coveted diplomas?
Does a $40,000 a year education that comes with an elite degree deliver ten times the education of a cheaper but no less rigorous self-generated approach assembled from less famous institutions and free or inexpensive resources?
If not, then the money is actually being spent on the value of the degree, on the doors it will open and the jobs it will snag. If this marketing strategy works big, it pays for itself in no time.
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DAVID, a 34-year-old living on the east coast of the United States, is a big fan of World of Warcraft but is anxious that his heavy workload is not leaving him enough time to play, and therefore make progress, in the online game. Rather than see his friends race ahead of him, he contacts a Chinese "gaming-services retail company" which sells him some WoW gold, the game's electronic currency, which he uses to buy magic potions and other stuff that boosts his power as a player. The gold was bought, in turn, from a cybercafé in a Chinese town which employs young professional gamers to play WoW for up to 60 hours a week to earn the online currency.Sitting in a café playing computer games sounds a lot more fun, and certainly less risky, than working down a Chinese coal mine. This is but one of the estimated 100,000 online jobs that now provide a living for people in places like China and India, according to a new study by infoDev, an initiative of the World Bank and its private-sector financing offshoot, the IFC. Other examples of paid work becoming available for anyone with a computer, an internet connection and plenty of spare time include: classifying the products in an online store's catalogue; transcribing handwritten documents; and signing up as a bogus fan of a consumer brand on Facebook or some other social-networking site, to boost the brand's visibility in search results.
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The Newark Council Education Committee met last night with group of stakeholders, including Theresa Adubato of the Robert Treat Academy, Junius Williams of the Abbott Leadership Institute, ELC founder Paul Tractenberg, and School Board Chair Shavar Jeffries. According to the Star-Ledger, the debate was noteworthy for its lack of contention, especially in light of recent fireworks. The meeting was chaired by South Ward Councilman Ras Baraka, who moonlights as Principal of Newark Central High School.The conversation veered toward the disparity between the number of special needs kids in charter schools (like Robert Treat) and the number of special needs kids in traditional public schools. Here's Michael Pallante, who is the former principal of Camden Street School, a district K-4 school. He's now is at Robert Treat:
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A misdialed union voicemail message, emails obtained through an open records request and official court documents reveal new details about the Madison teachers' work stoppage [Google Cached Link] that closed the district's public schools for four days.Emails Reveal Madison Teachers' Union Behind the Scenes StrategyThe Madison Metropolitan School District called the "sickouts" a "strike" and accused the union of organizing it. The union, Madison Teachers Inc., however, maintained that teachers were calling in sick on their own initiative. New evidence suggests the union's claim is not true.
The MacIver News Service obtained dozens of emails in response to an open records request filed with the school district.
On Tuesday, February 15th, the day before the four day sick out began, Dan Nerad, Madison Schools Superintendent, sent out a mass email to teachers stating "Throughout the day we have received significant information indicating that staff members will call in ill tomorrow, Thursday and/or Friday to protest the Governor's actions. While I believe his actions warrant protest, I am asking that this course of action not be taken,"
John Matthews, Madison Teachers Inc. Executive Director, replied to that email with one of his own, "What teachers are doing is based on their own conscience, for education, the children in our schools, for their own families," he wrote.
Wednesday, March 9th.Nerad was floored when he found out Matthews was telling the union MMSD was not willing to meet that past weekend. He said Matthews never confirmed a meeting with them.
Howard Bellman, the arbitrator, responded that he had suggested to Nerad they meet sometime over the weekend. Nerad said he wasn't available until Tuesday, and Bellman relayed that to the union.
Matthews then sent Nerad an email stating "Dan: I know that you are dealing with your Mother's illness at this time, and I respect that. However, for MMSD to not be prepared to deal with the issues facing both MMSD and MTI (your employees) today is reprehensible."
Later that day the Senate passed an amended version of the budget repair bill, and Nerad wondered if he could expect his staff to report to work on Thursday.
Matthews responded the union asked all teachers to go to work in the morning. He also pushed for a contract agreement for MTI's support staff groups.
"You have to know that our negotiations are at a very serious juncture. We simply must reach an agreement on Friday or the volcano may just erupt. It is not fair to those in the support unites to be treated differently than those in the professional unit. Because AFSCME took an inferior contract is no reason for MTI to do so. This matter is clearly in your hands to resolve, so be fair, creative and decisive. We have no time left to wring our hands. It is very difficult to hold people back from taking further action," said Matthews.
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On exam day in Sabina Trombetta's Colorado Springs first-grade art class, the 6-year-olds were shown a slide of Picasso's "Weeping Woman," a 1937 cubist portrait of the artist's lover, Dora Maar, with tears streaming down her face. It is painted in vibrant -- almost neon -- greens, bluish purples, and yellows. Explaining the painting, Picasso once said, "Women are suffering machines."The Economist has more.The test asked the first-graders to look at "Weeping Woman" and "write three colors Picasso used to show feeling or emotion." (Acceptable answers: blue, green, purple, and yellow.) Another question asked, "In each box below, draw three different shapes that Picasso used to show feeling or emotion." (Acceptable drawings: triangles, ovals, and rectangles.) A separate section of the exam asked students to write a full paragraph about a Matisse painting.
Trombetta, 38, a 10-year teaching veteran and winner of distinguished teaching awards from both her school district, Harrison District 2, and Pikes Peak County, would have rather been handing out glue sticks and finger paints. The kids would have preferred that, too. But the test wasn't really about them. It was about their teacher.
Trombetta and her students, 87 percent of whom come from poor families, are part of one of the most aggressive education-reform experiments in the country: a soon-to-be state-mandated attempt to evaluate all teachers -- even those in art, music, and physical education -- according to how much they "grow" student achievement. In order to assess Trombetta, the district will require her Chamberlin Elementary School first-graders to sit for seven pencil-and-paper tests in art this school year. To prepare them for those exams, Trombetta lectures her students on art elements such as color, line, and shape -- bullet points on Colorado's new fine-art curriculum standards.
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Fair warning: This article will piss off a lot of you.I can say that with confidence because it's about Peter Thiel. And Thiel - the PayPal co-founder, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist - not only has a special talent for making money, he has a special talent for making people furious.
Some people are contrarian for the sake of getting headlines or outsmarting the markets. For Thiel, it's simply how he views the world. Of course a side benefit for the natural contrarian is it frequently leads to things like headlines and money.
Consider the 2000 Nasdaq crash. Thiel was one of the few who saw in coming. There's a famous story about PayPal's March 2000 venture capital round. The offer was "only" at a $500 million-or-so valuation. Nearly everyone on the board and the management team balked, except Thiel who calmly told the room that this was a bubble at its peak, and the company needed to take every dime it could right now. That's how close PayPal came to being dot com roadkill a la WebVan or Pets.com.
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Nine years ago my wife had her first sonogram. The technician seemed to be asking routine questions: "How long have you been pregnant?" "Twelve weeks." "Any family history of genetic diseases?" "No." "Any family history of twins?" "No." Then she showed us the screen. "Well, you're having twins." My wife and I were scared. We were first-time parents. How were we supposed to raise two babies at the same time?Strangely enough, I already knew a lot about twins. I'd been an avid consumer of twin research for years. Identical twins (like ours turned out to be) share all their genes; fraternal twins share only half. Researchers in medicine, psychology, economics, and sociology have spent decades comparing these two types of twins to disentangle the effects of nature and nurture. But as our due date approached, none of my book learning seemed remotely helpful.
Only after our twins were born did I gradually realize how much I was missing. Twin researchers rarely offer parenting advice. But much practical guidance is implicit in the science.
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Before my extensive college marathon began, I thought there was only one barrier -- an academic one, consisting of standardized tests and rigorous coursework -- standing as an obstacle between me and going to college.Apparently, I was wrong, because there is definitely another hurdle. The second one doesn't require any scholarly attributes at all to leap over, just the money in my family's pocket. Now that I've earned my acceptances into several colleges, I am tested again with whether I can afford them.
After the rejection e-mail from Scripps College hit me like a fist in the face, I nursed my constellation of blackening bruises and refocused. The financial aid packages for two other colleges that did accept me -- Mills and Knox -- arrived a few weeks apart from each other. The Mills package was first to come through my doorway.
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For as long as there have been selective colleges, the spring ritual has been the same: Some applicants get a warm note of acceptance, and the rest get a curt rejection.Now, as colleges are increasingly swamped with applications, a small but growing number are offering a third option: guaranteed admission if the student attends another institution for a year or two and earns a prescribed grade-point average.
This little-noticed practice -- an unusual mix of early admission and delayed gratification -- has allowed colleges to tap their growing pools of eager candidates to help counter the enrollment slump that most institutions suffer later on, as the accepted students drop out, transfer, study abroad or take internships off campus.
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Nine years ago my wife had her first sonogram. The technician seemed to be asking routine questions: "How long have you been pregnant?" "Twelve weeks." "Any family history of genetic diseases?" "No." "Any family history of twins?" "No." Then she showed us the screen. "Well, you're having twins." My wife and I were scared. We were first-time parents. How were we supposed to raise two babies at the same time?Strangely enough, I already knew a lot about twins. I'd been an avid consumer of twin research for years. Identical twins (like ours turned out to be) share all their genes; fraternal twins share only half. Researchers in medicine, psychology, economics, and sociology have spent decades comparing these two types of twins to disentangle the effects of nature and nurture. But as our due date approached, none of my book learning seemed remotely helpful.
Only after our twins were born did I gradually realize how much I was missing. Twin researchers rarely offer parenting advice. But much practical guidance is implicit in the science.
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Boasting nine million members in nearly 200 countries, LiveMocha is capitalizing on an ever-expanding market. CEO Michael Schutzler talks to Inc.com about his business.As businesses go global, the market for second-language acquisition continues to grow due to both increasing globalization and an increasingly diverse U.S. population. According to the 2010 Census, the foreign-born population of the United States is approaching 37 million people. Meanwhile, approximately 280 million Americans age five and older speak only English in their homes. How can companies capitalize on the proliferation of technology to help adults learn a second language? Enter LiveMocha. Founded in 2007 and located in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, Washington, it is the largest online-based language learning service with 9 million members in nearly 200 countries. It's giving Rosetta Stone some serious competition by utilizing new technologies and offering a product at $150 to compete with the $500 to $1,000 that Rosetta charges for an equivalent service. Inc.com's Lou Dubois spoke with LiveMocha CEO Michael Schutzler, the former CEO of Classmates.com, one of the first social networks, about the continued need for secondary language acquisition in the United States, the industry's significant growth potential, and why Schutzler considers the company a mix of social networking and gaming mechanics.
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The California State College System reported recently that 47% of their freshmen must take remedial reading courses before they can be admitted to regular college academic courses. The Diploma to Nowhere report of the Strong American Schools Project said that more than one million of our high school graduates are in remedial courses at our colleges each year.
Keep in mind that these are not high school dropouts. These are students who did what we asked them to do, were awarded their high school diplomas at graduation, applied to college, were accepted at college, and then told when they got there that they were not well prepared enough by their high schools to take college courses.
The Chronicle of Higher Education did a survey of college professors, who reported that 90% of their freshmen were not very well prepared in reading, doing research or writing.
From my perspective, these students, regardless of their gender, race, creed, or national origin, have been disadvantaged during their twelve years in our public schools. My research indicates that the vast majority have never been asked to do a single serious research paper in high school, and, while I have been unable to find money to do a study of this, I have anecdotal evidence that the vast majority of our public high school students are never asked to read one complete nonfiction book by their teachers during their four years.
Race can be a disadvantage of course, even for the children of Vietnamese boat people, and poverty can be a disadvantage in education as well, even for the children of unemployed white families in Appalachia. But the disadvantages of disgracefully low expectations for academic reading and writing are disinterestedly applied to all of our public high school students, it appears.
Huge numbers of unprepared public high school students provide an achievement gap all by themselves, albeit one that is largely ignored by those who think that funding is the main reason so many of our students fail to complete any college degree.
In that study by The Chronicle of Higher Education, they also asked English teachers if they thought their students were prepared for college reading and writing tasks, and most of them thought their students were well prepared. The problem may be that English departments typically assign fiction as reading for students and the writing they ask for is almost universally personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay, supplemented now by work on the little 500-word personal "college essay."
It is hard to conceive of a literacy program better designed to render our public high school students poorly prepared for the nonfiction books and term papers at the college level. Of course, many colleges, eager to fill their dorms and please their "customers" with easy courses and grade inflation, are gradually reducing the number of books students are assigned and the length of papers they are asked to write, but this simply adds to the disadvantages to which we are subjecting our students, all the while charging them large amounts of money for tuition.
Many parents are satisfied when their children tell them that they love their high school, perhaps not fully realizing that the students are talking mostly about their social life and their after-school sports and other activities. They may remain unaware that our students are being prevented from learning to read history books and from writing serious term papers. No one mentions that disadvantage, so no doubt these parents are just as surprised, humiliated, and embarrassed as their children when they are not allowed into regular college courses when they get there.
Americans have big hearts, and are concerned when they are told of the plight of our disadvantaged students who are black, Hispanic, or poor. But they are naturally not really able to summon up much concern over an academic literacy achievement gap which disadvantages practically all of our public high school students, especially if the schools and the Edupundits keep them quite uninformed about it.
============
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
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I spent the first two months of 2011 living in Los Angeles, filming the second season of "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" for ABC. After last year's experience of trying to change food culture in the beautiful town of Huntington, West Virginia, I expected the challenges in L.A. to be very different. Shockingly, they were all too familiar.L.A. is home to the nation's second biggest school district, which feeds 650,000 children every day. Half of these kids are eligible for free school meals. Within a few miles of the Hollywood sign there are entire communities with no access to fresh food. People travel for well over an hour to buy fruits and vegetables, and in one of the communities where I worked, children had an 80% obesity rate.
I had planned to work in the L.A. schools to try to figure out how school food could be better--and, ideally, cooked from scratch. Thousands of outraged parents, not to mention teachers and principals, wanted me in their schools. But I couldn't even get in the door: the Los Angeles Unified School District banned me from filming any of their food service operations, claiming that they didn't need me because they were already leading the charge. [You can read the LAUSD's response here.]
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Odds are, your kid is in a failing school district.Odds are even better, if your kid's school or school district isn't failing now, by federal standards, it will be in a year or two.
Last month, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan estimated that within three years no less than four out of five American schools will not meet the standard for "Adequate Yearly Progress." That's government speak for saying the schools aren't meeting the federally mandated No Child Left Behind Act.
This week Minnesota students will begin taking this year's version of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments - the standardized tests that will determine the supposed success or failure of each Minnesota public school and school district. Results of the tests will be made public in late summer, and most educators, like Duncan, are not optimistic concerning the outcome.
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Richard Miller has had one of the toughest jobs in higher education. The Olin Foundation tapped him a dozen years ago to create an engineering college on a hilltop in the Boston suburb of Needham. When Miller started, there were no buildings, no faculty, no curriculum, no students.The foundation's mandate: design a boldly original model for a 21st century school whose graduates would be not just accomplished engineers but world-beater entrepreneurs and leaders.
Now the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering has a wind-swept cluster of six earth-toned buildings, 347 brainy students who pay a maximum of $38,000 tuition, an untenured faculty totaling 25 men and 13 women and a curriculum oriented toward what Miller calls "design based" learning. Miller, who has a Ph.D. in applied mechanics from the California Institute of Technology, has honed his leadership skills as Olin's chief creator and builder. The following is an edited version of an interview with Miller conducted by Inc. contributor Joseph Rosenbloom.
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Ohio Governor John Kasich wants the state's universities to offer a three-year degree program to make college more affordable, The Plain-Dealer reports. Students would have to squeeze in more courses during their time at school in order to satisfy degree requirements, much as they do today without an established three-year program. Ball State University in Indiana already offers three-year degrees for 30 of its 180 degree programs and Rhode Island lawmakers approved a measure in 2009 to offer three-year degrees at both of the state's public universities. Meanwhile, Kasich's budget anticipates a 10.5 percent cut in higher education funding in the 2012 fiscal year, less than had been feared, followed by a 3.7 percent increase in 2013, according to The Columbus Dispatch.SESSION ENDS: Idaho lawmakers gaveled their session to a close Thursday having approved three major education overhaul bills that had been a priority for Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter and state superintendent Tom Luna, according to The (Spokane) Spokesman-Review. The bills would weaken teachers' tenure and collective bargaining provisions, expand online courses, reduce the number of teachers and institute a merit pay system. The state Senate also approved legislation to implement the changes immediately rather than on July 1 in an effort to dampen an attempt to put the controversial changes up to a referendum next year.
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A human brain is three pounds of the most complex material in the universe. It is the mission control centre that drives the operation of your life, gathering dispatches through small portals in the armoured bunker of the skull. This pink, alien computational material, which has the consistency of jelly and is composed of miniaturised, self-configuring parts, vastly outstrips anything we've dreamt of building.Using those brains, humans have done something unique. As far as we know, we're the only system on the planet so complex that we've thrown ourselves headlong into the game of deciphering our own programming language. Imagine that your desktop computer began to control its own peripheral devices, removed its own cover and pointed its webcam at its own circuitry. That's us.
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African American Communication and Collaboration Council (AACCC), via a kind reader's email:
As a logical stage of development, the African American Communication and Collaboration Council (AACCC) has established a number of community projects for 2011. The AACCC will focus the wisdom and energy of its corresponding constituent groups toward areas in need of positive outcomes. The projects are designed to serve as a demonstration of what can be accomplished when the "talent" of the community is focused on solutions rather than symptoms.Much more on Orchard Ridge, here.Education
The AACCC's first educational pilot project is the "adoption" of Orchard Ridge Elementary (ORE) School for the first six months of 2011 (second semester of 2010/2011 school year).
After assessing the primary issues and unmet needs concerning student achievement, the AACCC, the ORE School Principal and Central Office MMSD administration (including the Superintendent) have determined a number of vital activities in which the AACCC could play a vital role.
Too much is at stake for the AACCC adoption of Orchard Ridge Elementary to be viewed as a "feel good" project. The student population of ORE involves 56% students of color, and fifty five percent (55%) of its student enrollment is from low-income homes. As dramatically depicted below, approximately two thirds of that population cannot read.
Please note the following:
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For students who have been treated for addiction, going back to a conventional high school is like sending an alcoholic into a bar, experts say. But, they add, it's extremely hard to find a safe, nurturing educational option for teens who are struggling to stay drug or alcohol-free.Horizon High School is a tiny, non-profit, Madison-based recovery school where students learn and help keep each other on track and sober, day in and day out. It's one of only three recovery schools in Wisconsin.
Horizon High School serves about a dozen mostly local kids each year, employs a handful of teachers and counselors and operates out of rented space at Neighborhood House on Mills Street in Madison. For the students, it means close relationships with their teachers and each other, and routine, random drug tests as a fact of life.
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Steven Mufson and Jia Lynn Yang:
As damaging as the new rules could be, Kaplan is also reeling from a storm of criticism of the industry's practices and of The Post Co., an institution more accustomed to publishing news of others' foibles.The company was snared in a government sting that found Kaplan employees pushing students to take on loans without regard to whether they could afford them. It has been hammered by congressional critics, sideswiped by hedge fund investors and investigated by journalists. In the end, The Post Co. reluctantly conceded it would have to revamp Kaplan's business model and turn away many prospective low-income students it once wooed.
The challenges have never jeopardized The Post Co.'s survival, but they cast a spotlight on management decisions and raise a question: How did The Post Co. end up here?
Post Co. executives blame outside forces, including a drop in political support for private-sector education companies and "financial and corporate agendas." They also acknowledge missteps. Current and past officers say The Post Co. did not keep close-enough tabs on its fast-sprawling education unit, even as it focused heavily on customers who were poorer and thus at the riskier end of the business. But they say serving that disadvantaged population is important.
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Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:
Much more on Kiplingers, College Station Schools and a Wisconsin State Journal Editorial, here. Background on the oft criticized WKCE.
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As the next class of college freshmen weigh their choices, I asked Lynn F. Jacobs and Jeremy S. Hyman, authors of The Secrets of College Success, to compile some tips for readers of The Choice. What follows are excerpts. - Jacques SteinbergFocus on the academics. Since the main reason you're going to college is to get a good education, the quality of the courses should be a critical factor in your choice-procedure. If you're able to visit -- or revisit -- your top two or three choices, you'll be able to assess how good the teaching is by attending a few first-year classes. Pay particular attention to who the instructor is (regular faculty, T.A., or adjunct professor -- ask if you're not sure), how well and interestingly the material is presented, and whether skills of analysis and interpretation are being emphasized.
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Do you agree that your life has a sense of purpose? Would you say that, overall, you have a lot to be proud of? Do you wish you lived somewhere else? Coming out of the blue, these are tricky questions to answer. Yet they aren't aimed at adults. They come from a questionnaire for children aged 11 to 16.http://www.actionforhappiness.org/The charity think-tank New Philanthropy Capital has devised the questions as part of its "well-being measure", a 15-minute survey that asks about relationships with family, school and community, as well as self-esteem and life satisfaction. The tool, being tested now, is designed to be used by charities, schools and youth groups to work out how happy (or not) children are. John Copps, who runs the project at NPC, believes the survey is capturing something that has been elusive: it is, he says, "putting a number on a feeling".
The desire to match numbers to feelings is popular at the moment. In November last year, prime minister David Cameron put happiness at the centre of government policy when he announced that the Office for National Statistics would produce a national "well-being index" alongside its usual tables measuring income, health, births and deaths. And from this month, as part of the data-gathering, about 200,000 people a year will be asked new questions about their life satisfaction as part of the Integrated Household Survey.
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On a cold, wet Friday morning, only a third of the children turn up for the 45-minute class in Shanghai's Putuo district.It's not as if the children can get there themselves. Junjun, the eldest, is just 21 months old. Nini, the youngest, is 19 months old.
Their young teacher begins the class by leading the children and various accompanying grandparents on a walk around the sides of a square painted on the ground.
The early education centre, which says its tuition is based on the theories of famed Italian educator Maria Montessori [Blekko], says the exercise helps calm the children and concentrate their minds for learning.
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Public education remains a passionate subject for Woz, who was unabashed in saying that schools today are far too structured and thus impede innovative thinking - which is key to "the artistic side" of technology.At issue, he said, are rules that tell each student exactly what they should be studying and when.
The learning cycle between what is taught and when a student is tested on it is far too short, he proclaimed. Short learning-testing cycles, Wozniak said, are nothing like the projects that technology innovators are afforded in real life.
When pressed by an audience member about how schools should judge student performance, Woz said they should be given one long project that spurs innovative thinking at the beginning of a semester and graded on their results.
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Maybe what the liberal arts needed was a full-blown depression."A couple of years ago I had great hope, because of the externality of the economic situation," Martin Ringle, the chief technology officer at Reed College, told a room full of fellow audience members at a summit of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) on Thursday.
"I was really hoping, contrary to all of my better judgment, that things would really go into the toilet," Ringle continued. "Because if we didn't stop at recession -- if we went all the way down to depression -- maybe that would be enough for the economic forces to require us to change."
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What is keeping undergraduates from learning? Last month, I speculated from my perspective as a college teacher about a set of interlocking factors that have contributed to the problem.In that column (The Chronicle, February 25), I referred to the alarming data presented by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011) in the context of President Obama's call for more students to attend college in order to prepare for the economy of the future. Why, I asked, should we send more students to college--at an ever greater cost--when more than a third of them, according to Arum and Roksa, demonstrate "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills" after four years of education?
This month I want to speculate on why students (and, to a lesser extent, their parents) are not making choices that support educational success. What could they possibly be thinking?
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Three children in Pingliang, Gansu, have died and 36 others have fallen ill from nitrite poisoning after drinking milk bought direct from farmers.Pingliang's No2 People's Hospital recorded the first food-poisoning death around 9am on Thursday and another hospital recorded two similar deaths shortly afterwards.
"The three dead children were all under three years old. The rest of the patients were mostly children under 14 years old," a Pingliang government spokesman said.
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We have all felt the sting of rejection.Law students have been particularly stung of late, as law firms continue to be rather parsimonious with job offers.
But a third year law student at the University of Virginia has turned rejection into an art form: the attached model of UVA Law built entirely out of law-firm rejection letters!!
Here's the Above the Law post that broke the news of this deranged act of brilliance. The sculptor was not identified by ATL.
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Madison School Board & Superintendent Dan Nerad, via a kind reader's email (160K PDF):
Page 25, a New goal, the District's budget:Related: the District's response to my February, 2011 request for the most recent Superintendent review 372K PDF.Proposed Organization Goal Goal Area: Development of 2011 - 12 District Budget.
STATUS: NewEvidence of Need / Baseline Data: There is a need to implement a budget process and develop a proposed budget consistent with the Governor's proposed budget and the reduction of aid.
Target Date for Completion: June, 2011.
Objective: To provide leadership, supervision, and direction to MMSD staff in a budget planning exercise that anticipates and prepares for reduction in state aid for 2011-12.
Results: (For each objective, state the progress.) This goal will be assessed through the implementation of a budget process (budget timeline) and by the development of a proposed 2011-2012 District budget plan.Action Plan: (Steps to be taken) 1. Implement the five-year budget model forecast to identify the impact of budget scenarios under consideration.
2. At the earliest date after the Governor releases his budget, work with department leaders to identify potential efficiencies and/or savings, taking into account Board priorities and District needs.
3. Use staff recommendations to develop a list of possible cuts for Board review no later than April 1, 2011. Said list must be reviewed and vetted to address mathematical and other errors before it is provided to the press, the Board, or MMSD staff. Said list must be vetted to remove any items that administration would not or could not implement before it is given to the Board for consideration.
4. Work to ensure that all spending for new programs with cumulative costs over $50,000 in property tax revenue be incorporated into the proposed budget and presented to the Board before it votes to approve the preliminary budget.
5. Identify the users of unexpended or unencumbered revenue, by source, as part of the budget materials presented to the Board.Summary and Next Steps:
360 Degree Feedback:Leadership Development Goal Goal Area: 360 Degree Feedback Reflection: What are my strengths?
STATUS: Completed
My strengths are in providing strategic, collaborative and participative leadership within the organization. Additional strengths include facilitation skills, communication skills, leading change, working with complex and difficult issues, multi-tasking, addressing diversity and resolving conflicts. Leadership practices inventory indicate strengths in the areas of inspiring a shared vision and modeling the way. My strengths remain stable over time.Leadership Self-Development Goal: In what area(s) do I need to "grow"? To focus on encouraging the heart in others and challenging the process. Areas
needing developing remain stable over time. Kouzes and Posner profile used for this assessmentObjectives: What are the desired end results? (How will my leadership look different in the future? What building level changes, interventions would occur?)
To further develop skills and practice in encouraging the heart in others and challenging the process.
End of the Year Results: For each objective, state the progress.
This goal will be assessed by the completion of the 360 degree feedback tool and a review of the perceptions of others related to my personal skills in encouraging the heart in others and challenging the process.
Personal Development Plan: What will I do? (Steps to be taken, including focused reading, study group membership, conference attendance, peer partnerships, reflective journaling, other.)1. Continue to read and learn about leadership in contemporary organizations.
2. Attend workshops/conferences consistent with needed leadership development areas.
3. Practice skills developed through various learning experiences.Summary and Next Steps:
Recent readings about leadership in contemporary organizations include How Leaders Learn (Gordon A. Donaldson, Jr., The School Leaders Our Children Deserve; George Theoharis, Instructional Rounds in Education (Elizabeth A. City, Richard F. Elmore, Sarah E. Fiarman and Lee Teitel). I have not recently attended workshops/conferences consistent with the need to develop additional skills in encouraging the heart and challenging the process. Given this assessment, I see a need to continue to specifically work on skills related to challenging the process. Specific skills needing to be worked on include searching for opportunities to seek innovative ways to change and experimenting and taking risks. I believe I have made improvements in my skills related to encouraging the heart by recognizing the contributions of others. We are also in the process of identifying a 360 degree feedback tool for all administrators that will be completed prior to my summative performance evaluation in January.
There is a need to finalize the 360 degree tool for all administrators including me. This work is being developed by the Human Resources Department.
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So we had our own parent teacher conferences, and, like with everything in life, therer was the rough and the smooth. It took a while, but I finally reminded myself that there was a whole lot more smooth than rough.First, the smooth: how many parents popped by just to tell me that they appreciated my hard work or that their kid tells them stories I told them in class or that their kid has never actually spent so much time studying for a class and yet enjoying themselves. Four of last year's kids' parents came by to tell me that they had gotten into the college they wanted, and to thank me for the recommendation letters, and one mom hugged me tight enough to crack a rib not once but twice. That was really nice.
Now, at the end was the parent who lies about what I do and say about once a week. He demanded that I do all sorts of things to appease him, and I politely but firmly refused even while he lied to my face four times in fifteen minutes. He huffed off after that, and I did regret the fact that this was how it went down. He then told my principal that I had "bullied" him (look up the definition of bullying, and you will see that that was what he has been attempting to do to me all year, but okay, whatever. I guess I won't be on the Christmas card list.
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Suppose that parents want their college-graduate son or daughter who has found a good job to be able to afford a house that would otherwise be too costly. So they give him or her $25,000 to be used toward the down payment. There is no doubt that they have made home ownership more affordable.That is the idea behind federal financial aid programs for students, which give (or lend at attractive terms) money that offsets some of the cost of going to college. Obviously those programs work. If students have more money, their college education won't cost them (and their families) as much.
But like many government programs, financial aid for college has unintended consequences that may partially or completely negate their intended consequences. In a recent paper, "How College Pricing Undermines Financial Aid" economists Robert Martin and Andrew Gillen make a strong case that instead of working to help students afford college, the government's financial aid programs actually work for the schools.
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Dorothy Snead now knows her ABCs - in order.Before coming to Literacy Services of Wisconsin, the 28-year-old knew only random letters and their sounds, which made reading difficult, if not impossible.
"If you get mail at home and do not know how to read, you're in trouble," said Snead, who often enlisted the help of others to read her own mail. "Going through life not knowing how to read can be hard on a person."
So, over the past two years, Snead has set out to change her path and is getting good results. "My reading levels are moving up."
Snead, who dropped out of high school, is among an increasing number of adult learners seeking literacy services, in large part to earn their GED, said India McCanse, the executive director of the agency, which served more than 800 people last year.
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In the never-ending quest to help people co-exist peacefully with their spouses, children, siblings and in-laws, therapists are turning to tools used to assess the psychological stability of pilots, police officers and nuclear-power plant operators: personality tests.I'm not talking about the pop quizzes in magazines that claim to help you determine the color of your aura or what breed you'd be if you were a dog. I am referring to tests that are scientifically designed and heavily researched, consisting of dozens if not hundreds of questions that identify specific aspects of your personality. Are you a thinker or a feeler? Intuitive or fact-oriented? Organized or spontaneous?
Answering questions like these helped Mardi and Richard Sayer get through a difficult period a few years ago when their adult daughter, Maggie Sayer, moved back into their Middletown, R.I. home.
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In the few days since my colleague Eric Platt and I began publishing our running tally on how many students applied to -- and were accepted by -- various colleges and universities this year, the ledger has more than doubled, to 100.Those of you who've been following this exercise know that our table is to be read with several caveats in mind. One is that it is far too early in the endgame of this year's decision process to draw meaningful conclusions from these figures, especially considering that they represent a fraction of the nation's four-year colleges and universities. Moreover, as a number of commenters have noted, colleges and universities sometimes spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on mass-mailing campaigns to drive up the number of applications they receive -- and, in effect, drive down their admission rates -- so that what might appear to be instant popularity could well be manufactured.
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Three new studies conclude that many widely used behavioral and medication treatments for autism have some benefit, one popular alternative therapy doesn't help at all, and there isn't yet enough evidence to discern the best overall treatment.Parents of children with autism-spectrum disorder often try myriad treatments, from drugs to therapy to nutritional supplements. The studies being published Monday and funded by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, were part of the effort to examine the comparative effectiveness of treatments in 14 priority disease areas, including autism-spectrum disorders.
Autism and related disorders, conditions marked by social and communication deficits and often other developmental delays, have become more common over the years and now affect 1 in 110 U.S. children, according to estimates from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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A series of worsening revenue forecasts and a $5 billion state budget shortfall have made it even more likely that the Legislature will again slash higher-education funding this year. So in February, top academic leaders at the UW made a painful decision to cut the number of Washington students the school will admit this fall to its main Seattle campus and increase the number of nonresident students, who pay nearly three times as much in tuition and fees."When the decision was made, it was not a happy one," said Philip Ballinger, the UW's admissions director. "There were real debates, and internal reluctance to the last minute."
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Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people, that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants.
India projects an image of a nation churning out hundreds of thousands of students every year who are well educated, a looming threat to the better-paid middle-class workers of the West. Their abilities in math have been cited by President Barack Obama as a reason why the U.S. is facing competitive challenges.
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As we have seen in the past, teacher licensing requirements have little relation to student achievement. One reason for this may be that rather than driving up teacher quality, licensure requirements can be so full of bureaucratic red tape that they drive away smart and knowledgeable teaching candidates who have other options.In support of that theory, I offer an anecdote, namely an email from a good friend of mine who has more knowledge and training than most prospective teachers -- she went to Princeton for undergrad, Yale for a master's degree, and Harvard for law school. But before she can even get in the door and start studying pedagogical techniques and the like, she is being told that she has to take nine (9) more undergraduate courses of background knowledge.
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The US Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a lawsuit filed by taxpayers in Arizona challenging a state tax credit program that primarily benefits parochial schools.In a 5-to-4 decision, the high court said the taxpayers lacked the necessary legal standing to bring their lawsuit.
The action sweeps away a ruling by a federal appeals court panel that had struck down the tax credit program as a violation of the First Amendment's ban on government establishment of religion.
The majority justices did not directly address the larger constitutional issue. Instead, the 19-page decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy focuses on whether the complaining taxpayers had suffered a direct and personal injury from Arizona's religious school tax credit program.
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Being born female set sometime actress Christine Liao on the road to a career in ballet, but it could all have been so different.Growing up in a traditional, male-dominated environment, the founder of the Christine Liao School of Ballet and the Hong Kong Ballet Company may never have had such an impact on the art form had she not seen other career paths blocked.
And that's precisely why she is backing a new campaign called "Because I am a Girl", which will promote the rights of girls.
Liao began dancing when she was eight and, at the age of 19, she became a film actress using the stage name Mao Mei, and starred in eight films from 1955 to 1962. After graduating from the University of Hong Kong with a degree in languages and literature, she turned her back on the silver screen and considered becoming a lawyer or working in an office.
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No longer the preserve of tree-huggers, the trend for sustainable design is gaining momentum as more people opt for homes and buildings created using renewable resources that don't cost the earth, literally. No wonder - these buildings use less energy, cost less to operate, use fewer natural resources and have less of an impact on the environment than their conventional counterparts.Hong Kong Academy's green school, which opens in Sai Kung in 2013, is part of a new era in sustainable architecture in our city, says Josh Arnold, who teaches middle school science, maths and design technology at HKA.
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The striking bit of news out of that ongoing study comparing private and public schools in Milwaukee is this: Researchers aren't yet sure how, but the private schools are better at getting kids across the finish line.Much more on the Milwaukee Parental Choice program, here.This is one bright spot in a report otherwise showing that children using Milwaukee's school choice program were doing only about as well as Milwaukee Public Schools kids on state tests. The study, by independent university researchers, is following two sets of children, matched for background and poverty, to see which system does a better job of improving their scores on math and reading tests. So far, say researchers, there's no statistically significant difference.
But the study's oldest students have reached graduation age. There, say researchers, there is a difference. Children in choice schools were notably more likely to graduate from high school. Just among those who spent ninth grade taking their state aid to a private school in the form of a voucher, 77% graduated in four years; 69% of MPS kids did.
Among students who spent all four years in a choice school, 94% graduated on time; 75% of kids who stayed in MPS all four years did.
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The Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education and the Madison Teachers, Inc. ratified an expedited Collective Bargaining Agreement for 2011-2013. Several significant considerations were ignored for the negative impact and consequences on students, staff and taxpayers.
First and foremost, there was NO 'urgent' need (nor ANY need at all) to 'negotiate' a new contract. The current contract doesn't expire until June 30, 2011. Given the proposals regarding school finance and collective bargaining processes in the Budget Repair Bill before the legislature there were significant opportunities and expectations for educational, management and labor reforms. With such changes imminent, there was little value in 'locking in' the restrictive old provisions for conducting operations and relationships and shutting the door on different opportunities for increasing educational improvements and performances in the teaching and learning culture and costs of educating the students of the district.
A partial listing of the missed adjustments and opportunities with the ratification of the teacher collective bargaining agreement should be instructive.
For further information and discussion contact:
Don Severson President
Active Citizens for Education
donleader@aol.com
608 577-0851
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I'm tired of talking about systems and governance and structures for education. If we've proved anything in Milwaukee, we've proved that these things make less difference than a lot of people once thought.Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman's 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club:Since 1990, Milwaukee has been one of the nation's foremost laboratories of experimentation in school structures. This has been driven by hope (some national experts used the word panacea) that new ways of creating, running and funding schools would bring big progress.
A ton of data was unloaded during the last week, including test results from last fall for every school in Wisconsin, a new round of studies comparing performance of students in Milwaukee's publicly funded private school voucher program with Milwaukee Public Schools students and - for the first time - school-by-school test results for those voucher schools.
And what did I learn from all this?
1.) We've got big problems. The scores, overall, were low.
2.) We're not making much progress overall in solving them.
3.) Schools in all three of the major structures for education in Milwaukee - MPS, voucher schools and charter schools - had about the same overall results.
4.) Some specific schools really did much better than others, even when dealing with students with much the same backgrounds as those in schools that got weaker results.
In my dreams, all of us - especially the most influential politicians, policy-makers and civic leaders - focus a lot more on the fourth point than we have been doing.
Zimman's talk ranged far and wide. He discussed Wisconsin's K-12 funding formula (it is important to remember that school spending increases annually (from 1987 to 2005, spending grew by 5.10% annually in Wisconsin and 5.25% in the Madison School District), though perhaps not in areas some would prefer.I appreciate and approve of Borsuk's sentiment."Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
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A joyful kaleidoscope in clay, Lo Yip-nang's display of intricate patterns in jewel tones entranced thousands of people who visited his exhibition at the Jockey Club Creative Art Centre in Shek Kip Mei. Although many were eager to talk to the artist, he kept working with his slivers of coloured clay, giving monosyllabic replies to queries."You've been working all day; are you tired?" asks one woman. "No," he says after a long pause. "People like your work, does that make you happy?" asks another. "Yes."
Lo wasn't playing the temperamental artist, though. The 30-year-old is autistic and his two-week exhibition last month is a personal triumph - and a sign of hope that people with the disability can live independently.
Autism stems from glitches in neurological development that cause sufferers to be socially impaired. Unable to interpret what people are expressing or to communicate how they feel, they typically become engrossed with specific objects instead or find comfort in repetitive behaviour and routine. But Lo, or Nang as he is affectionately known, is a rare autistic person who found a way to express himself.
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Americans are finally starting to ask: "Is all this higher education really necessary?"Since the appearance in The Atlantic of my essay "In The Basement of the Ivory Tower" (2008), in which I questioned the wisdom of sending seemingly everyone in the United States through the rigors of higher education, it's become increasingly apparent to me that I'm far from the only one with these misgivings. Indeed, to my surprise, I've discovered that rather than a lone crank, I'm a voice in a growing movement.
Also see:
In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: The idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth. An instructor at a "college of last resort" explains why.The Truth About Harvard: It may be hard to get into Harvard, but it's easy to get out without learning much of enduring value at all. A recent graduate's report. By Ross Douthat
What Does College Teach? It's time to put an end to "faith-based" acceptance of higher education's quality. By Richard H. Hersh
I hadn't expected my essay, inspired by the frustrations of teaching students unprepared for the rigors of college-level work, to attract much notice. But the volume and vehemence of the feedback the piece generated was overwhelming. It drew more visitors than almost any other article on the Atlantic's web site in 2008, and provoked an avalanche of letters to the editor. It even started turning up in the syllabi of college writing classes, and on the agendas of educational conferences.
In the months and years since then - and especially now, as I prepare to add to the critical tumult with a book expanding on that original article - I find myself noticing similar sentiments elsewhere. Is it merely a matter of my becoming so immersed in the subject that I'm seeing it everywhere? I don't think so. Start paying attention, and it becomes readily apparent that more and more Americans today are skeptical about the benefits of college.
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In contrast to some other states (yes, that means you, Wisconsin), Oregon's politicians and the leaders of its public colleges and universities are on the same page about changes the state should make in how it manages higher education. But don't blink, or you might miss the moment.Governor John Kitzhaber and the president of the University of Oregon, Richard Lariviere, agreed Tuesday that the university would postpone for a year its push for legislation that would give it a new financing stream and an independent governing board separate and apart from the existing State Board of Higher Education.
Under the agreement, which was memorialized in an exchange of letters, Lariviere said the university would throw its support behind the governor's plan to create a single statewide board to oversee pre-K to postsecondary education. While Kitzhaber did not openly state in return that he would fully back the university's autonomy plan, Lariviere said in an interview Thursday that he was heartened by what university officials had heard in their discussions with the governor and his staff. "What we have received is as strong and as clear an endorsement of our ideas as we could reasonably expect at this stage," he said.
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U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) today called on the American Bar Association (ABA) to improve its oversight of admissions and post-graduation information reported by law schools across the country.Boxer's letter follows news reports that have highlighted several law schools allegedly using misleading data to enhance a school's position in the competitive and influential U.S. News and World Report annual rankings. Such inaccurate post-graduation employment and salary data can mislead prospective students into believing they will easily be able to find work as an attorney and pay off their loans despite a sharp decline in post-graduation full-time employment.
The full text of the Senator's letter is below:
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Today the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) released new results for the statewide exam.Not surprising to those who have been paying attention, Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) did better than schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), otherwise known as the voucher program.
Overall, MPS had 47.8% of its students scoring as proficient in math, with 59% proficient in reading.
Among economically disadvantaged kids, MPS scored 43.9% in math and 55.3% in reading.
Those scores are lower for students in the voucher program--all of whom are economically disadvantaged, although that could change if Gov. Scott Walker has his way and opens up the program to middle-class and wealthy kids. Only 34.4% of voucher students scored proficient in math, while 55.2% were proficient in reading, about the same as MPS.
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Tovia Smith, via a kind reader's email:
Admissions committees at selective colleges sometimes have to plow through thousands of applications to choose the members of next year's freshman class. The committee at Amhest College in Mass., will accept only 1,000 of the more than 8,000 students who applied.RENEE MONTAGNE, host:
Spring is a mean season for high school seniors. It's college acceptance time. And if students don't get in, they never find out why.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, host:
Was it that C in Algebra 1, the lukewarm recommendation, the essay that should have gone through spell check?
MONTAGNE: NPR's Tovia Smith got a rare chance to sit in on an admissions committee at Amherst College in Massachusetts. The liberal arts college will accept only 1,000 of more than 8,000 students who applied.
TOVIA SMITH: High school kids may imagine the admissions officials deciding their fate as a bunch of tweedy old academics in spectacles and suits.
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Many families choose to enroll their children in Catholic schools for religious reasons, but educators say kids also get academic benefits.The Green Bay Area Catholic Education system for the first time compared test scores from 10 local Catholic schools with scores from area public schools. Catholic educators say the comparison showed students at the parochial schools are generally more proficient or advanced in math, reading and language arts than their peers at public schools.
Catholic school advocates say the scores highlight the strong quality of education at those schools at a time when they're working hard to attract students. That effort ramps up this week, which is National Catholic Schools Week.
GRACE president Carol Conway-Gerhardt said bringing together 10 local Catholic schools into one system allowed administrators to compare test scores from those students with those at public schools.
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onrad Tao, it goes without saying, is precocious. He started playing the piano at 18 months, began violin lessons at 3 and made his concert debut playing Mozart with an adult orchestra at 8. At age 9, he began studying at the Juilliard School in New York. Now 16, he has performed solos with symphonies in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Baltimore and other cities in the U.S. and Europe.For all the parents who relentlessly drive their children to succeed, there is a quieter group, like Conrad's parents. Mingfang Ting, Conrad's mother, says she has long worried that her son would feel pressured or that his prodigious talent would upend their own lives.
When Dr. Ting first heard Conrad playing the piano as a toddler, "I would literally think there was something wrong with him," she says. Unnerved, she sometimes called her husband, Sam Tao, at work, held up the phone and said, " 'Listen, he's playing again.' It was a little scary," she says.
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I came across the most recent summary report for the California State Teachers' Retirement System (CalSTRS) and I thought its pared-down tables and graphs nicely encapsulated the pension situation in the state.First note that the average annual salary in 2010 for active working educators enrolled in the system was $64,156. The next table states that the average retirement benefit paid out in 2010 was $4,256 per month. That's $51,072 annually. In other words, the average retired teacher in California made more than the average working teacher in 28 states, according to the salary rankings published by NEA.
The final graph in the report provides the big picture. While the value of the pension system's assets has increased fairly steadily over the past nine years, the accrued liabilities have grown non-stop during the same period, leaving the fund at 78% of full coverage. What's more, CalSTRS operated on an assumed annual return of 8 percent. Last year, the pension board lowered that expectation to 7.75 percent, which means projections for the future will show even more of a gap.
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The latest data from the U.S. Census's American Community Survey paints a fascinating picture of the United States at the county level. We've looked the educational achievement and the median income of the entire nation, to see where people are going to school, where they're earning money, and if there is any correlation.
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Michael J. Petrilli is the executive vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.Raising the "status" of teaching is like chasing a mirage: It looks great from a distance but it never seems to materialize. Teachers today are one of the most respected members of our society, according to opinion polls. The growing backlash against perceived "teacher-bashing" in Wisconsin and elsewhere is more testament that Americans like their teachers. So what exactly is the problem the status-boosters are hoping to solve? Raising teachers' self-esteem?
On the other hand, it's true that teaching today is not among the most attractive careers open to talented young people. Making it more attractive is an objective we can do something about.
Today's teacher compensation system is perfectly designed to repel ambitious individuals. We offer mediocre starting salaries, provide meager raises even after hard-earned skills have been gained on the job and backload the most generous benefits (in terms of pensions) toward the end of 30 years of service. More fundamentally, for decades we've prioritized smaller classes over higher teacher pay. If we had kept class sizes constant over the past 50 years, the average teacher today would be making $100,000.
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Marisol Bello and Jack Gillum:
The D.C. State Board of Education will hold a hearing next week on irregularities in standardized test scores, board President Ted Trabue said Monday.The hearing comes in response to a USA TODAY investigation that found 103 public schools in the nation's capital where tests showed unusually high numbers of answers that had been changed from wrong to right.
"It's disturbing," Trabue said. "You never want to see the system being gamed."
The board is a group of elected officials who advise the state superintendent, the District of Columbia's equivalent to a state education department.
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I just returned from the Association for Education Finance and Policy annual conference in Seattle, which was a really fantastic meeting. At the conference I saw Dartmouth economic historian, William Fischel, present a paper on Amish education, extending the work from his great book, Making the Grade, which I have reviewed in Education Next.Fischel's basic argument is that our educational institutions have largely evolved in response to consumer demands. That is, the consolidation of one-room schoolhouses into larger districts, the development of schools with separate grades, the September to June calendar, and the relatively common curriculum across the country all came into being because families wanted those measures. And in a highly mobile society, even more than a century ago, people often preferred to move to areas with schools that had these desired features. In the competitive market between communities, school districts had to cater to this consumer demand. All of this resulted in a remarkable amount of standardization and uniformity across the country on basic features of K-12 education.
Hearing Fischel's argument made me think about how ill-conceived the nationalization effort led by Gates, Fordham, the AFT, and the US Department of Education really is. Most of the important elements of American education are already standardized. No central government authority had to tell school districts to divide their schools into grades or start in the Fall and end in the Spring. Even details of the curriculum, like teaching long division in 4th grade or Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade, are remarkably consistent from place to place without the national government ordering schools to do so.
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Madison Urban League President Kaleem Caire 13mb .mp3 audio file. Notes and links on the Urban League's proposed IB Charter school: Madison Preparatory Academy. Caire spoke in favor of SB 22.
Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad 5mb .mp3 audio file. Nerad spoke in opposition to SB 22.
Madison School Board Member Marj Passman 5mb .mp3 audio file. Passman spoke in opposition to SB 22.
Much more on SB 22 here.
Well worth listening to. Watch the hearing here.
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Latest tests show voucher scores about same or worse in math and reading.Susan Troller:Students in Milwaukee's school choice program performed worse than or about the same as students in Milwaukee Public Schools in math and reading on the latest statewide test, according to results released Tuesday that provided the first apples-to-apples achievement comparison between public and individual voucher schools.
The scores released by the state Department of Public Instruction cast a shadow on the overall quality of the 21-year-old Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which was intended to improve results for poor city children in failing public schools by allowing them to attend higher-performing private schools with publicly funded vouchers. The scores also raise concerns about Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to roll back the mandate that voucher schools participate in the current state test.
Voucher-school advocates counter that legislation that required administration of the state test should have been applied only once the new version of the test that's in the works was rolled out. They also say that the latest test scores are an incomplete measure of voucher-school performance because they don't show the progress those schools are making with a difficult population of students over time.
Statewide, results from the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam show that scores didn't vary much from last year. The percentage of students who scored proficient or better was higher in reading, science and social studies but lower in mathematics and language arts from the year before.
Great. Now Milwaukee has TWO failing taxpayer-financed school systems when it comes to educating low income kids (and that's 89 per cent of the total population of Milwaukee Public Schools).Matthew DeFour:Statewide test results released Tuesday by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction include for the first time performance data from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which involves about 110 schools serving around 10,000 students. There's a total population of around 80,000 students in Milwaukee's school district.
The numbers for the voucher schools don't look good. But the numbers for the conventional public schools in Milwaukee are very poor, as well.
In a bit of good news, around the rest of the state student test scores in every demographic group have improved over the last six years, and the achievment gap is narrowing.
But the picture in Milwaukee remains bleak.
The test results show the percentage of students participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program who scored proficient or advanced was 34.4 percent for math and 55.2 percent for reading.Only DeFour's article noted that voucher schools spend roughly half the amount per student compared to traditional public schools. Per student spending was discussed extensively during last evening's planning grant approval (The vote was 6-1 with Marj Passman voting No while Maya Cole, James Howard, Ed Hughes, Lucy Mathiak, Beth Moss and Arlene Silveira voted yes) for the Urban League's proposed Charter IB School: The Madison Preparatory Academy.Among Milwaukee Public Schools students, it was 47.8 percent in math and 59 percent in reading. Among Milwaukee Public Schools students coming from families making 185 percent of the federal poverty level -- a slightly better comparison because voucher students come from families making no more than 175 percent -- it was 43.9 percent in math and 55.3 percent in reading.
Statewide, the figures were 77.2 percent in math and 83 percent in reading. Among all low-income students in the state, it was 63.2 percent in math and 71.7 percent in reading.
Democrats said the results are evidence that the voucher program is not working. Rep. Sondy Pope-Roberts, D-Middleton, the top Democrat on the Assembly Education Committee, said voucher students, parents and taxpayers are being "bamboozled."
"The fact that we've spent well over $1 billion on a failed experiment leads me to believe we have no business spending $22 million to expand it with these kinds of results," Pope-Roberts said. "It's irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars and a disservice to Milwaukee students."
Rep. Robin Vos, R-Rochester, who is developing a proposal to expand the voucher program to other cities, took a more optimistic view of the results.
"Obviously opponents see the glass half-empty," Vos said. "I see the glass half-full. Children in the school choice program do the same as the children in public school but at half the cost."
The Wisconsin Knowledge & Concepts Examination (WKCE) has long been criticized for its lack of rigor. Wisconsin DPI WKCE data.
Yin and Yang: Jay Bullock and Christian D'Andrea.
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Statewide the gap between the percentage of white and black students scoring proficient or advanced closed 6.8 percentage points in math and 3.9 points in reading between 2005-06 and this year. Comparing white students to Hispanics, the gap closed 5.7 points in math and 3.7 points in reading.The Wisconsin Knowledge & Concepts Examination (WKCE) has long been criticized for its lack of rigor.In Madison the gap between white and black students closed 0.4 percentage points in math and 0.6 points in reading. Among Hispanics, the gap increased half a point in math and decreased 1 point in reading.
Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad was unavailable to comment Monday on the results.
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A thread was requested about ALOs (Advanced Learning Opportunities, the third tier of the Advanced Learning program) and differentiated teaching. Differentiated teaching is a teacher knowing his/her students' strengths, challenges and readiness and being able to adjust teaching to the different levels in the classroom. (This doesn't necessarily mean teaching to every single student's level but rather knowing that there are different abilities in the classroom and trying to meet those needs.)
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In Houston, school district officials introduced a test score-based evaluation system to determine teacher bonuses, then -- in the face of massive protests -- jettisoned the formula after one year to devise a better one.Much more on "Value Added Assessment", here.In New York, teachers union officials are fighting the public release of ratings for more than 12,000 teachers, arguing that the estimates can be drastically wrong.
Despite such controversies, Los Angeles school district leaders are poised to plunge ahead with their own confidential "value-added" ratings this spring, saying the approach is far more objective and accurate than any other evaluation tool available.
"We are not questing for perfect," said L.A. Unified's incoming Supt. John Deasy. "We are questing for much better."
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For many families, this is March madness -- the moment of high anxiety concerning higher education as many colleges announce their admittance decisions. It is the culmination of a protracted mating dance between selective institutions and anxious students. Part agony, part situation comedy, it has provoked Andrew Ferguson to write a laugh-until-your-ribs-squeak book -- "Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College."He begins in Greenwich, Conn. -- a hedge fund habitat -- watching Katherine Cohen, an "independent college admissions counselor," market her $40,000 "platinum package" of strategies for bewitching Ivy League admissions officers. "Everyone in the room," writes Ferguson, "was on full alert, with that feral look of parental ambition. They swiveled their tail-gunning eyes toward Kat when she was introduced." Kat introduced them to terror:
"There are 36,000 high schools in this country. That means there are at least 36,000 valedictorians. They can't all go to Brown. You could take the 'deny pile' of applications and make two more classes that were every bit as solid as the class that gets in."
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A bill that would ban trans fats in Nevada public schools got support from health advocates and some mild opposition from administrators who don't want to be food police.A Senate committee on Friday heard Senate Bill 230, which bans trans fats from vending machines, student stores, and school activities. The current bill version exempts school lunches, but pending rules through the national school lunch program would ban trans fats there, too.
Trans fats raise levels of harmful cholesterol and decrease levels of healthy cholesterol. They are common in processed snack foods, fried foods and baked goods.
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When it comes to changing public education in Pennsylvania, Gov. Corbett's proposed billion-dollar funding cut to school districts this year could be just the beginning.The governor also is pushing a legislative agenda that could significantly affect the way children are taught, the teachers who instruct them, and how schools craft their budgets.
One proposal that many suburban school boards fear and many taxpayers relish calls for voter approval of proposed district budgets when tax increases exceed inflation. If this were in effect now, more than 80 percent of the districts in Philadelphia's suburbs probably would have to vote.
Other Corbett initiatives would:
Give school boards, for the first time, a free hand to lay off teachers to cut costs, with the decider in the furloughs being classroom performance, not seniority.
Create vouchers providing state funding so low-income children in struggling schools could transfer to private ones. The role of charter schools would also be expanded.
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I remember once, in the early 1980s, when I was teaching at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, I visited a class in European History taught by my most senior colleague, a man with a rich background in history and many years of teaching.
He presented a lot of historical material in that class period, interlaced with interesting historical stories and anecdotes which the students seemed to enjoy. While I envied him for his knowledge and experience, I began to notice that the students were, for the most part at least, laid back and simply being entertained.
They were not being asked to answer challenging questions on the material, or demonstrate the knowledge they had gathered from their homework or outside reading in history, or, in fact, do anything except sit there and be entertained.
This was before the IPod, IPhone, IPad or laptops appeared in classrooms, so no one was texting anyone, but I did see that a few students were not even being bothered enough to be entertained. Here was this fine, educated instructor offering them European history and they were just not paying attention.
I understand that high school classes are only partly voluntary, that if students want a high school diploma they have to take some courses, and history is generally less demanding than calculus, chemistry or physics.
Nevertheless it stayed with me that there was so little "audience participation" from these Juniors and Seniors. I couldn't see that any of them felt much obligation, or opportunity really, to do the work or take part in the class.
Perhaps the teacher was trying to entertain them because a junior colleague was visiting the class, but I don't think that was it. I think that good teacher, like so many of us, and so many of his colleagues to this day, had bought the idea that it was his job to entertain them, rather than to demand that they work hard to learn history for themselves.
He told good stories, but the students said nothing. They, too, had adopted the notion that a "good" teacher would keep them entertained with the absolute minimum of effort on their part, as though it was the teacher's responsibility to "make learning happen," as it were, to them.
The memory of this classroom visit comes back to me as I see so many people in and out of education these days, talk about selecting, monitoring, controlling, and, if necessary removing, teachers who are not sufficiently entertaining, who do not "make students learn" whether they want to or are wiling to work on it themselves or not.
As a high school student in Pennsylvania recently commented, "It's a teacher's job to motivate students." Of course, football and basketball coaches are expected to motivate their athletes as well, but not while those athletes do nothing but sit in the stands and watch the coach do "his thing." They are expected to take part, to work hard, to get themselves into condition and to carry their load in the enterprise of sports.
A sports clothing store near me sells sweatshirts which say; "Work all Summer, Win all Fall." I confirmed with the store owner, a part-time high school football coach, that "Work" in this case does not mean get a summer job and save some money. Rather, it means run, lift weights and generally put time in on their physical fitness so that they will be in shape to play sports in the Fall.
I do not know of any equivalent sweatshirt for high school academics: "Study all Summer, Get Good Grades all Fall." I don't think there is one, and I think the reason is, in part, that so many of us, including too many teachers, have decided that teachers are the ones who need to work on, and take responsibility for, student academic learning. Their job goes way beyond the coaches' task of motivating young athletes who "Work all Summer" and come expecting to give it their all in the Fall.
Those who keep saying that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality simply conspire with all those others, including too many students, who support the idea that academic work and student learning are the teachers' problem, and not one in which the students have a major share. Of course teachers who are forced out of teaching because their students don't do any academic work suffer, but we should also be concerned with the consequences for so many of our students who have been led down the primrose path of believing that school is not their primary job at which they also must work hard.
-------------------
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
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Terry Mazany, interim chief of Chicago Public Schools, was like a baseball manager beckoning a star relief pitcher an inning early to hold a lead. Rather than Mariano Rivera, he waved in Kate Maehr to last week's Board of Education meeting.He had opened an ultimately melancholy session dominated by budget woes by suddenly and without explanation defending the Breakfast in the Classroom program, quietly pushed through in January.
The defense was due partly to an earlier mention in this column that generated lots of "Huh, are they serious?" responses among parents and others, according to board officials. The program mandates that the first instructional class open with pupils having breakfast at their desks, even at schools already offering pre-class breakfast.
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Dear Liz: My son will be going to a for-profit technical school about 120 miles away from home. Unfortunately, we have not saved any money for his college education. What are our best options for borrowing to pay for his college education, which will cost about $92,000 for four years? He is not eligible for any financial aid other than federal student loans. Our daughter will graduate debt free with her bachelor's degree in December. Since we concentrated on her education first, our son kind of got left behind.Answer: Please rethink this plan, because your family probably cannot afford this education.
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In Chicago last school year, 245 public school students were shot, 27 of them fatally.It's a high toll. To try to find out who might be next, Chicago Public School officials developed a probability model by analyzing the traits of 500 shooting victims over a recent two-year period. They noted that the vast majority were poor, black and male, and had chronic absences, bad grades and serious misconduct.
Using this probability model, they identified more than 200 teenagers who have a shockingly good chance of being shot -- a better than 1 in 5 chance within the next two years.
Project Director Jonathan Moy says the probability model isn't perfect, but it's working.
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One of the articles in our special section on Money Through the Ages (produced in partnership with the public radio program Marketplace Money) is about an 18-year-old high school senior with a choice to make. Should he go into at least $6,500 in debt each year to attend a private college or university like Juniata or Clark, or is he better off working part time and attending community college for two years before transferring to one of those colleges?
Zac Bissonnette, the author of Debt-Free U and a senior in college himself, encourages students and families to take on as little debt as possible. He urged the subject of our profile, Mino Caulton of Shutesbury, Mass., to consider the University of Massachusetts, though Mr. Caulton was worried that he wouldn’t get enough individual attention there.
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Letters to the New York Times:
Re "Separate and Unequal," by Bob Herbert (column, March 22):In spite of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court, sadly the struggle goes on. The Department of Education reported in 2008 that 70 percent of white schoolchildren attend schools where at least 75 percent of the students are white, whereas more than half of all black children in industrial states attend schools where over 90 percent are members of minority groups. Go into any urban school and it is clear that 57 years after Brown, the schools have largely remained segregated.
Years of social science research have cited the benefits of integrated schools. In our work with the West Metro Education desegregation initiative in Minneapolis public schools, the students in grades 3 to 7 who got on the bus to attend suburban schools made three times the progress in both reading and math when compared with similar students who did not participate.
Teacher quality remains a consistent important factor. Ultimately, though, students in diverse classrooms benefit from collaboration and teamwork with those whose family circumstances are different from theirs. Eric J. Cooper
President, National Urban Alliance for Effective Education
Stamford, Conn., March 22, 2011
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I had the chance to speak at a local university on Tuesday, talking to a class on cloud computing about the impact of technology (especially, of course, the cloud) on higher education. The class was great and was, itself, focused on team-based learning and simulations using a variety of cloud and web-based tools. What was even better, though, was the Q&A session with the students and my follow-up conversations with faculty and staff.Let me start with something that ZDNet's digital video and photo blogger, Janice Chen, wrote in an unrelated discussion we were having about ZDNet's upcoming 20th anniversary:
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I had the chance to speak at a local university on Tuesday, talking to a class on cloud computing about the impact of technology (especially, of course, the cloud) on higher education. The class was great and was, itself, focused on team-based learning and simulations using a variety of cloud and web-based tools. What was even better, though, was the Q&A session with the students and my follow-up conversations with faculty and staff.Let me start with something that ZDNet's digital video and photo blogger, Janice Chen, wrote in an unrelated discussion we were having about ZDNet's upcoming 20th anniversary:
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I have this problem. I can't read self-help books. Like everybody else, I've experienced my share of life challenges--"life challenges" being the self-help euphemism for "problems"--and I would never pretend not to need any help in facing them, solving them, or at least getting through them. I accept the principles of, and am myself no stranger to, modern psychotherapy. But whenever I try to cope with one of life's predictable stress points by reading a self-help book, I can't manage it. My eyes glaze over. I think "This person is an idiot," or "This person thinks I'm an idiot," or "Maybe I am an idiot, because I can't follow this." Within minutes I toss the book aside and start digging around for a decent novel.hat I've come to believe is that psychological advice isn't worth much if it isn't rooted in personal experience. So instead of reading self-help books I read memoirs about the kinds of experience I'm trying to cope with. It doesn't especially matter whether the author went about confronting his problem in a sensible way, nor even, necessarily, whether the author came out of the experience with a clear understanding of what he did right and what he did wrong. For instance, just about the last person I'd look to for personal advice about anything is Joan Didion. But when my wife died six years ago, I devoured Didion's best-selling memoir about widowhood, The Year of Magical Thinking, and then for good measure I read the script she wrote when she adapted it into a one-person show starring Vanessa Redgrave. (If asked to blurb either, I'd write, "Loopy but compelling.") I read Donald Hall's lovely book of poems about his wife's death, Without, and Hall's more tedious nonfiction reworking of the same material, The Best Day, The Worst Day. I read a mediocre book called Widow written three decades earlier by a publicist for Little, Brown named Lynn Caine, and a brilliant book--the gold standard on widowhood--called A Grief Observed, written four decades earlier by C.S. Lewis, an author I'd previously avoided like the plague. Some of these books were more helpful than others, but all provided some form of "self-help." Meanwhile, a stack of self-help books pressed on me by well-meaning friends gathered dust.
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Miami Dade College announced Wednesday the American Dream Scholarship. The 'free college' offer could help boost college graduation rates - a goal of President Obama's.College tuition is going up and financial aid is on the chopping block in many states, but in the Miami area, one college is offering successful high school graduates a price tag that's hard to refuse: free.
Miami Dade College - the largest institution of higher education in America, serving more than 170,000 students on eight campuses - announced its American Dream Scholarship on Wednesday. It will cover 60 credits at a value of about $6,500 - enough to earn a two-year degree or start in on one of the four-year programs offered by the community college.
This spring's high school graduates in Miami-Dade County will be the first to benefit from the "free college" offer. To qualify for the new scholarship, students must have a 3.0 grade-point average and score well enough on entry tests to show they don't need remedial math or reading courses. Normally, about a third of the college's entering students pass at that level.
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It's practically been relegated to superstar status in the annals of parenting lore: the Manhattan mom who sued her daughter's $19,000-a-year preschool on grounds that the 4-year-old was not sufficiently prepared to tackle the entrance test for private kindergarten.Earlier this month, Nicole Imprescia filed her lawsuit against the York Avenue Preschool, claiming that her daughter, Lucia, was not primed to take the intelligence test and was instead relegated to a mixed-age classroom where talk revolved around -- oh, the horror -- shapes and colors. As a result, Imprescia withdrew her daughter from the preschool. (More on Time.com: Perspective on the Parenting Debate: Rich Parents Don't Matter?)
"The school proved to be not a school at all, but just one big playroom," the suit stated.
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As more kids are diagnosed with food allergies, more schools are faced with figuring out how to deal with students who require a special environment. Should schools be expected to inconvenience all students when only one of them has a severe peanut allergy? This debate is currently playing out at a school in Florida.A 6-year-old girl at a school in Florida has a peanut allergy so severe that she could have a reaction if she were to breath traces of nut dust in the air. Her elementary school in Edgewater, Fl., has taken extraordinary measures to accommodate her.
All students are now required to wash their hands and rinse out their mouths before stepping inside the classroom. Desks must be regularly wiped down with Clorox wipes. School administrators have banned all peanut products and snacks are no longer allowed in the class. Earlier this month, a peanut-sniffing dog walked through the school to make sure everyone is following the rules.
The school is legally obligated to take these safety precautions because of the Federal Disabilities Act, according to Nancy Wait, the the spokeswoman for Volusia County Schools.
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Testimony at the Capitol over a controversial bill that would strip control over charter schools from locally elected officials and place it in the hands of a politically appointed state-wide authorizing board drew hundreds on Wednesday to a standing-room-only Senate education committee hearing.Senate Bill 22, authored by state Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) would also fund independent charter schools ahead of traditional public schools. I wrote about the bill on Tuesday and it's generated a robust conversation.
Madison Superintendent Daniel Nerad testified in opposition to the bill, and so did local school board member Marjorie Passman. Kaleem Caire, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison and a strong proponent of the proposed boys-only Madison Preparatory Academy for minority students, testified in support of the bill. Madison Prep, if approved, will be a publicly funded charter school in Madison.
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Anxious families awaiting April college admission news are living their own March Madness.Their insanity is captured in Andrew Ferguson's new book, "Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College" (Simon & Schuster). He describes the vanity of a desperate mother at a cocktail party who is dying to announce her daughter's perfect SAT scores:
"'We were really surprised at how well she did,' the mother would say, running a finger around the rim of her glass of pink Zinfandel.
Her eyes plead: Ask me what they were, just please please ask."
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One of the most powerful tools for improving the educational achievement of poor black and Hispanic public school students is, regrettably, seldom even considered. It has become a political no-no.Educators know that it is very difficult to get consistently good results in schools characterized by high concentrations of poverty. The best teachers tend to avoid such schools. Expectations regarding student achievement are frequently much lower, and there are lower levels of parental involvement. These, of course, are the very schools in which so many black and Hispanic children are enrolled.
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Boys' and girls' brains are different--but not always in the ways you might think.A common stereotype is that boys develop more slowly than girls, putting them at a disadvantage in school where pressure to perform is starting ever younger. Another notion is that puberty is a time when boys' and girls' brains grow more dissimilar, accounting for some of the perceived disparities between the sexes.
Now, some scientists are debunking such thinking. Although boys' and girls' brains show differences around age 10, during puberty key parts of their brains become more similar, according to recent government research. And, rather than growing more slowly, boys' brains instead are simply developing differently.
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In the pale-turquoise ladies' room, they congregate in front of the mirror, re-applying mascara and lip gloss, brushing their hair, straightening panty hose and gossiping: This one is "skanky," that one is "really cute," and so forth. Dressed in minidresses, perilously high heels, and glittery, dangling earrings, their eyes heavily shadowed in black-pearl and jade, they look like a flock of tropical birds. A few minutes later, they return to the dance floor, where they shake everything they've got under the party lights.But for the most part, there isn't all that much to shake. This particular group of party-goers consists of 12- and 13-year-old girls. Along with their male counterparts, they are celebrating the bat mitzvah of a classmate in a cushy East Coast suburb.
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When T.S. Eliot wrote about the cruelest month "mixing memory and desire", he might also have had in mind that this is the season of school admissions in New York City. So as the sooty piles of snow melt into gray puddles, parents obsess over the letters they will and won't receive from the school that will or won't confer on their radiant progeny the blessing of its approval. It seems to be a challenge in this season for even the more sensible parents among us, even those who really have better things to do, not to fall prey to the prevailing fantasy that if your child is rejected from one of these desirable and enlightened places, he or she will be destined for a life of drug addiction, grand theft auto, or general exile.My 18-month-old recently had his first school interview. Apparently he sailed through it, though how is somewhat mysterious to me. Especially since he calls all fruits "apples" and sentences such as "Mommy. Moon. Get it" are not necessarily indicative of a huge understanding of the workings of the universe. However, no one is too young for the system, and a small obstacle like language cannot be permitted to get in the way of the judging and selecting and general Darwinian sorting to which it is never too soon to accustom yourself in this city. I have been asked to write recommendations for other one-and-a-half-year-olds for this same lovely school, and have thought of, but did not actually write, "He knows a lot about trucks."
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The Hechinger Report: It's well-known that Finland's teachers are an elite bunch, with only top students offered the chance to become teachers. It's also no secret that they are well-trained. But take us inside that training for a moment - what does it look like, specifically? How does teacher training in Finland differ from teacher training in other countries?Virkkunen: It's a difficult question. Our teachers are really good. One of the main reasons they are so good is because the teaching profession is one of the most famous careers in Finland, so young people want to become teachers. In Finland, we think that teachers are key for the future and it's a very important profession--and that's why all of the young, talented people want to become teachers. All of the teacher-training is run by universities in Finland, and all students do a five-year master's degree. Because they are studying at the university, teacher education is research-based. Students have a lot of supervised teacher-training during their studies. We have something called "training schools"--normally next to universities--where the student teaches and gets feedback from a trained supervisor.
Teachers in Finland can choose their own teaching methods and materials. They are experts of their own work, and they test their own pupils. I think this is also one of the reasons why teaching is such an attractive profession in Finland because teachers are working like academic experts with their own pupils in schools.
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Intercollegiate Studies Institute:
nlightened Citizenship: How Civic Knowledge Trumps a College Degree in Promoting Active Civic Engagement is the fifth report to the nation issued by ISI's National Civic Literacy Board. While each past study has had a different point of emphasis, all share a common thread of examining the relationships that exist between higher education, civic knowledge, and citizenship.Unfortunately, the results of ISI's past civic literacy research does not inspire confidence that our institutions of higher learning are living up to their educative and civic responsibilities, responsibilities that almost all American colleges recognize as critical to their overall public missions.
In 2006 and 2007, ISI administered a sixty-question multiple-choice exam on knowledge of American history and institutions to over 28,000 college freshmen and seniors from over eighty schools. In both years, the average freshman and senior failed the exam.
In 2008, ISI tested 2,508 adults of all ages and educational backgrounds, and once again the results were discouraging. Seventy-one percent of Americans failed the exam, with high school graduates scoring 44% and college graduates also failing at 57%.
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Creative writing is an academic discipline. I draw a distinction between writing, which is what writers do, and creative writing. I think most people in the UK who teach creative writing have come to it via writing - they are bona fide writers who publish poems and novels and play scripts and the like, and they have found some way of supporting that vocation through having a career in academia. So in teaching aspirant writers how to write they are drawing upon their own experience of working in that medium. They are drawing upon their knowledge of what the problems are and how those problems might be tackled. It's a practice-based form of learning and teaching.But because it is in academia there is all this paraphernalia that has to go with it. So you get credits for attending classes. You have to do supporting modules; you have to be assessed. If you are doing an undergraduate degree you have to follow a particular curriculum and only about a quarter of that will be creative writing and the rest will be in the canon of English literature. If you are doing a PhD you have to support whatever the creative element is with a critical element. So there are these ways in which academia disciplines writing and I think of that as Creative Writing with a capital C and a capital W. All of us who teach creative writing are doing it, in a sense, to support our writing, but it is also often at the expense of our writing. We give up quite a lot of time and mental energy and also, I think, imaginative and creative energy to teach.
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IN a speech last week, President Obama said it was unacceptable that "as many as a quarter of American students are not finishing high school." But our current educational approach doesn't just fail to prepare teenagers for graduation or for college academics; it fails to prepare them, in a profound way, for adult life.We want young people to become independent and capable, yet we structure their days to the minute and give them few opportunities to do anything but answer multiple-choice questions, follow instructions and memorize information. We cast social interaction as an impediment to learning, yet all evidence points to the huge role it plays in their psychological development.
That's why we need to rethink the very nature of high school itself.
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Students in California public schools are not achieving at the levels they should. Too many students are unprepared for jobs or have to take remedial courses when they start college. In California, we judge student achievement through student scores on statewide tests. These tests assess how much students know about subject-matter content that is specified in an official set of state academic-content standards. Research has long shown that effective teachers are among the best ways to bring up student achievement. But in order to improve teaching effectiveness, it is helpful to know where the challenges are.We've heard a lot in California recently about the move to factor student test scores from statewide standards-based tests into teacher evaluations. Yet did you know that for more than a decade, it has been the law in California to do just that?
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Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson:
The way college courses generally work is that a teacher presents a group of students with some subject matter, then attempts through tests and papers to determine how well the students have mastered the subject matter. Those judgments are summarized in a letter grade. A list of those subject matters and grades constitutes the transcript that describes what the student has learned and what the student's performance was overall.The students and the teacher are focused on the subject matter, and the implied view is that the learning in college is captured in the exercises that inform those grades. The limitations of this "subject matter recall" model of higher education are hilariously captured in Don Novello's comic performance on Saturday Night Live as Father Guido Sarducci, who marketed the "Five Minute University": http://youtu.be/kO8x8eoU3L4
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Evan Camp's frustration had built up to the point where he couldn't shed it even by feverishly cleaning his house.To him, all the talk about education reform seemed to be about punishing teachers, especially the part about tying teacher pay to test scores.
So Camp, a middle school science teacher in Greenwood, started jotting down thoughts as he cleaned one Saturday afternoon. Soon, he had enough material to write a tome for beleaguered teachers that would become an open letter to Gov. Mitch Daniels and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett.
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When I was a child there was a truism that anyone could make something (a rabbit hutch, say) or mend something (a bicycle) if they had a classical education. It was felt that using intellectual tools--parsing a bit of Latin history, constructing an argument--was training enough for taking on the material world. Learning gave you a steady approach to the tricksiness of the world of things. Lurking behind this belief was an attitude of de haut en bas; condescension towards those working with their hands.This annoyed me. Partly because I could only stumble through my Latin lessons but mostly because my afternoons were spent in a pottery workshop learning to throw pots. It was clear to me--a white apron over my school uniform as I kneaded the clay to take out the air bubbles and give it the right consistency, pulled the long twisted wire made from rabbit snares, divided it into 4-ounce balls and sat at my kick wheel in the corner readying myself for my hours of practice--that this was different from classroom learning.
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The facts are hard.A generation ago, California had what was considered the best education system on the planet.
Today, our daughters and sons attend one of the worst-performing education systems in the industrialized world.
We are failing on the rock-bottom basics. California students' ability to read is ranked 49th in the country by the U.S. Department of Education. Our kids' ability to do math is ranked 47th and we are second to worst in science. Compared globally, the situation darkens further. Of the top 35 nations, the United States is ranked 29th in science and 35th in math. Your neighborhood school might be good by California standards, but that is a very low bar indeed. Our education crisis is a human tragedy and a looming economic disaster.
The Bay Area Council resolutely refuses to accept this crisis as our state's fate. Let's get past the political gridlock and get down to the real business of dramatically improving California schools. We know, as every honest study has shown, that it will take a combination of real dollars and major changes in the way we deliver education.
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When a Stafford County jury this month found an autistic teenager guilty of assaulting a law enforcement officer and recommended that he spend 101/2 years in prison, a woman in the second row sobbed.It wasn't the defendant's mother. She wouldn't cry until she reached her car. It was Teresa Champion.
Champion had sat through the trial for days and couldn't help drawing parallels between the defendant, Reginald "Neli" Latson, 19, and her son James, a 17-year-old with autism.
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There are those who think the best way to determine teacher effectiveness is by looking only at students' test scores. The simplicity of this approach can be seductive, but it is inherently flawed. This approach only makes sense if you assume all children come to school with the same abilities, have the same educational resources and opportunities and return home to the same support systems. As a kindergarten teacher for more than 30 years, I can confirm what you already know to be true: Every child is different.The fact of the matter is student achievement and teacher effectiveness aren't simple to measure, and the results of one test are not going to offer a complete assessment of either. Many different measures must be used in order to determine true effectiveness.
So how do you define teacher effectiveness? How to evaluate it? How to reward it? These are all good questions. Most research will tell you an effective teacher is one of the most important factors in a student's education, and I would agree. Research will also tell you that many other factors can and do influence student success: poverty, hunger, homelessness, language skills, parental involvement and education, the learning environment, hormones and personal motivation.
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It's been 81 years since Virginia Wolff published her famous essay, more than 20 since I read it, and even more before I followed her advice that "a woman must have a room of her own, if she is to write."When my mother was my age, she considered the best part of her life as behind her. When my grandmother was this age, considered herself "old." And my great-grandmother most certainly was. But that was then, and this is the era of longevity, vitality and change. We've rewritten all the rules. But maybe rules are only scaffolds we construct to contain what we can't control. Which is just about everything.
My dreams and expectations changed radically when my child was diagnosed with Autism. From that moment, and for the next decade, every thought in my head, urge in my heart and pulse in my body was redirected to helping him. When your child is diagnosed as on the Spectrum, you're told that much can improve, but most profoundly before the age of 5. My son was already three. So the clock was ticking, the meter was running, and I had a choice to make; pursue my needs, or save his life. So I put away the screenplay I was writing, abandoned the film collective I was trying to form, and forgot any notion of going back to a traditional job. In their place, I organized a line of behavioral therapists, occupational therapists, auditory training technologies, and casein-free diets. And thanked God each day that I had the resources so I could.
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"It's no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you'll get a good job, and it's becoming less true with each passing decade," Paul Krugman writes today.Krugman is right that more school is no total panacea for our jobs crisis. But he's wrong that college is losing its edge. The fact is that that the bonus from a college education for men and women has doubled since the 1970s. Although the costs of an advanced degree have never been higher, the benefits of post-secondary education are growing similarly. Here are five reasons not to doubt the value of a college education today.
1. Seven of the ten fastest growing jobs in the next 10 years require a bachelor's degree or higher
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Has any concept more completely defined and disfigured public life over the last generation than so-called elitism? Ever since Richard Nixon's speechwriters pitted a silent majority (later sometimes "the real America") against the nattering nabobs of negativism (later "tenured radicals," the "cultural elite," and so on), American political, aesthetic, and intellectual experience can only be glimpsed through a thickening fog of culture war. And the fog, very often, has swirled around a single disreputable term.The first thing to note is the migration of the word elite and its cognates away from politics proper and into culture. Today "the cultural elite" is almost a redundancy -- the culture part is implied -- while nobody talks anymore about what C. Wright Mills in 1956 called "the power elite." Mills glanced at journalists and academics, but the main elements of the elite, in his sense, were not chatterers and scribblers but (as George W. Bush might have put it) deciders: generals, national politicians, corporate boards. "Insofar as national events are decided," Mills wrote, "the power elite are those who decide them." The pejorative connotations of "elite" have remained fairly stable across the decades. The word suggests a group of important individuals who have come by their roles through social position as much as merit; who place their own self-maintenance as an elite and the interests of the social class they represent above the interests and judgments of the population at large; and who look down on ordinary people as inferiors. Today, though, it's the bearers of culture rather than the wielders of power who are taxed with elitism. If the term is applied to powerful people, this is strictly for cultural reasons, as the different reputations of the identically powerful Obama and Bush attest. No one would think to call a foul-mouthed four-star general an elitist, even though he commands an army, any more than the term would cover a private equity titan who hires Rod Stewart to serenade his 60th birthday party. Culture, not power, determines who attracts the epithet.
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Acting Comm. Christopher Cerf directly rebutted "myths" about charter schools at a State Board of Education meeting, according to The Record. Contrary to claims by anti-charter proponents, says Cerf, NJ's charter school admit very poor kids and children with disabilities, and perform better than traditional public schools in Abbott districts.Here's the powerpoint.
For example, in NJ 15.87% of kids are classified as eligible for special education services. (We rank second in the nation in this category. First is Massachusetts. Then again, the classification rate at Wildwood High is 24.6%, Asbury Park High is 20.2%, John F. Kennedy in Paterson is 24.1%, and Camden Central High is a stunning 33.6%. But back to charters.)
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The notion that education pays and that better education pays better is taken for granted by almost everyone. For college professors like me, this is a very convenient idea, providing a high and growing demand for our services.Unfortunately, the facts seem to disagree. A recent study by economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger showed that going to more selective colleges and universities makes little difference to future income once one accounts for the underlying ability of the student. Their work confirms other studies that find no financial benefit to attending top-tier schools.
It's good to know that Harvard applicants can safely attend Boston University (my employer), and that "better" higher education doesn't pay better. But does higher education pay in the first place?
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"Stand up if you have ever been told that you weren't college material," the school president booms during the commencement ceremony.In answer to his question, dozens of students stand and pump their fists; cheers go up; an air horn blasts. He goes on:
"Now, stand if you are the first member of your family to go to college."
Dozens more rise.
"Stand if you started your degree more than 10 years ago," and then the president tells them to stay standing as he ticks off intervals of time, "Fifteen years? Twenty years? Twenty-five years?"
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Is studying the brain a good way to understand the mind? Does psychology stand to brain anatomy as physiology stands to body anatomy? In the case of the body, physiological functions--walking, breathing, digesting, reproducing, and so on--are closely mapped onto discrete bodily organs, and it would be misguided to study such functions independently of the bodily anatomy that implements them. If you want to understand what walking is, you should take a look at the legs, since walking is what legs do. Is it likewise true that if you want to understand thinking you should look at the parts of the brain responsible for thinking?Is thinking what the brain does in the way that walking is what the body does? V.S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, thinks the answer is definitely yes. He is a brain psychologist: he scrutinizes the underlying anatomy of the brain to understand the manifest process of the mind. He approvingly quotes Freud's remark "Anatomy is destiny"--only he means brain anatomy, not the anatomy of the rest of the body.
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The Los Angeles Board of Education shocked the city, and much of the education world, last week by ordering six charter schools shut down after a charter official was found to have orchestrated cheating on state tests. It is rare for a school board to close that many charters at once. Even the local teachers union, often hostile to charters, advised against it.But more surprising, and perhaps a sign of a significant shift in the national debate over testing, is the fact that the jump in scores at the Crescendo charter system was investigated at all. USA Today, in a series of stories launched this week, has compiled nationwide evidence of inexplicable test score gains, followed by equally puzzling collapses, that experts say suggest cheating but are ignored by the officials responsible for those schools.
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A big crowd packed into the University of Wisconsin's Memorial Union Theater on Tuesday night to hear education historian Diane Ravitch, considered one of the most influential scholars in the nation on schools.In her talk, she ripped into Gov. Scott Walker's budget, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's Race to the Top, the obsession with measuring student progress through high stakes testing, privatization of education through charters and vouchers and No Child Left Behind legislation that is closing schools and punishing teachers.
Her gloomy assessment of the current passion for "fixing" education and vilifying teachers is particularly striking because Ravitch herself is a former proponent of school testing and accountability and an early supporter of the No Child Left Behind legislation.
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Parents teach their children how to swim, how to ride a bicycle and how to drive. Should they also teach their teenagers how to drink responsibly?The volatile issue is seldom discussed at alcohol-awareness programs. But some parents do quietly allow their teens to have wine or beer at home occasionally, figuring that kids who drink in moderation with their family may be less likely to binge on their own.
Many other parents argue that underage drinking of any kind is dangerous and illegal, and that parents who allow it are sending an irresponsible message that could set teens up for alcohol abuse in later years.
U.S. government surveys have started tracking where and how teenagers obtain alcohol--and that at least some of the time, parents are the suppliers.
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The teacher-run Math Night at Madison's Olson Elementary was a chance for parents and children to play math games together, but there's more to the event."The real reason behind it is to have families and kids think a little differently about math," said Dawn Weigel Stiegert, instructional resource teacher at Olson.
At the recent second annual event, the activities focused on geometry, measurement and math facts/number work. Each area had games designed for different grade levels and chosen by the teachers to fit with math standards for the various grades. The games allow parents, who learned math differently when they were in school, to see the expectations at the different grade levels and how their children are learning math, Weigel Stiegert said.
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Eleven New York City education reporters were huddling on e-mail last October 20, musing over ways to collectively pry a schedule of school closings out of a stubborn press office, when the chatter stopped cold. Word had filtered into their message bins that the city was about to release a set of spreadsheets showing performance scores for 12,000 of the city's 80,000 teachers--names included. Few understood better than the beat reporters that this wonky-sounding database was a game changer.The Los Angeles Times already had jolted newsrooms across the country back in August, when it published 6,000 public school teachers' names next to its own performance calculations. New York education reporters, though, were considerably more reluctant to leap on this bandwagon. They found themselves with twenty-four hours to explain a complex and controversial statistical analysis, first to their editors and then to the public, while attempting to fend off the inevitable political and competitive pressure to print the names next to the numbers, something nearly every one of them opposed. "I stayed up all night kind of panicked," said Lindsey Christ, the education reporter for the local NY1 television station, "writing a memo to everyone in the newsroom explaining what was coming and what was at stake."
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A 15-year-old Australian boy is suing the government after allegedly being left illiterate and innumerate despite being taught at a state-run school, officials confirmed yesterday.The Victoria state education department said it was defending the claim made by the boy from Melbourne.
Lawyers for the student reportedly told the Federal Court that the state government promises a "world-class" education for students, but the boy had been severely bullied at school and left illiterate and innumerate.
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When Heriberto Avila lost his leg as a result of an accident during a high school wrestling match in January, he and his family could have started calling lawyers. They could have turned bitter or angry.But on the day Heriberto, a Belvidere North High School senior known as Eddie, woke up in a hospital bed and tearfully struggled to deal with the shock that his left leg had been amputated, he reminded his family and his pastor, who were in the room with him, that he was not the only one who needed solace.
He was worried about his wrestling opponent, Sean McIntrye, a senior at Genoa-Kingston High School, whose legal take-down had caused the broken bones and the rupture in a blood vessel that led to the amputation.
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In another sign that the city's economic recovery is flourishing, demand for the city's private schools increased by nearly 10% this year, according to new data to be released Monday.The number of parents willing to spend upwards of $30,000 a year for elite private schools increased sharply last year, as the number of children who took the admission tests jumped to 4,668, according the Educational Records Bureau, which administers the tests.
The last time private schools saw this kind of increase was between 2006 and 2007, when the city's real-estate market was in a frenzy, the stock market was at an all-time high and the number of students taking the admissions tests shot up by 12%. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, test takers dipped by nearly 2%; they fell by 5% in 2009.
"We had a banner year in 2007 with a surge in test takers, but where we are now even surpasses that jump," ERB's executive director, Antoinette DeLuca, said.
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Sony Michel is still a high school freshman, yet he has shown flashes of Hall of Fame potential. A tailback for American Heritage in Plantation, Fla., Michel has rushed for 39 touchdowns and nearly 3,500 yards in two varsity seasons."He's on par to be Emmitt Smith, on par to be Deion Sanders, on par to be Jevon Kearse," said Larry Blustein, a recruiting analyst for The Miami Herald who has covered the beat for 40 years. "He'll be one of the legendary players in this state."
Michel's recruitment will also be a test case for a rapidly evolving college football landscape. The proliferation of seven-on-seven nonscholastic football has transformed the high school game, once defined by local rivalries, state championships and the occasional all-star game, into a national enterprise.
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Stop the presses! The British, French and German heads of state agree on something: Cameron, Sarkozy and Merkel have all recently declared multiculturalism a failure.Like the related dogma of diversity, multiculturalism is so deeply embedded in the lexicon of liberalism that it has become axiomatic. Proponents hold it so dear that the faintest doubt poses an existential threat.
With the stakes so high, agnostics face sanctimonious wrath: if you don't believe in multiculturalism there is simply something wrong with you; maybe you're even nuts. While I have reservations I think I'm basically sane, and I sure as heck hope the aforementioned world leaders are operating with a full deck.
It's important to distinguish between diversity and multiculturalism, which are often lumped together in liberal orthodoxy. Diversity is inherently good; but multiculturalism too often leads to separation and resentment that foments extremism.
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Take the school John Norquist sent his son to when he was mayor of Milwaukee. It's private because it bought into the decidedly non-mainstream Waldorf movement. The Norquist family obviously felt it was worth the tuition, which the mayor could afford.The school also accepted children via Milwaukee's school choice program, so poor children could attend. Who was left out? Children from families neither poor nor well-off, including children whose parents worked for Norquist as firefighters and cops.
This is one reason Norquist says Gov. Scott Walker is right to expand school choice. By letting in the middle class, said Norquist, Walker makes better options available to middle-income parents in Milwaukee.
Norquist swiftly adds that he agrees with nothing else Walker has proposed lately. The ex-mayor goes on at length that he believes Walker wrong to limit public-union bargaining power.
That said, he vigorously favors more school choice. Milwaukee has school choice for the middle class, only it amounts to moving out to somewhere that the public schools are good. "One of the reasons people leave the city is because they feel they don't have good choices for their kids," Norquist said. "This bill changes that."
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Iowa has been widely known as an "education state" throughout its existence. Because of population shifts and changing educational needs for our K-12 students, this part of our education system receives a great deal of attention.There is another component of Iowa's education system which internally has probably not attracted as much attention but which has brought both distinction and tens of thousands of high school graduates to our state for more than a century and a half.
That component is higher education - public universities under the governance of the Board of Regents, private colleges and universities, and area community colleges. All have made great contributions to Iowa, the United States and the world. Their economic impact within Iowa might be described as "hidden in plain sight."
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Your fifth-grader asks you for help with the day's math homework. The assignment: Create a "stem-and-leaf" plot of the birthdays of each student in the class and use it to determine if one month has more birthdays than the rest, and if so, which month? Do you:a) Stare blankly
b) Google "stem-and-leaf plot"
c) Say, "Why do you need to know that?"
d) Shrug and say, "I must have been sick the day they taught that in math class."
If you're a parent of a certain age, your kids' homework can be confounding. Blame it on changes in the way children are taught math nowadays -- which can make you feel like you're not very good with numbers.
Well, our math guy, Keith Devlin, is very good at math, and he tells Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon that there's a reason elementary schools are teaching arithmetic in a new way.
"That's largely to reflect the different needs of society," he says. "No one ever in their real life anymore needs to -- and in most cases never does -- do the calculations themselves."
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our fifth-grade boys at Grace Patterson Elementary School in Vallejo became ill after eating part of a cookie that contained marijuana, officials said Tuesday.While on his way to school Monday, one of the boys, an 11-year-old, was given two individually wrapped cookies by a clerk at the Calco Mart and Gas station at 200 Maine St.
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Thank you to those who have commented on my blog of February 28.One reader made a thoughtful point about letters of recommendation and my use of the word "cheat." The writer points out that in writing a letter of recommendation, the student has a chance for self-evaluation and that there is also transparency if the student writes and the teacher signs -- both know what was said.
While I agree that self-evaluation and transparency are both good qualities, letters of recommendation for colleges are supposed to be confidential comments by a teacher about a student. In the States, it is rare for a teacher to agree to write a letter of recommendation if it will be negative, but a thoughtful letter that gives some detail about the work of a student, how a student interacts with others in the class, the degree of maturity shown, and the strengths and even some weaknesses as a way of showing where a student has worked hard to improve, are things that admissions people want to see; it's one of the many efforts to get to know many aspects of the applicant.
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Dan DiMaggio was blown away the first time he heard his boss say it.The pensive, bespectacled 25-year-old had been coming to his new job in the Comcast building in downtown St. Paul for only about a week. Naturally, he had lots of questions.
At one point, DiMaggio approached his increasingly red-faced supervisor at his desk with another question. Instead of answering, the man just hissed at him.
"You know this stuff better than I do!" he said. "Stop asking me questions!"
DiMaggio was struck dumb.
"I definitely didn't feel like I knew what was going on at all," he remembers. "Your supervisor has to at least pretend to know what's going on or everything falls apart."
DiMaggio's question concerned an essay titled, "What's your goal in life?" The answer for a surprising number of seventh-graders was to lift 200 pounds.
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As I've worked with Chinese students who want to attend college or university in the US, there are some, not surprising, generalizations that apply to the process and there are also constant and gratifying distinctive stories that keep me from being too stereotypical in my assumptions.Today the generalizations.
The US college application preparation is 180-degrees different from preparing to attend college in China. At the most basic level it is a difference between one test score (in China) and a process of many forms, the occasional interview, and each school's idiosyncratic process (in the States). In China, "universities" are the desired place for undergraduate education; "colleges" are three-year institutions more like our vocational schools. This difference can lead to some confusion at the outset of talking with Chinese students and parents about undergraduate education in the US.
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When Judy Smith was looking for someone to play the central role of stage manager in "Our Town," the classic Thornton Wilder play about life in small-town America, she wasn't expecting to cast a boy with Asperger's syndrome.Yet when 14-year-old Clayton Mortl auditioned more than six weeks ago, Smith said she experienced a director's "quintessential moment." He was perfect for the role.
Legendary actors like Paul Newman have brought powerful performances to the play - a staple of Broadway, community theater and classrooms since its 1938 debut, said Smith, the performing arts center manager and theater arts adviser at New Berlin West Middle / High School.
But when the 18-member middle school cast takes the stage Thursday, at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m., Clay's performance may be legendary in its own right.
Though everyone is different, people with Asperger's - an autism spectrum disorder - have impaired ability to socially interact and communicate nonverbally. Their speech may sound different because of inflection or abnormal repetition. Body movements may not seem age appropriate. Interests may be narrowly focused to the extent that common interests aren't shared.
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The guests sipped wine and nibbled sushi, guacamole and Gruyere - lawyers, bankers, preschool teachers, managers and consultants of various kinds, bound together by the anxious decision they must confront in the months ahead: where their 4-year-olds will go to school in the fall.Downstairs, a flyer by the doorman's desk had greeted them with a provocative question: "Why should you have to spend college tuition on kindergarten?" Back upstairs, in the stylish apartment on West 99th Street, Eva S. Moskowitz, a former City Council member who runs a network of charter schools in Harlem and the Bronx, delivered a tantalizing sales talk.
"Middle-class families need options too," she said.
But Moskowitz is trying to expand her chain into a whole new precinct of the city, the relatively well-off Upper West Side. And outside the parties she has organized to drum up interest, the reaction has been anything but warm from the neighborhood's stridently anti-charter political establishment.
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My daughter's college applications are all in, and now we can quietly go nuts while admissions fairies from coast to coast get busy, as Andrew Ferguson wonderfully puts it, "sprinkling pixie dust and waving wands, dashing dreams or making them come true."It's an apt metaphor because, as anyone who's been in it knows, the family caravan to collegeland is magical and terrifying: You begin wide-eyed and innocent, skipping along with outsized hopes, only to shrink before the fire-breathing ogres of the SAT, the essay, the deadlines, the costs. In "Crazy U," Ferguson invites you to join him on the dream-mare that he and his son endured.
The book is both a hilarious narrative and an incisive guide to the college admissions process. Ferguson, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, has done his research, poring over mountains of published material and interviewing admissions officers, college coaches, academics and the guy behind the U.S. News & World Report college rankings.
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Many states emphasise abstract concepts rather than history itself. In Delaware, for example, pupils "will not be expected to recall any specific event or person in history". Other states teach children about early American history only once, when they are 11. Yet other states show scars from the culture wars. A steady, leftward lean has been followed by a violent lurch to the right. Standards for Texas, passed last year, urge pupils to question the separation of church and state and "evaluate efforts by global organisations to undermine US sovereignty through the use of treaties".Related: The State of State U.S. History Standards 2011: Wisconsin = F.Some states fare better. South Carolina has set impressive standards--for example, urging teachers to explain that colonists did not protest against taxation simply because taxes were too high. Other states, Mr Finn argues, would do well to follow South Carolina's example. "Twenty-first century skills" may help pupils become better workers; learning history makes them better citizens.
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This is a boom time for parental choice in education. Frankly, that's pretty scary to me.I'm not talking about the school voucher program or charter schools, or other things like that.
I'm talking about the choices parents make in how they raise their children - how they can do (or not do) things that maximize the chances of their children becoming well-educated, well-balanced, constructive adults.
Since, say, the 1960s, expectations have grown for schools to take care of an increasing range of children's needs. That goes for academics, of course, but also for social development, recreation, mentoring and, in many cases, providing nutrition, clothing and some basics of health care. That's especially true for schools serving low-income kids, but you'd be surprised how often it is true in all schools.
I believe that one of the things we are seeing in the continuing chaos in Madison is that the tide is cresting for schools to play such roles. Teachers and staff members are simply going to be unable to do some of the things they've done to make up for what parents aren't doing.
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Central to debates over the New Badger Partnership is the question of whether additional flexibilities that make it possible to raise tuition are desirable.Evidence can and must be used to make these decisions. A robust, evidence-based debate on our campus is obviously needed but to date has not occurred. Instead, to many of us outside Bascom it seems as though administrators have mostly relied on the input of a few economists and some other folks who work in higher education but are not scholars of higher education. It also seems like seeking advice from those mostly likely to agree with you. (Please--correct me if I'm wrong--very happy to be corrected with evidence on this point.)
It would be wonderful to see a more thorough review of existing evidence and the development of an evaluation plan that will assess positive and negative impacts of any new policy in ways that allow for the identification of policy effects-- not correlations. (Let's be clear: comparing enrollment of Pell recipients before and after the implementation of a policy like the MIU does not count.)
A few years ago I blogged about studies on the effects of tuition and financial aid on individual decision-making. To summarize-- effects of each are relatively small (especially when compared to effects of academic under-preparation, for example) but usually statistically significant. Also, what we call "small" reflects our value judgments, and we must recognize that.
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Students from Chicago's Urban Prep Academies visited Madison Saturday, 2/26/2011 in support of the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school. A few photos can be viewed here.
I have not seen the Madison business community step up to the plate like this since getting Monona Terrace built 20 years ago.CUNA Mutual Foundation is backing Kaleem Caire's proposal for a Madison Prep charter school. Steve Goldberg, president of the CUNA Foundation, made that announcement this Saturday morning. The occasion was a forum held at CUNA to rally support for the project. CUNA's support will take the form of in-kind contributions, Goldberg said.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men would open in August 2012 -- if the Madison school board agrees. School board president Maya Cole told me that she knows there is one vote opposed. That would be Marj Passman, a Madison teachers union-first absolutist.
The school board is scheduled to decide at its meeting on March 28. Mark that date on your calendars.
CUNA is a much-respected corporate citizen. We'll see if that is enough to overcome the teachers union, which opposes Madison Prep because the charter school would be non-union.
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Here are the fiscal facts. Unlike most employees, few Wisconsin teachers have to contribute more than marginally to their retirement and health care costs. My colleague Bob Costrell, who has done substantial work in Milwaukee, calculates that the city's public school teachers get a remarkable package of benefits equal to 74% of salary, roughly double the normal benefits for workers calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics but in line with other Wisconsin teachers.And that's not all. By collective bargaining agreement, the Wisconsin Education Association Council has a lock on health insurance coverage for members, not necessarily a great service for teachers but a wonderful profit center for the union.
What explains this? As one who has served in government and taught public personnel management, the answers are three-fold, and in combination explain why allowing a broad scope for collective bargaining undermines transparency and, ultimately, democracy.
First, teachers unions play a big role in politics, meaning that, as Terry Moe writes in "Teacher Unions and School Board Elections" (published in a Brookings Institution book on school boards), "the fact that school boards are elected means that the teacher unions can actually participate in choosing - or even literally choose - the management they will be bargaining with."
In the California school districts Moe studies, unions fund candidates and mobilize voters in (low-turnout) school board elections and often recruit the candidates. Unions thus control both sides of the collective bargaining table. Surveys of school board members suggest that business interests, in contrast, have little power.
I have not seen comparable research on Wisconsin, but I suspect similar dynamics.
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Giving kids' allowances raises lots of questions for parents: How much to pay? Should the money be tied to chores - and if so, which ones? Can the kids spend the money freely, or must they save part of it?One family I read about in the Journal of Financial Planning paid their kids $6 a week, but allowances weren't tied to chores. The purpose of chores, said the parents (a financial planner and psychiatrist) was to develop a work ethic, while the purpose of an allowance was to help kids "learn to think, chose and consider alternatives when it comes to money." The $6, though, was divvied up very specifically: $2 went directly to the kids, who could spend it however they chose; $2 went to a charity of the kids' choice and $2 went to the bank. At the end of the year, the kids could withdraw half the money saved and spend it, leaving the other half to grow for longer. The purpose of the plan is to help the kids learn how to make smart decisions regarding finances and learn about the three main uses of money: spending, saving and giving.
I recently learned about another novel way to give allowance. One mom of a 4-year-old daughter, Alisa T. Weinstein, decided to forgo the traditional idea of paying for household chores. Instead, she compiled a list of careers and simple "kiddified" tasks associated with them. (A market researcher, for example, could do a small verbal survey of classmates' favorite ice cream flavors, or a banker could give different denominations of change.) Each week or so, her daughter would take on the role of a certain profession and perform the associated work. At the end, Weinstein rewarded her daughter with a "payday," according to the New York Times' Bucks blog, which profiled Weinstein.
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The word "fund-raiser" evokes an image of endless speeches, bland evening gowns and even blander buffets, but Edible Schoolyard's yearly benefit should veer a little more toward the wild side. With three fabulous hostesses (the food artist Jennifer Rubell, the fashion buyer Julie Gilhart and the 303 gallerist Lisa Spellman) and a storied downtown locale (the Odeon), the event promises to be more Studio 54 than Cipriani Ballroom. "It's the kind of fund-raiser that I would love to attend, a fund-raiser that is not boring" says Rubell, just back from the opening of her "Engagement" show at the Stephen Friedman gallery in London. "My favorite women in the city will be there, including Lynn Wagenknecht" -- the restaurant's owner -- "who came up with the idea."The $50 cover charge goes toward supporting Edible Schoolyard, the Alice Waters-founded organization that creates small farms in public schoolyards to reconnect children with the food-growing cycle. "I think kids should be exposed to the aesthetics of food from a very young age," Rubell says. "And growing food is so exciting."
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Despite the outcry over high college costs, tuition rates are still going up. Princeton, Brown, Stanford and George Washington, for example, all announced increases in the last few weeks.But a Tennessee college, the University of the South, better known as Sewanee, is reducing the cost to attend the school next year by 10 percent.
Tuition, fees, and room and board are all affected, with the overall cost falling from around $46,000 to about $41,500. The university said it will alter its student aid formula, but officials say no students will pay more next year than they pay now, and most will pay less.
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Robots could one day help teach kids in classrooms, suggests research involving droids and toddlers in California.
A robot named RUBI has already shown that it can significantly improve how well infants learn words, and the latest version of the bot under development should also be able to wheel around classrooms, too.The idea to develop RUBI came to Javier Movellan, director of the Machine Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, when he was in Japan for research involving robots and his kids were in a child care center.
"I thought, 'Let's bring robots to the child care center,' and the children got really scared. It was a really horrible experience," Movellan recalled. "But it showed that the robots really got their attention, and that if we got the experience right, it could be potentially very powerful at evoking the emotional responses we'd want."
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The author of The Cult Of The Amateur argues that if we lose our privacy we sacrifice a fundamental part of our humanity.Every so often, when I'm in Amsterdam, I visit the Rijksmuseum to remind myself about the history of privacy. I go there to gaze at a picture called The Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, which was painted by Jan Vermeer in 1663. It is of an unidentified Dutch woman avidly reading a letter. Vermeer's picture, to borrow a phrase from privacy advocates Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, is a celebration of the "sacred precincts of private and domestic life". It's as if the artist had kept his distance in order to capture the young woman, cocooned in her private world, at her least socially visible.
Today, as social media continues radically to transform how we communicate and interact, I can't help thinking with a heavy heart about The Woman in Blue. You see, in the networking age of Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, the social invisibility that Vermeer so memorably captured is, to excuse the pun, disappearing. That's because, as every Silicon Valley notable, from Eric Schmidt to Mark Zuckerberg, has publicly acknowledged, privacy is dead: a casualty of the cult of the social. Everything and everyone on the internet is becoming collaborative. The future is, in a word, social.
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Get out your library cards: Now you can wirelessly download electronic books from your local library using the Apple iPad or an Android tablet.Last week, OverDrive Inc. released OverDrive Media Console for the iPad, a free app from Apple's App Store. With the app, you can now borrow eBooks for reading on the go with a tablet.
You can already borrow an eBook from a library using an eReader, including the Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble Nook, but you'll need a PC and a USB cable for downloading and synching. Amazon's Kindle doesn't allow borrowing eBooks from libraries.
For the past week, I borrowed and wirelessly downloaded digital books onto tablets primarily using OverDrive, the largest distributor of eBooks for libraries. I tested the OverDrive Media Console for the iPad. I also used the Dell Streak 7 tablet to test the app on the Android operating system; this app also works on Android smartphones. An iPhone app is available.
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Milwaukee Public Schools is closed Monday for Presidents Day, according to a statement on the home page of the district's website.Superintendent Gregory Thornton said in the statement he wants to "assure families that we intend to have classes on Tuesday as scheduled."
The home page also includes a "fact sheet for families" about the demonstrations in Madison. It says MPS closed schools Friday because more than 1,000 MPS teachers attended the demonstrations. Another day of school will be added to make up for Friday, and teachers who were absent without leave face possible disciplinary action ranging from pay deductions to termination, according the fact sheet.
Members of the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association union plan to participate in demonstrations in Madison on Monday.
The Madison Metropolitan School District, which was scheduled to be open for Presidents Day, will close because of "substantial concerns about significant staff absences," according to a statement issues Sunday evening by the district.
However, classes are scheduled to resume Tuesday because the district "received assurances" that teachers would return then, the statement said.
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In Tunisia and Egypt, the young are rebelling against old rulers. In Britain, they are in revolt against tuition fees. What do these young people have in common? They are suffering, albeit in different ways, from what David Willetts, the UK government's minister of higher education, called the "pinch" in a book published last year.In some countries, the challenge is an excess of young people; in others, it is that the young are too few. But where the young outnumber the old, they can hope to secure a better fate through the ballot box. Where the old outnumber the young, they can use the ballot box to their advantage, instead. In both cases, powerful destabilising forces are at work, bringing opportunity to some and disappointment to others.
Demography is destiny. Humanity is in the grip of three profound transformations: first, a far greater proportion of children reaches adulthood; second, women have far fewer children; and, third, adults live far longer. These changes are now working through the world, in sequence. The impact of the first has been to raise the proportion of the population that is young. The impact of the second is the reverse, decreasing the proportion of young people. The third, in turn, increases the proportion of the population that is very old. The impact of the entire process is first to expand the population and, later on, to shrink it once again.
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Click on the images above to view the full screen panoramas on mac/pc/iPhone/iPad and Android devices. Look for one or two more panoramas tomorrow.
I've posted a number of still images, here.
Many Madison residents went about their weekend as always, including the ice fisherman captured in this scene (look closely for the eagle):
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1. Intensify reading instruction in Kindergarten in order to ensure all No additional costs. Professional development provided by central students are proficient in oral reading and comprehension as office and building-based literacy staff must focus on Kindergarten. measured by valid and reliable assessments by 2011-2012. Instruction and assessment will be bench marked to ensure Kindergarten proficiency is at readinQ levels 3-7 {PLAA, 2009).Related:2. Fully implement Balanced Literacy in 2011-12 using clearly defined, Comprehensive Literacy Model (Linda Dorn), the MMSD Primary Literacy Notebook and the MMSD 3-5 Literacy Notebook.
a. Explore research-based reading curricula using the Board of Education Evaluation of Learning Materials Policy 3611 with particular focus on targeted and explicit instruction, to develop readers in Kindergarten.
b. Pilot the new reading curricula in volunteer schools during 2011-12.
c. Analyze Kindergarten reading proficiency scores from Kindergarten students in fully implemented Balanced Literacy schools and Kindergarten students in the volunteer schools piloting the new reading curricula incorporated into a
Balanced Literacy framework to inform next steps.
d. Continue pilot in volunteer schools in Grade 1 during 2012-13 and Grade 2 durino 2013-14. 2011-12 Budget Addition Request $250,0003. Incorporate explicit reading instruction and literacy curricula into 6th grade instruction.
.....
3. Review previous Reading Recovery recommendations, with Additional Reading considerations to:
Additional Reading Recovery and/or Interventionist FTE costs. 1 FTE-$79,915 (average rate when teacher is re-assigned). 1 new FTE-$61,180 (displaced rate when new teacher is hired).
- Place Reading Recovery Teachers in buildings as needed to (displaced rate when new teacher is hired).reflect the needs of 20% of our District's lowest performing first graders, regardless of what elementary school they may attend;
- Analyze the other instructional assignments given to Reading Recovery teachers in order to maximize their expertise as highly skilled reading interventionists
- Ensure standard case load for each Reading Recovery teacher at National Reading Recovery standards and guidelines (e.g. 8 students/year).
- Place interventionists in buildings without Reading Recovery. Interventionists would receive professional development to lift the quality of interventions for students who need additional support in literacy.
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Every member in an Illinois school's senior class has been accepted into college for the second time in the school's two-year history."No other public school in the country has done this," said Tim King, CEO and founder of Urban Prep Academy in Chicago.
The school was established to battle the low high school and college graduation rates among black men.
"We are Urban Prep men," said Israel Wilson, a 2010 graduate and student at Morehouse College. "And at Urban Prep, we believe."
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Don Severson, via email:
Attached is the Active Citizens for Education statement regarding the MMSD Board of Education and Administration actions related to the Governor's Budget Repair Bill.Much more, here.Here is the link to the video of the MMSD Board meeting on 02/14/11
http://mediaprodweb.madison.k12.wi.us/node/601 go to the 9:50 minute mark for Marj Passman.
Letters from the Board and Superintendent to Governor Walker are accessible from the home page of the MMSD website.
Glaringly, there is no leadership from the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education nor administration for the overall good of the community, teachers nor students as evidenced by their actions the past few days. Individual Board members and the Board as a whole, as well as the administration, are complicit in the job action taken by teachers and their union. The Board clearly stepped out of line. Beginning Monday night at its Board meeting, Board member Marj Passman took advantage of signing up for a 'public appearance' statement as a private citizen. She was allowed to make her statement from her seat at the Board table instead of at the public podium--totally inappropriate. Her statement explicitly gave support to the teachers who she believed were under attack from the Walker proposed budget repair bill; that she was totally in support of the teachers; and encouraged teachers to take their protests to the Capital. Can you imagine any other employer encouraging their employees to protest against them to maintain or increase their own compensation in order to help assure bankruptcy for the organization or to fire them as employees? All Board members subsequently signed a letter to Governor Walker calling his proposals "radical and punitive' to the bargaining process. With its actions, including cancellation of classes for Wednesday, the Board has abdicated and abrogated its fiduciary responsibility for public trust. The Board threw their responsibility away as elected officials and representatives of the citizens and taxpayers for the education of the children of the District and as employers of the teachers and staff. The Board cannot lead nor govern when it abdicates its statutory responsibilities and essentially acts as one with employees and their union. Under these circumstances, it is obvious they have made the choice not to exercise their responsibilities for identifying solutions to the obvious financial challenges they face. The Board will not recognize the opportunities, nor tools, in front of them to make equitable, fair and educationally and financially sound decisions of benefit to all stakeholders in the education of our young people.Don Severson
President, ACE
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Matthew DeFour: (watch the 15 minute conference here)
Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad discusses on Wednesday Gov. Scott Walker's bill, teacher absences, and Madison Teachers Inc.
For Wisconsin, we only need two:Grow the economy (tax base) and significantly improve our schools....Raise our state's per capita income to 10 percent above Minnesota's by 2030.
In job and business creation over the next decade, Wisconsin is often predicted to be among the lowest 10 states. When I was a kid growing up in Madison, income in Wisconsin was some 10 percent higher than in Minnesota. Minnesota caught up to us in 1967, and now the average Minnesotan makes $4,500 more than the average Wisconsinite.Lift the math, science and reading scores of all K-12, non-special education students in Wisconsin above world-class standards by 2030. (emphasis added)
Wisconsinites often believe we lose jobs because of lower wages elsewhere. In fact, it is often the abundance of skills (and subsidies and effort) that bring huge Intel research and development labs to Bangalore, Microsoft research centers to Beijing, and Advanced Micro Devices chip factories to Dresden.
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Douglas County, a swath of subdivisions just south of here that is one of the nation's wealthiest, is something of a public school paradise.Related: A School Board Thinks Differently About Delivering Education, and spends less.The K-12 district, with 60,000 students, boasts high test scores and a strong graduation rate. Surveys show that 90% of its parents are satisfied with their children's schools.
That makes the Douglas County School District an unlikely frontier in the latest battle over school vouchers.
But a new, conservative school board is exploring a voucher system to give parents -- regardless of income -- taxpayer money to pay for their children to attend private schools that agree to abide by district regulations. If it's implemented, parents could receive more than $4,000 per child.
The proposal's supporters argue that competition can only improve already-high-performing schools.
Colorado's Douglas County School District spends $8512.74 per student ($476,977,336 for 56,031 students in 2009). Madison spent $15,241 per student in 2009, a whopping $6,728.26, 79% more than the "wealthy Denver suburbs".
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Rising stock prices signal upbeat expectations - echoed by employers and consumers - that the economy is finally bouncing back, Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke says.California's young people aren't so sure.
Three in 5 of them, age 16 to 22, now express sharp worries about finding a job or working long hours to pay for college, according to an eye-opening poll out last week. No civilization thrives when the next generation lacks optimism and chutzpah.
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Imagine "one-on-one tutoring for every student in every subject" and you get a picture of Open High School, a virtual charter school serving 250 Utah students in ninth and tenth grades, expanding to up to 1500 students 9-12 by 2014.Aptly named, the Open High School of Utah Trailblazers are forging new paths in multiple arenas,s but what sets them apart is their commitment to use open education resources (OER) where possible and to share what they develop under Creative Commons licenses.
The curriculum is hosted on MoodleRooms learning management system (but they miss their BrainHoney gradebook).
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I'm certain many of you read (or heard) about Milwaukee Hamilton star basketball player Elgin Cook's sudden departure from the team. I'm also certain you heard his mother has taken him out of state fearing for her son's life due to his (alleged) role in what led to the Milwaukee King basketball player being shot. If not, click here to read the story on jsonline.My comments aren't going to address the drama Cook and the other boy got themselves caught up in. I'm focused on a tragedy that continues to occur with the Black Student-Athlete over and over in Milwaukee Public Schools. I'm sick and tired of reading and hearing about OUR BEST (and average) student-athletes being academically ineligible before, during and after the sports season. What the hell is going on when kids who are being offered scholarships to play in college cannot maintain a simple 2.0 gpa?
Let's look at Cook for a moment. In the jsonline article, it mentions that he missed the first 3 games of this season due to being academically ineligible. Yet, in October he signed a letter of intent to accept a scholarship to play basketball at Iowa State. How is this possible? It's one thing for OUR kids to be lacking the grades and preparation for higher learning, but it is another thing when large colleges and universities know they aren't ready but bring them in anyway.
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Under its "performance pay" proposal, teachers would get more for staffing hard-to-staff schools and filling hard-to-fill positions. Pay would also be related to regular employee evaluations -- if in some as-yet-undefined, possibly very weak way. WEAC president Mary Bell declined to specify how closely student test scores should track with evaluations and thus pay hikes, for instance.Related: 2010 Fall Election - WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators in a Losing Cause.Protecting pay is, of course, the most important of the union's objectives in its reform plan. But pay is a function of how much money is available, and while WEAC is advocating paying better teachers better salaries, it's not in favor of cutting pay for teachers who aren't so good. This is about a bigger education pie, in other words, not about the same pie cut into different-sized pieces.
Pay is also a function of who's handing out the raises, and WEAC is doing what it can to ensure those partly or mostly responsible for handing out the raises are as sympathetic as possible.
To wit, it would like to see the majority of the members on a teacher's evaluation panel be teachers themselves -- thus paving the way, it seems to me, for a lot of good reviews.
"It's an extremely difficult task," Bell said of evaluating one of your peers, but one that can work because "people care so deeply about the quality of the profession."
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Urban Leage of Greater Madison:
The Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM) is submitting this budget narrative to the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education as a companion to its line‐item budget for Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (Madison Prep). The budget was prepared in partnership with MMSD's Business Services office. The narrative provides context for the line items presented in the budget.Additional documents: budget details and Madison Prep's Wisconsin DPI application.Madison Prep's budget was prepared by a team that included Kaleem Caire, President & CEO of ULGM; Tami Holmquist, Business Manager at Edgewood High School; Laura DeRoche‐Perez, ULGM Charter School Development Consultant; and Jim Horn, ULGM Director of Finance. Representative of ULGM and MMSD met weekly during the development of the Madison Prep budget. These meetings included including Erik Kass, Assistant Superintendent for Business Services and Donna Williams, Director of Budget & Planning. The budget was also informed by ULGM's charter school design teams and was structured in the same manner as start‐up, non‐instrumentality public charter school budgets submitted to the District of Columbia Public Charter School Board in Washington, DC. DCPCSB is widely regarded as one of the most effective authorizers of charter schools in the nation.
In addition, Madison Prep's Facilities Design Team is led by Dennis Haefer, Vice President of Commercial Banking with Johnson Bank and Darren Noak, President of Commercial Building with Tri‐North Builders. Mr. Noak is also the Treasurer of ULGM's Board of Directors. This team is responsible for identifying Madison Prep's school site and planning for related construction, renovation and financing needs.
......
Budget Highlights
A. Cost of EducationIn 2008‐09, the Madison Metropolitan School District received $14,432 in revenue per student from a combination of local, federal and state government and local property taxes. The largest portion of revenue came from property taxes, $9,049 (62.7%), followed by $3,364 in state aid (23.3%), $1,260 in federal aid (8.7%) and $759 in other local revenue (5.3%). That same year, MMSD spent $13,881 per student on educational, transportation, facility and food service costs for 25,011 students for a total of $347,177,691 in spending.
In 2010‐11, MMSD's Board of Education is operating with an amended budget of $360,131,948, a decrease of $10,155,522 (‐2.74%) from 2009‐10. MMSD projects spending $323,536,051 in its general education fund, $10,069,701 on food service and $8,598,118 on debt service for a total of $342,203,870. Considering the total of only these three spending categories, and dividing the total by the official 2010‐11 enrollment count of 24,471 students, MMSD projects to spend $13,984 per student.3 This is the amount per pupil that ULGM used as a baseline for considering what Madison Prep's baseline per pupil revenue should be in its budget for SY2011‐12. ULGM then determined the possibility of additional cutbacks in MMSD revenue for SY2011‐12 and reduced its base per pupil revenue projection to $13,600 per student. It then added a 1% increase to it's per pupil base spending amount for each academic year through SY2016‐17.
ULGM recognizes that per pupil funding is an average of total costs to educate 24,471 children enrolled in MMSD schools, and that distinctions are not made between the costs of running elementary, middle and high schools. ULGM also understands that the operating costs between all three levels of schooling are different. Middle schools costs more to operate than elementary schools and high schools costs more than middle schools.Reviewing expense projections for middle and high schools in MMSD's SY2010‐11 Amended Preliminary Budget, ULGM decided to weight per pupil spending in middle school at 1.03% and 1.16% in high school. Thus, in SY2012‐13 when Madison Prep opens, ULGM projects a need to spend $14,148 per student, not including additional costs for serving English language learners and students with special needs, or the costs of Madison Prep's third semester (summer).
B. Cost Comparisons between Madison Prep and MMSD
Staffing Costs
In 2010‐11, MMSD projected it would spend $67,133,692 on salaries (and benefits) on 825.63 staff in its secondary (middle and high) schools for an average salary of $81,312. This includes teachers, principals and in‐school support staff. In its first year of operation (SY2012‐13), ULGM projects Madison Prep it will spend $1,559,454 in salaries and benefits on 23 staff for an average of $67,802 in salary, including salaries for teachers, the Head of School (principal) and support staff. In its fifth year of operation, Madison Prep is projected to spend $3,560,746 in salaries and benefits on 52 staff for an average of $68,476 per staff person. In both years, Madison Prep will spend significantly less on salaries and benefits per staff member than MMSD.Additionally, MMSD spends an average of $78,277 on salaries and benefits for staff in its middle schools and $79,827 on its staff in its high schools.
The high cost results from the likelihood that Madison Prep will serve more low-income, non-English speaking and special education students, said Kaleem Caire, president of the Urban League of Greater Madison, which is developing the charter school. The school also plans to have a longer school year, school day and require students to participate in volunteer and extracurricular activities."What we're asking for is based on the fact that we're going to serve a high-needs population of kids," Caire said. "We don't know yet if what we're projecting is out of line."
Caire said the proposal will likely change as potential state and federal revenues are assessed.
A Republican charter school bill circulated in the Legislature this week could also alter the landscape. The bill would allow charter schools to receive approval from a state board, rather than a local school board, and those that don't use district employees, like Madison Prep, would be able to access the state retirement and health care systems.
Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school, here.
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The Center on Reinventing Public Education, via a Deb Britt email:
A new report finds that charter schools use the freedoms they have from traditional school district mandates to define and operate schools in innovative new ways. However, expectations about what a school "should look like," the stress of tight and unstable budgets, and overwhelming administrative demands are powerful forces pulling charter schools back to traditional practice.This report offers great reason for optimism that charter schools are well positioned to answer President Obama's call for public schools to innovate. But it also cautions that traditional regulatory structures and weaknesses in capacity must be addressed if they are to fully meet the challenge of innovation.
Based on a four-year study of the teachers, leaders, and academic programs in charter schools in six states, Inside Charter Schools: Unlocking Doors to Student Success observes that "autonomy only creates the opportunity for high-quality schools, it by no means guarantees it."
Author Betheny Gross, a researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the University of Washington, argues that autonomy makes it possible for charter schools to:
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I agree with many of Bryan Caplan's views on parenting, and Yana can attest that I have never attempted a "dragon mother" style. Yet I think that Bryan is overreaching a bit in rejecting virtually all of Amy Chua's claims. The simpler view -- which most Americans intuitively grasp -- is that some Asian parenting styles do make kids more productive, and better at school, although it is less clear they make the kids happier. It remains the case that most people overrate how much parenting matters in a broader variety of contexts, and in that regard Bryan's work is hardly refuted. Still, I see real evidence for a parenting effect from many (not all) Asian-American and Asian families.
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Amy Chua, the "tiger mother," is clearly hitting a nerve--especially among the anxious class (it used to be called the upper class), which understands how much skill and discipline are necessary for success in the new economy.What Ms. Chua and her critics agree on is that childhood is all about preparation for adulthood. Ms. Chua claims that her parenting methods will produce ambitious, successful and happy adults--while her critics argue that her methods will produce neurotic, self- absorbed and unhappy ones.
It took economist Larry Summers, in a debate with Ms. Chua at the World Economic Forum in Davos, to point out that part of the point of childhood is childhood itself. Childhood takes up a quarter of one's life, Mr. Summers observed, and it would be nice if children enjoyed it.
Bravo, Larry.
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"The Fraser Institute released its controversial B.C. elementary school rankings today," a TV news anchor intoned earlier this week, "and this year a school in the polygamous community of Bountiful topped the list. That's giving opponents of the rankings more ammunition."The report continued with Susan Lambert, president of the B.C. Teachers' Federation, saying that "everyone who has anything to do, credibly, with the public education system, will tell you that the rankings are worthless." (The thousands of parents who consult the rankings don't count, as they should have realized by now.) "It's just another example of how ... meaningless the rankings are, and that we should pay no attention to them."
And then the Fraser Institute's Peter Cowley rebutted: "How is it possible that ... a president of a teachers' union can say, on the basis of the evidence that shows that [the school is] doing well, for one year, in reading, writing and math skills at Grades 4 and 7, we have to invalidate those results because of [the community's religious] beliefs?"
And that was pretty much it. It was the line most media outlets took, and it was almost completely beside the point.
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New York state high-school students' college and career readiness lags far behind the graduation rates that most school districts post, according to data from the state Department of Education.Across the state, the graduation rate in 2009, the last year for which figures are public, was 77%. But only 41% of high-school students were prepared for a career or college, the state said. The state defines students as college- and career-ready if they score at least an 80 on the state's math Regents exam and at least a 75 on the English Regents exam. New York students receive a high-school diploma if they achieve a score of at least 65 on Regents tests.
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When it comes to the quality of Madison's public schools, the issue is pretty much black and white.Related: A Deeper Look at Madison's National Merit Scholar Results.The Madison Metropolitan School District's reputation for providing stellar public education is as strong as it ever was for white, middle-class students. Especially for these students, the district continues to post high test scores and turn out a long list of National Merit Scholars -- usually at a rate of at least six times the average for a district this size.
But the story is often different for Hispanic and black kids, and students who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
Madison is far from alone in having a significant performance gap. In fact, the well-documented achievement gap is in large measure responsible for the ferocious national outcry for more effective teachers and an overhaul of the public school system. Locally, frustration over the achievement gap has helped fuel a proposal from the Urban League of Greater Madison and its president and CEO, Kaleem Caire, to create a non-union public charter school targeted at minority boys in grades six through 12.
"In Madison, I can point to a long history of failure when it comes to educating African-American boys," says Caire, who is black, a Madison native and a graduate of West High School. "We have one of the worst achievement gaps in the entire country. I'm not seeing a concrete plan to address that fact, even in a district that prides itself on innovative education."
What often gets lost in the discussion over the failures of public education, however, is that there are some high-poverty, highly diverse schools that are beating the odds by employing innovative ways to reach students who have fallen through the cracks elsewhere.
Troller's article referenced use of the oft criticized WKCE (Wisconsin Knowledge & Concepts Examination) (WKCE Clusty search) state examinations.
Related: value added assessment (based on the WKCE).
Dave Baskerville has argued that Wisconsin needs two big goals, one of which is to "Lift the math, science and reading scores of all K-12, non-special education students in Wisconsin above world-class standards by 2030". Ongoing use of and progress measurement via the WKCE would seem to be insufficient in our global economy.
Steve Chapman on "curbing excellence".
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Children are often happier with their online lives than they are with reality, a survey has revealed.They say they can be exactly who they want to be - and as soon as something is no longer fun they can simply hit the quit button.
The study also shows that, despite concerns about online safety, one in eight young people is in contact with strangers when on the web and often lies about their appearance, age and background.
Researchers for children's charity Kidscape assessed the online activities of 2,300 11- to 18-year-olds from across the UK and found that 45 per cent said they were sometimes happier online than in their real lives.
The report - Virtual Lives: It is more than a game, it is your life - lays bare the attitudes of children today to the internet and includes revealing insights into how they feel when they are on the web.
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The two public high schools, 21/2 miles apart in Northwest Washington, serve vastly different student populations. And they do it with vastly different levels of financial support, according to an analysis of school spending by a District advocacy group.Locally, the Madison School District's 2010-2011 budget, according to the "State of the Madison School District Report" is $379,058,945. Enrollment is 24,471 which yields per student spending of $15,490.12.School Without Walls accepts only the city's most accomplished students after a competitive application process that requires interviews with prospective parents as well. More than 700 students are vying for 120 spots in next year's ninth-grade class. Those who are admitted will attend classes in a freshly renovated vintage building on the George Washington University campus. District funds per student: $10,257.
Cardozo, near 13th Street and Florida Avenue, is a neighborhood high school that takes all comers in an attendance area that includes about a dozen group homes and homeless shelters. Parole officers and social workers are sometimes the only adults who appear at the school on students' behalf. The wiring in the cavernous 1916 building was so bad a couple of years ago that when all of the computers were turned on, power in half of the school would go out, said Principal Gwendolyn Grant.
District funds per student: $7,453.
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A study of more than 1,000 sixth graders in several schools in southeastern Michigan found that those who regularly had the school lunch were 29 percent more likely to be obese than those who brought lunch from home.Spending two or more hours a day watching television or playing video games also increased the risk of obesity, but by only 19 percent.
Of the 142 obese children in the study for whom dietary information was known, almost half were school-lunch regulars, compared with only one-third of the 787 who were not obese.
"Most school lunches rely heavily on high-energy, low-nutrient-value food, because it's cheaper," said Dr. Kim A. Eagle, director of the University of Michigan Cardiovascular Center, and senior author of the paper, published in the December issue of American Heart Journal. In some schools where the study was done, lunch programs offered specials like "Tater Tot Day," he said.
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Montgomery County is rightly proud of its public school system, which is widely regarded as one of the best in the state. Perhaps that's why, nearly eight years after state lawmakers passed a law allowing for the establishment of charter schools -- alternative institutions that receive public funds but operate independently -- the Montgomery County school board has yet to approve a single application to open one.Is that because no one has come up with a credible plan for a school that would give parents more choices for educating their children? Or is it because local school officials simply don't want the competition?
The state school board looked into the matter last year, after Montgomery County school officials turned down the applications of two groups that wanted to set up new charter schools in the district. What they found goes a long way toward explaining why school reform advocates like the Washington-based Center for Education Reform have rated Maryland's charter school law as one of the weakest in the nation. Despite passing important reforms last year regarding lengthening of the time it takes teachers to earn tenure and linking student test scores with teacher evaluations, lawmakers need to take another look at strengthening the state's charter school law if Maryland is to build on those gains.
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A long-simmering dispute between the state and parents who prefer to teach their children at home is being renewed.The House Education Committee has scheduled for Tuesday hearings on three bills on home schooling in its largest room, the House chamber. Legislation regulating home schooling has drawn large crowds over the years.
Last month, a divorced couple who couldn't agree on how to educate their daughter took the fight to the state Supreme Court. The court is being asked if parents have a constitutional right to home school their kids. In this case, the father objected to his wife's strict Christian teachings and wants their daughter taught at public schools. The mother prefers home schooling.
Home schooling advocates say they want less regulation over what they argue is a parent's right.
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In my short time as a teacher in Connecticut, I have muddled through President Bush's No Child Left Behind act, which tied federal funding of schools to various reforms, and through President Obama's Race to the Top initiative, which does much the same thing, though with different benchmarks. Thanks to the feds, urban schools like mine--already entitled to substantial federal largesse under Title I, which provides funds to public schools with large low-income populations--are swimming in money. At my school, we pay five teachers to tutor kids after school and on Saturdays. They sit in classrooms waiting for kids who never show up. We don't want for books--or for any of the cutting-edge gizmos that non-Title I schools can't afford: computerized whiteboards, Elmo projectors, the works. Our facility is state-of-the-art, thanks to a recent $40 million face-lift, with gleaming new hallways and bathrooms and a fully computerized library.Here's my prediction: the money, the reforms, the gleaming porcelain, the hopeful rhetoric about saving our children--all of it will have a limited impact, at best, on most city schoolchildren. Urban teachers face an intractable problem, one that we cannot spend or even teach our way out of: teen pregnancy. This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one. There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch.
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Wang Tingting last saw her parents nearly two years ago, but now that they are reunited, no one knows what to say to one another. Finally, Su Taoying, Tingting's mother, clasps her 12-year-old daughter's hand and says, ruefully, "Next time I see you, you will be taller than me." As they smile, the family resemblance is striking. And yet for the past five years they have not really been a family.Wang Tingting is one of tens of millions of children in rural China growing up without their parents - parents who have decamped to the cities in order to earn a better living. Some of these children are cared for by their grandparents, but others are handed over to foster centres. Three years ago, as she was about to enter junior high school, Tingting's parents moved her from her grandparents' home to a foster centre in Gufeng, their remote village in the eastern province of Anhui. Nobody here found that strange: fewer than half of the children in Gufeng live with their parents, a situation repeated across several provinces in the heavily populated southern half of China.
The Chinese government estimates that there are 58 million "left-behind children", which accounts for almost 20 per cent of all the children in China, and close to half of all children in the countryside. Their lives illustrate the price China is paying for president Hu Jintao's goal of building a "moderately well-off society".
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Supporters call them a matter of choice, a lifeline for children stuck in broken schools. Opponents deride them as unconstitutional and unworkable and warn that they will erode conditions in some of Pennsylvania's most troubled schools.The debate over taxpayer-paid tuition vouchers to help poor children find alternatives to attending the state's weakest-performing public schools has emerged as a major item on the legislative agenda for the next six months -- perhaps the major item after the state budget.
The voucher issue will come to the fore in the General Assembly on Feb. 16, when the chairman of the Senate Education Committee will lead a hearing on his bill to establish the Opportunity Scholarship and Educational Improvement Tax Credit Act.
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The simplest of conversations, the most important of facts. And yet nearly six years after those images were discovered by the Madison School District, Nelson was a superintendent and had to be caught allegedly trying to solicit sex from what he thought was a 15-year-old boy online before the bizzaro world of public school human resources stood up and took notice.Rickert deserves props for contacting former Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater (who now is employed - along with others from the Madison School District - at the UW-Madison School of Education) on this matter.I am assuming (safely, I really, really hope) that had my imagined exchange occurred, Nelson's public schools career would have been over. There also does not appear to have been anything contractually or legally to prevent it from occurring.
Madison human resources director Bob Nadler said Nelson had an oral agreement -- "not a contract" -- under which, in exchange for Nelson's resignation, the district would disclose nothing more than his dates of employment, position and salary.
These kinds of agreements happened with some frequency, according to Art Rainwater, the superintendent in Madison at the time Nelson was nabbed for porn. As to the exact circumstances surrounding how Nelson was lucky enough to get one and who it was with, well, "I honestly don't remember," Rainwater told me.
Not only could Madison have dropped the dime on its very own pervert; state law provides some liability protection for doing so. Employers who act in "good faith" when providing a reference are protected unless they knowingly lie or provide a reference maliciously or violate the state's blacklisting statute, according to Marquette University Law School Associate Professor Paul Secunda.
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I worried constantly about my daughter Jerlisa when she attended our neighborhood elementary school. I knew that I wanted a better education for her, but I didn't know how to make that happen. In 2005, I took a chance and applied to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. Little did I know how much more than $7,500 I would be gaining.I grew up in the District and attended D.C. public schools. Jerlisa started off the same way. We enrolled her at Gibbs Elementary School for kindergarten, and as the years went by she started to fall behind. There was so much going on around the school and in the classroom. Every morning, I walked with her to school, and every afternoon I waited outside the school gates to walk her home again. She got teased for that, but I was worried about the drug dealers, addicts and bullies in the neighborhood. I didn't have any other choice. I had to make sure she was safe.
When Jerlisa was in fifth grade, she became anxious and didn't want to return to school. It was clear to me she wasn't getting the help that she needed. That's when I received fliers about the Opportunity Scholarship Program. Although I didn't know everything about the OSP, I knew I had to do something different, even if it meant getting out of my comfort zone. When you're a single mother on a fixed income, sometimes simple things like filling out your name, address or income on a form can be a scary thing to do.
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Background information: In 2010, the Board approved a number of administrative recommendations geared toward increasing usage of the Infinite Campus System. The current timeline requires all high school teachers to use grade-level appropriate Infinite Campus teacher tools by the end of the fourth quarter of the 2010-2011 school year.Much more on the Madison School District's implementation of Infinite Campus, here.
The administration has been notified by the vendor that significant changes will be made to the Infinite Campus interface in July 2011. Accordingly, if training sessions were to continue as required to meet the current deadline, those same teachers would have to be trained on a new interface only months later.It would be more prudent to wait until the new interface is available and require full implementation of the Infinite Campus teacher tools at the high schools by the end of the second quarter of the 2011-2012 school year.
D. BOE action requested: Postpone mandatory use of Infinite Campus teacher tools at the high schools until the end of the second quarter of the 2011-2012 school year.
The system originally lifted off during the fall of 2007. I wonder how much has been spent on it without full use? This type of system can be a useful way for parents, teachers and students to communicate - if it is used.....
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View a few still and panoramic images here.
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In a report issued on February 2nd, Harvard researchers question the value of 'college for all.'
According to the co-authors of the report, Academic Dean Robert Schwartz and Ronald Ferguson, a Senior Lecturer at Harvard, the US's four-year colleges are failing students by focusing too much on classroom-based academics and not adequately preparing students for careers. The proposal has sparked immediately concern from educators as it raises the 'specter of tracking,' in which students (often from lower-income or disadvantaged backgrounds) are 'channeled unquestioningly into watered-down programs that curtail their prospects,' according to EdWeek.Currently, 42 percent of 27-year-olds in the US have no more than a high school degree. Only 30 percent of Americans earn a bachelor's degree by the time they are 27. President Obama has stated that he wants to improve the nation's college graduation rate to 60 percent in 10 years (ABC News). The US now ranks in 12th place in the world for college graduates, In comparison Canada's college graduation rate is 55.8 percent; in South Korea and Russia, the rate for college graduates is 55.5 percent, according to statistics from the College Board.
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This is so awesome. A school district in Knox City, Texas has allowed a student with a severe illness that keeps him at home to attend classes like a normal freshman by using a Vgo telepresence robot. My son's school had to have a meeting with the school board to let me GIVE them technology.The boy is named Lyndon Baty and he suffers from polycystic kidney disease, and treatment for the disease has left his immune system suppressed. The poor immune system means he can't be around other kids to attend classes.
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The recent WSJ article on the supposedly Chinese style of parenting has generated a lot of interesting discussion. The most amusing commentary comes from The Last Psychiatrist, who also points out that Amy Chua, the "Chinese" mother, was actually born in America. There were also claims that the WSJ misrepresented her views, which may or may not be true, but is ultimately irrelevant since it's the ideas that are being debated.Here's the part of the article that interests me:
What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something -- whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet -- he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.
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Higher education in America, historically the envy of the world, is rapidly growing out of reach. For the past quarter-century, the cost of higher education has grown 440%, according to the National Center for Public Policy and Education, nearly four times the rate of inflation and double the rate of health care cost increases. The cost increases have occurred at both public and private colleges.Like many situations too good to be true--like the dot-com boom, the Enron bubble, the housing boom or the health care cost explosion--the ever-increasing cost of university education is not sustainable.
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Several dozen parents protested Thursday outside the Los Angeles archdiocese plans for a longer academic year at Catholic schools.The parents from at least eight schools are unhappy that church officials plan to extend the school year by 20 days to 200 days a year.
"Children need a break to rejuvenate and the time to try things they can't during the school year because they're overloaded," said Michelle Boydston, whose daughter attends St. Paul the Apostle School in Westwood. "Children need time to play outside, to sit, climb a tree, read a book. Our school is doing a very good job in terms of educating students. They don't need another 20 days."
For the archdiocese, the strategy is intended to improve the education program and provide an incentive for parents to choose to remain in Catholic schools, which charge tuition.
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While this particular website might be new, the idea is hardly innovative. That there are entrepreneurs willing to traffic in essays is no secret to anyone who evaluates admission applications for a living. And if the evidence and anecdotes of déjà vu experienced by admission officers are any indication, such sites probably do a brisk business. In that sense, the public premiere of a new outfit would border on prosaic if it weren't for the fervent and opposing arguments that inevitably follow:"Access to essays levels the playing field and helps students from schools with lackluster college counseling programs compete in today's take-no-prisoners admission wars!"
"The sale of essays promotes plagiarism and diminishes the capacity of students to think for themselves!"
If the first claim is misguided (and conventional wisdom among admission professionals suggests that it is), the second one is incomplete. Yes, plagiarism is a nasty potential byproduct of these businesses. And reliance on samples of other people's work to create one's own can certainly constrain rather than inspire. But there's also an important practical point that usually gets overlooked:
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Even while some minorities are surging ahead, others are trailing far behind.Higher education has always been the golden ticket to better fortunes. So you've gotta wonder: Who's cashing in, who's stagnating, and why? The answers are all contained in a must-see interactive infographic showing college graduation rates across the country, created by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
We'll get to the nuances of the story behind the data in a second, but let's look at how the map works. You get to see a color coded scale showing what portion of each county in the U.S. has a college degree -- the bluer the county, the more people are college graduates. And for every county, you can see a detailed chart, showing exactly how it stacks up against others:
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Even in middle school, there are a few easy things (and some more challenging steps) students can do to up their chances at a college admission. Join Jay Mathews to discuss these tactics.
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Children born to mothers who live close to freeways have twice the risk of autism, researchers reported Thursday. The study, its authors say, adds to evidence suggesting that certain environmental exposures could play a role in causing the disorder in some children."This study isn't saying exposure to air pollution or exposure to traffic causes autism," said Heather Volk, lead author of the paper and a researcher at the Saban Research Institute of Children's Hospital Los Angeles. "But it could be one of the factors that are contributing to its increase."
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The Detroit Public Schools is looking for an organization willing and able to open a public boarding school in fall 2012, the district announced today.Now through Feb. 28, DPS is accepting applications for a high school that would be a charter school offering residential housing.
The school would target students in grades 9 to 12 and focus on providing a high-quality, rigorous college-preparatory curriculum for youths "who need a thoughtful, caring, safe, and nurturing day and residential environment," according to a DPS statement released today.
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Samuel Abrams via a Mary Battaglia email:
While observing recess outside the Kallahti Comprehensive School on the eastern edge of Helsinki on a chilly day in April 2009, I asked Principal Timo Heikkinen if students go out when it's very cold. Heikkinen said they do. I then asked Heikkinen if they go out when it's very, very cold. Heikkinen smiled and said, "If minus 15 [Celsius] and windy, maybe not, but otherwise, yes. The children can't learn if they don't play. The children must play."In comparison to the United States and many other industrialized nations, the Finns have implemented a radically different model of educational reform--based on a balanced curriculum and professionalization, not testing. Not only do Finnish educational authorities provide students with far more recess than their U.S. counterparts--75 minutes a day in Finnish elementary schools versus an average of 27 minutes in the U.S.--but they also mandate lots of arts and crafts, more learning by doing, rigorous standards for teacher certification, higher teacher pay, and attractive working conditions. This is a far cry from the U.S. concentration on testing in reading and math since the enactment of No Child Left Behind in 2002, which has led school districts across the country, according to a survey by the Center on Education Policy, to significantly narrow their curricula. And the Finns' efforts are paying off: In December, the results from the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an exam in reading, math, and science given every three years since 2000 to approximately 5,000 15-year-olds per nation around the world, revealed that, for the fourth consecutive time, Finnish students posted stellar scores. The United States, meanwhile, lagged in the middle of the pack.
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A central Florida lawmaker wants school teachers to grade parents on their children's report cards.
State Rep. Kelli Stargel, R-Lakeland, recently proposed a bill that would require public school teachers to grade the parents of their students in kindergarten through third grade.A grade of "satisfactory," "unsatisfactory" or "needs improvement" would be added to their children's report cards.
The grading system would be based on the following criteria:
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We've needlessly turned parenting into an unpleasant chore. Parents invest more time and money in their kids than ever, but the shocking lesson of twin and adoption research is that upbringing is much less important than genetics in the long run. These revelations have surprising implications for how we parent and how we spend time with our kids. The big lesson: Mold your kids less and enjoy your life more. Your kids will still turn out fine.Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids is a book of practical big ideas. How can parents be happier? What can they change--and what do they need to just accept? Which of their worries can parents safely forget? Above all, what is the right number of kids for you to have? You'll never see kids or parenthood the same way again.
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Last week, 40-year-old Ohio mother Kelley Williams-Bolar was released after serving nine days in jail on a felony conviction for tampering with records. Williams-Bolar's offense? Lying about her address so her two daughters, zoned to the lousy Akron city schools, could attend better schools in the neighboring Copley-Fairlawn district.Williams-Bolar has become a cause célèbre in a case that crosses traditional ideological bounds. African American activists are outraged, asking: Would a white mother face the same punishment for trying to get her kids a better education? (Answer: No.)
Meanwhile, conservatives view the case as evidence of the need for broader school choice. What does it say when parents' options are so limited that they commit felonies to avoid terrible schools? Commentator Kyle Olson and others across the political spectrum have called this "a Rosa Parks moment for education."
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When it comes to reforming Big College, give the federal government a C+. Throughout 2010, grade grubbers in Congress, the White House, the Department of Education, and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) worked hard to investigate and regulate the booming for-profit college sector. Among other sins, they accused the schools of predatory recruiting practices, inflating grades to keep students eligible for federal aid, and charging too much for degrees that ultimately have little value in the workplace.Given that the approximately 2,000 for-profit colleges in the U.S. rely on federal aid for a huge portion of their revenues, such scrutiny is clearly warranted. Still, the $25 billion in federal grants and loans that flows to them each year represents just a fraction of the $113.3 billion the government made available to higher education as a whole in 2009-10. And not all of the $89 billion or so that non-profit institutions collected in federal aid went toward teaching the nation's youth such career-enhancing skills as how to deconstruct soap operas from a Marxist perspective.
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It may be that, like me, you don't quite know what to make of articles that have appeared recently about the state of contemporary secondary and post-secondary education. But maybe you can! If so, help me sort through it. I've spent my entire professional life as a teacher -- for over twenty years at the college level, and for the last nine years at a high school. Despite all that, I still don't know what to make of all this.So, I'm just going to call your attention here to some disparate things I've read in recent months, without trying to weave them together in a coherent essay. If you have thoughts, please let me hear them.
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With Colorado's unemployment rate at 8.6 percent, college graduates are getting creative when it comes to making a career out of their newly completed educations. For more and more graduates, this means starting a business venture all their own.Fortunately for these young hopefuls, the entrepreneurial environment in Colorado is a friendly one, from business schools preparing students to begin their venture to established business owners who welcome aspiring entrepreneurs.
The College of Business at Colorado State University is making sure that students have the opportunity to gain all the skills and inspiration necessary to jump-start any entrepreneurial leanings they may have. The college offers a certificate of entrepreneurship program to interested business and engineering students.
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They come with polished resumes and perfect SAT scores. Their grades are often impeccable. Some elite universities will deny thousands of high school seniors with 4.0 grade point averages in search of an elusive quality that one provost called "intellectual vitality." The perception is that today's over-achieving, college-driven kids have it -- whatever it is. They're not just groomed; they're ready. There's just one problem.Once on campus, the students aren't studying.
It is a fundamental part of college education: the idea that young people don't just learn from lectures, but on their own, holed up in the library with books and, perhaps, a trusty yellow highlighter. But new research, conducted by two California economics professors, shows that over the past five decades, the number of hours that the average college student studies each week has been steadily dropping. According to time-use surveys analyzed by professors Philip Babcock, at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks, at the University of California Riverside, the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. Today's average student hits the books for just 14 hours.
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I'm not sure why the University of Georgia Student Government Association wants tailgating beyond four hours, which seems like a reasonable period time for any pre-game party to me.Nor am I sure if the SGA is in the best position to ask for a relaxing of the restrictions put on tailgating by the UGA administration to cut down on the trash and mayhem. The administration says someone dragged a couch out of a dorm and set it on fire in Myers Quad during the Nov. 27 game against Georgia Tech. And the college had to deal with jagged glass from beer bottles on the ground as well.
Take a look at this AJC story, which states that UGA student leaders want three North Campus tailgating restrictions imposed last year relaxed; the prohibitions against tents, tables longer than four feet and tailgating more than four hours before kickoff. Lest anyone forget why these restrictions were imposed, please look at the photo accompanying this blog of North Campus after one of the tailgating afternoons that led to the clamp-down by UGA.
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Mary was four years old when she entered the pre-kindergarten program in Marshall. Her parents were struggling with her behavior. She had a significant speech delay. She didn't like snuggling with them. She didn't want to read books. And she refused to let her parents touch her hair.Much more on Madison's planned 4k program, here."What are we doing wrong?" her parents wondered.
Mary's early childhood teachers worked with her parents and her pediatrician to help diagnose the problem: Mary had autism. Her teachers created a special education plan for her, which included "social stories" -- books of pictures from Mary's daily life that helped explain mysterious rituals like brushing her hair.
The teachers taught Mary how to read facial expressions and verbalize her feelings, instead of having tantrums. They took her on field trips to public places, so she could get used to the noise and bustle of other people.
As Mary's parents began to understand autism, the teachers supported them by offering advice. The intense, early intervention helped Mary and her family learn to manage her autism. By sixth grade, Mary was doing so well she was able to exit special education services for good.
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Value Added Resource Center @ Wisconsin Center for Education Research
Complete report 1.4MB
Summary.
Much more on value added assessment here.
Madison's value added assessment program is based on the oft-criticized wkce.
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The controversy at West High School continues about the Madison School District's new talented and gifted program. Students, parents and teachers decry the plan, pointing to the likelihood of a "tracking" system and increasingly segregated classes.Lots of related links:While I am in agreement with them here, I must differ when they mistakenly point to the current "embedded honors" system as a preferable method for dealing with TAG students.
The idea itself should immediately raise red flags. Teaching two classes at the same time is impossible to do well, if at all. Forcing teachers to create twice the amount of curriculum and attempt to teach both within a single context is unrealistic and stressful for the educators.
The system creates problems for students as well. There is very little regulation in the execution of these "embedded honors" classes, creating widely varying experiences among students. By trying to teach to two different levels within one classroom, "embedded honors" divides teachers' attention and ultimately impairs the educational experiences of both groups of students.
While the concerns raised about Superintendent Dan Nerad's plan are legitimate, "embedded honors" as a solution is not.
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L.A. Compact, via a David Baskerville email:
In February 2009, leaders from the Los Angeles Education Community publicly signed the L.A. Compact - a collaborative commitment to transform education in Los Angeles. The Compact signers have pledged to put the interests of students first. They have committed to work together to meet the following goals:Goal 1: All students graduate from high schoolAs part of their commitment, the signers pledged to release an initial data report in order to facilitate the measurement of their progress against these baselines in future years. The data in this report details Los Angeles Unified School District's rates of graduation, enrollment, preparation, and more. It then follows LAUSD graduates and tracks their progress in post-secondary education. At this point in its development, the report highlights several important markers as we discuss collaborative opportunities for improvement. The measurements and their sources will continue to be refined and expanded over the coming years.Goal 2: All students have access to and are prepared for success in college
Goal 3: All students have access to pathways to sustainable jobs and careers
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"Since 1995 the average mathematics score for fourth-graders jumped 11 points. At this rate we catch up with Singapore in a little over 80 years . . . assuming they don't improve."- Norman R. Augustine,
retired CEO of Lockheed Martin
What America needs, says one American parent, is more parents who resemble South Korean parents. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, 46, a father of a third-grader and a first-grader, recalls the answer Barack Obama got when he asked South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, "What is the biggest education challenge you have?" Lee answered: "Parents are too demanding." They want their children to start learning English in first rather than second grade. Only 25 percent of U.S. elementary schools offer any foreign-language instruction.
Too many American parents, Duncan says, have "cognitive dissonance" concerning primary and secondary schools: They think their children's schools are fine, and that schools that are not fine are irredeemable. This, Duncan says, is a recipe for "stasis" and "insidious paralysis." He attempts to impart motion by puncturing complacency and picturing the payoff from excellence.
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Ding Xinzhu considers herself a strict mother. She lays down the rules for her four-year-old daughter, Yueyue, and she says she's the only one in the family of seven whom Yueyue "is afraid of" and obeys."I told her she needs to sit up straight and feed herself at the table. If she disobeys, I will spank her. She cries, but she listens to me," Ding, a 34-year-old executive in Shanghai, said. She picked a prominent kindergarten for her daughter and chose painting and ballet as extracurricular activities. On weekends, Yueyue takes piano lessons. "I think I'm the most demanding among my circle of mothers, but I'm only trying to provide the best for my child and prepare her for the future," Ding said.
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The emotional health of college freshmen -- who feel buffeted by the recession and stressed by the pressures of high school -- has declined to the lowest level since an annual survey of incoming students started collecting data 25 years ago.In the survey, "The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010," involving more than 200,000 incoming full-time students at four-year colleges, the percentage of students rating themselves as "below average" in emotional health rose. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who said their emotional health was above average fell to 52 percent. It was 64 percent in 1985.
Every year, women had a less positive view of their emotional health than men, and that gap has widened.
Campus counselors say the survey results are the latest evidence of what they see every day in their offices -- students who are depressed, under stress and using psychiatric medication, prescribed even before they came to college.
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I want to speak out on behalf of an oppressed minority. This is not one of those minorities one could call fashionable; its oppression might seem negligible, and perhaps most of it, in the west at least, occurred in the past. But left-handed people, who constitute about one-tenth of the population pretty much across the board, have suffered in the course of history.The negative connotations attached to left-sidedness and left-handedness are remarkably consistent across cultures and across history. Perhaps the most striking is the Latin adjective sinister, which starts off meaning "left" or "on the left hand", but quickly (in Latin that is) acquires the secondary meanings "wrong", "perverse" and then (closer to the meaning of sinister in modern English) "unfavourable", "adverse", "ill-omened".
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Tony Brown didn't set out to overhaul his college's policies on intellectual property. He just wanted an easier way of tracking local apartment rentals on his iPhone.The University of Missouri student came up with an idea in class one day that spawned an iPhone application that has had more than 250,000 downloads since its release in March 2009. The app created by Brown and three other undergraduates won them a trip to Apple headquarters along with job offers from Google and other technology companies.
But the invention also raised a perplexing question when university lawyers abruptly demanded a 25 percent ownership stake and two-thirds of any profits. Who owns the patents and copyrights when a student creates something of value on campus, without a professor's help?
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"After decades of funding our eleven campuses on the basis of past appropriations and past expenditures, we have lost track of the rationale for each campus's funding level. We must begin a new approach to funding higher education where we ask the board of higher education to develop a funding methodology that is based on the outcomes that education leaders and citizens would like to see from their college campuses."
-- North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple's Jan. 4 state of the state address.Faced with a 5 percent tuition rise and the likelihood of future increases, students at the City University of New York filed a lawsuit against the school protesting the tuition hike. Could we be on the verge of a student movement like that recently under way in England, where rioters incensed over tuition increases have thrown Molotov cocktails, smashed windows, and even attacked Prince Charles's car?
CUNY's was a modest hike, with average prices remaining well below the national average. CUNY takes pride in its history of serving low-income and first-generation students with a high-quality, affordable education.. But CUNY, like many public institutions in the U.S., is doing what led to student revolts in England: shifting the burden of paying for higher education from taxpayers to students. According to the State Higher Education Executive Officers association, tuition in the U.S. increased from 25 percent of all educational revenue to 37 percent from 1984 to 2009, even as total spending per student remained about the same.
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Hispanics for School Choice (HFSC), a non-profit organization founded in Milwaukee County, is hosting a coming out event at the United Community Center (UCC) on January 24th. It marks the first time in Wisconsin history that leaders in the Hispanic community have organized to expand the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.A Buzz at the State Capitol
Last week, Executive Board members of Hispanics for School Choice created somewhat of a buzz as they descended upon the State Capitol to circulate their legislative agenda. Associates from the American Federation of Children and School Choice Wisconsin accompanied HFSC in separate meetings with Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, Education Committee Chair Steve Kestell, and Secretary of the Department of Administration Mike Huebsch to discuss a timetable of moving the School Choice program forward.
HFSC Board Members were also given exclusive entry to a closed caucus in the Grand Army of the Republic Hearing Room before Assembly Republicans - an access rarely granted to non-profit organizations of any sort for any reason. Before the 60-member caucus, Board Members of HFSC were introduced communicating the idea that HFSC aimed to be more of a resource to legislators than a needy lobbyist.
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This school isn't a place you end up by accident.
A small propeller plane flight or a two-hour ferry ride into the northern reaches of Lake Michigan gets you as far as St. James, the northern hub of Beaver Island. But it takes another half hour by car, down bumpy gravel roads, to get to the south tip of the island and the small cluster of classroom buildings and log cabins, shadowed by the historic lighthouse for which this secluded alternative high school is named."What the hell have I gotten myself into?" That's exactly what 18-year-old Katie Daugherty thought as she arrived at the Beaver Island Lighthouse School last September.
She was scared, felt sick to her stomach. She hardly talked to anyone.
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The Gleason Family Foundation has long had an intense interest in the quality of education. With great disappointment over the decades, we've watched our public education system continually fail to meet the needs of all children.The education special interests tell us that the crisis in education is a fabricated one. But the growing body of achievement data overwhelmingly shows that K-12 student performance, particularly in urban school systems, has been middling at best, comparing unfavorably even to some Third World countries.
Rochester, like all too many urban school systems, graduates fewer than 50 percent of its students, many of whom are totally unprepared to meet the challenges of an increasingly high tech world.
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One hundred down, 1,150 more to go.Waukesha County researchers have identified 100 babies who'll be part of a landmark study of children's health - a tiny fraction of the 100,000 nationwide who may eventually be identified for the largest long-term study of children's health ever conducted in the country.
Waukesha County is among the first seven pilot locations, the only one in Wisconsin and part of 105 centers eventually who'll participate in the National Children's Study. The $2.7 billion study will follow children from before their birth until age 21 with the aim of identifying the influence of environmental factors, including physical, chemical, biological and psychosocial, on their health and development.
A celebration at the study's Waukesha office Wednesday highlighted the success in finding the first 100 local participants.
Another 1,150 babies will eventually be added in Waukesha County, and researchers are still recruiting from Brookfield, Big Bend, Hartland, Pewaukee, Oconomowoc, Dousman, New Berlin, Waukesha, Menomonee Falls and Sussex.
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From primary school onwards, Chinese children will now receive lessons in the art of queuing, good table manners, how to respect their elders and betters and the correct way to write letters, emails and even send SMS messages.Older children will be tutored in the arts of introducing oneself to strangers, dealing politely with members of the opposite sex, making public speeches and the rudiments of dealing with foreigners and (to Chinese eyes, at least) their strange ways.
"The goal is to let students know that China is a country with a long history of civilisation, rituals and cultures," said the guidelines which were published on the ministry's website.
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The 2011 legislative session presents a historic opportunity for Oklahoma to lead in improving our children's future through comprehensive education reform. The combination of a reform-minded Legislature, governor and state school superintendent, along with an engaged public, provides a unique window for passing the greatest educational improvements in our lifetime.The first reform is choice in education through an educational tax credit scholarship act that follows the example of the states that have seen the most rapid improvement in educational achievement. This bill empowers parents to find the schools that will best meet their children's needs, stimulates the creation of innovative scholarship schools, and provides the competition that has been proven to greatly improve the public schools.
Choice also is promoted by expanding the charter school laws, allowing the state schools superintendent to charter new schools, and freeing these highly successful charter schools to finance their own infrastructure needs.
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Hispanics for School Choice, an organization designed to expand school choice programs, launched Monday at a gathering at the United Community Center.The group's legislative agenda includes:
"Despite differences in political philosophies, our community agrees that school choice is educationally effective in educating our children, and we're serious about getting the best for our children," said Zeus Rodriguez, president of the organization.
- Removing the enrollment cap in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.
- Expanding choice schools to allow students from Milwaukee to attend schools throughout Milwaukee County.
- Allowing all parents to participate in choice by lifting income limits.
- Expanding school choice to other cities.
The school choice movement has backed an array of options outside the traditional public school system. Proponents argue that such programs expand options for parents and pressure public schools to operate more efficiently. Critics argue that the choice program drains resources from public schools, and that public funds shouldn't flow to private, often religious schools.
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Responding to concerns that potential locations for Madison's new 4-year-old kindergarten program are not located in poor neighborhoods where they may be most beneficial, school district officials said Monday they will evaluate additional sites.Much more on Madison's 4K program, here.The School Board on Monday approved 19 elementary schools with available space as potential 4K sites, but also asked the district to identify churches or community centers with space where Madison teachers could be assigned for the 2 1/2 hour daily program beginning this fall.
The district is expecting to hear back this week from 35 day care centers that were approved to participate in the program.
Not all of the 54 potential sites will end up being used, but the district won't know the exact distribution until parents register their students beginning Feb. 7.
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Austin schools Superintendent Meria Carstarphen met with facilities task force members Saturday to encourage them to broaden their scope and not to focus as much on the district's looming budget crisis.Austin School Board.In recent weeks, the task force seemed to stray a bit from its mission of creating a 10-year plan on future schools, renovations and attendance zones. After it earlier this month named nine schools that could be closed for efficiency's sake, outraged community members rallied to save their schools.
Although the long-term plan probably will have recommendations on closures, task force members said they felt pressured to produce short-term fixes to help the district get past one of the worst anticipated budget shortfalls in its history.
On Saturday, Carstarphen, in effect, told task force volunteers that was her burden, not theirs.
"There's only so much in efficiencies you can do," she said. "You can't do it all. You don't need to do it all."
The Austin School District's 2010-2011 budget is $973,997,900 for 86,000 students ($11,325.55 per student). Madison's 2010-2011 budget is $379,058,945 (according to the January, 2011 "State of the District" presentation for 24,471 students. That is $15,490 per student.
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After being pilloried by critics and written off by many families, 529 college-saving plans are getting better. But well-heeled investors still would be wise to spread their bets around.So-called 529 plans allow people to save for college expenses and withdraw the earnings tax-free. Many also offer a break on state income tax--savings that, in theory, an investor can roll back into the account.
For years 529s were pitched as the ultimate college-savings vehicle, but their limitations were thrown into sharp relief during the financial crisis. Too reliant on stocks, the average 529 investment option lost nearly 24% in 2008. Even portfolios geared to older kids just a few years away from college got hammered, losing 14%, according to investment-research firm Morningstar Inc. What's more, because savers can generally make investment changes only once a year, many people watched helplessly as their accounts dropped in value.
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A Dane County jury has awarded $1 million to a former Madison couple who claimed therapists created in their daughter false memories of childhood sexual and physical abuse.Jurors early Sunday found two of the three therapists who treated Charlotte Johnson in the early 1990s professionally negligent, said attorney Bill Smoler, who represented her parents, Dr. Charles and Karen Johnson.
The couple, now of St. Louis, had been accused by their daughter of being Satanists and incest perpetrators. Charlotte Johnson had come to believe that her father had raped her at age 3, that her mother had come after her with a knife and tried to drown her, and that the family dabbled in cults and infanticide, said Smoler, who termed the alleged memories "outrageous."
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Dmitriy Kozlov waited until nightfall to place a 911 call to Oregon authorities, alerting them to a terrible case of child abuse in an immigrant community that existed, almost invisibly, in this city's midst.The alleged victim was 14-year-old Dmitriy himself. From a pay phone on July 20, 2009, he reported that his parents regularly beat him and several of his six siblings. Their parents, he said, struck them with wires, branches and belts for wearing makeup and getting a fake tattoo.
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George Washington University has opened a private college-preparatory high school that will operate entirely online, one of the nation's first "virtual" secondary schools to be affiliated with a major research university.Smart.The opening of a laboratory-style school under the banner of a prestigious university generally counts as a major event among parents of the college-bound. The George Washington University Online High School, a partnership with the online learning company K12 Inc., is competing with brick-and-mortar prep schools and with a small but growing community of experimental online schools attached to major universities.
Online learning may be the next logical step in the evolution of university "lab" schools, an ongoing experiment in pedagogy. Online instruction holds the potential to transcend the factory model of traditional public education, allowing students to learn at their own pace. In the ideal online classroom, no lesson is ever too fast or too slow, and no one ever falls behind.
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A state Senate committee voted Thursday to advance a program that would offer vouchers for students in failing public schools to attend private and parochial schools.The Opportunity Scholarship Act is a signature piece of Gov. Chris Christie's education reform agenda and another proposal over which he and the state's largest teachers union are coming to blows. The New Jersey Education Association vehemently opposes the voucher program, calling it "a government bailout for struggling private schools."
If implemented, the bill would cost about $825 million and serve 40,000 students in 166 chronically failing public schools by its fifth year. It could be a boon for parochial schools, which have been closing in droves because of declining enrollment, but could also force reductions in state aid to public school districts.
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Some research has found that once Asian-American kids hit college, they no longer outstrip white students academically -- if they're living away from home.For example, a study of 452 students at UC Irvine led by University of Denver psychologist Julia Dmitrieva found that while both white and Asian-American students' freshman year grades dipped below their 12th-grade GPAs, Asian-Americans' fell dramatically, while white Americans' dropped only slightly.
"There's a reversal of ethnic differences in college grades, at least temporarily," Dmitrieva says. That reversal didn't stem, as some have guessed, from Asian-American students taking more natural science courses, which generally are graded more stringently than other subjects. In fact, her study showed that grades in both natural and social sciences dropped for the Asian-American freshmen, while grades in natural sciences rose for white students.
"We observed the same dip in grades for natural sciences among the Asian-Americans as there are for other majors," says Dmitrieva.
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These kids today. They're playing with apps and computer games and learning to use a mouse. Whatever happened to tying their shoes and learning to ride a bike?Young children are still learning to do those traditional activities, but they're also mastering a variety of tech skills early in life -- raising questions about how quickly the world is changing for kids and parents.
Take the skill of tying shoelaces, for example. In a recent survey, 14% of kids age 4 or 5 could tie their shoes, while 21% could play or operate at least one smartphone app.
In the same study, which polled 2,200 mothers in several developed countries, 22% of children that age knew at least one Web address, 34% could open a Web browser and 76% could play an online computer game. By comparison, 31% knew to dial 9-1-1 in an emergency, 35% could get their own breakfast (which we assume doesn't mean making eggs) and 53% knew their home address. (A full 67% could ride a bike, which makes your Digits blogger feel bad for not learning until she was well into elementary school.)
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TheBayport-Blue Point School District Board of Education discussed the district administration's preliminary budget plan Tuesday night at its work session meeting, stressing that Gov. Andrew Cuomo's proposed property tax cap would have a negative impact on the school district.Bayport-Blue Point's 2010-2011 budget is $66,338,637 for about 2,500 students ($24,795/student). Madison spent $15,241 per student during 2009-2010 according to the Citizen's Budget.While the district begins to formulate its budget for the 2011-2012 school year, it does so without knowing how much state aid it will receive and if the governor's 2 percent tax cap proposal will be law. Cuomo is expected to release his new budget next month.
Superintendent of Schools Anthony Annunziato said the proposed tax cap would be crippling to public schools, including Bayport-Blue Point. "I don't know if we can get down to 2 percent," Annunziato said to the board and community members. "I don't think we can."
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A Memphis, Tennessee high school is trying to come to grips with a teen pregnancy epidemic.Ninety students who attend Frayser High School are currently pregnant or have already had a baby this year.
The stunning number means nearly 11 percent of the school's approximately 800 students are already experiencing the trials of parenthood.
A Title One school, Frayser receives federal dollars based on the number of students from low income families who qualify for free or reduced lunch.
Nearly 100 percent of the students who attend the school qualify.
Such a high rate of pregnancy at one school is dire, but sources say there is a massive initiative in the works dedicated to preventing teen pregnancy in the Frayser community.
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Stephen Kreider Yoder, Isaac Yoder & Levi Yoder:
STEVE: In three weeks, Levi and I will be in northern Tanzania. Or on a cargo boat on Lake Victoria, or lost in a Ugandan village -- I'm not exactly sure.Sound crazy? I think so. I blame the ex-Army guy who runs the military-surplus store in Berkeley.
Yes, we finally decided to take The Trip. We wrote last year about my fantasy of pulling Levi out of school for six months to seek the sites of our human roots in Africa and then trace the dawn of civilization by vagabonding overland along the Rift Valley, on down the Nile and into the Middle East.
The scheme made no sense. It didn't make financial sense to take a leave from my great job. It was imprudent for Levi's education. It wasn't logical to abandon our comfortable life, leave behind my wife, Karen, and spend money on a whimsical journey when so many others were less fortunate than we.
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I really did not have time to write this today, but two articles I read made me drop what I was doing. First was the Wall Street Journal article by a Yale law professor who says Chinese mothers are superior because they produce more mathematical and musical prodigies.The reason, she says, is because none of them accept a grade less than an "A", all insist their child be number one in the class, they don't let their children be in school plays, play any instrument other than piano or violin, etc.
She says that this whole thing about people being individuals is a lot of crap (I'm paraphrasing a bit) and gives an example of how she spent hours getting her seven-year-old to play a very difficult piece on the piano. She uses the fact that the older daughter could do the same piece at that age as proof this was reasonable.
There are a few areas I would take exception with her article. First is her grasp of mathematics and logic. It is clearly impossible that every child in China is number one in the class, unless every classroom in the country has a thirty-way tie for first. Second, as my daughter asked, "There are 1.3 billion people in China. None of them ever got a B?" Third is the issue of claiming your parenting is such a great success when your children are not yet out of high school.
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If you pull some free market logic from Finance and apply it to the education market, you might frame things differently. Eugene Fama from the University of Chicago says that there are no such things as "bubbles" in financial markets. If there are, you ought to be able to predict them and act accordingly. He correctly points out that all publicly known information is incorporated into the price of an asset. Are asset bubbles in financial markets directly comparable to intangible assets? Probably not, but Fama's theory on efficient markets should at least give us a touchstone to think about.In this case, our asset is a college education. The asset is not physical like a stock or a piece of real estate, but intangible. Hence, there are properties to that asset that are subjective. For example, what is the real value of the Coca-Cola brand name? In turn, what is the real value of a college education-and within the finite range of colleges, what's the individual value?
Here is the hypothesis: We will assume that there is an education bubble.
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A big graduate recruiter plans to hire the "majority" of its trainees from among school leavers, not university graduates, and pay for them to receive a bespoke degree from a well-regarded British university.From next year, KPMG will take in 75 school leavers, and then meet the cost of a four-year accountancy degree from Durham university and an accountancy qualification. Trainees on the six-year scheme will start on up to £20,000 a year.
In 2012-13, the maximum university tuition fee, now £3,290, will rise to £9,000. At the same time, subsidies are being withdrawn from the sector and rules loosened to allow new entrants into the market and innovation in course design.
As a consequence, such schemes could become more attractive to universities. David Willetts, universities minister, welcomed the news, saying: "It's the kind of initiative that we hope will flourish as we reform higher education."
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Here are some of the things that my four children of a Jewish mother were always allowed to do:
- Quit the piano and the violin, especially if their defeatist attitude coincided with a recital, thus saving me from the torture of listening to other people's precious children soldier through hackneyed pieces of the juvenile repertoire, plink after ever more unbearable plonk.
- Sleep over at their friends' houses, especially on New Year's Eve or our anniversary, thus saving us the cost of a babysitter.
- Play on the computer and surf the Internet, so long as they paid for their Neopet Usuki dolls and World of Warcraft abomination cleavers out of their own allowances.
- Participate in any extracurricular activity they wanted, so long as I was never required to drive farther than 10 minutes to get them there, or to sit on a field in a folding chair in anything but the balmiest weather for any longer than 60 minutes.
- Quit said extracurricular activities, especially if their quitting coincided with league finals that might have demanded participation on my part exceeding the requirements stated above.
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An international study published last month looked at how students in 65 countries performed in math, science and reading. The winner was: Confucianism!At the very top of the charts, in all three fields and by a wide margin, was Shanghai. Three of the next top four performers were also societies with a Confucian legacy of reverence for education: Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea. The only non-Confucian country in the mix was Finland.
The United States? We came in 15th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math.
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Al Kouba, who lives in Bend, Ore., was told by his son in California that his family's Christmas letter would only be posted on Facebook--not mailed. That's when the retired systems engineer knew it was time to play catch up: "If you're going to communicate with your family, you have to be on Facebook," he says.So he turned to a technology expert: his 15-year-old granddaughter, Marlee Norr. But as Marlee explained the steps to log on to the social-networking site, Mr. Kouba protested: "Look, kid, I'm 77 years old! I'm not quite as swift as I used to be." Both laughed, says Marlee, also of Bend, and she agreed to "back up and slow down."
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Scott and Kim Yarnish live just across the street from Brookland Education Campus @ Bunker Hill, making it the most obvious choice when the time comes for their 2-year-old son, Theo, to begin preschool. But the Ward 5 couple, like most of the young families at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on Saturday afternoon, were searching for alternatives to their traditional neighborhood public schools.Attendance figures were not available, but the third-floor exhibition hall was packed for the second annual D.C. Public Charter School Recruitment Expo, where the city's 52 publicly financed and independently operated schools set up tables to answer questions and offer enrollment forms. The crowd included Mayor Vincent C. Gray, who has promised that his new administration will be more charter-friendly. His appearance alone was a change, according to Nona Richardson, communications director for the D.C. Public Charter School Board, who said that then-Mayor Adrian M. Fenty did not visit the inaugural expo last year.
Scott Yarnish said he came "to get the lay of the land" and because he'd received mixed reports about Brookland, a PS-8 school where less than half of the students read at proficiency level or higher on the 2010 DC CAS.
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Twenty-three years ago I walked the halls of Evanston Township High School in Evanston, Ill., with a diverse mix of white-, black- and brown-skinned fellow students.Then I would walk into an honors class and be confronted with a near-blanket of white.
Not much has changed at my alma mater, and as a result the school district has been embroiled in a contentious curriculum debate that touches on race, academics and the meaning of public education itself.
Sound familiar?
Evanston and Madison are both affluent, well-educated and liberal. And both have high schools where racial achievement gaps are the norm. Their school districts differ, though, in their approach to that gap today: Evanston is cutting honors classes; Madison is adding them.
Unlike Madison, Evanston has long had a sizable minority population and began desegregating its elementary and middle schools in the 1960s -- with some positive academic results.
Seniors at ETHS, the city's only public high school, last year had an average ACT score of 23.5, or 2.5 points higher than the national average. This in one of only five states that requires its students to take the test and in a high school whose student population, about 2,900, is 43 percent white, 32 percent black and 17 percent Latino.
Lots of related links:
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Do you think that strict, "Eastern" parenting eventually helps children lead happy lives as adults?When it works well, absolutely! And by working well, I mean when high expectations are coupled with love, understanding and parental involvement. This is the gift my parents gave me, and what I hope I'm giving my daughters. I've also taught law students of all backgrounds for 17 years, and I've met countless students raised the "tough immigrant" way (by parents from Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Korea, Jamaica, Haiti, Iran, Ireland, etc.) who are thriving, independent, bold, creative, hilarious and, at least to my eyes, as happy as anyone. But I also know of people raised with "tough love" who are not happy and who resent their parents. There is no easy formula for parenting, no right approach (I don't believe, by the way, that Chinese parenting is superior--a splashy headline, but I didn't choose it). The best rule of thumb I can think of is that love, compassion and knowing your child have to come first, whatever culture you're from. It doesn't come through in the excerpt, but my actual book is not a how-to guide; it's a memoir, the story of our family's journey in two cultures, and my own eventual transformation as a mother. Much of the book is about my decision to retreat from the strict "Chinese" approach, after my younger daughter rebelled at 13.
I have a 20-month-old, and my husband and I both enjoyed the article. How can you apply this to toddlers?
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Austin, Tex., drew the largest numbers of young Americans from 2007 through 2009, according to an analysis by a senior demographer at the Brookings Institution, replacing Riverside, Calif., which was the most popular destination for young people in the middle of the decade.Compare Wisconsin & Texas NAEP scores here (White students in Texas outscore Wisconsin students in Math) and have a smaller difference between black students.Migration slowed greatly during the recession, and rates have continued to remain low. But in an analysis of migration still occurring among some of the country's most mobile citizens -- people ages 25 to 34 -- the cities at the top of the list were those that had remained economically vibrant, like Dallas, and those that were considered hip destinations, like Austin and Seattle, the demographer, William H. Frey, found.
In the middle of the decade, before the recession, the top five destinations were Riverside, Phoenix, Atlanta, Houston and Charlotte, N.C., according to the analysis, which was based on Census Bureau data. Austin ranked ninth in that period, and Las Vegas was No. 10.
A Capital Times perspective on Texas, here. A look at College Station vs. Madison, here
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On a freezing Saturday in February, my wife and I sat through a full-day introduction to college admissions for the parents of 11th graders. This was our first little step on the high-anxiety journey thousands of families trod each year. As parents of twins, we were double-booked. There wasn't a vacation day in the next eight months that one of us didn't spend on a college campus, somewhere.That day, at a workshop called "Behind Closed Doors: the Life of the Application," an admissions dean from a prestigious small college in Connecticut described carrying home a teetering armload of folders every night during her decision season. She told of examining a student's high school transcript, the SAT or ACT scores, the letters of recommendation.
"And then," she said, her manner growing brighter, almost big-sisterly and confidential, "I turn to the personal essay, my favorite part."
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THE nation's most selective universities have long required three SAT subject tests. But with the introduction of writing sections on the SAT and ACT in 2005, colleges have been gradually reducing the subject-test requirement.This admissions cycle, Harvard has jumped on the two-test bandwagon, and Georgetown is "strongly" recommending three instead of requiring them. The most subject tests that any American college now requires is two, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling. For 18 institutions, the ACT is good enough -- no subject tests required at all.
The writing test has been found to be a good indicator of future academic success, says Jeff A. Neal, a Harvard spokesman.
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How do we motivate our children to succeed in school, and in life? It's a fundamental question that animates every parent's juggle, and there are as many answers as there are families. Amy Chua, author of the new book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," shares her own forceful, unyielding answer in an excerpt published in Saturday's Review section.Near the beginning, Ms. Chua writes, "Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:
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One summer at the annual Bremen Music Festival in Germany, Robert Levin, a classical pianist, was in the midst of improvising a passionate and wild cadenza during Beethoven's "C Major Piano Concerto." A cadenza is a passage in a concerto during which the orchestra ceases and a soloist strikes out on his own, improvising within the style of the piece. Up until the early nineteenth century, many classical composers wrote space for these cadenzas within their works. Levin is one of a handful of musicians who has taken it upon himself to revive the practice of classical improvisation. He is world renowned for his ability to effortlessly extemporize in the styles of several composers, including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn. In this particular concert, however, Levin had gotten himself into a bit of a pickle."I was going whole hog," Levin said, thanks to the permission Beethoven gave his renderers to modulate or change keys during his cadenzas. "I had gone really far afield and was in F sharp major. That's as far away from C major as you can possibly get because if you keep going, you start to get closer to the other side."
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EDUCATION, students are frequently told, is the key to a better job. First, finish high school. Then, go to college and get a degree. For those with higher aspirations, try for a master's.But increasingly, there is another way. Short vocational programs leading to a certificate are becoming the kudzu of the educational world. There's a program for virtually any skill, from interior design to paralegal to managing records at a doctor's office. Instead of investing in a master's, professionals itching to move up the career ladder can earn certificates in marketing strategies, credit analysis or even journalism.
In an economy that increasingly rewards specialization, more and more institutions -- from the ones that advertise on late-night cable to the most elite of universities -- are offering these programs, typically a package of five or six courses, for credit or not, taken over three to 18 months. Some cost a few thousand dollars, others tens of thousands.
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Gov. Gregoire's' bold new proposals for an integrated education department? Great in concept (in fact, much needed). Hard to do. Even harder to insure better results than we're getting now.That's how I'd summarize Gov. Gregoire's proposal to replace the various boards of education with a cabinet-level Department of Education.
First, the need: Sure, the state Board of Community and Technical Colleges, the Higher Education Coordinating Board, and the Board of Education for K-12 schools -- not to mention the entire Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction whose incumbent has already acquitted himself poorly in this debate -- all these bodies represent separate silos and have a tough time making their goals and systems fit together. Worse though, they're also creaky and inefficient, a poor system for making (or changing) policy. (The proposed new department would also absorb the recently created Department of Early Learning which already reports to the governor.)
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SARAH WILSON was speaking proudly the other day when she declared: "My house is a little messy."Ms. Wilson lives in Stroudsburg, Pa., a small town in the Poconos. Many days, her home is strewn with dress-up clothes, art supplies and other artifacts from playtime with her two small children, Benjamin, 6, and Laura, 3. "I let them get it messy because that's what it's here for," she said.
Ms. Wilson has embraced a growing movement to restore the sometimes-untidy business of play to the lives of children. Her interest was piqued when she toured her local elementary school last year, a few months before Benjamin was to enroll in kindergarten. She still remembered her own kindergarten classroom from 1985: it had a sandbox, blocks and toys. But this one had a wall of computers and little desks.
"There's no imaginative play anymore, no pretend," Ms. Wilson said with a sigh.
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Kids' Turn, a divorce education program located in San Francisco, encourages children grappling with their parents' split to express their feelings through art. Founded in 1988, the program--which serves five counties in the Bay Area--has been replicated nationally and internationally, and will be implemented in Great Britain later this year. The following pictures, which were drawn by kids and teens ages 5 to 15, express in crayon and marker feelings often too difficult to explain in words.
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New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will lay out his ideas for overhauling teacher tenure, giving parents a choice in where their children attend school and shoring up a teetering public worker pension system in his first State of the State address.Christie told The Associated Press in an interview that he plans to stick to three themes Tuesday in a speech that will top out at under 30 minutes: education reform; changes to the pension and health benefits funds for government workers, teachers, police and firefighters; and responsible budgeting.
"It's going to be brisk and direct," Christie said of the speech, "talking about those things and why they're so important to the future of the state. We'll do a little bit of a review of where we've been and what we accomplished our first year in office, but the majority of the speech will be talking about those three big issues to me."
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In the wake of several tragedies that have made bullying a high-profile issue, it's becoming clear that harassment by one's peers is something more than just a rite of passage. Bullied kids are more likely to be depressed, anxious, and suicidal. They struggle in school -- when they decide to show up at all. They are more likely to carry weapons, get in fights, and use drugs.But when it comes to the actual harm bullying does, the picture grows murkier. The psychological torment that victims feel is real. But perhaps because many of us have experienced this sort of schoolyard cruelty and lived to tell the tale, peer harassment is still commonly written off as a "soft" form of abuse -- one that leaves no obvious injuries and that most victims simply get over. It's easy to imagine that, painful as bullying can be, all it hurts is our feelings.
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Ms. Nelson is paying most of her own way at Landmark, a two-year college exclusively for students with learning disabilities and A.D.H.D. She wants to graduate on time this spring, and with tuition and fees alone at $48,000 a year -- more than any other college in the nation -- she cannot give in to distraction."I have a lot riding on this," says Ms. Nelson, who is also dyslexic. She wants to transfer to a four-year institution and get a bachelor's degree -- a goal that would have been out of reach, she says, had she not found Landmark three years after graduating from high school. If Ms. Nelson gets her associate degree in May after four semesters, she will buck the trend at Landmark.
Only about 30 percent graduate within three years; many others drop out after a semester or two. The numbers suggest that even with all the special help and the ratio of one teacher for every five students, the transition is not easy.
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A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:
- attend a sleepover
- have a playdate
- be in a school play
- complain about not being in a school play
- watch TV or play computer games
- choose their own extracurricular activities
- get any grade less than an A
- not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
- play any instrument other than the piano or violin
- not play the piano or violin.
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New evidence suggests children with ADHD have trouble switching off the "daydreaming" regions in the brain that often interfere with concentration, particularly on tedious tasks.Using a "Whac-a-Mole" style game, researchers found evidence from brain scans that children with ADHD require either much greater incentives--or their usual stimulant medication--to switch off those regions and focus on a task. The findings are published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
"The results are exciting because for the first time we are beginning to understand how in children with ADHD incentives and stimulant medication work in a similar way to alter patterns of brain activity and enable them to concentrate and focus better," says Chris Hollis, a professor of health sciences at the University of Nottingham. "It also explains why in children with ADHD their performance is often so variable and inconsistent, depending as it does on their interest in a particular task."
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IN the seven years since he quit his job as a college counselor at a private high school in Portland, Ore., Lloyd Thacker has become something of a folk hero in admissions circles. In standing-room-only gatherings in high school auditoriums, he has implored families to take back the college admissions process from those entities that, he says, do not always act in their best interests -- whether a magazine seeking to drum up sales for its rankings issue or a college trying to boost applications.Among his prime targets has been the College Board, the sprawling, nonprofit organization that oversees the SAT and Advanced Placement program.
In the introduction to "College Unranked: Ending the College Admissions Frenzy," a collection of essays he edited that was published in 2005, Mr. Thacker lamented the "corporatization" of the board and suggested that its efforts to "compete with other purveyors of college prep services and materials" -- referring, in part, to a failed attempt at a for-profit Web site -- raised questions about its credibility.
But that was then.
Last spring, Mr. Thacker announced that he and the organization he founded to promote his ideals, the Education Conservancy, were going into partnership with the College Board. Their joint venture: a Web site, free to users, that would provide all manner of advice and perspective on the admissions process.
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AT a time when recent graduates, age 24 and under, are experiencing a jobless rate of nearly 10 percent, a new study renews the debate over the value-added component of going to college.The sociologists Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia tracked 2,300 students through four years of college and into the labor market. The first two years are chronicled in their forthcoming book, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses" (University of Chicago Press).
This interview with Dr. Arum was conducted and condensed by Amanda M. Fairbanks.
Q. What piqued your interest in this topic?
A. For the last several decades, we've evaluated learning in K-12 education. But there's never been a serious attempt to follow kids through college. We conclude that large numbers don't appear to be learning very much.
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William H. Fitzhugh, the cantankerous publisher of a journal that showcases high school research papers, sits at his computer in a cluttered office above a secondhand shop here, deploring the nation's declining academic standards."Most kids don't know how to write, don't know any history, and that's a disgrace," Mr. Fitzhugh said. "Writing is the most dumbed-down subject in our schools."
His mood brightens, however, when talk turns to the occasionally brilliant work of the students whose heavily footnoted history papers appear in his quarterly, The Concord Review. Over 23 years, the review has printed 924 essays by teenagers from 44 states and 39 nations.
The review's exacting standards have won influential admirers. William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions, said he keeps a few issues in his Cambridge office to inspire applicants. Harvard considers it "something that's impressive," like winning a national math competition, if an applicant's essay has appeared in the review, he said.
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Luis Yudice, Safety/Security Coordinator Madison School District:
The Madison Metropolitan School District has the responsibility to provide a safe and secure learning environment for students and staff. To this end, the district periodically conducts assessments of its facilities and reviews its operating practices to ensure that all that can be done is being done to ensure the safety of our schools.Background
Following a school shooting in the Weston School District in Cazenovia, Wisconsin in 2006, Superintendent Art Rainwater issued security reminders that included the following:
- Ensure that building security and door locking procedures are followed.
- Ensure that all non-employees in a building are identified and registered in the office.
- Ensure that communication systems, radios and PA's are functioning.
- Have employees visibly display their MMSD identification badges.
- Be aware of the school's security plan and of their role in security procedures.
- Communicate with and listen to students.
- Remind students that they should always communicate with staff and share information regarding any threats to the school or to other persons.
- Ensure that the school's crisis team is in place.
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Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction: , via a kind reader's email.
Much more on open enrollment, here.
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The new Republicans in Congress have vowed to challenge Washington's role in American public education, and said they will seek to turn more power over to the states on many fronts. But one of their priorities is a new federal rule: to give parents in every state tax credits if their children are home-schooled.Previous efforts in Congress to adopt a nationwide tax break have failed, and currently only three states -- Illinois, Louisiana and Minnesota -- allow some benefit for home schooling.
Will the idea succeed in the new Congress, given some conservatives' longtime opposition, on the grounds that the credits might open the door to more government regulation of education? How would such a system work? Is it a threat to public education, as its critics claim?
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The American Bar Association has officially issued a warning on its website.The ABA is now making the case to persuade college students not to go to law school.
According to the association, over the past 25 years law school tuition has consistently risen two times faster than inflation.
The average private law student borrows about $92,500 for law school, while law students who attend public schools take out loans for $71,400. These numbers do not include any debt law students may still have from their time as undergraduates.
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The new Wisconsin governor is considering sweeping reforms in Madison, one of which could directly impact Beloit schools.Additional choices for our communities is a good thing. Thompson's perspective is correct and useful.Gov. Scott Walker and the incoming Republican legislature assumed power in the state Monday and wasted no time in introducing the possibility of expanding the state's school voucher program. The program, presently instituted in the Milwaukee area, allows students to receive taxpayer-financed vouchers to attend private schools, including religious schools. Just under 21,000 of the maximum 22,500 students enrolled in the program this year.
The governor has identified Beloit as one place where the vouchers could be phased in as part of a trial effort to spread the program statewide.
"I think school choice is successful," Walker told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. "I think it's worth looking at expanding it. How do you do that? There's really a multitude of options, not only those being discussed in other parts of the country. And we want to continue to be at the forefront of that."
Beloit School District Superintendent Milt Thompson said he views the potential voucher introduction as yet another reason for the district to reassess its direction.
"My concern is that the district has to become conscious of today's market. If you have a system that is attractive, people will send their kids here. If you don't, the days of an educational monopoly are over," he said.
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Sherri Oliver lives in a small town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. It's a two-hour bus ride to get to the Mount Washington Pediatric Hospital in Baltimore -- and she has brought her daughter, Katie Dail.Katie has dangerously high levels of lead in her blood.
She's a fast-moving first-grader with copper-colored hair. Katie has bright brown eyes but has trouble making eye contact. She also has autism -- and she doesn't really speak, but she makes a kind of whooping sound when she's happy.
But Katie is not here for autism treatment. The treatment she has been getting -- chelation therapy -- is to get her lead levels down. Although hospitals offer the treatment, some desperate parents are turning to home-based chelation kits and over-the-counter pills, which doctors say can be more dangerous.
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On Oct. 28, Tom Frank, chair of Anne Arundel County's Countywide Citizen Advisory Committee, resigned."I was under the impression that the role of the CAC was to meet with a representative of each school, other interested parents and citizens, and to bring their educational concerns to the school board and the superintendent,'' he explained. ''I have been told that I essentially have this backwards and the CAC is supposed to only bring items to the parents that the school board determines are important."
In a certified letter, board of education President Patricia Nalley had written to Frank that the CAC must restrict its agenda to board-approved issues and would not be allowed to convene any type of candidates' forum. Frank also was told he'd have to cancel the CAC candidates forum, which was to include the four board members on the ballot for November's election.
It became apparent the CAC regulations had become a fantasy document. The democratic vision contained in these regulations had been greatly diluted over the decades and many surviving democratic provisions had long since stopped being consistently enforced.
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For decades, parents of children with autism have been searching for a drug or diet to treat the disorder.Their latest hope is the hormone oxytocin. It's often called the trust hormone or the cuddle hormone. And just to be clear, it has nothing to do with the narcotic oxycontin.
But some children with autism are already being treated with oxytocin, even though it's not approved for this purpose.
The Trust Hormone
It's no wonder parents of children with autism have high hopes for oxytocin. So do a lot of researchers, like Jennifer Bartz at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
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Teachers and like-minded parents have struck first in an expected statewide battle over education changes being proposed by Gov.-elect Rick Scott's transition team.They have held meetings and conference calls, traded information via Facebook, planned an education summit and formed bill-writing committees to create alternative legislation.
And on Tuesday, they plan to wear red to send the new governor -- and the Republican-dominated legislature -- a message that they support public schools.
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Francesca Esposito, 29 and exquisitely educated, helped win millions of euros in false disability and other lawsuits for her employer, a major Italian state agency. But one day last fall she quit, fed up with how surreal and ultimately sad it is to be young in Italy today.A fascinating article, particularly the implications of top heavy compensation/benefit costs for older, long term workers. We see similar things in the States where dual compensation schemes significantly underpay new hires for a period of time.It galled her that even with her competence and fluency in five languages, it was nearly impossible to land a paying job. Working as an unpaid trainee lawyer was bad enough, she thought, but doing it at Italy's social security administration seemed too much. She not only worked for free on behalf of the nation's elderly, who have generally crowded out the young for jobs, but her efforts there did not even apply to her own pension.
"It was absurd," said Ms. Esposito, a strong-willed woman with a healthy sense of outrage.
The outrage of the young has erupted, sometimes violently, on the streets of Greece and Italy in recent weeks, as students and more radical anarchists protest not only specific austerity measures in flattened economies but a rising reality in Southern Europe: People like Ms. Esposito feel increasingly shut out of their own futures. Experts warn of volatility in state finances and the broader society as the most highly educated generation in the history of the Mediterranean hits one of its worst job markets.
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Complete Report: 1.5MB PDF FileValue added is the use of statistical technique to identify the effects of schooling on measured student performance. The value added model uses what data are available about students--past test scores and student demographics in particular--to control for prior student knowledge, home and community environment, and other relevant factors to better measure the effects of schools on student achievement. In practice, value added focuses on student improvement on an assessment from one year to the next.
This report presents value-added results for Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) for the two-year period between November 2007 to November 2009, measuring student improvement on the November test administrations of the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE) in grades three through eight. Also presented are results for the two-year period between November 2005 to November 2007, as well as the two-year period between November 2006 to November 2008. This allows for some context from the past, presenting value added over time as a two-year moving average.
Changes to the Value Added Model
Some of the details of the value-added system have changed in 2010. The two most substantial changes are the the inclusion of differential-effects value-added results and the addition to the set of control variables of full-academic-year (FAY) attendance.
Differential Effects
In additional to overall school- and grade-level value-added measures, this year's value-added results also include value-added measures for student subgroups within schools. The subgroups included in this year's value-added results are students with disabilities, English language learners, black students, Hispanic students, and students who receive free or reduced-price lunches. The results measure the growth of students in these subgroups at a school. For example, if a school has a value added of +5 for students with disabilities, then students with disabilities at this school gained 5 more points on the WKCE relative to observationally similar students across MMSD.
The subgroup results are designed to measure differences across schools in the performance of students in that subgroup relative to the overall performance of students in that subgroup across MMSD. Any overall, district-wide effect of (for example) disability is controlled for in the value-added model and is not included in the subgroup results. The subgroup results reflect relative differences across schools in the growth of students in that subgroup.Much more on "Value Added Assessment", here.
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Jim Wilkinson took it personally when Juan Perez murdered two men.Certainly he had sympathy for the victims, Joseph Rivera and Michael Ralston. But he didn't know them.
The issue was Perez. Wilkinson felt he barely knew him - and that was the problem. Perez had been one of Wilkinson's students the previous year when Perez was 15 and a freshman at Marquette University High School.
Almost everybody at Marquette High barely knew Perez. He never asked for help. He stayed to himself. He got mediocre grades, but he wasn't failing. And he left the school after that freshman year. Instead, he got involved deeply with a gang.
A tense, angry confrontation between members of two gangs in a restaurant on Feb. 13, 1993. A slap. Insults. A couple guns. And, in short order, the teenager was receiving a 60-year sentence.
Almost 18 years later, both Perez and Wilkinson feel they have changed for the better.
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Paul French and Matthew Crabbe:
An analysis of the growing problem of obesity in China and its relationship to the nation's changing diet, lifestyle trends and healthcare system.'When Deng Xiaoping said 'To get rich is glorious', he probably didn't realize that getting wealthy would make many Chinese fat... In an informative and entertaining style, French and Crabbe reveal the dark side of China's growing middle-class: a fast increase in obesity-related illnesses such as diabetes. A great read on an important topic.' Andy Rothman, China economist, CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, Shanghai
'In this remarkably well researched and thought-provoking book, French and Crabbe expose a darker side of globalisation in China... Western multinationalists have submerged the Chinese consumer in a sea of chocolate and ice cream. The consequences for public health are incalculable.' --Tim Clissold, China investment specialist and author of 'Mr China'
'While some people around the world agonize about the rapid spread of China's global influence, others within China are more worried about the spread of the country's waistlines - or at least they should be, according to this fascinating and exhaustively researched study by Paul French and Matthew Crabbe. By turns colourful, witty and alarming, this book provides fascinating insights into China's fast-changing society.' --Duncan Hewitt, Shanghai correspondent for 'Newsweek' and author of 'Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China'
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It turns out that fooling the gatekeepers of the nation's most selective university wasn't as hard as it looks.Adam Butler Wheeler, portrayed upon his arrest for fraud as a con artist whose brilliant forgeries landed him a coveted spot at Harvard, won over the admissions committee with an application rife with inconsistencies and an inscrutable personal essay, despite fake faculty recommendations that repeatedly praised his lucid writing.
A close examination of Wheeler's application materials, obtained by the Globe, reveals neither a meticulous feat of deceit nor a particularly elaborate charade. At times, he was just plain careless.
A gushing letter of recommendation, purportedly from the director of college counseling at Phillips Academy, said Wheeler enrolled in the prestigious Andover prep school as a junior. The accompanying transcript, though, indicated he attended for four years.
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Made any New Year's resolutions yet? Here's an idea: Focus on the state of your relationships instead of the state of your abs.Increasingly, experts have been telling us how important social bonds are to well-being, affecting everything from how our brains process information to how our bodies respond to stress. People with strong connections to others may live longer. The quality of our relationships is the single biggest predictor of our happiness.
With personal bonds this important, it would seem prudent to put a little work into improving them, especially if they are struggling or even just a little lackluster. And it might not hurt to forge some new ones, too.
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There's a big difference between thinking the U.S. News & World Report college rankings are of dubious value -- and actually refusing to try to use them to an institution's advantage.That's the conclusion of the second of a series of surveys released by the National Association for College Admission Counseling. A special NACAC committee has been conducting the series as part of an effort to study the impact of the U.S. News rankings. More survey results and a final report are expected from the panel next year.
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An athletic and academic standout in Lee County said a lunchbox mix-up has cut short her senior year of high school and might hurt her college opportunities.Ashley Smithwick, 17, of Sanford, was suspended from Southern Lee High School in October after school personnel found a small paring knife in her lunchbox.
Smithwick said personnel found the knife while searching the belongings of several students, possibly looking for drugs.
"She got pulled into it. She doesn't have to be a bad person to be searched," Smithwick's father, Joe Smithwick, said.
The lunchbox really belonged to Joe Smithwick, who packs a paring knife to slice his apple. He and his daughter have matching lunchboxes.
"It's just an honest mistake. That was supposed to be my lunch because it was a whole apple," he said.
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A 17-year-old honor student says she has been kicked off campus for the rest of the school year, because of a mix-up with her lunch box.In October, senior Ashley Smithwick says she got in trouble at school for the first time in her life after she mistakenly took her father's lunch container -- that's identical to hers -- to Southern Lee High School.
Her dad's container had a three-inch paring knife inside.
"And I had just grabbed my dad's lunch box," Smithwick said. "I didn't mean to. I really didn't. I just grabbed it and went out the door."
School leaders say during that day a faculty member discovered a student with marijuana on campus and Smithwick's paring knife was found during a random search.
According to a written statement received by ABC11 from Lee County Schools Superintendent Jeff Moss on Wednesday, the knife was found in Smithwick's purse, not her lunchbox.
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The photos of triplets born into a billionaire family that were splashed across the front pages of local papers in October made for a great story.Their proud grandfather, Lee Shau-kee, the 82-year-old chairman of property developer Henderson Land Development Ltd. and one of the richest men in Asia, held up the three baby boys swathed in blue. Next to him stood the father, Peter Lee, the bachelor vice chairman and heir apparent to the Henderson empire.
There was only one thing missing: their mother.
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For those wanting a less colloquial explanation, the Big Society is an attempt to transform the relationship between the state and its citizens. Using the weapons of devolution and transparency, it seeks to empower individuals, improve public services that fail the most disadvantaged and reconnect the civic institutions that lie between the people and the state.So why is the Big Society such a radical idea? As one of its leading proponents in government admits, it is a massive social experiment - stripping power from the state in the expectation that individuals, communities and enterprises will pick up the reins. "As in most such experiments, it is based upon instincts and understanding rather than empirical data," he says. "It will be two to three years before we begin to see if it is playing itself out properly. But the direction of change will be remorseless and I'm confident it will transform Britain."
This tussle between the responsibilities of state and citizens is at the centre of political struggles across the west, from France's battles over pensions to the backlash against Washington in the US. Unsurprisingly, the Big Society ideas - far removed from the rampant individualism of the Tea Party - are being watched with growing interest by moderate Republicans.
In Britain, they fit comfortably with a nation fed up with over-bearing statism and corporate irresponsibility. The latest British Social Attitudes survey revealed growing distrust of both state and big business, combined with a desire for smaller, more local institutions.
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A new study finds that delayed marriage and childbearing are leading to increased stress for American men and women in balancing work and family obligations.Noting that the median age for first marriage is 28 for men and 26 for women, the study, "Family Change and Time Allocation in American Families," says, "Delayed marriage and childbearing heighten the likelihood that the greatest child rearing demands come at the same time that job and career demands are great - particularly among the well-educated."
The study adds, "Delayed childbearing also increases the likelihood that one's parents may begin to suffer ill health and need assistance before one's children are fully launched." In other words, many men and women feel hugely stretched and stressed trying to help out their not fully independent 20-something children at the same time the health of their octogenarian parents is failing.
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Gage Martindale, who is 8 years old, has been taking a blood-pressure drug since he was a toddler. "I want to be healthy, and I don't want things in my heart to go wrong," he says.And, of course, his mom is always there to check Gage's blood pressure regularly with a home monitor, and to make sure the second-grader doesn't skip a dose of his once-a-day enalapril.
These days, the medicine cabinet is truly a family affair. More than a quarter of U.S. kids and teens are taking a medication on a chronic basis, according to Medco Health Solutions Inc., the biggest U.S. pharmacy-benefit manager with around 65 million members. Nearly 7% are on two or more such drugs, based on the company's database figures for 2009.
Doctors and parents warn that prescribing medications to children can be problematic. There is limited research available about many drugs' effects in kids. And health-care providers and families need to be vigilant to assess the medicines' impact, both intended and not. Although the effects of some medications, like cholesterol-lowering statins, have been extensively researched in adults, the consequences of using such drugs for the bulk of a patient's lifespan are little understood.
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Eighteen-year-old Monika Lutz had dreams of a career helping solve economic and social problems in poor nations. So after high school, she took a year off before college to work with a company, suggested by family friends, that is trying to bring solar power to a remote village in India.A few weeks of living in a mud hut changed her mind. Exhausted by the obstacles, she says, she told herself, "I'm not ready. I can't dedicate my life to this yet."
When Ms. Lutz starts college in the fall, she plans to explore other careers. "If I hadn't gone on a gap year, I might have spent four years and $200,000 on tuition to end up in that same country and find out the same thing," says Ms. Lutz, of Boulder, Colo.
College-admission letters are starting to roll in, but a growing number of students will decide instead to take a year off to try out potential careers or broaden their horizons. Gap-year activities range from doing volunteer work or taking classes, to working for pay, traveling or tackling outdoor adventures.
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America spends far more on education than countries like Germany, Japan, Australia, Ireland, and Italy, both as a percentage of its economy, and in absolute terms. Yet despite this lavish government support for education, college tuition in the U.S. is skyrocketing, reaching levels of $50,000 or more a year at some colleges, and colleges are effectively rewarded for increasing tuition by mushrooming federal financial-aid spending. Americans can't read or do math as well as the Japanese, even though America spends way more (half again more) on education than Japan does, as a percentage of income, according to the CIA World Fact Book.In light of this, it is easy to see why some education experts like Neal McCluskey are floating the idea of "draconian education cuts" to shake up a rotten educational establishment.
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When a student dies, the bill for his student loans often lives on - to the painful surprise and dismay of his co-signers. New Senate legislation seeks to change that, by requiring lenders to make clear the obligations of co-signers in the event of death.Introduced yesterday, the "Christopher Bryski Student Loan Protection Act," sponsored by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D., N.J.), is the culmination of a multi-year battle fought by the Bryski family, profiled by the Journal in August. In July 2006, Christopher Bryski died at the age of 25, after an accident left him with a brain injury that put him in a persistent vegetative state for two years. Today, his parents continue to make monthly payments on the $44,500 in private student loans that Mr. Bryski took out to attend Rutgers University. The legislation introduced yesterday would require lenders to provide students and parents with more information about what happens to loans in the event of death.
A first round of student loan and financial reform legislation already passed this year but did not address what happens to private student loans in the event of a student death. Federal student loans can generally be discharged if a student dies or becomes permanently disabled. But private student lenders, such as Sallie Mae, Citibank and Wells Fargo, are not required to discharge loans in the event of death or disability, leaving co-signers, typically parents, on the hook for the balance. Two years ago, Christopher's brother, Ryan Bryski, began talking to lawmakers about a bill. It's an amendment to the Truth in Lending Act and the Higher Education Act of 1965.
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Germany's main school teaching body has called for classroom weigh-ins and the enforced removal of ultra-overweight pupils to combat rising obesity in society.Josef Kraus, the DL teaching federation president, said: "When parents don't make sure their children eat healthily and get enough exercise, then it can be the beginning of child abuse in extreme cases." He said school doctors should take a more active role and conduct regular consultations and weight measurements of students. The should also report problem cases to authorities.
"When parental notices about overweight children are thrown to the wind, then youth services must be contacted and as a last resort there should be cuts to their parental benefits or welfare," Mr Kraus said.
His remarks follow the release of official figures which showed that 51 per cent of Germans are considered overweight. Sixty per cent of men and 43 per cent of women have a Body Mass Index (BMI) - a measure calculated by body weight and height - of more than 25, up from 56 per cent and 40 per cent respectively in 1999.
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Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard Medical School and colleagues at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center conducted a clinical trial and found a placebo pill without any active ingredient was better than no treatment at helping patients with irritable bowel syndrome.The therapeutic effect observed in the IBS patients who received the placebo treatment was not the common placebo effect, which is something observed in patients who do not know they are taking a dummy pill in the first place.
In this study, the researchers actually told those on the placebo treatment that they were using a placebo pill, but not a medicine.
The study published on December 22 in PLoS ONE suggests that any placebo treatment (which at least won't cause adverse or side effect) can be better than no treatment.
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School officials across the country are revisiting "zero-tolerance" disciplinary policies under which children are sometimes arrested for profanity, talking back to teachers or adolescent behavior that once would have been resolved in meetings with parents. The reappraisals are all to the good given that those who get suspended or arrested are more likely to drop out and become entangled in the criminal justice system permanently.The New York City Council clearly had this link in mind when it passed a new law earlier this week that will bring long overdue transparency to the school disciplinary process. Under the Student Safety Act, which takes effect in 90 days, the New York Police Department's school security division will be required to provide clear and comprehensive data that show how many students are arrested or issued summonses at school and why. School officials will also have to provide similarly detailed information on suspensions.
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John Medina, a developmental molecular biologist, has a lifelong fascination with how the mind reacts to and organizes information. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School--a provocative book that takes on the way our schools and work environments are designed. His latest book is a must-read for parents and early-childhood educators: Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child From Zero to Five You might ask, "What does this topic have to do with small business? Well, if you're having issues with your kids, you're not going to be on top of your game at the office.
Q: What's the gist of what one should do to foster emotionally health and intellectually successful kids?
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There was something strange in The Washington Post a week ago. A chart on page A16, using data provided by the D.C. public school system, showed that in late summer and fall 2009, Spingarn High School had by far the lowest number of assaults, thefts, threats and other crimes. There were just six incidents in four months compared with an average of 31 in the other eight high schools assessed.At that time, teachers at this allegedly safest of all regular D.C. high schools were reporting a rash of crimes and classroom intrusions. The situation became so intolerable that by January they had persuaded D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee to replace the Spingarn principal.
How could the incidents being reported by security guards under school district rules be so different from what people at the school were experiencing? Why did Rhee ignore the data in changing the school's leadership and yet her successor, Kaya Henderson, used data from similar security incident reports last week to replace the principal at Dunbar High?
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By outfitting students and teachers with wireless sensors, researchers simulated how the flu might spread through a typical American high school and found more than three-quarters of a million opportunities for infection daily.Over the course of a single school day, students, teachers and staff came into close proximity of one another 762,868 times -- each a potential occasion to spread illness.
The flu, like the common cold and whooping cough, spreads through tiny droplets that contain the virus, said lead study author Marcel Salathe, an assistant professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University.
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It's a holiday ritual as predictable as Santa showing up at your local mall: overheated rhetoric about the "War on Christmas." A lowlight this year was a feature on The O'Reilly Factor about a letter from the Tennessee chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union urging school districts to make holiday celebrations inclusive. Through O'Reilly's prism, the letter -- quoted selectively -- was an attempt to squelch Christmas. In reality, the letter just asked school districts to avoid celebrations focusing exclusively on a single religion. It was more common sense than state-coerced atheism.Unfortunately, once you cut through the blather on cable news, there is a real, if much less discussed, problem in that public schools are skittish about teaching much about religion. Although there is little hard data, the consensus among those who study the issue is that to the extent world religions are taught, they are treated superficially, usually with the help of just a few textbook pages that have been heavily sanitized to avoid even the hint of controversy. And that's not good news if you believe a working knowledge of the world's religions and their history is an important aspect of a well-rounded education.
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This is a season that begins with the story of a couple that wanted a family. Mary and Joseph had some high-profile intervention, of course. But when modern couples who want children find themselves frustrated, their first reaction these days is often to get to a fertility clinic.Many couples pay tens of thousands of dollars for rounds of medical wizardry instead of adopting children who are already among us, crying for our love and support. I think some of the people who choose assisted fertility may be missing out on a miracle.
I know that the impulse to bear children is deep. My wife and I tried, in the time honored way, for many years, and then with the assistance and injections of fertility experts. But at some point, the costs began to match those of an adoption and prompted us to ask, "Why are we doing this? There are already so many millions of children out there."
Adoption is as old as Abraham-and-Sarah-style begetting. To sit at a Seder dinner holding daughters in your lap (our two girls were left along roadsides in China) and hear the story of a baby boy who was floated into the bulrushes along the Nile, reminds you that the instinct to care for castaway children is ancient and inborn. When disease, slaughter or smiting felled or scattered families, friends and even enemies took in and loved the children left behind.
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Language analysts, sifting through two centuries of words in the millions of books in Google Inc.'s growing digital library, found a new way to track the arc of fame, the effect of censorship, the spread of inventions and the explosive growth of new terms in the English-speaking world.In research reported Thursday in the journal Science, the scientists at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Google and the Encyclopedia Britannica unveiled a database of two billion words and phrases drawn from 5.2 million books in Google's digital library published during the past 200 years. With this tool, researchers can measure trends through the language authors used and the names of people they mentioned.
It's the first time scholars have used Google's controversial trove of digital books for academic research, and the result was opened to the public online Thursday.
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When I think of the holidays, I envision seeing the latest films with my wife, gorging on sweets and contemplating the wonder of the schlocky ceramic village I have set up on top of the piano, the result of many visits to Christmas shops.You'll notice there aren't any children in this scenario. Nobody steals my chocolates or smashes the Sweet Shop from the Snow Village series. That is because only adults live in my house. Grandson No. 2 arrives next month, but he and his brother are stuck in L.A. because their very pregnant mother can't fly.
Local Living editor Liz Seymour, with two children at home, realized I was out of touch with her kind of winter vacation, so she more or less ordered me to gather expert advice on what parents can do during those daunting two weeks without school. Educators have fabulous ideas that I can put to use with my grandsons before long.
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The Census is in. There are now 308.74 million Americans, an increase of 27 million, or 9.7%, since 2000. Americans are still multiplying, one of the best indicators that the country's prospects remain strong.About 13 million of that increase were new immigrants. These newcomers brought energy, talent, entrepreneurial skills and a work ethic. Their continued arrival in such large numbers validates that the rest of the world continues to view the U.S. as a land of freedom and opportunity.
The Census figures also confirm that America is a nation in constant motion, with tens of millions hopping across state lines and changing residence since 2000. And more of them are moving into conservative, market-friendly red states than into progressive, public-sector heavy blue states.
In order the 10 states with the greatest population gains were Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Colorado and South Carolina. Their average population gain was 21%. In the fast-growing states, the average income tax rate is 4% versus 6.9% in the slowest growing states.
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In 1991, Charlotte Johnson dropped a bomb on her parents. She accused her father, Charles Johnson, of sexually abusing her. Two years later she accused her mother, Karen Johnson, of being complicit in the sexual abuse and of being physically abusive to her. The abuse, she believes to this day, happened when she was a young child.The painful memories, buried deep in Johnson's subconscious, surfaced in adulthood.
Charles and Karen Johnson, of St. Louis, say the abuse never happened and that mental health treatment providers encouraged and fostered false memories of abuse.
In 1996 the Johnsons sued Rogers Memorial Hospital, where their daughter was admitted for treatment. They also sued Heartland Counseling Services in Madison, Madison therapist Kay Phillips, Oconomowoc therapists Jeff Hollowell and Tim Reisenauer, and the defendants' insurers. The lawsuit has crept through the legal system for more than 14 years, including two trips to the state Supreme Court.
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My son Channing, the grinning eight year-old to the left, has too much homework. He attends one of the best schools in the state and they send him home every night with what the teachers say is one hour of homework but it looks like two hours to me. And since Channing would really rather be fishing or terrorizing his little brothers those two hours regularly turn into three hours or more. This is not only too much homework, it hurts rather than helps. It seems indicative of an educational system that's out of control.Several years ago I gave a speech about technology to the Texas Library Association's big annual meeting. After the speech I was talking with a pair of elementary school librarians. Channing was back then just going off to pre-school so homework was the last thing on my mind but they brought it up. "The best thing you can do for your kids," they said, "is to not allow them to do homework until the third grade."
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The Dec 8 event involving 200 females from six Jeddah private high schools broke ministry rules against girls' sports in schools, a ministry official said."We don't have any regulations that say that it's OK for girls' schools to hold sports classes or training," said Ahmed Al-Zahrani, director of girls' education in Jeddah.
"This tournament was held by these schools, something that has now led us to know about their illegal activities," he said.
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When art teacher Kandy Dea recently assigned fourth-graders in her Walnut, Iowa, classroom to create a board game to play with a friend, she was shocked by one little boy's response: He froze.While his classmates let their imaginations run wild making up colorful characters and fantasy worlds, the little boy said repeatedly, "I can't think of anything," Ms. Dea says. Although she reassured him that nothing he did would be judged "wrong," he tried to copy another student's game, then asked if he could make a work sheet instead. She finally gave him permission to make flash cards with right-and-wrong answers.
Americans' scores on a commonly used creativity test fell steadily from 1990 to 2008, especially in the kindergarten through sixth-grade age group, says Kyung Hee Kim, an assistant professor of educational psychology at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. The finding is based on a study of 300,000 Americans' scores from 1966 to 2008 on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, a standardized test that's considered a benchmark for creative thinking. (Dr. Kim's results are currently undergoing peer review to determine whether they will be published in a scholarly journal.)
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Rushing a student to a psychiatric emergency room is never routine, but when Stony Brook University logged three trips in three days, it did not surprise Jenny Hwang, the director of counseling.It was deep into the fall semester, a time of mounting stress with finals looming and the holiday break not far off, an anxiety all its own.
On a Thursday afternoon, a freshman who had been scraping bottom academically posted thoughts about suicide on Facebook. If I were gone, he wrote, would anybody notice? An alarmed student told staff members in the dorm, who called Dr. Hwang after hours, who contacted the campus police. Officers escorted the student to the county psychiatric hospital.
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It looks like Big Brother wants to put an end to child care fraud in Wisconsin.The state has approved a $1 million pilot program to install fingerprint scanners in child care centers to combat fraud in the Wisconsin Shares subsidy program. It's the kind of cutting-edge technology already in use at airports and some hospitals for security purposes.
Although many Americans are concerned about technology's encroaching threats to their privacy, that doesn't seem to apply when it comes to black children in Milwaukee.
The Wisconsin Shares program was ripped off for millions of dollars by some corrupt child care providers who used state funds meant for poor children and families to line their own pockets.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Pulitzer Prize-winning series "Cashing in on Kids" pulled the covers off much of the abuse, including shoddy oversight by state bureaucrats that allowed the scandal to happen.
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Mike Johnson & Kathleen Gallagher:
Desperate for clues to a 4-year-old's gut-destroying disease, doctors wonder whether a pioneering DNA technique could help.On a Saturday morning in June, when his children are at piano lessons and the Whitefish Bay house is quiet, pediatrician Alan Mayer composes the e-mail he hopes will persuade a colleague to try a costly new technology. He has been shaping the argument in his mind - the chance to take the first steps into the future of medicine and maybe save the life of a very sick little boy.
"Dear Howard - I hope you are well," he writes, addressing Howard Jacob, director of the Medical College of Wisconsin's Human and Molecular Genetics Center. "I'm writing to get your thoughts on a patient of mine . . . "
Nicholas Volker is a short, blue-eyed4-year-old who loves Batman and squirt gun fights and steak - on the rare occasions when he's not restricted to a feeding tube.
Food has become his dream - and his curse. Severely underweight, he arrived at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin in 2007 with the bony arms and distended belly of a famine victim. Yet when he ate, unusual holes would open between his intestine and skin, causing feces to leak into a large wound in his abdomen.
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Students from families with divorced or remarried parents pay twice the share of their college education as compared to their peers whose parents remain married to each other, according to recent research published online by the Journal of Family Issues."Divorced or separated parents contributed significantly less than married parents -- in absolute dollars, as a proportion of their income, and as a proportion of their children's financial need," Ruth N. López Turley, associate professor of sociology at Rice University, and Matthew Desmond, a junior fellow at Harvard University, say in their article, "Contributions to College Costs by Married, Divorced, and Remarried Parents."
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This fall, work demands have put a serious crimp in my school meeting schedule -- and (to be honest) in my willingness to bang my head against the wall known as "public engagement" at Seattle Public Schools. But last Monday I decided it was time to get back into the ring -- or at least into the loop -- so after dinner (and a prophylactic rum cocktail) I headed down to South Lake High School to hear what Southeast Director Michael Tolley had to say about the District's recently released School Reports.These reports represent the District's effort to track each school's progress on a variety of measures, from test scores to student absences to the teachers' feelings about their school's leadership. The schools have had annual reports before -- they're available online going back to 1998 -- but these new ones go into considerably more detail. They also include a one-page Improvement Plan for each school -- goals to raise achievement, or attendance, or whatever -- and a description of what the school is doing in order to reach those goals: instructional coaches, individual tutoring, more collaborative staff time, and so on. And every school has now been ranked on a five-point scale based on overall student performance and improvement on standardized tests, and the achievement gap between poor kids (those who qualify for free and reduced-price lunches) and everyone else.
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With the help of a small army of researchers and associates (most importantly, Chris Matgouranis, Jonathan Robe, and Chris Denhart) and starting with help from Douglas Himes of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) has unearthed what I think is the single most scandalous statistic in higher education. It reveals many current problems and ones that will grow enormously as policymakers mindlessly push enrollment expansion amidst what must become greater public-sector resource limits.Here it is: approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled--occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less. Only a minority of the increment in our nation's stock of college graduates is filling jobs historically considered as requiring a bachelor's degree or more. (We are working to integrate some earlier Edwin Rubenstein data on this topic to give us a more complete picture of this trend).
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An Eden Prairie school board vote on attendance zones may have broad impact on desegregation and neighborhood schools.When Eden Prairie's seven school board members convene Tuesday night, the controversial decision they are set to make about redrawing school boundary lines will be of keen interest throughout the metro area.
Will they back a plan that will move 1,100 elementary students next fall to new schools, largely to reduce segregation in schools? Or will they scale back in response to a huge parental outcry and make fewer changes or nix the plan altogether?
Bloomington and other metro-area suburban school districts, which also face increasingly diverse student demographics, are watching Eden Prairie's move. Bloomington's school board chair attended Eden Prairie meetings to watch how feedback was handled.
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We've been hearing a lot about high school dropouts because of a flurry of studies and reports that offer dire warnings about the drag dropouts can be on the economy and the nation's future. But if you want to understand why a million kids drop out of school every year, all you have to do is ask them -- which is what NPR's Claudio Sanchez did as part of a recent reporting assignment to Central Falls Rhode Island.
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Thought I'd spend a few minutes looking at the website of my alma mater, Stephen F. Austin State University. A lot has changed in the past 20 years!My crappy (that is being kind) old dorm was torn down a few years ago. This replaced it.
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When she gave birth to her daughter last July, Cassie Friesen, of Broomfield, Colo., imagined she was inside a bubble and repeated the word "peace" with each contraction.The 25-year-old former nanny learned these relaxation and visualization techniques in a hypnotherapy course she took in hopes of minimizing the pain of childbirth. "It's so corny-sounding," she says, and yet it worked. She describes her daughter Aster's July 7 arrival as "fun--even enjoyable," words not many other mothers use when describing the experience.
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A company called Pearson publishes the Scott Foresman textbook used in my third-grader’s class, “Communities.”
I posted about this textbook recently, and I mentioned research on the authors of this book. Here are the results of this research:
Valerie Ooka Pang has written a book about the unmet needs of Asian Pacific American children. She teach courses in multicultural education, social studies methods, curriculum & instruction, and social foundations. She is interested in culturally meaningful teaching.
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Ed Kupka is taking a strong stand. As principal of Milwaukee's Bradley Tech High School, he wants to encourage the good ones, do something about the bad ones and make the school more successful.I'm not talking about students, although that's been a hot subject. A recent gang fight at the school drew a massive police response, negative attention from Ald. Robert Donovan and new steps aimed at removing troublemakers from the school.
I'm talking about teachers. Kupka has taken a strong stand on removing teachers who he says are not succeeding in the classroom, so they can be replaced with teachers who can do better.
"I'm addicted to getting the best person in front of the students," he said. "It's the only way to get achievement up."
In an interview shortly before the fight, Kupka said that addressing ineffective performers on the staff was taking up much of his time. He thinks the school is making progress on that score, but setbacks last spring and summer were so serious that he considered quitting.
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As I wrote here last week, newly compiled data shows that a great many college graduates have been settling into jobs that do not require higher education. The data, prepared and released by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP), show that a majority of the increased number of college grads since 1992---some 60 percent-- are "underemployed" or "overqualified" for the jobs they hold. Thus we have one-third of a million waiters and waitresses with college degrees. Some 17 percent of the nation's bellhops ands porters are college graduates. A new CCAP study From Wall Street to Wal-Mart: Why College Graduates Are Not Getting Good Jobs, released today along with this essay, carries even worse news: the proportion of college-educated Americans in lower-skilled jobs has more than tripled since the 1960s, going from 11 percent in 1967 to 34 percent today.Why are more and more college graduates not entering the class of professional, technical and managerial workers that has been considered the main avenue of employment? Anyone who has read Charles Murray's great book Real Education (New York: Crown Forum, 2008) has good insights into why this problem has arisen. Truly, Murray argues, only a modest proportion of the population has the cognitive skills (not to mention work discipline, drive, maturity, integrity, etc.) to master truly higher education, an education that goes well beyond the secondary schooling experience in terms of rigor of presentation. Reading and comprehending 200- to 400-year-old literature is useful for advanced leadership -but difficult. Educated persons should read and understand Locke's "On Human Understanding" or Shakespeare's King Lear -they are insightful in many ways, but the typical person of average intelligence typically lacks both the motivation and ability to do so. Mastering complex forms of mathematics is hard -but necessary to function in some areas of science and engineering.
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Melissa Hoistion was enjoying dinner with her husband and their three children at a restaurant in Freehold, N.J., recently--until the waiter disappeared for 20 minutes.Her husband, Tim, began muttering. Ms. Hoistion braced herself. "Uh-oh, here it comes," she remembers thinking.
"EXCUSE ME!" he screamed across the room to another waiter, then stormed off to complain to the manager. When the original server finally returned to the table, her husband yelled, "Where the hell have you been for the last 45 minutes?" and continued berating him until the man walked away.
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Last week it was announced that the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders removed 50% of the personality disorders currently on its list. However none of the excluded disorders have gotten as much attention as the removal of "narcissistic personality disorder," or NPD.The uproar is unsurprising. Narcissism is one of the most obvious examples of a personality disorder. We see it everywhere in our culture. Narcissism can explain part of the motivation for participating in reality TV show antics, and Hollywood has always seemed a refuge for beautiful people who need to be the center of attention. We know that not much will change in Hollywood with this announcement. But will it change any other parts of our culture?
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Over the last year, Save the Children emerged as a leader in the push to tax sweetened soft drinks as a way to combat childhood obesity. The nonprofit group supported soda tax campaigns in Mississippi, New Mexico, Washington State, Philadelphia and the District of Columbia.At the same time, executives at Save the Children were seeking a major grant from Coca-Cola to help finance the health and education programs that the charity conducts here and abroad, including its work on childhood obesity.
The talks with Coke are still going on. But the soda tax work has been stopped. In October, Save the Children surprised activists around the country with an e-mail message announcing that it would no longer support efforts to tax soft drinks.
In interviews this month, Carolyn Miles, chief operating officer of Save the Children, said there was no connection between the group's about-face on soda taxes and the discussions with Coke. A $5 million grant from PepsiCo also had no influence on the decision, she said. Both companies fiercely oppose soda taxes.
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A few weeks ago at a conference, I listened to a distinguished political philosopher tell those in attendance that he would not be speaking before them had he not been the beneficiary, as a working-class youth in England, of a government policy to provide a free university education to the children of British citizens. He walked into the university with little knowledge of the great texts that inform modern democracy and he walked out an expert in those very same texts.It goes without saying that he did not know what he was doing at the outset; he did not, that is, think to himself, I would like to be come a scholar of Locke, Hobbes and Mill. But that's what he became, not by choice (at least in the beginning) but by opportunity.
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When art teacher Kandy Dea recently assigned fourth-graders in her Walnut, Iowa, classroom to create a board game to play with a friend, she was shocked by one little boy's response: He froze.While his classmates let their imaginations run wild making up colorful characters and fantasy worlds, the little boy said repeatedly, "I can't think of anything," Ms. Dea says. Although she reassured him that nothing he did would be judged "wrong," he tried to copy another student's game, then asked if he could make a work sheet instead. She finally gave him permission to make flash cards with right-and-wrong answers.
Americans' scores on a commonly used creativity test fell steadily from 1990 to 2008, especially in the kindergarten through sixth-grade age group, says Kyung Hee Kim, an assistant professor of educational psychology at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. The finding is based on a study of 300,000 Americans' scores from 1966 to 2008 on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, a standardized test that's considered a benchmark for creative thinking. (Dr. Kim's results are currently undergoing peer review to determine whether they will be published in a scholarly journal.)
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In past years the Madison School District might have expelled more than a dozen students in the first quarter.Watch a Madison School Board discussion of the Phoenix program, here (begins about 10 minutes into the video).This year the number of expulsions in the first quarter -- zero.
The sharp reduction is the result of the district's new Phoenix program, an alternative to expulsion that district officials hope will allow students to focus on academics and improved behavior, rather than spend as long as a year-and-a-half falling behind their peers while disconnected from school services.
As of last week, 17 students who have committed expellable offenses were enrolled in the program. Rather than face an expulsion hearing, each has been given a second chance to continue learning in a classroom away from their peers. The district has expelled between 33 and 64 students a year in the last decade.
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Arguing that Chicago Public Schools are "broken'' and that parents deserve a "choice,'' mayoral challenger James Meeks said Wednesday he would offer $4,500-a-year vouchers to 50,000 low-and-middle-income Chicago families to use toward private school tuition.If he is elected mayor, Meeks said he would also offer full-day kindergarten and character education in all Chicago Public Schools and double the time spent on reading and math in first through third grades. Full-day kindergarten would be financed in part by cutting bonus pay for teachers with master's degrees.
The 90 minutes of daily reading time -- up from 45 minutes currently -- is designed to make certain that students read at a third-grade level by the time they finish third-grade.
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Add this to Congress's year-end to-do list: Dealing with a potential $5.7 billion gap in grants for low-income students.Federal Pell grants are a form of need-based aid typically given to low-income students. As part of student loan legislation passed in March, the amount of money that students can receive from a Pell grant maxes out at $5,550 for the 2010-2011 school year, and was scheduled to be the same amount for 2011-2012.
There's usually little political wrangling around funding for the Pell grant, but this year, lawmakers underestimated the surge in students going to college -- and their financial need -- helping to create the gap. Congress would need to authorize the additional billions to fully fund the program for all students who qualify for the aid. They've done so in the past, but the gap hasn't ever been this large and comes in the midst of a tense political climate.
"When need-based aid like Pell grants doesn't increase," says Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org, "the gap between low income students and everyone else increases faster. It has a big impact."
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Superintendent Daniel Nerad School Board President Maya Cole School Board Members Ed Hughes, James Howard, Lucy Matthiak,Clusty Search: Chris Ahmuty.
Beth Moss, Marjorie Passman & Arlene Silveira, and
Student Representative Wyeth Jackson
Madison Metropolitan School District
545 W Dayton St
Madison WI 53703-1967RE: Opposition to Single Sex Charter School
Dear Superintendent Nerad, President Cole, and School Board Members:
We are writing on behalf of the ACLU of Wisconsin to oppose the proposal for an all-male charter school in Madison. Single sex education is inadvisable as a policy matter, and it also raises significant legal concerns.
The performance problems for children of color in Madison public schools cross gender lines: it is not only African-American and Latino boys who are being failed by the system. Many students of color and low income students - girls as well as boys - are losing out. Further, there is no proof that separating girls from boys results in better-educated children. What's more, perpetuating gender stereotypes can do nothing more than short-change our children, limiting options for boys and girls alike. For these reasons, the ACLU of Wisconsin opposes the effort to open a single-sex, publicly-funded charter school in Madison.
To be clear: the ACLU does not oppose the idea of providing a public charter school with a rigorous academic program and supplemental resources as an alternative to existing school programs in the Madison district. And we strongly encourage efforts to ensure that programming is available to children in underserved communities. Were this an effort to provide an International Baccalaureate program to both boys and girls in Madison - such as the highly- rated, coeducational Rufus King High School in Milwaukee, whose students are predominantly low-income children of color - we would likely be applauding it.
Much more on the proposed IB Charter School Madison Preparatory Academy, here.
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A lot of attention is being given to the idea of school "turnarounds" lately - the concept of taking a poorly performing school and drastically changing the staff, curricula, or other elements in an effort to make it much better.But a study out Tuesday underlines just how hard it is to actually turn around a failing school.
The study, "Are Bad Schools Immortal?," examined more than 2,000 of the worst-performing district and charter schools in 10 states over five years. It found that very few of them closed, and even fewer - about 1 percent - truly "turned around."
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Three area school districts were among only 14 statewide that received the highest marks under the Colorado Department of Education's new accreditation system, which places emphasis on academic growth and preparing students for college and careers.The districts, Cheyenne Mountain School District 12, Academy School District 20 and Lewis-Palmer School District 38, were deemed "accredited with distinction."
Nine other districts in the Pikes Peak region, including and Falcon School District 49 and Woodland Park RE-2, received the second highest ranking of "accredited." Five area districts received the mid-level "accredited with improvement plan" designation: Colorado Springs School District 11, Fountain-Fort Carson School District 8, Widefield School District 3, Harrison School District 2 and Cripple Creek-Victor School District RE-1.
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Mark Hyman loves the case study; when one of his posts at Huffington Post deals with an almost magical healing he's engendered, well, chances are, there's gonna be a kid involved. This time up, it's Hyman curing autism cuz he's teh man.Let's look at his first paragraph: "Imagine being the parent of a young child who is not acting normally and being told by your doctor that your child has autism, that there is no known cause, and there is no known treatment except, perhaps, some behavioral therapy."
Fortunately, I don't have to imagine this scenario; I can and do speak from experience. The whole assessment thing for Bobby was hell on wheels from 1994 when we first began the process through 1998 when we got a thorough assessment. We were never told there were no known causes. Even in the mid 90s there were known causes and tests to run, like Fragile X, so that right there is BS on Hyman's part. We were also, despite the crap we were told, never told there was no known treatment. Speech, OT, PT and therapy were begun in 1994, even as we went through a string of inaccurate diagnoses.
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Given middle of the pack reading levels on PISA results, the National Journal asked the rediculous question, “what’s so awful about being average?” They seem to ignore that US math and science results are much worse and lag most of the developed world. As dumb as the prompt was, it got a few of us to write a response. Here’s mine.
Twenty years of prompting, investing, threatening and reforming have largely failed to dramatically improve education in American. There are pockets of excellence, but results from American schools are flatlined. While unions and school boards argue about contract minutes, the rest of the developed world passed us by in achievement, high school graduation and college completion rates.
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The chief executive of McDonald's has described critics of the company who have tried to curtail the sale of Happy Meals aimed at children as "food police" and accused them of undermining parents in making decisions for their families.In an interview with the Financial Times, Jim Skinner responded to last month's vote by the San Francisco board of supervisors to forbid restaurants from offering toys with meals unless the food complied with limits on calories, sodium, sugar and fat.
"We'll continue to sell Happy Meals," said Mr Skinner, in the face of a ban that does not become effective until December 2011. The new rule "really takes personal choice away from families who are more than capable of making their own decisions".
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If anyone has reason to overthrow the public school establishment, it's parents in the Compton Unified School District. Five of the district's 35 schools are listed among the worst 5% statewide. In July, an auditor reported that the schools were run to benefit adults more than students and that the district appeared incapable of fixing the problem. And the school board recently fired its superintendent for charging thousands of dollars of personal expenses to her district credit card.So it's no great surprise that Compton Unified became the first school district targeted for the so-called parent trigger, which allows parents to force radical change at a particular school if 51% of them sign a petition. Among their options are replacing the school's management or most of its staff, or turning it into a charter school. Parents organized by the group Parent Revolution, the leading force behind the parent trigger movement, delivered their petition to district headquarters last week, demanding that McKinley Elementary School become part of the Celerity Education Group charter organization.
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Liu Yang, a coal miner's daughter, arrived in the capital this past summer with a freshly printed diploma from Datong University, $140 in her wallet and an air of invincibility.Her first taste of reality came later the same day, as she lugged her bags through a ramshackle neighborhood, not far from the Olympic Village, where tens of thousands of other young strivers cram four to a room.
Unable to find a bed and unimpressed by the rabbit warren of slapdash buildings, Ms. Liu scowled as the smell of trash wafted up around her. "Beijing isn't like this in the movies," she said.
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One suggestion Severson offered that hasn't gained much traction in the past is to have board members represent geographic areas rather than the entire city, more like the Milwaukee School Board.Ruth Robarts, who served on the board for 10 years, said a consequence of at-large seats like those in Madison is that races are more expensive -- hers cost $20,000 -- and it becomes impossible to campaign door-to-door.
That means candidates rely on the endorsements of Madison Teachers Inc., which Robarts said has "almost overwhelming influence" on local board elections, and other groups, which then tout candidates' qualifications and get members out to vote.
"However, the big unknown in my mind is whether School Board campaigns would become much more parochial," she added, referring to district-based elections. "If so, would that lead to good trade-offs needing to happen to get things done or would it lead to political gridlock at this very local level?"
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Blaming teachers for low test scores, poor graduation rates and the other ills of American schools has been popular lately, but a new survey wags a finger closer to home.An Associated Press-Stanford University Poll on education found that 68 percent of adults believe parents deserve heavy blame for what's wrong with the U.S. education system -- more than teachers, school administrators, the government or teachers unions.
Only 35 percent of those surveyed agreed that teachers deserve a great deal or a lot of the blame. Moms were more likely than dads -- 72 percent versus 61 percent -- to say parents are at fault. Conservatives were more likely than moderates or liberals to blame parents.
Those who said parents are to blame were more likely to cite a lack of student discipline and low expectations for students as serious problems in schools. They were also more likely to see fighting and low test scores as big problems.
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No sagging pants and grungy T-shirts will be allowed at this new Houston school.Related: The Proposed IB Charter Madison Preparatory Academy.Neither will bad attitudes.
And neither will girls.
This school, approved by the Houston board of trustees Thursday, will open next fall with only male students. The campus will start with sixth- and ninth-graders, who will have to apply to attend, and will grow annually to become a full middle and high school.
The boys at this new school in Houston's Fifth Ward will have to wear blazers and ties. They will take advanced courses, learn a foreign language and- the biggest expectation -- go on to earn a college degree.
This will be the first all-boys school started directly by the Houston Independent School District, which last month announced plans to open an all-girls campus next year. The district has two other all-boys schools, but they are run by contractors and one is leaving HISD's umbrella to become a state charter school.
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The recent figures released by the state Department of Education, which show a statewide public high school dropout rate of 37 percent among African American students, is a symptom of a broader social malaise and not an accurate measure of one group's performance.Because when you hear some of the stories of children living in big city, high-crime neighborhoods, you come to understand that steering clear of troubled streets is in itself a full-time job.
I spoke with four young African American men on Thursday, all of them dropouts who returned to school. They attend Dewey Academy, the continuation high school in Oakland, where the high school dropout rate hovers around 40 percent.
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Governor Jim Doyle today announced that 18,264 students signed the Wisconsin Covenant Pledge in the fourth year of the program, bringing the total number of students who have signed the pledge and indicated that they plan to go on to college to more than 71,400 students across the state. The first class of students to sign the pledge are currently seniors in high school and preparing to make the transition to college next fall."I am encouraged that so many students have signed the Wisconsin Covenant and chosen the path to higher education that will help train them for the high-paying, technical jobs we need to compete in the global economy," Governor Doyle said. "Regardless of their family's economic background, their past academic behavior, and whether anyone in their family has a college degree, all students need to know that higher education is an option for them."
Students who participate in the Wisconsin Covenant sign a pledge affirming that they will earn a high school diploma, participate in their community, take a high school curriculum that prepares them for higher education, maintain at least a B average in high school, and apply for state and federal financial aid.
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The majority of children participating in organized team-sports don't meet the federal recommendation of one hour a day of moderate-to-vigorous exercise, according to a study released Monday.Federal-government guidelines recommend children and teens get at least 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity each day. It is estimated that fewer than half of children and only about 10% of teenagers meet that goal.
Many parents might believe if their children participate in team sports, then they must be getting enough exercise. Researchers at San Diego State and the University of California, San Diego, showed that isn't necessarily the case.
The researchers looked at sports practices involving 200 children ranging in age from 7 to 14 years old, who were participants on a soccer, baseball or softball team in San Diego County. The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, was published online Monday in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
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The only remotely classical thing about Pegasus Primary School on the Blackbird Leys estate in Oxford is the name and the school logo of a blue winged horse. The logo looks cuddlier than the Pegasus of Greek mythology, sprung from the blood of the gorgon Medusa when the hero Perseus cut off her head.This is not the Oxford of the dreaming spires; the school is in one of the largest council estates in Europe, close to the former Morris car works at Cowley, where Minis are now made. My taxi driver points out the Blackbird pub, noted for fights, and a supermarket which he claims has been raided five times in the past year.
This well-run primary school in a tough area is doing something culturally counter-cyclical: it is teaching Latin and Greek under the auspices of the Iris Project, a volunteer-run scheme which brings classics to inner-city state schools. As someone who loved classics at public school in the 1970s, when the subject seemed out of date and doomed to oblivion, I find this both incredible and thoroughly heartening.
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Madison School District Administration
The last Talented and Gifted (TAG) Education Plan was adopted by the MMSD Board of Education in 1991. With state statute and policy reform, alignment with current District strategic planning, and a desire to utilize research in exemplary practice, approval of a comprehensive Talented and Gifted Plan has become a District priority.This document is meant to be a guide as the Division aims to achieve its mission in alignment with the MMSD Strategic Plan, the State of Wisconsin statutes and administrative rules for gifted and talented education, and the National Association for Gifted Children standards.
There will be a review of the Plan, with status reports issued to the Board of Education, in January and June 2010. Adjustments to the Plan will be documented at that time.
Wisconsin State Statute 121.02(1) (t), and Administrative Rule PI 8.01(2)(t).2 require school districts to identify those students who give evidence of high performance capability as talented and gifted and provide those students with access to appropriate systematic and continuous instruction. The National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) standards complements the Wisconsin framework and provides a guide for quality educational programming.
The Plan below identifies the following categories as areas in need of improvement in MMSD Talented and Gifted Programming. The primary focus in developing this Plan has been in the areas of identification, programming, and professional development.
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Stephen Kreider Yoder, Isaac Yoder & Levi Yoder
STEVE: "Cellphone," came the one-word email the other day. "Cellphone," said the handwritten sticky note on my desk when I got home.They were subtle messages from Levi, and he had a point: After years of resisting, Karen and I in June told him he could have a cellphone when school began. School had begun.
There are good reasons not to give a teen a cellphone. It's an addictive time sponge. The teen will text all night long and will mess with the phone at the dining table. The phone will magically be juiceless or out of range when Dad's calling on a Friday night.
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Is the College Debt Bubble Ready to Explode?," asks Laura Rowley at Yahoo! Finance. College tuition has skyrocketed much more than housing did during the housing bubble, in percentage terms. One hundred colleges charge $50,000 or more a year, compared to just 5 in 2008-09. College tuition has surged along with federal financial-aid spending, which effectively rewards colleges for increasing tuition. College financial-aid policies punish thrifty families, so that "parents who scrimp and save to come up with the tuition are in effect subsidizing the others.""University administrators are the equivalent of subprime mortgage brokers," notes Facebook investor Peter Thiel, "selling you a story that you should go into debt massively, that it's not a consumption decision, it's an investment decision. Actually, no, it's a bad consumption decision. Most colleges are four-year parties," he says, an assessment shared by prominent law professor Glenn Reynolds.
My wife is French. She spent twice as much time in class at her second-tier French university as I did in my flagship American university (the University of Virginia), and more time studying, too (even though I was studious by American standards, and as a result, later went on to attend Harvard Law School). France spends less per student on higher education than we do, to produce a more literate and knowledgeable citizenry.
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In most American schools, teachers are evaluated by principals or other administrators who drop in for occasional classroom visits and fill out forms to rate their performance.The result? More than 9 out of 10 teachers get top marks, according to a prominent study last year by the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit group focusing on improving teacher quality.
Now Bill Gates, who in recent years has turned his attention and considerable fortune to improving American education, is investing $335 million through his foundation to overhaul the personnel departments of several big school systems. A big chunk of that money is financing research by dozens of social scientists and thousands of teachers to develop a better system for evaluating classroom instruction.
The effort will have enormous consequences for the movement to hold schools and educators more accountable for student achievement.
Twenty states are overhauling their teacher-evaluation systems, partly to fulfill plans set in motion by a $4 billion federal grant competition, and they are eagerly awaiting the research results.
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A surprising trend among working parents in recent years has been that they are actually spending more time with their kids. But this intense parenting comes with a cost.Since 1965, married fathers' time caring for children nearly tripled to an average 7.0 hours a week from 2.5; married moms' child-care time also rose, by 36%-to 13.9 hours from 10.2 hours, based on research released at a conference Tuesday in Washington, D.C. The child-care hours include only the time parents were focused mainly on the child, such as feeding, clothing, bathing, playing with or reading to the child. It excludes time spent with children present when the parent's primary focus was something else, such as cooking dinner or watching TV.
Parents are paying for the increase in other realms of life, says the author, Suzanne Bianchi, a sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Married mothers spend less time on grooming - 8.2 hours a week, down from 10.1 hours in 1965, her data show; moms are also doing less housework.
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On November 29, 2010, the Madison School District responded to a request for information from the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) about Madison's services for talented and gifted students.The DPI initiated an audit of Madison's talented and gifted programming after West High School area parents filed a complaint on September 20, 2010, arguing that West refuses to provide appropriate programs for ninth and tenth grade students gifted in language arts and social studies. West requires all freshmen and sophomores to take regular core English and history courses, regardless of learning level.
(All three of Madison's other comprehensive high schools-East, LaFollette, and Memorial-provide advanced sections of core subjects before 11th grade. East and LaFollette offer advanced and/or honors sections starting in ninth grade, while Memorial offers English 10 honors and AP World History for tenth graders.)
As part of a Small Learning Community Initiative phased in over the past decade, West implemented a one-size-for-all English and social studies program to stop different groups of students from following different courses of study. Some groups had typically self-selected into rigorous, advanced levels while others seemed stuck in more basic or remedial levels. Administrators wanted to improve the quality of classroom experience and instruction for "all students" by mixing wide ranges of ability together in heterogeneous classrooms.
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AUTISM is a puzzling phenomenon. In its pure form it is an inability to understand the emotional responses of others that is seen in people of otherwise normal--sometimes above normal--intelligence. However, it is often associated with other problems, and can also appear in mild and severe forms. This variability has led many people to think of it as a spectrum of symptoms rather than a single, clear-cut syndrome. And that variability makes it hard to work out what causes it.There is evidence of genetic influence, but no clear pattern of inheritance. The thought that the underlying cause may be hereditary, though, is one reason for disbelieving the hypothesis, which gained traction a few years ago but is now discredited, that measles vaccinations cause autism.
One suggestion that does pop up from time to time is that the process which leads to autism involves faulty mitochondria. The mitochondria are a cell's powerpacks. They disassemble sugar molecules and turn the energy thus liberated into a form that biochemical machinery can use. Mitochondrial faults could be caused by broken genes, by environmental effects, or by a combination of the two.
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In the decade since educators launched a nationwide campaign to improve schools and stop students from dropping out, progress has been made, according to a new report, but more than 1 million public high school students failed to graduate with their class this year and 2 million attend so-called "dropout factory" schools where their chance of graduating is only 50-50.
Being able to read in third grade is an early indicator of whether a student will stay in school.In the first half of the decade, at least one out of every four public high school students and almost 40 percent of minority students (defined as African-Americans, Hispanics and American Indians) did not successfully graduate with their class. In 2008, the high school graduation rate was about 75 percent, a three-point increase from 2001.
Students can lose interest in school early, according to education experts. Studies show that you can tell who is most at risk for dropping out from third grade reading scores. Half of all low-income fourth-graders who could not read on grade level were put on a "drop out" track, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
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Enrollment in local Catholic preschool classes this year is up nearly 14 percent over last year and 22 percent over five years ago, as elementary schools in the Boston Archdiocese have added programs for 3- and 4-year-olds and freestanding Catholic preschools have sprung up in response to surging demand.Principals and administrators say the preschools are attracting working parents, including many non-Catholics, by providing high-quality programs for a lower price than full-time day care, which can easily run more than $10,000 a year.
"For working parents, there is going to be a cost, regardless of whether it's an academic program or a child-care program,'' said Russ W. Wilson, regional director of Pope John Paul II Catholic Academy, which offers prekindergarten through eighth grade at multiple campuses in Dorchester and Mattapan. "So parents are doing some simple math and realizing that, for an affordable price, they are able to send their child to . . . a full day of academics, socialization, computer skills.''
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As an unidentified first-year law student comes to grips with the reality of his situation--a likely $150,000 in debt by the time he graduates, with no guarantee of a legal job that will make it easy for him to repay this money--he is thinking about dropping out now.Owing only $21,000 in law school debt at this point, he tells Above the Law, he would probably be better off to call it quits now. That way, he will not only be better off financially, with far less to repay, but happier, since he won't have to work as hard.
About four out of five responders to an ATL reader survey seeking input about what the 1L should do agree that dropping out is the best option.
But his focus on finances in analyzing the situation shows exactly what the problem is, says Brian Tannebaum in a response to the ATL post on his My Law License blog:
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Amanda Ripley, via two kind readers:
FOR YEARS, POOR PERFORMANCE BY STUDENTS IN AMERICA RELATIVE TO THOSE IN OTHER COUNTRIES HAS BEEN EXPLAINED AWAY AS A CONSEQUENCE OF OUR NATIONWIDE DIVERSITY. BUT WHAT IF YOU LOOKED MORE CLOSELY, BREAKING DOWN OUR RESULTS BY STATE AND SEARCHING NOT FOR AN AVERAGE, BUT FOR EXCELLENCE?Emphasis added.Stanford economist Eric Hanushek and two colleagues recently conducted an experiment to answer just such questions, ranking American states and foreign countries side by side. Like our recruiter, they looked specifically at the best and brightest in each place--the kids most likely to get good jobs in the future--using scores on standardized math tests as a proxy for educational achievement.
We've known for some time how this story ends nationwide: only 6 percent of U.S. students perform at the advanced-proficiency level in math, a share that lags behind kids in some 30 other countries, from the United Kingdom to Taiwan. But what happens when we break down the results? Do any individual U.S. states wind up near the top?
Incredibly, no. Even if we treat each state as its own country, not a single one makes it into the top dozen contenders on the list. The best performer is Massachusetts, ringing in at No. 17. Minnesota also makes it into the upper-middle tier, followed by Vermont, New Jersey, and Washington. And down it goes from there, all the way to Mississippi, whose students--by this measure at least--might as well be attending school in Thailand or Serbia.
ANUSHEK, WHO GREW UP outside Cleveland and graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1965, has the gentle voice and manner of Mr. Rogers, but he has spent the past 40 years calmly butchering conventional wisdom on education. In study after study, he has demonstrated that our assumptions about what works are almost always wrong. More money does not tend to lead to better results; smaller class sizes do not tend to improve learning. "Historically," he says, "reporters call me [when] the editor asks, 'What is the other side of this story?'"
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Single-gender classes in public schools have had a positive effect on students' performance, attitude and ambitions, according to a survey released Tuesday by the South Carolina Department of Education.Two-thirds of about 7,000 students in South Carolina's single-gender programs who responded to the annual survey said the classes have improved their academic performance and classroom attitude, 79 percent reported increases in their classroom effort, and 83 percent said they were more likely to finish high school.
The survey also included responses from 1,120 of their parents and 760 teachers in 119 elementary, middle and high schools. Ninety-four percent of parents said their children were more likely to graduate from high school, and 85 percent of teachers saw increases in effort with school work.
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Has your kid had a checkup for heart disease lately?The vast majority of heart attacks happen to people well past middle age, so a potential problem a half-century away may not be high on your list of child health-care worries. But it is well-established that heart disease begins to develop in childhood. Now, two new studies add to a burgeoning body of evidence that developing heart-healthy habits as a youngster or adolescent may have lasting benefits in adulthood.
One of the reports, based on a pooling of data from four major studies that tracked people from early childhood into their 30s and 40s, suggests that the presence of such risk factors as high blood pressure and abnormal cholesterol by about age 9 strongly predicts a thickening of the walls in the carotid or neck arteries in early adulthood. Experts consider this condition, called carotid intima media thickness, a precursor to heart attacks and strokes.
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Remember that telephone game we played as children?
We all sat in a circle and the first person whispered a simple statement such as, "She is a girl" into a person's ear. By the time the phrase was whispered to everyone in the circle it would turn into "She is a nice gorilla."It was funny at the time, but now when our friends say, "Did you hear about ____" our ears perk up and an audience is born.
Gossip hurts people, but most of us love to hear it anyway. Tabloids make a mint writing about celebrities and people getting their hearts smashed to smithereens. Gossip tends to hold a bottomless well of interest, yet when you are talking about someone when they are not around, ask yourself if you would feel comfortable sharing the same information if they were standing right in front of you?
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What present can you give a kid that will outlast the latest must-have toy or gadget? How about some stock in the company that makes it.You can jump-start a young person's finances by giving him or her the gift of investing with stocks, bonds and mutual funds. Throw in some lessons on how the markets work -- and the common pitfalls investors face -- and you could end up giving them some financial savviness as well.
Getting kids investing early "allows them to accumulate knowledge over time on what can be a complex topic," says June Walbert, a certified financial planner based in San Antonio with financial-services firm USAA.
Individual Stocks. Does your 10-year-old nephew spend most of his free time playing videogames? Harness that interest by giving him stock in the videogame maker. A kid might be more interested in following a company's stock if it's linked to a brand he or she is familiar with, such as the company behind a favorite activity, toy, restaurant or snack food.
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The fight happened a long time ago when they were still in school. But for both Tom and Eric Hoebbel, the fight was a defining event -- the kind of family story that gets trotted out for new acquaintances because it seems to convey something important.Tom, as the story goes, was just back from college, and the two brothers were together in the kitchen late at night. They chatted aimlessly about school and sports. Then the conversation turned to money.
Tom's position was that money was inconsequential. "I said, 'I could just, you know, take out a dollar bill and burn it, and that wouldn't really matter,' " Tom says. But this idea horrified his brother. "A dollar bill is very valuable," says Eric. "Even if it's only $1, you can still do stuff with it."
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A few years ago, teachers at Ellis Middle School in Austin, Minn., might have said that their top students were easy to identify: they completed their homework and handed it in on time; were rarely tardy; sat in the front of the class; wrote legibly; and jumped at the chance to do extra-credit assignments.But after poring over four years of data comparing semester grades with end-of-the-year test scores on state subject exams, the teachers at Ellis began to question whether they really knew who the smartest students were.
About 10 percent of the students who earned A's and B's in school stumbled during end-of-the-year exams. By contrast, about 10 percent of students who scraped along with C's, D's and even F's -- students who turned in homework late, never raised their hands and generally seemed turned off by school -- did better than their eager-to-please B+ classmates.
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Students face a test as they walk in the doors of Waterloo East High School each morning.Their clothes must meet the definition of a school uniform enforced by adults who stand guard at the building entrances.
No shirt collar? No dress pants or skirts? No entry.
The routine will be familiar to every public school student in Waterloo by next year, if district officials win a battle to become the first in Iowa to require school uniforms.
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I picked up my 14-year-old son from school two weeks ago. I smiled at him. He laughed...and then he got mad.That morning, an orthodontist had slapped braces on my teeth. I smiled to show my son, who is just weeks away from getting his braces off. While at first he thought it was funny that Dad had braces too, he quickly realized I'd gotten the clear braces; his are full-metal jacket.
"How much extra was that?" he asked. I told him $500. "Why didn't I get those? Why do I have to get the ugly braces and you get the ones that don't look as bad?" He was miffed, and raised the topic again with his mom that night.
Later, as I thought more about it, I started to realize that something is wrong with this picture. Why does my son believe -- no, assume -- that he and I should spend the same amount of money on our respective braces?
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I heard Jeb Bush give a talk a few months ago in Milwaukee about education policies that he promoted while he was governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007. I should have taken notes, because I think I was listening to at least a few of the pages from the playbook that will be used by Scott Walker when he becomes governor of Wisconsin in about five weeks.I'm betting that is particularly true for the system of giving every school in the state a grade - A to F - each year. It's a centerpiece of the "A+ Schools" program that Bush championed in Florida. He credits the grading system with being a key driver of rising test scores over the last decade.
In his campaign platform, Walker called for launching a grading system for Wisconsin schools. He hasn't spelled out details, but Florida is the primary example of such a system, and Walker is an admirer of Bush. Walker also will have strong Republican majorities in both houses of the Legislature, and I can't think of any reason he won't succeed in turning what he said he would do into reality in the not-at-all-distant future.
So let's look at Florida's grading system on the assumption it is a lot like what will be used here.
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Business is booming at the Bank of Mom and Dad.As banks have tightened lending standards, growing numbers of families are stepping into the breach. But while intrafamily loans can yield significant financial rewards for lenders and borrowers, families must carefully assess the risks.
While many families handle the process in informal oral agreements, advisers urge clients to document such loans in written contracts, just as a bank would. This can also make it easier for families to comply with tax rules that require lenders to pay income tax on the interest they receive and allow borrowers with mortgages to deduct the interest payments they pay.
Some families choose to go through websites like Prosper and Lending Club, which match lenders and borrowers online--though they also set minimum interest rates.
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Incensed at the price of a private-college education? On the face of it, you have every reason to be. The average cost of a year at a four-year private school has lately run about $36,000, compared with $21,000 a decade ago, according to the College Board. Over the same ten-year period, family incomes have mostly stagnated. Many parents wonder whether a private-school education is attainable at all, much less worth the price.Don't grab the pitchforks yet, folks. Although the sticker price charged by private colleges may seem more suited to the Ancien Régime than to recession-weary families, the net price -- the cost after financial aid -- puts the total out-of-pocket cost, on average, closer to $22,000. And if you consider only tuition and fees, the net price (in inflation-adjusted dollars) is actually a bit less than it was a decade ago.
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While states and school districts hotly debate the issue of whether student test scores should be used to evaluate teachers, the nation has been virtually ignoring a more basic question: whether those teachers are even qualified in the first place. Too many of them aren't.The No Child Left Behind Act mandated that all students be taught by "highly qualified" teachers. And although we disagree with many elements of that 2001 federal school reform act -- its rigidity, its use of the wrong measurements to assess student progress -- this provision always made more sense.
Among other things, a highly qualified teacher in the secondary schools is supposed to have expertise in the subject he or she teaches, whether that means having majored in the subject in college or having a credential to teach it. Ample research has found that students learn better when their teachers have such formal expertise. Yet a new report by the Education Trust, a nonprofit organization devoted to improving the educational lot of poor and minority students, shows that the problem is widespread and that little progress has been made.
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Over the next few weeks, the Cedarburg School District will contact 111 families that did not return opt-in forms to have their children participate in sensitive issues of the human growth and development curriculum.Last year, only a handful of parents opted their children out of the sex education curriculum.
In a move that caused controversy among community members, the Cedarburg School Board voted to reverse the process - mandating that parents had to specifically opt their children into the programming by signing a permission slip by Nov. 1. If no form was returned, it was assumed they opted out.
That change in policy drew the attention of the state Department of Public Instruction, which notified the district in a letter that it could face a legal challenge if the board didn't return to an opt-out policy. Since then the board has discussed the policy at its last two regular meetings.
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Everyone's talking about superintendent salary caps. The Record reports that the New Jersey Association of School Administrators filed a motion in State Superior Court claiming that just because Gov. Christie has proposed caps doesn't mean he can enforce them right now. The association also argues that Acting Commissioner Rochelle Hendricks "broke the law" by advising our 21 Executive County Superintendents to veto any contracts above the caps.In other litigation, the Parsippany-Troy Hills School Board filed suit in the appellate division of Superior Court regarding the Morris County Executive County Superintendent's refusal to approve the new contract for Superintendent Le Roy Seitz, which will pay him $234,065 by the fifth year of the 5-year contract.
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On the eve of a pivotal academic year in Vishal Singh's life, he faces a stark choice on his bedroom desk: book or computer?By all rights, Vishal, a bright 17-year-old, should already have finished the book, Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle," his summer reading assignment. But he has managed 43 pages in two months.
He typically favors Facebook, YouTube and making digital videos. That is the case this August afternoon. Bypassing Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his only summer homework.
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Kaleem Caire, via email:
The initial proposal for Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men will be presented to the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education's Planning and Development Committee on MONDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2010 at 6:00pm in the McDaniels Auditorium of the Doyle Administration Building (545 West Dayton St., Madison 53703). The committee is chaired by Ms. Arlene Silveira (asilveira@madison.k12.wi.us). The Madison Prep proposal is the first agenda item for that evening's committee meeting so please be there at 6pm sharp. If you plan to provide public comment, please show up 15 minutes early (5:45pm) to sign-up!Related: an interview with Kaleem Caire.
Please show your support for Madison Prep by attending this meeting. Your presence in the audience is vital to demonstrating to the Board of Education the broad community support for Madison Prep. We look forward to you joining us for the very important milestone in Madison history!
The Mission
Madison Prep will provide a world class secondary education for young men that prepares them to think critically, communicate effectively, identify their purpose, and succeed in college, 21st century careers, leadership and life. For more information, see the attachments or contact Ms. Laura DeRoche at lderoche@ulgm.org.
Get Involved with Madison Prep
- Curriculum & Instruction Team. This design team will develop a thorough understanding of the IB curriculum and define the curriculum of the school, including the core and non-core curriculum. They will also develop a thorough understanding of the Harkness teaching method, outline instructional best practices, and address teacher expectations and evaluation. Both teams will address special education and English Language Learners (ELL).
- Governance, Leadership & Operation Team. This design team will help develop the school's operations plan, define the governing structure, and address the characteristics and expectations of the schools Head of School.
- Facility Team. This team will be responsible for identify, planning, and securing a suitable facility for Madison Prep.
- Budget, Finance & Fundraising Team. This team will be involved with developing Madison Prep's budget and fundraising plans, and will explore financing options for start-up, implementation, and the first four years of the school's operation."
- Community Engagement & Support Team. This team will develop strategies and work to establish broad community support for Madison Prep, develop criteria for partnering with others, and establish partnerships that support teaching, learning, leadership, and community engagement.
Madison Preparatory Academy Overview 600K PDF and executive summary.
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Steven and David Elmore were born identical twins, but their first days in this world could not have been more different. David came home from the hospital after a week. Steven, born four minutes later, stayed behind in the ICU. For a month he hovered near death in an incubator, wracked with fever from what doctors called a dangerous viral infection. Even after Steven recovered, he lagged behind his twin. He lay awake but rarely cried. When his mother smiled at him, he stared back with blank eyes rather than mirroring her smiles as David did. And for several years after the boys began walking, it was Steven who often lost his balance, falling against tables or smashing his lip.Those early differences might have faded into distant memory, but they gained new significance in light of the twins' subsequent lives. By the time Steven entered grade school, it appeared that he had hit his stride. The twins seemed to have equalized into the genetic carbon copies that they were: They wore the same shoulder-length, sandy-blond hair. They were both B+ students. They played basketball with the same friends. Steven Elmore had seemingly overcome his rough start. But then, at the age of 17, he began hearing voices.
The voices called from passing cars as Steven drove to work. They ridiculed his failure to find a girlfriend. Rolling up the car windows and blasting the radio did nothing to silence them. Other voices pursued Steven at home. Three voices called through the windows of his house: two angry men and one woman who begged the men to stop arguing. Another voice thrummed out of the stereo speakers, giving a running commentary on the songs of Steely Dan or Led Zeppelin, which Steven played at night after work. His nerves frayed and he broke down. Within weeks his outbursts landed him in a psychiatric hospital, where doctors determined he had schizophrenia.
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The stairwell at East High School where an alleged sexual assault took place last week will soon be off limits to students except in emergencies, a Madison School District official said Tuesday.The door at the top of the stairwell, which leads to a building exit, will be labeled as an emergency exit, and an alarm will sound if it is opened, security coordinator Luis Yudice said.
"We're talking about a comprehensive reassessment of building security at East," Yudice said. "This incident served as a reminder to other schools that we always need to be vigilant and alert."
The district also plans to add a sixth security officer to the school (other high schools have five), extra surveillance cameras and a visitor welcome center by January, as well as asking school staff to help patrol hallways.
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"It would be completely crazy to roll out this 4K plan that is supposed to really, fundamentally be about preparing children, especially underprivileged, and not have the centers in the neighborhoods that most need the service," School Board member Lucy Mathiak said.Much more on Madison's proposed 4K program, here. The District has a number of irons in the fire, as it were, including high school curricular changes, challenging reading results and 4K, among many others. Can 4K lift off effectively (both in terms of academics and costs)?Deputy superintendent Sue Abplanalp, who is coordinating implementation of the program, acknowledged some students will have to travel outside their school attendance areas to attend the nearest 4K program, "but it's not a long drive, especially if they're in contiguous areas."
"We will make it work," Abplanalp said. "We're very creative."
The school district is conducting its own analysis of how the distribution of day care providers and existing elementary school space will mesh under the new program. Some alternative programs may have to move to other schools to make room, but no final decisions have been made, Abplanalp said.
Detailed information has not been shared with the Madison School Board and is not expected to be ready before the board votes Monday on granting final funding approval for the program. The approval must happen then because the district plans to share information with the public in December before enrollment starts in February, Abplanalp said.
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I ought to have known better than to have lunch with a psychologist."Take you, for example," he said. "You are definitely autistic."
"What!?"
"I rest my case," he shot back. "Q.E.D."
His ironic point seemed to be that if I didn't instantly grasp his point -- which clearly I didn't -- then, at some level, I was exhibiting autistic tendencies.
Simon Baron-Cohen, for example, in his book "Mindblindness," argues that the whole raison d'être of consciousness is to be able to read other people's minds; autism, in this context, can be defined as an inability to "get" other people, hence "mindblind."
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Last year, a friend of mine sent a shipment of green rubber flooring, at great impractical expense, to a villa in the south of France because she was worried that over the summer holiday her toddler would fall on the stone floor. Generations of French children may have made their way safely to adulthood, walking and falling and playing and dreaming on these very same stone floors, but that did not deter her in her determination to be safe. This was, I think, an extreme articulation of our generation's common fantasy: that we can control and perfect our children's environment. And lurking somewhere behind this strange and hopeless desire to create a perfect environment lies the even stranger and more hopeless idea of creating the perfect child.Of course, for most of us, this perfect, safe, perpetually educational environment is unobtainable; an ineffable dream we can browse through in Dwell, or some other beautiful magazine, with the starkly perfect Oeuf toddler bed, the spotless nursery. Most of us do not raise our children amidst a sea of lovely and instructive wooden toys and soft cushiony rubber floors and healthy organic snacks, but the ideal exists and exerts its dubious influence.
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Susan Troller, via a kind reader's email:
It's been a rough week in Madison schools, with the first degree sexual assault of a student in a stairwell at East High School and an alleged mugging at Jefferson Middle School.The sexual assault occurred on Thursday afternoon, according to police reports. The 15-year-old victim knew the alleged assailant, also 15, and he was arrested and charged at school.
On Wednesday, two 13-year-old students at Jefferson allegedly mugged another student at his locker, grabbing him from behind and using force to try to steal his wallet. The police report noted that all three students fell to the floor. According to a letter sent to Jefferson parents on Friday, "the student yelled loudly, resisted the attempt and went immediately to report the incident. The students involved in the attempted theft were immediately identified and detained in the office."
The mugging was not reported to police until Thursday morning and Jefferson parents did not learn about the incident until two days after the incident. When police arrived at school on Thursday, they arrested two students in the attempted theft.
Parents at East were notified Thursday of the sexual assault.
Luis Yudice, Madison public schools safety chief, said it was unusual for police not to be notified as soon as the alleged strong arm robbery was reported to school officials.
Related: Gangs & School Violence Forum Audio & Video and police calls near Madison high schools 1996-2006.
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Channel3000, via a kind reader's email:
A Madison East High School student has been arrested and charged on suspicion of sexually assaulting another student on school grounds this week.
Madison police said the 15-year-old boy was arrested on a charge of first-degree sexual assault on Thursday after a 15-year-old girl reported the incident.Dan Nerad, superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District, said while these cases are rare, they happen and it forces district officials to take a step back and look how this could have been prevented. Officials sent a letter home to parents to explain the incident and the district's next steps.
"We're going to work real hard to deal with it, we're going to work real hard to learn from it. We're going to work real hard to make any necessary changes after we have a change to review what all of these facts and circumstances are," Nerad said.
Nerad said that while there are things the district can do to prevent such incidents, he believes much more help is needed from the community. He said the fact that this type of activity has entered the school door should be a wake up call to society.
Related: Gangs & School Violence Forum Audio & Video and police calls near Madison high schools 1996-2006.
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A new analysis of college admissions trends confirms what most high school seniors already know: Colleges are receiving thousands more applications than ever before, and each student is applying to more schools."Application inflation" is one of the most widely discussed but poorly documented trends in college admissions. Applications rose 47 percent at public colleges and 70 percent at private colleges between fall 2001 and fall 2008, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling in Arlington County.
In a new report, "Putting the College Admissions 'Arms Race' in Context," the group attempts to explain the unprecedented jump. Admissions officers point to a steady increase in the number of students applying to eight, 10 or 15 schools, particularly among top students courting selective colleges.
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Kids still getting visits from the Tooth Fairy are getting braces.The number of children 17 and younger getting orthodontic treatment has grown 46% over the past decade to 3.8 million in 2008, the latest figure available from the American Association of Orthodontists. The association doesn't break the number down further by age, but Lee W. Graber, the Association's president, estimates that in his own practice 15% to 20% of the 7- to 10-year-olds he sees get treatment.
Parents' hope is that the more early treatment a child gets--that is, before all the adult teeth have come in--the less treatment the child will need later on. While that's true in some cases, what many parents don't realize is that for some of the most common orthodontic problems, early treatment offers no guarantees against a second round of treatment in the teenage years and may not save time or money.
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When I was a kid my Uncle Robert, for whom I was named, used to say that blacks needed to "fight on all fronts, at home and abroad."By that he meant that while it was critically important to fight against racial injustice and oppression, it was just as important to support, nurture and fight on behalf of one's family and community.
Uncle Robert (my father always called him Jim -- don't ask) died many years ago, but he came to mind as I was going over the dismal information in a new report about the tragic conditions confronting a large portion of America's black population, especially black males.
We know by now, of course, that the situation is grave. We know that more than a third of black children live in poverty; that more than 70 percent are born to unwed mothers; that by the time they reach their mid-30s, a majority of black men without a high school diploma has spent time in prison. We know all this, but no one seems to know how to turn things around. No one has been able to stop this steady plunge of young black Americans into a socioeconomic abyss.
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MPS is in the throes of an alternative to suspensions - Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, or PBIS.According to the Milwaukee Public Schools, the goal of PBIS is to "reduce classroom disruptions and student suspensions through a schoolwide systematic three-tiered response-to-intervention (RTI) approach." PBIS looks like adults in the school community offering positive verbal redirection and modeling positive conduct. The point: to teach students about positive behavior.
Some of the nearly 100 MPS schools that use the PBIS system this academic year have reported successes. Fewer suspensions are being reported. That's good news, right? Superintendent Gregory Thornton believes that "Finding ways to keep students in school instead of suspending them improves their chances of learning and improving academically," which minimizes disruptions and keeps kids in class.
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We can learn a lot from a child. Plenty of adults engage in childish behavior, but not enough adults allow themselves to truly become childlike and exhibit an approach and display behaviors that exemplify the very best of what being a child is all about. Obviously, the point is not that we should become literally like children in every way--a group of 4-year olds is not going to build the next space shuttle or find a cure for an infectious disease this year. But as an exercise in personal growth, looking at the innocent nature of a small child offers illuminating and practical suggestions for changing our approach to life and work as "serious adults," including the work of presenting, facilitating, and teaching. You could probably come up with 100 things children do that you'd like to be able to still do today--here are just 13.(1) Be completely present in the moment. In the words of David M. Bader: "Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?" We adults are often living in the past (or have our heads in the future). Many adults carry around preconceptions, prejudices, and even anger about something that happened years ago--even hundreds of years ago before anyone they even know was born. And yet, very young children do not worry and fret about the past or the future. What matters most is this moment. "The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence," says Thich Nhat Hanh.
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There is no college cost crisis. That at least is the conclusion reached by the economists Robert B. Archibald and David H. Feldman in their new book, "Why Does College Cost So Much?" The title question is a teaser, for the book's message is that it doesn't. In fact, say the authors, "for most families higher education is more affordable than it was in the past."Archibald and Feldman build their analysis of college costs in opposition to what they call the "new orthodoxy" or the "dysfunctionality narrative." In that narrative, repeated almost religiously by critics and politicians, colleges and universities have "drifted away from their social mission," surrendered to the false god of research, and engaged in an "arms race" for more prestigious scholars and ever-glitzier student unions. As a result, "their costs have sprawled out of control" and "the college degree, an essential entry ticket to the modern economy" has become "increasingly out of reach for families with middle-class incomes."
In short the conditions everyone ritually complains about have an internal cause: if colleges and universities find themselves in a bad financial place, they have only themselves and their irresponsible practices to blame.
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The panel discussion at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee was timely.The topic: Failing black males in the public schools.
On Saturday, educators, community leaders, students and one journalist gathered for a screening of a documentary, "Beyond the Bricks." The film, directed by Derek Koen, covers the academic struggles and dreams of two Newark, N.J., high school students trying to stay on the right track.
One is a bright young black male frustrated that his peers don't seem to appreciate doing well in school; the other is a disenchanted black student struggling to continue an education offering little stimulation.
It is a timely subject for a documentary, seeing how failing black students are in the news a lot these days due to a rash of reports that suggest black males are doing even worse than previously thought.
My appearance on the panel came before publication of my Sunday column, which also looked at the issue of failing black males and the parents who failed them.
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Editor's note: Ed Dante is a pseudonym for a writer who lives on the East Coast. Through a literary agent, he approached The Chronicle wanting to tell the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has observed. In the course of editing his article, The Chronicle reviewed correspondence Dante had with clients and some of the papers he had been paid to write. In the article published here, some details of the assignment he describes have been altered to protect the identity of the student.The request came in by e-mail around 2 in the afternoon. It was from a previous customer, and she had urgent business. I quote her message here verbatim (if I had to put up with it, so should you): "You did me business ethics propsal for me I need propsal got approved pls can you will write me paper?"
I've gotten pretty good at interpreting this kind of correspondence. The client had attached a document from her professor with details about the paper. She needed the first section in a week. Seventy-five pages.
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Bruce Baker. Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers and blogger at SchoolFinance101, looks at performance in 4th and 8th grade math of charter schools versus traditional public schools in NJ. In "Searching for Superguy in Jersey" he's created a statistical model for schools within urban centers and weighted achievement for free and reduced lunch rates, homelessness, rates, and student racial composition. His conclusion is fair and reasonable:As you can see, there are plenty of charters and traditional public schools above the line, and below the line. The point here is by no means to bash charters. Rather, this is about being realistic about charters and more importantly realistic about the difficulty of truly overcoming the odds. It's not easy and any respectable charter school leader or teacher and any respectable traditional public school leader or teacher will likely confirm that. It's not about superguy. It's about hard work and sustained support; be it for charters or for traditional public schools.Dr. Baker's scattergrams place both charters and non-charters at the high end of performance ("Beating the Odds") and low end ("Underperforming"). He also features Newark-specific scattergrams.
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In almost every home and pre-school in America, young children are being taught how to recite the alphabet and how to say their numbers.A new study by University of Chicago psychology professor Susan Levine finds that simply repeating the numbers isn't as good as helping kids understand what they mean.
According to her study, for children to develop the math skills they'll need later on in school, it is essential that parents spend time teaching their children the value of numbers by using concrete examples -- instead of just repeating them out loud.
"Just about all 2-year-olds can rattle off the sequence from one to 10," Levine tells Weekend All Things Considered host Guy Raz. "But then, if you ask them to give you three objects ... they'll just grab a handful."
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Debates about education these days tend to center on familiar terms like charter schools and merit pay. Now a new fault line is emerging: "parent trigger."Like many radical ideas, parent trigger originated in California, as an innovation of a liberal activist group called Parent Revolution. The average student in Los Angeles has only a 50% chance of graduating high school and a 10% chance of attending college. It's a crisis, says Parent Revolution leader Ben Austin, that calls for "an unabashed and unapologetic transfer of raw power from the defenders of the status quo"--education officials and teachers unions--"to the parents."
Parent trigger, which became California law in January, is meant to facilitate that transfer of power through community organizing. Under the law, if 51% of parents in a failing school sign a petition, they can trigger a forcible transformation of the school--either by inviting a charter operator to take it over, by forcing certain administrative changes, or by shutting it down outright.
Schools are eligible for triggering if they have failed to make "adequate yearly progress," according to state standards, for four consecutive years. Today 1,300 of California's 10,000 schools qualify.
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The Los Angeles Times decided in August to publish "teacher effectiveness" ratings using "value-added" test scores, an action that not only did a disservice to teachers but also to the children of California. The Times reduced the definition of quality teaching to a simplistic equation: Good teachers produce good test scores.There is a simple, intuitive appeal to that formulation, but study after study demonstrates that scores on state tests, even using value-added measurement, are affected by too many factors to support simplistic conclusions about individual teachers.
That is not simply our opinion. Every major professional association of education researchers has said so. The National Academies and the Economics Policy Institute have said so as well.
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CT: How will you bring boys who are already behind a couple of years or more up to grade level so they are fully prepared for college?Watch an interview with Kaleem here. Much more on Kaleem via this link.KC: One, we will have a longer school day, a longer school year. They will start about 7:30 and end about 5 o'clock. Tutoring will be built into our school program. It will be built into each schedule based on your academic performance. We're going to use ability grouping to tackle kids who are severely behind, who need more education. We'll do that if we can afford it by requiring Saturday school for young people who really need even additional enrichment and so we're going to do whatever it takes so we make sure they get what they need.
CT: What kind of commitment will Madison Prep require of parents or guardians?
KC: They have to sign a participation contract. These are non-binding contracts but it will clearly spell out what their expectations are of us and our expectations are of them. Parents will be given a grade for participation on the child's report card. There are ways for ALL parents to be involved. You know, some people have asked, 'What will you do if parents won't show up to a child's performance review?' Literally, we'll go set up our tables outside their houses and it will be kind of embarrassing but we'll do it because we won't allow our kids to be left behind.
CT: You've said you'd like to see more flexibility and innovation. Does that mean you'd like to run this school without a union contract?
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Much has been written about mainland mothers giving birth in Hong Kong, yet little is known about what happens to the children once their parents take them home.The number of babies born in Hong Kong to mainland parents surged from 2,070 in 2003 to 16,044 in 2006. The figure reached 29,766 last year - representing 45.5 per cent of all births in the city.
Despite such a sharp rise, the Census and Statistics Department has conducted just one rudimentary survey into the phenomenon.
Some 11,643 parents were polled between 2007 and 2009 at Immigration Department birth registries. They were asked whether and when their children would return to Hong Kong. A majority said their children would come back between the ages of three and 11.
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Stanley H. Kaplan started his tutoring business in the basement of his parents' Brooklyn home in 1938. As standardized tests became a bigger fixture of American education, his company became a national operation, preparing millions of students for the SAT, LSAT, MCATs and other tests.Kaplan was still a test-prep company when the Washington Post Company bought it in 1984, after Richard D. Simmons, the president, convinced Katharine Graham of its potential for expansion and profits.
Over the last decade, Kaplan has moved aggressively into for-profit higher education, acquiring 75 small colleges and starting the huge online Kaplan University. Now, Kaplan higher education revenues eclipse not only the test-prep operations, but all the rest of the Washington Post Company's operations. And Kaplan's revenue grew 9 percent during the last quarter to $743.3 million -- with higher education revenues more than four times greater than those from test-prep -- helping its parent company more than triple its profits.
But over the last few months, Kaplan and other for-profit education companies have come under intense scrutiny from Congress, amid growing concerns that the industry leaves too many students mired in debt, and with credentials that provide little help in finding jobs.
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The Lost Generation: What it's like for 20-somethings to go in search of meaningful work--and not find it.Since January, for 35 hours a week, at a rate of $10 an hour, Luke Stacks has been working for a home-electronics chain. He answers the phone and attempts to coax callers into buying more stuff. This is not how he imagined he would be spending his late 20s.
Like a lot of us, Stacks was given a fairly straightforward version of how his life would unfold: He would go to college and study something he found interesting, graduate, and get a decent job. For a while, things went pretty much according to plan. Stacks, who now is 27, went to the University of Virginia, not far from where he grew up, majoring in American Studies. He later enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the University of Iowa, with the eventual goal of becoming a professor.
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On Sunday, November 7, the Wisconsin State Journal featured a front-page article about the Madison School District's Talented and Gifted education services: "TAG, they're it." The story describes parents' frustration with the pace of reform since the Board of Education approved the new TAG Plan in August, 2009. It paints the TAG Plan as very ambitious and the parents as impatient-perhaps unreasonable-to expect such quick implementation.The article includes a "Complaint Timeline" that starts with the approval of the TAG Plan, skips to the filing of the complaint on September 20, and proceeds from there to list the steps of the DPI audit.
Unfortunately, neither this timeline nor the WSJ article conveys the long history leading up to the parents' complaint. This story did not start with the 2009 TAG Plan. Rather, the 2009 TAG Plan came after almost two decades of the District violating State law for gifted education.
To provide better background, we would like to add more information and several key dates to the "Complaint Timeline."
November 2005: West High School administrators roll out their plan for English 10 at a PTSO meeting. Most of the 70 parents in attendance object to the school eliminating English electives and imposing a one-size-for-all curriculum on all students. Parents ask administrators to provide honors sections of English 10. They refuse. Parents ask administrators to evaluate and fix the problems with English 9 before implementing the same approach in 10th grade. They refuse. Parents appeal to the BOE to intervene; they remain silent. Meanwhile, parents have already been advocating for years to save the lone section of Accelerated Biology at West.
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Political scientist Barry Rubin has an interesting column criticizing the modern tendency to teach kids that playing to win is bad:My son is playing on a local soccer team which has lost every one of its games, often by humiliating scores. The coach is a nice guy, but seems an archetype of contemporary thinking: he tells the kids not to care about whether they win, puts players at any positions they want, and doesn't listen to their suggestions.He never criticizes a player or suggests how a player could do better. My son, bless him, once remarked to me: "How are you going to play better if nobody tells you what you're doing wrong?" The coach just tells them how well they are playing. Even after an 8-0 defeat, he told them they'd played a great game.
And of course, the league gives trophies to everyone, whether their team finishes in first or last place.....
[A]m I right in thinking that sports should prepare children for life, competition, the desire to win, and an understanding that not every individual has the same level of skills? A central element in that world is rewarding those who do better, which also offers an incentive for them and others to strive....
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t Seattle Public Schools, we truly believe in excellence for all. It's more than a saying; it's our commitment to this community and the name of our five-year strategic plan to ensure every child graduates ready for college, career and life.Linda Shaw:Seattle Public Schools is providing detailed information on how each school, and the district overall, is performing. These reports also explain what we are doing to increase academic achievement and close the achievement gap in each school and across the district.
The second annual District Scorecard shows how our students are
performing across the district - from test scores to graduation rates. The Scorecard also shows how the district is performing operationally, in areas such as facilities, transportation and family satisfaction. District ScorecardFor the first time, we are issuing individual School Reports. We want to give parents, students and the community important information so we can all learn from and act on the data.
You can read about your school's academic growth, student climate, accountability, family and staff engagement, and overall school performance. We hope you also take time to read the narrative page,
On Tuesday morning, Seattle Public Schools will unveil detailed new reports on 82 of its schools, and a new ranking system that rates each school on a scale of 1-5 based largely on test scores and whether those scores are moving up or down.The reports, which will be posted on the school district's website about 10 a.m., will give parents and the public more information than ever before on the city's public schools.
In addition to test scores, each school's report includes data about attendance rates, average class size, percent of high-school students taking college classes and much more. The schools also outline their goals for the year and how they plan to achieve them.
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Gayle Worland, via a kind reader's email:
Three times a week, Van Hise Elementary fifth-grader Eve Sidikman and two fellow students from her school board a bus bound for GEMS, the Madison school district's "Growing Elementary Math Students" program for students whose math abilities are so high they aren't challenged in a standard classroom.Lots of related links:
Eve's bus also makes the rounds to Randall and Thoreau before pulling up to the curb at Shorewood Elementary, where Eve and her GEMS classmates have a two-hour math session taught by a member of the district's Talented and Gifted staff."She teaches it in a creative and fun way," Eve, who was placed in GEMS after her mother sought out and paid for a national test that proved Eve was capable of acing eighth-grade math, said of her teacher. "I think she's preparing us for our middle school years well."
The Madison School district is grappling with how best to serve students deemed "Talented and Gifted," or TAG in district shorthand -- partly to stem a talent drain through open enrollment, partly to satisfy a vocal group of dissatisfied parents, and partly to find more Eves who don't necessarily have a family with the financial means, determination and know-how to capitalize on their student's untapped talents.
District critics say change is happening too slowly -- something Superintendent Dan Nerad admits -- and programs like GEMS are few and far between. Advocates also acknowledge, however, there is skepticism of gifted services among both the public and educators at a time when so many students fail to meet even minimal standards.
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Having worked some 40 years in the business world, mostly abroad, with many leaders in business, politics and religion, I believe the most important ingredient for success is setting one or two ambitious, long-term goals that are routinely and publicly measured against the best in the world.Clusty Search: Dave Baskerville.For Wisconsin, we only need two:
Raise our state's per capita income to 10 percent above Minnesota's by 2030.
In job and business creation over the next decade, Wisconsin is often predicted to be among the lowest 10 states. When I was a kid growing up in Madison, income in Wisconsin was some 10 percent higher than in Minnesota. Minnesota caught up to us in 1967, and now the average Minnesotan makes $4,500 more than the average Wisconsinite.Lift the math, science and reading scores of all K-12, non-special education students in Wisconsin above world-class standards by 2030. (emphasis added)
Wisconsinites often believe we lose jobs because of lower wages elsewhere. In fact, it is often the abundance of skills (and subsidies and effort) that bring huge Intel research and development labs to Bangalore, Microsoft research centers to Beijing, and Advanced Micro Devices chip factories to Dresden.
Our educational standards are based relative to the United States. So even if we "successfully" accomplish all of our state educational goals, our kids would still be in the global minor leagues. How about targeting Finland and Singapore in math, South Korea and Japan in science, Canada in reading?
As the saying goes: "When one does not know where one is going, any road will do" (or not do).
Without clear scorecards, we citizens will have little ability to coerce and evaluate politicians and their excuses, rhetoric and laws from the right and left. If JFK had not set a "man on the moon" stretch target, would we have landed there? Do the Green Bay Packers have a chance at winning another Super Bowl if they never tack that goal to the locker room walls?
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Failure to educateThe Boston school system is churning out illiterate students whose only skills are to pass predictable standard tests
I DID not attend a graduation ceremony in 25 years as a Boston public high school teacher. This was my silent protest against a skillfully choreographed mockery of an authentic education - a charade by adults who, knowingly or unwittingly, played games with other people's children.
I knew that most of my students who walked across the stage, amidst the cheers, whistles, camera flashes, and shout-outs from parents, family, and friends, were not functionally literate. They were unable to perform the minimum skills necessary to negotiate society: reading the local newspapers, filling out a job application, or following basic written instructions; even fewer had achieved empowering literacy enabling them to closely read, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate text.
However, they were all college bound - the ultimate goal of our school's vision statement-- clutching knapsacks stuffed with our symbols of academic success: multiple college acceptances, a high school diploma; an official transcript indicating they had passed the MCAS test and had met all graduation requirements; several glowing letters of recommendation from teachers and guidance counselors; and one compelling personal statement, their college essay.
They walked across the stage into a world that was unaware of the truth that scorched my soul --the truth that became clear the first day I entered West Roxbury High School in 1979 (my first assignment as a provisional 12th grade English teacher): the young men and women I was responsible for coaching the last leg of their academic journey could not write a complete sentence, a cohesive paragraph, or a well-developed essay on a given topic. I remember my pain and anger at this revelation and my struggle to reconcile the reality before me with my own high school experience, which had enabled me to negotiate the world of words--oral and written--independently, with relative ease and confidence.
For the ensuing 30-plus years, I witnessed how the system churned out academically unprepared students who lacked the skills needed to negotiate the rigors of serious scholarship, or those skills necessary to move in and up the corporate world.
We instituted tests and assessments, such as the MCAS, that required little exercise in critical thinking, for which most of the students were carefully coached to "pass.'' Teachers, instructors, and administrators made the test the curriculum, taught to the test, drilled for the test, coached for the test, taught strategies to take the test, and gave generous rewards (pizza parties) for passing the test. Students practiced, studied for, and passed the test--but remained illiterate.
I also bear witness to my students' ability to acquire a passing grade for mediocre work. A's and B's were given simply for passing in assignments (quality not a factor), for behaving well in class, for regular attendance, for completing homework assignments that were given a check mark but never read.
In addition, I have been a victim of the subtle and overt pressure exerted by students, parents, administrators, guidance counselors, coaches, and colleagues to give undeserving students passing grades, especially at graduation time, when the "walk across the stage'' frenzy is at its peak.
When all else failed, there were strategies for churning out seemingly academically prepared students. These were the ways around the official requirements: loopholes such as MCAS waivers; returning or deftly transferring students to Special Needs Programs--a practice usually initiated by concerned parents who wanted to avoid meeting the regular education requirements or to gain access to "testing accommodations''; and, Credit Recovery, the computer program that enabled the stragglers, those who were left behind, to catch up to the frontrunners in the Race to the Stage. Students were allowed to take Credit Recovery as a substitute for the course they failed, and by passing with a C, recover their credits.
Nevertheless, this past June, in the final year of my teaching career, I chose to attend my first graduation at the urgings of my students--the ones whose desire to learn, to become better readers and writers, and whose unrelenting hard work earned them a spot on the graduation list--and the admonition of a close friend who warned that my refusal to attend was an act of selfishness, of not thinking about my students who deserved the honor and respect signified by my presence.
At the ceremony I chose to be happy, in spite of the gnawing realization that nothing had changed in 32 years. We had continued playing games with other people's children.
Junia Yearwood, a guest columnist, is a retired Boston Public Schools teacher who taught at English High for 25 years.
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
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New site provides financial literacy curricula for parents, students, and educators.Our sister site GoCollege has given a great deal of attention to the current student loan crisis. The problem is actually a very simple one, easy access to loans has led naïve students to borrow significant sums of money as they pursue their college degree.
The problem is that too many students are borrowing far too much and thus are literally mortgaging their entire future. I recently highlighted my concerns with what is happening in my own state where students are leaving the state university with some of the highest average debt levels in the country.
Unfortunately, financial literacy is not a typical topic generally taught in public schools. Thus, educating children about money and the concept of using credit in a healthy manner still falls upon parents. In essence, this is a subject where every family must employ the home-schooling concept.
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The most successful schools ignore government advice and set their own standards for effective teaching, according to a thinktank report published today.The best schools have an "open culture", in which heads regularly pop into classrooms informally, the thinktank Reform says.
"The teachers view this as supportive rather than threatening ... the best schools foster an expectation and culture of perpetual improvement."
This change in culture leads to failing teachers either improving or leaving, the report says.
Being taught by a good teacher rather than a poor one improves a student's results by half a GCSE grade a subject, according to academic research quoted in the report.
By contrast, class size makes little difference.
Korea and Japan, which have bigger class sizes, do better at maths than pupils in England, according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) figures.
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Gary W. Phillips, Ph.D., via a Richard Askey email
It is worth looking at the data to see how Wisconsin compares with some other states. Here is the mathematics comparison with Minnesota.The "state" results are the percent of students ranked as proficient on the state test with the current cut scores being used. The international percent was obtained by using the state results on NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) and this was mapped by comparing levels of problems to the level on TIMSS, (Trends in Mathematics and Science Study).
Grade 4 Mathematics Percent proficient
State International
Wisconsin 74 45
Minnesota 68 55
Massachusetts 49 63Grade 8 Mathematics
Wisconsin 73 33
Minnesota 56 41
Massachusetts 46 52No, the Massachusetts scores were not reversed here. Their cut score levels are set higher than the TIMSS levels.
It is time for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction to redo the cut score levels to make them realistic. Parents in Wisconsin are mature enough to be told the truth about how well their children are doing.
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Students and parents at Highland Park High School want to stay connected to their school's news, events and numerous activities.The Highland Park School District spends $18,472 per student (6,649) via a $122,825,784 2010/2011 budget. Madison will spend $15,485 per student during the 2010-2011 budget year (24,471 students and a $378,948,997)And now they can. Because there's an app for that.
"[Last year], I was looking for extra things for my kids to do," said Kelly Snowden, an adviser for the school's broadcast and newspaper staff. "We started brainstorming ideas, first for a website and then the app."
In January, the advisers were approached by a media designer, Allan Restrepo, president of YOUniversal Ideas and parent to two students in the district. By fall, the school had introduced its new technology to students and parents.
Since its Sept. 3 kickoff, more than 1,500 people have downloaded the iPhone app, HPHS Media. The app is available to iPhone users, but plans are to expand to other brands of smart phones. The app also can be used with the iPod Touch and iPad.
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An educational earthquake aimed at improving the effectiveness of teachers is rumbling across the nation.So far, the quake is only beginning to affect Wisconsin. But the tremors of change are already being felt here, and more are coming.
In the process, a new world of teaching is being built.
Nationwide, the federal government and giant philanthropies such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are putting hundreds of millions of dollars into underwriting work in dozens of states and cities on better ways to select teachers, monitor their work and pay them.
President Barack Obama has taken on teachers unions - traditionally partisan allies - over teacher improvement issues, while many Republicans, including Wisconsin Governor-elect Scott Walker, say they support reform in teachers' pay.
National leaders of teachers unions, long opposed to change, are willing to talk about once-taboo subjects such as making it easier to get weak teachers out of classrooms.
Multiple factors have ushered in this new era. First, it is now widely understood that not only are teachers the most important school-related factor in student learning, but that teacher effectiveness varies drastically. Second, the recession - and the resulting stimulus package - gave Obama a chance to launch large programs focused on increasing teacher effectiveness. Third, data about students and teachers has improved greatly, providing better tools for figuring out the success of many teachers on an individual basis.
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Enclosed is an update report regarding the High School Career and College Readiness Plan. This plan is written as a complement to the first document entitled "Dual Pathways to Post-Secondary Success". The original document was intended to outline both a possible structure for organizing accelerated and preparatory courses for high school students. The original document was also intended to serve as an internal document outlining a planning process. Since, the dissemination of the "Dual Pathways to Post-Secondary Success" many questions and concerns have been expressed by a variety of stakeholders. Through feedback and questions brought forth by teachers, students, community members and the Board of Education it is understood that our original plan did not effectively communicate the rationale, scope, scale, and end outcomes as intended. The conversations that occurred as a result of the dissemination of the "Dual Pathways to Post-Secondary Success" have been at times difficult but they have also been the right conversations for us to have in order to move forward as a district. These conversations have highlighted the interconnectedness ofall grade levels, calling on us to proceed with a k-12 district wide curricular alignmentprocessinwhichhighschoolisembedded. hlordertomoreaccuratelycapturetheintentofouroriginal work we have renamed the plan High School Career and College Readiness to accurately reflect the intended goal; for all MMSD graduates will become self-determined learners able to access a wide array ofpost-secondary options. For these reasons, we have not included the original "Dual Pathways to Post-Secondary Success" plan in this report. Rather we have created this document to serve as bridge that more clearly articulates the history, rationale, data, work to date and next steps that are outlined in the original plan. Our Theory of Action, process
and end goals have not changed, but how we articulate this work has become more explicit, transparent and responsive. Weare in process ofcreating a more comprehensive plan to be shared with a broad range ofaudiences. We will share that plan with the Board of Education when finalized. We will also share periodic updates with the Board of Education. ill the meantime, the enclosed report serves to answer questions, concerns received to date and provide more detailed and accurate iuformation. Attached is the original document, unchanged.
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Developing Asia's rapidly expanding middle class is likely to assume the traditional role of the US and Europe as primary global consumers and help rebalance the global economy, says a new report on Asia's middle class from the Asian Development Bank (ADB).The report, published in a special chapter of Key Indicators for Asia and the Pacific 2010, the flagship annual statistical publication of the ADB, found that Asia's consumers spent an estimated $4.3 trillion (in 2005 purchasing power parity dollars), or about one-third of OECD consumption expenditure, in 2008 and by 2030 will likely spend $32 trillion, comprising about 43% of the worldwide consumption.
The special chapter, titled "The Rise of Asia's Middle Class", examines the rapid growth of Asia's middle class, how the poor advance to the middle class, factors that characterize the middle class, and pathways through which they become effective contributors to growth and poverty reduction in the region.
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Officials limit access to Stoughton High School after gun threatResponding to rumors that a student might bring a gun to Stoughton High School today, Stoughton police officers patrolled the school Thursday and plan to continue patrols today and Monday, district Administrator Tim Onsager said.
Access to the high school was allowed through only one door all day and at a second door before school, during lunch and after school, principal Mike Kruse said in an e-mail. Most extracurricular activities were canceled Thursday and today, as were staff meetings scheduled for today to allow teachers to remain in the classroom with students, Kruse wrote.
The district continues to investigate the origin of the rumors, but has not been able to substantiate any of the various stories circulating among students. No students have been disciplined so far, Onsager said.
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Alan Borsuk via a Senn Brown email
Two quick education-related comments on Tuesday's election outcomes in Wisconsin:Change is certainly in the air.
First, this was a banner outcome in the eyes of voucher and charter school leaders. Governor-elect Scott Walker is a long-time ally of those promoting the 20,000-plus-student private school voucher program in the city of Milwaukee, and he is a booster of charter schools both in Milwaukee and statewide. But just as important as Walker's win was the thumpingly strong victories for Republicans in both the Assembly and State Senate, which will now come under sizable Republican majorities.What will result?
Let's assume it's good-bye to the 22,500-student cap on the voucher enrollment in Milwaukee. Will Walker and the Legislature expand the voucher program beyond the city, perhaps, for openers, to Racine? Will they open the doors wider for charter schools, for national charter-school operators to come into Wisconsin, and for more public bodies to be given the power to authorize charter schools? (Currently, UW-Milwaukee, Milwaukee City Hall, and UW-Parkside are the only ones authorized to do that, other than school boards.) Perhaps most important, what will the Republicans do about the per-student payments to voucher and charter schools? School leaders now are chafing under the impact of receiving less than $6,500 per student for each voucher student and less than $8,000 for each charter student. Will this be one of the very few spots where the Republicans increase the state's financial involvement? Pretty good chance the answer is yes to all of the above.
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In Advanced Placement Nation, that version of America populated by high school students taking college-level AP courses and tests, Florida covers a huge portion of the map. The St. Petersburg Times points out the state is number one in the percentage of graduating seniors taking AP tests and number five in the percentage of seniors passing them.So, Times reporter Ron Matus reveals, the newspaper decided to see if Florida was getting its money's worth for paying its students' AP testing fees, something only two other states do. The Times analysis concluded that the program was saving college families tens of millions of dollars they don't have to pay for college courses that AP exempts their students from taking. Whether taxpayers are also saving money is more difficult to determine, Matus said.
"Florida students passed 114,430 AP tests this year," Matus wrote, "up from 66,511 five years ago. Even assuming a fair chunk of those tests won't translate into credits, the Times estimates Florida families will save at least $40 million in tuition and fees."
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Fellow graduate students sometimes express shock at how little many undergraduates know about the structure and purpose of universities. It's not astonishing to me: I didn't understand the basic facts of academic life or the hierarchies and incentives universities present to faculty and students when I walked into Clark University at age 18. I learned most of what's expressed here through osmosis, implication, inference, discussion with professors, and random reading over seven years. Although most of it seems obvious now, as a freshman I was like a medieval peasant who conceived of the earth as the center of the universe; Copernicus' heliocentric[1] revolution hadn't reached me, and the much more accurate view of the universe discovered by later thinkers wasn't even a glimmer to me. Consequently, I'm writing this document to explain, as clearly and concisely as I can, how universities work and how you, a freshman or sophomore, can thrive in them.The biggest difference between a university and a high school is that universities are designed to create new knowledge, while high schools are designed to disseminate existing knowledge. That means universities give you far greater autonomy and in turn expect far more from you in terms of intellectual curiosity, personal interest, and maturity.
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This Saturday, high-school students around the country will sit for hours of silent testing that will determine some portion of their future: That's right, it's SAT time. For both parents and kids, the preparation for taking the standardized test is stressful and expensive, often involving hours of studying and several hundreds of dollars spent on classes, workbooks and tutors. And many kids will take these tests more than once.So this week I tried a Web-based form of test prep called Grockit that aims to make studying for the SAT, ACT, GMAT, GRE or LSAT less expensive and more enjoyable. Grockit.com offers lessons, group study and solo practice, and does a nice job of feeling fun and educational, which isn't an easy combination to pull off.
A free portion of the site includes group study with a variety of questions and a limited number of solo test questions, which are customized to each student's study needs. The $100 Premium subscription includes full access to the online platform with unlimited solo practice questions and personalized performance analytics that track a student's progress. A new offering called Grockit TV (grockit.com/tv) offers free eight-week courses if students watch them streaming live twice a week. Otherwise, a course can be downloaded for $100 during the course or $150 afterward. Instructors hailing from the Princeton Review and Kaplan, among other places, teach test preparation for the GMAT business-school admissions test and SAT.
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High property prices and economic development have begun to erode China's traditional preference for sons, leading to a rise in the number of Chinese parents who say they would prefer a daughter.The centuries-old cultural preference for boys was exacerbated in recent decades by China's "one child" policy, which led to the abandonment, abortion or infanticide of millions of girls.
But the conventional wisdom - that China is a land of unwanted girls, many of them sent overseas for adoption - is being turned on its head as urbanisation increases the cost of raising male heirs and erodes the advantage of having sons to work the fields and support parents in their dotage.
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New Jersey Star Ledger Editorial Board
First, get the data right. Then, hand it over to parents.As soon as standardized evaluations become available for teachers in New Jersey, they should be made public -- with teacher names attached. That will force districts to make a priority of teacher quality.
Elsewhere, newspapers have filed Freedom of Information requests to get this data released. They're following in the footsteps of the Los Angeles Times, which recently published the names and "value-added" scores of about 6,000 L.A. teachers.
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When it comes to our nation's future, millions of us will be glued to our television screens looking for clues from the election results. Not Roberto Huie. When it comes to America's future, this high school senior already knows his part: as a member of the West Point Class of 2015.Mr. Huie may not be the kind of kid you think of when you think of our military academies. Part Latino, part African-American, he lives in a South Bronx neighborhood that belongs to the poorest congressional district in the nation. Nevertheless, he has two big things going for him: a mom raising him to be a man--and an all-boys public school teaching him what it means to be a leader.
All that converged yesterday morning on the second floor of the Eagle Academy for Young Men in the Bronx. There 50 of Mr. Huie's peers, drawn from the school's highest-performing students, were seated for what they--and Mr. Huie--all assumed would be another presentation from another college rep. Instead, they watched, captivated, as Army Maj. Michael Burns presented Mr. Huie with a letter from the superintendent of the United States Military Academy congratulating him on his appointment.
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At last month's Food for Thought Festival in Madison, Martha Pings attended a panel discussion titled "Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children." Among the panelists was Frank Kelly, director of food services for the Madison school district, who spoke of his desire to provide kids with nutritious food.Two weeks later, Pings' daughter came home from O'Keeffe Middle School on Madison's east side with news that the cafeteria had a new a la carte option: a slushie machine.
The machine drew a backlash from Pings and other O'Keeffe parents, and last week was removed from the school at the request of the principal, Kay Enright (see article, 10/21/10). "I wish they would have asked me to begin with," says Enright, who agrees the slushies were not "a healthy addition to our menu of choices."
But there are larger issues here, as Pings, a member of Madison Families for Better Nutrition, related in a letter to school officials posted on the group's website.
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Yet again, the California State University trustees are poised to raise tuition - this time by 15.5 percent - when they meet in Long Beach two weeks from now.Chancellor Charles Reed is recommending a midyear tuition increase of 5 percent for undergraduates, credential candidates and graduate students, and another 10 percent increase on top of that for fall 2011.
If approved, the current annual tuition of $4,230 for undergraduates would rise by $654 next fall to $4,884 - not including mandatory campus fees, which are $950 this year, or the cost of housing, books and meals.
The midyear hike would raise the spring semester price tag to $2,220 for undergraduates, up from $2,115.
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Positive recognition has long been a trusted way of raising money on college campuses, where buildings, benches, and even the insides of library books bear the names of donors.But in an effort to spur gifts among young soon-to-be alumni, students at two Ivy League institutions are trying a different approach: publicizing the names of seniors who don't contribute to their class gift.
With lists supplied by college administrators, student volunteers at Dartmouth College and Cornell University circulated the names of students who had not donated to senior-gift drives. The programs relied on students to single out their peers to meet high participation goals.
Not everyone participated happily. The single student from Dartmouth's 1,123-student Class of 2010 who did not contribute this year was criticized in a column in the college newspaper and on a popular blog, which posted her name and photograph. The student e-mailed a testy response to fellow classmates describing her position.
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When I tell people that I'm the founder of Uncommon Schools, a network of high-performing charter schools for low-income children, started in 1997, I often hear a skeptical response: "Admirable what you're trying, but you're cherry-picking your students. The average poor kid is doomed, right?"I know a second grader--let's call him Hosea--who would seem to have drawn a doomed hand, born into the wrong ZIP Code in Newark, N.J., to a teen mom and an absent father. When his grandmother attended public school here in the 1970s, the district was dysfunctional and corrupt; by the 1990s, when his mom was in school, the state had "taken over," but the result was the same: abysmal test scores and sad outcomes. According to skeptics, Hosea has about a 1% chance of graduating from college.
But please don't tell any of this to Hosea! At 7:45 on a recent morning, he started the day singing the Oberlin College cheer. At North Star Academy's elementary school (which opened four years ago as part of our network), he sat with 225 other first, second and third graders in a giant circle, hands folded, backs straight, focused laser-like on their teacher, Julie Jackson.
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Will Fitzhugh, via email:
"...Within a system that fails very few students, then, only those student who have high standards of their own--who have more stringent criteria for success and failure--will strive to do better than merely to pass their courses and graduate."
"...Third, there are important differences in how students view the causes of their successes and failures, and these differences in students' beliefs have important implications for how they actually perform in school. Successful students believe that their accomplishments are the result of hard work, and their failures the consequence of insufficient effort.""Beyond the Classroom," Laurence Steinberg
Beyond the Classroom, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, pp. 183-187
For nearly fifteen years now, educators and policy-makers have been engaged in a nationwide effort to solve the problem of low student achievement in America. In one blue-ribbon bipartisan commission report after another, the American public has been told that if we change how we organize our schools, how and what we teach in the classrooms, and how we select, train, and compensate our teachers, we will see improvements in our children's educational performance. In response to these reports, government agencies and private foundations have spent massive amounts of money on research designed to transform America's schools. Although we hear occasional success stories about a school here or a program there that has turned students' performance around, the competence of American students has not improved.
It is time we faced the music: fifteen years of school reform has not really accomplished anything. Today's students know less, and can do less, than their counterparts could twenty-five years ago. Our high school graduates are among the least intellectually competent in the industrialized world. Contrary to widespread claims that the low achievement of American students is not real--that it is merely a "statistical artifact"--systematic scientific evidence indicates quite compellingly that the problem of poor student achievement is genuine, substantial, and pervasive across ethnic, socioeconomic, and age groups.
The achievement problem we face in this country is due not to a drop in the intelligence or basic intellectual capability of our children, but to a widespread decline in children's interest in education and in their motivation to achieve in the classroom; it is a problem of attitude and effort, not ability. Two decades ago, a teacher in an average high school in this country could expect to have three or four "difficult" students in a class of thirty. Today, teachers in these same schools are expected to teach to classrooms in which nearly half of the students are uninterested. And only a very small proportion of the remaining half strives for excellence.
Given the findings of our study, it is not difficult to understand why so many students coast through school without devoting very much energy to schoolwork. As things stand, there is little reason for the majority of students to exert themselves any more than is necessary to avoid failing, being held back, or not graduating. Within an educational system in which all that counts is promotion to the next level--in which earning good grades is seen as equivalent to earning mediocre ones, and worse yet, in which actually learning something from school is seen as equivalent to not learning anything at all--students choose the path of least resistance. Getting by, rather than striving to succeed, has become the organizing principle behind student behavior in our schools. It is easy to point the finger at schools for creating this situation, but parents, employers, and the mass media have been significant participants in this process as well.
Our findings suggest that the sorry state of American student achievement is due more to the conditions of students' lives outside of school than it is to what takes place within school walls. In my view, the failure of the school reform movement to reverse the decline in achievement is due to its emphasis on reforming schools and classrooms, and its general disregard of the contributing factors that, while outside the boundaries of the school, are probably more influential. In this final chapter, I want to go beyond the findings of our study and discuss a series of steps America needs to take if we are to successfully address [solve] the problem of declining student achievement.Although we did not intend our study to be a study of ethnicity and achievement, the striking and consistent ethnic differences in performance and behavior that we observed demand careful consideration, if only because they demonstrate that some students are able to achieve at high levels within American schools, whatever our schools' shortcomings may be. This does not mean, of course that our schools are free of problems, or that all students would be performing at high levels "if only" they behaved like their successful counterparts from other ethnic groups. Nevertheless, our findings do suggest that there may be something important to be learned by examining the behaviors and attitudes of students who are able to succeed within American schools as they currently exist, and that something other than deficiencies in our schools is contributing to America's achievement problem.
By identifying some of the factors that appear to contribute to the remarkable success of Asian students (and Asian immigrants in particular), or that impede success among African-American and Latino students (and especially among Latinos whose families have been living in the United States for some time), we were able to ask whether these same factors contribute to student achievement in all groups. That is, we asked whether the factors that seem to give an advantage to Asian students as a group are the same factors that facilitate student achievement in general, regardless of a youngster's ethnic background. The answer, for the most part, is yes.
Across all ethnic groups, working hard in school is a strong predictor of academic accomplishment. One clear reason for the relative levels of performance of the various ethnic groups is that Asian students devote relatively more effort to their studies, and Black and Latino youngsters relatively less. Compared with their peers, Asian youngsters spend twice as much time each week on homework and are significantly more engaged in the classroom. Students from other ethnic groups are more likely to cut class, less likely to pay attention, and less likely to value doing well in school. Black and Latino students are less likely to do the homework they are assigned than are White or Asian students.
Second, successful students are more likely than their peers to worry about the potential negative consequences of not getting a good education. Students need to believe that their performance in school genuinely matters in order to do well in the classroom, but students appear to be more strongly motivated by the desire to avoid failure than by actually striving for success. Because schools expect so little from students, however, it is easy for most of them to avoid failing without exerting much effort or expending much energy. Within a system that fails very few students, then, only those student who have high standards of their own--who have more stringent criteria for success and failure--will strive to do better than merely to pass their courses and graduate.
Asian students are far more likely to be worried about the possibility of not doing well in school and the implications of this for their future; this, then, is the second reason for their superior performance relative to other youngsters. Contrary to popular stereotype, African-American and Latino students are not especially pessimistic or cynical about the value of schooling, but, rather are unwisely optimistic about the repercussions of doing poorly in school. Either these students believe they can succeed without getting a good education or they have adopted this view as a way of compensating psychologically for their relatively weaker performance. In either case, though, their cavalier appraisal of the consequences of doing poorly in school is a serious liability.
Third, there are important differences in how students view the causes of their successes and failures, and these differences in students' beliefs have important implications for how they actually perform in school. Successful students believe that their accomplishments are the result of hard work, and their failures the consequence of insufficient effort. Unsuccessful students, in contrast, attribute success and failure to factors outside their own control, such as luck, innate ability, or the biases of teachers. The greater prevalence of the healthful attributional style we see among Asian students in this country is consistent with what other researchers have found in cross-cultural comparisons of individuals' beliefs about the origins of success. Americans, in general, place too much emphasis on the importance of native ability, and too little emphasis on the necessity of hard work. This set of views is hurting our children's achievement in school.
Regardless of ethnic background, success in school is highly correlated with being strongly engaged in school emotionally. The factors that contribute to the relative success of Asian students--hard work, high personal standards, anxiety about doing poorly, and the belief that success and failure are closely linked to the amount of effort one exerts--are keys to academic success in all groups of students. The superior performance of Asian students in American schools, then, is not mysterious, but explainable on the basis of their attitudes, values, and behavior.
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Catherine Gewertz via Will Fitzhugh:
Those of you who lament the state of high school students' research and writing skills will be interested in a discussion that's been unfolding at the National Association of Scholars. It began a couple weeks ago with the publication of a previously undisclosed report on why students are not learning--let alone mastering-- the skills of crafting substantial research papers.2002 History Research Paper Study:The report is here, and the explanation of its origins and disclosure is described in the press release here. A response from a frustrated high school English teacher is here.
The report found that most social studies/history teachers never assign moderately long research papers. Most of the teachers--whose student loads often surpass 150--said they can't afford the time necessary to grade such papers.
This is hardly a new conversation. Consider the work done by Achieve and ACT on this issue, and the look Cincinnati took at it last year. And Will Fitzhugh, who was the driving force behind the recently disclosed paper, has been tirelessly advocating for rigorous high school research papers for years. A retired history teacher, he runs the Concord Review, the only journal that publishes high school students' history research papers, and blogs as well. (He sums up his views on the importance of research papers in this EdWeek commentary, from a few years ago, and more recently on The Washington Post's Answer Sheet blog.)
On a related note, another recent paper pinpointed a fragmented high school English curriculum and a neglect of close-reading skills as key explanations for teenagers' poor reading skills. That paper was written by one of the architects of Massachusetts' academic standards, former state board member Sandra Stotsky, and published by the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW).
While the reflections on students' mastery of reading, writing and research skills are hardly new, they take on an interesting dimension (and more urgency, perhaps?) with the widespread adoption of common standards that envision a significant shift in how literacy skills are taught.
Among those teachers who do not assign research papers, the predominant factor is time. Namely, the time it takes to correct and grade the assigned papers and the time research papers can take away from other curriculum priorities.The majority (82%) of teachers say it is difficult to find adequate time to devote to reading and grading the research papers they assign. Almost half (49%) of teachers say that is very difficult to find the time, one third (33%) say that it is somewhat difficult.
Underscoring that difficulty is that grading papers cuts into teacher's personal time--more than six in ten specify non-school time, or personal time, as the place where they grade papers. Specifically, one in five (20%) grades papers at home or outside of school, 10% do so on weekends and 15% on their own time, 8% say they use evenings or late nights, 3% use time in the early morning and 1% assign papers over a holiday or break.
Since time is such an important consideration, it is not surprising that teachers value the timeliness of paper submission. On a scale of one to ten, 70% ranked submitting the paper on time as a "9" or a "10." In terms of grading importance, timeliness is followed by the quality of written expression and a well-defined, important thesis or hypothesis.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
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Ken Syke, via email:
All community members are invited to participate in a Community Conversation on Education during which attendees can share - in small group discussions - their hopes and concerns for public education in Madison.
Join the Community Conversation on EducationShare your concerns and hopes for public education in Madison. Sponsors United Way of Dane County, Urban League of Greater Madison, Madison Teachers, Inc., Madison Metropolitan School District and UW-Madison School of Education have organized an evening of focus questions and small group discussion intended to elicit ideas for action.
When: Tuesday, November 9 • 6:30 - 8:30 PM
Where: CUNA Mutual Group Building • 5910 Mineral Point Road
Who: Parents/Guardians, Educators, High School Students, Community Members
To register, go to www.Madison4Education.org or call 663-1879.
Seating capacity is 200 so please register soon. It is not necessary to have seen the movie Waiting for Superman.Transportation from a few specific sites will be available to registrants, as will be childcare and language interpretation. However, it's important to register to obtain these supports.
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College costs a fortune. It takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of money.When a professor assigns you to send a blogger a list of vague and inane interview questions ("1. How did you get started in this field? 2. What type of training (education) does this field require? 3. What do you like best about your job? 4. what do you like least about your job?") I think you have an obligation to say, "Sir, I'm going to be in debt for ten years because of this degree. Perhaps you could give us an assignment that actually pushes us to solve interesting problems, overcome our fear or learn something that I could learn in no other way..."
When a professor spends hours in class going over concepts that are clearly covered in the textbook, I think you have an obligation to repeat the part about the debt and say, "perhaps you could assign this as homework and we could have an actual conversation in class..."
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Half of high school students say they've bullied someone in the past year, and nearly half say they've been the victim of bullying, according to a national study.The survey released Tuesday by the Los Angeles-based Josephson Institute of Ethics asked more than 43,000 high school students whether they'd been physically abused, teased or taunted in a way that seriously upset them. Forty-three per cent said yes, and 50 per cent admitted to being the bully.
The institute's president, Michael Josephson, said the study shows more bullying goes on at later ages than previously thought, and remains extremely prevalent through high school.
"Previous to this, the evidence was bullying really peaks in middle school," Josephson told The Associated Press.
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Parents of preschoolers who are applying to New York's top private schools are now coming face to face with the test universally known as the E.R.B., a nerve-racking intelligence exam made more so because there is no do-over if the child has a bad day.But for a select few students who do not score well, there is something of a second chance. Admissions consultants, preschools and some private schools acknowledge that a small number of children every year are permitted to undergo another round of intelligence testing to supplement their results on the E.R.B., which stands for the Educational Records Bureau, the organization that administers the test.
The practice is not publicized on schools' Web sites, and the psychologists who offer the service do not openly advertise it. Nor is it entirely clear what qualifies a child for another test, although those who are children of alumni or have a sibling already at a school are most frequently granted the option, according to consultants and schools.
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When the principal told Sylvia Mojica that her 12-year-old son had brought a weapon with him to the Latino Studies Academy at Burns Elementary School on Friday, she became nervous and reacted, she said, as any mother would.Mojica told the principal she had given the BB gun to her son -- even though it wasn't true, she said.
"I took the blame so that my son would not get arrested," she said. "I know I made a mistake, but I believe any parent would have done the same thing."
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The simple truth is that many families in this country don't put a high priority on education. After all, it takes 13 years to finish high school and another four years to earn a college degree. That's 17 years that parents must regularly cajole their children, and 17 years that they must feed, clothe and provide shelter without any return on their investment.The problem with education in this country lies not with the children, but with the parents. If parents don't continually emphasize the importance of education, only the most self-motivated students will ultimately become independent of their families and the state.
Currently, the vast majority of funds allocated to education are for tuition, scholarships, lunches and books. Only a miniscule amount of money is being used to help parents become better parents.
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Superintendent Daniel A. Nerad
It has been requested of Administration to put together possible scenarios for funding four year old kindergarten (4-k) through the use of Education Jobs Bill funding, Equity Reserves, Property Taxes, and any other sources of funding.Much more on Madison's planned 4K program here.What you will find below are three distinct scenarios looking at how we may fund 4-k over the first 4 years. The focus is on the first 4 years, because the original projections put together by administration and subsequently by PMA through the forecasting model looked at the program beginning in the 2010-11 school year as year one, so we consequently only have projections going through the 2014-15 school year.
These projections will be updated as part of our work with the 5 year budget model ad hoc committee of the Board in the coming months.
All of the following scenarios we believe to be very conservative in terms of the number of students to be enrolled, and especially on projections for funding from the State of Wisconsin. These original projections from earlier this year, assumed MMSD would be losing 15% funding from the State of Wisconsin for the 2010-11, 2011-12, and 2012-13 budget years. As we have seen recently, we have lost less than the maximum state law allows (2010-11 reduction of approximately 8.4%). The funding scenarios are as follows:
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What if failure really were not an option?Geoffrey Canada is adamant in his answer: People would succeed. They wouldn't give up, they would work harder, and, when it comes to schools, they wouldn't keep doing the same unsuccessful things over and over.
"When it's clear that failure won't be tolerated or accepted, you know what happens? People stop failing," Canada told more than 500 people Friday at the Hyatt Regency Milwaukee. He was the keynote speaker at a national conference of the Alliance for Children and Families, a Milwaukee-based organization for human services organizations.
Canada is the founder and CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone, a birth-through-college set of programs focused on getting children in a 97-block area of New York's Harlem to earn college diplomas. He has become a national celebrity as a crusader for such efforts. He is featured in the new, controversial movie, "Waiting for 'Superman.' "
Canada said things Friday that would leave people from most anywhere on the political spectrum saying, no way, can't be done, he's crazy. Teachers, major politicians, rich people, low-income people - he said things all would dislike.
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Widespread predictions that students would approach the college decision differently in an economic downturn, and that colleges would plan conservatively to make their new classes, appear to have come true. A report from the National Association for College Admission Counseling, released on Wednesday, documents changes in student and college behavior in the 2009 admissions cycle.The report, "The State of College Admission 2010," uses data from the association's surveys of colleges and schools, the College Board's annual survey of colleges, and the federal government.
During the 2009 cycle, the number of students graduating from high school in the United States reached a peak of 3.33 million; the number of high-school graduates is projected to decline through 2014-15.
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The city's teachers' union said on Wednesday that it would request a restraining order to prevent education officials from releasing reports that rate thousands of city teachers based on how much progress students made on state standardized tests.The release of the reports, if a judge does not block it, would propel New York City to the center of a national debate about how student test scores should be used to evaluate teachers and whether news media organizations should release the ratings of teachers to the public as a measure of their performance. The reports include the names of teachers and their schools.
The city's public school principals have received the reports for the past two years, and last year, they were instructed to use them in teacher evaluations and tenure decisions. But education officials have repeatedly refused to make the reports public because of an agreement with the teachers' union and because of concerns that their release could compromise student privacy. Several news media organizations, including The New York Times, requested their release.
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Spanish-speaking parents filled the cafeteria at Moffett Elementary School in Lennox earlier this month to watch Lorena Marin, a parent coordinator and literacy coach, demonstrate how to use a digital thermometer and liquid-medicine dispenser."What do you do when your child is choking?" Marin asked the crowd of about 50, some toting babies.
Get them to hold their arms up or look at a bird in the sky, parents said. Marin pointed to a section in a simply worded medical reference book that each had received that morning as part of the program. The book explained in Spanish about choking hazards and resuscitation.
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As an undergraduate at Sacramento State, Ryan Stevens founded NoteUtopia in order to provide a mechanism for students to buy, sell, and share their university course notes. Stevens graduated last spring and NoteUtopia officially launched in August. But less than six weeks into the startup's history, NoteUtopia has received a cease-and-desist letter from the California State University system, charging that the company violates a provision of the state education code.The provision in question dates back a decade and reads "no business, agency, or person, including, but not necessarily limited to, an enrolled student, shall prepare, cause to be prepared, give, sell, transfer, or otherwise distribute or publish, for any commercial purpose, any contemporaneous recording of an academic presentation in a classroom or equivalent site of instruction by an instructor of record. This prohibition applies to a recording made in any medium, including, but not necessarily limited to, handwritten or typewritten class notes."
Following the cease-and-desist letter, officials also emailed the students at all 23 universities in the Cal State system, warning them that selling their class notes online "including on the NoteUtopia website, is subject to discipline, up through and including expulsion from the university."
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Augustana College has never been a pure liberal arts institution.The Illinois college has long had programs like education and business amid the traditional liberal arts disciplines. But those programs have been relatively few in number and, faculty members say, have never defined the institution's ethos, which is solidly in the liberal arts tradition. The college is proud of its general education program, of its study abroad offerings, and of its emphasis on critical thinking and building of community, not just on job preparation.
Now, in the face of the economic downturn, the college is making some adjustments -- which Steven C. Bahls, its president, calls the "post-recession strategic plan" for a liberal arts college. That means several new majors focused on pre-professional interests. With new majors, Bahls says the college may need, over time, to move away from a tradition (rare among American colleges) of paying faculty members equivalent salaries across disciplines; the plan also means symbolic and real steps to be sure that the college can attract diverse students, beyond its historic (and shrinking) base of Swedish Lutheran families.
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Michael C. Macchiarola & Arun Abraham:
After the bursting of the housing bubble and the Great Recession that followed, there has been an increasing focus on improving market transparency and recognizing other potential bubbles. The higher education and student loan markets are under new levels of scrutiny because they display many of the hallmarks of a bubble. The American government's model of freely extending federal loans to students, while improving lower- and middle-class access to higher education, has enabled the formation of detrimental distortions in the higher education market. At the same time, the soaring cost of higher education has saddled a generation of young Americans with unmanageable student loan debt. Evidence is beginning to mount that, for too many, their debt-financed higher education represents a stifling encumbrance instead of the great investment that society's collective commonsense has long suggested.This Article explores the factors that contribute to the distortions in the higher education market, including (1) the informational asymmetries that exist between the various parties to a typical debt-financed purchase of an education, (2) accreditation rules, (3) the peculiar incentives of school faculties, and (4) widely followed school rankings. Due to nuances between different segments of the higher education market, this Article focuses on one segment for the sake of brevity: law schools. However, the analysis and prescription have more general applicability to all segments of the higher education market.
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The fact is, today's young professionals need to be told how to dress and actA few summers ago, Google (GOOG) intern Gregory Duncan was receiving instruction at his workstation in the company's New York office when a visitor swung by for a chat. Duncan remembers that his engineer-supervisor wasn't very gracious about the social call. "Just a minute," he hissed at the visitor, holding up an index finger in the universal signal for 'I have way more important things to deal with.' The visitor? Sergey Brin.
Civility in the workplace has been on the decline since Emily Post published her primer on the topic, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home, in 1922. Even books about etiquette--like the current best-seller The No Asshole Rule--lack a certain polish. Yet as hoodie-wearing, emoticon-tweeting millennials graduate college and prepare for the workforce, the low point may just be arriving. In other words, it's a great time to be a professional etiquette coach.
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Jeevan Vasagar & Jessica Shepherd:
Universities should be allowed to decide what they charge students under a radical shakeup of higher education which would see the existing cap on tuition fees lifted.A new system of financing universities will allow for a 10% increase in student places to meet rising demand for a degree-level education, the Browne review proposes.
Lord Browne, the former chief executive of BP, said universities that charged the highest fees would have to demonstrate they are widening access to students from poorer homes.
"There are a variety of things they can do in that area, including offering scholarships for living expenses," he told the Guardian.
Graduates will start repaying the cost of their degrees when they start earning £21,000 a year, up from £15,000 under the current system, the review recommends.
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I am both delighted and honored to receive Dr. Hacker's correspondence--as well as the generous message of thanks left publicly by co-author Claudia Dreifus in the comments of the post itself--and given the opportunity, I composed a reply to them which clarifies and expands my earlier comments. What follows is a slightly altered version of these additional thoughts.Firstly, I did not mean to argue that because many less prestigious colleges provide a great undergraduate education that therefore prestigious places which employ graduate teaching assistants do not. The PhD students in the United States I've met are brilliant, enthusiastic, generous people, and I feel fortunate to know them. Their undergraduates are likewise fortunate. So while I believe it is accurate to suggest that undergraduate education in the Ivy League schools is no better than it is in many other (occasionally unlikely) places, on the other hand I would be hesitant to argue that it is necessarily worse. Obviously, you do not need a research superstar to teach Sociology 101 -- nor do you need an instructor with thirty years of experience. Some of the most dedicated and effective teachers I've ever met are current PhD students.
Nevertheless, that fact does not justify the wholesale casualization of the academic workforce. My experience at Raritan Valley Community College was perhaps atypical. Like most community colleges, RVCC relies heavily upon poorly-paid adjuncts (some of whom are also graduate students in the region), but because I was taking upper-level courses as a student there I was fortunate to have taken classes taught primarily by full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty. I believe that this was an invaluable part of my experience. These professors provided not just expertise but also continuity to the educational experience. For students such as me, knowing that the professors would be there semester after semester, year after year, fosters attachment to the college and confidence in its mission. Thus the faculty was key to RVCC's strength. A strong community requires social stability.
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FOR more than half a century, Americans have fled the cities in their millions, heading away from crime and poverty towards better schools and safer neighbourhoods in the suburbs. Now poverty is catching up with them. According to two new reports from the Brookings Institution, over the past decade the number of poor people in the suburbs has jumped by a whopping 37.4% to 13.7m, compared with some 12.1m people below the poverty line in cities. Although poverty rates remain higher in the inner cities, the gap is narrowing.Suburban areas largely escaped during earlier downturns, but not this time. Support groups say people are using safety-net programmes, such as food stamps or unemployment insurance, who have never applied for them before. They are often making tough choices. "It's mortgage or food," observes Paule Pachter of Long Island Cares, a non-profit group on Long Island, one of the first destinations to be populated by escapees from the city.
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Ask preschooler Zane Pike to write his name or the alphabet, then watch this 4-year-old's stubborn side kick in. He spurns practice at school and tosses aside workbooks at home. But Angie Pike, Zane's mom, persists, believing that handwriting is a building block to learning.She's right. Using advanced tools such as magnetic resonance imaging, researchers are finding that writing by hand is more than just a way to communicate. The practice helps with learning letters and shapes, can improve idea composition and expression, and may aid fine motor-skill development.
It's not just children who benefit. Adults studying new symbols, such as Chinese characters, might enhance recognition by writing the characters by hand, researchers say. Some physicians say handwriting could be a good cognitive exercise for baby boomers working to keep their minds sharp as they age.
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Tanya Lawler was taken aback. Her daughter, returning from West High's homecoming dance on Sept. 25, mentioned that students were randomly selected to take a breath test as they arrived, to see if they'd been drinking.While her daughter was not tested, Lawler considers this a "violation of Fourth Amendment rights" because officials lacked probable cause to suspect the people being tested. Her son attended La Follette's homecoming dance, held the same night, and reported that no testing was done there.
In fact, West is the only high school in Madison that has a formal written policy (PDF) regarding student dances, and the only one that randomly tests students as they enter using "a passive alcohol detection device." Students and a parent must sign a form agreeing to these rules.
Lawler, who doesn't remember this form, advised her daughter to refuse this test. "I would rather forfeit the price of the ticket and have her call me. I'd say, 'No, they're not going to violate your rights.'"
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Lots of related links:[Update: I just got emailed this letter as West parent. Crisis communication is happening. Not much new here, but some clarity}
The first steps with the “High School Curricular Reform, Dual Pathways to Post-Secondary Success” are a mess, a big mess of the administration’s own making.
Before I delve into the mess and the proposal, I think it is important to say that despite huge and inexcusable problems with the process, many unanswered questions and some real things of concern; there are some good things in the proposal. One part near the heart of the plan in particular is something I’ve been pushing for years: open access to advanced classes and programs with supports. In the language of the proposal:
Pathways open to all students. Students are originally identified by Advanced Placement requirements and other suggested guidelines such as EXPLORE /PLAN scores, GPA, past MS/HS performance and MS/HS Recommendation. however, all students would be able to enroll. Students not meeting suggested guidelines but wanting to enroll would receive additional supports (tutoring, skill development classes, AVID, etc.) to ensure success. (emphasis added and I would like to see it added in the implementation).
Right now there are great and at times irrational barriers in place. These need to go. I hope this does not get lost as the mess is cleaned up.
This is in four sections: The Mess; What Next?; The Plan: Unanswered Questions and Causes for Concern; and Final Thought.
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We once cherished our universities--but now feel that there are too many of them and they hand out worthless degrees. Why have our highest seats of learning become so unloved?The streets of London will soon be bustling with architecture students starting their first year at UCL's Bartlett faculty. Armed with illuminating quotations from great authorities they will inspect, for example, the Nelson staircase at Somerset House, marvel at its elegant, soaring wit, discover for themselves its moral purpose, and never take staircases for granted again. At the same time, University of Westminster architecture undergraduates will seethe under and over the city, mapping where global warming will flood it and creating apocalyptic, realistic flood defences. Last year a similar project won every prize going. The head of the English department at Roehampton, Jenny Hartley, (the author of a highly praised book on Dickens's house for fallen women) will organise reading groups in prisons. War studies students at King's College, London will spend their second year gaming every battle in the second world war from both sides to see if they can get them to come out differently, while history undergraduates at Queen Mary prepare questions to put to the cabinet secretary when they meet him. The dentistry department at King's has invented an online course that is managed in the developing world by students and teachers--and is changing the subject. Meanwhile, politics undergraduates at Hull prepare for placements with local politicians.
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When a 12-year-old's mother asks him "How many times do I have to tell you to stop?" he will understand that the answer, if any is required, had better not include a number.But that insight requires a sophisticated understanding of ironic language that develops long after fluent speech. At what age do children begin to sense the meaning of such a question, and to what degree can they respond appropriately to other kinds of irony?
In laboratory research on the subject, children demonstrate almost no comprehension of ironic speech before they are 6 years old, and little before they are 10 or 11. When asked, younger children generally interpret rhetorical questions as literal, deliberate exaggeration as a mistake and sarcasm as a lie.
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As more students choose web-based learning for reasons that can include bullying or health issues, enrollment at the state's publicly funded online charter schools has risen by nearly half within five years, according to data from the Ohio Department of Education.Department figures show that the state's 27 free e-schools had more than 29,000 students taking classes by computer during the last school year, up from about 20,000 in 2005. The enrollment numbers were first reported Monday by The Columbus Dispatch, which also noted that the increase came during a period when no new online charters opened in Ohio. The state imposed a moratorium before the 2005-06 school year.
The e-charters are drawing more students because they fill a need and provide families with options, school officials and parents said.
Online schools can be attractive to students who feel they're being bullied at a traditional school and need a refuge, said Nick Wilson, a spokesman for the Columbus-based Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow. ECOT is the state's oldest and largest Internet charter school.
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The housing bubble blew up so catastrophically because science and technology let us down. It blew up because our technocratic elite told us to expect an ever-wealthier future, and science hasn't delivered. Except for computers and the Internet, the idea that we're experiencing rapid technological progress is a myth.Such is the claim of Peter Thiel, who has either blundered into enough money that his crackpot ideas are taken seriously, or who is actually on to something. A cofounder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook (his stake was recently reported to be around 3%), Mr. Thiel is the unofficial leader of a group known as the "PayPal mafia," perhaps the most fecund informal network of entrepreneurs in the world, behind companies as diverse as Tesla (electric cars) and YouTube.
Mr. Thiel, whose family moved from Germany when he was a toddler, studied at Stanford and became a securities lawyer. After PayPal, he imparted a second twist to his career by launching a global macro hedge fund, Clarium Capital. He now matches wits with some of the great macro investors, such as George Soros and Stanley Druckenmiller, by betting on the direction of world markets.
Those two realms of investing--narrow technology and broad macro--are behind his singular diagnosis of our economic crisis. "All sorts of things are possible in a world where you have massive progress in technology and related gains in productivity," he says. "In a world where wealth is growing, you can get away with printing money. Doubling the debt over the next 20 years is not a problem."
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Nick Clegg is considering sending his eldest son to one of Britain's leading Catholic state schools - despite both his atheism and his party's opposition to faith schools.The Deputy Prime Minister faces accusations of hypocrisy after he and his Catholic wife Miriam were given a private tour of the London Oratory, where Tony Blair controversially sent his sons.
Headmaster David McFadden told The Mail on Sunday that he believed his school would be a 'natural choice' for the couple, who were 'happy with what they saw' during their tour last week.
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Anna Peterson, via a kind reader's email:
This afternoon, I received an outraged phone call from my sister. "A bunch of obnoxious and pushy parents are demanding West High offer more AP classes. They say West needs to improve talented and gifted classes. Can you believe it? I knew this would happen someday." Although my sister's characterization of these parents' complaints was less than completely accurate, her impressions and outrage will be shared with many members of my high school's community. This makes me both frustrated and concerned for my former school.Complaint Filed Against Madison Schools.Madison West High School prides itself on its diversity, fine arts programs, and impressive academic achievements, and West prepared most of my classmates well for our college careers. The preparation, however, did not involve many AP classes. Some of my classmates took AP exams for subjects in which they had not had official AP classes, and they often scored well. But many of us took only an AP language exam or maybe an AP calculus test. Historically, West's teachers have resisted forgoing their own curricula in favor of those dictated by the College Board. And with instructional minutes treated like a precious commodity, I can see why many teachers don't want to sacrifice the six weeks of school after the AP exams to the severe senioritis that overcame my classmates and myself in the few AP classes I did take. I have great respect for my teachers' anti-AP position, and I think West is a better school for it. So whether or not these "obnoxious and pushy parents" are demanding AP classes for their gifted children, I share my sister's skepticism of changing West's curriculum to fit with that of the College Board.
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Officials with several suburban school districts responded to their critics Thursday, claiming that they have no choice but to disobey a new law that calls for public schools to fund private school scholarships for special education students."We have taken this very courageous stand to try to get this law reviewed, not because we want to be sued or because we want to violate the law," Union Superintendent Cathy Burden said. "We have no way of getting it to the court system without drawing a line in the sand."
Burden will ask the Union school board on Monday to join the Broken Arrow and Jenks boards in approving measures that state that they do not intend to pay any parent who requests a Lindsey Nicole Henry Scholarship.
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Early each school day morning, 10-year-old twins Galyn and Grace Hartung and their 8-year-old brother Henry bound out of the house and run to the school bus stop to play with friends from their Cross Plains neighborhood. But when the school bus pulls up to the curb some 20 minutes later, only the friends get on board.The Hartung kids, virtual school students, head back home to a brightly painted basement room where many assignments are digital, the teachers are heard through a laptop and the study hall monitor is mom.
"It just feels like a normal way to do school," said Grace.
Galyn, Grace and Henry are among some 3,955 students enrolled this fall in 12 virtual charter schools statewide. That's up from 3,829 students in 2009-10 and 2,983 in 2008-09.
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136K PDF
A few numbers:
Total District Enrollment 24,796 (The Wisconsin DPI enrollment number for Madison is 25,395).
Open Enrollment Leavers: 772
Open Enrollment Enterers: 175
Much more on outbound open enrollment here.
Tax & spending authority are largely based on enrollment.
The most recent 2010-2011 budget document indicates total planned spending of $373,157,148, which yields $15049.08 per student.
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Over the past few years, I have often complained about a hidebound culture that prevents many newspapers from responding to the challenges of new technology. There is, however, another hidebound American institution that is also finding it difficult to respond to new challenges: our big-city schools.Today, for example, the United States is home to more than 2,000 dysfunctional high schools. They represent less than 15% of American high schools yet account for about half of our dropouts. When you break this down, you find that these institutions produce 81% of all Native American dropouts, 73% of all African-American dropouts, and 66% of all Hispanic dropouts.
At our grade schools, two-thirds of all eighth-graders score below proficient in math and reading. The average African-American or Latino 9-year-old is three grades behind in these subjects. Behind the grim statistics is the real story: lost opportunities, crushed dreams, and shattered lives. In plain English, we trap the children who need an education most in failure factories.
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Kaleem Caire, via email:
October 8, 2010Next Generation Preparatory Academy for Young Men Empowering Young Men for Life 1.5MB PDF and Madison Preparatory Academy Overview 150K PDF.
Greetings Madison Prep.
It was so wonderful to have those of you who were able to join us for the information session Tuesday night (Oct 5) here at the Urban League. We appreciate you dedicating part of your evening to learning about Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men and we look forward to working with you on this very important project. You are receiving this email because you volunteered to join the team that is going to put Madison Prep on the map!
There are a few things we want to accomplish with this email:
1. Share information about the project management website that we've established to organize our communications and planning with regard to developing the school2. Secure dates and times that you're are available to attend the first of your selected Design Team meeting(s)
3. Provide, as promised, background information on Madison Prep along with hyperlinks that will help you educate yourself on charter schools and components of the Madison Prep school design
Please SAVE this email as it contains a number of information resources that you will want to refer back to as we engage in planning Madison Prep. There is a lot of information here and we DO NOT expect you to read everything or learn it all at once. Take your time and enjoy the reading and learning. We will guide you through the process. J
PROJECT MANAGEMENT WEBSITE
Today, you will receive an email with a subject line that reads, "You're invited to join our project management and collaboration system." Please open this email. It will contain the information you need to sign up to access the Madison Prep Project Management Site. You will need to select a username and password. FYI, Basecamp is used by millions of people and companies to manage projects. You can learn more about basecamp by clicking here. Once in the site, you can click on the "help" button at the top, if necessary, to get a tutorial on how to use the site. It is fairly easy to figure out without the tutorial. If you have spam controls on your computer, please be sure to check your spam or junk mail box to look for emails and posting that we might make through Basecamp. Occasionally, postings will end up there. Please approve us as an email "sender" to you.
We have already posted the business plan for the original school (NextGen Prep) that is the same model as Madison Prep. We've also posted other important documents and have set a deadline of Friday, October 15, 2010 for you to review certain documents that have been posted. The calendar shown in Basecamp will include these assignments. Please email me or Ed Lee (elee@ulgm.org) if you have questions about using this site.
DATES FOR DESIGN TEAM MEETINGS
At the Interest Meeting we held on Tuesday (or in other conversation with us), you indicated a preference for getting involved in one of the following design teams. Please click on the name of the team below. You will be taken to www.doodle.com to identify your availability for these meetings. Please share your availability by Monday, October 11 at 12pm so that we can send out meeting notices that afternoon. We will address the dates and times of future meetings at the first meeting of each team. Please note, you do not need to be a "charter school" expert to be involved with this. You will have a lot of fun working towards developing a "high quality public charter school" and will learn in the process.· Curriculum & Instruction Team. This design team will develop a thorough understanding of the IB curriculum and define the curriculum of the school, including the core and non-core curriculum. At least for the first meeting of this design team, Instructional strategies will be addressed as well. The Instruction team will develop a thorough understanding of the Harkness teaching method, outline instructional best practices, and address teacher expectations and evaluation. Both teams will address special education and English Language Learners (ELL). Additional details will be shared at the first meeting.
· Governance, Leadership & Operation Team. This design team will help develop the school's operations plan, define the governing structure, and address the characteristics and expectations of the schools Head of School. The Head of School will be the instructional leader and therefore, there will be some overlapping conversations that need to occur with the team that addresses instruction and quality teaching.
· Facility Team. This team will be responsible for identify, planning, and securing a suitable facility for Madison Prep.
· Budget, Finance & Fundraising Team. This team will be involved with developing Madison Prep's budget and fundraising plans, and will explore financing options for start-up, implementation, and the first four years of the school's operation."
· Community Engagement & Support Team. This team will develop strategies and work to establish broad community support for Madison Prep, develop criteria for partnering with others, and establish partnerships that support teaching, learning, leadership, and community engagement.
BACKGROUND ON MADISON PREPARATORY ACADEMY AND CHARTER SCHOOLS
There is a lot of good support and buzz growing around Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (charter school). To ensure you have the opportunity to familiarize yourself with charter schools and single gendered school models, we have listed internet resources below that you can visit and review. Just click on the hyperlinks.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men will be an all-male charter school that we intend to open in the Madison area in the fall of 2012. It will serve as a high quality school option for parents as well as a demonstration school for secondary education reform and improvement in Dane County. We want local teachers and schools to learn from Madison Prep, and will take steps
We have attached the two page executive summary again for your review along with a business plan for the school (that will be modified to fit Madison). Madison Prep was originally to be launched as a charter school in Washington, DC and Prince Georges County, Maryland in 2011 and 2013 under Next Generation, an organization I founded in Maryland with my wife and other partners in 2006.ABOUT CHARTER SCHOOLS
In 2009, there were 5,043 charter schools in the United States compared to 33,740 private schools and 98,916 traditional public schools. Nationally, charter schools enrolled 1,536,079 students in 2009. According to the Wisconsin Charter School Association, there are more than 223 charter schools in Wisconsin serving more than 37,432 students. There are presently just two charter schools in Madison: James C. Wright Middle School on Madison's South side, founded in 1997 (originally as Madison Middle School 2000).
Until recently, other school districts in Wisconsin have been more open to charter schools. Appleton (14), Janesville (5), Kenosha (6), LaCrosse (4) and Milwaukee (66), Oshkosh (6), Sheboygan (7), Sparta (4), Stevens Point (7), and Waukesha (6) have authorized a significant number of public charter schools when considering the size of their total school district enrollments. However, recent enthusiasm around the formation of Badger Rock School is a sign that Madison area school districts could be more receptive to innovative charter school models that serve a specific community need and purpose. With your support and that of many others, we intend to make a very strong case for Madison Prep and why it's so desperately needed in our community.
DESIGNING MADISON PREP
In Maryland, our team spent three years researching and designing the school and the curriculum. Members of the founding team were involved in the establishment and/or leadership of Bishop John T. Walker School for Boys , Septima Clark Public Charter School , The SEED Foundation and Public Charter Schools, Sidwell Friends School (where President Obama's children attend), and Hyde Leadership Public Charter School . We had an expert on international baccalaureate education lead our curriculum design. We also worked closely with the leadership and faculty of other private and charter schools as we developed the business plan, curriculum and education program, including Washington Jesuit Academy , the St. Paul's School in Baltimore, and Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. The school will utilize the highly regarded college-preparatory International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum and the teaching methodology will be rooted in Harkness instruction. St. Paul's also has a school for girls - the St. Paul School for Girls.
Prior to being hired as President & CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM), I shared with our ULGM board that I would look to establish charter schools as a strategy to address the persistent underperformance and failure of our children attending Madison area schools. As we have engaged our community, listened to leaders, researched the issues, and evaluated the data, it is clear that Madison Prep is not only needed, but absolutely necessary.
SINGLE GENDERED PUBLIC SCHOOLS
As of June 2010, there were 540 public schools in the U.S. offering a single-gendered option, with 92 schools having an all-male or all-female enrollment and the rest operating single gendered classes or programs. There were 12 public schools in Wisconsin offering single gendered classes or classrooms (6 middle schools, 5 high schools, and one elementary school).
There are several single gendered charter schools for young men that have garnered a lot of attention of late, including Urban Prep Academies in Chicago - which sent 100% of its first graduating class to college, The Eagle Academy Foundation in New York City, Boys Latin of Philadelphia, and Brighter Choice Charter School for Boys and Green Tech High School in
Albany, NY, Bluford Drew Jemison Academy in Baltimore.MORE ABOUT CHARTER SCHOOLS
To learn more about charter schools, visit the following websites:US Charter Schools
Information WebsiteNational Alliance of Public Charter Schools, Washington, DC
National Association of Charter School Authorizers, Chicago, IL
District of Columbia Public Charter School Board, Washington, DC (one of the best authorizers of charter schools; the local school board will authorize our school)
Center for Education Reform, Washington,
Wisconsin Charter School Association
Madison, WIWisconsin Department of Public Instruction (Charter Schools), Madison ,WI
Green Charter Schools Network, Madison, WI
National Council of LaRaza Charter School Development, Phoenix, AZ
Coalition of Schools Educating Boys of Color (COSEBC), Lynn, MA
National Association for Single Sex Public Education Exton, PA
The Gurian Institute,
Colorado Springs, COSome of the more highly recognized and notable "networks" of charter
schools:Green Dot Public Schools, Los Angeles, California
KIPP Schools, San Francisco, CA
Aspire Public Schools, Oakland, CA
Achievement First Schools, New Haven, CT
Uncommon Schools, New York, NY
Other Programs of interest:
America's Top Charter Schools, U.S. News & World Report (2009)
New Leaders for New Schools, New York,
NYTeach for America, New
York, NYTeacher U, New York, NY
Charter School Financing (excluding banks):
State of Wisconsin Charter School Planning and Implementation Grants (planning, start-up, and implementation)Walton Family Foundation, Bentonville, AR (planning, start-up, and implementation; however, only focus in Milwaukee right now but we can talk with them)
Partners for Developing Futures, Los Angeles, CA (planning, start-up, and implementation)
Building Hope, Washington, DC (facilities)
Charter School Development Center, Hanover, MD (facilities)
Local Initiatives Support Corporation, New York, NY (facilities)
NCB Capital Impact, Arlington, VA (facilities)
Raza Development Fund, Phoenix, AZ (facilities)
We look forward to getting Madison Prep off the ground with you! WE CAN DO THIS!!
Whatever it Takes.
Onward!
_____________________________________________
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
2222 South Park Street, Suite 200
Madison, WI 53713
Main: 608-729-1200
Assistant: 608-729-1249
Mobile: 202-997-3198
Fax: 608-729-1205
Email: kcaire@ulgm.org
Internet: www.ulgm.org
Related: Kaleem Caire video interview.
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In 1936 the University of Iowa became the first school in the United States to offer a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in creative writing. Forty years later there were only a dozen such programs in the world. Today, according to an article in the current issue of Poets & Writers magazine entitled "The MFA Revolution," there are nearly 200 creative writing MFA programs worldwide, and at least 4,000 aspiring writers apply to these programs each year in the U.S. alone. "What is clear," the article concludes, "is that the burgeoning network of fully funded MFA programs is rapidly becoming the nation's largest-ever patronage system for young artists."Whenever the words "patronage" and "artists" appear in the same sentence, questions must be asked. Is this mass patronage system a boon for American fiction, or is it a poison pill? Do creative writing programs nurture genuine talent, or are they spawning a torrent of technically accomplished books that are devoid of felt life? And more broadly: Just what good does schooling of any kind do for a writer?
In The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, Mark McGurl points out the "seemingly banal" fact that virtually all contemporary American fiction writers have attended college. "In previous generations this would not likely have been the case," McGurl writes, "both because fewer individuals of any kind went to college before the postwar advent of mass higher education and because a college education was not yet perceived as an obvious...starting point for a career as a novelist. Rather, as the un-credentialled, or rather press-credentialled, example of the high school graduate Hemingway makes clear, the key supplementary institution for the novel until mid-century was journalism."
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A legal complaint alleges that the Big Easy's schools discriminate against children with disabilities. What good is the charter revolution if it doesn't reach the students who are most in need?New Orleans, where more than 70 percent of public schools will be independently chartered after this school year, has been placed on a pedestal as a shining model by education reformers. The new documentary Waiting for "Superman", which hopes to serve as a call to arms for education reform, devotes a page of its Web site to touting New Orleans's new citywide school-choice system.
Charter-school advocates such as Caroline Roemer Shirley, executive director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools (LAPCS), are boasting of the success they've had in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when much of the population of New Orleans that might have opposed those policies was displaced from the city. "I don't think we need to wait for Superman," says Shirley. "It is happening today." National media outlets have similarly gushed over New Orleans, some going so far as to suggest that Katrina saved the public-education system in the city.
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I finally got around to sorting state-level test score data, something I've been meaning to do since the Academic Performance Index release last month. (Boy, is it harder than it should be. Those mismatched column headers...)Five of Oakland's schools are up in the top 100 -- roughly 1 percent of all public schools in California -- when sorted by API: the three American Indian Model charter schools, Montclair and Hillcrest.
The American Indian Public Charter School in East Oakland's Laurel District was the highest-performing middle school in the state, with an API of 988. (Not including schools with K-8 or 6-12 grade configurations, whose middle school scores aren't broken out here.)
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American families have felt first-hand the significant impact of the economic crisis. The job market continues to show weakness, homes have lost value, and families are concerned about their economic future. Many studies have found that families are making tough choices in limiting their discretionary spending. It is in the context of this crisis that Sallie Mae has commissioned Gallup to conduct the second annual study of How America Saves for College, a national survey of families with children under 18. This year's survey shows that, despite the on-going economic uncertainty, most families have not lessened their commitment to saving for a college education nor have they lowered their expectations for higher education attainment for their children. However, this challenging environment has illuminated the need for an increased commitment to savings that can soften these short-term economic impacts and the need for families to make smarter choices about their spending and saving.
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Watching Waiting for Superman last week left me exhausted. For too many years, education reformers have fought hard against the very injustices in the education system portrayed in the film. The good news, however, is that this newest declaration against the intolerable conditions of a broken public education system could finally call enough attention to the persistent problems to change things for the children whom we care so deeply about.Geoffrey Canada, CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone, is interviewed throughout the film. Canada talks about his childhood and how disappointed he was to learn that there was no real Superman who would save him from the hardships of his own difficult childhood. His anecdote inspired the title of the movie.
The movie shows over and over again why ineffective teachers should be replaced with successful ones and how important that is to children's academic progress. Fighting against such commonsense ideas are the teachers unions, which oppose the teacher evaluation, merit pay, and firing of poor teachers.
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Listen to this report
Did you watch kids play football or soccer this weekend? You might be ruining sports for your kids without even realizing it. A lot of their attitudes toward the game depends on what you say to the them, on the car ride home."You should have done this. You should have done that. Next time do this. Hey, let's work on this. Hey, when we get home let's work on that," says Mike Bergstrom. "My child could have had the greatest game of their life, and what they really wanted to do was hear dad say, 'I'm so proud of you. There's nothing I like more than watching you play. I'm so proud of you.' And I didn't say that enough.
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Where are you right now? Maybe you are at home, the office or a coffee shop--but such responses provide only a partial answer to the question at hand. Asked another way, what is the location of your "self" as you read this sentence? Like most people, you probably have a strong sense that your conscious self is housed within your physical body, regardless of your surroundings.But sometimes this spatial self-location goes awry. During a so-called out-of-body experience, for example, one's self seems to be transported outside the physical body into a surreal perspective--some people even believe they are viewing their bodies from above, as though their true selves were floating. In a related experience, people with a delusion known as somatoparaphrenia disown one of their limbs or confuse another person's limb for their own. Such warped perceptions help researchers understand the neuroscience of selfhood.
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The College Board hits back against critics who complain about the rising costs of higher education with a report that shows the economic benefits of college. Here are a couple of the charts that are being widely distributed.What is missing from the analysis is the breakdown by private and public college. Does a $50,000 tuition education at Sarah Lawrence give you a better return than a state college?
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One of the many outrages perpetrated under the Reagan administration was the proposal to classify ketchup as a vegetable for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's subsidized school lunch program. If it weren't so sad for the kids who depended on school lunches for an integral part of their daily meals, it would have been funny.The truth is, school-provided lunches have never been great. Who can forget overcooked canned vegetables and gray mystery meat?
As pendulums swing, that stuff was supplanted by fried and greasy hamburgers, pizza and tons of fattening junk food for our already overweight kids to consume. Well, there's a movement afoot to change all of that, and one of the epicenters of that movement is here in Wisconsin, in the small, southwestern city of Viroqua. A consortium of farmers, educators and high school kids is out to change the way students connect to food and the sourcing of food.
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Pennsylvania's Tunkhannock Area School District has settled a lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of NN, a student whose mobile phone was searched by her principal. The principal dug through several screens' worth of menus to discover some partial nude photos of NN, as well as a blurry full nude that NN had intended for her long-term boyfriend. This may or may not have been advisable, but I'm with NN and the ACLU: it wasn't the principal's place to go digging through her phone for the pix. And the principal certainly shouldn't have done what he did next: turn the photos over to the DA's office for criminal prosecution (you see, the principal believed that in taking pictures of herself, a minor, NN became a child pornographer).The school district settled for $33K (which sounds like the ACLU's legal fees), and another suit against the DA remains ongoing. As a result of the settlement, the Pennsylvania School Boards Association is developing guidelines for searching students' phones.
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They are classmates - and strangers.And they are standing attentively in the lobby of the Mitchell Park Domes.
"What makes these buildings so unique?" asked Paula Zamiatowski, education coordinator at the Domes.
"The nature inside," one girl said.
"Their shape," said another boy.
The students Zamiatowski led through the three beehive-shaped glass buildings that sit just south of I-94 were from an equally unique place - a virtual school.
Students from Wisconsin Connections Academy, a kindergarten through eighth-grade public school that operates almost entirely over the Internet and is chartered through the Appleton School District, took a field trip to learn about the world's ecosystems and interact with the classmates they may have never met. About 400 students are enrolled at WCA, and roughly 100 of those are from southeastern Wisconsin, said school spokeswoman Lauren Olstad.
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Though it has become something of a sport to bash public education, a new poll shows that most Americans actually think highly of their neighborhood public schools and have trust in teachers.The Obama administration's education agenda gets mixed reviews in the 2010 poll by the Gallup organization and Phi Delta Kappa, a global association of education professionals. The PDK/Gallup poll has been conducted with Gallup annually since 1969.
Here are highlights of the poll, published by Kappan Magazine and available here:
- Americans believe the most important national education program should be improving the quality of teaching. Developing demanding standards, creating better tests, and improving the nation's lowest-performing schools were rated significantly lower.
- Seventy-one percent of Americans say they have trust and confidence in teachers, with a greater percentage (78 percent) of public school parents registering confidence. Two out of three Americans would support their child's decision to teach in the public schools for a career.
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Kaleem Caire, via email:
September 21, 2010Much more on the proposed Charter IB Madison Preparatory Academy here.Dear Friends & Colleagues,
Today, our President & CEO, Kaleem Caire, was invited to participate in a taping of the Oprah Winfrey Show as a member of the studio audience for a town hall discussion Ms. Winfrey is having on education reform as a follow-up to her show yesterday on the critically acclaimed documentary, "Waiting for Superman." The film is directed by award winning filmmaker, David Guggenheim, the creative genius behind AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH.
Ms. Winfrey has invited leaders in education, along with parents, community, business leaders, and students to discuss what needs to be done to fix America's public schools. The full format has not yet been shared but guests have also been invited to view a showing of Waiting for Superman Thursday evening at her studio. The show will air this Friday afternoon. If anything should change, we will let you know.
Considering just 7 percent of Madison's African American graduating seniors in the class of 2010 who completed the ACT college entrance exam were considered "college ready" by the test-maker (93 percent were deemed "not ready"), it is more important now than ever that the Urban League, our local school districts, local leaders, and other organizations move swiftly and deliberately to implement solutions that can move our children from low performance to high performance. It is even more important that we provide our children with schools that will prepare them to succeed in the economy of the future . With the right approaches, we believe our education community can get the job done!
We look forward to working with our partners at the United Way of Dane County, Madison Metropolitan School District, Boys & Girls Clubs of Dane County, YMCA of Dane County, Madison Community Foundation, Great Lakes Higher Education, and many others to get our youth on the right track.
Madison Prep 2012
Whatever it Takes!
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Whether it's this post or Oprah, today may be the first time you hear of the movie "Waiting for Superman" but it won't be the last. A flood of pissed-off parents, Charter Schools and reformers and deep-pocketed billionaires and millionaires will make sure of that.But the other reason you'll keep hearing about this documentary on the state of America's public education system is that it's just a really great documentary.
I've never quite understood how the public school system of the wealthiest country in the world-one where every President pledges to "fix" education and one where education spending continually goes up-could be so intractably horrible. The problem seems too big, bloated, complex and confusing to even have a smart debate around, much less try to fix. Fortunately, since I'm not a parent, it's an issue where I can just throw up my hands, assume any politician saying they'll fix it is lying, and start saving for the private school I'll one day need when I do have kids.
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What child hasn't dreaded September, the end of summer and the return to school. But for some kids, the prospect of school produces a level of fear so intense that it is immobilizing, resulting in what's known as school-refusal behavior.These are the kids who may be absent for weeks or months. Some may cry or scream for hours every morning in an effort to resist leaving home. Others may hide out in the nurse's office. Some kids who miss school are simply truant--they'd just rather be doing something else. But in about two-thirds of cases, a psychiatric problem, most commonly an anxiety disorder, is the cause, according to research led by Christopher A. Kearney, professor and director of clinical training at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Anywhere from 5% to 28% of children will exhibit some degree of school-refusal behavior at some point, including truancy, according to Dr. Kearney, a leading authority on the behavior, and other experts. For kids with anxiety-fueled school refusal, the fear is real and can take time to overcome. Families may struggle for months to help a child get back into the classroom. Ignoring the problem, or failing to deal with it completely, can lead to more-serious problems later on.
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Although obsessed with all things theatrical, this column tries to eschew any mention of celebrities. But when out of the blue Barry Manilow invites you to lunch because he likes something you've written, it's not so easy keeping it under your hat.We sat for a few hours in the pink and gold dining room of a fancy hotel, talking about our passions. He said something I've never heard anyone say before: "I think it's a great idea if you end up doing for a living what you were happiest doing at 14." He was happiest writing songs and singing, he said, and me? I was happiest doing my homework, sitting at a trestle table looking longingly and with great approval at my collection of pencils and glue sticks, rattling my little cough sweet tin filled with ink cartridges, joyfully greeting each fresh white sheet of my preferred Oxford file paper (the one with narrow grey lines and sky-blue margins) with a mild frisson and then filling it with writing. Sixty per cent carthorse, 40 per cent thoroughbred, I got results. I put so much into my homework. I think it even got the teachers down a little bit.
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My family lives on the west side of Los Angeles. I face the same choice as many urban families: Will the kids attend public or private schools? Should one minimize opportunities for one's own child in service to the greater good?In our desire to protect our children physically and academically, we send them to very expensive schools that are inherently segregated ethnically and economically. We, being white, educated, and comparatively affluent, are the agenda-setters in society. The agenda does not include fierce protection of the public school system we value in general terms but abandon in our own specific cases.
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The father of an 11-year-old bullying victim threatened to kill his daughter's tormenters after joining her on her Florida school bus.James Jones took his daughter, who has cerebral palsy, onto her school bus and told her to point out the bullies. Then, he said he would kill them.
"I'm gonna (expletive) you up -- this is my daughter, and I will kill the (expletive) who fought her," Jones said.
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A Wall Street Journal investigation into online privacy has found that popular children's websites install more tracking technologies on personal computers than do the top websites aimed at adults.Check your Google "preferences" here.The Journal examined 50 sites popular with U.S. teens and children to see what tracking tools they installed on a test computer. As a group, the sites placed 4,123 "cookies," "beacons" and other pieces of tracking technology. That is 30% more than were found in an analysis of the 50 most popular U.S. sites overall, which are generally aimed at adults.
The most prolific site: Snazzyspace.com, which helps teens customize their social-networking pages, installed 248 tracking tools. Its operator described the site as a "hobby" and said the tracking tools come from advertisers.
Starfall.com, an education site for young children, installed the fewest, five.
The research is part of a Journal investigation into the expanding business of tracking people's activities online and selling details about their behavior and personal interests.
The tiny tracking tools are used by data-collection companies to follow people as they surf the Internet and to build profiles detailing their online activities, which advertisers and others buy. The profiles don't include names, but can include age, tastes, hobbies, shopping habits, race, likelihood to post comments and general location, such as city.
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two mp3 audio files, via a kind reader's email: 30mb. The open enrollment conversation begins at about 19:40 in this first mp3 file and continues in the second (33mb) mp3 file.
Much more on outbound open enrollment here.
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President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have made charter schools a big part of their reform agenda, but the pushback from unions has been fierce. Perhaps that explains why the new $10 billion federal teacher bailout will be dispensed in a way that discriminates against charters.The Administration's initial guidance excluded many charter school teachers, even though charters are public schools. The Department of Education said money from the Education Jobs Fund could go only to teachers and others employed by a local education agency or school district.
"A charter school," says the department, "may not use Ed Jobs funds to pay for the compensation and benefits of employees of a charter management organization or an educational management organization who provide school-level educational and related services in the charter school." Many charter school teachers are employees of management firms rather than the school district, so the guidelines would have excluded more than 1,000 charters nationwide (serving around 400,000 students) from the cash.
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At 10, Grace Morgan is a young fashionista and takes pains to dress in the latest styles. But her mom, Amy, works part-time and her husband was recently laid off, leaving little room in the family budget for designer-brand clothes.So Grace didn't ask her mom to open her wallet this fall to buy clothes. Instead, she sold a stack of her own old jeans and shirts at a rummage sale and paired the proceeds with discount coupons to get the stylish jeggings and tops she wanted for school, says her mother, of Lake in the Hills, Ill. Grace is learning "we have to make choices with our money," she says.
The cost of raising kids is continuing to rise. A middle-income family can expect to shell out nearly a quarter of a million dollars, or $222,360, to raise a baby born in 2009 to age 18, according to the Department of Agriculture. That is up about 1.4% from 2007, before the recession began--and it doesn't include college costs.
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15.8MB mp3 audio file, via a kind reader.
Related:
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It is 8:30 on a crisp September morning, the start of a busy day for preschoolers at the Waisman Center's Early Childhood Program, a nationally renowned laboratory school.At a piano in the gym, a teacher holds a 4-year-old named Michael in her lap and helps him tap out "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." She speaks to him using both sign language and a singsong voice. Several other boys driving toy cars swerve around another teacher doing duty as traffic cop. A student teacher is coloring at a table with students. In a corner of the gym, two girls are playing house. "This is your bed, Baby Kitty. Go to sleep right NOW!" one of them says. A tiny child with big brown eyes, named Caroline, curls up on a mat and pretends to sleep.
Michael, distracted by the noisy traffic behind him, wriggles out of Kerri Lynch's lap and runs up to the boys in cars, making guttural sounds. The boys ignore him and continue to whiz past. Lynch waves down an especially energetic driver in a red T-shirt who has snagged the school's popular police car. "Michael is talking to you," she says, holding Michael, who is clearly becoming frustrated. She puts Michael's face between her hands gently so that he makes eye contact with the other child and encourages him to try to speak again. The other boy listens carefully as the teacher translates: "Michael is wondering when he can have a turn?"
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The handwriting workshop at Meriter Hospital is much more than penmanship drills.The 8-week program for elementary students focuses on areas such as upper body strength and stability and eye-hand coordination. Some students took the hour-long class, which was held once a week, in the summer to be more prepared for school this fall. Two more evening workshops for students grades second through fifth will start Sept. 28.
"Handwriting is really important," said Noah Walker, 7, a second grader at Cottage Grove Elementary School. "It won't be all scribbly."
At a recent session, Noah practiced throwing animal-shaped bean bags against the wall. Later he practiced writing with a vibrating pen to work on grip strength and to make the task more enjoyable.
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When it came to violent crime, Armando Barragan started young, shooting up a van of rival gang members at age 14 and, eight months later, attacking a Milwaukee police officer, trying to grab his gun.The crimes landed Barragan in the juvenile justice system, but he got breaks that kept him on the street, where he committed new crimes, according to Children's Court records and police reports reviewed by the Journal Sentinel.
Barragan quickly rose to become a leader of the Latin Kings and was charged with ordering the execution of a man who tried to stop a fight outside a Cudahy gas station in 2003 - one of six homicides or attempted homicides he was investigated for by the time he was 18.
The Journal Sentinel reported in July that miscommunication between federal and state authorities resulted in missing a chance to arrest Barragan in a courtroom before he fled to Mexico and became one of the U.S. Marshals Service's most wanted fugitives.
Court documents show Barragan could have - and probably should have - been behind bars in April 2003, when Kevin Hirschfield was shot to death outside the gas station. He was free because of breaks he received, first from a judge and later from police, according to court records and interviews.
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Officials with Contra Costa County's Head Start program were frustrated. In order to meet federal requirements, they had to take attendance every hour.These and other administrative tasks were taking up a lot of teachers' time - between one and three hours a day per teacher - and using up a lot of the program's limited funds.
We sympathize with their pain. An hourly attendance requirement is indeed burdensome, and it's a useless distraction from the very important work that Head Start does - preparing low-income preschoolers for school. But we can't support what those officials did next, which was to implement a microchip tracking program for those very young children.
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The suit alleges that more than 30 districts require students and their families to pay for books and other basic supplies that are supposed to be provided at no cost.The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the state of California on Friday for allowing school districts to charge students for books, uniforms, classes and other basic supplies.
The suit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, alleges that more than 30 districts require students and their families to pay for basic supplies that are supposed to be provided at no cost. Districts cited in the lawsuit include Beverly Hills, Burbank and Long Beach.
The Los Angeles Unified School District was not named in the suit, although "we have heard anecdotal reports about Los Angeles," Mark Rosenbaum, chief counsel for the ACLU of Southern California, said at a morning news conference.
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At New York's colleges and universities, the arrival of a new school year brings anticipation tinged with anxiety. For many students, the second emotion is prompted by one nagging question: How am I going to pay for this?Many of them won't be able to find an answer. The Higher Education Services Corp., which services and collects federally backed college loans in New York, has almost $2 billion worth of defaulted debt on its hands.
As of July 1, HESC listed 145,437 accounts with $1,983,922,931 in college loans that had gone into default. That's up from last year, when there were 144,216 borrowers for a total of $1,895,211,727 by the end of July.
In 1991, the defaulted sum was just $230 million.
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Is there really a bubble in US higher education?Today, one way or another, we're going to find out! First, let's define just what a bubble is:
An economic bubble exists whenever the price of an asset that may be freely exchanged in a well-established market first soars then plummets over a sustained period of time at rates that are decoupled from the rate of growth of the income that might be realized from either owning or holding the asset.Here, we'll consider the asset to be one year of college education at a four-year institution, whose price is given by the cost of tuition and any required fees for attendance.
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In February, 12-year-old Alexa Gonzalez doodled on her desk in social studies class at her junior high school in Forest Hills: "Lexi was here 2/1/10" and "I Love my babis, Abby & Faith."Ms. Gonzalez was escorted to the dean's office where school safety officers had her empty her backpack, take off her shoes and sweater and then searched her pockets. The New York Police Department was then called and four officers arrived, arrested her then walked her out of the school with her wrists handcuffed behind her back as classmates looked on. Her mother was told she would have to report to family court on vandalism charges.
The severity of authorities' reaction has turned Ms. Gonzalez, who was using an erasable marker, into the poster child for a student rights movement that wants more transparency on the suspensions, expulsions and arrests in each school. A protest rally, sponsored by the New York Civil Liberties Union and student rights groups, was held at the Board of Education building behind City Hall on Tuesday calling on law makers to pass the so-called Student Safety Act. It would provide detailed data of disciplinary action taken by the School Safety Division, which is part of the NYPD, by race, sex, age, disability and socioeconomic status.
Both the city's Department of Education and NYPD have conceded their officers overreacted in Ms. Gonzalez's case and didn't act within their guidelines.
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Young people often worry whether the qualification for which they are studying will stand them in good stead in the workplace. According to the OECD, college and university leavers are better placed in the labour market than their less educated peers, but this advantage is not even in all countries. Young graduates living in Spain are particularly likely to end up taking low-skilled work, while those in Luxembourg rarely take anything other than a graduate job. American and British students appear to have the biggest incentive to study: British graduates aged 25-34 earn $57,000 on average. Their Swedish peers earn $37,400.
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The days of getting caught talking in class are over--and so aren't the days of even getting caught.According to a new survey by app developer textPlus, which surveyed more than 600 of its users aged 13 to 17, texting is more rampant than ever in the classroom. A whopping 42.5% of teens admit to texting during class, and more than half of those say they text sometimes or constantly. What's more, nearly 80% of students say they've never gotten in trouble for texting during class, suggesting the eyes-down, cell-under-the-desk method is slipping past even your most yard-stick taunting school teachers.
With more than 42% of teens admitting to bringing a cell phone or iPod Touch to class, isn't it time schools start cracking down? And if technology is to become more a part of education, how will teachers ever track students who are already able to pull off using these devices when they're not supposed to? As more and more gadgets enter the classroom, won't it just make it easier to find distractions?
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An armed altercation Friday outside West High School involving known and suspected members of two street gangs involved in an April homicide heightened concerns of possible retaliation, police and school officials said Tuesday.Related: Gangs & School Violence Forum audio / video.Sgt. Amy Schwartz, who leads the Madison Police Department's Crime Prevention Gang Unit, said it is not known if members of the South Side Carnales gang went to the high school looking for members of the rival Clanton 14, or C-14 gang.
But staff at West and the city's three other main high schools and two middle schools were told Tuesday to determine if safety plans are needed for any students who might be at risk, said Luis Yudice, security coordinator for the Madison School District.
Police have not notified the School District of a specific threat against any student, Yudice said.
But authorities have been concerned about possible retaliation since the April 28 shooting death of Antonio Perez, 19, who police say founded Madison's C-14 gang several years ago while he was a high school student. Five people, who police say are associated with the South Side Carnales and MS-13 gangs, are charged in Perez's slaying. Two of them remain at large.
A kind reader noted this quote from the article:
"But authorities have been concerned about possible retaliation since the April 28 shooting death of Antonio Perez, 19, who police say founded Madison's C-14 gang several years ago while he was a high school student."Much more here.
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This is an era in which many devices are watching us. We carry about wireless phones that tell our service providers exactly where we are. Surveillance cameras blink down from corners and storefronts. Advertisers follow us effortlessly around the Internet. Still, plans in Contra Costa County, Calif., to tag preschoolers with radio frequency identification chips to keep track of their whereabouts at school seem to go too far.The concern that school officials would use the ID chips to keep tabs on children's behavior -- and tag them perhaps as hyperactive or excessively passive -- seems overwrought. County officials point out that the tags will save money and allow teachers to devote less time to attendance paperwork and more time to their students. And the chips, which will be randomly assigned to different children every day, according to a county representative, will not carry personal information that could be intercepted by others.
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The hour when Ariana Kramer will begin her college career is fast approaching -- and her parents are in an office supply store, disagreeing about hanging files, of all things."She'll need them," her mother says.
"I don't think so," her dad counters.
Ariana, meanwhile, walks dreamily through the store, offering no opinion on this particular decision. She is, in fact, confident that she will have what she needs when she starts her freshman year at the University of Iowa.
She has mom, the family organizer, with her, and dad, the calm encourager. And they have "the list," which mom printed from one of those "what-you'll-need-at-college" websites.
New laptop. Check.
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The lawn is meticulously manicured, as if the groundskeeper's tools include a cuticle scissors. Classic brick buildings, a bell tolling the hour and concrete lion statues almost convince me that I'm at an East Coast college. But this is Lakeside School in Northeast Seattle.This is where super-achievers went to school - Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Craig McCaw to name a few. Many of Seattle's affluent families send their kids here for a challenging private education. With an acceptance rate of 24 percent, Lakeside is the most elite private high school in the Northwest. This photo of Bliss Hall was taken before the current renovation project started.
So what was I doing there? Just wandering, and wondering if my children would have a better start in life if they went to private schools.
"As someone who has experienced both public schooling and private schooling, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind: sending your child to a private school is one of the best decisions you can make for him or her," says Peter Rasmussen, a recent Lakeside alumnus. "In retrospect, if my parents made me pay my tuition all by myself, I would have. That's how valuable a Lakeside education is."
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Steven Snead, via a kind reader
Recall now the biblical phrase, "from whence comes my help?" It mentions looking up to the hills and Detroiters are doing just that.Clusty Search: Steven Snead.They are looking to the Hills of Bloomfield, Auburn Hills, and Rochester Hills. They are looking to the rich green lawns of Troy, Sterling Heights, Farmington, and Gross Pointe. And yes, they are looking to their excellent schools too.
I have no doubt that this mother's prayers have been duplicated by thousands of Detroit parents. The results of the 2010 census will no doubt show that minority populations have increased in suburban cities and overall population in Detroit will yet again hit an all time low. So while they desperately scramble to enroll their children in charter schools and suburban schools of choice, parents still have their compass set due north. Way north.
This is the New Black Migration. And if school leaders cannot devise a way to make the city schools a viable option for parents who want the best for their children, it will be a migration whose tide will know no end.
Related: Madison Preparatory Academy.
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Esther Wojcicki & Michael Levine, via a Kris Olds email:
American students' lack of knowledge about the world is unsettling.According to surveys by National Geographic and Asia Society, young Americans are next to last in their knowledge of geography and current affairs compared to peers in eight other countries, and the overwhelming majority of college-bound seniors cannot find Afghanistan, Iraq or Israel on a world map.
Less than one half of today's high school students study a foreign language, and while a million study French, a language spoken by some 80 million worldwide, less than 75,000 study Chinese, a language spoken by some 1.3 billion. Minority students especially have little access to global topics taught in "higher performing" schools, ranging from languages and economics to exchanges, arts and cultural activities.
The typical teacher or supervisor is not prepared to address this gap: most educators have not taken any international courses and comparatively few participate in study abroad programs.
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The Harlem-based educator and activist Geoffrey Canada first met the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim in 2008, when Canada was in Los Angeles raising money for the Children's Defense Fund, which he chairs. Guggenheim told Canada that he was making a documentary about the crisis in America's schools and implored him to be in it. Canada had heard this pitch before, more times than he could count, from a stream of camera-toting do-gooders whose movies were destined to be seen by audiences smaller than the crowd on a rainy night at a Brooklyn Cyclones game. Canada replied to Guggenheim as he had to all the others: with a smile, a nod, and a distracted "Call my office," which translated to "Buzz off."Related: An increased emphasis on adult employment - Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman's recent speech to the Madison Rotary Club and growing expenditures on adult to adult "professional development".Then Guggenheim mentioned another film he'd made--An Inconvenient Truth--and Canada snapped to attention. "I had absolutely seen it," Canada recalls, "and I was stunned because it was so powerful that my wife told me we couldn't burn incandescent bulbs anymore. She didn't become a zealot; she just realized that [climate change] was serious and we have to do something." Canada agreed to be interviewed by Guggenheim, but still had his doubts. "I honestly didn't think you could make a movie to get people to care about the kids who are most at risk."
Two years later, Guggenheim's new film, Waiting for "Superman," is set to open in New York and Los Angeles on September 24, with a national release soon to follow. It arrives after a triumphal debut at Sundance and months of buzz-building screenings around the country, all designed to foster the impression that Guggenheim has uncorked a kind of sequel: the Inconvenient Truth of education, an eye-opening, debate-defining, socially catalytic cultural artifact.
Everyone should see this film; Waiting for Superman. Madison's new Urban League President, Kaleem Caire hosted a screening of The Lottery last spring. (Thanks to Chan Stroman for correcting me on the movie name!)
Caire is driving the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy International Baccalaureate charter school initiative.
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The children most at risk of attempted abduction by strangers are girls ages 10 to 14, many on their way to or from school, and they escape harm mostly through their own fast thinking or fierce resistance, according to a new national analysis.Probing a crime that is infrequent but strikes fear in the hearts of parents as little else does, analysts from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children found that children who encountered would-be abductors were usually alone, often in the late afternoon or early evening.
It's a chilling thought for working parents and all those who have asked children to hold hands tightly in crowds or to phone as soon as they get home from school. It calls to mind last year's killing of Somer Thompson, 7, snatched en route from school in Florida as she ran ahead of her siblings, and the highly publicized case of Elizabeth Smart, taken from her Utah bedroom at age 14.
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Is it worth it to pay $200,000 for a liberal arts education, especially if it means taking out loans? One of my 20-something Kiplinger colleagues answers bluntly: "If I had realized how much debt I was getting into, I would have gone to my state school instead of an expensive private college."As important as education is in today's world, families need to find more affordable ways to pay for it. Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org and FastWeb.com, has calculated that total student-loan debt exceeds revolving credit (mostly credit-card debt).
Here's my guide for parents about avoiding the student-debt trap:
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Vernita Otukoya said her son, Babatunde, was struggling in third grade last year. So she met with his teacher at Milwaukee's 53rd St. School."We made a plan, we stuck with it, we checked with each other on a regular basis," Otukoya said. The literacy coach at the school gave her books that her son could read. The teamwork and the focus on how to help Babatunde paid off.
"He actually made the honor roll" by the end of the school year, Otukoya said proudly as her son began his first day of fourth grade Wednesday.
Would that all stories of parent-teacher interaction were that positive. For that matter, would that there were a lot more stories of parent-teacher interaction at all.
There is no getting around the fact that the low level of parent involvement in helping children succeed in school is a huge impediment to educational success, especially in low-income communities.
That's true nationwide. It's true in Milwaukee. The teacher who has 30 kids and maybe five parents show up for conferences is a common and discouraging story.
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A special advisory task force is meeting in Fairbanks to address poor retention and graduation rates in higher education.The state Legislature created the group largely to address poor skills exhibited by many high school graduates entering college and vocational programs.
The task force, which includes education leaders, lawmakers and students, is meeting at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and hearing from education agencies.
Senate President Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak and one of the group's two chairmen, said the task force hopes to pinpoint enough potential solutions to buttress recommendations, due by April, for better preparing high school students for postsecondary education.
"No surprises here, we know the problems," Stevens said. Local funding shortfalls, heavy demand for remedial coursework after high school and a shortfall of student counseling services challenge school districts and the university, he said. Alaska would benefit from a standing education task force to keep studying those issues, he said.
Read more: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner - Lack of funding high speed Internet counseling hampers Alaska students group says
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I wrote a column in June that offered advice to the new superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools. With the new school year beginning, I thought I would offer some advice to MPS students on their first day of class.Good morning, students. On your first day of school, there are a million things going through your minds. I hate to do this to you, but I am going to add a few more things for you to think about.
First and foremost, take a look around. Do you see where you are? Make it a habit. Attend all of your classes each and every day. That is the only way you are going to get an education.
Second, do your homework. Don't just bring it home and back to school - actually do it. The only way you can get anything out of it is by actually doing your best to complete each and every assignment.
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The role of test scores in evaluating teachers is a prickly and complicated issue, which is why California has been avoiding the conversation for so long. Fortunately, that procrastination is no longer possible after The Times took the bold step of analyzing standardized test scores in the Los Angeles Unified School District to see whether individual teachers appeared to be successful at raising their students' scores.Given the current nationwide push to include test data in teacher evaluations, it was time to strip away the mystery about test scores and take a close look at what they are, what they show and don't show, and what teachers, administrators and the rest of us might learn from them. The Times' articles and online database rating nearly 6,000 elementary school teachers allow the examination to begin.
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Wisconsin State Journal Editorial
Another national magazine says Madison is one of the nation's best cities in which to raise a family.Madison School Board member Ed Hughes compares WKCE scores, comments on the Kiplinger and Wisconsin State Journal article and wonders if anyone would move from Madison to College Station, TX [map], which Kiplinger's ranked above our local $15,241 2009/2010 per student public schools.That's something to celebrate.
But Kiplinger's, a monthly business and personal finance periodical, also raps ours city schools as "weak" in its latest edition.
That's troubling.
"Madison city schools are weak relative to the suburban schools," the magazine wrote in its analysis of the pros and cons of living here with children.
Really?
The magazine apparently used average test scores to reach its conclusion. By that single measure, yes, Dane County's suburban schools tend to do better.
But the city schools have more challenges - higher concentrations of students in poverty, more students who speak little or no English when they enroll, more students with special needs.
None of those factors should be excuses. Yet they are reality.
And Madison, in some ways, is ahead of the 'burbs. It consistently graduates some of the highest-achieving students in the state. It offers far more kinds of classes and clubs. Its diverse student population can help prepare children for an increasingly diverse world.
I compared Madison, WI to College Station, TX using a handy Census Bureau report.
93.8% of College Station residents over 25 are high school graduates, a bit higher than Madison's 92.4%.Madison does have a higher median household and per capita income along with a population about three times that of College Station.58.1% of College Station residents over 25 have a bachelor's degree or higher, compared to Madison's 48.2%
Turning to the public school districts, readers might be interested in having a look at both websites: the College Station Independent School District and the Madison Metropolitan School District. 75% of College Station students took the ACT (average score: 22.6) while 67% of Madison students took the exam and achieved a composite score of 24.2.
College Station publishes a useful set of individual school report cards, which include state and national test results along with attendance and dropout data.
College Station's 2009-2010 budget was $93,718.470, supporting 9,712 students = $9,649.76 per student. . They also publish an annual check register, allowing interested citizens to review expenditures.
Madison's 2009-2010 budget was $370,287,471 for 24,295 students = $15,241 per student, 57.9% higher than College Station.
College Station's A and M Consolidated High School offers 22 AP classes while Madison East offers 12, Memorial 25 (8 of which are provided by Florida Virtual...), LaFollette 13 and West 8.
College Station's "student profile" notes that the District is 59.3% white, 31.4% are economically disadvantaged while 10.3% are in talented and gifted.
Texas's 2010 National Merit Semifinalist cut score was 216 while Wisconsin's was 207. College Station's high school had 16 National Merit Semi-Finalists (the number might be 40 were College Station the same size as Madison and perhaps still higher with Wisconsin's lower cut score) during the most recent year while Madison's high schools had 57.
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There is a growing trend toward minimalism and voluntary simplicity. I have written about it many times here. We made a huge leap towards minimalism and a more simple life last year. We moved from a large house in the suburbs to a small 1000 square foot house in the city. We downgraded to one car and we got rid of 50% of our belongings. You kind of have to when you move into a smaller place. It was a wonderful experience and has helped us see more clearly what kind of life we want to shape.We are moving again to a better area of town and a slightly nicer home but it is only 300 square feet bigger and lucky for us that wiggle room translates into better closet space (so we can ditch our dressers), a dishwasher, and an extra bathroom. Once again we chose a place that is right next to one of the major Metro Parks because being close to nature is what we value. It was only after living so simply that we can move into this equally modest home and feel like we are living luxuriously. And because we don't want to move tons of stuff.. even if it is way less than what we had a year ago... we have given away or sold another 50% of our stuff.
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I went to McDonald's this weekend with the kids. We go to McDonald's to eat about once a week because it is a mile from the house and has an indoor play area. Our normal routine is to walk in to McDonald's, stand in line, order, stand around waiting for the order, sit down, eat and play.
On Sunday, this decades-old routine changed forever. When we walked in to McDonald's, an attractive woman in a suit greeted us and said, "Are you planning to visit the play area tonight?" The kids screamed, "Yeah!" "McDonald's has a new system that you can use to order your food right in the play area. Would you like to try it?" The kids screamed, "Yeah!"The woman walks us over to a pair of kiosks in the play area. She starts to show me how the kiosks work and the kids scream, "We want to do it!" So I pull up a chair and the kids stand on it while the (extremely patient) woman in a suit walks the kids through the screens. David ordered his food, Irena ordered her food, I ordered my food. It's a simple system. Then it was time to pay. Interestingly, the kiosk only took cash in the form of bills. So I fed my bills into the machine. Then you take a little plastic number to set on your table and type the number in. The transaction is complete.
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I take it that you think that nearly all of the value of schooling is signaling? I used to take that view too, but the accumulation of evidence that I've seen leads me to believe that isn't the case.For one thing I find it very hard to believe that we would waste so many resources on a nearly unproductive enterprise. There are plenty of entrepreneurs out there trying to make money by selling cheaper, in time and money, versions of education and they aren't very successful. Mainstream schools have experimented with programmed learning, lectures on video, self-paced learning, etc. and none of the methods have caught on. Why wouldn't they if they worked?
Of course its hard to believe that reading novels and poems contributes much to ones productivity on the job. So how do I square curriculum content with my view that education is productive? Here goes:
1. Education isn't mainly about learning specific subject matter. Rather education is mainly about practicing the sort of self-discipline that is necessary to be productive in a modern work environment. High school allows you to practice showing up on time and doing what you are told. College allows you to practice and work out techniques that work for you that allow you to take on and complete on time complicated multi-part tasks in an environment where you have considerable freedom about how you spend your time. Some people may be more talented than others at this sort of thing (you come to mind as someone who is particularly talented at self-discipline), but this is also an acquired skill that one can develop with practice, and everyone needs to develop certain work habits that make one more productive at both types of tasks.
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I had the pleasure of teaching a group of Milwaukee Public Schools students this summer. And, yes, it was a pleasure. Classes were small - 15 students maximum - there was team-teaching and students and faculty had access to technology.Many of the students were those who had not met math and literacy requirements during the 2009-'10 academic year. Some had let their behavior get in the way of their learning, so we were eager to provide some structure that would help them move forward.
By the end of the summer session, our data revealed that our students made gains in math and vocabulary acquisition. According to MPS standards, a 7% to 9% gain in math or literacy is acceptable. Many of our students had 10% to 60% gains.
I don't believe this progress would be possible with 40 students in a classroom, without access to technology or without extra adults in the classroom. We were able to give our students the individualized attention that they would not get in an overcrowded and understaffed classroom.
It is crucial that our educational leaders go back to the basics during the 2010-'11 school year. Education is a contact activity, and more contact is better.
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Did Bill Gates waste a billion dollars because he failed to understand the formula for the standard deviation of the mean? Howard Wainer makes the case in the entertaining Picturing the Uncertain World (first chapter with the Gates story free here). The Gates Foundation certainly spent a lot of money, along with many others, pushing for smaller schools and a lot of the push came because people jumped to the wrong conclusion when they discovered that the smallest schools were consistently among the best performing schools.Related: Small Learning Communities and English 10........
States like North Carolina which reward schools for big performance gains without correcting for size end up rewarding small schools for random reasons. Worst yet, the focus on small schools may actually be counter-productive because large schools do have important advantages such as being able to offer more advanced classes and better facilities.
Schools2 All of this was laid out in 2002 in a wonderful paper I teach my students every year, Thomas Kane and Douglas Staiger's The Promise and Pitfalls of Using Imprecise School Accountability Measures.
In recent years Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation have acknowledged that their earlier emphasis on small schools was misplaced. Perhaps not coincidentally the Foundation recently hired Thomas Kane to be deputy director of its education programs.
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It felt more like a day of summer camp than the first day of school, with team-building fun and games and youthful leaders in T-shirts and shorts.But the goal of ninth-grade orientation Wednesday at Madison's East High School -- the school year's first day that's been labeled "Freshman Academy" -- was serious: to lower truancy rates, curb behavior problems and raise academic success of the incoming class of 2014.
As it's been in Madison for years, the first day of school in the city's public high schools was dedicated to welcoming only ninth-graders, an effort to help them find their way before the buildings become flooded with additional sophomores, juniors and seniors Thursday.
East's new take on that is based on Link Crew, a national program designed to bond newcomers with juniors and seniors, who throughout the year will serve as mentors and personal cheerleaders to a freshman group of about six students each.
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Nobody but a schoolteacher or a union acolyte could criticize the Los Angeles Times' terrific package of stories--complete with searchable database--about teacher performance in the Los Angeles Unified School District.Union leader A.J. Duffy of the United Teachers Los Angeles stupidly called for a boycott of the Times. Boycotts can be sensible things, but threatening to boycott a newspaper is like threatening to throw it into a briar patch. Hell, Duffy might as well have volunteered to sell Times subscriptions, door-to-door, as to threaten a boycott. Doesn't he understand that the UTLA has no constituency outside its own members and lip service from members of other Los Angeles unions? Even they know the UTLA stands between them and a good education for their children.
Duffy further grouched that the Times was "leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by ... a test." [Ellipsis in the original.] Gee, Mr. Duffy, aren't students judged by test results?
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten also knocked the Times for publishing the database that measures the performance of 6,000 elementary-school teachers. Weingarten went on to denounce the database as "incomplete data masked as comprehensive evaluations." Of course, had the Times analysis flattered teachers, Weingarten would be praising the results of the analysis.
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Kenneth M. Goldstein and William G. Howell
Over half of Wisconsinites (51 percent) told us that they were paying either "a great deal" or "quite a bit" of attention to issues involving education. In national surveys, 38 percent of the American public as a whole. When asked about specific education reforms, moreover, Wisconsinites are as much as five times more likely to stake out a clear position either in support or opposition than is the American public. Assuming such differences aren't strictly an artifact of survey methodology, a possibility we will discuss, Wisconsinites seem to pay more attention to educational issues and revealed a greater willingness to offer their opinions on education and potential reforms. In other words, when it comes to education, the people of Wisconsin have strong views and that makes them different from the rest of the country.Wisconsin residents reported higher levels of support for a variety of reforms--in particular vouchers, charter schools, online education, and merit pay--than does the nation as a whole. That said, opposition levels to these reforms were also as high or higher than the nation as a whole. Though they give their local schools slightly lower grades than does the American public, Wisconsin residents also claimed (correctly) that their students perform as well as or better than students in other states on standardized tests. And Wisconsin residents are just as enthusiastic about student accountability requirements as is the American public. And Wisconsinites have another thing in common with their fellow Americans: they vastly underestimate the actual amount of money that is spent each year on students in public schools.
There is another important element that can be taken from this poll. The divide between residents of Milwaukee and the rest of the state is deep. When asked about the quality of education in the state, Milwaukee residents offered significantly lower assessments than do residents statewide. In addition, city of Milwaukee residents distinguish themselves from other Wisconsinites for their higher levels of support for various education policy reforms.
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In "Steal This Movie, Too" (column, Aug. 25), Thomas L. Friedman is right to rejoice in those educators working from the bottom up.I have been lucky enough to have enjoyed a career as a teaching artist in the Catskills and in New York City for many years. I see the really great teachers and administrators every day, and they have two important characteristics in common: they love and respect the children, and they love and are open to thought.
Everything else follows -- the expectations that the children really want to learn and will do well, the enthusiasm with which the educators seek out and bring new ideas to the classroom and are willing to listen to the students' theories, and the eagerness to bring others into the classroom to contribute other concepts. These educators should indeed be championed.
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Learning to ride a bike usually involves bumps, bruises, lots of practice--and back-breaking pain, too, if you're the parent running hunched over behind your child's wobbling cycle.A new breed of bicycles that claims to help improve balance and allay jitters is changing how kids reach this childhood milestone. The bikes promote a simple strategy: ride without the pedals first.
Balance bikes--also called like-a-bikes and run bikes--are already widespread in Europe and are gaining popularity in the U.S. Bike makers say that children develop balance most effectively by sitting on the bike and walking with their feet flat on the ground and learning to pedal later. The bikes are generally meant for children ages two to five although some parents choose to buy them earlier.
Models cost from $50 to upwards of $200, or more than a regular kid's bike with pedals. And 4- and 5-year-olds may outgrow them pretty quickly, moving on to a real two-wheeler in less than a year.
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As students in the state's first online-only public school, they will log onto a computer and find out what books they need to read and what new skills they should master.The Massachusetts Virtual Academy opens in Greenfield on Thursday, not only as the first in the state, but also as the first virtual school in New England to serve students from kindergarten through high school.
At virtual school, the students will take all of their classes online and have a learning coach make sure they complete their assignments. A parent could be certified, for instance, to be the learning coach.
The student can work anytime of day and some may never see their teachers in person.
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Stacey Wright had more than a dozen choices when it came to enrolling three of her children in an elementary school, from charters to magnets to traditional public schools in every corner of the city.She chose Jefferson Elementary School, the brick St. Louis public school across the street. And for that, she may get $900.
For the first time, a local organization is offering parents a cash incentive to enroll their children at Jefferson. The money is limited to students who didn't attend the school last year. To get it, the kids must finish this semester with near-perfect attendance and receive no out-of-school suspensions; the parent must attend three PTO meetings. The program is being offered to families in three mixed-income housing complexes surrounding the school, where most of the students live.
Wright, an in-home caregiver, recently moved with her children to north St. Louis from Oxford, Miss. She's eager to get involved at Jefferson, located at Hogan and O'Fallon streets.
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Autism has hit L.A. harder than almost any other region of California, with diagnosed cases double or quadruple the state average in many instances, and at a time when our local schools and public health agencies have ever less funds to intervene. In the September issue of Los Angeles we tackle the subject of autism in L.A. While the causes of this public health crisis are elusive, understanding the disorder doesn't have to be. We offer practical advice for parents on what do after their son's or daughter's diagnosis and an etiquette handbook for friends and relatives (example: Do not say, "She's autistic? She looks normal."). We explore how the film industry has shaped--and misshaped--autism awareness, whether it's Elvis Presley as a singing physician who smothers autism with hugs in 1969's Change of Habit or Claire Danes's majestic work in HBO's Temple Grandin. Dustin Hoffman discusses the many realities that coalesced into his Oscar-winning role as Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man. We hear from warrior moms--or "AutMoms"--struggling for their children in Silver Lake and Compton, and from dads as diverse as Altadena poet Tony Peyser and former NFL quarterback Rodney Peete. Then there are firsthand accounts from adults with autism, among them Pulitzer-winning music critic Tim Page, who tells how he chooses not to wear prescription eyeglasses in order to dull the sensory assault that is Los Angeles.
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My six-year-old son is affectionate (a Southern granny couldn't give bigger hugs), funny (he looked at me one morning and declared, "Mama's hair is broke"), and bright (his memory is scary-sharp, and he can assemble a 250-piece puzzle five times faster than I can). He is also autistic.We learned that Isaac had mild autism when he was three. A close friend asked my husband and me, "Do you notice how he flaps his hands? He has a lot of anxiety, too. I'm just wondering..." It had never crossed our minds. We just thought Isaac was eccentric, a late talker but a charmer. I Googled "autism symptoms" and sat at the computer in disbelief. Assessments followed. Out went his Montessori, where he was most often found safe in the lap of a teacher, far from the mayhem of Duck, Duck, Goose; in came a special-needs program with our school district. The teacher was kind but the classroom too large, the demands of the children too disparate. Isaac sat on his assigned carpet square, lined up for snacks, and absorbed nothing. He was slipping further into his obsessions--fountains, photographs, Dr. Seuss--and became so fettered by his fears of crying babies and barking dogs that it was hard to leave our house. During trips to the Getty or dinners at our local pizza joint, I bristled at the reproachful stares of strangers.
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What you've always suspected is true: your elders kind of like it when you have to suck on the lemons of life experience. According to a study conducted by Drs. Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick of Ohio State and Matthias Hastall, from the Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, Germany, older folks are often shown in a negative light, derided as stodgy and absent-minded. So, says Dr. Knobloch-Westerwick, older folks in "a youth-centered culture" are grateful for what they see as "a boost in self-esteem." She continues: "That's why they prefer the negative stories about younger people, who are seen as having a higher status in our society." Knobloch-Westerwick and Hastall studied nearly 300 German adults, ages ranging from 18-30 and 55 to 60. They showed the adults a fake online news site and gave them a few moments to browse either negative or positive versions of several articles. Older test subjects tended to pick negative articles about younger people. In general, they had no interest in articles about people in their age group or older.
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As many students in the Madison School District head back to the classroom Wednesday, Sennett Middle School principal Colleen Lodholz hopes that upgrades outside her school will turn a "scary" traffic situation into a safer one.A new pedestrian safety island, designed to give walkers a place to pause on Pflaum Road, plus rejuvenated bike lanes, crosswalks and a permanent speed board clocking motorists' miles-per-hour (still on order) are part of changes made there after an 11-year-old boy was hit by a car in a Sennett school crosswalk last year on the second day of the school year -- and is part of two big-ticket upgrades meant to help children get to school more safely.
Across the city, parents and principals are also taking measures to encourage safer drop-offs and pick-ups in front of schools as well as to urge parents and students to leave the car at home and walk to school.
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New York City's standalone middle schools do a worse job educating students than schools that offer kindergarten through eighth grade under one roof, according to a new study to be released Wednesday by researchers at Columbia University.The complete paper is available here:On average, children who move up to middle school from a traditional city elementary school, which typically goes up to fifth grade, score about seven percentiles lower on standardized math tests in eighth grade than those who attend a K-8 school, says Jonah Rockoff, an associate professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Business who co-authored the study.
The disparity stems from the toll that changing to a new school takes on adolescents and differences in the sizes of grades, the study says. Typically, K-8 schools can fit fewer children in each grade than standalone middle schools.
"What we found bolsters the case for middle-school reform." says Mr. Rockoff, noting that there aren't significant differences in financial resources or single class sizes between the two types of schools. Standalone "middle schools, where kids are educated in larger groups, are not the best way to educate students in New York City."
The research culls data for city school children who started in grades three through eight during the 1998-99 school year and tracks them through the 2007-2008 school year, comparing test scores, attendance rates and parent evaluations. Of the student sample, 15,000 students attended a K-8 school versus 177,000 who attended a standalone middle school.
We examine the implications of separating students of different grade levels across schools for the purposes of educational production. Specifically, we find that moving students from elementary to middle school in 6th or 7th grade causes significant drops in academic achievement. These effects are large (about 0.15 standard deviations), present for both math and English, and persist through grade 8, the last year for which we have achievement data. The effects are similar for boys and girls, but stronger for students with low levels of initial achievement. We instrument for middle school attendance using the grade range of the school students attended in grade 3, and employ specifications that control for student fixed effects. This leaves only one potential source of bias--correlation between grade range of a student's grade 3 school and unobservable characteristics that cause decreases in achievement precisely when students are due to switch schools--which we view as highly unlikely. We find little evidence that placing public school students into middle schools during adolescence is cost-effective.One of the most basic issues in the organization of public education is how to group students efficiently. Public schools in the U.S. have placed students of similar ages into grade levels since the mid-1800s, but grade configurations have varied considerably over time. At the start of the 20th century, most primary schools in the U.S. included students from kindergarten through grade 8, while the early 1900s saw the rise of the "junior high school," typically spanning grades 7-8 or 7-9 (Juvonen et al., 2004). More recently, school districts have shifted toward the use of "middle schools," which typically span grades 6-8 or 5-8.1 Interestingly, middle schools and junior high schools have never been popular among private schools.2
The impact of grade configuration has received little attention by economists relative to issues such as class size or teacher quality. There are a few studies which provide evidence that the transition to middle school is associated with a loss of academic achievement, elevated suspension rates, and reduced self esteem (Alspaugh (1998a, 1998b), Weiss and Kipnes, (2006), Byrnes and Ruby (2007), Cook et al. (2008)). There is also a large body of work by educational researchers and developmental psychologists documenting changes in attitudes and motivation as children enter adolescence (Eccles et al. (1984)), and some have hypothesized that instructional differences in middle schools contribute to these changes. However, these studies examine differences between middle school and elementary school students using cross-sectional data, and therefore are unable to reject the hypothesis that differences across students, rather than differences in grade configuration, are responsible for divergent educational outcomes.3
In this study, we use panel data in New York City to measure the effects of alternative grade configurations. Specifically, we focus on variation in achievement within students over time, and examine how student achievement is affected by movement into middle schools. Elementary schools in New York City typically serve students until grade 5 or grade 6, while a smaller portion extend through grade 8; thus most students move to a middle school in either grade 6 or grade 7, while some never move to a middle school. We find that achievement falls substantially (about 0.15 standard deviations in math and English) when students move to middle school, relative to their peers who do not move. Importantly, these negative effects persist through grade 8, the highest grade level on which test data are available.
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522K PDF via a Kaleem Caire email:
Based on current education and social conditions, the fate of boys of color is uncertain.More here.Black boys are grossly over-represented among youth failing to achieve academic success, are at grave risk of dropping out of school before they reach 10th grade, are disproportionately represented among adjudicated and incarcerated youth, and are far less likely than their peers in other subgroups to achieve to their dreams and aspirations.
Research indicates that although black boys have high aspirations for academic and career success, their underperformance in school and lack of educational attainment undermine their career pursuits and the success they desire. This misalignment of aspirations and achievement is fueled by and perpetuates a set of social conditions wherein black males find themselves disproportionately represented among the unemployed and incarcerated. Without meaningful, targeted, and sustainable interventions and support systems, hundreds of thousands of young Black men will never realize their true potential and the cycle of high unemployment, fatherless homes, overcrowded jails, incarcerated talent, deferred dreams, and high rates of school failure will continue.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (aka Madison Prep) will be established to serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity among young men of color. Its founders understand that poverty, isolation, structural discrimination, lack of access to positive male role models and achievement-oriented peer groups, limited exposure to opportunity and culture outside their neighborhood or city, and a general lack of understanding - and in some cases fear - of black boys among adults are major contributing factors to why so many young men are failing to achieve to their full potential. However, the Urban League of Greater Madison - the "founders" of Madison Prep - also understand that these issues can be addressed by directly countering each issue with a positive, exciting, engaging, enriching, challenging, affirming and structured learning community designed to exclusively benefit boys.
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More than a fifth of the incoming kindergarteners registered in the Madison School District will be more ready for school this fall after attending a six-week summer program.The full-day K-Ready program helps children prepare for kindergarten by working on academic readiness skills such as letter recognition, name writing and counting. They also have the opportunity to learn what school is like, how to get along with others, and how to listen to a teacher.
This summer, the program grew to a new high of 460 students - about 22 percent of projected kindergarteners.
Fakeith Hopson enrolled his daughter, Aniyah, who will attend Leopold Elementary School, in the K-Ready program at Huegel Elementary School and was impressed by the strides she made in counting and saying her ABCs. She also learned how to tie her shoes.
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"At some schools, a teaching load of five courses every academic year is considered excessive. But Sal Khan, as an earlier Slashdot post noted, manages to deliver his mini-lectures an average of 70,000 times a day. BusinessWeek reports that Khan Academy has a new fan in Bill Gates, who's been singing and tweeting the praises of the free-as-in-beer website. 'This guy is amazing,' Gates wrote. 'It is awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources.' Gates and his 11-year-old son have been soaking up videos, from algebra to biology. And at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of 2,000 people, Gates gave Khan a shout-out, touting the 'unbelievable' Khan Academy tutorials that 'I've been using with my kids.'"
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Students are returning to school this week. But they're not heading back to class -- they're walking straight into a war zone. Our kids have become cannon fodder for two rival ideologies battling to control America's future.In one camp are conservative Christians and their champion, the Texas State Board of Education; in the other are politically radical multiculturalists and their de facto champion, President Barack Obama. The two competing visions couldn't be more different. And the stakes couldn't be higher. Unfortunately, whichever side wins -- your kid ends up losing.
That's because this war is for the power to dictate what our children are taught -- and, by extension, how future generations of Americans will view the world. Long gone are the days when classrooms were for learning: now each side sees the public school system as a vast indoctrination camp in which future culture-warriors are trained. The problem is, two diametrically opposed philosophies are struggling for supremacy, and neither is willing to give an inch, so the end result is extremism, no matter which side temporarily comes out on top.
Both visions are grotesque and unacceptable -- and yet they are currently the only two choices on the national menu. Which shall it be, sir: Brainwashing Fricassee, or a Fried Ignorance Sandwich?
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The UCLA meeting hall was standing room only as campus psychologist Susan Bakota delivered a message to about 150 parents gathered at an orientation session designed just for them."Take a moment to inhale and release your concerns and anxieties and release your student to this wonderful adventure," she told the audience, whose children are about to enroll as UCLA freshman. "And I suggest you too enjoy the ride."
That may be easier said than done for many parents who are dropping their children off for the first time at a big university in a huge city. But at this time of year, more and more colleges across the country are attempting to teach anxious mothers and fathers a lesson not contained in any traditional curriculum: Let go.
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Well, we survived the first week of school, so for this week, let's review as we do every year how parents can help keep kids safe.
- Never place your child's name on any piece of clothing that is visible to anyone. You do not want to make them a target for a stranger to call out to by name.
- Make sure your child knows his or her full name, phone number, parents' full names, address and a work phone number. It is not helpful when officers find children who do not know their full names or addresses.
- Throughout the school year, talk to your child about drugs, strangers and any weapon they might see or hear about, a bully or any related concerns. Let the child know that such information should be reported to the teacher and to you immediately.
- If your child is going into a new school or going to school for the first time, ask her whether there is anything that frightens or makes him/her uncomfortable. Share that information with the teacher or school police; officers are well-trained in safety issues.
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Economists have discovered that the earning gap for college is even bigger because students are studying far less than previous generations. Midmorning asks if students are coming to college better prepared, or if the schools are complicit in lowering standards?
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C.W. Nevius' columns about parents' distress over San Francisco schools rang a bell with me, and I was prompted to weigh in about my delight with the public schools my daughter has attended in San Francisco.When my daughter was starting kindergarten, friends said: "You can't stay in San Francisco; you have to move!" I heard this often enough that I worried. Did my husband and I have to leave the city we loved?
Well, we did decide to stay, and we entered our daughter in our neighborhood school, Fairmount Elementary. "You can't send her there - she won't learn anything at a Spanish immersion school," friends protested. I worried anew.
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Food Revolution hero Ann Cooper recently re-launched her new and improved website for The Lunch Box -- a collection of scalable recipes, resources and general information to turn any school lunch system into a healthy, balanced diet for kids. One of the most exciting initiatives of this revamp is the Great American Salad Project (GASP) which, in partnership with Whole Foods, will create salad bars in over 300 schools across America. The new salad bars will give young students daily access to the fresh fruits and vegetables they need, and will be funded by donations from Whole Foods shoppers and visitors to the website. To donate, click here.Schools can begin grant applications on September 1. If you'd like to see a fresh salad bar in your cafeteria, click here to review the process and get your app ready.
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I'll confess my initial gut reaction to the news that HISD plans to offer parents cash to show up to parent-teacher conferences and help their children study was righteous indignation. What a shame, I thought, that we've been reduced to paying parents to be engaged in their children's learning. I'd be insulted if someone were to greet my wife and me with a fistful of dollars when we show up at her pre-kindergarten open house tonight.Obviously, many of our readers had the same reaction when we posted reporter Ericka Mellon's story to chron.com just after 1 p.m.
It took a reader going by the name of R_Dub just five minutes to fire the first shot:
"What a (expletive) discrace (sic)! HISD giving away money for grades. This is not teaching students anything other than how to manipulate the system or take advantage of others. Good job you idiots."
Similar comments have been streaming in at a clip of about one per minute.
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When I get into cocktail-party conversation about language and politics, someone inevitably says "and of course there's the rise of China." It seems like any conversation these days has to work in the rise-of-China angle. Technology is changing society? Well, it's the flood of cheap tech from China. Worried about your job? It's the rise of China. Terrified of nuclear Iran? If only that rising China would stop resisting sanctions. What's for lunch? Well, we'd all better develop a taste for Chinese food.
I was reminded of this walking down New York's Park Avenue last night, when I saw a pre-school offering immersion courses in French, Italian, Spanish and Chinese. For years now, we've been seeing stories like this: Manhattan parents, always eager to steal some advantage for their children, are hiring Mandarin-speaking nannies, so their children can learn what some see as the language of the future.
But while China's rise is real, Chinese is in no way rising at the same rate. Yes, Mandarin Chinese is the world's most commonly spoken language, if you simply count the number of speakers. But the rub is that they're almost all in China. Yes, we've also read that Mandarin is advancing in Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas Chinese communities (which have traditionally spoken one of China's other languages, such as Cantonese). And China is trying to expand the use of the language through the expansion of its overseas Confucius Institutes. But English remains the world's most important language. America's superpower status has made it everyone's favourite second language. This is where its power lies. A Japanese businessman does deals in Sweden in English. A German airline pilot landing in Milan speaks English to the tower. English is also the language of writing intended for an international audience, whether scientific, commercial or literary.
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Children who carry schoolbags and adopt improper postures while sleeping, walking and doing homework are susceptible to spinal problems, chiropractors warned.
A Children Chiropractic Foundation survey of 1,298 Primary One to Six students from September last year to May this year found 18 percent of them suffered from spinal problems.Foundation member Tony Cheung Kai-shui said girls are more susceptible to spinal problems as their growth development is faster compared with boys of the same age.
Cheung noted that common symptoms of spinal problems are headaches, chest pains, asthma, back pains and overall weakness.
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Kathryn McCormick, Kevin Carey & Brandon Krapf:
College classrooms were once filled primarily by eager students straight out of high school. But the vast majority of today's college students work, have a family, are enrolled only part time, or a combination of all three. This new breed of college student is reshaping the face of higher education in America.
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A report released Tuesday ranks cities not in terms of best-performing schools but on their openness to outside ideas and education reform.Complete Study: 9.9MB PDF:Education entrepreneurs - the sort of people who want to open a new charter school, or have an innovative way to get talented new teachers into schools - would do well to head to New Orleans. Or Washington or New York.
At least that's the judgment of "America's Best (and Worst) Cities for School Reform: Attracting Entrepreneurs and Change Agents," a study released Tuesday that's attempting to rank cities in a new way. It doesn't look at how well their students perform, or even on the programs their districts have put in place, but on how welcoming they are to reforms and new ideas. The education version of the World Bank's annual ranking of the best countries for business, if you will.
Enter the education entrepreneur, a problem-solver who has developed a different and--it is to be hoped--better approach to teaching and learning, either inside or outside the traditional school system. He or she may provide, among other things, a novel form of brick and mortar teaching, an alternative version of teacher recruitment or training, or time-saving software and tools that make for more efficient instruction and surer learning. Which cities would welcome and support such problem-solvers by helping to bring their ideas to scale, improve their odds of success, and nurture their growth? Put another way, which cities have the most reform-friendly ecosystems?
To answer this question, analysts examined six domains that shape a jurisdiction's receptivity to education reform:Human Capital: Entrepreneurs need access to a ready flow of talented individuals, whether to staff their own operations or fill the district's classrooms.
Financial Capital: A pipeline of flexible funding from private and/or public sources is vital for nonprofit organizations trying to break into a new market or scale up their operations.
Charter Environment: Charter schools are one of the primary entrees through which entrepreneurs can penetrate new markets, both as direct education providers and as consumers of other nontraditional goods and services.
Quality Control: Lest we unduly credit innovation per se, the study takes into account the quality- control metrics that appraise and guide entrepreneurial ventures.
District Environment: Because many nontraditional providers must contract with the district in order to work in the city, finding a district that is both open to nontraditional reforms and has the organiza- tional capacity to deal with them in a speedy and professional manner can make or break an entrepreneur's foray into a new market.
Municipal Environment: Beyond the school district, is the broader community open to, even eager for, nontraditional providers? Consider, for example, the stance of business leaders, the mayor, and the media.
Drawing on publicly available data, national and local survey data, and interviews with on-the-ground insiders, analysts devised a grading metric that rated each city on its individual and collective accom- plishments in each of these areas.
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Americans, plugged in and on the move, are confiding in their pets, their computers, and their spouses. What they need is to rediscover the value of friendship.Science-fiction writers make the best seers. In the late 1950s far-sighted Isaac Asimov imagined a sunny planet called Solaria, on which a scant 20,000 humans dwelt on far-flung estates and visited one another only virtually, by materializing as "trimensional images"--avatars, in other words. "They live completely apart," a helpful robot explained to a visiting earthling, "and never see one another except under the most extraordinary circumstances."
We have not, of course, turned into Solarians here on earth, strictly limiting our numbers and shunning our fellow humans in revulsion. Yet it's hard not to see some Solarian parallels in modern life. Since Asimov wrote The Naked Sun, Americans have been engaged in wholesale flight from one another, decamping for suburbs and Sunbelt, splintering into ever smaller households, and conducting more and more of their relationships online, where avatars flourish. The churn rate of domestic relations is especially remarkable, and has rendered family life in the United States uniquely unstable. "No other comparable nation," the sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin observes, "has such a high level of multiple marital and cohabiting unions."
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Few education stories have excited me as much as the series on teacher assessment being done by reporters Jason Song, Jason Felch and Doug Smith of the Los Angeles Times. They have dug up a goldmine of data on the student test score gains of 6,000 individual elementary school teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, information that the district has refused to show to parents despite pleas from its staff to do so.The latest story in the series, "L.A.'s leaders in learning," does many things that I think are crucial to improving American education, and fit what I have been trying to do calculating the level of challenge in high schools, nationally and in the Washington area, the last 12 years.
The latest Times story focuses on how schools as a whole, not individual teachers, are doing in raising achievement. That emphasis encourages schools to create team-like cultures in which everyone works to make everyone else better. The story buttresses the central point of the series--that schools that seem similar to parents trying to choose where to send their children look very different when unreported data like relative test score gains are revealed. It also shows in a dramatic way the uselessness of our usual means of rating schools. Those that have the highest test scores are considered the best, even though achievement measured that way reflects the average incomes of the parents far more than it does the quality of the teaching.
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IT'S AUGUST, and time to reheat an old story, as most sensible journalists are on holiday (as I will be next week). Today the New York Times reports a trend in families seeking bilingual nannies. They reported on this same trend in 2006, with specific reference to Chinese nannies.Parents think kids get a benefit from bilingualism, and they're probably right. But this article does mention some of the costs I hadn't seen mentioned before: word retrieval is said by Ellen Bialystock, a psychologist at York University in Toronto, to be milliseconds slower in bilingual kids than in monolingual ones. Overall vocabulary in the first language tends to be somewhat smaller (though overall vocabulary in both languages combined is of course greater). "It doesn't make kids smarter," says Ms Bialystock, though there are clear cognitive "developments", some good, some less so.
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A world without antibiotics could be a mere 10 years away as science and nature compete in a battle that may render some routine operations too risky to consider.Just 65 years ago, David Livermore's paternal grandmother died following an operation to remove her appendix. It didn't go well but it was not the surgery that killed her. She succumbed to a series of infections that the pre-penicillin world had no drugs to treat. Welcome to the future.
The era of antibiotics is coming to a close. In just a couple of generations, what once appeared to be miracle medicines have been beaten into ineffectiveness by the bacteria they were designed to knock out. Once, scientists hailed the end of infectious diseases. Now, the post-antibiotic apocalypse is within sight.
Hyperbole? Unfortunately not. This month, the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases posed the question over a paper revealing the rapid spread of drug-resistant bacteria. "Is this the end of antibiotics?" it asked.
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"It isn't fair."I'd be willing to bet that somewhere, some kid is uttering those words at this very moment. And most likely the outburst was triggered by sibling rivalry.
Amy and I got a taste of it (hardly our first) a while back when we took our 13-year-old son to see the latest installment of the "Twilight" movie saga. He has read all the books and seen the first two movies, so we've been promising we would take him as soon as we could.
Our 7-year-old daughter stayed with her grandmother, Amy's mom. We knew various scenes in the movie -- as well as the dark, overarching theme of vampires and werewolves -- would simply be too scary for her.
So we arranged for her and her grandmother to have dinner at a restaurant our daughter likes. That way everyone would be happy.
Or so we thought.
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I remember hearing it somewhere.
What's that term again, oh yes, "free education."Anyone can get a public education because it's free.
Really, because I just spent close to $90 at one of our fine local retailers picking up a few of those last minute mandated items for that free education.
Obviously when you're talking about parochial or private schools, there is a degree of tuition associated with that choice. But the public school system is supposed to be something that we pay taxes to cover.
And yet each year, I see a rack of flyers for each school within a one-hour radius with lots of small lettering detailing every item the students must have to attend the public schools to acquire their free public education.
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Since Andie was in 6th grade - she'll be entering 8th grade Sept. 1 - the Smith family has used Infinite Campus, an electronic data system that gives parents access to information about how students are doing in school. It often provides more information than the typical middle school student brings home and it helps parents know from week-to-week what's going on in the classroom. Madison, like most other Dane County school districts, has been using some form of electronic communication system for the last several years.Much more on Infinite Campus and "Standards Based Report Cards", here."I don't have to ask to look at her planner anymore," says Smith. "And, her group of teachers at Toki wrote a weekly newsletter last year that I could read online. When your kids get into middle school, they've got more classes, and parents generally have fewer connections with the teachers so I really appreciate the way it works."
For the first time this year, Smith, like the rest of the parents and guardians of the approximately 24,000 students in the Madison Metropolitan School District, is using the online system to enroll her children in class. She also has a son, Sam, who will be a 5th grader at Chavez Elementary this fall. District officials hope that giving parents a password and user ID at the enrollment stage will expand the number of parents using Infinite Campus. A primary goal is to help increase communication ties between home and school, which is a proven way to engage kids and boost academic achievement.
But whether all parents will take to the system remains to be seen. Despite the boom in electronic communication, there are plenty of homes without computers, especially in urban school districts like Madison where poverty levels are rising. The extent to which teachers will buy in is also unclear. Teachers are required to post report cards and attendance online, but things like test scores, assignments and quizzes will be discretionary.
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If you have a child in college, or are planning to send one there soon, Craig Brandon has a message for you: Be afraid. Be very afraid."The Five-Year Party" provides the most vivid portrait of college life since Tom Wolfe's 2004 novel, "I Am Charlotte Simmons." The difference is that it isn't fiction. The alcohol-soaked, sex-saturated, drug-infested campuses that Mr. Brandon writes about are real. His book is a roadmap for parents on how to steer clear of the worst of them.
Many of the schools Mr. Brandon describes are education-free zones, where students' eternal obligations--do the assigned reading, participate in class, hand in assignments--no longer apply. The book's title refers to the fact that only 30% of students enrolled in liberal-arts colleges graduate in four years. Roughly 60% take at least six years to get their degrees. That may be fine with many schools, whose administrators see dollar signs in those extra semesters.
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Letters to the New York Times Editor
"Schools Given Grade on How Graduates Do" (front page, Aug. 10) was revealing of system failure on several levels.Especially telling for me were the comments by a remedial writing teacher at a community college who noted: "They don't know how to develop an argument. They have very little ability to get past rhetoric and critically analyze what is motivating the writer."
This teacher's observation highlights what may well be the school system's worst deficiency in terms of skills development: a failure to promote critical thinking. That skill is fundamental if our youth are to become thoughtful workers and thoughtful citizens of a democratic society rather than robots. Developing it can't be left to writing classes alone but must happen throughout the curriculum.
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Striving to be a dad, I read "The Odyssey" this summer.You probably know the story. Odysseus is trying to make his way back home from the battlefield at Troy. He's been away at war for two decades.
But the gods punish him again and again on the sea journey home. With each new disaster that befalls him, Odysseus longs more for his wife and son. Finally he reaches the soil of his beloved Ithaca and speaks this line lamenting all he had lost by seeking glory in battle:
...I had no love for working the land, the chores of household either, the labor that raises crops of shining children.
That line caught my attention because I was reading "The Odyssey" precisely to help raise my family "crop." My 14-year-old son enters high school in a few weeks and "The Odyssey" was his assigned summer reading.
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he descendant of a slave is about to enter Mars Hill College, bringing to an end 105 years of segregation at the Baptist school in western North Carolina.* Her admittance means something more: the payoff of a novel moral debt.The founders of little Mars Hill were in trouble as soon as they laid the last handmade brick on the first building in 1856. They owed the contractors $1,100; the treasury was empty. While they frantically passed the hat, the builders slapped a judgment on the Rev. J. W. Anderson, future secretary of the college. The Rev. Mr. Anderson owned a Negro named Joe --a strapping young man easily worth $1,100 on the slave market in nearby Asheville. Some say that Joe himself volunteered to be a human surety. The builders took him to jail for safekeeping. Four days later, when the founders raised the cash. Mars Hill was saved.
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Katharine Beals, Trumpeter Books, 2009 Reviewed by Barry Garelick, via email
Many school parents question the value of today's homework assignments. They rightly wonder whether their children are getting the education they need in order to succeed in college. For the most part, they are well-meaning parents who were educated from the 1950's through the 1970's in a different style--a style derided by the current power elite in graduate schools of education and school administration. They describe the schoolroom remembered by today's parents as: sitting in rows, facing front, listening passively to a teacher who talked to the blackboard, "memorizing by rote", and thinking uncritically. In today's classrooms, students are given a minimal amount of instruction, and instead are presented with a question--say a math problem--told to form groups and work out an approach to solving the problem. Or if not a math problem, they are told to discuss an aspect of a book they are reading. Homework assignments are often art projects, in which students must construct dioramas of the climactic event of a story they read, or decorate a tissue box with German phrases to help them learn the language, or put together a family tree with photographs and label each with the Spanish term for their place in the family.In Raising a Left-brain Child in a Right-brain World, Katharine Beals explores today's classrooms and describes in detail why this approach is particularly destructive and ineffective for students who are shy, awkward, introspective, linear and analytic thinkers. She is careful to explain that her use of the term "left brained" is her way of categorizing students who are linear thinkers--who process information by learning one thing at a time thoroughly before moving on to the next. (I use the term in the same fashion in this review.)
A particularly powerful passage at the beginning of the book describes the difficulties that left-brained children face and provides a stark and disturbing contrast with the traditional classrooms that the parents of these children remember:
Making matters worse is how today's informal discussions favor multiple solutions, personal opinions, and personal connections over single correct answers. In previous generations the best answer, exerting an absolute veto power, favored the studious over the merely charismatic; how that there is no best answer, extroversion is king. ... To fully appreciate the degree to which today's classrooms challenge our children, we should consider how they might have fared in more traditional schools. Imagine how much more at ease they might be in general, and how their attitudes toward school might improve, if they enjoyed the privacy of quietly listening to teachers lecture instead of having to talk to classmates. ...Imagine if they could read to themselves instead of to a group, do math problems on their own, and find, in the classroom, a safe haven from school yard dynamics. (p. 23)
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My relationship with journalist Zac Bissonnette began on the wrong foot. He told me a high school from his part of Massachusetts was misrepresenting itself on my annual high schools list for Newsweek. I checked and decided he was wrong, which he found hard to accept. I assumed someone so certain of his conclusions had to be an experienced reporter. In fact, he was only 18.That was just the first of the surprises he had in store for me. He turned out to be an entrepreneurial prodigy who had grown up in a family that did not have much money. He started his first business in the second grade, built his brokerage account to five figures by the ninth grade, and moved on to help run a personal finance site, WalletPop.com, for AOL.
Having developed a sharp sense of the real world unusual for his age, Bissonnette commenced the college admissions process. If the National Association for College Admissions Counseling had anticipated the dire consequences of one of the smartest teenagers in America encountering the ill-examined assumptions of their profession, they might have found some way to buy him off, maybe a full ride scholarship to Harvard.
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The premise of this book is enticingly simple . It presents two solutions to two prevalent problems in education . The first is the vast amount of content required to be taught because of various state standards, and how one can thread that maze and "teach for understanding ." That is, how can educators get students to apply what they've learned to new and unfamiliar problems? The second is the diverse nature of today's classrooms, the result of heterogeneous grouping of students of different abilities . How does an educator differentiate instruction to accommodate such diversity in a single classroom?I read this book in a math teaching methods class a few years ago . One event in that class stands out regarding this textbook . In a chapter on assessing understanding, a chart presents examples of "Inauthentic versus Authentic Work" (p . 68) . For example, "Solve contrived problems" is listed as inauthentic; "Solve 'real world' prob- lems" is listed as authentic . The black-and-white nature of the dis- tinctions on the chart bothered me, so when the teacher asked if we had any comments, I said that calling certain practices "inauthentic" is not only pejorative but misleading . Since the chart listed "Practice decontextualized skills" as inauthentic and "Interpret literature" as authentic, I asked the teacher, "Do you really think that learning to read is an inauthentic skill?"
She replied that she didn't really know about issues related to reading . Keeping it on the math level, I then asked why the authors automatically assumed that a word problem that might be contrived didn't involve "authentic" mathematical concepts . She answered with a blank stare and the words "Let's move on ."
That incident remains in my mind because it is emblematic of the educational doctrine that pervades schools of education as well as this book . The doctrine holds that mastery of facts and attaining procedural fluency in subjects like mathematics amounts to mind- numbing "drill and kill" exercises that ultimately stifle creativity and critical thinking . It also embodies the belief that critical thinking skills can be taught .
In a discussion of what constitutes "understanding," the authors state that a student's ability to apply what he or she has learned does not necessarily represent understanding . "When we call for an appli- cation we do not mean a mechanical response or mindless 'plug-in' of a memorized formula . Rather, we ask students to transfer--to use what they know in a new situation" (p . 67) . In terms of math and other subjects that involve attaining procedural fluency, employing worked examples as scaffolding for tackling more-complex prob- lems is not something that these authors see as leading to any kind of understanding . That a mastery of fundamentals provides the foun- dation for the creativity they seek is lost in their quest to get stu- dents performing authentic work from the start
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Recently, I found my 2-1/2-year-old son sitting on our building doorstep, waiting for me to come home. He spotted me as I was rounding the corner and the scene that followed was one of inexpressible loveliness, right out of the film I'd played to myself before having a child, with him popping out of his babysitter's arms and barrelling down the street to greet me. This happy moment, though, was about to be cut short and, in retrospect, felt more like a tranquil lull in a slasher film.When I opened our apartment door, I discovered my son had broken part of the toy wooden garage I'd spent an hour assembling that morning. This wouldn't have been a problem, except that as I attempted to fix it, he grew impatient and began throwing its various parts at the walls, with one plank narrowly missing my eye. I recited the rules of the house (no throwing, no hitting). He picked up another large wooden plank. I ducked. He reached for the screwdriver. The scene ended with a time-out in his cot.
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Knowledge is power, but it is not always welcome. The Los Angeles Times just completed an extensive study of how individual teachers have fared at raising their students' math and English test scores in the state's most populous city. The raw data have been available to the L.A. Unified School District for years, but it never bothered to crunch those numbers, let alone share them with parents. The Times has pledged to publish its ratings of 6,000 elementary school instructors.Reaction of the local teachers union? It has called for a "massive boycott" of the Times.
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Local school districts have started to grade teachers based on student test scores, but the early results suggest the effort deserves an incomplete.Related: Standards Based Report Cards and Value Added Assessment.The new type of teacher evaluations make use of the standardized tests that have become an annual rite for American public-school students. The tests mainly have been used to measure the progress of students and schools, but with some statistical finesse they can be transformed into a lens for identifying which teachers are producing the best test results.
At least, that's the hope among some education experts. But the performance numbers that have emerged from these studies rely on a flawed statistical approach.
One perplexing finding: A large proportion of teachers who rate highly one year fall to the bottom of the charts the next year. For example, in a group of elementary-school math teachers who ranked in the top 20% in five Florida counties early last decade, more than three in five didn't stay in the top quintile the following year, according to a study published last year in the journal Education Finance and Policy.
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It is always news to me when I hear or read something good about the Newark school system, so I took notice when the Schott Foundation for Public Education released a new study saying that both that city, and the state of New Jersey, lead the nation in the percent of black male students graduating from high school.Schott's report focused on the abysmal national graduation rate for black males, only 47 percent in the 2007-08 school year, but it heralded the New Jersey results, and gave credit to that state's heavy spending and innovative measures to raise graduation rates for everyone.
It said New Jersey had a graduation rate for black males of 69 percent in 2007-08, with the next closest states being Maryland (55 percent), California (54 percent) and Pennsylvania (53 percent). In Newark, the graduation rate for black males was 76 percent. The other school districts nearest that level were Fort Bend, Tex. (68 percent), Baltimore County, Md. (67 percent) and Montgomery County, Md. (65 percent). The list only included states with more than 100,000 black male students and districts with more than 10,000 black male students.
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WITH only a few weeks left until school starts, the tutoring business is gearing up. And it is one industry in America that seems immune to recession. More parents are paying for tutors for their children.
Spending on tutors is growing at more than 5 percent a year, said Steve Pines, executive director of the Education Industry Association. This is down from yearly growth of 8 to 10 percent in 2007, when the education research firm EduVentures estimated the size of the tutoring industry at $5 billion to $7 billion a year. But it is still strong, given the state of most people's personal finances. And Sandi Ayaz, executive director of the National Tutoring Association, said the number of tutors her organization had certified had grown 18 percent in each of the last five years.
While tutors once focused on helping children who were falling behind in particular subjects or had a learning disability, they are now being used far more to guide students through particularly tough courses, insure their grades are equal to or above their peers' and, in the end, polish a child's college application. This costs parents a lot of money, and the question is, What returns should they expect for their investment? And how does that desire mesh with what is right?
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As summer vacation comes to an end, District students are not alone in their transition from leisure to learning. Parents must also prepare to be involved for another year of academic growth.According to the Harvard Family Research Project, parental involvement is key to student achievement. Public, private and charter schools are becoming more insistent that parents get involved with their children's education inside and outside the classroom.
"We need to be encouraging them to participate in their child's education," said Kaye E. Savage, founder and chief executive of Excel Academy Public Charter School, an all-girls school in Southeast.
Savage said each parent at her school must sign a "covenant of excellence" to ensure their involvement.
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Good eye contact, a firm handshake and self confidence can pave the way to a good interview. Turns out, that's the case even if the applicant is 4 or 5 years old.In the frenzy to get kindergarteners into the top private schools, parents are now hiring consultants to coach their children on the art of the interview.
For years, such preparations have been the norm for the standardized tests children must take to get into private schools, the so-called ERBs, which measure IQ and are administered by the Educational Records Bureau. But after a cottage industry devoted to test-prep materials and classes developed, parents say scoring in the top percentile or two became the norm rather than the exception; schools such as Horace Mann, Dalton and Collegiate began placing more emphasis on the interview and getting more granular in their assessments.
Since New York parents have a tendency to exaggerate their sons' and daughters' piano or French skills, admissions directors say they like to see any special talents with their own eyes.
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This book is depressing because it is so persuasive. There is a school of thought in America which argues that the government must be the main force that provides help to the black community. This shibboleth is predicated upon another one: that such government efforts will make a serious difference in disparities between blacks and whites. Amy Wax not only argues that such efforts have failed, she also suggests that such efforts cannot bring equality, and therefore must be abandoned. Wax identifies the illusion that mars American thinking on this subject as the myth of reverse causation--that if racism was the cause of a problem, then eliminating racism will solve it. If only this were true. But it isn't true: racism can set in motion cultural patterns that take on a life of their own.Wax appeals to a parable in which a pedestrian is run over by a truck and must learn to walk again. The truck driver pays the pedestrian's medical bills, but the only way the pedestrian will walk again is through his own efforts. The pedestrian may insist that the driver do more, that justice has not occurred until the driver has himself made the pedestrian learn to walk again. But the sad fact is that justice, under this analysis, is impossible. The legal theory about remedies, Wax points out, grapples with this inconvenience--and the history of the descendants of African slaves, no matter how horrific, cannot upend its implacable logic. As she puts it, "That blacks did not, in an important sense, cause their current predicament does not preclude charging them with alleviating it if nothing else will work."
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Families in the most affluent New York City school districts, including the Upper East and Upper West sides, file more claims than other parts of the city seeking reimbursement of their children's private-school tuition, according to Department of Education data.The department last year spent $116 million in tuition and legal expenses to cover special-education students whose parents sued the DOE alleging that their public-school options were not appropriate. The number is more than double three years ago, and the costs are expected to continue to rise.
Parents have been helped by a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that strengthened their legal position to sue school districts. The most recent case was last summer.
"No one begrudges parents the right to send their children to private school," said Michael Best, general counsel at the DOE. "But this system was not intended as a way for private school parents to get the taxpayers to fund their children's tuition."
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The Los Angeles Unified School District has done an admirable job of collecting useful data about its teachers -- which ones have the classroom magic that makes students learn and which ones annually let their students down. Yet it has never used that valuable information to analyze what successful teachers have in common, so that others can learn from them, or to let less effective teachers know how they're doing.Marketplace has more as does Daniel Willingham.For the record: This editorial says the federal Race to the Top grant program pushed states to make students' test scores count for half or more of a teacher's performance evaluation. Although the program has encouraged this by awarding its first grants to states that promised to do so, it has not formally required it.
If it weren't for the work of a team of Times reporters, this information might have remained uselessly locked away. Now that the paper is reporting on the wide disparities among teachers, the public is getting its first glimpse of some surprising findings.
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Birth order within families has long sparked sibling rivalry, but it might also impact the child's personality and intelligence, a new study suggests. First-borns are typically smarter, while younger siblings get better grades and are more outgoing, the researchers say.The findings weigh in on a long-standing debate: What effect if any does birth order have on a person's life? While numerous studies have been conducted, researchers have yet to draw any definitive conclusions.
The results lend support to some previous hypotheses -- for instance, that the eldest sibling tends to have higher aptitude. But the study also contradicts other proposed ideas, for example, that first-borns tend to be more extroverted.
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Come to Milwaukee and help grow the good food revolution. Hosted by Growing Power--a national organization headed by the sustainable urban farmer and MacArthur Fellow Will Allen--this international conference will teach the participant how to plan, develop and grow small farms in urban and rural areas. Learn how you can grow food year-round, no matter what the climate, and how you can build markets for small farms. See how you can play a part in creating a new food system that fosters better health and more closely-knit communities.
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Science-fiction writers make the best seers. In the late 1950s far-sighted Isaac Asimov imagined a sunny planet called Solaria, on which a scant 20,000 humans dwelt on far-flung estates and visited one another only virtually, by materializing as "trimensional images"--avatars, in other words. "They live completely apart," a helpful robot explained to a visiting earthling, "and never see one another except under the most extraordinary circumstances."We have not, of course, turned into Solarians here on earth, strictly limiting our numbers and shunning our fellow humans in revulsion. Yet it's hard not to see some Solarian parallels in modern life. Since Asimov wrote The Naked Sun, Americans have been engaged in wholesale flight from one another, decamping for suburbs and Sunbelt, splintering into ever smaller households, and conducting more and more of their relationships online, where avatars flourish. The churn rate of domestic relations is especially remarkable, and has rendered family life in the United States uniquely unstable. "No other comparable nation," the sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin observes, "has such a high level of multiple marital and cohabiting unions."
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Todd Braver emerges from a tent nestled against the canyon wall. He has a slight tan, except for a slim pale band around his wrist.For the first time in three days in the wilderness, Mr. Braver is not wearing his watch. "I forgot," he says.
It is a small thing, the kind of change many vacationers notice in themselves as they unwind and lose track of time. But for Mr. Braver and his companions, these moments lead to a question: What is happening to our brains?
Mr. Braver, a psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, was one of five neuroscientists on an unusual journey. They spent a week in late May in this remote area of southern Utah, rafting the San Juan River, camping on the soft banks and hiking the tributary canyons.
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Iowa parents who thought a shift to public preschool meant less money out of their pockets are in for a surprise.Parents of 4-year-old students in some Iowa school districts will be charged tuition, despite the nearly $65 million Iowa taxpayers will pump this year into a statewide preschool expansion led by Gov. Chet Culver.
The practice could fuel an election-year debate about whether taxpayers should foot the bill for preschool. Terry Branstad, Culver's Republican opponent, said he will scrap universal preschool if he wins the Nov. 2 election.
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I have never let my schooling interfere with my education - Mark Twain.Our new, wired world has brought forth many positives. One of the simplest, yet powerful, of the new tools available is the ability to bookmark worthy Internet materials for future use.
Even more powerful is the ability to share those materials indirectly through the use of sites like Delicious. We subscribe so as to have the most popular education bookmarks forwarded to us on a daily basis.
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Jordan Holt needed a business plan. So he went back to school.A technician for a military contractor in Yuma, Ariz., Mr. Holt launched a side business last year, servicing and repairing generators--and quickly realized he would need to write up a formal plan if he ever wanted to borrow money for equipment. But after doing some online research, putting together a plan "looked complicated and overwhelming," he says.
He decided to get the help he needed from a business-plan development course at Arizona Western College in Yuma. "I was able to take everything in my head and put it down on paper," says Mr. Holt, a 29-year-old ex-Marine. "I truly think it could work."
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Madison and nearby school districts annually publicize their National Merit Scholar counts.
Consequently, I read with interest Madison School Board member Ed Hughes' recent blog post:
We brag about how well Wisconsin students do on the ACT, and this is certainly good. But about 30 states have higher cut scores than Wisconsin when it comes to identifying National Merit Scholars, which means that their top 1% of students taking the test score higher than our top 1% do. (We in the MMSD are justly proud of our inordinate number of National Merit semi-finalists, but if - heaven forbid - MMSD were to be plopped down in the middle of Illinois, our number of semi-finalists would go down, perhaps significantly so. Illinois students need a higher score on the PSAT to be designated a National Merit semi-finalist than Wisconsin students do.)I asked a few people who know about such things and received this response:
The critical cut score for identifying National Merit Semifinalist varies from state to state depending on the number of students who took the test and how well those students did on the test. In 2009, a score of 207 would put a student amongst the top 1% of test takers in Wisconsin and qualify them as a National Merit Semifinalist. However this score would not be high enough to qualify the student as a semifinalist in 36 other states or the District of Columbia.View individual state cut scores, by year here. In 2010, Minnesota's cut score was 215, Illinois' 214, Iowa 209 and Michigan 209. Wisconsin's was 207.
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If you want a little entertainment, you could check out a movie or head to the bookstore. But you might have better luck firing up YouTube to watch the latest crop of video résumés. Since the start of the recession, thousands of unemployed hopefuls have posted clips of themselves wooing imaginary recruiters, and many seem to have gone mad in their quest for a job. They look tired, they look bored, they look angry. They talk about themselves in the third person. And they don't mind making their private ambitions public. As one candidate told the camera, "I just want to commit my life to, you know, a job that, you know, my life can be committed to."Video résumés aren't new, but as high unemployment drags on, they're increasingly pitched to job hunters looking to stand out. Colleen Aylward, CEO of video service InterviewStudio.com, says she sees a new competitor launch just about every week. The services are popular with career counselors as well. Todd Lempicke, founder of OptimalResume.com, says more than 260 colleges, libraries and job centers will be offering his video services to their constituents, double the number in 2009.
A video résumé can run you anywhere from $7,000 (for "executive Web portfolio" packages) to $50 (for guided tutorials that have candidates recording presentations with a webcam). And, of course, many folks take the DIY route. When done right, the results can be impressive: It's a chance to flaunt engaging qualities that a paper CV can't capture. But more often, the effort goes horribly wrong.
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When Emily Cooper headed off to first grade in Moody, Ala., last week, she was prepared with all the stuff on her elementary school's must-bring list: two double rolls of paper towels, three packages of Clorox wipes, three boxes of baby wipes, two boxes of garbage bags, liquid soap, Kleenex and Ziplocs."The first time I saw it, my mouth hit the floor," Emily's mother, Kristin Cooper, said of the list, which also included perennials like glue sticks, scissors and crayons.
Schools across the country are beginning the new school year with shrinking budgets and outsize demands for basic supplies. And while many parents are wincing at picking up the bill, retailers are rushing to cash in by expanding the back-to-school category like never before.
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Under pressure from state public health officials, the professors behind UC Berkeley's controversial plan to genetically test incoming freshmen and transfer students said Thursday they will scale back the program so that participants will not receive personal results from their DNA samples.The university raised the ire of genetic watchdog and privacy groups in May when it first launched "Bring Your Genes to Cal." The voluntary program is believed to be the largest genetic testing project at a U.S. university.
The 5,500 incoming freshman and transfer students for the fall semester received testing kits in the mail and were asked to submit cheek swabs of their DNA to kick off a yearly exercise to involve the new students in a common educational experience centered on a theme. This year's theme is personalized medicine.
Students were to receive personal information about three of their genes - those related to the ability to break down lactose, metabolize alcohol and absorb folates. This information was to be the basis of lectures and discussions on such topics as the ethical, social and legal interpretations of genetic testing.
But what was meant to be a group educational exercise turned into a lesson for the university on the politics and policy of medical testing.
Assembly hearing
The program was the subject of a state Assembly committee hearing on Tuesday in Sacramento. On Wednesday, officials from the state Department of Public Health said the university must use certified laboratories that meet specific standards, rather than the campus labs, if the school planned to release individualized test results, identified only by barcodes, to students.
"The California Department of Public Health made the determination that what we're doing isn't really actual research or education; that what we're doing is providing medical information, conducting a test," said Dr. Mark Schlissel, dean of biological sciences at UC Berkeley's College of Letters & Science and a professor of molecular and cell biology.
Schlissel said he disagreed with that assessment, but said the university will comply with state regulators. UC officials have asked the Department of Public Health to provide legal authority for its interpretation.
The university still plans to analyze the DNA samples in a campus research lab, but students will not have access to their personal results. Instead, the test results will be presented in aggregate to students during lectures and panel discussions this fall.
Schlissel said the controversy and intervention by state regulators has raised interesting questions for the discussions. "Who has authority to tell an individual what they're allowed to know about themselves?" he said. "I don't know the answer to that."
About 700 students have already submitted their samples.
Critics' concerns
Critics had raised questions about how the genetic information, even seemingly innocuous, could be misinterpreted or misused. For example, students who learn they metabolize alcohol well may mistakenly think they can overindulge without consequence.
Jeremy Gruber, who testified at Tuesday's hearing before the Assembly Committee on Higher Education in his role as president of the Council for Responsible Genetics, still has lingering concerns about how the samples will be handled and whether students had the proper amount of information before offering consent to provide them.
"The fact it required the intervention of the Department of Public Health before they would act in the best interest of their students is absolutely appalling," he said.
UC Berkeley officials have said the university will incinerate the samples after they are tested in the next few weeks. Jesse Reynolds, policy analyst at the Center for Genetics and Society in Berkeley, had opposed the university's program primarily over privacy concerns and what he considered the lack of research into the implications of such a mass experiment.
He said restricting students from receiving information about their personal genetics essentially cancels the "personalized medicine" aspect of the program. He said that although students signed consent forms to participate as part of submitting their DNA samples, he is concerned they have now signed consent forms for what is to be a different program.
"Genetic testing in general and personalized medicine specifically are likely to be an increasing part of our lives," Reynolds said. "More education is certainly needed, but this was not the way to go about it."
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As you help pack up the minifridge, laptop and extra-long twin sheets for your college freshman, you might consider a few other last-minute chores:• Scour your health-insurance coverage for loopholes.
• Reread your homeowner's insurance policy.
• Call your lawyer.
Sending a child off to college for the first time is wrenching enough, but a slew of conflicting rules and changing banking and health-care laws are making this year's move-in season more confusing than ever.
And with college costs and student debt at record levels, it is all the more important for students--and their parents--to avoid the new financial traps cropping up on campuses these days, from debit cards to health insurance.
Overlooking small details now, in the frenzied rush to campus, can invite much stress later on.
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Fion Chan Chui-tung could barely utter a complete sentence in Putonghua or English a year ago.Now, after 12 months at Utahloy International School, a sprawling and pristine international school in Guangzhou, the Hong Kong teen converses effortlessly with her ethnically diverse schoolmates.
Fion, 18, is one of a growing number of pupils who have upped sticks and headed north to study. Enrollment of Hongkongers in international schools in Guangzhou and Shenzhen is rising by 5 to 10 per cent a year.
Parents who spurn prestigious international schools in Hong Kong in favour of mainland ones cite a list of factors: lower tuition fees, low living costs, a strict teaching regimen and bucolic campuses where not a word of Cantonese is spoken.
Fion's mother, Luk Yim-fong, a businesswoman, transferred her daughter from Heung To Secondary School in Tseung Kwan O to Utahloy so that she would not be surrounded by Cantonese speakers. "Although Heung To offers Putonghua classes, all the students speak Cantonese after class," she says. "From my business dealings with multinational corporations like Samsung, even Korean businessmen speak fluent Putonghua. Mandarin is a language my daughter must master in order to thrive in future."
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The number of college students who are afflicted with a serious mental illness is rising, according to data presented Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in San Diego.The findings came from an analysis of 3,265 college students who used campus counseling services between September 1997 and August 2009. The students were screened for mental disorders, suicidal thoughts and self-injurious behavior.
In 1998, 93 percent of the students seeking counseling were diagnosed with one mental disorder, compared to 96 percent of students in 2009. The percentage of students with moderate to severe depression rose from 34 percent to 41 percent while the number of students on psychiatric medications increased from 11 percent to 24 percent.
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One of the most popular articles on Digg yesterday was titled, "Why Does College Cost So Much?" -- I guess it's that time of year. The article was written by a pair of economics professors who have written a forthcoming book on the subject. The authors argue that the primary factors driving college-tuition inflation are:1. The labor-hours needed to provide this "artisanal" service have not declined;
2. The cost of employing the highly educated workers needed to provide the service has gone up; and
3. The cost of the technologies employed in higher education has risen faster than the cost of other technologies.I'm interested to see what kind of evidence the authors provide for this thesis in their book, because I'm not at all persuaded by this article. The authors don't bother to mention the argument, even for the purpose of dismissing it, that the primary factor driving college-tuition inflation is actually ballooning federal tuition support: Tuition keeps going up because the federal government ensures that students can afford to pay it.
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Goldie Blumenstyk, Brian O'Leary, and Alex Richards
A total of 319 degree-granting private institutions have failed the Education Department's financial-responsibility test at some point in the past three years, receiving a composite score below 1.5.
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Education in South Korea is a paradox, where two big truths clash. Koreans are incredibly keen, and on many measures do very well. Yet nobody - students, parents, teachers or the authorities - is happy. And now battles are raging, on everything from testing and elitism to teachers' politics, free school meals and corporal punishment.Let's start with the positive. I'm a bit skeptical when Koreans tell you how their Confucian heritage values learning. In theory yes, yet for centuries hardly anyone got to study except a tiny male scholar elite. Modern education - girls not excluded - only arrived with Christian missionaries in the late 19th century. Mass schooling for all is newer still. As recently as 1945, when Japan's harsh 40-year rule ended, less than a quarter of Korean adults (22%) were literate.
They've certainly made up for lost time since. South Korea's first rulers were no democrats, but they knew that so resource-poor a country needed human capital to develop. Hence even after a terrible war in 1950-53 and despite being poorer than much of Africa - yes, really - at that stage, under Syngman Rhee (1948-1960) primary education was vastly expanded. General Park Chung-hee (1961-1979) extended this to secondary and vocational schooling. By 1987, when South Koreans wrested back democracy from another general (Chun Doo-hwan), one third of high school-leavers went on to higher education: more than in the UK at that time.
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CHILDREN can be tender souls. Pitch them a sob story and they often swallow it whole. Reflect the harsh reality outside the school gates, however, and they develop sophisticated strategies for making hard choices. That, at least, is the early experience of an initiative to teach philanthropy to young teenagers.Two years ago the Big Give, an organisation which collates information about 6,000 charities worldwide in an attempt to foster philanthropy, asked the fee-paying Dragon School in Oxford to run a pilot programme. It gave the school £1,250 to donate to charity and asked 13-year-old pupils to decide where the money should go.
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I have two guest columnists today, Patricia and Luis. Their teacher, Michael L. Conners, introduced me to their work. They cannot use their last names here because both are in the United States illegally.Conners was an English as a Second Language teacher at the Columbia Heights Education Center in the District, a public secondary school previously known as Bell Multicultural High School, when he taught these students. In 2008, his class submitted essays to NPR's "This I Believe" radio program. None were selected for broadcast, but Conners thought they represented good examples of student writing and sent them to me.
Both of these essays were influenced by the students' research into the laws that restrict their access to college financial aid. Both are entering their senior year, and college is on their minds.
I thought this would be an opportunity to show the level of writing for students at an urban high school whose Advanced Placement English program I have often praised. I don't take sides on the issue they raise, but I am interested in how well they raise it. Conners will be teaching at the E.L. Haynes Public Charter School in the District this year. He can be reached at milloydconners@gmail.com.
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Children crowd into a large, open room an hour drive from Peshawar, Pakistan, their young bodies packed together despite the lingering heat. A small boy with a serious face sits in the back, a copy of the Quran on the cement floor beside him.Madrasas like this have come to dominate much of rural education in countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the state has forgotten its children and the mullahs have room to step in.
But with the Taliban insurgency going strong and a rising Islamic militancy in Pakistan, experts worry that such schools -- which often push a more fundamentalist brand of Islam than is traditional in these countries -- have become fertile recruiting grounds for the Taliban.
With their own public education systems in shambles, however, Afghanistan and Pakistan are beginning to look to Turkey's brand of Islamic education as a potential antidote to madrasas where there is often little offered beyond rote memorization of the Quran.
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Noting that far more students attend charter schools in Philadelphia than are enrolled in the state's second-largest school district, a group has formed to represent city charters.Founders of Philadelphia Charters for Excellence say they want to publicize the successes of charter schools and reassure the public that most of the 74 charters are not being investigated for possible corruption.
The organization requires member schools to meet strict ethical standards and plans to create a website to help parents compare the performance of charter schools.
The nonprofit organization was scheduled to be announced Friday.
"There are 74 of us, and in a typical school district with 74 schools, there would be a public-relations representative," said Jurate Krokys, chief executive officer of Independence Charter School in Center City and the group's vice president. "The idea is to be a resource about charter schools in Philadelphia."
The group's mission statement calls it "an alliance of high-performing public charter schools committed to creating a path toward academic and personal excellence for all students."
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Three weeks had passed since Shannon Rosa had glanced over the numbers on her tiny blue raffle ticket. Like many other parents, she had agreed to cough up $5 not because she thought she had any real chance of winning, but to support the school.Now, as she sat in her Honda Odyssey in a Redwood City parking lot, about to pick up some tacos for the family, her cellphone rang. It was the school secretary. Rosa had won the raffle.
Alone in her van, she screamed. Then she drove straight to Clifford School to claim her prize: a glistening new iPad.
Although Rosa already owned an iPod Touch, she had purposely held off on the iPad. She isn't an early adopter; she likes to wait until the kinks are worked out. But for $5, she didn't mind taking the iPad home one bit. Maybe Leo would like it.
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At 6-foot-2 and 240 pounds, Stephen Kemp, had to move his size-14 feet to avoid tripping toddlers at his pediatrician's office in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. "It was kind of awkward, but I love my pediatrician. We're really good friends," says Mr. Kemp. Now 19 years old and a student at Butler University, he's still looking for another doctor he likes as much and still consults his pediatrician occasionally.Every kid outgrows the pediatrician at some point--but when that point comes can vary. Some can't wait to escape the Highlights magazines and Barbie Band-Aids. Others never want to leave--finding it just as awkward to be the youngest patient in a grown-up internist's waiting room by four or five decades.
These days, more young adults are staying with their pediatricians at least through their college years, says David Tayloe, a past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who still practices in Goldsboro, N.C.
Even though most colleges have health services on campus, when students are home for weekends and holidays and need a doctor, the pediatrician's office may be staffed when the adult-oriented internist's office isn't.
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Hunching over her notebook at Borough of Manhattan Community College, Sharasha Croslen struggled to figure out what to do with the algebra problem in front of her: x2 + 2x - 8 = 0.It was a question every ninth grader is expected to be able to answer. (For those who have erased the ninth grade from memory, the answer is at the end of the article.) But even though Ms. Croslen managed to complete three years of math and graduate from high school, she did not know how to solve for x.
"It's incredibly frustrating," she said during a break from her remedial math course, where she has spent the last several weeks reviewing arithmetic and algebra. "I know this is stuff I should know, but either I didn't learn it or I forgot it all already."
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One in 12 babies born in the U.S. in 2008 were offspring of illegal immigrants, according to a new study, an estimate that could inflame the debate over birthright citizenship.Undocumented immigrants make up slightly more than 4% of the U.S. adult population. However, their babies represented twice that share, or 8%, of all births on U.S. soil in 2008, according to the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center's report.
"Unauthorized immigrants are younger than the rest of the population, are more likely to be married and have higher fertility rates than the rest of the population," said Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at Pew in Washington, D.C.
The report, based on Pew's analysis of the Census Bureau's March 2009 Current Population Survey, also found that the lion's share, or 79%, of the 5.1 million children of illegal immigrants residing in the U.S. in 2009 were born in the country and are therefore citizens.
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Every Friday night, 8-year-old Maeve Morgan Phoa gets together with three other children for dinner, movies and general kid mayhem. The purpose isn't just fun. At the "Friday Night Club" the parents created, Maeve, an only child, is forced to learn to take turns riding a coveted scooter, negotiate who gets which super powers in make-believe games, and accept that squabbles are a natural part of life.Creating this kind of close relationship is one of many strategies parents of only children are employing in their attempts to raise happy, social kids. Others are purposefully spending less time with their child to better mimic what happens in a family with siblings. And some are policing gift-proffering grandparents to fight that old stereotype that an only child is a spoiled child.
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Consumers now owe more on their student loans than their credit cards.Americans owe some $826.5 billion in revolving credit, according to June 2010 figures from the Federal Reserve. (Most of revolving credit is credit-card debt.) Student loans outstanding today -- both federal and private -- total some $829.785 billion, according to Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org and FastWeb.com.
"The growth in education debt outstanding is like cooking a lobster," Mr. Kantrowitz says. "The increase in total student debt occurs slowly but steadily, so by the time you notice that the water is boiling, you're already cooked."
By his math, there is $605.6 billion in federal student loans outstanding and $167.8 billion in private student loans outstanding. He estimates that $300 billion in federal student loan debts have been incurred in the last four years.
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In a 1963 Supreme Court opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren observed that "the fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a great danger to the privacy of the individual." The advances have only accelerated since then, along with the dangers. Today, as companies strive to personalize the services and advertisements they provide over the Internet, the surreptitious collection of personal information is rampant. The very idea of privacy is under threat.Most of us view personalization and privacy as desirable things, and we understand that enjoying more of one means giving up some of the other. To have goods, services and promotions tailored to our personal circumstances and desires, we need to divulge information about ourselves to corporations, governments or other outsiders.
This tradeoff has always been part of our lives as consumers and citizens. But now, thanks to the Net, we're losing our ability to understand and control those tradeoffs--to choose, consciously and with awareness of the consequences, what information about ourselves we disclose and what we don't. Incredibly detailed data about our lives are being harvested from online databases without our awareness, much less our approval.
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Badger Rock Middle School Planning Committee 1.8mb PDF:
Superintendent Nerad, President Cole and Members of the Board,Please accept this detailed proposal for Badger Rock Middle School, a project based charter school proposed for South Madison, which focuses on cultural and environmental sustainability. As you know, our charter school concept is part of the larger Resilience Research Center project spearheaded by the Madison based Center for Resilient Cities (CRC), bringing urban agriculture, community wellness,sustainability and alternative energy education to South Madison and the MMSD community.
We are proud of the work we have been able to accomplish to date and the extraordinary encouragement and support we have gotten from the neighborhood, business and non-profit community, local and national funders, and MMSD staff and Board. We are confident that Badger Rock Middle School, with its small class size, collaborative approach, stewardship and civic engagement model, will increase student achievement, strengthen relationships and learning outcomes for all students who attend, while also offering unparalleled opportunities for all MMSD students and faculty to make use of the resources, curriculum and facility.
Our stellar team of educators, community supporters, funders and business leaders continues to expand. Our curriculum team has created models for best practices with new templates for core curriculum areas. Our building and design team has been working collaboratively with architects Hoffman LLC, the Center for Resilient Cities and MMSD staff on building and site plans. In addition, outreach teams have been working with neighborhood leaders and community members, and our governance team has been actively recruiting a terrific team for the governing board and our fundraising team has been working hard to bring local and national donors to the project. In short, we've got great momentum and have only begun to scratch the surface of what this school and project could become.
We are submitting the proposal with a budget neutral scenario for MMSD and also want to assure you that we are raising funds to cover any contingencies that might arise so that additional monies from MMSD will not be needed. Our planning grant from DP! has recently been approved, seeding the school $175,000 in planning grant monies immediately, with another $175, 000 to arrive before the school opens in August 2011.
We ask for your full support of this proposal and the creation of Badger Rock Middle School. BRMS will surely be a centerpiece and shining star of MMSD for years to come.
Thanks for your consideration.Sincerely,
Badger Rock Middle School Planning Committee
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I suppose I arrived at my charitable commitment largely through guilt. I recognized early on that my good fortune was not due to superior personal character or initiative so much as it was to dumb luck.I was blessed to be born in an advanced society with caring parents. So, I had the advantage of both genetics (winning the "ovarian lottery") and upbringing. As I looked around at those who did not have these advantages, it became clear to me that I had a moral obligation to direct my resources to help right that balance.
America's "social contract" is equal opportunity. It is the most fundamental principle in our founding documents and it is what originally distinguished us from the old Europe. Yet, we have failed in achieving that seminal goal; in fact, we have lost ground in recent years.
Another distinctly American principle is a shared partnership between the public and private sectors to foster the public good. So, if the democratically directed public sector is shirking, to some degree, its responsibility to level the playing field, more of that role must shift to the private sector.
As I addressed my charitable purposes, all of this seemed pretty clear: I was only peripherally responsible for my own good fortune; I was morally duty bound to help those left behind by the accident of birth; America's root principle was equal opportunity but we were far from achieving it. Then I had to drill down to identify the charitable purposes most likely to right that wrong.
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Guilt, stirred up by leftist thinkers, is now de rigueur in the west. But Pascal Bruckner believes our soul-searching is both hypocritical and injurious.According to Pascal Bruckner, we in the west suffer from neurotic guilt, a condition imposed upon us by the high priests of the left. This secular clerisy are heirs to the Christian tradition of original sin, which universalised guilt by claiming that humans are fallen and must redeem themselves. Nietzsche denounced Christian guilt as a psychic evil which forces man's will to power in on himself. Pascal Bruckner is a latter-day Nietzschean who gives no quarter when it comes to excoriating our new moral elite.
Bruckner represents a distinct species of French intellectual. Born in 1948 and coming of age in the upheavals of 1968, he initially indulged the revolutionary fervour sweeping Paris but soon became affiliated with the nouveaux philosophes, a group of anti-Marxist intellectuals. Consisting of figures like Andre Glucksmann, Alain Finkielkraut, Bernard-Henri Levy and Jean-Marie Benoist, this cenacle may be considered France's second generation of anti-communist thinkers.
Bruckner's day job is that of novelist--one item in his bulging portfolio, Bitter Moon, even received film treatment at the hands of Roman Polanski. As a result of his literary background and immersion in the fiery French essayist tradition, he writes in a sparkling prose, captured well here by his translator, Steven Rendall. The resulting tone is redolent for Anglo-Saxon readers of an earlier era, when social critics like Marx or Nietzsche conveyed their ideas with combative gravitas.
Beneath Bruckner's eloquence is a serious message: we remain prisoners of a white guilt whose victim is its supposed beneficiary. Our guilt, he writes, is actually a means for us to retain our superiority over the non-white world, our masochism a form of sadism. After all, if everything is the fault of the west then the power to change the world lies squarely in the hands of westerners.
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In July 2006, 25-year-old Christopher Bryski died.His private student loans didn't. Mr. Bryski's family in Marlton, N.J., continues to make monthly payments on his loans--the result of a potentially costly loophole in the rules governing student lending.
As the college season nears, throngs of parents and students still are applying for private student loans, long used by students as an alternative to federal loans. But they may be unaware that in cases where the student dies, the co-signers often are obliged to pay off the balance of the loan themselves--a requirement typically not found in federal loans.
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It's time for my son to get a job.Technically, he's still too young to flip burgers or bag groceries, as I once did. He's only 13 years old, and federal law tends to frown on child labor.
But his money needs are increasing, especially when it comes to electronics. And his mom and I refuse to feed that habit. We've told him he has to earn the money if he really wants all this stuff.
Thus, the need for some kind of job.
The problem: We can't seem to motivate him to see the value in earning what you spend. And part of that, I fear, is my fault.
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Bob Herbert, via a kind reader:
The world leadership qualities of the United States, once so prevalent, are fading faster than the polar ice caps.We once set the standard for industrial might, for the advanced state of our physical infrastructure, and for the quality of our citizens' lives. All are experiencing significant decline.
The latest dismal news on the leadership front comes from the College Board, which tells us that the U.S., once the world's leader in the percentage of young people with college degrees, has fallen to 12th among 36 developed nations.
At a time when a college education is needed more than ever to establish and maintain a middle-class standard of living, America's young people are moving in exactly the wrong direction. A well-educated population also is crucially important if the U.S. is to succeed in an increasingly competitive global environment.
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Internet companies such as Facebook and Google have come in for repeated criticism in Germany, where the government has concerns about what they do with users' data. Now one state, worried about the amount of information young people reveal online, plans to teach school pupils how to keep a low profile on the web.Many of Facebook's 2 million users in Germany are young people who might not give a second thought to posting pictures of themselves and their friends skinny-dipping or passed out at parties. Unfortunately, being casual with one's data also has its risks. After all, potential employers also know how to use social networking tools.
Now the government of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, recognizing that young people are not always aware of the dangers of revealing personal information on the Internet, is planning to teach school students how to deal with the Internet and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
"Our goal is to convey that the Internet doesn't only offer chances and opportunities, but also has risks that students should understand in order to exercise autonomy with regards to digital media," said North Rhine-Westphalia's media minister, Angelica Schwall-Düren, in an interview with the Thursday edition of the regional newspaper WAZ.
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The start of the school year is right around the corner, and for parents of college-age children that means it's time to open up the wallet.In addition to tuition, there are "lab fees, recreation fees, computer fees, materials fees, and then a bus pass! We didn't realize nearly every class would have fees associated with it," says Judy McNary, a financial adviser in Broomfield, Colo., who has three children attending the University of Colorado. "When one of my children adds a class," Ms. McNary says, "it seems like there is some sort of fee that gets added as well to the tuition."
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"Welcome to college, " the director is saying, "I congratulate you." She then asks them, one by one, to talk about what motivates them and why they're here. There is some scraping of chairs, shifting of bodies, and the still life animates.The economic motive does loom large. One guy laughs, "I don't want to work a crappy job all my life." A woman in the back announces that she wants to get her GED "to get some money to take care of myself." What is interesting, though -- and I wish the president and his secretary could hear it -- are all the other reasons people give for being here: to "learn more," to be a "role model for my kids," to get "a career to support my daughter," to "have a better life." The director gets to the older man. "I'm illiterate," he says in a halting voice, "and I want to learn to read and write."
The semester before, students also wrote out their reasons for attending the program -- as this current cohort will soon have to do -- and their range of responses was even wider. Again, the economic motive was key, but consider these comments, some written in neat cursive, some in scratchy uneven (and sometimes error-ridden) print: "learning new things I never thought about before"; "I want my kids too know that I can write and read"; "Hope Fully with this program I could turn my life around"; "to develope better social skills and better speech"; "I want to be somebody in this world"; "I like to do test and essay like it is part of my life."
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When was the last time you spoke to a student about his or her experiences at school? I don't think anyone working in education reform can have these conversations often enough. I was fortunate to hear from a group of high school students last week at one of The Broad Center's professional development sessions.To help make our discussions about the current state of education a little more real, we invited a group of students and teachers from local schools to talk about their views on education today. It was a powerful, stark reminder that our young people are amazingly resilient, but also keenly aware that we as adults are, in general, letting them down.
One high school student had this to say about the current budget crisis in her local school district: "I don't understand why we have to suffer because adults don't know how to manage their money. It's not right. If we are the country's future, you are cutting off the tree at the root."
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Traditional elite schools continued their dominance of the fifth-form public exam to the last, with their pupils filling most of the top-scoring slots.In the last Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination (HKCEE), 16 pupils scored 10 distinctions, compared to 13 last year, results released yesterday show.
St Joseph's College did best, with four straight-A stars. Diocesan Girls' School and Queen's College each produced three top scorers, La Salle College two and three other elite schools - St Paul's Co-educational College, King's College and Kwun Tong Maryknoll College - one each.
The only one among the 16 from a New Territories school has a special distinction - she racked up her perfect result despite suffering from a rare blood disease that requires frequent medial check-ups and occasional spells in hospital.
"I feel pain in the stomach and vomit when I am under pressure," said Yiu Sze-wan, 17 - only the second straight-A pupil in the history of the SKH Lam Woo Memorial Secondary School in Kwai Hing.
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High school sports are becoming increasingly popular with teens, and with that comes injuries. A new study reveals that fractures are not to be taken lightly. They are they fourth-most-common injury and can cause players to drop out of competition and rack up medical procedures.The study, published recently in the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine, looked at fractures that occurred among high school athletes at 100 randomly selected high schools around the country from 2005 to 2009. The injuries were categorized to determine who gets them, what causes them and what effect they may have.
Fractures were the fourth-most-common injury after ligament sprains, muscle strains and bruises. Football had the highest fracture rate, and volleyball had the lowest. Fractures happened more often during competition than in practice for every sport except volleyball.
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As soon as he received his roommate assignment in the mail, Sam Brown did what any 17-year-old about to enter college would do: He looked him up on Facebook.When Sam, who will be attending the University of Colorado at Boulder, couldn't find him, he turned to Google Earth. By searching the address the college provided, Sam could see aerial photos of his future roommate's house in Encino, Calif.--his lawn, his basketball hoop, the cars in his driveway, his pool.
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For many years, critics of the SAT have cited a verbal question involving the word "regatta" as an example of how the test may favor wealthier test-takers, who also are more likely to be white. It's been a long time since the regatta question was used -- and the College Board now has in place a detailed process for testing all questions and potential questions, designed to weed out questions that may favor one group of students over another.But a major new research project -- led by a scholar who favors standardized testing -- has just concluded that the methods used by the College Board (and just about every other testing entity for either admissions or employment testing) are seriously flawed. While the new research doesn't conclude that the tests are biased, it says that they could be -- and that the existing methods of detection wouldn't reveal that.
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Professor Andrew Hacker says that higher education in the U.S. is broken.He argues that too many undergraduate courses are taught by graduate assistants or professors who have no interest in teaching.
Hacker proposes numerous changes, including an end to the tenure system, in his book, Higher Education?
"Tenure is lifetime employment security, in fact, into the grave" Hacker tells NPR's Tony Cox. The problem, as he sees it, is that the system "works havoc on young people," who must be incredibly cautious throughout their years in school as graduate students and young professors, "if they hope to get that gold ring."
That's too high a cost, Hacker and his co-author, Claudia Dreifus, conclude. "Regretfully," Hacker says, "tenure is more of a liability than an asset."
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Educators in the Marshall School District properly determined that a student with a genetic disease was no longer eligible for special education and related services, a federal appeals court has ruled.The decision by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, released Monday, reversed a lower court's ruling that relied heavily on a doctor's opinion and discounted the testimony of the student's special education gym teacher.
Barbara Sramek, Marshall superintendent, said the ruling's implications extend far beyond one school district.
"This was not about money, it was about principle," she said. "Ultimately, it reinforces the value of educators and professional development."
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Higher education may be heading for a reckoning. For a long time, despite the occasional charge of liberal dogma on campus or of a watered-down curriculum, people tended to think the best of the college and university they attended. Perhaps they attributed their career success or that of their friends to a diploma. Or they felt moved by a particular professor or class. Or they received treatment at a university hospital or otherwise profited from university-based scientific research. Or they just loved March Madness.Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman:Recently, though, a new public skepticism has surfaced, with galling facts to back it up. Over the past 30 years, the average cost of college tuition and fees has risen 250% for private schools and nearly 300% for public schools (in constant dollars). The salaries of professors have also risen much faster than those of other occupations. At Stanford, to take but one example, the salaries of full professors have leapt 58% in constant dollars since the mid-1980s. College presidents do even better. From 1992 to 2008, NYU's presidential salary climbed to $1.27 million from $443,000. By 2008, a dozen presidents had passed the million-dollar mark.
Meanwhile, tenured and tenure-track professors spend ever less time with students. In 1975, 43% of college teachers were classified as "contingent"--that is, they were temporary instructors and graduate students; today that rate is 70%. Colleges boast of high faculty-to-student ratios, but in practice most courses have a part-timer at the podium.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).Zimman noted that the most recent State of Wisconsin Budget removed the requirement that arbitrators take into consideration revenue limits (a district's financial condition @17:30) when considering a District's ability to afford union negotiated compensation packages. The budget also added the amount of teacher preparation time to the list of items that must be negotiated..... "we need to breakthrough the concept that public schools are an expense, not an investment" and at the same time, we must stop looking at schools as a place for adults to work and start treating schools as a place for children to learn."
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At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site's frequently asked questions page about homelessness -- and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student's copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive -- he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.
And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries -- unsigned and collectively written -- did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.
Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.
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Michael Winerip, via a kind reader:
People with autism are often socially isolated, but the Madison public schools are nationally known for including children with disabilities in regular classes. Now, as a high school junior, Garner, 17, has added his little twist to many lives.He likes to memorize plane, train and bus routes, and in middle school during a citywide scavenger hunt, he was so good that classmates nicknamed him "GPS-man." He is not one of the fastest on the high school cross-country team, but he runs like no other. "Garner enjoys running with other kids, as opposed to past them," said Casey Hopp, his coach.
Garner's on the swim team, too, and gets rides to practice with a teammate, Michael Salerno. On cold mornings, no one wants to be first in the water, so Garner thinks it's a riot to splash everyone with a colossal cannonball. "They get angry," the coach, Paul Eckerle, said. "Then they see it's Garner, and he gets away with it. And that's how practice begins."
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Google it. That's what many college students do when asked to read an excerpt of a play for class, write a resume or find the e-mail address of a politician.They trust Google so much that a Northwestern University study has found many students only click on websites that turn up at the top of Google searches to complete assigned tasks. If they don't use Google, researchers found that students trust other brand-name search engines and brand-name websites to lead them to information.
The study was published by the International Journal of Communication.
"Many students think, 'Google placed it number one, so, of course it's credible,'" said Eszter Hargittai, associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern. "This is potentially tricky because Google doesn't rank a site by its credibility."
In the published, study 102 students at the University of Illinois at Chicago sat at computers with researchers. Each student was asked to bring up the page that's usually on their screen when they start using the Web.
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I never gave much credence to the theory that one's personality is formed by first or second grade, until I recently found my elementary school report cards.Reading what my teachers wrote about me at Tularcitos Elementary in Carmel Valley in the late 1970s, I realized I am in many ways the same person - just bigger.
By second grade, I was already exhibiting signs of becoming a bookworm:
"Not too interested in physical education. Would prefer to stay in room and work. Works very hard in classroom; I often have to throw her out at recess." - Second-grade report card, December 1977.
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Classes wrap up this week for about 40,000 Detroit Public Schools students in the district's summer school academy, which saw a 22 percent increase in enrollment over last year.Of the 38,613 students who enrolled for summer classes, 415 are high school seniors who will graduate without needing an additional year of school, district officials said.
Classes end Thursday.
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"You do not interest me. No man can say these words to another without committing a cruelty and offending against justice," writes philosopher Simone Weil. To turn a deaf ear is an offence not only to the ignored person but also to thinking, justice and ethics. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner is cursed because no one will listen to his story. The Italian chemist-turned-writer Primo Levi was preoccupied with this fable because of his fear that on returning from Auschwitz people like him would be either ignored or simply disbelieved. Regardless, listening gets a very mixed press amongst critics and intellectuals. There is a suspicion of "wistful optimism" or the quasi-religious appeal to "hold hands" and play priest at the confessional. These qualms miss the centrality of listening to a radical humanism which recognises that dialogue is not merely about consensus or agreement but engagement and criticism. This is something that Primo Levi understood.
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A new study finds that babies raised by working mothers don't necessarily suffer cognitive setbacks, an encouraging finding that follows a raft of previous reports suggesting that women with infants were wiser to stay home.Researchers at Columbia University say they are among the first to measure the full effect of maternal employment on child development -- not just the potential harm caused by a mother's absence from the home, but the prospective benefits that come with her job, including higher family income and better child care.
In a 113-page monograph, released this week, the authors conclude "that the overall effect of 1st-year maternal employment on child development is neutral."
The report is based on data from the most comprehensive child-care study to date, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care. It followed more than 1,000 children from 10 geographic areas through first grade, tracking their development and family characteristics.
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McGill University's medical school may have an Ivy League reputation, but it no longer has something that most of the top medical schools on the continent do -a requirement for all students to write the Medical College Admission Test.Beginning this month, Canadian students who studied at a Canadian university before applying to McGill medical school will no longer be required to write the MCAT -the widely used admissions test that measures students in physical sciences, verbal reasoning, biological sciences and a written sample. Students typically spend about three months studying for the exam.
In making the decision, McGill is aligning itself with francophone or bilingual universities here and elsewhere in Canada that also don't require the MCAT because the test has no French equivalent. Students from outside the country will still have to write the MCAT.
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In Chicago, dozens of lunch ladies are leaving the schools they've worked at--sometimes for years. That's because those schools are being "turned around"--a strategy that involves removing the entire staff at failing schools to "reset" the culture there. It's a strategy Education Secretary Arne Duncan is now pushing nationwide. But a question is: Is it necessary to remove lunch ladies, janitors, and security guards to create better schools?In mid-June, the lunch ladies at Deneen Elementary School on the city's south side were serving up one of their last meals.
LUNCH LADY: How are you? What do you want? Carrots or salad?
Fewer than half of kids meet standards here on state tests, so Deneen is being forced to start over. As a "turnaround," every adult has to leave, from the principal to the teachers to the seven lunch ladies. Veronica Fluth was Deneen's cook. After insisting I put on a hair net, she gave me a tour of her spotless kitchen.
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“You do not interest me. No man can say these words to another without committing a cruelty and offending against justice,” writes philosopher Simone Weil. To turn a deaf ear is an offence not only to the ignored person but also to thinking, justice and ethics. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner is cursed because no one will listen to his story. The Italian chemist-turned-writer Primo Levi was preoccupied with this fable because of his fear that on returning from Auschwitz people like him would be either ignored or simply disbelieved. Regardless, listening gets a very mixed press amongst critics and intellectuals. There is a suspicion of “wistful optimism” or the quasi-religious appeal to “hold hands” and play priest at the confessional. These qualms miss the centrality of listening to a radical humanism which recognises that dialogue is not merely about consensus or agreement but engagement and criticism. This is something that Primo Levi understood.
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They see life as a game. They enjoy nothing more than outsmarting the system. They don’t trust politicians, medias, nor brands. They see corporations as inefficient and plagued by an outmoded hierarchy. Even if they harbor little hope of doing better than their parents, they don’t see themselves as unhappy. They belong to a group — several, actually — they trust and rely upon.
“They”, are the Digital Natives.
The French polling institute BVA published an enlightening survey of this generation: between 18-24 years of age, born with a mouse and a keyboard, and now permanently tied to their smartphone. All of it shaping their vision of an unstable world. The study is titled GENE-TIC for Generation and Technology of Information and Communication. Between November 2009 and February 2010, BVA studied hundred young people in order to understand their digital habits. Various techniques where used: spyware in PCs , subjective glasses to “see what they see”, and hours of video recording. (The 500 pages survey is for sale but abstracts, in French, are here ; BVA is considering a similar study for the US market). Here are the key findings:
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A few weeks ago I was asked to a friend's son's christening. "We haven't found God, just a really good church school" she scrawled across the bottom of the invitation. In days gone by I might have huffed and puffed about the hypocrisy of it all. But now I'm a parent myself and school admission is hovering on the horizon.We share the dilemma faced by thousands of families across London. Our home is just about equidistant between a fairly average Church of England school and a local primary that has been in special measures for the past two years. The idealist in me says stand by your principles -- I believe in community and the impact supportive parents can have on a school. The parent in me says: do whatever is best for your child's education.
But the choice, such as it is, also makes me cross. Why are so many inner London schools still so poor that parents feel they have to lie about religion, compromise their principles, or even -- and most can't afford this option -- move house to secure a half-decent place? We're not even on to secondary yet.
Education Secretary Michael Gove claims he gets it. His academies bill -- passed in the Commons last night-- allows schools to opt out of local authority control and be directly funded by government. They will have greater freedom over the curriculum and teachers' pay and access to extra funds currently administered by councils.
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David Leonhardt, via a Rick Kiley email:
How much do your kindergarten teacher and classmates affect the rest of your life?Complete PDF Report.Economists have generally thought that the answer was not much. Great teachers and early childhood programs can have a big short-term effect. But the impact tends to fade. By junior high and high school, children who had excellent early schooling do little better on tests than similar children who did not -- which raises the demoralizing question of how much of a difference schools and teachers can make.
There has always been one major caveat, however, to the research on the fade-out effect. It was based mainly on test scores, not on a broader set of measures, like a child's health or eventual earnings. As Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist, says: "We don't really care about test scores. We care about adult outcomes."
Early this year, Mr. Chetty and five other researchers set out to fill this void. They examined the life paths of almost 12,000 children who had been part of a well-known education experiment in Tennessee in the 1980s. The children are now about 30, well started on their adult lives.
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"You do not interest me. No man can say these words to another without committing a cruelty and offending against justice," writes philosopher Simone Weil. To turn a deaf ear is an offence not only to the ignored person but also to thinking, justice and ethics. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner is cursed because no one will listen to his story. The Italian chemist-turned-writer Primo Levi was preoccupied with this fable because of his fear that on returning from Auschwitz people like him would be either ignored or simply disbelieved. Regardless, listening gets a very mixed press amongst critics and intellectuals. There is a suspicion of "wistful optimism" or the quasi-religious appeal to "hold hands" and play priest at the confessional. These qualms miss the centrality of listening to a radical humanism which recognises that dialogue is not merely about consensus or agreement but engagement and criticism. This is something that Primo Levi understood.
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It took an offer to appear on a national TV show for Wade Warren to reluctantly give up what he calls his "technology" for a week.That was the only way, his mother says, that he would ever pack his 2006 MacBook (with some recent upgrades, he'll tell you), his iPad tablet computer, and, most regretfully, his Nexus One smart phone into a cardboard box and watch them be hustled out the door of his room to a secret hiding place.
Wade, who's 14 and heading into ninth grade, survived his seven days of technological withdrawal without updating his 136 Twitter followers about "wonky math tests" and "interesting fort escapades," or posting on his photography product review blog, or texting his friends about... well, that's private. But he has returned to his screens with a vengeance, making up for lost time.
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I'm a broke writer who can't find a gig in the recession, so I decided to save myself -- by helping students cheatMy clients never fail to amuse.
"Can I have a military discount?" one asked.
"Do you give student discounts?" asked another.
No and no, I thought, hitting Delete on those e-mails. In the business of doing other people's homework, there are no discounts of any kind. (Who needs my services besides students, anyway?) All sales are final, and all payment is upfront. No one gets free credit -- well, they get credit from their instructors, plus high grades and lots of compliments.
I entered this business purely by accident. A victim of the craptastic economy, I've done all sorts of things for money. I've cleaned maggots out of other people's kitchens. I've scraped cat poop off carpets. I've watched small screaming children for hours at a time. But doing college homework for cash? That one took me by surprise. It began innocently. Having tutored writing at a small private school, I decided to offer my services to the larger market via Craigslist. Soon, a prospect contacted me.
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Few U.S. citizens would agree to cutting special education funds. After all, students with an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) obviously learn differently and need increased time and attention from educators in order to ensure they are attending to and learning the academic standards. However, another group of students who learn differently and need time and attention to guide their learning of the academic standards are being denied this year. These are the gifted students.According to the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) Policy Insider, the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee met to draft the Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 budget for the Department of Education. Although the budget has increased 3.2% since FY 2010, the budget completely eliminates the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Student program. "The 20 year-old Javits program is the only federal program that supports the unique learning needs of America's three million students with gifts and talents."
Portland schools may not feel an immediate impact from the loss of the Javits Program. However, this program provides scholarships to the disadvantaged gifted student and research support in the area of effective instructional practices for these students who learn differently than their peers.
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In his much-discussed recent Wall Street Journal op ed, Virginia Senator James Webb makes some good points about affirmative action and race, but also some key mistakes and omissions. On the plus side, Webb's article highlights the contradictions between the "diversity" and compensatory justice rationales for affirmative action. He also correctly suggests that slavery and segregation inflicted considerable harm on southern whites as well as blacks; it is therefore a mistake to view these injustices as primarily a transfer of ill-gotten wealth from one race to another. On the negative side, Webb is very unclear as to his own position on affirmative action. He also seems to blame racism and the historic economic backwardness of the South on the machinations of a small elite. The reality was more complicated. Low-income southern whites were often much more supportive of racism and segregation than economic elites were, and Jim Crow might have been less virulent without their support.Clusty Search: James Webb, Ilya Somin.I. Competing Rationales for Affirmative Action.
One of Webb's best points is that affirmative action has resulted in preferences for groups that cannot claim to be victims of massive, systematic injustices inflicted in the United States:
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Today marks the first anniversary of Congress's decision to raise the federal minimum wage by 41% to $7.25 an hour. But hold the confetti. According to a new study, more than 100,000 fewer teens are employed today due to the wage hikes.Economic slowdowns are tough on many job-seekers, but they're especially hard on the young and inexperienced, whose job prospects have suffered tremendously from Washington's ill-advised attempts to put a floor under wages. In a new paper published by the Employment Policies Institute, labor economists William Even of Miami University in Ohio and David Macpherson of Trinity University in Texas find a significant drop in teen employment as a direct result of the minimum wage hikes.
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Attending school in California and becoming an engineering major can really pay off for college graduates -- by thousands of dollars a year.According to a report released Thursday from salary-tracker PayScale.com, petroleum engineering majors and graduates of Harvey Mudd College are taking home the biggest paychecks.
While mid-career salaries fell 1.5% overall between 2009 and 2010, engineers, scientists and mathematicians continued to rake in the big bucks, as well as students who graduated from Ivy League schools.
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College students study a lot less now than in the 1960s, yet they get better grades.For students, these trends must seem like marvelous developments. But they raise questions about both declining rigor and potential grade inflation in higher education.
In a forthcoming study in the journal Economic Inquiry, economist Philip Babcock finds the trends linked. As Babcock related in an e-mail, when the instructor "chooses to grade more strictly, students put in a lot more effort." And when the professor gives easy A's, students expend less effort.
The finding relates to an earlier study, cited in a previous post here, showing that professors who get high ratings from their students tend to teach those students less. (The minimal effort required in those classes apparently fuels the professor's popularity.)
Babcock, an economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, reviewed two sets of research literature that document crisscrossing trends.
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An infant's intelligence is shaped more by family environment than by the amount of omega 3 fatty acid from breast milk or fortified formula, new research shows.Scientists followed 241 children from birth until they reached four years of age to investigate the relationship between breastfeeding and the use of DHA-fortified formula in infancy and performance in tests of intelligence and other aspects of brain function.
Details appear in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.
After taking into account the influence of mothers' intelligence and level of education, researchers found no relationship between the estimated total intake of DHA in infancy and a child's IQ.
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Nia Lozano, a middle school parent, tells us about a new group that's building support for Oakland High School.An interesting new group has formed in the Crocker and Glenview neighborhoods of Oakland. It was formed by some parents from Edna Brewer who would like other neighborhood parents to consider Oakland High.
This is truly the first time I have ever heard families musing about Oakland High, even among the die-hard, Edna Brewer, go public, local school advocates. The communities of Crocker and Glenview have been relatively silent about Oakland High, which is interesting given that the last time I checked their scores were only marginally lower than Oakland Tech and Skyline (and may have been better in some areas of math, I can't recall right now.)
What I gather is that the new principal is well regarded and that may have sparked the interest, besides the fact that if parents could raise the community profile of Edna Brewer, they should be able to do the same with O High.
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"SCHOOL reform chaos?" asked a frowning satchel depicted on posters plastered around Hamburg. "No thank you." The sorrowful satchel was the mascot of a citizens' rebellion against a proposed school restructuring in the city-state. Voters rejected the plan in a referendum on July 18th. The stinging defeat for Hamburg's government, a novel coalition between the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Green Party, has national consequences, as it may make the CDU-Green alliance a less appealing model for a future federal government. Ole von Beust, Hamburg's mayor, announced his resignation before the result, saying he had done the job for long enough. He is the sixth CDU premier to leave office this year. Chancellor Angela Merkel, who leads the CDU, must now promote a new generation of leaders.More important are the implications for schools. Hamburg's plan was a bold attempt to correct a German practice that many think is both unjust and an obstacle to learning. In most states, after just four years of primary school children are streamed into one of several types of secondary school: clever kids attend Gymnasien, middling ones Realschulen and the slowest learners Hauptschulen, which are supposed to prepare them for trades. (A few go to Gesamtschulen, which serve all sorts.) Early selection may be one reason why the educational achievement of German children is linked more closely to that of their parents than in almost any other rich country. Children at the bottom often face low-wage drudgery or the dole.
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Christina Garcia had her heart set on going to the University of Washington in Seattle.But with annual out-of-state tuition topping $25,000, the recent Cedarburg High School graduate and her family calculated it would cost more than $40,000 per year to go to school at her first college choice. In the end, it only made sense to head to another UW -- the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
That decision came as a pleasant surprise to Garcia's father, a dentist in suburban Milwaukee, who has been "putting money aside" over the years with the idea of helping his two children get through college. Likewise, Garcia's grandmother had also been saving.
"It's funny, because grandma said, 'Don't worry, I've got enough to pay for college,'" says Daniel Garcia, Christina's father. "But she was thinking about when I went to college. I'm like, 'That won't cover one semester today.' "
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Susan Engel & Marlene Sandstrom, via a Rick Kiley email:
HERE in Massachusetts, teachers and administrators are spending their summers becoming familiar with the new state law that requires schools to institute an anti-bullying curriculum, investigate acts of bullying and report the most serious cases to law enforcement officers.This new law was passed in April after a group of South Hadley, Mass., students were indicted in the bullying of a 15-year-old girl, Phoebe Prince, who committed suicide. To the extent that it underlines the importance of the problem and demands that schools figure out how to address it, it is a move in the right direction. But legislation alone can't create kinder communities or teach children how to get along. That will take a much deeper rethinking of what schools should do for their students.
It's important, first, to recognize that while cellphones and the Internet have made bullying more anonymous and unsupervised, there is little evidence that children are meaner than they used to be. Indeed, there is ample research -- not to mention plenty of novels and memoirs -- about how children have always victimized one another in large and small ways, how often they are oblivious to the rights and feelings of others and how rarely they defend a victim.
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Tamar Lewin, via a Rick Kiley email:
Adding to a drumbeat of concern about the nation's dismal college-completion rates, the College Board warned Thursday that the growing gap between the United States and other countries threatens to undermine American economic competitiveness.The complete 3.5MB PDF report is available here.The United States used to lead the world in the number of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees. Now it ranks 12th among 36 developed nations.
"The growing education deficit is no less a threat to our nation's long-term well-being than the current fiscal crisis," Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board, warned at a meeting on Capitol Hill of education leaders and policy makers, where he released a report detailing the problem and recommending how to fix it. "To improve our college completion rates, we must think 'P-16' and improve education from preschool through higher education."
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Spending in California classrooms declined as a percentage of total education spending over a recent five-year period, even as total school funding increased, according to a Pepperdine University study released Wednesday.Complete study: 1.1MB PDF.More of the funding increase went to administrators, clerks and technical staff and less to teachers, textbooks, materials and teacher aides, the study found. It was partially funded by a California Chamber of Commerce foundation.
Total K-12 spending increased by $10 billion over the five-year period ending June 30, 2009, from $45.6 billion to $55.6 billion statewide. It rose at a rate greater than the increase in inflation or personal income, according to the study. Yet researchers found that classroom spending dipped from 59 percent of education funding to 57.8 percent over the five years.
Spending on teacher salaries and benefits dropped from 50 percent of statewide spending to 48 percent over the same period. Spending on administrators and supervisors, staff travel and conferences all increased faster than teachers' pay.
This is not a big surprise, given the increasing emphasis on, ironically, in the K-12 world, adult to adult spending, often referred to as "Professional Development". Yippy Search: "Professional Development".
The report mentions that California's average per student expenditure is just under $10,000 annually. Madison's 2009/2010 per student spending was $15,241 ($370,287,471 budget / 24,295 students).
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Seattle Public Schools has a number of slogans. Among them is "Every School a Quality School". The District claims to be working towards this goal, but the District has no definition of a Quality School, so those claims lack credibility. Rather than clucking at the District for not having a definition of a Quality School, our time would be more productively used helping them to find one.What is a Quality School? We need to be clear that we separate the idea of a Quality School from the students in the school. If we were to rely on student achievement, for example, as our definition of a Quality School, then we might conclude that Bryant is good school and that Hawthorne is a struggling school. But does anyone believe that if the Hawthorne students were all transferred to Bryant and if the Bryant students were all transferred to Hawthorne that the outcomes for the students would be much different? Would the Hawthorne students suddenly start to achieve because they are now at a good school and the Bryant students suddenly start to under-perform because they are now at a struggling school? I doubt it.
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Tuition inflation has always been a subject that has fascinated me. How can our political system stand idly by as our public universities increase tuition at double the rate of inflation? How could a trend that is so harmful to the middle-class (I'm not even talking working class -- nobody cares about them) stand stronger against the will of the people than even the most powerful Wall Street banks?Craver makes an excellent point. It seems that higher education is spending more and more on expensive student facilities. One might refer to it as an "arms race" for student dollars.What is more fascinating is that nobody seems to have a definitive explanation for why students have to pay more and more every year. Liberals blame declining state support, while conservatives tend to place the blame on wasteful administration and high professor salaries.
All of these points inevitably show up in every discussion of the issue, in addition to an unavoidable observation about campus life these days: It's a lot nicer.
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When Kim Lecus heard that the Fritsche Middle School program would move into Bay View High School in the fall of 2010, she immediately was concerned about the impact on her daughter, who just finished seventh grade at Fritsche.The emerging middle/high model at Bay View may offer student Lindsey Lecus a greater variety of accelerated courses, but in her mother's eyes, it comes with a serious price: the mixing of vulnerable adolescents with older teenagers.
The Milwaukee School Board has approved an increasing number of sixth through 12th grade schools in the city. Board members think it will improve the transition for students from middle to high school and will consolidate space in the district.
The "best" way to serve children in the delicate and hormonally charged years between ages 11 and 13 - something national researchers have wrestled with for years - is still unclear. Underscoring that point is Milwaukee, where the emergence of more 6-12 schools is coming just a few years after former superintendent William Andrekopoulos championed moving middle schoolers in with elementary students in K-8 schools.
"It's not like any other time period in life," said Trish Williams, executive director of EdSource, a non-profit group that recently studied the effects of grade design on middle schoolers at more than 300 schools in California.
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The decision to switch to neighborhood schools has been a divisive one in Wake County, and although the school board has already voted to shift to the new model, groups like "Great Schools In Wake" said they will still plan to have a presence and a voice at the meetings as the board hashes out the specifics of the new policy."Give our input and have some influence," said Yevonne Brannon with the Great Schools in Wake Coaltion. "I still hope, think, there's room for negotiation and still hope there's room for reconsideration."
That's the hope for many who oppose neighborhood schools. It's also why the NAACP will hold a protest before the meeting in down town Raleigh Tuesday morning. The organization will call school board leaders to stop what they say is segregation and promote diversity.
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Has endlessly skimming short texts on the internet made us stupider? An increasing number of experts think so - and say it's time to slow down . . .If you're reading this article in print, chances are you'll only get through half of what I've written. And if you're reading this online, you might not even finish a fifth. At least, those are the two verdicts from a pair of recent research projects - respectively, the Poynter Institute's Eyetrack survey, and analysis by Jakob Nielsen - which both suggest that many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion.
The problem doesn't just stop there: academics report that we are becoming less attentive book-readers, too. Bath Spa University lecturer Greg Garrard recently revealed that he has had to shorten his students' reading list, while Keith Thomas, an Oxford historian, has written that he is bemused by junior colleagues who analyse sources with a search engine, instead of reading them in their entirety.
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Many parents are frustrated these days by a feeling of entitlement by today's youth. Whether it's getting almost anything they ask for or expecting everything to be done for them, today's kids have learned how to get their way and the problem is out of control like a run-away train.Amy McReady.So who's to blame? It's easy to point to Hollywood and Madison Avenue, but while they may contribute to the issue, the real problems start at home.
Pampering and overindulging
The biggest culprits of the entitlement epidemic are parents who pamper and overindulge their kids. No parent intends to raise a child who feels the world owes him a living; instead, the problem starts small and continues to fester. A toddler throws a tantrum at the store and her tired, overworked mom buys a toy to keep her happy and quiet. Years later, Dad is eventually worn down by his teenager's dramatic threat that her "life will come to an end" if she doesn't get the latest and greatest Smartphone. The "quick fix" does nothing to solve the challenge at hand -- it only sets the stage for the next incident.
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Therapists for years have listened to patients blame parents for their problems. Now there is growing interest in the other side of the story: What about the suffering of parents who are estranged from their adult children?While there are no official tallies of parents whose adult children have cut them off, there is no shortage of headlines. The Olympic gold medal skier Lindsey Vonn reportedly hasn't spoken to her father in at least four years. The actor Jon Voight and his daughter, Angelina Jolie, were photographed together in February for the first time since they were estranged in 2002.
A number of Web sites and online chat rooms are devoted to the issue, with heartbreaking tales of children who refuse their parents' phone calls and e-mail and won't let them see grandchildren. Some parents seek grief counseling, while others fall into depression and even contemplate suicide.
Joshua Coleman, a San Francisco psychologist who is an expert on parental estrangement, says it appears to be growing more and more common, even in families who haven't experienced obvious cruelty or traumas like abuse and addiction. Instead, parents often report that a once-close relationship has deteriorated after a conflict over money, a boyfriend or built-up resentments about a parent's divorce or remarriage.
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Christine Armario, Terence Chea:
Students graduating from high school this spring may be collecting their diplomas just in time, leaving institutions that are being badly weakened by the nation's economic downturn.Across the country, mass layoffs of teachers, counselors and other staff members -- caused in part by the drying up of federal stimulus dollars -- are leading to larger classes and reductions in everything that is not a core subject, including music, art, clubs, sports and other after-school activities.
Educators and others worry the cuts could lead to higher dropout rates and lower college attendance as students receive less guidance and become less engaged in school. They fear a generation of young people could be left behind.
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The expenses can be daunting even to parents who've saved since their child was little. Here are some things you can do before freshman year and beyond.About 19 million kids head to college next month, which is likely to have their parents in a mild panic about how to pay the bills. Even if you saved religiously from the time your child was a toddler, the stock market has worked against you over the last decade, leaving many families short.
Worse, college isn't a one-time expense. One of my friends likens it to buying a luxury car, then driving it off a cliff. "Repeat that four times," he said. "Then you can imagine what it's like to pay for college."
Of course, the hope is that college will pay off in increased earnings for your child. But that's only if your child goes to the right school and manages to graduate and get a job. What can you and your child do to boost that chance and reduce out-of-pocket costs in the meantime?
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This is a life's work," says Jay Kenton, the Oregon University System's vice chancellor for finance and administration. "I've been working to change this for 30 years."Flexibility for higher ed."This" is not Oregonians' understanding of the importance of a national-class higher education system, why some states regard their universities as economic engines, why it's a problem to be among the lowest higher-ed-funding states in the country. Changing that could be more than a life's work; it could take at least until Oregon State wins a Rose Bowl.
Kenton's goal, expressed in a proposal from the State Board of Higher Education earlier this month, is to loosen the Legislature's control over the state universities' budgets, control that has not lightened an ounce while the state's fiscal contribution has become almost weightless.
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A research group led by Dr. Li-Huei Tsai from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had recently discovered that the psychiatric risk gene, Disrupted in Schizophrenia-1 (DISC1), is an essential regulator of the proliferation of early brain cells (known as neural progenitor cells) via inhibition of a molecule called GSK3? and modulation of the Wnt signaling pathway. Disruptions in the Wnt pathway, which is critical for embryonic development, have previously been linked with developmental defects and with various human diseases."Our recent finding was particularly interesting because one of the actions of lithium, the most common mood disorder drug, is to inhibit GSK3?." explains Dr. Tsai. "Although DISC1 was one of the first psychiatric illness risk genes to be identified and we know that it plays a key role in brain development, the mechanisms by which DISC1 is regulated remain unknown." In this study, Dr. Tsai and colleagues built on earlier work and investigated how DISC1 is regulated during cortical development by looking for novel DISC1-interacting proteins.
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To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, the morning people are different from you and me - or so says new research.Early birds are more proactive than evening people - and so they do well in business, says Christoph Randler, a biology professor at the University of Education in Heidelberg, Germany.
"When it comes to business success, morning people hold the important cards," Randler told the Harvard Business Review of his research, some of which originally appeared in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. "[T]hey tend to get better grades in school, which gets them into better colleges, which then leads to better job opportunities. Morning people also anticipate problems and try to minimize them. They're proactive." (Not that evening people are life's losers: They're smarter and more creative, and have a better sense of humor, other studies have shown.)
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When kids act out, it's often the parents who get the blame.Whether they're getting in trouble in school or misbehaving with family, many parents worry they're doing something wrong. But that may not always be the case.
Guests:
Dr. Richard Friedman, professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York
Po Bronson, author of NurtureShock
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House Democrats are moving forward on first lady Michelle Obama's vision for healthier school lunches, propelling legislation that calls for tougher standards governing food in school and more meals for hungry children.A bill approved by the House Education and Labor Committee Thursday would allow the Agriculture Department to create new standards for all food in schools, including vending machine items. The legislation would spend about $8 billion more over 10 years on nutrition programs.
"This important legislation will combat hunger and provide millions of schoolchildren with access to healthier meals, a critical step in the battle against childhood obesity," Mrs. Obama said in a statement after committee passage.
Some Republicans on the committee expressed concern about how the bill would be paid for, but three of them ended up voting for it. The legislation was approved on a 32-13 vote.
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New research paints a decidedly mixed picture when it comes to mandatory drug testing for high school students trying out for sports or other extracurricular activities: While testing seems to reduce self-reported drug use in the short term, it has virtually no effect on teens' plans to use drugs in the future.A U.S. Department of Education study, out today, surveyed students at 36 high schools that got federal grants to do drug testing. Half of the schools had already begun testing for marijuana, amphetamines and other drugs; the other half had not.
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LEONARDO DA VINCI had many talents, including the ability to read (and write) mirror-writing fluently. Most adults find this extremely difficult, but new evidence suggests that recognising mirror images comes naturally to children. The 7th Forum of European Neuroscience, held in Amsterdam this week, heard that learning to read requires the brain's visual system to undergo profound changes, including unlearning the ancient ability to recognise an object and its mirror image as identical.Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist at the French medical-research agency, INSERM, believes that skills acquired relatively recently in people's evolutionary past must have piggybacked on regions in the brain that originally evolved for other purposes, since there has not been time for dedicated neural systems to develop from scratch..
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"I don't know what I've done wrong," the patient told me.She was an intelligent and articulate woman in her early 40s who came to see me for depression and anxiety. In discussing the stresses she faced, it was clear that her teenage son had been front and center for many years.
When he was growing up, she explained, he fought frequently with other children, had few close friends, and had a reputation for being mean. She always hoped he would change, but now that he was almost 17, she had a sinking feeling.
I asked her what she meant by mean. "I hate to admit it, but he is unkind and unsympathetic to people," she said, as I recall. He was rude and defiant at home, and often verbally abusive to family members.
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Contrary to Leo Tolstoy's famous observation that "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," a new psychology study confirms that unhappy families, in fact, are unhappy in two distinct ways. And these dual patterns of unhealthy family relationships lead to a host of specific difficulties for children during their early school years."Families can be a support and resource for children as they enter school, or they can be a source of stress, distraction, and maladaptive behavior," says Melissa Sturge-Apple, the lead researcher on the paper and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Rochester.
"This study shows that cold and controlling family environments are linked to a growing cascade of difficulties for children in their first three years of school, from aggressive and disruptive behavior to depression and alienation," Sturge-Apple explains. "The study also finds that children from families marked by high levels of conflict and intrusive parenting increasingly struggle with anxiety and social withdrawal as they navigate their early school years."
The three-year study, published July 15 in Child Development, examines relationship patterns in 234 families with six-year-old children. The research team identified three distinct family profiles: one happy, termed cohesive, and two unhappy, termed disengaged and enmeshed.
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The League of Education Voters is trying to co-opt dissent by creating a campaign called Education Revolution and using a lot of incendiary language and images, but not taking any action.Well worth reading.It got me thinking about what the Revolution really is or should be. Help me clarify my thinking on this.
I think that the Revolution is about re-defining and re-purposing the District's central functions and responsibilities. The change will come when the role of the central administration is defined. What do we want the District's central administration to do? And what DON'T we want them to do?
Ideally, the District's headquarters will take responsibility for everything that isn't better decided at the school building level. They should relieve the school staff of those duties. They should:
1) Provide centralized services when those services are commodities and can achieve economies of scale. For example, HR functions, facilities maintenance, data warehousing, contracting, food service, procurement, accounting, and transportation.
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A proposed sex education program that teaches fifth graders the different ways people have intercourse and first graders about gay love has infuriated parents and forced the school board to take a closer look at the issue.Helena school trustees were swamped Tuesday night at a hearing that left many of the hundreds of parents in attendance standing outside a packed board room. They urged the school board in this city nestled in the Rocky Mountains to take the sex education program back to the drawing board.
The proposed 62-page document covers a broad health and nutrition education program and took two years to draft. But it is the small portion dealing with sexual education that has drawn the ire of many in the community who feel it is being pushed forward despite its obvious controversial nature.
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For as long as exams and term papers have existed, cheating has been a temptation. But with Web technology, it's never been easier. College professors and high school teachers are engaged in an escalating war with students over cutting and pasting articles from the Internet, sharing answers on homework assignments and even texting answers during exams. The arms race is now joined between Web sites offering free papers to download and sophisticated software that can detect plagiarism instantly
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Darci Hemleb Thompson had been on the lookout for Alice D'Addario for many years. From her home in Hampton, Va., Ms. Thompson, 49, who is married and has a 12-year-old daughter, was determined to find Ms. D'Addario on the Internet. She tried every search engine and networking site she could find.About 18 months ago she hit the jackpot.
"Nice to see one of the greatest teachers of all time on Facebook!" Ms. Thompson wrote on Ms. D'Addario's wall. "I love to go to your page just to see your smiling face. Even your eyes still smile. You are an amazing person!"
Ms. D'Addario was Ms. Thompson's Advanced Placement history teacher at Walt Whitman High School in Huntington Station, on Long Island, in 1977.
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Female twins who shared the womb with a brother are better at visualizing shapes being rotated than those who shared the womb with a sister, according to a study in Psychological Science. Sex differences in mental rotation tasks--in which participants try matching rotated versions of 3-D block figures--have been linked to testosterone levels, with males outperforming females from an early age. Previous studies have reported that female twins from opposite-sex pairs are exposed to higher levels of testosterone in the womb than those from same-sex pairs. That degree of testosterone exposure appears to masculinize certain physiological features, such as finger-length ratios. In the present study, 804 twins, the average age of which was 22 years old, performed a mental rotation test in which they matched figures that were identical but rotated. Out of a maximum score of 24, females with a twin sister scored 9.01 on average, while females with a twin brother scored 10.26--a statistically significant difference after the researchers factored in age, birthweight and other variables. Male twins from same-sex pairs scored 12.87, while those from opposite-sex pairs averaged 13.74, but the difference between the two groups wasn't statistically significant.Caveat: Environmental differences between same-sex and opposite-sex twins might have influenced rotation test scores.
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When Ann and Jonathan Binstock started shopping for an apartment in Manhattan in 2007, their first call was not to a real estate broker. Instead, they hired an educational consultant, to show them where the best schools for their daughter, Ellen, were. After the consultant suggested the most desirable zones , they chose a two-bedroom apartment near Public School 87 on the Upper West Side. Public records show it cost $1.975 million.Ms. Binstock said the family's apartment "was a stretch financially."
"We ended up buying the apartment that we live in now based on the schools," she added. "All of our money is in our little two-bedroom apartment."
Now Ellen is entering second grade, and the Binstocks are finding that plenty of other parents shared their real estate strategy: P.S. 87 has become so overcrowded with students that, in first grade, Ellen had no gym class, and her lunch started before 11 a.m. It has a waiting list. The Binstocks heard that a neighboring school, P.S. 199, was also crowded, with its own waiting list.
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When college presidents and academic administrators pay their usual obeisance to "diversity" you know they are talking first and foremost about race. More specifically, they are talking about blacks. A diverse college campus is understood as one that has a student body that -- at a minimum -- is 5 to 7 percent black (i.e., equivalent to roughly half the proportion of blacks in the general population). A college or university that is only one, two, or three percent black would not be considered "diverse" by college administrators regardless of how demographically diverse its student body might be in other ways. The blacks in question need not be African Americans -- indeed at many of the most competitive colleges today, including many Ivy League schools, an estimated 40-50 percent of those categorized as black are Afro-Caribbean or African immigrants, or the children of such immigrants.As a secondary meaning "diversity" can also encompass Hispanics, who together with blacks are often subsumed by college administrators and admissions officers under the single race category "underrepresented minorities." Most colleges and universities seeking "diversity" seek a similar proportion of Hispanics in their student body as blacks (since blacks and Hispanics are about equal in number in the general population), though meeting the black diversity goal usually has a much higher priority than meeting the Hispanic one.
Asians, unlike blacks and Hispanics, receive no boost in admissions. Indeed, the opposite is often the case, as the quota-like mentality that leads college administrators to conclude they may have "too many" Asians. Despite the much lower number of Asians in the general high-school population, high-achieving Asian students -- those, for instance, with SAT scores in the high 700s -- are much more numerous than comparably high-achieving blacks and Hispanics, often by a factor of ten or more. Thinking as they do in racial balancing and racial quota terms, college admissions officers at the most competitive institutions almost always set the bar for admitting Asians far above that for Hispanics and even farther above that for admitting blacks.
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As the population of Muslims in the United States continues to grow, so too does the number of Islamic schools serving Muslim families across the nation.American Muslims see these schools as a way to provide their children with a combination of good, mainstream education and training in the essentials of their faith. But critics fear some of these schools might expose Muslim children to radical Islamist views.
Religious education
Education has always been very important to the Muslim community in the United States. And like many other families, Muslim parents have educational options. They can send their children to secular, county-administered public schools or private academies while providing religious training at home or on weekends.
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MIDDLE SCHOOL students are champion time-wasters. And the personal computer may be the ultimate time-wasting appliance. Put the two together at home, without hovering supervision, and logic suggests that you won't witness a miraculous educational transformation.Still, wherever there is a low-income household unboxing the family's very first personal computer, there is an automatic inclination to think of the machine in its most idealized form, as the Great Equalizer. In developing countries, computers are outfitted with grand educational hopes, like those that animate the One Laptop Per Child initiative, which was examined in this space in April. The same is true of computers that go to poor households in the United States.
Economists are trying to measure a home computer's educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.
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Across the country, public education is in the midst of a quiet revolution. States are embracing voluntary national standards for English and math, while schools are paying teachers based on student performance.The Gates Foundation funded a Small Learning Community initiative at Madison West High SchoolIt's an agenda propelled in part by a flood of money from a billionaire prep-school graduate best known for his software empire: Bill Gates.
In the past 2 1/2 years, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged more than $650 million to schools, public agencies and other groups that buy into its main education priorities.
The largest awards are powering experiments in teacher evaluation and performance pay. The Pittsburgh school district landed $40 million, Los Angeles charter schools $60 million and the Memphis schools $90 million. The Hillsborough County district, which includes Tampa, won the biggest grant: $100 million. That has set the nation's eighth-largest school system on a quest to reshape its 15,000-member teaching corps by rewarding student achievement instead of seniority.
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Bharat Balasubramanian, via Jim Fallows:
"I will state that there will be a polarization of society here in the United States. People who are using their brains are moving up. Then you have another part of society that is doing services. These services will not be paid well. But you would need services. You would need restaurants, you would need cooks, you would need drivers et cetera. You will be losing your middle class."This I would not see in the same fashion in Europe, because the manufacturing base there today can compete anywhere, anytime with China or India. Because their productivity and skill sets more than offset their higher costs. You don't see this everywhere, but it's Germany, it's France, it's Sweden, it's Austria, it's Switzerland.... So I feel Europe still will have a middle level of people. They also have people who are very rich, they also have people doing services. But there is a balance. I don't see the balance here in the US."
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The head of Atlanta Public Schools promised an impartial inquiry into reports of cheating on state achievement tests. Recusing herself, Superintendent Beverly Hall declared the investigation would be conducted by "a respected outside organization."Five months later, the investigation remains incomplete, and questions have emerged that challenge its independence.
The "blue-ribbon" commission appointed to oversee the investigation is populated with business executives and others who have done business with the school district or who have other civic or social ties to the district or to Hall.
One of the firms chosen to run the inquiry also is a school district vendor, having collected $1.7 million for other work performed as recently as 2008.
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Andrew Schilcher
Volunteer Coordinator
Urban League of Greater Madison, via email:
Good Morning,
I am contacting you today because our President & CEO, Kaleem Caire, our Board of Directors, and our team would like to extend an invitation to you and your agency to get involved with the Urban League of Greater Madison's Community Outreach Campaign. The campaign is aimed at gathering information about the current needs of its residents and the vision of its residents for the future of Madison. Madison's Mayor Dave Cieslewicz has pledged to work in partnership with the Urban League on establishing a vision for the city that includes ideals, interests, needs, and values of all residents. The campaign is just the beginning of this process.
The outreach campaign will enable us to go much deeper and further than telephone or electronic polling of registered voters offers. Instead, this boots-on-the-ground campaign will involve volunteers discussing with residents, business owners, and passers-by issues and topics that define the community's outlook on the present and future. Organizations and individuals who participate in the campaign will have the benefit of getting out into communities to talk with residents and build a sense of community. All individual and agency volunteers will receive a full report on what we learned at the end of the campaign.
By participating in this campaign, you will not only actively help to develop a deep understanding of our Greater Madison community, but also shape the future of our community as well. To support this effort, volunteers are needed to do the door-to-door and business outreach in targeted neighborhoods and commercial districts. Training and a t-shirt will be provided free of charge, and volunteers are only needed to commit to one (3 hour) shift every week for as many weeks as you can participate. This campaign is scheduled to run from the middle of July through the end of September 2010.
I hope that you and your agency will be able to join us in our efforts to enhance the sense of community, inclusion, and common understanding of our city's value and purpose among all who live and work in the capital of the Badger State, and improve the quality of life and for all of our city's children and families.
Please forward this call for volunteers to any service committees or engaged employees or patrons of your agency. We need all the support we can get to help shape Madison into a welcoming, supportive, and prosperous place for all people who make this their home.
If you, or any member of your agency have any questions, or wish to get involved, please contact me at aschilcher@ulgm.org or 608.729.1225.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Andrew Schilcher
Volunteer Coordinator
Urban League of Greater Madison
2222 South Park Street, Suite 200
Madison, WI 53713
Main: 608-729-1225
Fax: 608-729-1205
Email: aschilcher@ulgm.org
Internet: www.ulgm.org
Facebook: Click Here
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Naomi Schaefer Riley, via a Rick Kiley email:
In the spring of 1989 Wendy Kopp was a senior at Princeton University who had her sights set on being a New York City school teacher. But without a graduate degree in education or a traditional teacher certification, it was nearly impossible to break into the system. So she applied for a job at Morgan Stanley instead.Thinking back to the bureaucratic hurdles of getting a job in a public school, Ms. Kopp tells me it "seemed more intimidating than starting Teach for America." Which is exactly what she did as soon as she graduated.
What began as a senior thesis paper has since grown into a $180 million organization that this fall will send 4,500 of the best college graduates in the country to 100 of the lowest-performing urban and rural school districts. A few months ago, Teach for America (TFA) received an applicant pool that Morgan Stanley recruiters would drool over. Their 46,000 applicants included 12% of all Ivy League seniors, 7% of the graduating class of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and 6% from U.C. Berkeley. A quarter of all black seniors at Ivy League schools and a fifth of Latinos applied to be teachers in the 2010 corps. It is, I'm told by some recent grads, one of the coolest things you can do after college.
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College students today are spending less time studying than they did in the past, according to a recent report. The University of California study finds that the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. Today's average student hits the books for just 14 hours. That downward trend has been consistent across all kinds of schools, majors, and students. But why is this happening? Here are a few thoughts and theories, many of them courtesy of the very thoughtful commenters at Mother Jones, where blogger Kevin Drum asked "professors and current students" to suggest explanations.
- Study Leaders Cite Professor Apathy The Boston Globe's Keith O'Brien writes, "when it comes to 'why,' the answers are less clear. ... What might be causing it, they suggest, is the growing power of students and professors' unwillingness to challenge them."
- Modern Technology Not to Blame The Boston Globe's Keith O'Brien says the study leaders don't think so. "The easy culprits -- the allure of the Internet (Facebook!), the advent of new technologies (dude, what's a card catalog?), and the changing demographics of college campuses -- don't appear to be driving the change, Babcock and Marks found." Why so sure? "According to their research, the greatest decline in student studying took place before computers swept through colleges: Between 1961 and 1981, study times fell from 24.4 to 16.8 hours per week (and then, ultimately, to 14)."
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While performance differences between boys and girls have narrowed considerably, boys still outnumber girls by more than about 3-to-1 at extremely high levels of math ability and scientific reasoning.At the same time, girls slightly outnumber boys at extremely high levels of verbal reasoning and writing ability.
Those are the findings of a recent study that examined 30 years of standardized test data from the very highest-scoring seventh graders. Except for the differences at these highest levels of performance, boys and girls are essentially the same at all other levels of performance.
The findings come from a study performed by Duke University's Talent Identification Program, which relies on SAT and ACT tests administered to the top 5 percent of 7th graders to identify gifted students and nurture their intellectual talents. There were more than 1.6 million such students in this study.
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Children in Everett will be walking up to a mile to get to school next year. The budget saving plan has some parents worried about traffic and safety.The school board says the plan will save the district more than $400,000.
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Content from Sternberg, R. (1994). In search of the human mind. New York: Harcourt Brace.1. Lack of motivation. A talent is irrelevant if a person is not motivated to use it. Motivation may be external (for example, social approval) or internal (satisfaction from a job well-done, for instance). External sources tend to be transient, while internal sources tend to produce more consistent performance.
2. Lack of impulse control. Habitual impulsiveness gets in the way of optimal performance. Some people do not bring their full intellectual resources to bear on a problem but go with the first solution that pops into their heads.
3. Lack of perserverance and perseveration. Some people give up too easily, while others are unable to stop even when the quest will clearly be fruitless.
4. Using the wrong abilities. People may not be using the right abilities for the tasks in which they are engaged.
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There was a day a few weeks ago when I found my 2½-year-old son sitting on our building doorstep, waiting for me to come home. He spotted me as I was rounding the corner, and the scene that followed was one of inexpressible loveliness, right out of the movie I'd played to myself before actually having a child, with him popping out of his babysitter's arms and barreling down the street to greet me. This happy moment, though, was about to be cut short, and in retrospect felt more like a tranquil lull in a slasher film. When I opened our apartment door, I discovered that my son had broken part of the wooden parking garage I'd spent about an hour assembling that morning. This wouldn't have been a problem per se, except that as I attempted to fix it, he grew impatient and began throwing its various parts at the walls, with one plank very narrowly missing my eye. I recited the rules of the house (no throwing, no hitting). He picked up another large wooden plank. I ducked. He reached for the screwdriver. The scene ended with a time-out in his crib.As I shuffled back to the living room, I thought of something a friend once said about the Children's Museum of Manhattan--"a nice place, but what it really needs is a bar"--and rued how, at that moment, the same thing could be said of my apartment. Two hundred and 40 seconds earlier, I'd been in a state of pair-bonded bliss; now I was guided by nerves, trawling the cabinets for alcohol. My emotional life looks a lot like this these days. I suspect it does for many parents--a high-amplitude, high-frequency sine curve along which we get the privilege of doing hourly surfs. Yet it's something most of us choose. Indeed, it's something most of us would say we'd be miserable without.
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Fewer low- and moderate-income high school graduates are attending college in America, and fewer are graduating.Enrollment in four-year colleges was 40% in 2004 for low-income students, down from 54% in 1992, and 53% in 2004 for moderate-income students, down from 59% over the same period, according to a report recently submitted to Congress by the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance.
If that trend has continued, low- and moderate-income students who don't move on to college face an even darker outlook. The unemployment rate for 16- to 19-year olds averaged 17% in 2004, the jobless rate for people over age 25 with just a high school diploma averaged 5% the same year. So far this year, those figures have jumped to 25.8% and 10.6%, respectively.
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Here is the opening paragraph, which includes a pretty big number, but I don't know what this writer means by "the educational community", or what he means by "support and services for open source software by 2012″:The educational community has discovered open source tools in a big way. Analysts predict that schools will spend up to $489.9 million on support and services for open source software by 2012, and that only includes charges related to operating systems and learning management systems. Teachers, professors and home schoolers are using open source applications as part of their educational curriculum for a wide variety of subjects.There is no link to the number or to the analysts, so I don't know from where the information comes. I'd like to say right away that I don't like that the writer of this blog post is saying that these open source tools "replace" existing tools or software. I don't think there is any way for one person to measure that. I think it is helpful, though, to say that these open source tools may work well in cooperation with existing software, or as accents for software that already exists.
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Breach of contract action focuses on written contract requiring divorced father to cover daughter's school costs until age 25It's not news that some children, especially as they hit their teenage and college years, don't get along with their parents. But even experienced attorneys say it's rare when the disagreements grow to a point where litigation is required.
So consider the odd case of Dana Soderberg, who went to court to force her father to live up to a deal to pay her tuition at Southern Connecticut State University. Hamden family lawyer Renee C. Berman handled the lawsuit for Soderberg.
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Jan Fleischhauer and Wiebke Hollersen:
Germany's left has its own tales of abuse. One of the goals of the German 1968 movement was the sexual liberation of children. For some, this meant overcoming all sexual inhibitions, creating a climate in which even pedophilia was considered progressive.In the spring of 1970, Ursula Besser found an unfamiliar briefcase in front of her apartment door. It wasn't that unusual, in those days, for people to leave things at her door or drop smaller items into her letter slot. She was, after all, a member of the Berlin state parliament for the conservative Christian Democrats. Sometimes Besser called the police to examine a suspicious package; she was careful to always apologize to the neighbors for the commotion.
The students had proclaimed a revolution, and Besser, the widow of an officer, belonged to those forces in the city that were sharply opposed to the radical changes of the day. Three years earlier, when she was a newly elected member of the Berlin state parliament, the CDU had appointed Besser, a Ph.D. in philology, to the education committee. She quickly acquired a reputation for being both direct and combative.
The briefcase contained a stack of paper -- the typewritten daily reports on educational work at an after-school center in Berlin's Kreuzberg neighborhood, where up to 15 children aged 8 to 14 were taken care of during the afternoon. The first report was dated Aug. 13, 1969, and the last one was written on Jan. 14, 1970.
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Earlier this week I hopped on the Red Line in the middle of the afternoon to attend a screening of the education reform documentary Waiting for Superman at the Gallery Place movie theater downtown. It's a resonant, skillfully made film, a pitch-perfect representation of education reform in 2010. And arguably the most striking aspect was the near-total absence of No Child Left Behind, which is mentioned only in passing as one more failed federal plan.This reinforced an idea that's been nagging me for a while now: Some time in the last two or three years, we moved into the post-NCLB era of education reform.
It didn't used to be that way. When I began working on education policy full-time in the early 2000's, the center of gravity in education reform sat with the coalition of civil rights advocates, business leaders, and reform-minded governors of both parties who pushed NCLB through Congress in 2001. To find that same hum of ideas and influence today, you'd head straight for the annual New Schools Venture Fund Summit and its confluence of charter school operators, TFA alumni, urban reformers, philanthropies, and various related "edupreneurs." It's a different world with a different mindset, and this has real implications for public schools.
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Forget about students spending one year in each grade, with the entire class learning the same skills at the same time. Districts from Alaska to Maine are taking a different route.Instead of simply moving kids from one grade to the next as they get older, schools are grouping students by ability. Once they master a subject, they move up a level. This practice has been around for decades, but was generally used on a smaller scale, in individual grades, subjects or schools.
Now, in the latest effort to transform the bedraggled Kansas City, Mo. schools, the district is about to become what reform experts say is the largest one to try the approach. Starting this fall officials will begin switching 17,000 students to the new system to turnaround trailing schools and increase abysmal tests scores.
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Thirty-seven states have some sort of mandate to address the needs of gifted and talented students in public schools. While many parents and teachers have mixed views about the tests used to identify talent and "giftedness," the programs are strongly supported by many parents who cannot afford to send their children to private schools. They are hard to overhaul, for various reasons.
In New York City, officials are seeking a new exam for admissions of gifted students that may involve testing children as young as 3. The city says it is responding to complaints that minorities are underrepresented in the current selection process and that many parents have learned to game the system. Is New York's approach a step forward or backward? What does the latest research show in identifying gifted and talented students?
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Bill Cosby used his trademark humor and storytelling style to chide hundreds gathered Saturday at the Essence Music Festival's empowerment seminars into talking to their children about real life and, in the process, keeping it simple."We've got to lay it out for them," Cosby said when asked about how to help cut the rate of teen pregnancies in America. "Let's tell them about life. You're 14 and having sex. OK. So, what kind of job do you have?"
Cosby, who received a standing ovation when he walked on stage, said the African-American community must get involved if change is going to occur in any area.
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Halfway through his Presidency, George W. Bush called on the country to build "an ownership society." He trumpeted the soaring rate of U.S. homeownership, and extolled the virtues of giving individuals more control over their own financial lives. It was a comforting vision, but, as we now know, behind it was a bleak reality--bad subprime loans, mountains of credit-card debt, and shrinking pensions--reflecting a simple fact: when it comes to financial matters, many Americans have been left without a clue.The depth of our financial ignorance is startling. In recent years, Annamaria Lusardi, an economist at Dartmouth and the head of the Financial Literacy Center, has conducted extensive studies of what Americans know about finance. It's depressing work. Almost half of those surveyed couldn't answer two questions about inflation and interest rates correctly, and slightly more sophisticated topics baffle a majority of people. Many people don't know the terms of their mortgage or the interest rate they're paying. And, at a time when we're borrowing more than ever, most Americans can't explain what compound interest is.
Financial illiteracy isn't new, but the consequences have become more severe, because people now have to take so much responsibility for their financial lives. Pensions have been replaced with 401(k)s; many workers have to buy their own health insurance; and so on. The financial marketplace, meanwhile, has become a dizzying emporium of choice and easy credit. The decisions are more numerous and complex than ever before. As Lusardi puts it, "It's like we've opened a faucet, and told people they can draw as much water as they want, and it's up to them to decide when they've had enough. But we haven't given people the tools to decide how much is too much."
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It is agreed, then, that bad eating habits are a government problem. Up to now, you would have been forgiven for thinking that all social ills are to be cured by television presenters. Then this week, the Health Secretary took Jamie Oliver and his well-intentioned - if sadly ineffective - efforts to reform school dinners to task. Take-up of meals is down, argued Andrew Lansley, suggesting that Jamie's formula for school dinner reform is not working. I would suggest Andrew Lansley aims his guns in a different direction.Oliver has often talked of his frustration and, indeed, has even burst into tears at the refusal of sinners to convert to his way of eating, or stay faithful afterwards. But their diets are not his fault, or his responsibility. He valiantly highlighted an important issue. Millions watched; the previous government made a lot of the right noises, but they never ran with Oliver's campaign.
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I did not immediately see any reference to the dual language program on Midvale/Lincoln's website. This Madison School District search offers a bit more information.
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Inspired by the realist style of Edward Hopper, recent Century High School graduate Ali Sifuentes snapped a few nighttime photographs of Silver Lake Foods on north Broadway hoping to recreate the scene in an oil painting."I've been by there many times and after studying the building I thought I'd try to recreate the cinematic contrast between light and dark colors," Sifuentes said. "The building has a fantasy sort of feel and it seemed ideal for this style of painting."
Sifuentes believes Hopper, a well-known American artist that often focused on urban and rural scenes depicting modern American life, was sending a message about himself and people of his time.
"I'm basically trying to do the same thing, only I'm showing what the present looks like," Sifuentes said.
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Labor economists have an interesting way of looking at leisure time, and it should not come as a surprise to anyone at this time of the year. We call most things that we can buy "normal goods", because more income generally leads us to buy more of such things. Along these lines, we recognize that leisure is actually a "normal good", and something that is desired and, in a sense, "purchased" when we take time out to enjoy ourselves rather than use that time to work and earn money. Such a view of leisure leads to the result that it is possible that, as wages increase, people will use that increased income to buy more leisure. Thus, while one normally thinks of increasing wages as leading to people working more, it is possible that higher wages could actually cause people to work less, as the potentially increased income from higher wages is used to "purchase" more leisure time. This is a theoretical possibility called the "backward bending labor supply curve." I found myself thinking of this last weekend as I splashed in the city pool with my daughter, and could well imagine a world in which I would want to use every extra penny to buy such warm summer weekends with my family.When we adopted my daughter, we put together a CD of songs that had special meaning to us and called it "Waiting for our Daughter", with the intention of giving it to her some day, so she could capture some of the emotion of that moment. Included in it were songs that were popular in the months leading up to her adoption, as well songs that had special meaning to us, such as "Return to Pooh Corner", which still makes me, a lifelong Pooh fan, cry. Also included in the CD was the song "I Hope You Dance". Its refrain sings "when you get the choice to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance". I see it as a song that reflects the life affirming joy that I want to pass on to my child.
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The new test works by extracting the DNA of the foetus from the mother's blood and screening it for Down's syndrome and other abnormalities.At present, pregnant women are given the odds on whether they are carrying a child with Down's syndrome, and if they want to know for certain they have to undergo one of two invasive processes; either amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling. The first involves taking a sample of fluid from around the foetus and can, in some cases, cause a miscarriage even if the woman is carrying a healthy foetus. The second requires taking a fragment of the placenta.
The new test involves the same equipment needed for amniocentesis testing, but uses blood instead of amniotic fluid and is not invasive.
So far, researchers have been able to prove the technique works in principle and have described the results as "promising". They hope to use the same method to detect other abnormalities in an unborn child's DNA such as Edwards' syndrome, which causes structural malformations in the foetus, and Patau's syndrome, which can result in severe physical and mental impairment and is often fatal.
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A CAREFULLY MANICURED soul patch graces Jordan Kavoosi's lower lip. His polo shirt exposes tattoos on both forearms--on his right, a Chinese character; on his left, a cover-up of previous work. Curling his mouth up into a sideways grin, the 24-year-old sinks back into his brown leather chair."I mean, anybody can do anything," he says, gazing out a window that overlooks the strip-mall parking lot. "You just have to do whatever it takes to get there."
Kavoosi is in the business of plagiarism. For $23 per page, one of his employees will write an essay. Just name the topic and he'll get it done in 48 hours. He'll even guarantee at least a "B" grade or your money back. According to his website, he's the best essay writer in the world.
Kavoosi's business, Essay Writing Company, employs writers from across the country. Most of the customers are high school or college students, but not all. In one case, an author asked Kavoosi's crew to write a book to be published in his own name.
To be sure, there are ethical implications to running a business that traffics in academic fraud. The services Kavoosi offers are the same as those exposed in the University of Minnesota's 1999 basketball scandal, during which an office manager admitted to doing homework for players.
"Sure it's unethical, but it's just a business," Kavoosi explains. "I mean, what about strip clubs or porn shops? Those are unethical, and city-approved."
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One day this year, one of my elementary gifted students went home and proclaimed (in obvious distress) to his mom that he didn't want to be a "smarty" anymore. Turns out the kids in his class had been teasing him about his very-apparent intelligence. In his meltdown, he expressed that he just wanted to be normal, that he wanted to know what it was like to not worry about everything so much, that he just wanted to be a regular kid and not "stick out" so much all the time.I wondered how many of my other students wished at times that they weren't so intelligent. What were their thoughts on the "love/hate" relationship gifted individuals sometimes have with their giftedness? As a means of offering you some insight into the mind of a gifted child, here are their responses to the prompt, "Sometimes I wish I wasn't so smart because..." [To their credit, about half of the kids said they were glad they were intelligent. I'll post those responses separately.] [All names are student-chosen pseudonyms.]
"I get taken advantage of. People ask to be my partner or work with me on a paper and I am stuck doing all the work. The only thing they do is make sure their name is on the paper or project." Charlotte, 8th grade
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Private, nonprofit colleges will hike tuition and fees by an average of 4.5 percent in the coming academic year, outpacing inflation while still holding close to last year's nearly 40-year low increase rate, according to a survey released Tuesday by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.The 4.5 percent increase for 2010-11 follows a 4.3 percent increase for 2009-10, which was the smallest increase since 1972-73.
"I think it's a pretty fundamental adjustment that we're seeing here," said David L. Warren, NAICU president. "What we've got is a recession, which has indefinite future to it, and recognition all around that colleges want to hold their expenses as low as they can, and that includes of course the tuition they're charging."
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In 2000, in a book called Losing the Race, I argued that much of the reason for the gap between the grades and test scores of black students and white students was that black teens often equated doing well in school with "acting white." I knew that a book which did not focus on racism's role in this problem would attract bitter criticism. I was hardly surprised to be called a "sell-out" and "not really black" because I grew up middle class and thus had no understanding of black culture. But one of the few criticisms that I had not anticipated was that the "acting white" slam did not even exist.Clusty Search: Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation, by Stuart Buck.I was hardly the first to bring up the "acting white" problem. An early description of the phenomenon comes from a paper by John Ogbu and Signithia Fordham in 1986, and their work was less a revelation of the counterintuitive than an airing of dirty laundry. You cannot grow up black in America and avoid the "acting white" notion, unless you by chance grow up around only white kids. Yet in the wake of Losing the Race, a leading scholar/activist on minority education insisted that he had never encountered the "acting white" slander--while shortly thereafter describing his own son doing poorly in school because of precisely what Ogbu, Fordham, myself, and others had written about. Jack White, formerly of Time, roasted me in a review for making up the notion out of whole cloth. Ogbu (with Astrid Davis) published an ethnological survey of Shaker Heights, Ohio describing the "acting white" problem's effects there in detail, while a documentary on race and education in that town explicitly showed black students attesting to it. Both book and documentary have largely been ignored by the usual suspects.
Stuart Buck at last brings together all of the relevant evidence and puts paid to two myths. The first is that the "acting white" charge is a fiction or just pointless marginal static. The other slain myth, equally important, is that black kids reject school as alien out of some sort of ingrained stupidity; the fear of this conclusion lies at the root of the studious dismissal of the issue by so many black thinkers concerned about black children. Buck conclusively argues that the phenomenon is a recent and understandable outgrowth of a particular facet of black people's unusual social history in America--and that facet is neither slavery nor Jim Crow.
Related: Madison Teachers' Harlem trip's aim is to aid 'culturally relevant' teaching.
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Two decades ago, Xavier University could only count on three of every four freshmen returning for sophomore year. Even fewer made it to graduation.Today, though, close to 9 of every 10 students who start freshman year at the Jesuit university in Cincinnati makes it back the next fall. Seven in 10 will graduate in four years, and another one will likely graduate in the two years after that.
The quality of students Xavier admits hasn't changed, nor have its academic standards. The biggest difference is one man - Adrian A. Schiess, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel -- and his day-in, day-out devotion to keeping students at Xavier.
Since 1990, Schiess, a former professor of military science at Xavier, has been the university's full-time director for student success and retention, an on-campus guru whose job responsibilities all lead to the same goal: helping any student who wants to be at Xavier stay at Xavier.
"There's no magic to retention," he says. "The key is hard work and a position like mine -- having someone who has focused responsibility from the university to guide and steer efforts to keep students here."
At other colleges, Schiess says, retention is an afterthought. "All the enrollment management people are really thinking about is admissions and financial aid. They might say, 'You get them, you pay for them and you keep them,' but they end up taking the third part as a given -- but it really isn't."
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Everyone warns parents about the drama of the teen years--the self-righteous tears, slamming doors, inexplicable fashion choices, appalling romances.But what happens when typical teen angst starts to look like something much darker and more troubling? How can parents tell if a moody teenager is simply normal--or is spinning out of control? This may be one of the most difficult dilemmas parents will ever face.
Studies show that about 20% of teenagers have a psychiatric illness with depression, anxiety and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder being among the most prevalent. Yet parents of teens are often blind-sided by a child's mental illness. Some are unaware that mental illnesses typically appear for the first time during adolescence. Or they may confuse the symptoms of an actual disorder with more normal teen moodiness or anxiety.
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One should not under-estimate the impact of the DC school voucher program on student achievement. According to the official announcement and the executive summary of the report, school vouchers lifted high school graduation rates but it could not be conclusively determined that it had a positive impact on student achievement.Something about those findings sounds like a bell striking thirteen. Not only is the clock wrong, but the mechanism seems out of whack. How can more students graduate from private schools if they weren't learning more? Are expectations so low in the private sector that any one can graduate?
Peering beneath the press release and the executive summary into the bowels of the study itself one can get some, if not all the answers, to these questions.
Let's begin with the most important--and perfectly uncontested--result: If one uses a voucher to go to school, the impact on the percentage of students with a high school diploma increases by 21 percentage points (Table 3-5), an effect size of no less than 0.46 standard deviations. Seventy percent of those who were not offered a school voucher made it through high school. That is close to the national average in high school graduation rates among those entering 9th grade four years earlier. As compared to that 70 percent rate among those who wanted a voucher but didn't get one, 91 percent of those who used vouchers to go to private school eventually received a high school diploma.
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Robin Lake, Brianna Dusseault, Melissa Bowen, Allison Demeritt, Paul Hill, via a Deb Britt email:
Charter management organizations (CMOs), nonprofit entities that directly manage public charter schools, are a significant force in today's public K-12 charter school landscape.CMOs were developed to solve serious problems limiting the numbers and quality of charter schools. The CMO model is meant to meld the benefits of school districts--including economies of scale, collaboration among similar schools, and support structures--with the autonomies and entrepreneurial drive of the charter sector.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the major philanthropies funding charter schools invested heavily in CMOs and similar organizations, spending an estimated total of $500 million between 1999 and 2009. Ultimately, those who invest in CMOs want to achieve a significantly higher number of high-quality schools in the charter school sector. Their investments in CMO growth have been targeted to specific urban school districts that have been considered difficult, if not impossible, to reform.
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The girl's parents, wild with outrage and fear, showed the principal the text messages: a dozen shocking, sexually explicit threats, sent to their daughter the previous Saturday night from the cellphone of a 12-year-old boy. Both children were sixth graders at Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgewood, N.J."I said, 'This occurred out of school, on a weekend,' " recalled the principal, Tony Orsini. "We can't discipline him."
Had they contacted the boy's family, he asked.
Too awkward, they replied. The fathers coach sports together.
What about the police, Mr. Orsini asked.
A criminal investigation would be protracted, the parents had decided, its outcome uncertain. They wanted immediate action.
They pleaded: "Help us."
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Last month, I was contacted by a faculty member I had met several years ago at a conference (I'll call her Claire). Our conversation began like many I've had recently, with tears in response to a negative and critical annual review. Claire is a brilliant social scientist, incredibly hard-working, and passionately committed to her scholarship, her institution and her students. While Claire is an award-winning teacher, and far exceeded her college's service expectations, her publication record was significantly below her department's standards. Her chair was clear that her lack of publications was problematic and she left the meeting feeling an almost desperate sense of urgency to move several manuscripts forward this summer.Of course, I suggested she make a summer plan and join a writing group that would motivate and support her throughout the summer. Last week, when I was writing about resistance to writing I couldn't help but think of Claire, so I decided to give her a call. Unfortunately, she had done very little writing: only three short sessions in the 30 days since we last spoke. When I asked Claire what was holding her back, she had difficulty identifying anything specific. She readily acknowledged having more free time and fewer responsibilities than she did during the academic year. But despite knowing that this was an important summer for her to be productive and having a general sense that she should try to write every day, somehow her days kept flying by without any progress on her manuscripts.
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I was standing on what used to be the stage on what used to be called the Old Hall at the school I used to attend. It was a stage on which I'd won minor acclaim as Dame Crammer ("Girls! Girls! Cease this vulgar brawl at once!") and Lady Lucre ("Hark! Here comes Sir Jaspar, your first cousin once removed and twice convicted"). My Mother Abbess from The Sound of Music had done her mountain climbing in the New Hall round the corner, and my "When the Lord closes a door somewhere he opens a window" had brought the house down for some reason. It wasn't even meant to get a laugh.I had been invited to my old school to fire the pupils up about Oxford University. I'd sent round a warning in advance. "I had quite a mixed time," I wrote, "but I will try to stay positive."
I dressed smartly, but not luxuriously, for my talk. My schooldays had had a shabby, down-at-heel flavour due to slender means, so I was eager to make a fresh impression. When I was there the establishment had boasted girls so shiny it was pointless trying to keep up, let alone compete. The girls with curls had their hair straightened on Saturday mornings at their mothers' beauty parlours, and the girls with straight hair had theirs curled. This evening my hair was newly cut and freshly curled, my nails short and neat, my outlook springy and optimistic.
My shoes and handbag very nearly matched. In fact, there was nothing about me that was remotely macabre. Apart from the 3cm thread hanging from the hem of my pencil skirt, I was damn near immaculate.
The room, containing about 60 teenagers and their parents, crackled with anxiety. It felt as though the souls in the Old Hall wanted Oxford almost more than life itself. Various experts spoke before me.
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This isn't actually about vouchers. It's about a new government report (pdf) on a school vouchers program in Washington, D.C., that reveals just how perversely narrow our view of "student achievement" has become.I wonder how much was spent per student in the voucher schools vs the traditional public districts?Issued this week by the Education Department, the report is the final evaluation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program ordered by Congress.
The program was the first federally funded private school voucher program in the country. Since 2004, more than 3,700 students -- most of them black or Hispanic -- have been awarded scholarships, each worth up to $7,500 tuition. Since Congress refused to reauthorize the program, no new students are being accepted.
The new evaluation of the program is remarkable for how it describes student achievement. It says: "There is no conclusive evidence that the OSP affected student achievement."
What is student achievement? In this report it is all about standardized test scores. The evaluation says:
"On average, after at least four years students who were offered (or used) scholarships had reading and math test scores that were statistically similar to those who were not offered scholarships."
Somewhat related: Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold voted to kill the DC Voucher program, along with the Democrat majority.
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A bipartisan group of legislators in Louisiana have passed a pilot voucher program for children with special needs in Louisiana.I think this makes Louisiana the sixth state to pass a private choice program for special needs children (Florida, Ohio, Utah, Arizona, Oklahoma having already done so).
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Charles Leadbeater went looking for radical new forms of education -- and found them in the slums of Rio and Kibera, where some of the world's poorest kids are finding transformative new ways to learn. And this informal, disruptive new kind of school, he says, is what all schools need to become.
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If you'd asked me a year ago whether or not I would be sad to graduate, I probably would've broken out in an uproar of laughter.But as I stood in my bedroom hours before the ceremony, clad in my cap and gown, I was completely overwhelmed. Senior year has come to an end, and with it, a new chapter of life has begun.
Needless to say, I am extremely excited to begin my life at NYU, but parting ways with Stuyvesant High School is harder than I thought it would be. As I cleared out my locker a few days ago, I found little pieces of memorabilia (my choral music folder, old math notes, gym clothes, the Stuyvesant Spectator newspaper) and instantly it hit me: this is it.
And I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but I almost cried (well, it was more of an "awww" moment than a full out cry of agony).
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Hidden in the maze of mud-walled alleys in the Loy Wiyala district of Kandahar, Amina, 16, is taking her first, secretive steps towards becoming a teacher.Banned by her father Abdul from making the short walk to school, she uses a clandestine classroom to impart her smattering of knowledge to younger sisters poring over textbooks scattered across a rug.
This is not a tale of a conservative parent depriving his daughter of an education, but an Afghan family braving the risk of Taliban violence to give their girls the chance to learn.
Abdul is one of a number of anxious fathers who have set up underground schools to allow his daughters to continue studying in defiance of an escalating campaign of insurgent attacks designed to thwart a major Nato operation to secure the city.
"I went to school in Kandahar city for a while, but now we are too scared," said Amina. "I think it is important that we all learn as much as we can at home until the situation for us improves. I want to be a teacher one day and go to teacher training college."
Gains in promoting female education, which was banned under the Taliban, have often been cited by Western politicians seeking to buoy support for the nine-year war among increasingly sceptical publics. But some of the initial progress has been eroded by a surge in violence, particularly in the south.
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Amid the Father's Day festivities, many of us are privately asking a Scroogely question: "Having kids--what's in it for me?" An economic perspective on happiness, nature and nurture provides an answer: Parents' sacrifice is much smaller than it looks, and much larger than it has to be.Most of us believe that kids used to be a valuable economic asset. They worked the farm, and supported you in retirement. In the modern world, the story goes, the economic benefits of having kids seem to have faded away. While parents today make massive personal and financial sacrifices, children barely reciprocate. When they're young, kids monopolize the remote and complain about the food, but do little to help around the house; when you're old, kids forget to return your calls and ignore your advice, but take it for granted that you'll continue to pay your own bills.
Many conclude that if you value your happiness and spending money, the only way to win the modern parenting game is not to play. Low fertility looks like a sign that we've finally grasped the winning strategy. In almost all developed nations, the total fertility rate--the number of children the average woman can expect to have in her lifetime--is well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children. (The U.S. is a bit of an outlier, with a rate just around replacement.) Empirical happiness research seems to validate this pessimism about parenting: All else equal, people with kids are indeed less happy than people without.
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Think of it as summer school for the Facebook generation.That's the idea behind Grockit Inc., a San Francisco startup that offers tutoring and test prep online. The company aims to take on companies like Kaplan and the Princeton Review Inc. by undercutting their prices, offering more custom features and using social networking to appeal to students.
The site lets users collaborate and socialize while studying, giving them more reasons to keep coming back. The challenge is winning the trust of parents, who may be more comfortable relying on established names to get their kids into top colleges. A handful of players dominate test preparation and course supplements, a market worth more than $1 billion, according to research firm Outsell Inc.
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In 2009 a group of 42 researchers, educators, and entrepreneurs met together at the invitation of Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm, to discuss how the Web could transform education. A major theme of the daylong discussion, which took place under the theme "Hacking Education," was "unbundling," the process through which online distribution of digital media and information breaks apart and erodes existing industries. At the center of "unbundling" are new technologically-enabled relationships that democratize access to the means of production and collectively create plenty where scarcity once existed.An often-cited example of "unbundling" is newspapers: with blogs and other online tools, one no longer needs a printing press or fleet of delivery vehicles to be heard. The newspaper editorial room competes with an army of bloggers and other online media outlets. Craigslist emerges as the marketplace for used household items, local job listings, and community announcements, replacing the advertising function of the traditional print newspaper. The combination is a perfect storm leading to a steady, nationwide stream of newspaper closures.
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Does differential access to computer technology at home compound the educational disparities between rich and poor? Would a program of government provision of computers to early secondary school students reduce these disparities? The authors use administrative data on North Carolina public school students to corroborate earlier surveys that document broad racial and socioeconomic gaps in home computer access and use. Using within‐student variation in home computer access, and across‐ ZIP code variation in the timing of the introduction of high‐speed internet service, the authors demonstrate that the introduction of home computer technology is associated with modest but statistically significant and persistent negative impacts on student math and reading test scores. Further evidence suggests that providing universal access to home computers and high‐speed internet access would broaden, rather than narrow, math and reading achievement gaps.Is this a wise investment of public funds? Very little evidence exists to support a positive relationship between student computer access at home and academic outcomes.
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In the Advanced Learning work session there was a slide that showed the growth of AP and IB in the District. It is true that many more students are taking AP classes than ever before. But it doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means.Take, for example, Roosevelt High School. At Roosevelt about half of the 10th grade students used to take AP European History. This is typically the first AP available to students, one of the few open to 10th grade students on the typical pathway. The class is challenging for 10th grade students and the fact that about half of the students took it is a testament to Roosevelt's academic strength. The other half of the students took a history class similar to the one that students all across district and the state take in the 10th grade.
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A number of responses to my column about the education I received at Classical High (a public school in Providence, RI) rehearsed a story of late-flowering gratitude after an earlier period of frustration and resentment. "I had a high school (or a college) experience like yours," the poster typically said, "and I hated it and complained all the time about the homework, the demands and the discipline; but now I am so pleased that I stayed the course and acquired skills that have served me well throughout my entire life."Now suppose those who wrote in to me had been asked when they were young if they were satisfied with the instruction they were receiving? Were they getting their money's worth? Would they recommend the renewal of their teachers' contracts? I suspect the answers would have been "no," "no" and "no," and if their answers had been taken seriously and the curriculum they felt oppressed by had been altered accordingly, they would not have had the rich intellectual lives they now happily report, or acquired some of the skills that have stood them in good stead all these years.
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What's one sure-fire way to stress out parents? Shorten the school day.This expenditure appears to continue the trend of increased adult to adult expenditures, which, in this case, is at the expense of classroom (adult to student) time.And that's exactly what the Madison school district is proposing, starting next year, for grades six to 12. According to a letter recently sent to middle school staff by Pam Nash, the district's assistant superintendent of secondary schools, ending school early on Wednesdays would allow time for teachers to meet to discuss professional practices and share ideas for helping students succeed in school.
"I am pleased to announce that as a result of your hard work, investment and commitment, as well as the support of central administration and Metro busing, together we will implement Professional Collaboration Time for the 10-11 school year!" Nash wrote enthusiastically.
Despite Nash's letter, district administrators appeared to backpedal on Monday on whether the plan is actually a done deal. Thus far there has not been public discussion of the proposal, and some teachers are expressing reservations.
Some middle school teachers, however, who also happen to be parents in the district, say they have some serious concerns about shortening the day for sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders. Not only will there be less time spent on academics each week, they say, but the additional unsupervised hours will pose a problem for parents already struggling to keep tabs on their adolescent kids.
Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman:
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
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Donovan Forde was dozing when the teacher came around to his end of the table. Pale winter light filtered in through the grated classroom window, and the warm room filled softly with jazz. It fell to his teacher's aide to wake him up from his mid-morning nap.She shined a small flashlight back and forth in his eyes like a dockworker signaling a ship, and called his name. Then she put her hand on his cheek, steering his head forward as he focused his eyes.
The teacher, Ricardo Torres, placed a red apple against Donovan's closed left hand, and then held it near his nose so he could smell it. "Donovan, the fruit holds the seeds of the plant," he said.
Then Mr. Torres held a plastic container of apple seeds to Donovan's ear, shaking it, and placed Donovan's hand inside so he could feel them. "And these are the seeds," Mr. Torres said.
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The daughter of businesswoman Winnie Tsoi is studying in the economics and finance programme at the University of Hong Kong. The price she paid to get a quality degree education for her eldest daughter was HK$900,000.The world-renowned HKU has not become a mercenary diploma mill selling degrees to the rich - it was more a case of Tsoi sending her daughter overseas on a pricey education detour to skip the gruelling local A-levels exams, but still secure the required grades.
The HK$900,000 became the "entrance ticket" to the hotly contested programme at HKU. A student seeking admission had to score a minimum of two Bs and credits for two languages in the local A-levels last year. With a less-than-brilliant score of 21 (out of 30) in the Form Five public exam in 2007, Tsoi figured that the odds of her daughter passing the Hong Kong A-levels with flying colours and gaining entry to the HKU degree course would be very low.
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When activists (who are not necessarily students) were able to delay construction of a UC Berkeley sports center by living in trees for 21 months, there was no review of what went wrong.When protesters with torches vandalized UC Chancellor Robert Birgeneau's home, there was no review. But when UC police arrested 46 people demonstrating against higher-education cuts by occupying Wheeler Hall on Nov. 20, there were complaints that police over-reacted. And so - with authorities, not anarchists in the sights - a review was born.
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Planning laws are being torn up so that hundreds of parents can set up their own schools in shops and houses, the education secretary, Michael Gove, announced today. Gove said at least 750 groups of teachers, parents and charities had expressed an interest in establishing the schools that will be run as academies.Applications to set up the schools opened today. The plan, a flagship Tory education policy, is modelled on Sweden's free schools and charter schools in the US.
Teachers argue it would strip existing schools of much-needed cash and increase social segregation. They say only middle class parents would start their own schools. The man in charge of Sweden's schools, Per Thulberg, has said free schools do not improve standards.
Gove said the amount spent per pupil would stay the same and the policy would reduce the attainment gap between rich and poor pupils. Planning laws and regulations were being rewritten to make it far easier for the schools to be established, he said.
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School officials in Mounds View will decide next week whether to get rid of class rank for graduating seniors. If they do, they'll join a handful of other public school districts who have made the switch in recent years, and who say it might help some students get into college.More than 400 seniors from Mounds View High School got their diplomas last week during commencement ceremonies. The school doesn't list a valedictorian -- but rather reconizes the top 10 ranking graduates during the ceremony.
That part of commencement might be gone next year, if the Mounds View School Board votes next Tuesday to ditch class rank. Class rank compares one student's grade point average with that of his or her classmates.
Principal Julie Wikelius says the top of each class at Mounds View is compacted. Plenty of students earn good grades in honors and advanced classes, which creates a tight battle for the top-ranking GPA.
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Some Georgia students will be able to log on to a home computer and attend high school in their pajamas this fall.The Georgia Charter Schools Commission on Friday approved the state's first virtual charter high schools, opening the door for kids across the state to have a full k-12 experience online.
The two statewide virtual campuses, Kaplan Academy of Georgia, for students in grades 4-12, and the Provost Academy Georgia high school, will expand choice for families of gifted, struggling and special needs students who want the flexibility of learning at their own pace. Virtual schools provide the curriculum, the teachers and, for those who qualify, the computers , too, for free.
Kaplan and Provost follow the state's first and largest virtual charter, Georgia Cyber Academy, a K-8 cyberschool of 5,000 , in serving public school students online.
"I think it is going to be a wonderful opportunity, especially for kids who have some very unique special needs," said Ben Scafidi, state charter commission chairman. "These virtual schools are a lifeline to them."
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The Economist in Waunakee, WI:
SARAH ZANDER and Ashley Jacobsen are like many teenage girls. Sarah likes soccer. Ashley was captain of her school's team of cheerleaders this year. They are also earning good money as nursing assistants at a retirement home. Sarah plans to become a registered nurse. Ashley may become a pharmacologist. Their futures look sunny. Yet both are products of what is arguably America's most sneered-at high-school programme: vocational training.Vocational education has been so disparaged that its few advocates have resorted to giving it a new name: "career and technical education" (CTE). Academic courses that prepare students for getting into universities, by contrast, are seen as the key to higher wages and global prowess. Last month the National Governors Association proposed standards to make students "college and career ready". But a few states, districts and think-tanks favour a radical notion. In America's quest to raise wages and compete internationally, CTE may be not a hindrance but a help.
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Recess will be one of the topics on today's The Conversation starting at noon. Call in if you have thoughts, 543-KUOW. Here's their report on it. Interesting finding:
Another big difference between the schools is that at Thornton Creek, most of the students are white and middle-class. At Dunlap, nearly all of the students are black, Latino or Asian and from low-income families.That corresponds to what KUOW found when we surveyed recess times across the Seattle school district. For instance, we looked at the 15 highest-poverty and lowest--poverty schools. Kids at the low-poverty schools average 16 minutes more recess than kids at the high-poverty schools. That amounts to about one whole recess more.
And amount of recess?
Dornfeld: "A lot of schools in the district give kids 45 minutes to an hour of recess every single day. Is that something that you see as realistic for this school?"
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This high school graduation season, millions of young adults from around the country will celebrate their achievements and prepare to begin the next chapter in their lives. For many, setting out into the "real world" also means taking on new financial responsibilities. Capital One Financial Corporation (COF 42.16, -0.21, -0.49%) recently surveyed high school seniors to see how prepared they are to manage finances on their own. The survey shows that while many students are uncertain about their ability to manage their banking and personal finances, those who have had financial education -- both in the classroom and through conversations at home -- are significantly more confident about their personal finance skills and knowledge.One troubling statistic shows that nearly half (45 percent) of all high school seniors polled say they are unsure or unprepared to manage their own banking and personal finances. However, of the students surveyed who have taken a personal finance class (30 percent of the sample), 75 percent said they feel prepared to manage their finances. In addition, two thirds (66 percent) of students who have taken a personal finance class rate themselves as "highly" or "very" knowledgeable about personal finance, compared to only 30 percent of students with no financial education course who show the same level of confidence in their skills.
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It is "extremely challenging" for councils to ensure children taught at home in England receive a suitable education, inspectors have warned.Ofsted said the absence of a home education register meant authorities did not have a full picture of how children in their area were taught.
There is no official figure for how many UK children are home schooled, but is estimated to be around 50,000.
Proposals for a register for home educators were shelved in April.
Home educators rejected the suggestion that a register for home-schooled children was necessary.
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Andy Hall, via a kind reader:
Two dozen children donned homemade mortarboards Wednesday for a commencement ceremony marking their graduation from a program designed to help them be ready for kindergarten this fall.As many of their parents snapped photos, the children received certificates and were cheered by a crowd that included the graduates' siblings and officials from government and nonprofit agencies.
The ceremony and a picnic at Madison's Vilas Park celebrated the end of the first year of the KinderReady program, which served 320 children ages 3 to 5, far exceeding its goal of 200.
The surge was largely credited to a weekly call-in program, "Families Together," on La Movida, 1480-AM, a Spanish-language station, that includes learning activities for children, said Andy Benedetto, who is directing KinderReady for the nonprofit Children's Service Society of Wisconsin.
Although data measuring KinderReady's effects won't be available until next year, interviews with parents and officials suggest the program is helping prepare children for kindergarten.
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In primary and secondary education, measures of teacher quality are often based on contemporaneous student performance on standardized achievement tests. In the postsecondary environment, scores on student evaluations of professors are typically used to measure teaching quality. We possess unique data that allow us to measure relative student performance in mandatory follow-on classes. We compare metrics that capture these three different notions of instructional quality and present evidence that professors who excel at promoting contemporaneous student achievement teach in ways that improve their student evaluations but harm the follow-on achievement of their students in more advanced classes.
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AM I awake or am I dreaming?" I ask myself for probably the hundredth time. I am fully awake, just like all the other times I asked, and to be honest I am beginning to feel a bit silly. All week I have been performing this "reality check" in the hope that it will become so ingrained in my mind that I will start asking it in my dreams too.If I succeed, I will have a lucid dream - a thrilling state of consciousness somewhere between waking and sleeping in which, unlike conventional dreams, you are aware that you are dreaming and able to control your actions. Once you have figured this out, the dream world is theoretically your oyster, and you can act out your fantasies to your heart's content.
Journalistic interest notwithstanding, I am pursuing lucid dreaming for entertainment. To some neuroscientists, however, the phenomenon is of profound interest, and they are using lucid dreamers to explore some of the weirder aspects of the brain's behaviour during the dream state (see "Dream mysteries"). Their results are even shedding light on the way our brains produce our rich and complex conscious experience.
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People with autism often have a hard time finding and keeping jobs, so more schools are creating programs to help students with autism get prepared for the workplace. One of those programs helped change the life of Kevin Sargeant.Just a few years ago, when Kevin was still in elementary school, things weren't looking good for him. He was antisocial, desperately unhappy and doing poorly in school.
"He was pretty much a broken child, the way I would describe it," says his mother, Jennifer Sargeant. "We really didn't see that he would be able to go to college, even have a job. That just wasn't in our future for him."
Kevin, now 18, says his autism left him unable to handle the social interactions at school.
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Jonathan Supovitz & Sam Rikoon:
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania conducted two external analyses of the performance of Harlem Success Academy Charter School (HSA) 2008-9 3rd graders on the New York State Test in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics. The first analysis was based on a comparison of the performance of 2006-7 first graders (who became the 2008-9 3rd graders) who were chosen through a random selection lottery process to attend HSA, and remained in HSA through the 3rd grade, relative to those who were not admitted by lottery to attend HSA and remained in New York City public schools. The second analysis compared the same HSA 3rd graders to 3rd graders in geographically proximate and demographically comparable New York City public schools. Student results were compared separately for ELA and mathematics using ordinary least squares regression and controlling for student gender, age, and special education status. The results indicated that HSA 3rd graders performed statistically significantly better than did either the randomized comparison group or the students in the demographically similar schools. More specifically, attendance at HSA was associated with 34-59 additional scale score points (depending on test subject) for non-special education students, after adjusting for differences in student demographic characteristics. Described another way, these results represent between 13-19 percent higher test performance associated with attending Harlem Success Academy.The Harlem Success Academy Charter School (HSA) opened its doors in August 2006. The school, located in Harlem Community School District 3 of New York City at 118th street and Lenox Avenue, is currently a K-4 school that intends to add a grade each year as students matriculate until it is a full K-8 school. HSA is one of four existing Harlem Success Academies founded by the Success Charter Network. Over the next ten years, the Success Charter Network plans to expand the network to 40 schools.
Students are admitted into HSA through an annual lottery which randomly selects students to attend the school from the pool of applicants. Any student who lives in New York City can apply to HSA and the school uses the lottery process to determine who will attend the school. Since the school has documented both the students who applied to HSA and were accepted through the lottery, as well as those who applied and were not selected, these conditions make for an experimental study of the impact of HSA on student learning outcomes.
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Even though the Supreme Court ordered a ban on the administration of corporal punishment to children almost a decade ago, it is shocking that schools across the country continue to adhere to the philosophy of 'spare the rod and spoil the child'. The tragic case of Rouvanjit Rawla once again highlights this point. Rouvanjit, who was a student of Kolkata's prestigious La Martiniere School for Boys, committed suicide after he was caned by his school principal and allegedly by four other teachers as well. What is truly despicable is that the school principal has no regrets about the incident and has admitted as much to the school's board of governors and the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights investigating the case. This reflects a perverse streak among certain educators who have no qualms about using their position of authority to inflict physical torture on children. The problem is symptomatic of a virulent mindset within the education system that sees corporal punishment as a legitimate means to discipline students and build character. In reality all it does is promote a culture of violence.
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Recently I was invited to Paris to present at a prestigious international colloquium on autism and education, which was organized by the INS HEA, the French Ministry of Education's training institute for special education teachers. Seventeen years earlier, I had left France because in those days, children with autism did not have the right to an education, and my son, Jeremy, was severely impacted by autism.It was an emotional moment for me, standing there, addressing 500 attendees in a lecture hall of the Universite Paris Descatres in Bolulogne - Billancourt, explaining my son's educational experience in the United States, where all children have the right to a free and appropriate education under IDEA.
In 1993, my family left France, where we had been living since 1981. Both Jeremy and his sister, Rebecca (who is neurotypical), were born in Paris at the time when children with autism were considered mentally ill, not developmentally disabled. They had no right to an education. Instead, they were enrolled in day programs on hospital sites, where they were treated with psychoanalysis. Parents had no right to visit the day program, nor did they receive any communication about what went on during the hours their child spent there.
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Almost a decade ago, third graders at seven high-poverty schools in the Twin Cities got an offer: Stay in school, and we'll give you $10,000 for college. All the students had to do was stay in the Minneapolis or St. Paul public schools, graduate, and go to college. Midday looks at how the experiment turned out.
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After remaining incommunicado for nearly a month, La Martiniere for Boys issued a press release on Friday, denying responsibility for Rouvanjit Rawla's death."As a school, we deeply regret the loss of young life. Attempts being made to hold the school entirely responsible are certainly misplaced. There are times when children need to be corrected and helped. The idea has always been to inculcate a sense of values amongst them. It is also important for the school to ensure that there is an environment conducive to learning and often corrective measures have to be taken to ensure this environment is not vitiated in the interest of the larger student community of the school," read the statement, signed by governing board secretary Supriyo Dhar.
"The constant attack against the school has damaged the confidence of teachers and students who are totally innocent and are being unnecessarily drawn into unseemly public scrutiny."
Five teachers of La Marts for Boys, including principal Sunirmal Chakravarthy, are facing charges of abetment to suicide after Rouvanjit's father Ajay Rawla filed an FIR.
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Houston ISD Superintendent Terry Grier has eliminated the position of manager of magnet programs. That means Dottie Bonner, who held the job since March 2002, is out. She submitted her letter of resignation effective Aug. 31, according to the district.Grier instead has created a higher-level position, an assistant superintendent over school choice. Lupita Hinojosa, the former executive principal over the Wheatley High School feeder pattern, has been named to the post.
We know that changing anything related to magnets puts parents on edge, especially after former HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra's failed attempt to reduce busing to the specialty schools. A quick Internet search shows that magnet transportation also was a hot topic in Grier's former district, San Diego Unified. The school board there voted in spring 2009 to eliminate busing to magnets to save money but reversed the decision after parent outcry, according to Voice of San Diego.
I talked to Grier this morning about what happened in San Diego, and he said the decision to end busing to magnet schools was the school board's, not his. "(Deputy Superintendent) Chuck Morris and I counseled and advised and recommended that they not do this -- that it would destroy the magnet program -- but they did anyway."
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How does a university rate the quality of a professor? In K-12 education, you have standardized tests, and those scores have never been more widely used in evaluating the value added by a teacher.But there's no equivalent at the college level. College administrators tend to rely on student evaluations. If students say a professor is doing a good job, perhaps that's enough.
Or maybe not. A new study reaches the opposite conclusion: professors who rate highly among students tend to teach students less. Professors who teach students more tend to get bad ratings from their students -- who, presumably, would just as soon get high grades for minimal effort.
The study finds that professor rank, experience and stature are far more predictive of how much their students will learn. But those professors generally get bad ratings from students, who are effectively punishing their professors for attempting to push them toward deeper learning.
The study is called "Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors." It was written by Scott E. Carrell of the University of California, Davis and National Bureau of Economic Research; and James E. West of the U.S. Air Force Academy
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In response to the questions raised at the June 7 meeting of the Performance and Achievement Committee, the following information is shared in hopes ofclarifying proposed changes to the Student Code of Conduct:Will there be a more specific definition ofbullying than the one that currently exists in the Explanation of Conduct Rules and Terms?
The following definition comes from the draft Anti-Bullying & Anti-Harassment Protocol and it, or a similar definition, will be brought forward with the version of the revised Code for which Board approval will be sought in July:
Bullying is the intentional action by an individual or group of individuals to infiict physical, emotional or mental suffering on another individual or group of individuals when there is an imbalance of real or perceived power. Harassing and bullying behavior includes any electronic, written, verbal or physical act or conduct toward an individual which creates an objectively hostile or offensive environment that meets one or more of the following conditions:
Places the individual in reasonable fear of harm to one self or one's property
Has a detrimental effect on the individual's personal, physical or mental health
Has a detrimental effect on the individual's academic performance
Has the effect of interfering with the individual's ability to participate in or benefit from any curricular, extracurricular, recreational, or any other activity provided by the school
Has the intent to intimidate, annoy or alarm another individual in a manner likely to cause annoyance or harm without legitimate purpose
Has personal contact with another individual with the intent to threaten, intimidate or alarm that individual without legitimate purpose
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via a Maurice Fisher email:
Dear Subscriber --Could you share the following message with your STAFF, TEACHERS OR PARENTS? We are offering a complimentary copy of Gifted Education Press Quarterly. They would need to email me directly to receive our SUMMER 2010 issue. My email address is:
gifted@giftededpress.com
Please encourage your colleagues and friends to email me for a complimentary online subscription to GEPQ.
I need your help in locating new subscribers, and would greatly appreciate your asking colleagues and friends to contact me. We are now in a major political battle with federal and state governments to maintain gifted education programs in the public schools. I need your support in making Gifted Education Press Quarterly a resource available to all educators and parents who want to maintain and expand programs for gifted students! Your colleagues and friends should email me at: gifted@giftededpress.com. Thank you.
We're all on a mission to advance the well-being of gifted education, and we all share a vision of excellence in this field. At this time in our nation's history, it is important to maintain our leadership in education, science and the humanities. Therefore, I am asking the readers of Gifted Education Press Quarterly for your support to insure that we can continue publishing this Quarterly. Please consider sending a few dollars to help defray the costs of producing this important periodical in the gifted education field or ordering some of our books. We have been publishing GEPQ for 23 years with the goal of including all viewpoints on educating the gifted. Our address is: Gifted Education Press; 10201 Yuma Court; P.O. Box 1586; Manassas, VA 20109. Thank you.
I would also like to give you a special treat. Joan Smutny, the editor of the Illinois Association for Gifted Children Journal has given me permission to place the entire Spring 2010 Journal on the Gifted Education Press web site in PDF format. This is a very important journal issue in the gifted education field because it contains 27 excellent articles on Advocating for Gifted Education Programs. I invite you to read and/or print any or all of these articles from our web site. There is no charge for accessing this journal! Just go to my web site at www.GiftedEdPress.com and click the link for Gifted Advocacy - Illinois Association for Gifted Children Journal. Happy reading!
Members of the National Advisory Panel for Gifted Education Press Quarterly are:Dr. Hanna David -- Ben Gurion University at Eilat, Israel; Dr. James Delisle -- Kent State University; Dr. Jerry Flack -- University of Colorado; Dr. Howard Gardner -- Harvard University; Ms. Margaret Gosfield - Editor, Gifted Education Communicator, Published by the California Association for the Gifted; Ms. Dorothy Knopper -- Publisher, Open Space Communications; Mr. James LoGiudice -- Bucks County, Pennsylvania IU No. 22; Dr. Bruce Shore -- McGill University, Montreal, Quebec; Ms. Joan Smutny -- National-Louis University, Illinois; Dr. Colleen Willard-Holt -- Dean, Faculty of Education, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario; Ms. Susan Winebrenner -- Consultant, San Marcos, California; Dr. Ellen Winner -- Boston College.
Sincerely Yours in the Best Interests of the Gifted Children of America,
MauriceMaurice Fisher, Ph.D.
PublisherGifted Education Press
Attention Parents who are Homeschooling their Gifted Children, or Parents or Teachers who are Interested in Using Additional Enrichment Materials in the Home or Classroom. Please see our Latest Book by Robert E. Myers at:http://www.giftededpress.com/MYERSHOMESCHOOLING.pdf
______________________________________________________________________________
For my latest interview in EducationNews.Org (June 11, 2009) about the gifted education field, click the following link:
http://www.giftededpress.com/INTERVIEW%20WITH%20MAURICE%20FISHER%2005282009.pdf
________________________________________________________________________________The SUMMER 2010 Online Issue of GEPQ contains the following articles:
1. Editorial Comments by Maurice Fisher - Some Useful Resources for Gifted Child Advocacy
2. Under-Representation of African American Students in Gifted Education: Nine Theories and Frameworks for Information, Understanding, and Change
Donna Y. Ford, Ph.D. Peabody College of Education Vanderbilt University
Michelle Trotman Scott, Ph.D. College of Education University of West Georgia
3. An Interview with Dr. Margie Kitano San Diego State University
Interviewers:
Teresa Rowlison, Ph.D. Southwest Regional Education Center
Michael F. Shaughnessy, Ph.D. Eastern New Mexico University
4. Inside Specialized High Schools for the Gifted: A Comparison of Two Major Studies
Jill Olthouse The University of Toledo
5. George Santayana (1863-1952): Nurturer of the Gifted Sensibility
Michael E. Walters, Ed.D. Center for the Study of the Humanities in the Schools
If you know a colleague or friend who would like a complimentary copy of the SUMMER 2010 Online Issue, tell them to send their request to:
gifted@giftededpress.com
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Our latest books are as follows:
1. By Maurice & Eugenia Fisher, Editors: Heroes of Giftedness: An Inspirational Guide for Gifted Students and Their Teachers --Presenting the Personal Heroes of Twelve Experts on Gifted Education. Discusses Highly Gifted Individuals who can be used as models for motivating gifted students to study different fields of knowledge.
"Heroes of Giftedness: An Inspirational Guide is an exciting new edition to gifted education literature. It well fulfills its purpose in the inspiring, exhilarating accounts of famous individuals and their contribution to the world. Gifted students, teachers, and parents will benefit hugely from these biographies of great men and women who overcame personal and professional challenges to move forward in their fields." Joan Smutny, Director The Center for Gifted National-Louis University
"My view of the world is that people are best served when they find their passion early on, because we tend to be good at things we're passionate about. I think we also need to find people whom we admire and try to emulate them." Chesley Sullenberger, the Captain who successfully guided US Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River on January 15, 2009 (From Air & Space Magazine, May 2009, p. 11)
http://www.giftededpress.com/HEROESOFGIFTEDNESS.htm
2. By Harry T. Roman: Energizing Your Gifted Students' Creative Thinking & Imagination: Using Design Principles, Team Activities, and Invention Strategies --A Complete Lesson Guide for Upper Elementary and Middle School Levels. Concentrates on nurturing Gifted Children's Applied Creative Thinking and Imagination to solve practical and real world problems. This book will help them become masters at using engineering and design principles in their everyday life in the school and home.
http://www.giftededpress.com/HARRYTROMANCREATIVITY.htm
3. By Robert E. Myers: Golden Quills: Creative Thinking and Writing Lessons for Middle-School Gifted Students. Contains Twenty-Seven Challenging Lessons for Stimulating Creative Learning in Language Arts. Further information can be found at:http://www.giftededpress.com/REMYERS.htm
4. By Judy Micheletti: MORE SNIBBLES: Serendipitous Seasons. This book focuses on how to motivate gifted students to be more creative at their school and home, and it contains several delightful line drawings that will entice the imagination of all curious children and adults. Further information can be found at:
http://www.giftededpress.com/SNIBBLES2.htm
5. By Harry T. Roman: Solar Power, Fuel Cells, Wind Power and Other Important Environmental Studies for Upper Elementary and Middle School Gifted Students and Their Teachers: A Technology, Problem-Solving and Invention Guide. It is perfect for use in Tech Ed, pre-engineering and environmental courses and study units. Further information can be found at:
http://www.giftededpress.com/HARRYTROMAN.htm
All of these books are useful resources for gifted students and their parents and teachers. They can be ordered directly from Gifted Education Press or through Amazon.com. All orders under $50.00 (sent to GEP) must be prepaid. Orders of $50.00 or more (sent to GEP) can be made with a purchase order. If you have any questions, please email me. Please add 10% for Postage and Handling. Thank you.__________________________________________________________________
Contact me if you have any ideas for new articles or books that GEP can publish.
Sincerely,Maurice Fisher, Ph.D.
Publisher
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Christian Oliver and Kang Buseong:
South Korea has some of the world's most over-educated bakers. In one class in Seoul teaching muffin and scone-making, there are graduates in Russian, fine art and animation. For South Korean parents, the world's highest spenders on their children's education, something is going horribly wrong."I wanted to ease the burden on my parents by earning just a little something and finding a job that could give me something more dependable than temporary work," said one 29-year-old trainee baker. Since graduating in art she could only find part-time work as a waitress. Like so many young people asked about finding work in a socially competitive society where unemployment is a stigma, she was too embarrassed to give her name.
South Koreans often attribute their economic success to a passion for education. But the country of 48m has overdone it, with 407 colleges and universities churning out an over-abundance of graduates.
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Detroit Public Schools will be awarding $25,000 in Target gift cards to parents, incentives to get them to submit contact information to the district.The contact information - which includes up-to-date phone numbers, e-mail addresses and home addresses - will be used as part of a strategy to retain students and to have ongoing communications with parents about district and school news, school closing information and emergencies.
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The new national standards are too timid to recommend that high school students read complete history (or other nonfiction) books, or that high school students should write serious research papers, like the Extended Essays required for the International Baccalaureate Diploma.
Even the College Board, when it put together "101 books for the college-bound student" included only four or five nonfiction books, and none was a history book like Battle Cry of Freedom, or Washington's Crossing.
For several reasons it has become taboo to discuss asking our students to read complete nonfiction books and write substantial term papers. Not sure why...
In fact, since the early days of Achieve's efforts on standards, no one has taken a stand in recommending serious history research papers for high school students, and nonfiction books have never made the cut either.
Since 1987 or so it has seemed just sensible to me that, as long as colleges do assign history and other nonfiction books on their reading lists, and they also assign research papers, perhaps high school students should read a nonfiction book and write a term paper each year, to get in academic shape, as it were.
After all, in helping students prepare for college math, many high schools offer calculus. For college science, high school students can get ready with biology, chemistry and physics courses. To get ready for college literature courses, students read good novels and Shakespeare plays. Students can study languages and government and even engineering and statistics in their high schools, but they aren't reading nonfiction books and they aren't writing research papers.
The English departments, who are in charge of reading and writing in the high schools, tend to assign novels, poetry, and plays rather than nonfiction books, and they have little interest in asking for serious research papers either.
For 23 years, I have been publishing exemplary history research papers by high school students from near and far [39 countries so far], and it gradually became clearer to me that perhaps most high school students were not being asked to write them.
In 2002, with a grant from the Shanker Institute, I was able to commission (the only) study of the assignment of history term papers in U.S. public high schools, and we found that most students were not being asked to do them. This helped to explain why, even though The Concord Review is the only journal in the world to publish such academic papers, more than 19,000 of the 20,000 U.S. public high schools never submitted one.
The nonfiction readings suggested in the new national standards, such as The Declaration of Independence, Letter From Birmingham Jail, and one chapter from The Federalist Papers, would not tax high school students for more than an hour, much less time than they now spend on Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, and the like. What would the equivalent be for college preparation in math: long division? decimals?
High school graduates who arrive at college without ever having read a complete nonfiction book or written a serious term paper, even if they are not in remedial courses (and more than one million are each year, according to the Diploma to Nowhere report), start way behind their IB and private school peers academically, when it comes to reading and writing at the college level.
Having national standards which would send our high school graduates off to higher education with no experience of real term papers and no complete nonfiction books doesn't seem the right way to make it likely that they will ever get through to graduation.
"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 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
http://www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
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In the center of Boston is the Boston Common, where there are several small statues of the ducklings made famous by the book "Make Way for Ducklings". Long before I became a parent, I bought a painting from a local Boston artist that depicted the statues of the ducklings from that children's book. In a decision of radical faith in the future, and one that involved finding a few extra dollars that I, as a graduate student, didn't really have at the time, I bought it and decided that if I was ever to have a child, I would hang it in their room. I know that someday my daughter will outgrow it, but for now, it hangs above her desk in her room. I hope to visit the Boston Commons with her some day and show her the original statues that depict the characters from the book which she, of course, has a copy of. If such a visit takes place some year, it will be after my summer school class has ended for the summer.I know of many people who claim that that just don't teach summer school. The pay is often not great, and it takes away from time that might be spent on research and course development. However, someone must teach summer classes, which reminds me of the question of the "tragedy of the commons." Like the farmers who all brought their cows to graze in the commons in the center of town, each individual professor is asking whether they, as individuals, wish to teach summer school. Something similar happens as is found when the common grazing land is depleted as too many cows are brought to the commons to graze. In both cases, since a "public good" is involved, the individual decisions may not lead to an optimum result. Too few professors may end up choosing to teach at that time.
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The Board has two work sessions scheduled for this month.The first, today, Thursday June 10 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm, will be on Math. No agenda details are available but there is sure to be a powerpoint and it is sure to appear on the District web site soon. I have to believe that the Board is looking for a report on the implementation of the curricular alignment, the implementation of the Theory of Action from the High School textbook adoption, and some update on student academic progress in math.
Next week, on Wednesday, June 16, from 4:00pm to 5:30pm, will be a Board Work Session on Advanced Learning. I honestly cannot imagine what the District staff will have to report
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Do entrepreneurs need a college education? Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake may have argued that the best way to become an entrepreneur is to drop out of college, but Read Write Web profiles one college entrepreneur who disagrees. Jay Rodrigues is a 21-year-old University of Pennsylvania junior who secured Series A funding for his college-calendaring system start-up, DormNoise. "Don't drop out of school, because for every Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, there are hundreds of entrepreneurs who drop out and go nowhere," he advises. "At least if you stay in school, you'll have an education." But it isn't easy juggling his roles as CEO and college student--Rodrigues says he works about 16 hours a day. "Be 150 million percent sure this is what you want," he says. For more on successful college entrepreneurs, check out our 2010 list of America's Coolest College Start-ups.
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With a little tweaking "The Lottery" would fit nicely into the marketing materials for the Harlem Success Academy, a public charter school founded by Eva Moskowitz, a former New York City councilwoman. On one level, this heart-tugging documentary recounts the experiences of four children competing in the academy's annual intake lottery. On another, it's a passionate positioning of charter schools as the saviors of public education.Though infinitely classier -- and easier on the eyes -- than "Cartel," the recent documentary exploring public education, this latest charter-school commercial is no less one-sided. Virtually relinquishing the floor to Ms. Moskowitz (who delights in vilifying the "thuggish" tactics of the United Federation of Teachers) and her supporters, the director, Madeleine Sackler, captures a smidgen of naysayers in mostly unflattering lights. Ignoring critical issues like financial transparency, Ms. Sackler sells her viewpoint with four admirable, striving families, each of whose tots could charm the fleas off a junkyard dog.
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This fall, Jeanet Ugalde will attend UW-Madison on a full scholarship to study nursing. But first, she'll be among the initial group of students receiving a diploma as part of a Madison School District program designed to give first-generation college-bound students the training to succeed in high school and post-secondary education."When I got the (UW acceptance) letter ... I cried and I couldn't believe it. I still can't believe it. When I get the (tuition) bill around July and it says 'zero,' I will be so amazed," Ugalde, the first person in her family to graduate from high school, said of being accepted to college.
Started three years ago at East High and now running in all four Madison high schools, AVID, which stands for Advancement Via Individual Determination, is designed to give "students in the middle" who may be the first in their families to graduate high school and attend college the training to succeed. The correlating TOPS -- Teens of Promise -- program is focused on extracurricular activities, including summer work internships.
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Following is a message from the Superintendent and VAHS Administration. Please address any inquiries to VAHS Administration or Dr. Gorrell.Related: Gangs & School Violence Forum Audio / Video.Through our contacts with the Dane County Gang Task Force we have recieved information that indicates in the coming days the VAHS campus or Verona Hometown Days are possible locations for an altercation between two rival gangs. These gangs are the Clanton 14 gang and the Carnales gang. These are the two gangs alleged to have connections with the murder of Antonio Perez last month.
Given this information the following security measures will be put in place immediately:
Tomorrow and Friday we will have an additional VPD Officer stationed on campus working with Officer Truscott. Also, regular VPD patrol officers will be in the area patrolling both the VAHS campus and the neighboring residential area in their squad cars.
Members of the administrative team will also be out patrolling the interior and exterior of the buildings throughout the day. Special attention will be paid to monitoring the two designated K-Wing and two designated main building entrances. All other entrances are to be kept closed and locked. This too will be monitored by the VPD and HS administration.
Given current information the Administrative team, in consultation with our partners in law enforcement, believes that these are prudent preventative steps. If additional information becomes available we will alter this plan accordingly. We ask all staff members to do their usual stellar job of remaining vigilant and reporting anything of concern to the Administrative Team at once.
Keeping staff informed is a priority and more information will be provided if and when it becomes available.
Thank You,
Dr. Gorrell
Ms. Hammen
Ms. Williams
Mr. Murphy
Mr. Boehm
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Can a $50 stack of paperbacks do as much for a child's academic fortunes as a $3,000 stint in summer school?Researchers think so. Now, an experimental program in seven states -- including the Chicago Public Schools -- will give thousands of low-income students an armful of free books this summer.
Research has shown that giving books to kids might be as effective at keeping them learning over the summer as summer school -- and a lot cheaper. The big questions are whether the effect can be replicated on a large scale -- and whether it can help reduce the achievement gap between low-income and middle-class students.
Schools have always tried to get students to read over the summer. For middle-class students, that's not as big a deal. They usually have access to books, says Richard Allington, a reading researcher at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
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The 14-hour study sessions were over but the nerves remained for Tong Dan as she squeezed in some last-minute cramming during a lunch break Monday from the most important test she and millions of other Chinese teens will ever take.Each year, about 10 million high school seniors across China take the "gaokao" -- the exam that is the sole determinant for whether they get into a university. About 68 percent of test takers this year are expected to pass -- but for the vast majority who don't it means they head straight into the search for a low-paying, blue-collar job.
But even a college degree no longer guarantees graduates a good job in China's increasingly competitive workplace. With about 700,000 of last year's university graduates still unemployed, there is added pressure on students like 17-year-old Tong to do well on the two-day college entrance exam and gain one of the few coveted slots at the country's elite schools.
China has poured billions of dollars into a massive university expansion plan over the past few decades, meaning the number of graduates will skyrocket to a record 6.3 million this year, compared to 1 million in 1998. The expansion has also led to a widening gap between the quality of education found in many universities, especially those in poorer provinces, and the top schools.
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As the number of black children in Dallas ISD declined over the last decade, the number of black activists closely observing school board meetings has dwindled to a few in the audience.And some leaders of a civil rights group that once battled for equal education in Dallas schools are now urging black parents to send their kids elsewhere. Some say the rising attention to the needs of children learning English is overshadowing the needs of black students.
As their focus wanes from Dallas ISD, some fear a powerful lobby for the interests of the district's minority students could be lost.
"It's not a surprise to anybody that blacks are leaving DISD," said Juanita Wallace, president of the Dallas NAACP. "We know that Hispanics are really taking over the school district. The whites are completely gone, and now blacks are going."
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If you run up big credit card bills buying a new home theater system and can't pay it off after a few years, bankruptcy judges can get rid of the debt. They may even erase loans from a casino.But if you borrow money to get an education and can't afford the loan payments after a few years of underemployment, that's another matter entirely. It's nearly impossible to get rid of the debt in bankruptcy court, even if it's a private loan from for-profit lenders like Citibank or the student loan specialist Sallie Mae.
This part of the bankruptcy law is little known outside education circles, but ever since it went into effect in 2005, it's inspired shock and often rage among young adults who got in over their heads. Today, they find themselves in the same category as people who can't discharge child support payments or criminal fines.
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I wore my high school ring for more than 40 years. It became black and misshapen and I finally took it off. But now I have a new one, courtesy of the organizing committee of my 55th high school reunion, which I attended over the Memorial Day weekend.I wore the ring (and will wear it again) because although I have degrees from two Ivy league schools and have taught at U.C. Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Duke, Classical High School (in Providence, RI) is the best and most demanding educational institution I have ever been associated with. The name tells the story. When I attended, offerings and requirements included four years of Latin, three years of French, two years of German, physics, chemistry, biology, algebra, geometry, calculus, trigonometry, English, history, civics, in addition to extra-curricular activities, and clubs -- French Club, Latin Club, German Club, Science Club, among many others. A student body made up of the children of immigrants or first generation Americans; many, like me, the first in their families to finish high school. Nearly a 100 percent college attendance rate. A yearbook that featured student translations from Virgil and original poems in Latin.
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Packed neatly on the bookshelves in Mark Changizi's Carnegie Building office sit stacks of notebooks containing hundreds of questions. Why do we have fingernails? Why are organs packaged in such a specific way inside our bodies? Why does skin wrinkle when it gets wet? Why are our hands shaped the way they are?These are among the questions in the notebooks--26 and counting--that Changizi fills with potential research ideas he poses as queries about the design and behavior of biological systems.
So far questions in the notebook have yielded highly acclaimed research findings, including why primates see in color and have forward-facing eyes, why optical illusions succeed at tricking our eyes, and why written characters across languages share common shapes.
Changizi's groundbreaking explanations have landed on the pages of The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and New Scientist. In May 2009, his findings will appear in Changizi's first-ever trade book The Vision Revolution, published by Benbella Books.
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Boston school officials this week will unveil a more stringent residency policy for students applying to the city's three exam schools, responding to growing concerns that out-of-towners are improperly gaining admission.The proposed policy, which officials will present to the School Committee on Wednesday, would allow only city residents to apply to Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy, and the John D. O'Bryant School of Math and Science.
Currently, nonresidents can take the entrance exam for those schools; they must establish residency shortly before admission decisions are made.
"It's a fairly significant change,'' said Rachel Skerritt, chief of staff for Superintendent Carol R. Johnson. "We want to make sure students who have access to the stellar education at the exam schools live in the city.''
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New research adds to a growing body of evidence showing the perks of a good night's sleep.A study from researchers at Stanford University finds that extra hours of sleep at night can help improve football players' performance on drills such as the 40-yard dash and the 20-yard shuttle.
"The goal was to aim for 10 hours of sleep per night," says Cheri Mah of the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic. At the beginning of the season, Mah found that the players had moderate levels of daytime fatigue, even though they thought they were getting enough rest at night. Seven players were included in the study.
It's not easy to convince college students to add hours of sleep to their schedules each day. "It's a lot to ask," Mah says, but throughout the season she was able to document a significant extension of nighttime sleep.
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It takes a lot to organize a classroom of 20 children. It can take even more to organize the kids' busy parents--and that often means turning to technology to get everyone on the same page.Over the past nine months, my first-grader's school has seen that in spades. Like many elementary schools, ours relies on parent volunteers to help out with one-on-one reading with students and math exercises. In my 6-year-old's class, at least two parent volunteers are needed a day. In the past, volunteers were organized the old-fashioned way on paper, with parents signing up for their preferred time slots for the month on a calendar sent home with their children.
But in recent years as more schools and families have gone digital, parents are opting for an online solution to organizing volunteer class time. And a host of volunteering and calendar services have popped up on the Web to oblige them. When I asked our school's room parent which online sites people were using to organize volunteering, he blasted out an email to poll his network of room parents. The informal survey yielded one conclusion: Each classroom was using different services, each with their own perks and drawbacks. Among the hodge-podge of choices were well-known applications such as Yahoo Inc.'s Yahoo Groups and Google Inc.'s Calendar, as well as less familiar names including VolunteerSpot Inc.'s VolunteerSpot and Doodle AG's Doodle.com.
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Ann Larson's recent IHE column, in which she dissects the popular idea that that a college education is the key to upward mobility for lower-income Americans, resonated for me in a personal way, because I have two nephews who joined the military after they ran out of money for college tuition. One, in the National Guard, spent a year in Iraq and could be called up again. The other will have shipped out to Afghanistan when this column is posted.Both are highly intelligent young men who made what seem to a fond and panicked aunt to be foolish decisions based on false assumptions, though they would tell you otherwise. Our politics are very different, but neither joined up out of a fervent desire to further a political cause. It was a trade-off, in both cases: service in return for educational support. And because they are honorable people, they are prepared to give their lives to fulfill their end of the agreement.
Larson discusses the case of "Valerie," who immigrated from Haiti with the dream of attending college, and is now saddled with student-loan debts she is unlikely to ever be able to pay off given the jobs available to her. A recent NYT article describes a middle-class family in a similar economic situation. My nephews, like many other young people, saw the military as an alternative to a life that is crippled by either crushing debt or limited vocational opportunities. But, Larson argues,
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In Harlem--as elsewhere in this city, state, and nation--there is a sharply rising struggle between teachers' unions and black parents.
That dispute is over parental choice of schools, especially in regards to publicly financed charter schools which can, and usually do, refuse to recognize teachers' unions. Geoffrey Canada, whose Harlem Children's Zone is nationally known for making charter schools a working part of the community, recently sent out a rallying cry to black parents everywhere when he said, "Nobody's coming. Nobody is going to save our children. You have to save your own children."In Harlem, where thousands of parents apply for charter schools on civil rights grounds, State Senator Bill Perkins--whose civil liberties record I've previously praised in this column--is in danger of losing his seat because of his fierce opposition to charter schools. The UFT contributes to his campaigns. His opponent, Basil Smikle--who has worked for Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Bill Clinton Foundation, and, unfortunately, Michael Bloomberg--says: "Education has galvanized the community."
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1833: Founding of Kalamazoo College, Michigan's oldest college campus.1874: Kalamazoo paves the way for tax-funded education in Michigan when the state Supreme Court affirms Kalamazoo's right to levy taxes to operate a public high school.
1896: Kalamazoo Public Library is among the first 10 in the country, and the second in Michigan after Detroit, to create a children's section with its own librarian.
1903: Founding of Western Michigan University, now one of the 50 largest universities in the country.
1906: Kalamazoo Central High School creates state's first high school marching band.
1920: Kalamazoo Central becomes the country's second high school with a drama class and opens Chenery Auditorium, one of the largest high school auditoriums of that era.
1958: Kalamazoo College creates its study-abroad program, one of the first in the country.
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A good friend of mine, James, has an interview this morning. It is quite important. If he is successful, it will mean quite a lot in the future. If he fails, he will certainly be at a disadvantage.Given the importance of doing well, he has spent some time preparing and rehearsing answers to practice questions. What he wears to the interview has been carefully thought out as first impressions are very important. There is a lot riding on the 15 minutes he will spend being questioned.
James, however, is not taking this very seriously. I am confident that he does not have the faintest idea how important this is. In fact, it is fairly likely that he will not even realise that he has to do an interview at all until he is right there in the room.
James is two years old. His interview is for the purpose of whether he will get into primary school, in a couple of years. There is nothing particularly special about the school he is applying to; its admission policies are the same as a lot of schools in Hong Kong.
I have been known to produce pieces of pure fiction in this column from time to time, but I am not making this up. This actually happens. Schools really employ people to interview two-year-olds and make a decision about each toddler's academic future.
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It's a story of an industry that may sound familiar.Related: Wal-Mart partners with online school to offer college credit to workers.The buyers think what they're buying will appreciate in value, making them rich in the future. The product grows more and more elaborate, and more and more expensive, but the expense is offset by cheap credit provided by sellers eager to encourage buyers to buy.
Buyers see that everyone else is taking on mounds of debt, and so are more comfortable when they do so themselves; besides, for a generation, the value of what they're buying has gone up steadily. What could go wrong? Everything continues smoothly until, at some point, it doesn't.
Yes, this sounds like the housing bubble, but I'm afraid it's also sounding a lot like a still-inflating higher education bubble. And despite (or because of) the fact that my day job involves higher education, I think it's better for us to face up to what's going on before the bubble bursts messily.
College has gotten a lot more expensive. A recent Money magazine report notes: "After adjusting for financial aid, the amount families pay for college has skyrocketed 439 percent since 1982. ... Normal supply and demand can't begin to explain cost increases of this magnitude."
Consumers would balk, except for two things.
First -- as with the housing bubble -- cheap and readily available credit has let people borrow to finance education. They're willing to do so because of (1) consumer ignorance, as students (and, often, their parents) don't fully grasp just how harsh the impact of student loan payments will be after graduation; and (2) a belief that, whatever the cost, a college education is a necessary ticket to future prosperity.
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Mr Green, speaking at the Hay Festival on the Welsh borders on Saturday, said it would be of particular relevance to those who would grow up to become part of the sub-prime market."Part of the answer lies in financial literacy education in schools," said Mr Green, promoting his 2009 book Good Value: Reflections on Money, Morality and an Uncertain World.
"I really don't think it's wise in the circumstances of modern life to have people come out of the school system into working life or, sadly, often not working life, without the very basics of financial literacy."
Mr Green, who has been chairman of HSBC since 2005, and is also an ordained priest, was keen to stress that there was a social imperative for banking services to be open to those on lower incomes.
However, he said some forms of lending were unacceptable, citing 110pc mortgages, and said those at the bottom end of the market may not have had proper understanding or access to information when taking out such loans.
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If one knew nothing about the backgrounds of the young men and women gathered in the student union at City College, the end-of-semester scene could be mistaken as being merely poignant instead of extraordinary. More than 60 students filled their paper plates with food as they awaited the announcement of scholarship winners. They beamed when their names were called for having earned a scholarship or admission to a four-year university. They applauded each other's successes. They posed for photographs. Young mothers clutched their children's hands.What was remarkable was how the master of ceremonies, Michael McPartlin, did not need to look at his notes to talk about the students' accomplishments - or even the final exam, child-care or work obligations that prevented some from attending. He knew all the little details and cared about getting them right. What was even more remarkable were the odds that each of the students had to overcome to be celebrating the successful conclusion of an academic year.
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In a nod to the rising cost of college tuition and the burden of massive student loan debt on graduates, a growing number of universities are stepping up with "no-loan" aid pledges.More than 50 colleges -- including elite private schools and flagship state universities in Virginia and Maryland -- have eliminated or capped loans in their financial aid portfolios for some or all students, promising enough aid in grants and work-study to cover most of the gap between what they charge and what each student can afford to pay.
At a handful of private universities with sizable endowments, including Princeton, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, the goal is quite literally to eliminate loan debt for most graduating seniors.
"It's going down, and it's going down dramatically," said Amy Gutmann, president of Penn. "A typical family earning $90,000 a year attends Penn tuition-free. A typical family earning $40,000 a year attends Penn with tuition, room and board covered."
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Wander Ursinus College and you'd think you had stepped into an Ivy League idyll. Stone-clad buildings overlook a sweeping lawn, which slopes to a picture-perfect, small-town Main Street. Winding paths skirt carefully tended gardens. Outdoor statues gaze raptly at midair as students stroll by, chattering on cellphones.But Ursinus College, in Collegeville, Pa., lacks the wealth and status that allow the real Ivies to choose from among the best students in the country and to cover their full financial need with no-loan aid packages. Like the vast majority of colleges, Ursinus must not only troll for top students but also calibrate exactly how much money it will take to bring them to campus and keep them there.
In college-speak, it's called enrollment management -- a way of slicing and dicing admissions policies and financial aid to attract a strong and diverse student body while bringing in enough revenue to keep the doors open. Whereas elite colleges take merit as a given and extend financial aid only to those who need it, Ursinus offers sizable scholarships to outstanding applicants from every economic strata, including the wealthiest.
Surprised? Consider your own college search. As a parent, you look for the best academic program for your student at an affordable price -- the same basic process that colleges use to attract the best students, but in reverse. The better you understand how colleges conduct their deliberations, the better you can go about yours.
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Overly protective parents might be leaving a lasting impact on their child's personality, and not in a good way, a new study finds.The results show having so-called "helicopter parents" was associated with being dependent, neurotic and less open, a slew of personality traits that are generally thought of as undesirable.
The study, which surveyed college freshman, is one of the first to try to define exactly what helicopter parenting is, and measure it. The term was originally coined by college admissions personnel when they started to notice a change in parents of prospective students -- parents would call the admissions office and try to intervene in a process that had previously just been between the student and the college, said study researcher Neil Montgomery, a psychologist at Keene State College in N.H.
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The face of California public education soon will look a lot like Alum Rock Union Elementary School District in San Jose.Almost 78 percent of the district's 13,816 students are of Hispanic or Latino origin. About 54 percent of them are English-language learners. The district, which sprawls over the foothills in east San Jose, is more working class than middle class.
It's tempting to view a district like Alum Rock as indicative of the challenges California will face in educating the next generation of children, but it might be better to view it as an opportunity. California's educational system desperately needs to adapt to both a 21st century economy and the state's shifting demographics. We can't afford to fail the next generation of students. So how will California's educational system adapt to meet their needs?
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'What's funny," says Madeleine Sackler, "is that I'm not really a political person." Yet the petite 27-year-old is the force behind "The Lottery"--an explosive new documentary about the battle over the future of public education opening nationwide this Tuesday.In the spring of 2008, Ms. Sackler, then a freelance film editor, caught a segment on the local news about New York's biggest lottery. It wasn't the Powerball. It was a chance for 475 lucky kids to get into one of the city's best charter schools (publicly funded schools that aren't subject to union rules).
"I was blown away by the number of parents that were there," Ms. Sackler tells me over coffee on Manhattan's Upper West Side, recalling the thousands of people packed into the Harlem Armory that day for the drawing. "I wanted to know why so many parents were entering their kids into the lottery and what it would mean for them." And so Ms. Sackler did what any aspiring filmmaker would do: She grabbed her camera.
Her initial aim was simple. "Going into the film I was excited just to tell a story," she says. "A vérité film, a really beautiful, independent story about four families that you wouldn't know otherwise" in the months leading up to the lottery for the Harlem Success Academy.
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Diagnosis of autism has always been difficult and often the condition remains unrecognised until too late for treatment to have a maximum effect.But now researchers at Imperial College London have discovered a potential way of spotting the disorder in children as young as six months old.
They have found that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) also suffer from disorders in their gut and that this can be detected with a simple urine test.
That would mean that intensive behavioural and social treatment could begin before the disease has caused any permanent psychological damage.
Professor Jeremy Nicholson, the author of the study, said: "Children with autism have very unusual gut microbes which we can test for before the full blown symptoms of the disease come through.
"If that is the case then it might become a preventable disease."
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For years, Pat Bearce had a message for his daughter Andrea: After her college graduation, she would be on her own financially.It has been three years, and she isn't quite there yet.
After studying broadcast journalism at Texas Christian University, Andrea decided to pursue a career as a chef, choosing a pricey culinary school in New York City. The restaurant jobs she landed didn't come with health coverage, so, in addition to guaranteeing her apartment lease in Manhattan, her parents covered her health-care costs for a couple of years. They paid her monthly cellphone bill, too. And she still has a jointly held credit card with her mother, Catherine.
"It's pretty hard to get them launched," says Mr. Bearce, a pilot at Boeing Co. in Seattle, who now says he never actually intended to enforce the deadline. "The real bottom line is that when they're done with school, they're not really done."
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This shrinking city needs to hang on to people like Johnette Barham: taxpaying, middle-class professionals who invest in local real estate, work and play downtown, and make their home here.Ms. Barham just left. And she's not coming back.
In seven years as a homeowner in Detroit, she endured more than 10 burglaries and break-ins at her house and a nearby rental property she owned. Still, she defied friends' pleas to leave as she fortified her home with locks, bars, alarms and a dog.
Then, a week before Christmas, someone torched the house and destroyed almost everything she owned.
In March, police arrested a suspect in connection with the case, someone who turned out to be remarkably easy to find. For Ms. Barham, the arrest came one crime too late. "I was constantly being targeted in a way I couldn't predict, in a way that couldn't be controlled by the police," she says. "I couldn't take it anymore."
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In a nod to the rising cost of college tuition and the burden of massive student loan debt on graduates, a growing number of universities are stepping up with "no-loan" aid pledges.More than 50 colleges -- including elite private schools and flagship state universities in Virginia and Maryland -- have eliminated or capped loans in their financial aid portfolios for some or all students, promising enough aid in grants and work-study to cover most of the gap between what they charge and what each student can afford to pay.
At a handful of private universities with sizable endowments, including Princeton, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, the goal is quite literally to eliminate loan debt for most graduating seniors.
"It's going down, and it's going down dramatically," said Amy Gutmann, president of Penn. "A typical family earning $90,000 a year attends Penn tuition-free. A typical family earning $40,000 a year attends Penn with tuition, room and board covered."
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Like so many parents at this time of year, we stood watching and cheering as our daughter walked across the stage at graduation.For Julia, it was graduation from college in mid-May. For others, it will be graduation from high school. But whatever the setting, Julia and her fellow graduates take an awful lot of people across the stage with them -- many of them teachers.
Not that we have any particular bias as her parents, you understand. We think Julia is incredibly smart, poised, inquisitive, a leader in her group. But we also know that step by step through her days in school, it was teachers who helped shape her into the graduate we applauded on that Saturday in May.
As a society we say we value education. We are sure a whole lot more ambivalent about teachers as a group. You heard that ambivalence in the Madison area as the School Board wrestled with a very tough budget for the coming year. You hear that at the national level as President Obama's education policies are demanding more accountability from teachers.
My point is not that teachers ought not be asked to share in the financial burden of tough times nor that there ought not be ways to hold them accountable. My point is that in looking at ways to strengthen our education system, we ought to remember that the teachers are the ones giving of themselves day after day to prepare our sons and daughters for the future. It does no one any good to be bashing them.
Is every teacher terrific? Of course not. But at least in the Madison schools, with four kids who have been educated by something like 150 teachers over the years (to say nothing of another vast array of teachers at the college level), I have developed a deep admiration for the work they do.
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It's "payday" in Jill Strand's classroom at Glacier Edge Elementary School in Verona.Strand's third-graders rush toward plastic bins crammed with parent-donated school supplies and trinkets, eager to cash the weekly mock paychecks issued by Strand for classroom jobs like collecting library books and checking desks for tidiness.
"They don't understand how much they're really learning," says Strand. "They see it as fun, free-choice time."
But in a sign that a deeper financial message is resonating, not all students are quick to part with the hard-earned classroom currency the paychecks are exchanged for. Kate Veak tucks her "Strand Bucks" away, saying she is saving for something bigger, like a hardcover book.
Strand recently chronicled her lessons in savings and investing in "Financial Literacy: TEACH IT!," a series of online teacher vignettes compiled by the Wisconsin Educational Communications Board, which won a 2010 award from the Governor's Council on Financial Literacy for the project. Strand says she may soon introduce her third-graders to the concept of sales tax and is considering letting them borrow from their classroom bank, potentially leading to discussions about credit card interest and maybe even payday loans.
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Madison School District [4.6MB PDF]:
District administration, along with school leadership and school staff; have examined the research that shows thatfundamental change in education can only be accomplished by creating the opportunity for teachers to talk with one another regarding their instructional practice. The central theme and approach for REaL has heen to improve and enhance instructional practice through collaboration in order to increase student achievement. Special attention has been paid to ensure the work is done in a cross - district, interdepartmental and collaborative manner. Central to the work, are district and school based discussions focused on what skills and knowledge students need to know and be able to do, in order to be prepared for post-secondary education and work. Systemized discussions regarding curriculum aligmnent, course offerings, assessment systems, behavioral expectations and 21 st century skills are occurring across all four high schools and at the district level.Related: Small Learning Community and English 10.Collaborative professional development has been established to ensure that the work capitalizes on the expertise of current staff, furthers best practices that are already occurring within the MMSD high school classrooms, and enhances the skills of individuals at all levels from administration to classroom teachers needed. Our work to date has laid the foundation for further and more in-depth work to occur.
Since March of 2010, MMSD district and school staff has completed the following work to move the goals of the REaL Grant forward. Specific accomplishments aligning to REaL grant goals are listed below.
REaL Grant Goal 1: Improve Student Achievement for all students
- Accomplishment I: Completed year 2 of professional development for Department Chairpersons to become instructional leaders. The work will continue this summer with the first ever Department Chairperson and Assistant Principal Summer Institute to focus on leading and fostering teacher collaboration in order to improve student achievement.
- Accomplishment 2: Continued with planning for implementing the ACT Career and College Readiness Standards and the EP AS system. Visited with area districts to see the
impact of effective implementation the EP AS system in order to ensure successful implementation within MMSD.- Accomplishment 3: Piloted the implementation of the EXPLORE test at Memorial, Sherman and with 9th grade AVID students at all four comprehensive high schools.
- Accomplishment 4: This summer, in partnership with Monona Grove High School and Association of Wisconsin School Administrators (AWSA), MMSD will host the Aligned by Design: Aligning High School and Middle School English, Science, Math and Social Studies Courses to College/Career Readiness Skills. To be attended by teams of MMSD high school and middle school staff in July of 2010.
- Accomplishment 5: Continued focused planning and development of a master communication system for the possible implementation of early release Professional Collaboration Time at MMSD High Schools. Schools have developed plans for effective teaming structures and accountability measures.
- Accomplishment 6: District English leadership team developed recommendations for essential understandings in the areas of reading, writing, speaking and listening for 9th and 10th grades. Following this successful model, similar work will occur in Math, Science and Social studies.
Bruce King, who evaluated the West High's English 9 (one English class for all students) approach offers observations on the REal program beginning on page 20 of the PDF file.
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In this era of rising college expectations -- more applications, more students and more university places than ever -- we Americans remain very insular. We think nothing can be better than Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford or some other moldy brick institution high on the U.S. News list. A few adventurous U.S. students are enrolling in Canadian and British schools, but nobody talks about that in the high school cafeteria or the PTA.Our self-regard is, in some ways, justified. On most international ratings, one of the topics of Ben Wildavsky's intriguing new book "The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World," U.S. colleges still dominate the top 10. But Wildavsky reveals that that will probably change. Students in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America are beginning to speak as knowledgeably about France's Ecole Polytechnique, the Indian Institutes of Technology and Britain's University of Leicester as they do about Columbia and Caltech. Many foreign universities are catching up with ours.
In our comfortable spot at the top of the world's higher ed pyramid, we are ignoring one of the most powerful trends of the 21st century -- a growing free trade in great minds. Wildavsky, a senior fellow in research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation, argues that this will make this era more innovative, and more prosperous, than any that human civilization has seen.
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The number of colleges that offer bachelor's degrees in three years can be counted on two (or three) hands. They include Lake Forest College in Illinois, Southern New Hampshire University, Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., and, in a recent conversion, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.The three-year degree has spawned a round of news coverage and, last month, an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times by the former president of George Washington University.
"The college experience may be idyllic," Stephen Joel Trachtenberg wrote, "but it's also wasteful and expensive, both for students and institutions."
Trachtenberg, who co-wrote the piece with GWU professor Gerald Kauvar, floated the idea of a three-year degree during his tenure at the Foggy Bottom university.
That piece drew enough notice to prompt a rebuttal, released today by the president of the Association of American College and Universities, a D.C. nonprofit advocating for the cause of liberal education.
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Terence Chea & Christine Armario:
Students graduating from high school this spring may be collecting their diplomas just in time, leaving institutions that are being badly weakened by the nation's economic downturn.Across the country, mass layoffs of teachers, counselors and other staff members -- caused in part by the drying up of federal stimulus dollars -- are leading to larger classes and reductions in everything that is not a core subject, including music, art, clubs, sports and other after-school activities.
Educators and others worry the cuts could lead to higher dropout rates and lower college attendance as students receive less guidance and become less engaged in school. They fear a generation of young people could be left behind.
"It's going to be harder for everybody to get an opportunity to get into college," said Chelsea Braza, a 16-year-old sophomore at Silver Creek High School in San Jose. "People wouldn't be as motivated to do anything in school because there's no activities and there's no involvement."
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A U.S. appeals court heard arguments Thursday over whether school officials can discipline students for making lewd, harassing or juvenile Internet postings from off-campus computers.Two students from two different Pennsylvania school districts are fighting suspensions they received for posting derisive profiles of their principals on MySpace from home computers. The American Civil Liberties Union argued that school officials infringe on student's free speech rights when they reach beyond school grounds in such cases to impose discipline.
"While children are in school, they are under the custody and tutelage of the school," ACLU lawyer Witold Walczak argued Thursday in the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. "Once they leave the schoolhouse gate, you've got parents that come into play."
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OBJECTIVE By using a large, multicenter database, we investigated the characteristics and morbidities of 1591 children returning from 218 global destinations and presenting for care in 19 countries.METHODS Data reported to the GeoSentinel Surveillance Network between January 1997 and November 2007 were analyzed, to assess demographic features, travel characteristics, and clinical diagnoses of ill pediatric travelers. Data were compared between children and adults and among 3 pediatric age groups (0-5 years, 6-11 years, and 12-17 years).
RESULTS Children were predominantly tourist travelers returning from Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, or Latin America. Compared with adults, children disproportionately presented within 7 days after return, required hospitalization, lacked pretravel health advice, and had traveled for the purpose of visiting friends and relatives. Diarrhea (28%), dermatologic conditions (25%), systemic febrile illnesses (23%), and respiratory disorders (11%) accounted for the majority of diagnoses reported for children. No fatalities were reported. Diarrhea occurred disproportionately among children after exposure to the Middle East/North Africa, dermatologic conditions after exposure to Latin America, systemic febrile illnesses after exposure to sub-Saharan Africa or Asia, and respiratory disorders after exposure to Europe or North America. The proportionate morbidity rates of travel-associated diseases differed among the pediatric age groups and between children and adults.
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Pressure for quick fixes can outweigh research evidence when ministers set schools policy, according to a study of three decades of education initiatives.Media pressure and political expediency are more likely to influence decision making, says a report from the CfBT education charity.
The report draws upon interviews with former ministers and civil servants.
It calls for the setting up of an independent chief education officer to give objective advice.
The report, Instinct or Reason, due to be published next week, examines the pressures that have shaped education policy since the late-1970s, across Conservative and Labour administrations.
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Teenage smoking is often thought of as kind of innocent experiment, but a drag on a friend's cigarette may be the beginning of something that will be hard to shake.A study of adolescent smokers in the journal Pediatrics tracks the course of addiction to nicotine among a group of sixth-graders. After following 1,246 middle-school children for four years, researchers say a pattern emerged of occasional smoking that led to an addiction to tobacco: A cigarette a month will do it.
"When people are just wanting a cigarette, every now and then, they think they just enjoy smoking," says study coauthor Dr. Joseph DiFranza of the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. "As time passes, then they start to notice they will crave a cigarette. So even when they are with someone who is not smoking, something will pop into their mind that will tell them it is time for a cigarette."
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A new report published today shows that school absenteeism in Ireland remains high.The report show that over 57,000 students miss school each day. Approximately 31,500 of truants are primary students and 26,000, post-primary students. This equates to a loss of 12 school days per student per year in primary school and 13 days in post-primary school.
The new data, is contained in a National Educational Welfare Board's report which calculates attendance from the academic years 2006/07 to 2007/08.
NEWB's study reveals that about 58,000 or 12 per cent of all primary school students and 57,000 or 17 per cent of post-primary students are absent for 20 days or more per year.
Close to 17,000 pupils are suspended from school every year with another 150 students expelled.
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Shawn Doherty via a kind reader's email:
It started out as the dreaming of a lonely mother overwhelmed and held captive by the challenges of raising twin toddlers with autism, each of whom required up to 43 hours a week of intensive in-home therapy. There should be a refuge where she and others struggling with the devastating developmental disorder could find respite, company, play groups and therapy, Jackie Moen thought. As her boys grew, so did her dreams. Why couldn't schools build curriculum around these children's unique talents and needs, rather than forcing many of them to fall short of the rigid classroom norms?And so Jackie and her husband Ken, joined by a passionate group of other parents, teachers and therapists, have set out to create such a place themselves. In 2007, they bought an old brick schoolhouse in McFarland and poured their savings and a pool of grants and contributions into renovating it into a homey space with donated couches, sunlit classrooms and gleaming wood floors. As soon as the Common Threads Family Resource Center opened in 2007, director of operations Ellen Egen recalls, "the phone calls just kept coming." Hundreds of children and desperate family members flocked to the cheerful schoolhouse for an array of activities not available elsewhere, including play groups, teen therapy sessions, respite care and mental health counseling. "It grew like magic," Moen, now the center's director, recalls.
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One of the favorites to win this year's National Spelling Bee lay face down on his living room floor wearing a black shirt, blue jeans and white socks, his torso supported by a couple of big pillows. His hands seemed to be on nonstop autopilot as they folded colorful paper into origami shapes.Across the room in a big chair sat his younger brother. Between them were stacks and stacks of oversized, homemade note cards, bound by rubber bands and arranged like a city skyline on a large footstool. They are only a fraction of some 20,000 cards in the house, each printed with a word, its origin, pronunciation and definition.
These particular stacks contained the really hard words, the ones 13-year-old Tim Ruiter hadn't mastered yet.
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A member of the Class of 2010--who this season dons synthetic cap and gown, listens to the inspirational words of David Souter (Harvard), Anderson Cooper (Tulane), or Lisa Kudrow (Vassar), and collects a diploma--need not be a statistics major to know that the odds of stepping into a satisfying job, or, indeed, any job, are lower now than might have been imagined four long years ago, when the first posters were hung on a dorm-room wall, and having a .edu e-mail address was still a novelty. Statistically speaking, however, having an expertise in statistics may help in getting a job: according to a survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, graduates with math skills are more likely than their peers in other majors to find themselves promptly and gainfully employed.The safest of all degrees to be acquiring this year is in accounting: forty-six per cent of graduates in that discipline have already been offered jobs. Business majors are similarly placed: forty-four per cent will have barely a moment to breathe before undergoing the transformation from student to suit. Engineers of all stripes--chemical, computer, electrical, mechanical, industrial, environmental--have also fared relatively well since the onset of the recession: they dominate a ranking, issued by Payscale.com, of the disciplines that produce the best-earning graduates. Particular congratulations are due to aerospace engineers, who top the list, with a starting salary of just under sixty thousand dollars--a figure that, if it is not exactly stratospheric, is twenty-five thousand dollars higher than the average starting salary of a graduate in that other science of the heavens, theology.
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How does Google's unchallenged domination of Search shape the way we retrieve information? Does Google flatten global knowledge?
I look around, I see my kids relying on Wikipedia, I watch my journalist students work. I can't help but wonder: Does Google impose a framework on our cognitive processes, on the way we search for and use information?Two weeks ago, at an INMA conference in Oxford, I met Monica Bulger, an Education PhD, she was giving a speech covering the notion of cognitive containers associated with devices such as the iPad (see her blog). Then, at a dinner at Exeter College, in a room right out of a Harry Potter movie set, she discussed her work at the University of California Santa Barbara where she investigated her students' use of Web searches.
Dr. Bulger took 150 graduate and undergraduate students and asked them to write a 1 to 2 pages recommendation for the use of computers in the classroom (she verified that the question was not already treated in Wikipedia). They had 50 minutes to complete the assignment.
The goal of the experiment was 'to disprove the fact that information is simply a matter of access, and after that, everything else is easy. I wanted to show the highly sophisticated cognitive process taking place. No matter how sophisticated machines are, research still requires a bit of work'.
Among her findings (details here):
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Pediatricians should screen children for possible mental health issues at every doctor visit, according to new, extensive recommendations a national pediatrician group issued Tuesday.These doctors also should develop a network of mental-health professionals in the community to whom they can send patients if they suspect a child needs further evaluation, according to the task force on mental health convened by the American Academy of Pediatrics. The recommendations were made in a series of reports published in a supplement to the journal Pediatrics.
In recent years, pediatricians and mental health professionals have been calling for increased attention to mental health in primary-care settings because of growing rates of disorders in children such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism and anxiety.
At the same time, there is a shortage of child mental-health experts, particularly psychiatrists. While 21% of U.S. children and adolescents have a diagnosable mental illness, only one-fifth of that group receives treatment, according to the academy.
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During the winter of 2007, a UCLA professor of psychiatry named Gary Small recruited six volunteers--three experienced Web surfers and three novices--for a study on brain activity. He gave each a pair of goggles onto which Web pages could be projected. Then he slid his subjects, one by one, into the cylinder of a whole-brain magnetic resonance imager and told them to start searching the Internet. As they used a handheld keypad to Google various preselected topics--the nutritional benefits of chocolate, vacationing in the Galapagos Islands, buying a new car--the MRI scanned their brains for areas of high activation, indicated by increases in blood flow.The two groups showed marked differences. Brain activity of the experienced surfers was far more extensive than that of the newbies, particularly in areas of the prefrontal cortex associated with problem-solving and decisionmaking. Small then had his subjects read normal blocks of text projected onto their goggles; in this case, scans revealed no significant difference in areas of brain activation between the two groups. The evidence suggested, then, that the distinctive neural pathways of experienced Web users had developed because of their Internet use.
The most remarkable result of the experiment emerged when Small repeated the tests six days later. In the interim, the novices had agreed to spend an hour a day online, searching the Internet. The new scans revealed that their brain activity had changed dramatically; it now resembled that of the veteran surfers. "Five hours on the Internet and the naive subjects had already rewired their brains," Small wrote. He later repeated all the tests with 18 more volunteers and got the same results.
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The New York Times reports:"[...]The unemployment rate for the 16-to-24 age group reached a record 19.6 percent in April, double the national average..."
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A documentary from a pair of Dutch filmmakers about urban farming at a Detroit school for pregnant teens and young mothers is getting wider recognition as the school's program faces the prospect of being uprooted.Mascha and Manfred Poppenk made "Grown in Detroit" first for Dutch public television and began screening it last year. It focuses on the Catherine Ferguson Academy for Young Women, which has its own working farm.
"This is really a film Americans should see," Mascha Poppenk said. "They need to see there are good things going on in Detroit."
The building that houses Catherine Ferguson could be closed in June and its program moved to another one about a mile away. It's part of a plan announced in March by district emergency financial manager Robert Bobb to close 44 schools.
Detroit Public Schools, which is fighting years of declining enrolment and a $219 million budget deficit, closed 29 schools before the start of classes last fall and shuttered 35 buildings about three years ago.
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A few weeks ago my friend's 8-year-old came home all excited, waving a letter from school about a test called the Scholastic Reading Inventory.Not only did the little boy have test results showing he'd scored well above the third-grade level (no surprise to anyone who knows this avid reader), he also had a list of recommended books. Number one on the list: Arctic Dreams. Number two: A Clockwork Orange.
A Clockwork Orange?
His mom gently took the list away and scanned the titles before explaining that she would not be getting a dystopian novel about ultraviolence for her third-grader (or, for that matter, most of the other recommended books, including Guns of August, Left for Dead, and Kafka's Metamorphosis). Then she called her son's school, Shorewood Elementary, to ask what was going on.
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The "unschooling" movement of the 1970s featured open classrooms, in which children studied what they were most interested in, when they felt ready. That was followed by today's back-to-basics, early-start model, in which students complete math worksheets in kindergarten and are supposed to take algebra by eighth grade at the latest. Under the "whole language" philosophy of the 1980s, children were expected to learn to read by having books read to them. By the late 1990s, reading lessons were dominated by phonics, with little time spent on the joys of what reading is all about -- unlocking the world of stories and information.Diffused governance, is, in my view, the best way forward. This means that communities should offer a combination of public, private, virtual, charter and voucher options. A diversity of K-12 approaches insures that a one size fits all race to the bottom does not prevail. I was very disappointed to recently learn that Wisconsin's Democrat Senator Russ Feingold voted to kill the Washington, DC voucher program. No K-12 approach is perfect, but eliminating that option for the poorest members of our society is simply unpalatable.A little more than a decade ago, educators bore no responsibility for their students' failure; it was considered the fault of the students, their parents and unequal social circumstances. Now schools are held liable for whether students learn, regardless of the students' lack of effort or previous preparation, and are held solely accountable for reaching unrealistic goals of achievement.
No wonder schools have a chronic case of educational whiplash. If there's a single aspect of schooling that ought to end, it's the decades of abrupt and destructive swings from one extreme to another. There is no magic in the magic-bullet approach to learning. Charters are neither evil nor saviors; they can be a useful complement to public schools, but they have not blazed a sure-fire path to student achievement. Decreeing that all students will be proficient in math and reading by 2014 hasn't moved us dramatically closer to the mark.
Somewhat related Lee Bergquist and Erin Richards: Wisconsin Governor Candidate Mark Neumann taps public funds for private schools
Republican businessman Mark Neumann started his first taxpayer-funded school with 49 students, and in eight years enrollment has mushroomed to nearly 1,000 students in four schools.Neumann, a candidate for governor who preaches smaller government and fiscal conservatism, has used his entrepreneurial skills to tap private and public funds - including federal stimulus dollars - to start schools in poor neighborhoods.
The former member of the U.S. House operates three religious-based schools in Milwaukee, a fourth nonreligious school in Phoenix and has plans to build clusters of schools across the country.
The Nashotah businessman is part of a growing national movement from the private sector that is providing poor neighborhoods an alternative to traditional public schools.
There are signs the schools are achieving one of their primary goals of getting students into post-secondary schools.
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Nearly four dozen public and private schools in Indiana are offering Chinese language instruction for credit as part of an effort to make Mandarin Chinese the next world language.Many of the programs are taught by Chinese educators through a collaboration between the College Board and Hanban, a government-funded organization affiliated with the Chinese Education Ministry.
Since 2006, China has sent more than 325 "guest teachers" to work in U.S. schools to help launch Chinese language programs. The teachers can stay for three years, then reapply to stay for another three years.
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For many, saving for retirement is a difficult process even during the best of times. And in 2009, according to a recent survey from Wells Fargo, 20% of pre-retirees have reduced funding to their retirement savings. Many who once thought they were secure are now forced to delay their retirement plans by several years. What's even more troubling is that 41% of women and 32% of men now believe they will have to work after retirement just to make ends meet. Considering that saving $1 million will only amount to about $40,000 per year for the average retiree (assuming you stick to a widely accepted rule of thumb that says you should limit your withdrawals to 4% of your savings during your first year in retirement), it's easy to understand why retirement has become almost a luxury. Below, Kiplinger.com examines the cost of retirement.
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A reporter asked me "what went wrong with the small schools idea?" It's odd question because all the networks developing highly effective new schools--KIPP, Achievement First, Success Network, Green Dot, Alliance and dozens more--still use the tried and true rule of thumb of 100 students per grade.Related: English 10.The better question is "what went wrong with the big schools idea?" The 50-year experiment with mega-high schools of 1,500-4,500 students had disastrous results especially for low income students. The combination of anonymity and a proliferation of low expectation courses set up the results we see today: one third of American students drop out and one third graduate unprepared for college or careers.
Fixing this problem has proven vexing. The one difference between good schools and bad schools is everything--structure, schedule, curriculum, instruction, culture, and connections with families and community. That makes turnarounds, especially at the high school level, really difficult. Layer on top of that outdated employment contracts and revolving door leadership and you have a national Gordian knot.
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When Nitya Rajendran started kindergarten, she didn't talk until November. "She'd point and wave," said her teacher, Rick Parbst. This year she was the lead in Trinity School's spring musical and decided to translate parts of "The Iliad" from ancient Greek. She's headed to Georgetown University in September.In fourth grade, Cody Cowan's class was studying ancient Egypt, and he was asked to develop an irrigation system. He was fine with the engineering, but didn't know how to draw people and animals. "By the time I turned around, he had four girls doing his drawings," recalled his teacher from that year, Mary Lemons. This summer, Mr. Cowan will intern on Representative Carolyn B. Maloney's re-election campaign, and he plans to study international relations in the fall.
At Trinity, one of Manhattan's oldest independent schools, a roomful of graduating seniors and their childhood teachers unearthed these pieces of the past at the annual survivors breakfast, a rite of passage for seniors who received all 13 years of their formal education at Trinity. Over coffee and bagels and chocolate Jell-O pudding doused with crushed Oreos and gummy worms (a class of 2010 culinary tradition), the students reconnected with teachers and dished about who, at age 5 , ate Play-Doh, sang well and cried whenever his mom left the room.
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Like all human beings, educators accept rules and procedures that make sense to them, even when academic types wave data in their faces proving they are wrong. That appears to be the case with one of the most powerful and widespread practices in Washington area high schools -- the extra grade point for college-level courses.Thousands of students are taking panicked breaths wondering whether what I am about to reveal will incinerate their grade-point averages, keep them out of any college anyone has heard of and consign them to a life of begging for dollar bills like that scruffy guy on Lynn Street south of Key Bridge.
A new study shows that grade weighting for Advanced Placement courses is unnecessary. Schools have been promising students 3 grade points (usually given for a B) if they get a C in an AP course so they will not be frightened away by its college-level demands. It turns out, however, they will take AP with or without extra credit.
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Cell phone companies are finding that they're sitting on a gold mine--in the form of the call records of their subscribers.Researchers in academia, and increasingly within the mobile industry, are working with large databases showing where and when calls and texts are made and received to reveal commuting habits, how far people travel for public events, and even significant social trends.
With potential applications ranging from city planning to marketing, such studies could also provide a new source of revenue for the cell phone companies. "Because cell phones have become so ubiquitous, mining the data they generate can really revolutionize the study of human behavior," says Ramón Cáceres, a lead researcher at AT&T's research labs in Florham Park, NJ.
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Like all human beings, educators accept rules and procedures that make sense to them, even when academic types wave data in their faces proving they are wrong. That appears to be the case with one of the most powerful and widespread practices in Washington area high schools---the extra grade point for college-level courses.Thousands of students are taking panicked breaths wondering if what I am about to reveal will incinerate their grade point averages, keep them out of any college anyone has heard of and consign them to a life of begging for dollar bills like that scruffy guy on Lynn Street south of Key Bridge.
A new study shows that grade weighting for Advanced Placement courses is unnecessary. Schools have been promising students 3 grade points (usually given for a B) if they get a C in an AP course so they will not be frightened away by its college-level demands. It turns out, however, they will take AP with or without extra credit.
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Like many middle-class families, Cortney Munna and her mother began the college selection process with a grim determination. They would do whatever they could to get Cortney into the best possible college, and they maintained a blind faith that the investment would be worth it.Today, however, Ms. Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University, has nearly $100,000 in student loan debt from her four years in college, and affording the full monthly payments would be a struggle. For much of the time since her 2005 graduation, she's been enrolled in night school, which allows her to defer loan payments.
This is not a long-term solution, because the interest on the loans continues to pile up. So in an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning. They and their families made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason, much as subprime borrowers assumed the value of their houses would always go up.
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Amy Hetzner:
A 3.5 grade-point average is enough to qualify a student for honor roll and be considered above a B-plus average at Brookfield East High School, but it might not be enough to put a student among the top third of the class.That's one of the reasons why sophomores at the school say they won't be sad when class rank is eliminated from high school transcripts and report cards in two years.
"We get good grades, but we don't get credit for it," said Alison Kent, a sophomore at Brookfield East. "You can have a 3.5 or higher and it looks terrible."
Nearly a decade after some of the state's top-performing high schools began dropping class rank from their students' transcripts, more are following their lead.
The Elmbrook School Board voted this month to end reporting class rank on high school transcripts and student report cards in the 2011-'12 school year. The school boards for Nicolet and Mequon-Thiensville will consider whether to enact similar measures this summer.
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In middle school, Ivan Cantera ran with a Latino gang; Laura Corro was a spunky teen. At age 13, they shared their first kiss. Both made it a habit to skip class. In high school, they went their separate ways.This fall, Ivan will enter the University of Oklahoma, armed with a prestigious scholarship. "I want to be the first Hispanic governor of Oklahoma," declares the clean-cut 18-year-old, standing on the steps of Santa Fe South High School, the charter school in the heart of this city's Hispanic enclave that he says put him on a new path.
Laura, who is 17, rose to senior class president at Capitol Hill High School, a large public school in the same neighborhood. But after scraping together enough credits to graduate, Laura isn't sure where she's headed. She never took college entrance exams.
The divergent paths taken by Laura and Ivan were shaped by many forces, but their schools played a striking role. Capitol Hill and Santa Fe South both serve the same poor, Hispanic population. Both comply with federal guidelines and meet state requirements for standardized exams and curriculum. Santa Fe South enrolls about 490 high school students, while Capitol Hill has nearly 900.
At Santa Fe South, the school day is 45 minutes longer; graduation requirements are more rigorous (four years of math, science and social studies compared with three at public schools); and there is a tough attendance
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Sarae White is an all-too-typical student in Philadelphia -- she stopped going to school last year, and was on her way to becoming one more dropout."The teachers didn't care, the students didn't care," White said. "Nobody cared, so why should I?"
In Philadelphia, the country's sixth largest school district, about one of every three students fails to graduate -- about the national average. CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker reports that of the 4 million students who enter high school every year, one million of them will drop out before graduation. That's 7,000 every school day -- one dropout every 26 seconds.
Michael Piscal, Headmaster of View Park Prep Charter School in Los Angeles said, "It's not working for teachers, it's not working for students -- it's not working for society.
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What has the government proposed?Every state school in England will be allowed to apply to become an academy - a school funded by the state but independent from local authorities. That leaves them free to set their curriculum and run themselves as they see fit. In practice, however, anything too unconventional will attract a bad rating from Ofsted, the schools watchdog. Fears that this academic freedom could, for example, lead to the teaching of Creationism as a factual discipline can therefore be largely allayed.
Hasn't this all been done already by Labour?
Yes, but the policy was limited. Only 203 academies were established under Labour out of a possible 3,100 secondary schools. The last government mainly invited bids from schools in deprived areas, arguing that this was where radical changes such as the creation of academies were most needed. But Michael Gove, the Conservative education secretary, said on Wednesday he expected the bulk of secondaries to become academies eventually. He has also invited applications from primaries, which were disbarred by Labour from bidding for academy status.
Are these academies the same as "free schools"?
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Last week I visited the Carpe Diem charter school in Yuma Arizona. Yuma is off the beaten path, in far western Arizona near the borders of California and Mexico.
Carpe Diem is a 6-12 school with 240 students. A value added analysis of test scores found that they have the biggest gains in the state of Arizona. Their math results are really off the chart, with some grades averaging at the 98th percentile on Terra Nova.
Carpe Diem is a hybrid model school, rotating kids between self-paced instruction on the computer and classroom instruction. Their building is laid out with one large computer lab, with classroom space in the back. They had 240 students working on computers when I walked in, and you could have heard a pin drop.
Carpe Diem has successfully substituted technology for labor. With 6 grade levels and 240 students they have only 1 math teacher and one aide who focuses on math. Covering 6-12 and 240 students and getting the best results with a demographically challenging student body = no problem for Carpe Diem. Their founder, Rick Ogston, told me they use less staff than a typical model, and have cash reserves in the bank despite relatively low per pupil funding in AZ. They have never received support from philanthropic foundations, making due with state funding, but their model seems like it could be brought to scale with the right investment.
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I once interviewed Alyson Barker, a former student at Annandale High School in Fairfax County, about her attempt to use the college admission process to drive her relationship with her parents into a ditch.Barker's parents wanted her to attend the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, a fine state school with lower tuition for Virginia residents. Barker told them, with a 17-year-old's irritating certitude, that instead she would attend a small, expensive private school in Ohio.
Because so many area families are starting their college searches, I am going to write a few columns on the hidden pitfalls of the process. I started last week warning against overlooking the quality of campus extracurricular activities. That was important but, I realize now, not the right place to begin.
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Kurt Schmoke, the former mayor of Baltimore who helped broker the contract agreement between D.C. schools and its teachers union, had strong words for those who wanting to improve education. "Stop demonizing the unions," he told an education roundtable convened Wednesday at the Aspen Institute. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan quickly seconded his message. I couldn't help wondering if the two had happened to catch Monday night's final episode of "Law & Order."The program, centered on a frantic search to find a blogger threatening to assault a New York City high school, deals with some of the thorny issues of school management and reform. The program's title, "The Rubber Room," comes from the real-life temporary reassignment centers where New York City teachers who are facing disciplinary action are sent. For those who are less avid "Law & Order" fans and missed the show, detectives first suspect a deranged student, but it turns out the blogger, called Moot, is a teacher who had been sent to a rubber room after he was falsely accused of molesting a student.
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Lesley Surman, a 42-year-old housewife and mother of three - "working class and proud of it" - wants to set up a new secondary school in the west Yorkshire village of Birkenshaw.Related Links: The Guardian's Editorial.Mrs Surman is no fantasist. She is part of a group of about 60 activists trying to establish the school in 2013 because she harbours doubts about the alternatives available to local parents. "We want to get back to core values, pastoral care and a school where you celebrate winning." Instead of offering "beauty therapy and mechanics" - vocational subjects increasingly offered in the state sector - she would prefer a focus on nine or so academic subjects, including science and history.
The answer to her problems could lie several hundred miles across the North Sea. Tomorrow's Queen's Speech, outlining the ruling coalition's legislative priorities, is expected to use Sweden's "free schools" as a model for an overhaul of the English education system, making it easier for parents and teachers to create privately run but state-funded primary and secondary schools.
"Free" in the sense of independent, these private establishments were introduced in 1995 to provide greater choice for parents unable to afford the fees for Sweden's tiny (now even tinier) privately funded sector. Underpinning the policy of the country's centre-right government was the free-market principle that competition would raise standards in all schools as state institutions were forced to work harder to keep up.
The government has similar hopes for England (Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are responsible for their own education policies) - where, in spite of large numbers of private, fee-charging, schools, 93 per cent of children are state educated.
"Legislation will be introduced to...give teachers greater freedom over the curriculum and allow new providers to run state schools."The purpose of the Bill is to:
Give full effect to the range of programmes envisaged in the Coalition agreement.
The main benefits of the Bill will be:The main elements of the Bill are:
- To give all schools greater freedom over the curriculum
- To improve school accountability
- To take action to tackle bureaucracy
- To improve behaviour in schools
- To provide schools with the freedoms to deliver an excellent education in the way they see fit.
- To reform Ofsted and other accountability frameworks to ensure that head teachers are held properly accountable for the core educational goals of attainment and closing the gap between rich and poor.
- To introduce a slimmer curriculum giving more space for teachers to decide how to teach.
- To introduce a reading test for 6 year olds to make sure that young children are learning and to identify problems early.
- To give teachers and head teachers the powers to improve behaviour and tackle bullying.
- We expect standards across the education sector to rise through the creation of more Academies and giving more freedom to head teachers and teachers. We will also ensure that money follows pupils, and introduce a 'pupil premium' so that more money follows the poorest pupils.
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With young children receiving twice as many vaccines as they did 25 years ago, many parents are seeking to postpone at least some shots. A new study, though, finds no benefit to a child's development in delaying vaccines, and doctors warn that waiting can expose kids to possible disease.One of the researchers, Michael J. Smith, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at the University of Louisville School of Medicine in Kentucky, says some parents request alternative immunization schedules out of concern that getting so many vaccines in such a short time period might lead to health problems later on.
Dr. Smith and Charles R. Woods, also a pediatric infectious-disease specialist, looked at results of intelligence, speech and behavior tests conducted on children several years after receiving their infant vaccines and found few differences between children who were vaccinated on schedule and those who waited. "This study suggests that delaying vaccines does not give infants any advantage in terms of brain development," Dr. Smith said. Published online Monday in the medical journal Pediatrics, the study is believed to be the first to address the issue of delayed vaccination.
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CNN:
CNN's Alina Cho talks to a recent graduate loaded down with $275,000 in student debt.
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You know what would be, like, a total buzzkill? Signing a scholarship to play collegiate basketball at a major institution, making good on your end of the commitment, and then finding out after a year -- or two or three -- that, hey, thanks for coming, but we kind of need that scholarship for someone vastly more talented now. Would you mind transferring? This is where we the school will kindly remind you that your scholarship is a one-year, merit-based, renewable document, and we are under no obligation to extend it for another year should we choose not to. Any questions?Harsh, bro. Harsh. The practice of sending players away via transfer to make room for scholarships is called a runoff, and it happens more frequently than it should -- which is to say it shouldn't happen at all.
Typically, runoff players transfer quietly, moving on from their schools with little protest. Sometimes, though, a player or a player's family gets angry about what they see as a raw deal. Sometimes they talk to the media. These are important moments; they draw the curtain back on one of college basketball's most unfair, exploitative policies, and they're worth discussing when they arrive.
Last year's biggest such moment came when Kentucky coach John Calipari oversaw the transfer of seven players leftover from Billy Gillispie's tenure at the school. Several of those players publicly claimed they forced out of the program, while Calipari insisted that he merely told those players they likely wouldn't get much playing time if they decided to stay at UK.
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Today, when you were supposed to be reading your book, and while I was meeting with another student, I saw you writing something furiously. You are one of the few students in the class who regularly and dutifully records your thoughts on post-its, and, when I excused myself from my conference to come see what you were doing, I expected to see just that. However, when I asked you what you were doing, you told me about your book. I listened, but continued to glance at what you were trying to hide under your arm. When I saw it, I was less than happy. You were doing last night's homework, and I was livid.I did not react as I should have. Taking your paper and crumpling it was inappropriate. Had I thought for a moment, instead of reacting instantly, I would have remembered that you are one of the most diligent, hard-working students in the class. I would have realized something was amiss.
I should have asked you why you didn't do your homework, rather than make rash assumptions. But I didn't. Instead, I tossed your paper in the trash and returned to the other student, without a word to you or even a glance back, thinking that you'd receive the message of disappointment and disdain I sought to deliver. (Maybe I didn't want to see the horror that had surely set upon your face).
When I finished with the other student, I called you over to my desk and told you to sit. Again, I seethed, and let my emotions get the best of me. I continued to lecture you and said I was upset with two things: you didn't do your homework, and you lied to me.
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When he moved to Milwaukee from a tiny town in Mexico, Carlos Torres couldn't speak a word of English. Not even hello or goodbye.He was a frightened kid, plunked into fifth grade at a south side Milwaukee school. His family - he's the youngest of 10 children - rented a place near 14th and Lincoln.
Now, a mere dozen years later, Carlos is a standout graduate of Marquette High School and, as of last weekend, the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Faced with an enviable choice among four medical schools that accepted him, he has chosen Harvard on a full-tuition scholarship. He's the first member of his family to graduate from college.
As American dreams go, this one's pretty vivid.
Carlos became an American citizen, by the way. You may already be wondering about that. We're living in sensitive times when it comes to immigration issues. Carlos admits he was tempted to wear a shirt to UW graduation saying, "Do I look legal? Want to see my papers?" but he thought better of it.
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A former Pennsylvania high school student has sued school and county officials for damages in a controversial sexting case.The student alleges a violation of her constitutional rights, in a civil suit filed last week that could serve as a cautionary tale to other officials considering punishing students over risque self-portraits.
In the complaint filed in a U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania, the former student -- identified only as "N.N." -- accuses former District Attorney George P. Skumanick, Jr., principal Gregory Ellsworth, the Tunkhannock School District and Wyoming County of violating her constitutional rights (.pdf). The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages.
The complaint alleges that officials had no probable cause to seize and search her phone, and violated her privacy and her right to free expression by punishing her for storing nude and semi-nude photos of herself on her phone.
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From the outside, it looks like any other school in Kabul. A red two-story building is sealed off from the street by a high wall. A few trees stand in the front yard. Children constantly go in and out.But listen carefully. When the noise of the traffic dies down, you can hear the gentle sounds of violins being played and the patter of drums. In this city where music was illegal less than a decade ago, a new generation of children is being raised to understand its joys.
"This school is unique in Afghanistan," said Muhammad Aziz, a 19-year-old student who dreams of becoming one of the world's greatest players of the tabla, a South Asian drum. "It's the only professional music school and there are so many good teachers here."
The new National Institute of Music has been offering some courses for the past several months, but the formal opening will be later in May.
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Shocking findings about violence and abuse at schools have been revealed in a survey of secondary students.About seven in 10 students questioned by researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong said they have been victims of physical violence and verbal abuse, while a third have been sexually harassed.
More than half of the 1,800 respondents to the survey, which was conducted between December and February, admitted they have bullied schoolmates, though this sort of bad behavior lessens as they grow more mature.
On that, Chen Ji-kang, an assistant professor at the university's department of social work, said there is a higher incidence of violence among juniors, particularly Form One students, and boys are usually the aggressors.
On positive interaction between students, Chen said support from friends is crucial for victims.
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Houston Independent School District:
The Houston Independent School District is in the midst of developing a long-term strategic plan that will provide a road map for the future as the district strives to become the best public school system in the nation. To ensure that all key stakeholders are engaged and involved in this process, HISD is inviting any member of the Houston community to give their input at an open discussion on Monday, May 24, from 6:00-7:30 p.m. at the Hattie Mae White Educational Support Center's board auditorium (4440 West 18th Street).Related: Madison School District Strategic Planning Process.To develop a long-term Strategic Direction, HISD is working with the Apollo Consulting Group in a six-month effort that started in February 2010 and will culminate in August with the release of a final plan. The goal is to create a set of core initiatives and key strategies that will allow HISD to build upon the beliefs and visions established by the HISD Board of Education and to provide the children of Houston with the highest quality of primary and secondary education.
Over the past two months, HISD has been gathering input from members of Team HISD, as well as from parents and members of the Houston community, including faith-based groups, non-profit agencies, businesses, and local and state leaders. After analyzing feedback and conducting diagnostic research, a number of core initiatives have emerged. They include placing an effective teacher in every classroom, supporting the principal as the CEO, developing rigorous instructional standards and support, ensuring data driven accountability, and cultivating a culture of trust through action.
"True transformation cannot happen overnight and it cannot happen without the input from everyone at Team HISD and those in our community who hold a stake in the education of Houston's children," says Superintendent of Schools Terry B. Grier. "In order for it to be meaningful, we need everyone to lend their voice to the process and help us shape the future direction of HISD."
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Sokhom Mao will do something today that few like him ever do: He'll graduate from college.Little about Mao appears unusual, except maybe his waist-length black hair. He's 23, like many students who will walk the stage today at San Francisco State University. He majored in criminal justice, has applied for the usual summer internships and wants to become a politician.
What's rare about this graduating senior is that he was raised in a group home since age 12. His mother had died, leaving him in the care of abusive relatives. Just 2 percent of foster youth earn a bachelor's degree, research shows.
Mao is in that small club because of the Guardian Scholars, a program at San Francisco State that mimics, to the extent possible, the role of parents for students who have none.
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Summer vacation for Hawaii's schoolchildren starts on Wednesday. About 170,000 young people will be hitting the beach, the mall, grandma's house, the sofa -- all the places they have already been spending most Fridays for nearly the entire school year. Seventeen school days were sliced out of their educations by a series of school-closing teacher furloughs to help close a nearly $1 billion state budget gap.The furloughs were rightly deplored by parents and denounced by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and showed Hawaii's political and education establishment at its worst. When the first "furlough Friday" happened last October, we didn't imagine that Hawaii -- which has one statewide school district with a lackluster record of achievement -- would slouch through the rest of the school year without getting its kids back in their seats.
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Police estimate there are now more than 1,100 confirmed gang members in Madison and about 40 gangs, about 12 of which are the main Latino gangs.Related: Gangs & School Violence Forum audio, video & links.The Dane County Enhanced Youth Gang Prevention Task Force recommended in August 2007 that a countywide gang coordinator's position be considered. That group's co-chairman, former Madison police Capt. Luis Yudice, who's also security coordinator for the Madison School District, first called for a "comprehensive strategy so we can all work in unison" to address gang violence in September 2005.
Since then, Yudice said, staff in Madison schools are recognizing more issues involving gangs among students, which he attributes in part to greater awareness and training.
"We have gang-involved kids in probably most of our high schools and middle schools and some of our elementary schools," he said. Staff do a good job of keeping gang activity out of the schools, he said, and work closely with students, families, police and social workers in an effort to keep students out of gangs.
Locally, the gang issue is not unique to Madison schools. "We're seeing more gang activity in the suburban school districts," Yudice said, as well as the emergence of hate groups targeting blacks and Latinos in Madison, Deerfield, Cottage Grove and DeForest.
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These two documents [1MB .txt or 2MB PDF] include some email messages sent to "comments@madison.k12.wi.us" from 1/1/2009 through September, 2009.
I requested the messages via an open records request out of concerns expressed to me that public communications to this email address were not always making their way to our elected representatives on the Madison Board of Education. Another email address has since been created for direct public communication to the Board of education: board@madison.k12.wi.us
There has been extensive back and forth on the scope of the District's response along with the time, effort and expense required to comply with this request. I am thankful for the extensive assistance I received with this request.
I finally am appreciative of Attorney Dan Mallin's fulfillment (a few items remain to be vetted) and response, included below:
As we last discussed, attached are several hundreds of pages of e-mails (with non-MMSD emails shortened for privacy purposes) that:It would be good public policy to post all communications sent to the District. Such a simple effort may answer many questions and provide a useful look at our K-12 environment.(1) Are not SPAM / commercial solicitations / organizational messages directed to "school districts" generally
(2) Are not Pupil Records
(3) Are not auto-generated system messages (out of office; undeliverable, etc.)
(4) Are not inquiries from MMSD employees about how to access their work email via the web when the web site changed (which e-mails typically contained their home email address)
(5) Are not technical web-site related inquiries (e.g., this link is broken, etc.)
(6) Are not random employment inquiries / applications from people who didn't know to contact the Human Resources department and instead used the comments address (e.g., I'm a teacher and will be moving to Madison, what job's are open?).
(7) Are not geneology-related inquiries about relatives and/or long-lost friends/teachers/etc.
(8) Are not messages that seek basic and routine information that would be handled clerically(e.g., please tell me where I can find this form; how do I get a flyer approved for distribution; what school is ____ address assigned to; when is summer school enrollment, etc.)
Some of the above may have still slipped in, but the goal was to keep copying costs as low as possible. Once all of the e-mails within your original request were read to determine content, it took over 2 hours to isolate the attached messages electronically from the larger pool that also included obvious pupil records, but you've been more than patient with this process and you have made reasonable concessions that saved time for the District in other ways, and there will be no additional copying charge assessed.
I am indebted to Chan Stroman Roll for her never ending assistance on this and other matters.
Related: Vivek Wadhwa: The Open Gov Initiative: Enabling Techies to Solve Government Problems
Read more: http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/22/the-open-government-initiative-enabling-techies-to-solve-problems/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29#ixzz0ohshEHIG
While grandma flips through photo albums on her sleek iPad, government agencies (and most corporations) process mission-critical transactions on cumbersome web-based front ends that function by tricking mainframes into thinking that they are connected to CRT terminals. These systems are written in computer languages like Assembler and COBOL, and cost a fortune to maintain. I've written about California's legacy systems and the billions of dollars that are wasted on maintaining these. Given the short tenure of government officials, lobbying by entrenched government contractors, and slow pace of change in the enterprise-computing world, I'm not optimistic that much will change - even in the next decade. But there is hope on another front: the Open Government Initiative. This provides entrepreneurs with the data and with the APIs they need to solve problems themselves. They don't need to wait for the government to modernize its legacy systems; they can simply build their own apps.
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Instead of better officers, the academies produce burned-out midshipmen and cadets. They come to us thinking they've entered a military Camelot, and find a maze of petty rules with no visible future application. These rules are applied inconsistently by the administration, and tend to change when a new superintendent is appointed every few years. The students quickly see through assurances that "people die if you do X" (like, "leave mold on your shower curtain," a favorite claim of one recent administrator). We're a military Disneyland, beloved by tourists but disillusioning to the young people who came hoping to make a difference.Bruce Fleming websiteIn my experience, the students who find this most demoralizing are those who have already served as Marines and sailors (usually more than 5 percent of each incoming class), who know how the fleet works and realize that what we do on the military-training side of things is largely make-work. Academics, too, are compromised by the huge time commitment these exercises require. Yes, we still produce some Rhodes, Marshall and Truman Scholars. But mediocrity is the norm.
Meanwhile, the academy's former pursuit of excellence seems to have been pushed aside by the all-consuming desire to beat Notre Dame at football (as Navy did last year). To keep our teams in the top divisions of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, we fill officer-candidate slots with students who have been recruited primarily for their skills at big-time sports. That means we reject candidates with much higher predictors of military success (and, yes, athletic skills that are more pertinent to military service) in favor of players who, according to many midshipmen who speak candidly to me, often have little commitment to the military itself.
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One absolutely great thing that the folks at CPPS did was to include every single comment. There are pages of them so it takes awhile to read. But it is valuable reading because you start seeing a theme to them even as each one differs somewhat in its issue.What did people say? If I had to sum it up, it would be two things. One, there is almost zero feeling that Dr. Goodloe-Johnson listens to parents. There were several comments that applauded her strong stance (which many others thought autocratic) or the changes she has made in the district . I didn't see one comment saying she was approachable or was someone who collaborates well with the community.
Two, is the overwhelming sense that she is hurting the district, either through her lack of ability to engage/motivate/inspire and/or the amount of churn that she has caused in the district with not a lot to show for it in terms of results.
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A new study comparing reading skills of fourth- and eighth-grade children in 18 urban school systems once again places Milwaukee Public Schools near the bottom of the ladder, a pattern of underachievement that gave voice to worries Thursday about the future of Milwaukee's children and calls - yet again - for a greater sense of urgency to improve.In a set of national reading tests, Milwaukee's fourth-graders outperformed only Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia, while its eighth-graders outperformed only Detroit, Fresno, Calif., and Washington, D.C., according to the results of the Trial Urban District Assessment, a special project of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress is a periodic national assessment, often referred to as the Nation's Report Card, that allows for state-to-state comparisons in core academic subjects. The urban district study isolates scores among a number of the country's high-minority, high-poverty school systems to better compare how those students are doing.
All of the voluntary participants in the program are from cities with populations of at least 250,000, ranging from districts serving Fresno, Calif., and Louisville, Ky., to those in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago.
This is the first time that Milwaukee Public Schools participated in the reading tests for the urban districts. Last year, results from the math tests also carried bad news for MPS, which did better than only Detroit at the eighth-grade level.
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Keeping just 20 books in the home can boost children's chances of doing well at school, according to a major study.Regular access to books has a direct impact on pupils' results, irrespective of parents' own education, occupation and social class, it was claimed.
Researchers said that children coming from a "bookish home" remained in education for around three years longer than young people born into families with empty bookshelves.
The study, led by Nevada University, in the United States, comes despite continuing concerns over a decline in reading at school.
It is feared that some teachers are being forced to dump books - and teach children using basic worksheets - to boost their performance in literacy tests.
Michael Rosen, the former Children's Laureate, has said that many pupils now go all the way through their formative years at school without reading a single novel.
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Genetic watchdog groups want UC Berkeley to suspend plans to ask incoming freshmen and transfer students to supply a DNA sample to participate in what is considered the first mass genetic testing by a university.Next month, about 5,500 first-year students will receive testing kits in the mail and be asked to submit DNA swabs to test three genes. The genes include those related to the ability to break down lactose, metabolize alcohol and absorb folates.
Berkeley officials said the university has followed appropriate privacy and consent procedures and has no intent to changes its plans.
But the Center for Genetics and Society, a Berkeley public interest organization, and the Council for Responsible Genetics, which is based in Cambridge, Mass., say the project disregards the potential harmful use of the information.
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We're in graduation days for the Class of 2010. 1.6 million bright-faced young men and women getting undergraduate degrees, college diplomas, across the country.Ashbrook included a segment from media "star" Anderson Cooper's commencement address at Tulane in his show. While not a fan of the generally thin coverage provided by the "Mainstream Media", Cooper's story of determination, risk and luck is worth a look:And the job market? Brutal. It was brutal last year, of course. Now it's brutal stacked on brutal. 19.6 percent unemployment for Americans under 25. The highest since 1948.
Just one in four new college grads who applied for a job has one. Twenty five percent. And many have applied for scores of jobs.
This Hour, On Point: we talk to the Class of 2010 about the job hunt - and survival strategies in the economy of 2010.
When I graduated there were hiring freezes at most TV news networks. I tried for months to get an entry-level job at ABC news, answering phones, xeroxing, whatever, but I couldn't get hired. At the time it was crushing. But in retrospect, not getting that entry-level job, was the best thing that could have happened to me.After months of waiting, I decided if no one would give me a chance as a reporter, I should take a chance. If no one would give me an opportunity, I would have to make my own opportunity.
I wanted to be a war correspondent, so I decided to just start going to wars. As you can imagine, my mom was thrilled about the plan. I had a friend make a fake press pass for me on a mac, and I borrowed a home video camera... and I snuck into Burma and hooked up with some students fighting the Burmese government... then I moved onto Somalia in the early days of the famine and fighting there.
I figured if I went places that were dangerous, I wouldn't have as much competition, and because I was willing to sleep on the roofs of buildings, and live on just a few dollars a day, I was able to charge very little for my stories. As ridiculous as it sounds, my plan worked, and after two years on my own shooting stories in war zones, I was hired by ABC news as a correspondent. I was the youngest correspondent they had hired in many years. Had I gotten the entry-level job I'd wanted, I would have never become a network correspondent so quickly, I probably would never have even become one at all. The things which seem like heartbreaking setbacks, sometimes turn out to be lucky breaks.
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The progressive decline of students' ability in English worries me as a secondary school teacher. Do people know students are no longer formally tested in grammar?Instead, it would appear that our curriculum is leaning toward encouraging students to be more creative and expressive. I would argue that this can be beneficial as long as students have a basic understanding of the foundation in the language.
A glaringly clear example of this going wrong is when Chinese medium of instruction students, who cannot demonstrate a clear understanding of the tenses, are asked to have a group discussion about a book or film.
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The Unincorporated Man is a science fiction novel in which shares of each person's income stream can be bought and sold. (Initial ownership rights are person 75%, parents 20%, government 5%--there are no other taxes--and people typically sell shares to finance education and other training.)The hero, Justin Cord a recently unfrozen business person from our time, opposes incorporation but has no good arguments against the system; instead he rants on about "liberty" and how bad the idea of owning and being owned makes him feel. The villain, in contrast, offers reasoned arguments in favor of the system. In this scene he asks Cord to remember the starving poor of Cord's time and how incorporation would have been a vast improvement:
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The University of California at Berkeley is an experimental place, and sometimes those experiments start as early as the summer before new students set foot on campus.This summer, the university's College of Letters and Science -- home to three quarters of Berkeley's 25,000 undergraduates -- will ask freshmen and transfers to return a cotton swab covered in cells collected from their inner cheeks in an effort to introduce them to the emerging field of personalized medicine.
Like so many other institutions, the college usually asks students to read a specific book or watch an assigned movie in the weeks before classes start, to inform discussion during orientation and throughout the fall. But a reading assignment didn't make sense for something as cutting-edge and personalized as genetic analysis.
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We hear a lot of talk about the importance of educational achievement and the knee-buckling costs of college. What if you could get kids to complete two years of college by the time they finish high school?Related: Credit for Non-Madison School District Courses.That is happening in New York City. I had breakfast a few weeks ago with Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, to talk about Bard High School Early College, a school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that gives highly motivated students the opportunity to earn both a high school diploma and a two-year associate of arts degree in the four years that are usually devoted to just high school.
When these kids sail into college, they are fully prepared to handle the course loads of sophomores or juniors. Essentially, the students complete their high school education by the end of the 10th grade and spend the 11th and 12th grades mastering a rigorous two-year college curriculum.
The school, a fascinating collaboration between Bard College and the city's Department of Education, was founded in 2001 as a way of dealing, at least in part, with the systemic failures of the education system. American kids drop out of high school at a rate of one every 26 seconds. And, as Dr. Botstein noted, completion rates at community colleges have been extremely disappointing.
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On March 30 2010, President Obama signed "historic student loan legislation" into law. The Education Reconciliation Act is intended to generate $61 billion in savings, by streamlining the student loan program and reinvesting the money to make college more affordable. Sadly, it is too little, too late.Once a Great Nation
The student loan burden on today´s working population has already destroyed the economy, practically removed any last semblance of freedom in our workplace and just served to fatten the wallets of the bankers, lawyers and corporate suits that now run the country. The virtues that once made America a great nation have been abused by those entrusted with its care, and even $61 billion will not reverse the situation that we now find ourselves in.
The History
In 1944, the GI Bill ("Servicemen´s Readjustment Act") was enacted to help war veterans further their educations and, in turn, increase the number of employable persons in order to strengthen the U.S. economy. Throughout the next twenty years, improvements were made to this system through the National Defence Student Loan Program (1958 - aka Perkins Loan Program) and the Higher Education Act of 1965 - creating the Guaranteed Student Loan Program.
Sallie Mae
Although it would be easy to say that the rot set in with the founding of Sallie Mae in 1972, you have to acknowledge that they only exasperated later problems through their incompetence and greed. In 1972, people still worked their way through college, and Sallie Mae was established to simply facilitate loans to those who needed them, rather than lend any funds themselves.
No. The cause of all today´s problems are those pillars of education - the colleges.
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I can remember once when my eyes started to wander, ever so slightly, over to my neighboring classmate's desk in a high school math class."Amy Graff keep your eyes on your own paper, and go sit in the back of the class," my teacher screamed.
The school's football coach was also my math teacher so you can only imagine the harsh tone he used when he said those words.
I was humiliated and my eyes never wandered again.
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WHAT'S the key to success in the United States?Short of becoming a reality TV star, the answer is rote and, some would argue, rather knee-jerk: Earn a college degree.
The idea that four years of higher education will translate into a better job, higher earnings and a happier life -- a refrain sure to be repeated this month at graduation ceremonies across the country -- has been pounded into the heads of schoolchildren, parents and educators. But there's an underside to that conventional wisdom. Perhaps no more than half of those who began a four-year bachelor's degree program in the fall of 2006 will get that degree within six years, according to the latest projections from the Department of Education. (The figures don't include transfer students, who aren't tracked.)
For college students who ranked among the bottom quarter of their high school classes, the numbers are even more stark: 80 percent will probably never get a bachelor's degree or even a two-year associate's degree.
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If I were looking for people who had done much to curb the use of performance-enhancing drugs, I think I might take Arnold Schwarzenegger over Bud Selig. Apparently, the Taylor Hooton Foundation thinks differently.NEW YORK -- Commissioner Bud Selig was named the first recipient of Taylor's Award, presented by the Taylor Hooton Foundation to an individual who has made a major impact on efforts to educate and protect American youth from the dangers of using performance-enhancing drugs.
...
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It's a question that can make most any mom stop in her tracks: "Can I wear makeup?"In a world where little girls of 5 or 6 get spa treatments and mega-birthday parties, can lip gloss and mascara be such a leap?
What's the right age? What's the right "starter makeup"? Why can't she wait just a little while?
It's a question that's popping up sooner than it once did. Little girls whose ages have not yet reached the double-digits are wanting to wear makeup more and more.
A new report by the NPD Group, which researches consumer trends, finds that makeup usage is going up in the fresh-faced group known as tweens (ages 8 to 12).
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The true aim of the humanities is to prepare citizens for exercising their freedom responsibly.In 1867, when he discharged his main responsibility as honorary rector of St. Andrews University by delivering an address on liberal education to the students, the philosopher and civil servant John Stuart Mill felt compelled to defend the place of the sciences alongside the humanities. Today it is the connection of the humanities to a free mind and citizenship in a free society that requires defense.
For years, an array of influential voices has been calling for our nation's schools and universities to improve science and math education. Given the globalized and high-tech world, the prize, pundits everywhere argue, goes to the nations that summon the foresight and discipline to educate scientists and engineers capable of developing tomorrow's ideas.
No doubt science and math are vital. But all of the attention being paid to these disciplines obscures a more serious problem: the urgent need to reform liberal education.
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The moment of truth for Ivan and Olga Rojas came in 2008, when their son Esteban finished his sophomore year at the Blackstone Academy Charter School in Pawtucket and told his parents he wanted to transfer to Central Falls High School. The thought alarmed them. The high school had been under-performing for years, and Esteban's mother feared there were gangs and drugs at the school.For Blanca Giraldo the reckoning came in February 2009, when Central Falls High School Principal Elizabeth Legault sent a letter asking her to come to the school. Legault told Giraldo that her daughter Valerie Florez was failing: she was frequently late, skipping class and not doing her work.
For Jackie Wilson, a random act of violence forced her to uproot her daughter Sakira during her junior year at Central Falls High.
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A bill introduced this month in Congress would put the federal and state governments in the business of tracking how fat, or skinny, American children are.States receiving federal grants provided for in the bill would be required to annually track the Body Mass Index of all children ages 2 through 18. The grant-receiving states would be required to mandate that all health care providers in the state determine the Body Mass Index of all their patients in the 2-to-18 age bracket and then report that information to the state government. The state government, in turn, would be required to report the information to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for analysis.
The Healthy Choices Act--introduced by Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.), a member of the House Ways and Means Committee--would establish and fund a wide range of programs and regulations aimed at reducing obesity rates by such means as putting nutritional labels on the front of food products, subsidizing businesses that provide fresh fruits and vegetables, and collecting BMI measurements of patients and counseling those that are overweight or obese.
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via a kind reader's email. The survey is apparently available via the District's "Infinite Campus" system:
1. The Embedded Honors option provided work that was challenging for my child.o Strongly disagree
o Disagree
o Neither agree nor disagree
o Agree
o Strongly agree2. Please provide an explanation to Question 1.
(empty box)
3. The Embedded Honors work allowed my child to go more in-depth into the content of the course.o Strongly disagree
o Disagree
o Neither agree nor disagree
o Agree
o Strongly agree
4. Please provide an explanation to Question 3.(empty box)
5. For Embedded Honors, my child had to do more work than other students.o Strongly disagree
o Disagree
o Neither agree nor disagree
o Agree
o Strongly agree
6. For Embedded Honors, my child had to do more challenging work than other students.o Strongly disagree
o Disagree
o Neither agree nor disagree
o Agree
o Strongly agree
7. Mark the following learning options that were part of your child's experience in the Embedded Honors for this corse.o extension opportunities of class activities
o class discussions and labs to enhance my learning
o flexible pace of instruction
o access to right level of challenge in coursework
o opportunities to focus on my personal interests
o independent work (projects)
o opportunities to demonstrate my knowledge
o opportunities to explore a field of study
o additional reading assignments
o more challenging reading assignments
o additional writing assignments
o helpful teacher feedback on my work
o activities with other Embedded Honors students
o more higher-level thinking, less memorization
8. My child benefited from the Embedded Honors option for the course(s) for which he/she took, compared to courses without Embedded Honors.o Strongly disagree
o Disagree
o Neither agree nor disagree
o Agree
o Strongly agree
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When Christopher Xu turned 2, his mother's worst fears were confirmed. The other babies at her son's birthday party babbled, gestured and used simple words as they played and interacted with their parents and each other. But Christopher was different.Much more on autism here and via Wolfram Alpha."He was locked in his own world," Sophia Sun recalls. "No eye contact. No pointing. No laughing at cartoons or looking at me when I talk to him."
In fact, Sun says, she and her husband, Yingchun Xu, both Chinese-born computer engineers who earned their graduate degrees in Vancouver, British Columbia, had never known anyone with this kind of remote, inaccessible child.
The couple were living with their older daughters, Iris and Laura, in a Chicago suburb when Christopher was born. Both girls were interactive, affectionate babies, but Christopher paid little attention to his mother, his family or his surroundings. As a toddler he spent most of his time lining up his favorite toys in order or spinning himself in circles -- over and over again. When the Xu family went to an air show, his mother pointed to the planes roaring overhead, saying, "Christopher, look at that! Look up!" but the little boy just spun around and around, oblivious to the noise or the world surrounding him.
Now Christopher is 11, and he will soon graduate from the fifth grade at Madison's John Muir Elementary to head off to middle school. Thanks to the love and persistence of his family, powerful early training, insightful teachers and accepting classmates, his story has changed dramatically, and his remarkable abilities are increasingly apparent.
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WILX-TV LANSING, MI -- For last year's graduating Class of 2009, women dominated at every level of higher education. Here's the national breakdown: for every 100 men, 142 women graduated with a bachelor's, 159 women completed a master's and 107 women got a doctoral degree. University of Michigan Economics Professor Dr. Mark Perry says similar numbers are in tow this year (see chart above for the Class of 2010)."What's happening is historic and unprecedented and we're seeing this huge structural change in higher education," says Perry. "When it happens year by year, we just don't pay as close attention." But Perry says attention now must be paid. According to the U.S. Department of Education, in 1971, the percentage of men outnumbered women in degrees conferred 61 to 39, but by 2017, expect a complete reversal.
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Under President Obama's new $4.35 billion Race to the Top program, states can compete for funds by creating programs that improve the quality of their schools. The idea of rewarding school reform initiatives is good, but one-time grants from the federal government will not improve our public education system by itself.Mr. Williams is a state senator from Pennsylvania and a candidate in the May 18 Democratic primary for governor.Why? Because the $400 million grant Pennsylvania now seeks represents less than half of 1% of the $23 billion spent annually in my state's public school system. Given the thousands of dollars already being spent per student, an additional $56 per child will be insignificant--unless it is accompanied by comprehensive school-choice reform.
Pennsylvania should adopt reform based on the same premise as the Race to the Top initiative: that competition for taxpayer dollars improves the quality of education.
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Over the past 40 years or so, child advocates have given a good amount of lip service to the view that adults, especially educators, should respect children's "individual differences."In theory, this recognizes the fact that every trait is distributed in the general population in a manner represented by the bell-shaped curve. Whether the issue is general intelligence, sociability, optimism, musical aptitude, artistic ability, or mechanical skill (to mention but a few), relatively few people are "gifted" and relatively few people are disadvantaged.
Whatever the characteristic, most folks are statistically "normal." That is, they possess an adequate amount, enough to get by.
People gifted in more than a couple of areas are rare, and people gifted in one area but lacking in another are not unusual. A person with outstanding musical aptitude, for example, may be noticeably lacking in social skills, and a person with outstanding verbal skills may be mechanically inept.
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Students are not the only ones at Adelante Dual Language Academy in San Jose who are graded on their classroom participation. Parents are, too.Parents of children attending the public elementary school receive a check, plus or minus based on how much they volunteer in class. If mom and dad slack off they even might get a call from the principal.
Inspired by Adelante, now San Jose's Alum Rock Union Elementary School District is at work on a proposal to require the families of all its 13,000 students to do 30 hours of volunteering per school year. Many of the schools in the district, where 88 percent of the students are poor, do not even have a Parent-Teachers Association.
"We are trying to create a culture of strong parent-guardian-family participation," trustee Gustavo Gonzalez, whose children attend Adelante, told The San Jose Mercury News.
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In late 2000, Wes Moore, an ex-military officer and soon-to-be Rhodes scholar, came across a series of articles in the Baltimore Sun that caught his attention. They chronicled the aftermath of a robbery gone awry: A few months earlier a group of armed men had broken into a Baltimore jewelry store, and in the process of making their escape, shot and killed an off-duty police officer named Bruce Prothero. It wasn't just the violence of the act that shocked Moore, it was the name of one of the suspects: Wes Moore.Several years later, when Moore (the Rhodes scholar) returned from his studies at Oxford, the story continued to haunt him. Here were two men with the same name, from the same city, even the same age, and two dramatically different trajectories. In the hopes of finding out why, Moore began writing and visiting the man (who had since been sentenced to life in prison). The result is "The Other Wes Moore," Moore's vivid and richly detailed new book about both men's childhoods in Baltimore and the Bronx.
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Infants aged 5 months react very differently to a fearful face than those aged 7 months. "At the age of 7 months babies will watch a fearful face for longer than a happy face, and their attentiveness level as measured by EEG is higher after seeing a fearful than a happy face. By contrast, infants aged 5 months watch both faces, when they are shown side by side, for just as long, and there is no difference in the intensity of attention in favour of the fearful face," said Mikko Peltola, researcher at the University of Tampere, at the Academy's Science Breakfast this week.It seems that at age 6 months, important developmental changes take place in the way that infants process significant emotional expressions. A fearful face attracts intense attention by the age of 7 months. In addition, it takes longer for infants to shift their attention away from fearful than from happy and neutral faces.
"Our interpretation of this is to suggest that the brain mechanisms that specialise in emotional response and especially in processing threatening stimuli regulate and intensify the processing of facial expressions by age 7 months," Peltola said.
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It began for Alyssa Pometta, as these habits so often do, with the soft stuff. We are talking, of course, about lip gloss. She began wearing it in fourth grade - Bonne Bell's Lip Smackers, a girl's rite of passage - after yearsof wearing ChapStick and pretending it was Revlon. But the thrill of flavoured lip gloss was fleeting, and in January, 11-year-old Alyssa asked her mother, Phyllis Pometta, if she could graduate to the hard stuff: lipstick, eyeliner and mascara.Pometta's first instinct was to send her daughter to her room, but she reconsidered. Instead, she took her for a makeover.
"I'm using the choose-your-battles kind of parenting," Pometta, an independent publicist, reasons. "I figured, better that she's informed and has the right tools than she goes into it blindly with her friends in the bathroom and comes out looking like a clown."
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The district faced a $3 million revenue shortfall for the coming fiscal year when it began. The board elected to cover the shortage by taking $2 million out of the district's $5.5 million fund balance and the remaining $1 million through spending cuts."Every decision at this point is tougher than the last," superintendent Paul Durand told the board as it began weighing the fate of historically popular and successful programs and student activities.
Most of the cuts came $2,000 or $3,000 at a time from a list of programs prepared by district administrators.
Challenged to find a way to reduce the music budget without doing away with fourth-grade orchestra, music department staff and district principals managed to trim more than $13,000 by cutting travel and other expenses from the marching and pep band programs. The savings still put the marching bands on the street for local parades and the Minnesota State Fair and puts the pep band in the stands for sporting events.
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The number of children born outside marriage in the United States has increased dramatically to four out of ten of all births.Figures show that 41 per cent of children born in 2008 did not have married parents - up from 28 per cent in 1990.
Researchers have concluded that although Christian values still play an important role in American society, public attitudes have changed.
Having a child out of wedlock does not carry the stigma and shame it once did, they say.
The study also found that in America there is a declining number of teenage mothers and rising numbers of older parents.
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Kudzu, (Pueraria lobata), I learn from Wikipedia, was "...introduced from Japan into the United States in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, where it was promoted as a forage crop and an ornamental plant. From 1935 to the early 1950s, the Soil Conservation Service encouraged farmers in the southeastern United States to plant kudzu to reduce soil erosion... The Civilian Conservation Corps planted it widely for many years. It was subsequently discovered that the southeastern US has near-perfect conditions for kudzu to grow out of control--hot, humid summers, frequent rainfall, and temperate winters with few hard freezes...As such, the once-promoted plant was named a pest weed by the United States Department of Agriculture in 1953."
We now have, I suggest, an analogous risk from the widespread application of "the evidence-based techniques and processes of literacy instruction, k-12." At least one major foundation and one very old and influential college for teachers are now promoting what I have described as "guidelines, parameters, checklists, techniques, rubrics, processes and the like, as props to substitute for students' absent motivation to describe or express in writing something that they have learned."
Most of these literacy experts are psychologists and educators, rather than historians or authors of literature. Samuel Johnson, an 18th century author some may remember, once wrote that "an author will turn over half a library to produce one book." A recent major foundation report suggests that Dr. Johnson didn't know what he was talking about when it comes to adolescents:
"Some educators feel that the 'adolescent literacy crisis' can be resolved simply by having adolescents read more books. This idea is based on the misconception that the source of the problem is 'illiteracy.' The truth is that adolescents--even those who have already 'learned how to read'--need systematic support to learn how to 'read to learn' across a wide variety of contexts and content." So, no need for adolescents to read books, just give them lots of literacy kudzu classes in "rubrics, guidelines, parameters, checklists, techniques, and processes..."
Other literacy kudzu specialists also suggest that reading books is not so important, instead that: (to quote a recent Washington Post article by Psychologist Dolores Perin of Teachers College, Columbia) "many students cannot learn well from a content curriculum because they have difficulty reading assigned text and fulfilling subject-area writing assignments. Secondary content teachers need to understand literacy processes and become aware of evidence-based reading and writing techniques to promote learners' understanding of the content material being taught. Extended school-based professional development should be provided through collaborations between literacy and content-area specialists."
E.D. Hirsch has called this "technique" philosophy of literacy instruction, "How-To-Ism" and says that it quite uselessly tries to substitute methods and skills for the knowledge that students must have in order to read well and often, and to write on academic subjects in school.
Literacy Kudzu has been with us for a long time, but it has received new fertilizer from large private foundation and now federal standards grants which will only help it choke, where it can, attention to the reading of complete books and the writing of serious academic papers by the students in our schools.
Writing in Insidehighereducation.com, Lisa Roney recently said: "But let me also point out that the rise of Composition Studies over the past 30 or 40 years does not seem to have led to a populace that writes better."
Educrat Professors and Educrat Psychologists who have, perhaps, missed learning much about history and literature during their own educations, and have not made any obvious attempt to study their value in their education research, of course fall back on what they feel they can do: teach processes, skills, methods, rubrics, parameters, and techniques of literacy instruction. Their efforts, wherever they are successful, will be a disaster, in my view, for teachers and students who care about academic writing and about history and literature in the schools.
In a recent issue of Harvard Magazine an alum wrote: "Dad ( a professional writer) used to tell us what he felt was the best advice he ever had on good writing. One of his professors was the legendary Charles Townsend Copeland, A.B. 1882, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. Copeland didn't collect themes and grade them. Rather, he made an appointment with each student to come to his quarters in Hollis Hall to read his theme and receive comments from the Master..."Dad started reading his offering and heard occasional groans and sighs of anguish from various locations in the (room). Finally, Copeland said in pained tones, 'Stop, Mr. Duncan, stop.' Dad stopped. After several seconds of deep silence, Copeland asked, 'Mr. Duncan, what are you trying to say?' Dad explained what he was trying to say. Said Copeland, 'Why didn't you write it down?'"
This is the sort of advice, completely foreign to the literacy kudzu community, which understands that in writing one first must have something to say (knowledge) and then one must work to express that knowledge so it may be understood. That may not play to the literacy kudzu community's perception of their strengths, but it has a lot more to do with academic reading and writing than anything they are working to inflict on our teachers and students.
I hope they, including the foundations and the university consultant world, may before too long pause to re-consider their approach to literacy instruction, before we experience the damage from this pest-weed which they are presently, perhaps unwittingly, in the method-technique-process of spreading in our schools.
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The Chronicle:
Arne Duncan, the U.S. secretary of education, has asked the National Center for Education Statistics and the Office of Postsecondary Education to conduct a study of "restrictive" policies that make it more difficult for students to transfer credits from one institution to another. Higher-education experts have argued that loosening such policies would help the nation reach President Obama's goal of increasing the number of college graduates.
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The Great Depression did not have too many silver linings, but it did change the way Americans thought about education, clearly for the better. In 1930, only 30 percent of teenagers graduated from high school. By 1940, after a decade in which there often was nothing better to do than stay in school, the number had jumped to 50 percent. The Depression didn't just make Americans tougher. It made them smarter.In the years that followed, these newly skilled workers helped create an economic colossus. They were the factory workers, office clerks and managers who built up General Motors, U.S. Steel, R.C.A. and I.B.M. So when our own Great Recession began more than two years ago, it was reasonable to hope that something similar, if less extreme, might take place.
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"Medical school is the wrong place to train psychiatrists," writes Daniel Carlat in his new book, Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry - A Doctor's Revelations About a Profession in Crisis. In place of the sort of education that makes psychiatrists fifteen-minutes-per-patient pill dispensers, and gives them little in the way of slower, psychotherapeutic skills, he proposes something like a "doctor of mental health" program: Perhaps "two years of combined medical and psychological courses, followed by three years of psychiatric residency."An ego- and money-driven need to be the equal of other MD's will, as Carlat knows, probably keep this from happening any time soon; indeed, a need to feel that one's clinical activity has the same empirical warrant as a heart surgeon's will also keep the pills flowing.
Yet I lost track of the number of times Carlat, in the course of this book, cautions the reader that
new diagnoses are based on votes of committees of psychiatrists, rather than neurobiological testing. Because diagnosis in psychiatry is more art than science, the field is vulnerable to 'disease-mongering,' the expansion of disease definitions in order to pump up the market for medication treatment.
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Driving through some of this city's neighborhoods is like driving through an alternate, horrifying universe, a place where no one thinks it's safe to be a child.You follow a map in which the coordinates are laid out in blood. Over there, in front of that convenience store, is where Fred Couch, 16, was shot to death last December. The Couch boy went to the same school, Christian Fenger Academy, as Derrion Albert, an honor student who was beaten with wooden planks and kicked to death three months earlier in a broad daylight attack that was recorded on a cellphone by an onlooker.
Right there, on South Manistee Avenue, is where a 7-year-old girl riding her scooter was shot in the head and critically injured a few weeks ago.
And here, on East 92nd Street, is where a toddler, just 20 months old, was shot in the head and killed in the back seat of her father's car.
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A growing number of school districts are trying to break up concentrations of poverty on their campuses by taking students' family income into consideration in school assignments.Some of the districts replaced race with socioeconomic status as a determining indicator after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that using race as the primary factor in assigning students to schools violates the Constitution. Other districts that take family income into account never included race as a factor.
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The recession has not been kind to many private schools.Nationally, public school enrollment is rising as the recession has forced many parents to pull their kids from private schools. In Wisconsin, the number of students enrolled in private schools fell more than 2 percent from 2007 to 2009, according to the state Department of Public Instruction.
But Edgewood High School of the Sacred Heart, under the leadership of President Judd Schemmel, seems to be bucking the trend. Enrollment at the nearly 130-year-old school during Schemmel's five-year tenure has risen a little over 5 percent, from 626 to 660 this year; Schemmel has his eye on an optimal enrollment of between 700 and 725 students.
The school, not traditionally known as an academic powerhouse, has also seen improved academic performance under Schemmel; elite universities from Harvard to Stanford and Princeton to Yale accepted Edgewood students from the class of 2009. It is also on more stable financial footing than it was five years ago, with its debt shrinking from just under $1 million to about $335,000 today, despite a number of building improvements and classroom renovations.
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For legions of 4- and 5-year-olds and their parents, the test known as the E.R.B. is the entree into the world of private schooling, its pressure and price a taste of the expensive years to come.Gabriella Rowe, head of the Mandell School, which has dropped the test. "None of us can truly trust the E.R.B. results because the prepping materials are so accessible," she said.
But parents who grumble about a test that they fear could determine their children's educational future now have company: some of the private schools themselves.
At least two schools in Manhattan have dropped the exam as a requirement for admission starting this fall, bucking a trend of more widespread use of such tests. More broadly, a powerful coalition of New York schools is contending that pretest preparation, which they believe skews the results, has become so widespread as to cast doubt on the value of the test.
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The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind--creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These people--artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers--will now reap society's richest rewards and share its greatest joys." --Daniel Pink, A Whole New MindI remember when my twins entered kindergarten at our community public school. All of the parents were invited to the school for an introductory presentation on the teachers' goals for learning in the upcoming year. Everything sounded wonderful. The 25 children in the classroom would be organized into small groups. Creating art would introduce them to science and math concepts. They would be exposed to different cultures by learning songs in different languages. Time would be allotted for daily storytelling followed by discussion. The teachers described an interdisciplinary, imaginative and stimulating year ahead, complete with field trips and physical, active play.
While listening to the teachers' presentation at my twins' school, I had a moment of clarity: The kindergarten classroom is the design studio. All of the learning activities that take place inside the kindergarten classroom are freakishly similar to the everyday environment of my design studio in the "real world." In an architectural design studio, we work as an interdisciplinary global team to solve the complex problems of the built environment in a variety of different cultural contexts. We do this most effectively through storytelling--sharing personal experiences--with the support of digital media and tools. A variety of activities--reflective and collaborative, right-brain and left-brain--happen simultaneously in an open environment. Like the design studio, the kindergarten environment places human interaction above all else.
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Via Chris Lydon at Open Source, Thomas Oboe Lee, a conductor on faculty at Boston College and a founding member of Composers in Red Sneakers, has filmed his own five-year-old conducting Rite of Spring. The kid has clearly seen some conductors at work; his body language is all in his knees and at the center of his tiny frame, not waving around in his hands. Sometimes he'll casually bring a section in without looking. He may need a sturdy rail at the back of his podium, as you can see if you scroll forward to 2:10 or so.
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An innovative study of 17 schools along the East Coast suggests that putting literacy coaches in schools can help boost students' reading skills by as much as 32 percent over three years.The study, which was presented here on May 1 during the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, is as notable for its methods as for its results. It's among the first of what many scholars hope will be a new generation of studies that offer solid clues not only to what works but also when, under what conditions, and to some extent, why.
The study finds that reading gains are greatest in schools where teachers receive a larger amount of coaching. It also finds that the amount of coaching that teachers receive varies widely and is influenced by an array of factors, including relationships among staff members and how teachers envision their roles.
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The Instructional Technology Council recently released a report on the trends in distance education and online learning at community colleges. Among its findings: Enrollment in distance education courses increased by over 20%, while overall community college enrollment increased by less than 2%. Clearly online learning offers many opportunities to students, teachers and academic institutions. But what are the opportunities for entrepreneurs?The Case for OpenCourseWare
Of course, entrepreneurs can benefit themselves from taking online classes. As Bill Gates said in a recent speech at M.I.T., he's a "super happy user" of the university's OpenCourseWare program, which offers free online courses, noting that he "retook physics" along with over a dozen of the other online offerings. Gates praised OpenCourseWare for offering a blend of the best of video technology, professional instruction and testing, and argued that accreditation too should be separated from place-based learning. Gates stated that "What's been done so far has had very modest funding. This is an area we need more resources, more bright minds, and certainly one that I want to see how the foundation could make a contribution to this."
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As a former administrator, I have had the good fortune to visit a significant number of classrooms over the years. Because I have been witness to bad or indifferent teaching, there has always been a special feeling of excitement during those times I was able to witness the talents of a true professional at work in the classroom. It also has encouraged me to be reflective on my years in the classroom.Having begun teaching in the 1970's at the high school level, my approach in the early years was very traditional. My classroom would have been best described as teacher-centered and my organizational skills combined with my ability to relate to students created a room that earned me high marks from my administrators.
In the early nineties though, it became increasingly clear that my methods were growing less popular with students. In addition, I found myself less and less successful on the most important element, student achievement. My classroom was well-managed and discipline issues seldom arose, but my students seemed to be losing interest in the subjects that I taught.
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Art From the Start The current rage in education is STEM, or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. But creative types are working valiantly to turn STEM into STEAM - with the A standing for the arts. At the Boston Arts Academy, for instance, the arts are infused in every subject. While creative pursuits are often the first to go when budgets are cut, this high school continues to innovate as it engages students through the arts. The ninth grade just wrapped up a unit on African civilization with a multimedia celebration called "Africa Lives." The students got their hands dirty. And they mastered the material."High school shouldn't be a preparation for life," says co-headmaster Linda Nathan. "It should be life."
Nathan is not alone in her belief that the arts foster deep learning. Young Audiences of Massachusetts, a nonprofit that brings artists into schools, is inaugurating an arts integration program at the Salemwood Elementary School in Malden this fall. Visiting artists will help teachers incorporate the arts into the literacy and social studies curriculums. If the pilot program takes off, Young Audiences hopes to make it a model for other Extended Learning Time schools like Salemwood. Explains executive director Diane Michalowski Freedland: "We need to think big."
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This is the story the teachers unions wish never happened. This is the story that proves all their hysterical demands for more money are nothing but a sham. This is the story that makes the unions and education bureaucrats sick to their stomachs. This is the personal story of my daughter Dakota Root.In each of the books I've written, I've taken great care to acknowledge my beautiful and brilliant little girl, Dakota. I often noted that Dakota and her parents were aiming for her acceptance at either Harvard or Stanford and would accept nothing less. The easy part is aiming for gold. The hard part is achieving it. "Homeschool to Harvard" is a story about turning dreams into reality.
Dakota has been home-schooled since birth. While other kids spent their school days being indoctrinated to believe competition and winning are unimportant, and that others are to blame for their shortcomings and failures, Dakota was learning the value of work ethic, discipline, sacrifice and personal responsibility. While other kids were becoming experts at partying, Dakota and her dad debated current events at the dinner table. While other kids shopped and gossiped, Dakota was devouring books on science, math, history, literature, politics and business. I often traveled to business events and political speeches with my home-schooled daughter in tow. While other kids came home to empty homes, Dakota's mom, dad, or both were there every day to share meals and a bedtime kiss and prayer. Despite a crazy schedule of business and politics, I'm proud to report that I've missed very few bedtime kisses with my four home-schooled kids.
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Ben Bromley, via a kind reader:
It's 6:30 p.m., that after-dinner time slot when my daughter and I play our least-favorite game show, "Are You Smarter Than A Third-Grader?"Claire's homework often consists of a page of math problems. And when a math-averse third-grader teams with her writer father to tackle the evening's homework, what typically results is math problems.
My daughter is a bookworm and, like her father, a bit of a right-brainer. We are the type of people who can conjugate verbs in multiple languages, sketch the image of a long-lost friend from memory, or summarize the day's events in haiku. But we couldn't balance a checkbook if the Earth's fate depended on it.
A sheet of math problems gives us a cold chill, like when someone walks over your grave, or you accidentally walk in on your grandmother in the bathtub. Claire already is being asked to multiply and divide double-digit figures, and last week she brought home a worksheet requiring her to compute the area and volume of prisms. I don't remember being asked to handle such concepts in third grade. But maybe I blocked it out, just like the mental image of Grandma in the tub.
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Most employers and recruiters agree that the top reason that makes them reject a resume is spelling mistakes. Some mistakes are so funny that we couldn't let recruiters have all the fun and put together this list for your enjoyment.If you don't want to end up on this list, there is a simple rule to follow: proofread, proofread again, and then have someone else proofread your resume and your cover letter. For more tips, make sure to read Resume Tips Everyone Needs to Know and Cover Letter for Your Resume - How to Write One that Doesn't Get Thrown Away?
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Reasonable people may disagree as to whether it's appropriate for middle-school-age children to have a Facebook page or belong to any other online social network.Anthony Orsini, principal at the Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgewood, N.J., does not seem to be a reasonable person, at least not based upon my reading of an e-mail he sent to parents that all but accuses them of child abuse should they allow their youngsters to use such networks. From a local CBS television station's Web site:
"It is time for every single member of the BF Community to take a stand! There is absolutely no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site! ... Let me repeat that - there is absolutely, positively no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site! None."
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In the world of education, it was the equivalent of the cool kids' table in the cafeteria.Executives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, McKinsey consultants and scholars from Stanford and Harvard mingled at an invitation-only meeting of the New Schools Venture Fund at a luxury hotel in Pasadena, Calif. Founded by investors who helped start Google and Amazon, this philanthropy seeks to raise the academic achievement of poor black and Hispanic students, largely through charter schools.
Many of those at the meeting last May had worried that the Obama administration would reflect the general hostility of teachers' unions toward charters, publicly financed schools that are independently run and free to experiment in classrooms. But all doubts were dispelled when the image of Arne Duncan, the new education secretary, filled a large video screen from Washington. He pledged to combine "your ideas with our dollars" from the federal government. "What you have created," he said, "is a real movement."
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A Boston High School Senior, Chrismaldy Morgado, writing an Op-Ed in The Boston Globe today, has claimed that students have some responsibility for their own academic achievement.
The Boston Globe may be forgiven for printing such a heretical claim, because it is trying to give a "voice" to young people, and the high school student may not be aware that his suggestion goes against the settled wisdom of the vast majority of U.S. Edupundits.
Our Edupundits are in substantial agreement, often repeated, that "the principal variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality." I have nowhere found much interest in my own argument that the principal variable in student academic achievement is student academic work.
Yet here is a high school Senior, writing that: "students seem to socialize more than they should. In hallways, stairwells, and bathrooms, students sit and talk to their friends after the late bell rang for classes." He adds that: "My friends agree that new teachers alone are not going to solve the problems at Burke [Jeremiah Burke High School in Boston is one of 35 schools in the state that is asking its staff to re-apply for their jobs]. Jussara Sequeira, a Junior, said: "Some of us students are not trying hard enough and I don't think the school's teachers should pay the consequences."
Paul Zoch, a high school Latin teacher, in Doomed to Fail [2004] points out that: "the United States looks to its teachers and their efforts, but not to its students and their efforts, for success in education. That being the accepted wisdom, students are free to do nothing more than wait for the teachers to create success for them. Education reform literature rarely contains the thought that our students are primarily failing because they do not study enough." Another heretic!
Many thanks to Paul Zoch, Diane Ravitch, Chrismaldy Morgado, and Jussara Sequeira for pointing out the egregious folly of leaving student effort out of the analysis of those things which make for academic success in the schools.
It is hard to understand how so many Edupundits miss this essential sine qua non of good learning outcomes for our schools. One possibility is that their view is so lofty and unfocused that they never take the academic work of mere students into account.
Tony Wagner at Harvard has found that only three high schools in the country, for instance, ever sit down in a focus group with their graduates and ask them for their thoughts about their education while they were at the school.
This still does not completely explain why students' academic responsibility gets so routinely overlooked in all the multi-billion-dollar efforts at school reform.
Paul Zoch writes: "In reading about Japanese education, one is repeatedly struck by the expectation that the students must work hard for success, in contrast to the United States, where the teacher is expected to work hard to find a way for the students to succeed...Effort and self-discipline are considered by the Japanese to be essential bases for accomplishment. Lack of achievement, then, is attributed to the failure to work hard."
What chance is there that the voices of Chirsmaldy Morgado and Jussara Sequeira will be heard in their call for more student academic effort in Boston high schools? It is hard to say. So much attention and concern, on the part of parents and the rest of us, seems to be on whether our students have friends and are having a good time in school, rather than whether they are working as hard as they can academically. It is far easier to blame teachers if student academic achievement is too low.
If we listened to those two public high school students, we should surely inform our students at the start of every school year, that they have the responsibility to pay attention, do their homework, read books and write papers, and in general give their very best efforts to making the most out of the free public education which has been provided them. Let's tell them that their academic success is their job. It is up to them how much they learn and how much they grow in competence through their own work in school.
"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 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
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ithin the 242 pages of Diane Ravitch's lightning rod of a book, "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," there appear exactly three references to Catholic education. Which makes sense, given that Ms. Ravitch is addressing and deploring recent efforts to reform public schools with extensive testing and increasing privatization.Yet what subtly informs both her critique and her recommendations for improving public schools is, in significant measure, her long study of and admiration for Roman Catholic education, especially in serving low-income black and Hispanic students.
In that respect, Ms. Ravitch and her book offer evidence of how some public-education scholars and reformers have been learning from what Catholic education is doing right. What one might call the Catholic-school model is perhaps the most unappreciated influence on the nation's public-education debate.
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Jacqueline Byrne developed the creative teaching techniques that form the basis of the academic and verbal test prep curricula at Ivy Educational Services. Her SAT prep book, "SAT Vocabulary Express" (McGraw Hill, 2004), introduces students to a new strategy for improving their functional vocabulary and raising their SAT and ACT verbal scores. In addition, Ms. Byrne designed Ivy Educational Services' college essay writing program.ACT scores came out this week, and sophomores are starting to think about college tests for next year, so this is a good time to talk about options.
Every college in the United States accepts the ACT (with the optional essay) and the SAT equally, so students now have a choice about which test to take. While the choice is wonderful, it can create more stress for families because there are more options:
Option One
Take both tests in alternating months: February ACT, March SAT, April ACT, May SAT, June SAT and ACT.
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For 400 years, higher education in the US has been on a roll. From Harvard asking Galileo to be a guest professor in the 1600s to millions tuning in to watch a team of unpaid athletes play another team of unpaid athletes in some college sporting event, the amount of time and money and prestige in the college world has been climbing.I'm afraid that's about to crash and burn. Here's how I'm looking at it.
1. Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students.
Pick up any college brochure or catalog. Delete the brand names and the map. Can you tell which school it is? While there are outliers (like St. Johns, Deep Springs or Full Sail) most schools aren't really outliers. They are mass marketers.
Stop for a second and consider the impact of that choice. By emphasizing mass and sameness and rankings, colleges have changed their mission.
This works great in an industrial economy where we can't churn out standardized students fast enough and where the demand is huge because the premium earned by a college grad dwarfs the cost. But...
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Lorie Raihala 91K PDF via email:
For years there has been broad disparity among the four MMSD high schools in the number of honors, advanced/accelerated, and AP courses each one offers. In contrast to East and LaFollette, for instance, West requires all students, regardless of learning level or demonstrated competence, to take standard academic core courses in 9th and 10th grade. There has also been wide discrepancy in the requirements and restrictions each school imposes on students who seek to participate in existing advanced course options.Related: English 10 and Dane County AP Course Comparison.Parents of children at West have long called on administrators to address this inequity by increasing opportunities for advanced, accelerated instruction. Last year Superintendent Dan Nerad affirmed the goal of bringing consistency to the opportunities offered to students across the District. Accordingly, the Talented and Gifted Education Plan includes five Action Steps specifically geared toward bringing consistency and increasing student participation in advanced courses across MMSD high schools. This effort was supposed to inform the MMSD master course list for the 2010/11 school year. Though District administrators say they have begun internal conversations about this disparity, next year's course offerings again remain the same.
Please consider what levels of English, science, and social studies each MMSD high school offers its respective 9th and 10th graders for the 2010-11 school year, and what measures each school uses to determine students' eligibility for advanced or honors level courses.
I appreciate Lorie's (and others) efforts to compile and share this information.
Update: 104K PDF revised comparison.
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Salon/iStockphotoIn the past few months, the perennial controversy over psychiatric drug use has been growing considerably more heated. A January study showed a negligible difference between antidepressants and placebos in treating all but the severest cases of depression. The study became the subject of a Newsweek cover story, and the value of psychiatric drugs has recently been debated in the pages of the New Yorker, the New York Times and Salon. Many doctors and patients fiercely defend psychiatric drugs and their ability to improve lives. But others claim their popularity is a warning sign of a dangerously over-medicated culture.
The timing of Robert Whitaker's "Anatomy of an Epidemic," a comprehensive and highly readable history of psychiatry in the United States, couldn't be better. An acclaimed mental health journalist and winner of a George Polk Award for his reporting on the psychiatric field, Whitaker draws on 50 years of literature and in-person interviews with patients to answer a simple question: If "wonder drugs" like Prozac are really helping people, why has the number of Americans on government disability due to mental illness skyrocketed from 1.25 million in 1987 to over 4 million today?
"Anatomy of an Epidemic" is the first book to investigate the long-term outcomes of patients treated with psychiatric drugs, and Whitaker finds that, overall, the drugs may be doing more harm than good. Adhering to studies published in prominent medical journals, he argues that, over time, patients with schizophrenia do better off medication than on it. Children who take stimulants for ADHD, he writes, are more likely to suffer from mania and bipolar disorder than those who go unmedicated. Intended to challenge the conventional wisdom about psychiatric drugs, "Anatomy" is sure to provoke a hot-tempered response, especially from those inside the psychiatric community
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Co-education is bad enough, with its ability to make it very hard indeed to pay attention to what the teacher/professor is saying, but a recent piece by two medical school professors brings me to write about the follies of those who defend the attractions of digital learning and multi-tasking.
These professors say that their students have indicated to them that they (the professors) are digital immigrants, while the students themselves are digital natives, used to attending to multiple sources of information at once. Students did not indicate whether in these multiple digital processes they felt they were engaging several or all of their multiple intelligences at the same time or not, but their main argument was that the professors, if they hoped to teach the digital natives what they needed to know about medicine, needed to "get with it, Daddy-O" in the vernacular of another generation of teens who believed they belonged to a different (better, smarter, cooler) future than their (old) teachers.
The professors (this was an article in a medical journal, and I don't have the citation) came to believe that indeed they were employing old-fashioned methods like reading, speaking, and writing, to bring medical knowledge to their students, and they expressed an awakening to their need to learn about this new digital culture of multi-tasking and so on.
In my own view, it is instead the students who are, in fact, the immigrants to the study of medicine and they would be wise to attempt some humility in the face of their own plentiful ignorance of the field, instead of trying to influence their teachers to provide them with more stimulation and better entertainment.
The first example of harmful multi-tasking that comes to my mind is the elevated accident rate of those drivers who think they can manage traffic and chat (or text!) on their cell phones at the same time. They can't, and the accident numbers for those who try to manage those two tasks at the same time demonstrate that the net result is a minus not a plus.
The Kaiser Foundation, in a ten-year study of the use of electronic entertainment media by young people, found that on average they spend more than six hours a day with instant messaging, facebooking, twittering, music, chat, video games, and other forms of digital distraction, adding up to more than 48 hours a week. Young people believe they can do several of these activities at once, but the chances are that their competence in each task suffers with the addition of one more new task attempted at the same time.
According to the American College Testing program, more than half of high school students report spending three to four hours a week on homework, and it is not unlikely that the quality of even this small amount of homework is diminished by students multi-tasking with entertainment media while they do it.
These distractions do not all occur at home, or while driving, of course. Laura Mortkowitz reports in The Washington Post [April 25, 2010} that "The trend of laptop-banning seems strongest at law schools," although a number of college professors have banned them from their classes as well.
Laptops were originally thought to provide an opportunity for students to take better notes and to absorb the learning their professors were offering even more profoundly, but as it has turned out, for far too many students, the laptop has opened a window on pure distraction, allowing the student to wander off into the Web, and multitask their social life, completely missing the content of their college courses in the process.
I don't know how many high school history teachers have been seduced into having their students prepare PowerPoint© presentations instead of reading books and writing papers, but the computer/software industries, in collaboration with trendy students, have put a lot of pressure on school systems all over the country, and succeeded in causing them to spend many many billions of dollars on equipment to allow them to enter the new new worlds of multi-tasking and digital learning.
It seems likely to me that if, as they report, 47% of the freshmen in California's state college system have to take remedial English classes, there is a chance that the students may have multi-tasked and digitally-enhanced their way to a very expensive and time-wasting state of aliteracy.
Let us make an effort to resist the persuasive billions spent by Disney and Microsoft et al to lure us and our students away from the basic tasks of reading books (especially history books), writing serious research papers, and paying attention to their teachers. Change can be charming, and technology is lots of fun, but learning is now, and always has been, hard work, and we pretend we and they can slide by without that at our students' peril.
"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 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
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Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.Much more on Powerpoint & schools here."When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war," General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"PowerPoint makes us stupid," Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
Related: Seth Godin and Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry on PowerPoint.
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There's a subtle debate unfolding among financial aid experts and advocates for students about just how much student loan debt is too much. While some recent studies have declared a crisis in student borrowing, citing the growing number of student borrowers and the amounts they owe, the College Board, in a report released Monday, seeks to reframe the discussion by focusing on those deepest in debt.It's not that the authors of the College Board report, Sandy Baum and Patricia Steele, don't think there's a major problem with student loan debt; they do, and their report, "Who Borrows Most? Bachelor's Degree Recipients With High Levels of Student Debt," offers plenty of troubling data. But in an era where grant money is usually insufficient to meet ever-rising tuition costs, it's not borrowing per se that's the problem, they argue; it's the amount and types of loans that are likeliest to land borrowers in significant financial trouble.
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Ace choreographer Saroj Khan, who has made almost all top Bollywood celebrities dance to her moves, is judging a reality show Chak Dhoom Dhoom on Colors which starts April 30.
She talks about her experience of judging the kids and her Broadway musical. Excerpts:
How was your judging experience in the audition rounds?
Superb! The kids are very talented, gifted and considering their age, really scary! All of them wanted to be different from each other and to be the best. Their spirit is admirable. It is very difficult to reject kids and see the sadness they go through, but we had to say 'No' to some. We will ensure that we do not break the hearts of these children.You are known to be a very strict teacher. Are you going to be strict with the kids?
I am strict with the adults who claim to be good dancers and perform wrong steps and mudras. So I correct them. That is my duty and I will always do that. During Nach Baliye [ Images ] you must have seen how celebrity couples improvised and transformed into good dancers. Correction is very important and I don't care if someone doesn't like that. But with children, we have to very cautious and sensitive.
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A new institute dedicated to spreading Chinese language and culture across Washington state was officially launched Monday, a partnership of Seattle Public Schools, the University of Washington and Hanban, a Chinese nonprofit group affiliated with China's Ministry of Education.Called the Confucius Institute, it will join about 250 similar organizations across the globe, one of a number of Hanban's efforts to capitalize on the growing international interest in China.
Its efforts have been met with suspicion in some communities, most recently in suburban Los Angeles, where some parents expressed concern that a Hanban program might promote the Chinese government's political views.
Washington officials don't share those worries.
"We see nothing but upsides to teaching the languages and cultures of the world," said Stephen Hanson, the UW's vice provost of global affairs.
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via a kind reader's email:
Those interested in Freshman Accelerated Biology at Madison West High School may take the screening test Tuesday, May 4th at James C. Wright Middle School from 4-6 pm (room TBA) or Wednesday, May 5th at West High School from 4-6 (room 225).
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American college students are "addicted" to the instant connections and information afforded by social media, a new study suggests.According to researchers, students describe their feelings when they have to abstain from using media in literally the same terms associated with drug and alcohol addictions: in withdrawal, frantically craving, very anxious, extremely antsy, miserable, jittery, and crazy.
In the study, University of Maryland researchers conclude that most college students are not just unwilling, but functionally unable to be without their media links to the world. However, the study was based upon self-report by students engaging in a set of unnatural and largely unrealistic behaviors.
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In the fall of 1970, I dropped out of the University of Michigan during my senior year with the intention of never re turning. I was a math major and I convinced myself that I would have a better chance being a writer than a mathematicianIn the fall of 1970, I dropped out of the University of Michigan during my senior year with the intention of never re turning. I was a math major and I convinced myself that I would have a better chance being a writer than a mathematician. I figured I would work at any job I could get to support myself. The only job I could get was unloading telephone books from a truck into the cars of people who were to deliver them. The job was to last three days--I quit after the first. During that first day, around the time when my arms became like rubber and I could hardly even lift one phone book, I had a flash of insight and decided to return to school and get my degree. Then I would become a writer. In the summer of 1971, I got my degree, and vowed to never again set foot in another math classroom in my life, and told myself that if I ever did I would puke.
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I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the 2010 Wisconsin Solo & Ensemble Festival. It is a true delight to enjoy the results of student and teacher practice, dedication and perseverance.
I very much appreciate the extra effort provided by some teachers on behalf of our children.
I thought about those teachers today when I received an email from a reader asking why I continue to publish this site. This reader referred to ongoing school bureaucratic intransigence on reading, particularly in light of the poor results (Alan Borsuk raises the specter of a looming Wisconsin "reading war").
I'll respond briefly here.
Many years ago, I had a Vietnam Vet as my high school government teacher. This guy, took what was probably an easy A for many and turned it into a superb, challenging class. He drilled the constitution, Bill of Rights, Federalist Papers and the revolutionary climate into our brains.
Some more than others.
I don't have the ability to stop earmark, spending or lobbying excesses in Washington, nor at the State, or perhaps even local levels. I do have the opportunity to help, in a very small way, provide a communication system (blog, rss and enewsletter) for those interested in K-12 matters, including our $400M+ Madison School District. There is much to do and I am grateful for those parents, citizens, teachers and administrators who are trying very hard to provide a better education for our children.
It is always a treat to see professionals who go the extra mile. I am thankful for such wonderful, generous people. Saturday's WSMA event was a timely reminder of the many special people around our children.
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Start the war.Related: Reading Recovery, Madison School Board member suggests cuts to Reading Recovery spending, UW-Madison Professor Mark Seidenberg on the Madison School District's distortion of reading data & phonics and Norm and Dolores Mishelow Presentation on Milwaukee's Successful Reading Program.What about Wisconsin? Wisconsin kids overall came in at the U.S. average on the NAEP scores. But Wisconsin's position has been slipping. Many other states have higher overall scores and improving scores, while Wisconsin scores have stayed flat.
Steven Dykstra of the Wisconsin Reading Coalition, an organization that advocates for phonics programs, points out something that should give us pause: If you break down the new fourth-grade reading data by race and ethnic grouping, as well as by economic standing (kids who get free or reduced price meals and kids who don't), Wisconsin kids trail the nation in every category. The differences are not significant in some, but even white students from Wisconsin score below the national average for white children.
(So how does Wisconsin overall still tie the national average? To be candid, the answer is because Wisconsin has a higher percentage of white students, the group that scores the highest, than many other states.)
Start the war.
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Paul Caron:
Since I am touring colleges with my daughter this week in advance of the May 1 acceptance deadline, I was particularly struck by the law prof blogosphere discussion (here and here) of The Price of Admission : How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges--and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, by Daniel Golden. From the Washington Post's review:Stepping into this cauldron of anxiety about admission to elite colleges is Daniel Golden, a Wall Street Journal reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for a series of articles on the inner workings of college admissions offices. In his provocative and stimulating book, The Price of Admission, Golden makes a powerful case that the number of well-to-do whites given preference to highly selective colleges dwarfs that of minorities benefiting from affirmative action. He follows this central theme in a wide-ranging series of case studies of systematic preference for the wealthy, the privileged and the famous, as well as legacies, faculty children and -- most innovatively -- athletes in such patrician sports as rowing, horseback riding, fencing and even polo. A tough investigative reporter, Golden does not hesitate to name names -- not only of specific institutions (including Harvard, Duke, Brown, Notre Dame, the University of Virginia, Princeton, Stanford and Amherst) and administrators, but also of individual students (including the sons of Al Gore and Sen. Bill Frist) whom he deems to be beneficiaries of preferences for the privileged. The result is a disturbing exposé of the influence that wealth and power still exert on admission to the nation's most prestigious universities.That virtually all elite private colleges give preference to the sons and daughters of alumni will come as a surprise to no one. But preference also extends to wealthy applicants whose families have been identified as potential donors -- "development cases" in the parlance of the trade. Golden documents that even Harvard, with its $25.9 billion endowment, is not above giving preference to the scions of the super-rich. His primary example, however, of development cases being central to the admissions process is Duke, where the university embarked on a systematic strategy of raising its endowment by seeking out wealthy applicants. Golden estimates that Duke admitted 100 development applicants each year in the late 1990s who otherwise would have been rejected. Though this may be something of an extreme case, special consideration for applicants flagged by the development office is standard practice at elite colleges and universities.
Also enjoying substantial preference at elite colleges, both public and private, are varsity athletes. In a fascinating case study of women's sports at the University of Virginia, Golden shows how the effort to comply with Title IX, a gender equity law that has the praiseworthy goal of ensuring equality between female and male athletes, has had the unintended effect of giving an admissions edge to female athletes who play upper-class sports. Between 1992 and 2002, the number of college women nationwide in rowing, a sport highly concentrated in private schools and affluent suburbs, rose from 1,555 to 6,690; more recently, the number of female varsity horseback riders increased from 633 to 1,175 between 1998 and 2002. The net effect of the rise of these overwhelmingly patrician sports, Golden argues, has been to further advantage already advantaged women.
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"The Review embodies Will Fitzhugh's idea about how to get students thinking and writing. In supporting him, you would be helping a person who is building what should and can become a national education treasure." Albert Shanker, 1993Denis Doyle:"What is called for is an Intel-like response from the business and philanthropic community to put The Concord Review on a level footing with a reasonable time horizon." Denis P. Doyle, 2010
With recent NAEP results (holding steady) and the RTTT announcements (DE and TN are the two finalists in this round) everyone's eye continues to focus on the persistent problem of low academic achievement in math and English Language Arts. And that's too bad; it's time for a change.Instead of looking exclusively at the "problem," it's time to see the promise a solution holds. It's time to "backward map" from the desired objective--universal literacy--to step-by-step solutions. Achieving true literacy--reading, writing, listening and speaking with skill and insight--is, as Confucius said, a journey of a thousand miles; we must begin with a single step. Let's begin at the end and work our way backwards.
How might we do that? Little noted and not long remembered is the high end of the literacy scale, high flyers, youngsters who distinguish themselves by the quality of their work. By way of illustration, young math and science high flyers have the Intel Talent Search to reward them with great fanfare, newspaper headlines and hard cash (the first place winner gets a $100,000 scholarship) and runners-up get scholarships worth more than $500,000 in total.
That's as it should be; the modern era is defined by science, technology and engineering, and it is appropriate to highlight achievement in these fields, both as a reward for success and an incentive to others.
But so too should ELA receive public fanfare, attention and rewards. In particular, exemplary writing skills should be encouraged, rewarded and showcased.
It was the Council for Basic Education's great insight that ELA and math are the generative subjects from which all other knowledge flows. Without a command of these two "languages" we are mute. Neither math nor English is more important than the other; they are equally important.
Indeed, there is a duality in literacy and math which is noteworthy--each subject is pursued for its own sake and at the same time each one is instrumental. Literacy serves its own purpose as the fount of the examined life while it serves larger social and economic purposes as a medium of communication. No wonder it's greatest expression is honored with the Nobel Prize.
What is called for is a Junior Nobel, for younger writers, something like the Intel Talent Search for literary excellence. In the mean time we are lucky enough to have The Concord Review. Lucky because its editor and founder, Will Fitzhugh, labors mightily as a one-man show without surcease (and without financial support). We are all in his debt.
Before considering ways to discharge our obligation, what, you might wonder, is The Concord Review?
I quote from their web site: "The Concord Review, Inc., was founded in March 1987 to recognize and to publish exemplary history essays by high school students in the English-speaking world. With the 81st issue (Spring 2010), 890 research papers (average 5,500 words, with endnotes and bibliography) have been published from authors in forty-four states and thirty-seven other countries. The Concord Review remains the only quarterly journal in the world to publish the academic work of secondary students." (see www.tcr.org)
Lest anyone doubt the importance of this undertaking, permit me to offer a few unsolicited testimonials. The first is from former Boston University President John Silber, "I believe The Concord Review is one of the most imaginative, creative, and supportive initiatives in public education. It is a wonderful incentive to high school students to take scholarship and writing seriously."
The other is from former AFT President Al Shanker: "The Review also has a vital message for teachers. American education suffers from an impoverishment of standards at all levels. We see that when we look at what is expected of students in other industrialized nations and at what they achieve. Could American students achieve at that level? Of course, but our teachers often have a hard time knowing exactly what they can expect of their students or even what a first-rate essay looks like. The Concord Review sets a high but realistic standard; and it could be invaluable for teachers trying to recalibrate their own standards of excellence."
Can an enterprise which numbers among its friends and admirers people as diverse as John Silber and Al Shanker deserve anything less than the best?
What is called for is an Intel-like response from the business and philanthropic community to put TCR on a level footing with a reasonable time horizon. Will Fitzhugh has been doing this on his own for 22 years (he's now 73) and TCR deserves a more secure home (and future) of its own.
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These days, it seems like most middle class kids go on to college.In fact, many jobs are now requiring a Bachelor's degree. Thus, many kids are going to college as almost a default stage of life. Some people are wondering if a college degree is still worth it. While it is difficult to quantify the benefits of a college education, if you are in college you should try to get the full value out of every dollar you pay.
Some of the key ingredients in preparing for college are getting college savings, applying for scholarships, reducing expenses, and getting student loans (and, of course, later paying student loans). However, the value of a college education is about a lot more than the cost of tuition.
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The Houston school district has scheduled meetings to discuss with parents its plans for reforming Lee, Jones, Kashmere and possibly Sharpstown high schools. HISD Superintendent Terry Grier and his staff presented the plans, which include extending the school day and year and offering students small-group tutoring, at a school board workshop last week. District officials plan to implement the changes this coming school year, so the turnaround is fast -- and the parent meetings are just around the corner. After columnist Lisa Falkenberg got a tip about the upcoming meeting at Lee from a peeved state lawmaker, I asked the district for a list of all the meetings. It took a day to get it, but here it is:
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Children enrolled in Los Angeles Universal Preschool programs made significant improvements in the social and emotional skills needed to do well in kindergarten, according to a study released Monday. The gains were especially pronounced for English language learners, the study showed.Clusty Search: Los Angeles Universal Preschool.The findings confirmed observations of preschool teachers that children attending high-quality programs are better prepared for kindergarten. For the first time, the study provided data to back up those observations, officials with the nonprofit preschool organization said.
"This is unique because there's very little research in terms of cognitive progression in the preschool years," said Celia C. Ayala, chief operating officer for Los Angeles Universal Preschool. "We know there are differences, we see the differences, but this gives us a way to assess improvements."
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San Francisco School Board Member Rachel Norton:
On April 20, the San Francisco Board of Education will convene a policy discussion to discuss the Superintendent's plans for our 10 schools labeled "persistently underperforming" by the state of California.This list was created as part of the state's efforts to qualify for Race to the Top. It designates five percent of the state's schools as failing, and prescribes one of four turnaround models for districts to take. There's no choice in the matter, though it's unclear under state law when these actions would have to be taken. If, however, a district wants to apply for Federal funds to help implement one of the turnaround models, it must submit a plan in the next few weeks--and begin the work within six months.
I am not crazy about any of the turnaround models. They assume that school leaders are so stupid that--D'oh! We never thought of replacing principals! We never thought of reconstitution (which we tried in this district and which failed, miserably)! Charter schools! Wow! (Even though charter schools have as mixed a record as traditional public schools--no miracles here.) School closure! (How does closing a school affect the achievement of its former students, exactly?)
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Now they tell you, just when you've sold the old Harvard Classics on eBay, hauled the Britannicas down to the dump and signed up Junior for online SAT prep. Tom Jacobs reports for Miller-McCune:
After examining statistics from 27 nations, a group of researchers found the presence of book-lined shelves in the home -- and the intellectual environment those volumes reflect -- gives children an enormous advantage in school."Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents' education, father's occupational status and other family background characteristics," reports the study, recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. "Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books.
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Steve Graham & Michael Hebert:
Around the world, from the cave paintings in Lascaux, France, which may be 25,000 years old, to the images left behind by the lost Pueblo cultures of the American Southwest, to the ancient aboriginal art of Australia, the most common pictograph found in rock paintings is the human hand. Coupled with pictures of animals, with human forms, with a starry night sky or other images that today, we can only identify as abstract, we look at these men's and women's hands, along with smaller prints that perhaps belong to children, and cannot help but be deeply moved by the urge of our ancestors to leave some permanent imprint of themselves behind.Clearly, the instinct for human beings to express their feelings, their thoughts, and their experiences in some lasting form has been with us for a very long time.This urge eventually manifested itself in the creation of the first alphabet, which many attribute to the Phoenicians.When people also began to recognize the concept of time, their desire to express themselves became intertwined with the sense of wanting to leave behind a legacy, a message about who they were, what they had done and seen, and even what they believed in.Whether inscribed on rock, carved in cuneiform, painted in hieroglyphics, or written with the aid of the alphabet, the instinct to write down everything from mundane commercial transactions to routine daily occurrences to the most transcendent ideas--and then to have others read them, as well as to read what others have written--is not simply a way of transferring information from one person to another, one generation to the next. It is a process of learning and hence, of education.
Ariel and Will Durant were right when they said,"Education is the transmission of civilization." Putting our current challenges into historical context, it is obvious that if today's youngsters cannot read with understanding, think about and analyze what they've read, and then write clearly and effectively about what they've learned and what they think, then they may never be able to do justice to their talents and their potential. (In that regard, the etymology of the word education, which is "to draw out and draw forth"--from oneself, for example--is certainly evocative.) Indeed, young people who do not have the ability to transform thoughts, experiences, and ideas into written words are in danger of losing touch with the joy of inquiry, the sense of intellectual curiosity, and the inestimable satisfaction of acquiring wisdom that are the touchstones of humanity.What that means for all of us is that the essential educative transmissions that have been passed along century after century, generation after generation, are in danger of fading away, or even falling silent.
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By almost every conceivable measure Americans are less positive and more critical of government these days. A new Pew Research Center survey finds a perfect storm of conditions associated with distrust of government - a dismal economy, an unhappy public, bitter partisan- based backlash, and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials.Rather than an activist government to deal with the nation's top problems, the public now wants government reformed and growing numbers want its power curtailed. With the exception of greater regulation of major financial institutions, there is less of an appetite for government solutions to the nation's problems - including more government control over the economy - than there was when Barack Obama first took office.
The public's hostility toward government seems likely to be an important election issue favoring the Republicans this fall. However, the Democrats can take some solace in the fact that neither party can be confident that they have the advantage among such a disillusioned electorate. Favorable ratings for both major parties, as well as for Congress, have reached record lows while opposition to congressional incumbents, already approaching an all- time high, continues to climb.
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Not long ago education schools had a virtual monopoly on the teaching profession. They dictated how and when people became teachers by offering coursework, arranging apprenticeships and granting master's degrees.Related, Janet Mertz: An Email to Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad on Math Teacher Hiring Criteria.But now those schools are feeling under siege. Officials in Washington, D.C., and New York State, where some of the best-known education schools are located, have stepped up criticisms that the schools are still too focused on theory and not enough on the craft of effective teaching.
In an ever-tightening job market, their graduates are competing with the products of alternative programs like Teach for America, which puts recent college graduates into teaching jobs without previous teaching experience or education coursework.
And this week, the New York State Board of Regents could deliver the biggest blow. It will vote on whether to greatly expand the role of the alternative organizations by allowing them to create their own master's degree programs. At the extreme, the proposal could make education schools extraneous.
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There are a number of people who believe that the District intentionally cultivates confusion around the definitions of the terms "curriculum", "materials", "content", and "Standards". The misuse of these terms on official District documents and by District staff is exactly the sort of thing that supports this suspicion. The misuse of these terms detracts from transparency and community engagement. This example is particularly egregious because it speaks to an adoption. These actions do NOT adopt a curriculum, only materials.
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One by one, mothers stepped forward to face Alameda County Superior Court Judge Cecilia Castellanos and explain why their children have repeatedly failed to show up to elementary school.One mom said she couldn't find her son's school. Another blamed traffic. One said her son was repeatedly tardy to class because he had difficulty opening his locker.
To each, Judge Castellanos said, "That's not an excuse," and ordered them back to truancy court for a follow-up.
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Many people get too excited about the latest hot education innovation. They lose their sense of perspective. It has happened even to me once or twice. When we wander off like that, we need someone with a sharp intellect and strong character to pull us back to reality.One such person is Paul T. Hill, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education and John and Marguerite Corbally Professor at the University of Washington Bothell. He has written a short, wise book, "Learning As We Go: Why School Choice is Worth the Wait," which provides the clearest explanations I have seen for why independent public charter schools need more time to develop. Hill believes it is worth waiting for charters to make what he thinks will be widespread positive impact on the quality of education. He thinks they are more promising than a renewed fondness for strengthening bureaucracy and standardizing instruction that seems to be bubbling in some foundations and national advocacy groups.
Hill makes five simple points and more or less devotes a chapter to each. Here is what he says, with some fussing and worrying by me. If you want to add your ideas to these, or explain why these are nonsense, the comments box below awaits.
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Paul Barrett:
The aftermath of a historic financial crisis seems an appropriate time to take stock of graduate business education. What are we teaching these people before they head off to the executive suite?Three Harvard Business School scholars, Srikant M. Datar, David A. Garvin and Patrick G. Cullen, address this question in "Rethinking the M.B.A.: Business Education at a Crossroads," a thought-provoking examination of the curriculums that shape many top investment bankers, consultants and chief executives. After studying the nation's most prestigious business schools, the authors conclude that an excessive emphasis on quantitative and theoretical analysis has contributed to the making of too many wonky wizards. M.B.A. recipients, according to this book, haven't learned the importance of social responsibility, common-sense skepticism and respect for the dangers of taking risks with other people's money.
Put even more bluntly: Business schools played a contributing role in creating the geniuses who brought us the economic meltdown of 2008.
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The federal government expects parents to help pay for college. But plenty of students can't get one penny from them. "At Michigan State, we see several hundred of those students every year," says Val Meyers, associate director of its financial aid office. Some parents don't believe they can or should contribute, or maybe they don't like a particular college, or aren't living together. A father might refuse to take responsibility for the education of a child from a first marriage.And here's a sticky wicket: an 18- year-old may be an adult in most states, but for financial aid purposes, students aren't independent until age 24.
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Recently I visited a history class at a local, low-performing high school where students read in turn from the autobiography of a famous American. The teacher was bright and quick. He interrupted often with comments and questions. The 18 sophomores and juniors seemed to be into it, but it was such an old-fashioned--and I suspect to some educators elementary--approach for that I decided to see what other educators thought of it.I love spending time in classrooms, listening and watching. Often I see something new and surprising, or sometimes old and surprising like one young English teacher diagramming sentences. Was round robin reading (what educators usually call the read aloud technique I witnessed) bad or good? Was it a time-wasting throwback or a useful way to involve every student?
Yes and yes, teachers told me. That is the problem judging the way teachers teach. It all depends on the circumstances, the students, the object of the lesson, the style of the instructor and the judge. Read these and tell me who is right:
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1. To become a United States senator, a person must be at least how old?2. President John Adams was a member of what political party at the time of his election?
3. What was the given name of the Civil War general Stonewall Jackson?
4. What revolutionary leader famously uttered the words "Give me liberty or give me death!" in a speech at the second Virginia Convention?
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A few times each month, second graders at a charter school in Springfield, Mass., take time from math and reading to engage in philosophical debate. There is no mention of Hegel or Descartes, no study of syllogism or solipsism. Instead, Prof. Thomas E. Wartenberg and his undergraduate students from nearby Mount Holyoke College use classic children's books to raise philosophical questions, which the young students then dissect with the vigor of the ancient Greeks."A lot of people try to make philosophy into an elitist discipline," says Professor Wartenberg, who has been visiting the school, the Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School of Excellence, since 2007. "But everyone is interested in basic philosophical ideas; they're the most basic questions we have about the world."
One afternoon this winter, the students in Christina Runquist's classroom read Shel Silverstein's "Giving Tree," about a tree that surrenders its shade, fruit, branches and finally its trunk to a boy it has befriended. The college students led the discussion that followed -- on environmental ethics, or "how we should treat natural objects," as Professor Wartenberg puts it -- with a series of questions, starting with whether the boy was wrong to take so much from the tree.
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At 83, Marian C. Diamond has been teaching anatomy at the University of California, Berkeley, for 50 years. Her class is so popular that it's difficult for students to get in, though she holds court at the campus's largest lecture hall, with room for 736.She begins by opening a colorful hatbox. Dressed in an elegant suit and scarf with her hair swept back into a chig non, Professor Diamond pulls on a pair of latex gloves and reveals the box's contents: a human brain. It is in alcohol, she says, "because alcohol will preserve the brain. Need I say more?" The students laugh as they take this in. She has the room in the palm of her hands.
Professor Diamond is one of the tweedy celebrities of cyberspace. Videos of her anatomy course, Integrative Biology 131, have been viewed nearly 1.5 million times on YouTube, where they have been available since 2005 to anyone with an Internet connection. Some of the world's foremost scholars are up there for viewing, tuition free. From Yale, you can tune into an economics class by a professor with his own home-price index, Robert Shiller, or a course by the Milton scholar John Rogers. The undisputed rock star academic is Walter H. G. Lewin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who flies across the room to demonstrate that a pendulum swings no faster or slower when there is an added mass (Professor Lewin) hanging at the end.
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An Education Life:
Why homeschool? Maybe to brush up for an exam, get a sense of what a college is like, or just to learn. In the articles listed below, writers who know the fields weigh in on some of the highlights of free education.
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The study of ethics, once an academic orphan, is grabbing a more central role at many business schools since the financial crisis shone a spotlight on the damage that can be done by irresponsible business practices and an exclusive focus on the bottom line.Critics have suggested that B-schools bear some responsibility for the culture of excessive risk-taking that helped trigger the credit crunch, saying they failed to teach students that there is more to business than just making money. Many schools have responded by re-examining their priorities, and giving ethics more classroom time, either in modules of its own or incorporated into key classes like strategy, finance and accounting.
Faculty are defining the subject broadly, arguing that ethical business practice is not just about refraining from cheating and corruption, but recognizing that a company has responsibilities beyond its shareholders' wallets--to employees, community, customers and the environment.
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A mind-numbing barrage of random television clips and trash-talking heads, "The Cartel" purports to be a documentary about the American public school system. In reality, however, it's a bludgeoning rant against a single state -- New Jersey -- which it presents as a closed loop of Mercedes-owning administrators, obstructive teachers' unions and corrupt school boards.Blithely extrapolating nationally, the writer and director, Bob Bowdon, concludes that increased financing for public schools is unlikely to raise reading scores but is almost certain to raise the luxury-car quotient in administrator parking lots. To illustrate, Mr. Bowdon rattles off a laundry list of outrages -- like a missing $1 billion from a school construction budget -- and provides a clumsy montage of newspaper headlines detailing administrative graft.
The evidence may be verifiable (and even depressingly familiar), but its complex underpinnings are given short shrift. Instead Mr. Bowdon, a New Jersey-based television reporter, employs an exposé-style narration lousy with ad hominems and emotional coercion. In one particularly egregious scene he parks his camera in front of a weeping child who has just failed to win a coveted spot in a charter-school lottery -- another tiny victim of public school hell. Later, confronted with the president of the New Jersey Education Association, Mr. Bowdon performs the rhetorical equivalent of poking a lion with a stick and running away.
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Representative John Kline (R-MN):
Rep. John Kline (R-MN), the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee's senior Republican member, today warned sensitive student information could be at risk through vast data warehouses that collect private, personally identifiable information on school children. The committee heard testimony on the risks to students' personal information during a hearing on data collection in the K-12 education system."Today's hearing reinforces the need for federal, state, and local policymakers to ensure sensitive personal information about our children is safeguarded, and student and family privacy rights are protected. Efforts to collect vast troves of information on our students, tracking them from cradle to career, raise serious concerns," said Kline. "Information on student performance, while important to a child's success in the classroom and ensuring we have the best teachers serving in our schools, should not supersede our responsibility to protect a student's personal information."
The committee heard testimony from Professor Joel Reidenberg, academic director of the Center on Law and Information Policy at the Fordham University School of Law, who shared his research into security weaknesses in current state-based data systems and the potential that state data warehouses could be commandeered to create an unprecedented federal tracking system for maintaining private student information.
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Local foodies are cheering the news that Wisconsin lawmakers this week passed legislation that will help bring local farm products to school lunchrooms.The Assembly passed AB 746, which creates a statewide council to coordinate the process of selling Wisconsin-grown products to schools. The Senate concurred on the Farm-to-School initiative which is cheering news to Wisconsin farmers and advocates for more fresh foods on school menus.
Meanwhile, a newly released report from chef Beth Collins and Lunch Lessons about Madison's school meal program says the Madison school district's food service facilities, staff and organization pose no barriers to putting healthier, less processed food on kids' plates at school. But district budget woes and time constraints, plus the lack of a well-focused plan, still pose significant hurdles to upgrading what kids eat at school.
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Ashley Koski, ranked third in the senior class at Thomas Dale High School in Chester, Va., has wanted to attend Duke University since she was 12.Late last month, she learned that Duke had neither accepted nor rejected her. It had offered her a spot on the waiting list -- along with 3,382 other applicants. That is almost twice the size of the incoming freshman class.
"I kind of just went quiet the rest of the day," Ms. Koski said. "I'd rather have a yes or no. I can't make plans and be excited like the rest of my friends."
Duke, which had a record 27,000 freshman applicants, has placed 856 more on its waiting list than a year ago. The reasons include the uncertain economy, which makes it hard for Duke to estimate how many of the 4,000 it has accepted will say yes.
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A federal judge Tuesday ordered a rural county in southwestern Mississippi to stop segregating its schools by grouping African American students into all-black classrooms and allowing white students to transfer to the county's only majority-white school, the U.S. Justice Department announced.The order, issued by Senior Judge Tom S. Lee of the U.S. District Court of Southern Mississippi, came after Justice Department civil rights division lawyers moved to enforce a 1970 desegregation case against the state and Walthall County.
Known as Mississippi's cream pitcher for its dairy farms and bordering Louisiana 80 miles north of New Orleans, Walthall County has a population of about 15,000 people that includes about 54 percent white residents and 45 percent African American residents, according to the U.S. Census.
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Dear Public Education Advocate:
Yesterday I attended the premier showing of A Right Denied produced by Bob Compton who also produced 2 Million Minutes and few other related documentaries about education systems in the US and the world.
In between watching the Masters or the Yankees lose a few ballgames this weekend, please review this information and in particular, the attached 240 slide PPT presentation prepared by Whitney Tilson who is featured in A Right Denied. Whitney's research and factual data took a few years to compile and is the basis for the documentary. I have been following Whitney's work closely for a few years and if you asked me if I could have dinner with any one person in America today who would it be; my answer (after my wife of course) Whitney Tilson. Please review his material and feel free to share this with those you know.
While the achievement gap among racial groups and the sad inequities based solely one's zip code are illustrated, so is the decline in the U.S. education system on a whole - the data is alarming.
Some select pieces from the PPT slides (5.5MB PDF):
Why hasn't additional money resulted in improved results?
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The Milwaukee Drum:
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College student Sehrish Shah perched on a well-worn chair in a student activities lounge and pulled markers and glitter paint from her backpack. A white sheaf of poster board was spread on a table, and several other students huddled around it, trying to tap latent artistic genes to create a poster for an upcoming event.The students, who represented different religious groups on campus, sketched a tree incorporating religious symbols and words into the branches and trunk. They were promoting World Peace Day to foster the idea of various faiths working together. As they sketched, Shah and the other students talked about fundraising possibilities (a kissing booth was rejected), groaned about classes and compared parents' discipline policies.
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I recently watched Al Sharpton on the Stephen Colbert show talk about how education is the civil rights issue of the 21st century. He discussed his collaboration with Newt Gingrich to promote education reforms. Al Sharpton and Newt Gingrich? That's an interesting coupling.And I thought of all the interesting volunteers who come together at School on Wheels to tutor a homeless child. Why do they do this? For some it's because they recognize the vulnerability and difficulty of being a homeless student. For others, it's the opportunity to give back to those they consider less fortunate. For most, however, it's the understanding that education is the one sure path out of poverty and the cycle of homelessness. In Los Angeles County, we have a 60% graduation rate, well below the national average of 70%. And not only is the poverty rate in L.A. County higher than the nation as a whole, but we are the homeless capital of the nation.
Homelessness is extreme poverty. A serious illness or the loss of a job can leave anyone in extreme poverty. And when kids become homeless, their education suffers immensely.
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Disappointment was widespread last month when Minnesota failed to make the list of finalists for federal Race to the Top education funds. For a state accustomed to being a national leader in education, it was a rude awakening to be bested by winners Delaware and Tennessee and eight other finalists.Still, the poor showing can be the kick in the teeth Minnesota needs to jump-start educational reforms, and it should serve as a wake-up call for a teachers union that has wielded too much power in preserving the status quo. Minnesota lost points in the competition for poor plans to produce better educators and close the achievement gap, and for not having more support from its teachers unions.
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Granite School District has proposed a policy on banning faculty from becoming friends on Facebook with students. If the policy is passed, it will be the first of its kind in the entire state. The proposed policy applies to all employees in the District. "I think it's very good because I think it's a check and balance on the Facebook," said Helen Mellen, teacher at Olympus High School. "I think they get out of hand. They can become very dangerous."Some students at school will not deny the dangers of getting to know their teachers better on Facebook, but a few students feel the social networking site has helped them in contacting their teachers.
"Even if they do make the policy, I could see teachers getting away with it," said student Gavin Salisbury. "Last week I turned in an assignment over Facebook, I at least told the teacher over Facebook that my assignment was in his e-mail, so the assignment was on time because of Facebook."
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History matters. Most intelligent adults, no matter how limited their education, understand that. Even if they have never formally studied the subject, they are likely to take an interest in historical topics. Historians on television - notably Simon Schama and David Starkey - draw big audiences (the book of Schama's History of Britain sold more than a million copies). Military historians who have become household names in recent years include Richard Holmes and Anthony Beevor. And journalists such as Andrew Marr, Jeremy Paxman and David Dimbleby have also been highly successful in reaching a mass audience with historical material.History, it might be said, has never been more popular. Yet there is a painful paradox at the very same time: that it has never been less popular in British schools.
History is not a compulsory part of the British secondary school curriculum after the age of 14, in marked contrast to nearly all other European countries. The most recent statistics for England and Wales indicate the scale of the problem. In 2009 a total of 219,809 candidates sat the GCSE in history - just 4 per cent of all GCSEs taken. More students sat the design and technology GCSE (305,809).
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New York-based online video management company whistleBox has developed a new browser-based augmented reality (AR) experience geared directly at children by integrating it with the one thing every kid loves: cartoons. The project, dubbed Do Crew, is a series of animated stories for kids that include interactive AR games and challenges that the kids can play with using a webcam attached to a desktop or laptop computer.In examples shown in videos on the Do Crew site, kids can control cartoon vehicles by jumping or leaning side-to-side, and can play other games by waving their hands in front of the camera. Think Project Natal but in a web browser, and integrated within kids' cartoons. This is an excellent use of augmented reality technology because it is a practical application with genuine value, an attribute we discussed last week as being the strongest way AR can break into the mainstream.
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While most doctoral programs have some sort of orientation, the focus on such matters as required courses, time to degree and dissertation goals may diminish opportunities to consider really important matters -- such as how to wander into a colloquium at which food is served, timing your entrance so you don't need to listen to the talk.Adam Ruben wants to help. His Surviving Your Stupid Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School is just out from Random House and offers advice -- tongue in cheek but with plenty of truth -- for those who want a doctorate. Ruben earned his Ph.D. in molecular biology from Johns Hopkins University in 2008, so the material comes from his personal experience -- although the attitude comes from his moonlighting as a stand-up comic. He covers everything from selecting professors to work with to figuring out when you need to finish up already (the latter in a chapter appropriate for the Passover season, "Let My Pupil Go.")
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I was flipping through the paper the other day, and one of the comics stood out to me. (Yes, I do still enjoy reading the funny pages; it's relaxing after a long day.) It was Ziggy, one of my favorites, because of its cute illustrations, and funny one-liners.In this particular comic, Ziggy was at the doctor's office, sitting on a chair next to the doctor, when he looked at the diploma on the wall. Then he cried out, "Wait a minute! This says you were homeschooled!"
I laughed, because it was a stereotypical illustration of a common reaction that people have of homeschoolers, such as myself.
One of my favorite reactions happened at my school, Fox Valley Technical College. I was chatting with another student before my class and, somewhere in the conversation, I mentioned having been homeschooled. She looked at me in amazement, and exclaimed, "I would have never guessed you were homeschooled!"
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I haven't had a chance to read the details yet, but from the executive summary of the new results released today by the School Choice Demonstration Project, it looks like vouchers have done a good job of improving education for all students in the city of Milwaukee.What? That's not the way you heard it?
Of course not. Because the new result, taken in isolation from other information, simply says that after two years, the voucher students are making learning improvements about the same as public school students. The scores for the voucher students are higher, but the difference is not statistically certain.
However, let's plug that into the larger universe of information. We know - from the very same research project - that vouchers are improving education in Milwaukee public schools. The positive incentives of competition and the improved matching of student needs to school strengths are causing public schools to deliver a better education.
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AS THE Obama administration spreads enthusiasm about a proposal to replace a patchwork of state education standards with national ones, it might also heed a cautionary tale. In the 1990s California too established rigorous standards. "We thought they were the highest," up there with those of Massachusetts and Indiana, says Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think-tank in Washington, DC. But California never translated those standards into results. Its public schools are, with some exceptions, awful. Moreover, the state's fiscal crisis is about to make them even worse.California's 8th-graders (14-year-olds), for example, ranked 46th in maths last year. Only Alabama, Mississippi and the District of Columbia did worse. California also sends a smaller share of its high-school graduates to college than all but three other states. One of its roughly 1,000 school districts, Los Angeles Unified, which happens to be the second-largest in the country, has just become the first to be investigated by the federal Office for Civil Rights about whether it adequately teaches pupils who have little or no English.
Eli Broad, a Los Angeles philanthropist who is trying to reform education, blames a combination of California's dysfunctional governance, with "elected school boards made up of wannabes and unions", and the fact that the state's teachers' union is both more powerful and "more regressive" than elsewhere. The California Teachers Association (CTA) is the biggest lobby in the state, having spent some $210m in the past decade--more than any other group-- to intervene in California's politics.
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Has anyone been watching Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution? I have and I have to say that Jamie is truly inspiring. He's got so much passion and drive. I wish I had a pinky's worth of his. If you're not familiar with Jamie, he has a long career that I believe started with his simple cooking show The Naked Chef. Since then he's revolutionized the British school lunch program and is now on to America's unhealthiest city to continue the revolution.So just what is so bad about school lunches? Well, this is certainly not a new topic for The Green Mama, but it's important because kids are the future and habits are created when we're young. This is the first generation that is not expected to live longer than their parents due mostly to obesity. One in three Illinois children is overweight or obese and according to the Community Food Security Commission, 1 in 3 children will develop type 2 diabetes. It's heartbreaking.
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If you didn't know me, and I told you that I was an attorney working as the executor for a recently deceased prince and needed your help to move millions of dollars would you believe me?Right, I didn't think so.
What if you did know me, and you found out that I enabled a social networking app that tells me how many times each of my friends were peeking at pictures I posted from my last vacation to the beaches in Spain?
I bet you might want to enable it too!
In a previous blog post last year (http://siblog.mcafee.com/consumer/from-the-419-to-facebook-email-scams-and-you/), I commented about the possibility of social networking scams using information gleaned from Social Networks about a person to target them in a confidence scam. Since that posting, that concept has become a reality, and criminals have begun executing advanced fee and confidence scams on people on social networks like Facebook. Today, tools like SiteAdvisor and SiteAdvisor Plus (http://www.siteadvisor.com) which show you sites that are bad (phishing, etc.) and protect you from being exposed to malware for download, along with good old-fashioned vigilance, go a long way to keep you safe from these types of threats.
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Back in 1982, Gifted Child Quarterly published a special edition that focused on myths about gifted education - and the research that dispels those myths. For a look at those first articles, check out this link. It really was an important collection of works, focusing on such myths as "myth: we need to have the same scores for everyone" and "myth: there is a single curriculum for the gifted" and " myth: the gifted constitutes a single, homogenous group."
Recently, GCQ undertook the same task, tackling a series of current myths about gifted students and gifted education and providing the research that backs up why those myths are not true. Many of the myths tackled in the 2009 issue are the very same ones tackled in the 1982 issue, plus the list is expanded with timely and relevant new (actually - old) myths, such as "myth: it is fair to teach all children the same way" and "myth: classroom teachers have the time, the skill, and the will to differentiate adequately" and "myth: high-ability students don't face problems and challenges."
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For the most part, admissions and financial aid are honorable professions. My colleagues are generally very ethical people who strive to help students and deeply believe in the importance of their mission and the service they provide.That being said, sometimes their work this time of year - the months that colleges and universities package financial aid - can seem a little dirty. I'm not talking DIRTY - I've yet to hear about a colleague finding a way to engineer financial aid kickbacks or helping the cartels launder money through financial aid.
Clearly, however, the process is neither transparent nor easy to understand. For years I've listened to my colleagues cry that we're NOT used car dealers (by the way, I know some very ethical car dealers), but in the end, it comes down to a basic question for most families:
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After the endowment of Centenary College in Shreveport, La., fell by 20 percent from 2007 to 2009, the private school decided to eliminate half of its 44 majors. Over the next three to four years, classic humanities specialities like Latin, German studies, and performing arts will be phased out. It's quite a change from 2007, when NEWSWEEK labeled Centenary the "hottest liberal-arts school you never heard of," extolling its wide range of academics. In their place, the school is considering adding several graduate programs, such as master's degrees in teaching and international business. Such professional programs have proven increasingly popular and profitable at other universities and colleges, especially during economic downturns, a point that the college president tries to downplay. "We're not intentionally trying to chase markets," says David Rowe. "We think the students need to have a grounding in the arts and sciences, but they also probably need some training in a specific area."
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I generally have a great deal of sympathy for regular schmoes who look inordinately like famous people. Through no fault of their own, they walk through life being judged on what they are not (the famous person), rather than what they are (a working stiff that is sick of being told he looks like Jim from "The Office.")Imagine if you were the guy who works at Kinko's who looks sort of like Matt Damon. (Trust me, this is going somewhere.) People don't notice that you may be better looking than your average guy - they only judge you on how far you fall short of looking like Jason Bourne. (After all, if you looked exactly like Matt Damon, you probably wouldn't be working at Kinko's. Staples, maybe - but certainly not Kinko's.)
On Wednesday of this week, the results of a longitudinal study of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) were released. The study, mandated by a state law enacted in 2006 and conducted by researchers at the University of Arkansas, is an attempt to compare student achievement in the Choice program in Milwaukee to similar students in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS).
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When Maurice Johnson was laid off a year ago from his six-figure salary as a managing director at GE Capital, it wasn't his future he was worried about.It was his children's.
The family income of the Johnsons is a fifth of what it used to be. And the children are about to feel the pain. Mr. Johnson's two oldest are attending his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, at an annual cost of $50,000 apiece. And his youngest daughter, 15 years old, recently began her own college search. Mr. Johnson isn't sure whether he'll be able to help her to go to college, or even to get the older kids to graduation.
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Two economists who work 2,274 miles away have identified the essence of parenthood in the Washington area since 1995. It turns out we have been spending all that time with our older children -- chauffeuring, applauding, coordinating, correcting, planning, obsessing -- because we have a deep need to beat the other stressed-out parents in getting our kids into good colleges.The researchers are Garey and Valerie A. Ramey, a married couple at the University of California-San Diego. They have done the hyper-active parent thing themselves and have a son at Stanford University to show for it. They also admit that most of this exhaustive parenting is done not by men but by women, including, by her own account, Ms. Ramey herself. To sum up, college-graduate soccer moms are trying to outdo all the other soccer moms to get their children into a good school so their daughters can repeat the cycle with their own children.
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The Los Angeles Board of Education on Tuesday will consider amending a new policy that limits the ability of students who live in the district to attend school elsewhere, a contentious issue expected to draw scores of parents to the afternoon meeting.In February, Los Angeles schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines moved to limit the types of permits issued to families seeking attendance in other districts, allowing exemptions only for students whose parents work within the boundaries of the other school district and for students who would complete fifth, eighth or 12th grades next year.
Last year, L.A. Unified granted permission to more than 12,200 students to enroll in 99 other districts, including Torrance, Culver City and Santa Monica-Malibu. Cortines estimates that the district is losing $51 million in state per-pupil funding, money that could help to close a $640-million budget shortfall.
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Despite signs of life in the job market, the outlook for newly minted college graduates remains grim and many are trying new strategies for landing positions.Students are starting their job hunts months earlier than usual, while others are looking into short stints at positions outside their major.
Bob Tutag began beating the bushes in October, a time when most college seniors are barely back from summer vacation. But it paid off: The 21-year-old Michigan State University student in March accepted an offer at Developers Diversified Realty Corp., a commercial real-estate firm in Beachwood, Ohio. He starts in May.
Mr. Tutag knew he faced a challenge, having majored in accounting with a specialization in real estate, a sector of the economy hammered by the downturn.
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Reports on the third-year evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program will be released in Madison on Wednesday, April 7.The reports on growth, school switching, testing, integration and other measures of the 20-year-old program will be released by the evaluation team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Room 313 of the Pyle Center, 702 Langdon St., from 9:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
The evaluation team includes professor John Witte of UW-Madison's La Follette School of Public Affairs; Patrick Wolf, Jeffery Dean, Jonathan Mills and Brian Kisida, all of the School Choice Demonstration Project at the University of Arkansas; Joshua Cowen of the University of Kentucky; David Fleming of Furman University; Meghan Condon of UW-Madison; and Thomas Stewart of Qwaku & Associates.
The Wisconsin Legislature authorized the evaluation in 2005 to learn how well the program, the oldest and largest urban educational voucher program in the United States, is working. The maximum voucher amount in 2007-08 was $6,607, and approximately 20,000 children used vouchers to attend secular or religious private schools.
The general purposes of the evaluation are to analyze the effectiveness of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program in terms of longitudinal student achievement growth and grade attainment, drop-out rates and high school graduation rates. The former will be primarily accomplished by measuring and estimating student growth in achievement as measured by the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations in math and reading in grades three through eight during a five-year period.
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It explores two different approaches to math; one is representative of the fuzzy math side of things, and the other is in the traditionalist camp. I make it clear what side I'm on. I talk about how the fuzzy side uses what I call a "separate path" in which students are given open ended and ill posed problems as a means to teach them how to apply prior knowledge in new situations. I present two different problems, one representing each camp.
The math may prove challenging for some readers, though high school math teachers should have no problems with it.Much has been written about the debate on how best to teach math to students in K-12--a debate often referred to as the "math wars". I have written much about it myself, and since the debate shows no signs of easing, I continue to have reasons to keep writing about it. While the debate is complex, the following two math problems provide a glimpse of two opposing sides:
Problem 1: How many boxes would be needed to pack and ship one million books collected in a school-based book drive? In this problem the size of the books is unknown and varied, and the size of the boxes is not stated.
Problem 2: Two boys canoeing on a lake hit a rock where the lake joins a river. One boy is injured and it is critical to get a doctor to him as quickly as possible. Two doctors live nearby: one up-river and the other across the lake, both equidistant from the boys. The unhurt boy has to fetch a doctor and return to the spot. Is it quicker for him to row up the river and back, or go across the lake and back, assuming he rows at the same constant rate of speed in both cases?
The first problem is representative of a thought-world inhabited by education schools and much of the education establishment. The second problem is held in disdain by the same, but favored by a group of educators and math oriented people who for lack of a better term are called "traditionalists".
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College students are known for their ability to survive on instant noodles, toast and a shoestring budget. But recently, some students in Ireland have gotten particularly desperate. "I have heard from students who have lived on biscuits stolen from the chaplaincy in their college for a week, students who have lived in their cars for months," says Hugh Sullivan, education officer at the Union of Students in Ireland, a group that advocates on the behalf of over 250,000 students around the country.The reason? Over the past 15 years, fees at Irish universities that cover the cost of registration, exams and student services have gone from the equivalent of $240 per student to nearly $2,000. On top of that, the government cut funding to universities by 5% last year and Sullivan expects another 5% cut this year. "It's a time of famine," Sullivan says, adding that even though students don't show up in the country's grim unemployment rate (currently 13.1%), they have become the hidden victim of the recent financial crisis. "The last thing you eat is your seeds."
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Via a kind reader.
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Whitney Tilson and True South Studios present A Right Denied: The Critical Need for Genuine Education Reform. Education reformer Whitney Tilson gives the most in-depth exploration ever committed to film of the twin achievement gaps that threaten our nation's future: between the U.S. and our economic competitors, and between low-income, minority students and their more affluent peers. After spending more than two decades on the front lines, witnessing first-hand public education's shocking failures and remarkable successes, Mr. Tilson was inspired to assemble a powerful and at times unsettling presentation about the twin achievement gaps and what must be done to address them. He utilizes the latest data and research to paint the most detailed portrait of American public education ever committed to film. More importantly, he presents us with a way forward so our nation can deliver on its promise to all of its children and ensure its long-term future.
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University of Wisconsin System leaders are crafting a plan to boost the number of degrees the schools award each year by 30% over the next 15 years, a move that would make the universities even more of an engine that makes the state's economy attractive for businesses.Interesting.The goal is to boost the percentage of Wisconsin residents who have college degrees or some professional certificate from a university or college. To meet it, the schools would have to confer 33,700 degrees in 2025, up from today's rate of about 26,000 a year. If the universities meet the goal, they will award 80,000 more degrees over the next 15 years than they would otherwise.
UWM would be a major player in the plan, UW System President Kevin Reilly said. Officials could announce as early as Monday how many additional degrees the urban campus would produce under the plan.
Meeting the goal would come at an up-front cost for the state, Reilly said. The universities would have to make the case to state lawmakers to reverse a long-term trend in which a shrinking share of the budget for the campuses comes from the state. Reilly also said the state would have to help increase faculty salaries, which lag behind salaries at peer universities in other states.
Related: Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding.
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Stephone Kreider Yoder, Isaac Yoder & Levi Yoder:
STEVE: "Are girls different from boys?" I asked Levi the other night.He slowly turned toward me from his Facebook screen, arching his eyebrows and flashing a smirk that said: Wow, Dad is even more clueless than I thought. "About money," I quickly added. "How are teenage girls different from boys about money?"
"Oh," he mumbled, less cocky now. He thought for a minute: "I don't know." Truth is, neither of us does, which is why we've avoided the topic in this column. We're a family with three boys; what do we know about girls?
Boy issues seem simple to me. Girls seem, well, complicated.
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WENDY KOPP proposed the idea for creating a national teacher corps in her undergraduate senior thesis at Princeton University in 1989. She then did just that, creating Teach For America (TFA) shortly after graduation. Ms Kopp tells the remarkable story behind the early days of the organisation in her book "One Day, All Children...". Today TFA attracts many of the brightest college graduates to teach in America's neediest communities. In the most recent school year, the organisation placed some 7,300 corps members in schools across the country. They join nearly 17,000 TFA alumni, many of whom have become leaders in the education-reform movement. We close out education week by asking Ms Kopp about TFA's success and what lessons it holds for America's public-education system.DiA: You have done a lot of research on the characteristics of successful TFA teachers. What is the magic formula and do you think it holds for non-TFA teachers as well?
Ms Kopp: We have found that the most successful teachers in low-income communities operate like successful leaders. They establish a vision of where their students will be performing at the end of the year that many believe to be unrealistic. They invest their students in working harder than they ever have to reach that vision, maximise their classroom time in a goal-oriented manner through purposeful planning and effective execution, reflect constantly on their progress to improve their performance over time, and do whatever it takes to overcome the many challenges they face.
It follows that the characteristics our research has shown to differentiate our most successful teachers are leadership characteristics--perseverance in the face of challenges, the ability to influence and motivate others, organisational ability, problem-solving ability. All of our insights around successful teaching have come from our work in the nation's most economically disadvantaged communities so I can't say that this is the approach or that these are the characteristics that differentiate successful teachers elsewhere.
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The recent disclosure that African-American fourth-graders in Wisconsin have the worst reading skills in the entire country came as a shock to many Milwaukeeans.Keisha Arnold wasn't among them.
Her 10-year-old son has experienced reading problems and poor grades at his Milwaukee school for some time. Arnold has been frustrated with her inability to find a way to address the problem.
"I just don't understand why he can't seem to get the help he needs," said Arnold, 28, a single parent who returned to Milwaukee a few years ago after living in Phoenix.
When she returned to her hometown, she enrolled her son in a local charter school. "I didn't want him to go to MPS because I didn't think he'd get a good education there," she explained.
But it didn't take long for Arnold to recognize that deficiencies in her son's reading and math skills were not being addressed.
She met with his teachers and sought additional tutoring, but her son's grades failed to improve.
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IN 1971, a young black lawyer brought up in rural North Carolina under Jim Crow laws argued on behalf of a boy from Charlotte called James Swann before the United States Supreme Court. In that case, Swann v Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the court held that school districts may use busing, quotas and other such methods to ensure integration. Nearly 40 years later that same lawyer, Julius Chambers, stood once again before nine people, this time the Wake County board of education, and this time as a concerned citizen rather than an advocate, to plead a case: that the county ought to retain its programme of assigning pupils to schools based on levels of family income. His suit failed: on March 23rd the board voted 5-4 to abandon that policy.That vote ended a decade-long experiment. In 2000 Wake County's school board decided to integrate its schools by income level rather than race. No more than 40% of students at any one school should be receiving free or subsidised lunches (which are given to children from poor families). Evidence dating back more than 40 years shows that schools with too great a concentration of poor pupils are undesirable. Teachers do not stay, and poor pupils tend to perform worse when they are put with others who are poor.
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Watch a recent Madison School Board Candidate Forum here. The spring election is tomorrow, April 6, 2010.
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In February, the national press reported on a pilot program that will give high school sophomores in eight states a chance to earn a diploma and head straight to credit-bearing math and English courses at a state college. To do so, they will have to take special course work and can try to pass academic tests known as board exams as early as grade 10.The idea of a grade 10 diploma is the latest brainchild of the National Center on Education and the Economy, the originator of the unsuccessful school-to-work initiative in the 1990s. The project is funded by the Gates Foundation, which has abandoned its initiative to create small high schools as a way to get more low-achieving students through high school.
The center's so-called fast-track approach ups the ante and aims to get at-risk students out of high school and into college - and supposedly on a quick credit-bearing path to a degree. It also aims to get bright high school students into college sooner for supposedly better course work. However, the center's proposed 10th-grade "diploma" is the wrong answer to the wrong problem for three groups of students: those with a strong academic orientation, those without it but who are willing to stay in school and those who drop out.
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It was a Race to the Top, but Colorado, amazingly, finished close to the bottom.
Of the 16 finalists for President Obama's cash giveaway for education reform, only New York and Washington, D.C. -- areas with some of the country's worst schools -- finished below Colorado. It was an embarrassing plummet for a state whose bid just a year ago looked so promising.Colorado had been at the forefront of education reform since Gov. Roy Romer ushered in CSAPs and then-state lawmaker Bill Owens pushed for charter schools. Even Denver Public Schools for the past five years have been incubators for what are now emerging as national reforms.
This was Colorado's race to lose. And we did.
Obama dangled $4.35 billion in front of states to spur them into developing innovative education-reform plans. But Colorado's plan lacked ambition, bold ideas and statewide impact. It also failed to build great teachers and leaders, according to the Obama administration's scoring system.
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With job openings scarce for young people, the number of unpaid internships has climbed in recent years, leading federal and state regulators to worry that more employers are illegally using such internships for free labor.Convinced that many unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws, officials in Oregon, California and other states have begun investigations and fined employers. Last year, M. Patricia Smith, then New York's labor commissioner, ordered investigations into several firms' internships. Now, as the federal Labor Department's top law enforcement official, she and the wage and hour division are stepping up enforcement nationwide.
Many regulators say that violations are widespread, but that it is unusually hard to mount a major enforcement effort because interns are often afraid to file complaints. Many fear they will become known as troublemakers in their chosen field, endangering their chances with a potential future employer.
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The chances of a high school student eventually becoming first violin for the Boston Philharmonic: one in a million.The chances of a high school student eventually playing basketball in the NBA? About the same.
In fact, the chances of someone growing up and getting a job precisely like yours, whatever it is, are similarly slim. (Head of development at an ad agency, director of admissions for a great college... you get the idea). Every good gig is a long shot, but in the end, a lot of talented people get good gigs. The odds of being happy and productive and well compensated aren't one in a million at all, because there are many good gigs down the road. The odds are only slim if you pick precisely one job.
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s spanking an acceptable way of disciplining children?Opinions differ (1). Some consider it barbaric and a definite no-no, others think it merely old-fashioned but quite handy in case of a parenting emergency. A hard core of disgusted disciplinarians protest that the practice's decline is why today's youth lacks any respect for authority - and ultimately is one of the main causes for the Decline of Everything.
The ambiguity extends to the legal sphere. Many countries have outlawed corporal punishment in the classroom (2), while only a handful have done the same for parental correction of the physical kind. This map shows those countries on a world map, and amplifies their relatively small number by submerging all other countries (3).
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I count 23 countries on this map. So, which are the members of the World Anti-Spanking League?
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In the 1980s, when I was teaching history at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, one day there was a faculty meeting during which some of my colleagues put on a skit about one of our most intractable problems: students wandering in the hallways during classes. One person played the principal, another the hall monitor, and others the guidance counselor, the vice-principal, and I can't remember who else from the staff. One teacher played the student who had been in the halls.
They did a good job on the acting and the lines were good, but as it went on, I noticed something a bit odd. Everyone had a part and things to say, but the only passive member of the show was the student, who had nothing much to say or do.
I notice a parallel to this in the majority of discussions about education reform these days. With some exceptions, including Carol Jago, Diane Ravitch, Paul Zoch, and me, edupundits seem occupied with just about everything except what students do academically.
There is a lot of discussion of what teachers do, and what superintendents, curriculum coordinators, principals, financial officers, mayors, legislators, and so on, do, but the actual academic work of students gets very little attention.
This observation was reinforced for me when the TCR Institute did a study in 2002 of the assignment of serious term papers in U.S. public high schools. It was the first (and last) study of its kind, and it found that the majority of HS students are not being asked to do the sort of academic writing they need to work on to prepare themselves for college (and career).
In the last eight years, I have sought funds for a study of the assignment of complete nonfiction books in U.S. public high schools, but no one seems interested. Of course, many billions have been spent since 2002 on school reinvention and reorganization, assessment plans, teacher selection, training and retention, and so on, but again, the academic work of the students (the principal mission of schools) is "more honored in the breach than the observance."
My perspective on this is necessarily a bottom-up, Lower Education one. I publish the serious research papers of high school students of history. Most of the 20,000+ U.S. public high schools never send me one, which is not a great surprise, because most history departments, other than in IB schools, do not assign research papers.
But it gives me a curiosity over the neglect of student work which does not seem to be present in those whose focus is at a Higher Level in education. Those who live on the Public Policy level of Education Punditry can not see far enough Down or focus closely enough on the activity of schools to find out whether our HS students are reading history books and writing term papers.
I believe this is because foundation people, consultants, education professors, public policy experts, and their tribes mostly talk to each other, not to students or even to teachers, who are so far far beneath them. They hold conferences, and symposia, and they write papers and books about what needs to be done in education, but from almost none of them come suggestions that involve the academic reading and writing our students should be doing.
Of course what teachers do is vastly important, as well as very difficult to influence, but surely it cannot be that much more important than what students do.
Naturally, we should design curricula rich in knowledge, but if they don't include serious independent academic work by students, the burden will still be on the teacher, and many too many students can slide through under it and arrive in college ready for their remedial classes in reading, math and writing, as more than a million do now each year.
Tony Wagner, the only person I know at the Harvard Education School who is interested in student work, did a focus group with some graduates of a high school he was working with, and they all said they wished they had been given more serious work in academic writing while they were in the high school. I asked him how many schools he knows of which take the time to hold focus groups with their recent graduates to get feedback from them on their level of academic preparation in school, and he said he only knew of three high schools in the country which did it.
We do need improvements in all the things the edupundits are working on, and the foundations and our governments are spending billions on. But if we continue to lack curiosity about and to ignore what students are doing academically, I feel sure all that money will continue to be wasted, as it has been so many many times in the past.
"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 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
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Rhode Island's new education boss told a large crowd of Bristol and Warren residents last Thursday night that their towns have gotten a great deal for nearly two decades, but it's time to settle up. The message was frustrating and disappointing to many in attendance.Department of Education Commissioner Deborah Gist confirmed that a proposed funding formula would slash into the Bristol Warren Regional School District's revenue stream each year for the next 10 years, escalating to a $9.1 million reduction by 2020. Her message was delivered to a large crowd packed into the Mt. Hope High School auditorium to hear her speak.
Half the reduction is elimination of a regionalization "bonus" that has been given to the school district each year since the two towns merged their school systems in the early 1990s. Ms. Gist said the state simply does not have the resources to continue to fund the district at the level it has been. However, Ms. Gist offered one small carrot -- she said the state would help pay for students requiring a high level of specialized services.
According to Ms. Gist, the proposed funding formula would distribute enough funds to each district so all can adhere to the Basic Education Plan, an outline of standards Rhode Island students must achieve.
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Why draw from the model? A number of years ago, my husband and I and some friends--all, except for me, artists who also teach at art schools here in New York--spent hours discussing this question, though without arriving at anything particularly convincing. A few of them recalled drawing from the model as undergraduates, but none had done so in graduate programs--these were the heady, experimental days of the early '70s, when all the action took place in the seminar room; in my husband's program, studios had been dispensed with altogether. When we turned our attention to the art world today, drawing and models seemed just as antiquated. Installation, photography, and video, more popular than ever, are mechanically derived. And though we could easily think of paintings with figures in them, all of them had been lifted from mass-media images; they had as little relation to drawing from the pose of a living person in the artist's studio as photography.Yet, at art schools today, freshmen are required to draw from the model, sometimes six hours at a stretch, their labors then judged by teachers who have no use for, indeed, who disdain, the practice in their own work. We spent quite a while trying to account for this odd disjuncture. The best anyone could come up with is that studio drawing focuses the eye and hand; it is an intense discipline in seeing and then translating what one sees into material form. This, it seemed to me, was another way of saying that it was good for its own sake, even if it had no relation to making art these days. The conversation drifted to other subjects, but the next morning what had eluded us the night before now appeared so ridiculously obvious that I could not believe we had missed it: The reason the Academy required students to master the painstaking practice of drawing from the model was because, until very recently, the action of figures--gods, heroes, and mere mortals--was the prime subject, the central drama, the moving force, of all the greatest paintings.
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Tuition discounting reached record high levels at private colleges and universities in 2008, and the largest share of that aid was awarded without consideration of students' financial need, according to a report released Tuesday by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO).The average discount rate for full-time freshmen increased from 39 percent in fall 2007 to 42 percent in fall 2008, and the average award covered more than half - 53.5 percent - of the "sticker price." The discount rate represents the share of tuition and fee revenues colleges use to award institutionally funded aid.
Despite lamentations from some college presidents, tuition discounting has become an increasingly common practice at private institutions. Standard discounting involves placing the sticker price of attendance beyond the reach of many families, only to effectively slash that price by offering institutionally funded financial aid to many or, more typically, most students. Critics say it steers too much aid toward students without financial need, and it also forces high-tuition colleges to defend sticker prices students seldom actually pay.
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The founders of the Blue School aspired to create something different: a private school not fixated on the Ivy League prospects of preschoolers and devoid of admissions hysteria. An education that, as they put it, "you don't have to recover from."The school was in the East Village, not uptown, and its leaders were not bluebloods but the founders and spouses of the Blue Man Group, the alternative theater troupe.
The school, which is entering its fourth year, has remained true to its progressive roots, with "imagination stations" and "glow time." Children help direct the curriculum, and social and emotional skills are given equal weight to reading and math.
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Nine students are being prosecuted for bullying a fellow student, Phoebe Prince, who committed suicide after being taunted and threatened. What, if anything, could and should the school have tried to protect Ms. Prince? What can and should teachers and administrators do at any school where students are bullying other kids?In their article "9 Teenagers Are Charged After Classmate's Suicide," Erik Eckholm and Katie Zezima consider what happened at South Hadley High School in Massachusetts, and the legal fallout
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As his patient lay unconscious in an emergency room from an overdose of sedatives, psychiatrist Damir Huremovic was faced with a moral dilemma: A friend of the patient had forwarded to Huremovic a suicidal e-mail from the patient that included a link to a Web site and blog he wrote. Should Huremovic go online and check it out, even without his patient's consent?Huremovic decided yes; after all, the Web site was in the public domain and it might contain some potentially important information for treatment. When Huremovic clicked on the blog, he found quotations such as this: "Death makes angels of us all and gives us wings." A final blog post read: "I wish I didn't wake up." Yet as Huremovic continued scanning the patient's personal photographs and writings, he began to feel uncomfortable, that perhaps he'd crossed some line he shouldn't have.
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A casual joke on Twitter recently let slip a dirty little secret of large science and engineering courses: Students routinely cheat on their homework, and professors often look the other way."Grading homework is so fast when they all cheat and use the illegal solutions manual," quipped Douglas Breault Jr., a teaching assistant in mechanical engineering at Tufts University. After all, if every answer is correct, the grader is left with little to do beyond writing an A at the top of the page and circling it. Mr. Breault, a first-year graduate student, ended his tweet by saying, "The profs tell me to ignore it."
While most students and professors seem to view cheating on examinations as a serious moral lapse, both groups appear more cavalier about dishonesty on homework. And technology has given students more tools than ever to find answers in unauthorized ways--whether downloading online solution manuals or instant-messaging friends for answers. The latest surveys by the Center for Academic Integrity found that 22 percent of students say they have cheated on a test or exam, but about twice as many--43 percent--have engaged in "unauthorized collaboration" on homework.
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Teenagers in the San Diego Unified School District will no longer need parental consent to leave campus for private medical appointments, including pregnancy, abortion, drug and suicide counseling.The school board unanimously adopted the revised policy Tuesday night to comply with state law.
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Dads are helping out with childrearing more and more these days. The result can be both a boon and a letdown for super-moms, whose self-competence can take a hit when paired with husbands who are savvy caregivers, new research finds.The findings reveal the fallout as women have entered the workplace in droves over recent decades, many of them leaving young children at home. One result is mothers have less time for care-giving. Past studies have shown working moms are torn between full-time careers and stay-at-home duties. And lately more diligent dads are helping out with the diaper-changing and other household duties.
But since mothers pride themselves on being just that -- moms -- their self-esteem can take a blow.
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Many educators greatly admire the wide range of human achievements over the millennia and want their students to know about them. However, there are those, like the Dean of the Education School at a major east coast university, who told me that: "The myth of individual greatness is a myth." Translated, I suppose that might be rendered: "Individual greatness is a myth (squared)."
Why is it that so many of our teachers and others in education are, as it were, in the "clay feet" business, anxious to have our students know that human beings who accomplished wonderful things also had flaws, like the rest of us? As they emphasize the flaws, trying to encourage students to believe that they are just fine the way they are now, with their self-esteem and perhaps a couple of the multiple intelligences, they seem to teach that there is no need for them to seek out challenges or to emulate the great men and women who have gone before.
One of the first major problems with this, apart from its essential mendacity, is that it deprives students of the knowledge and understanding of what these people have accomplished in spite of their human failings. So that helps students remain ignorant as well as with less ambition.
It is undeniable, of course, that Washington had false teeth, sometimes lost his temper, and wanted to be a leader (sin of ambition). Jefferson, in addition to his accomplishments, including the Declaration of Independence, the University of Virginia, the Louisiana Purchase and some other things, may or may not have been too close to his wife's half-sister after his wife died. Hamilton, while he may have helped get the nation on its feet, loved a woman or women to whom he was not married, and it is rumored that nice old world-class scientist Benjamin Franklin was also fond of women (shocking!).
The volume of information about the large and small failings is great, almost enough to allow educators so inclined to spend enough time on them almost to exclude an equal quantity of magnificent individual achievements. Perhaps for an educator who was in the bottom of his graduating class, it may be some comfort to focus on the faults of great individuals, so that his own modest accomplishments may grow in comparison?
In any case, even the new national standards for reading include only short "informational texts" which pretty much guarantees for the students of educators who follow them that they will have very little understanding of the difficulties overcome and the greatness achieved by so many of their fellow human beings over time.
Alfred North Whitehead wrote that: "Moral education is impossible apart from the habitual vision of greatness." What Education School did he go to, I wonder?
Peter Gibbon, author of a book on heroes, regularly visits our high schools in an effort to counter this mania for the denigration of wonderful human beings, past and present.
Surely it would be worth our while to look again at the advantages of teaching our students of history about the many many people worthy of their admiration, however small their instructor may appear by comparison.
Malvolio was seriously misled in his take on the meaning of the message he was given, that: "Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them," but his author, the greatest playwright in the English language, surely deserves, as do thousands of others, the attention of our students, even if he did leave the second-best bed to his wife in his will.
Let us give some thought to the motivation and competence of those among our educators who, whether they are leftovers of the American Red Guards of the 1960s or not, wish to advise our students of history especially, not to "trust anyone over thirty."
After all, in order to serve our students well, even educators should consider growing up after a while, shouldn't they?
==============
"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 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
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It's become a common lament this session among lobbyists and journalists and other Annapolis insiders: not much is happening.Perhaps, but in case anyone missed it, two bills with major implications for Maryland education policy cleared the Senate on Wednesday without much fanfare.
One would gradually raise the state's dropout age from 16 to 18. The other would create a new tax credit with the hope of stemming the tide of Catholic school closures. Debate over both measures has been heavily colored by concerns over the state's fiscal situation. Neither has made it through the House.
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Goodnight, John-Boy: Driven partly by job losses, more multigenerational families are choosing to live together as "boomerang kids" flock home and people help care for grandchildren or aging parents.About 6.6 million U.S. households in 2009 had at least three generations of family members, an increase of 30 percent since 2000, according to census figures. When "multigenerational" is more broadly defined to include at least two adult generations, a record 49 million, or one in six people, live in such households, according to a study being released Thursday by the Pew Research Center.
The rise in multigenerational households is heavily influenced by economics, with many young adults known as "boomerang kids" moving back home with mom and dad because of limited job prospects and a housing crunch.
But extended life spans and increased options in home health and outpatient care over nursing homes have also played a role. So, too, has a recent wave of immigration of Hispanics and Asians, who are more likely to live with extended family.
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In 1978, a trio of psychologists curious about happiness assembled two groups of subjects. In the first were winners of the Illinois state lottery. These men and women had received jackpots of between fifty thousand and a million dollars. In the second group were victims of devastating accidents. Some had been left paralyzed from the waist down. For the others, paralysis started at the neck.The researchers asked the members of both groups a battery of questions about their lives. On a scale of "the best and worst things that could happen," how did the members of the first group rank becoming rich and the second wheelchair-bound? How happy had they been before these events? How about now? How happy did they expect to be in a couple of years? How much pleasure did they take in daily experiences such as talking with a friend, hearing a joke, or reading a magazine? (The lottery winners were also asked how much they enjoyed buying clothes, a question that was omitted in the case of the quadriplegics.) For a control, the psychologists assembled a third group, made up of Illinois residents selected at random from the phone book.
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am in the eighth grade and a student at Robert E. Howard Middle School. I have been attending the school since 2008. I'm writing to your newspaper in view of the recent allegations of bullying at the school. In all fairness, individual incidents of bullying can happen because they are hard to detect and manage. The reason for this is that bullying can take many forms.Since being at the school, I have not personally seen anyone being bullied by another student. The security at Howard is good. Teachers monitor student activities while traveling to and from classes and at the end of the day. When teachers see something going on that should not be happening, they do their best to stop it.
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This will be an especially personal post, but as it brings into sharp relief many of the ideas I've spent years writing about here, I figured it's worth sharing.As many of you know, a few evenings ago I received the following email from one of my old creative writing professors:
Jeff,
Would you mind taking my name off your "about" page on Proteinwisdom? I've always liked you and your fiction, and your and [name redacted] impetus to make that conference happen, at that moment in time, did a great deal to speed this program along. I was also simply grateful to have you in the program when you came along, because you were-and are-a very smart and intellectual fiction writer, a rare commodity still, to this day. But I am more and more alarmed by the writings in this website of yours, and I do not want to be associated with it.
Brian Kiteley
Here's the context of that mention on my "about" page: "Some of the writers Jeff studied under are Rikki Ducornet, Beth Nugent, Brian Kiteley, and Brian Evenson.
My reply was terse:
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GWEN IFILL: Finally tonight: Does the U.S. need more college graduates in its work force to remain competitive in the global economy? That was the central question at the kickoff of a new season of national debates hosted by the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs.Former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and Michael Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund, argued that we need more college graduates. George Leef, director of research at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Richard Vedder, professor of economics at Ohio University, argued that many jobs being created today don't require college degrees.
PAUL SOLMAN: Is it not the case that the United States needs to have a more and more sophisticated work force? Isn't it the case that, if other countries with whom we're competing are becoming more sophisticated, that that's a challenge to us, George?
GEORGE LEEF, director of research, John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy: Oh, it's a challenge, but putting more people through college is not the way to meet it.
At the margin -- remember, we're not talking here about are we going to educate most of the Americans who -- who have high skills and high aptitude, the high-SAT kids, the motivated students. They can -- they're going to go to college. The question is, are we going to get a few more at the margin into college?
That's what we're debating.
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Like its predecessor, the Obama Administration is focusing its education policy on fixing failed schools. Education Secretary Arne Duncan calls for a "dramatic overhaul" of "dropout factories, where 50, 60, 70 percent of students" don't graduate. The intentions are good, but a new study shows that school turnarounds have a dismal record that doesn't warrant more reform effort."Much of the rhetoric on turnarounds is pie in the sky--more wishful thinking than a realistic assessment of what school reform can actually accomplish," writes Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution. "It can be done but the odds are daunting" and "examples of large-scale, system-wide turnarounds are nonexistent."
Mr. Loveless looked at 1,100 schools in California and compared test scores from 1989 and 2009. "Of schools in the bottom quartile in 1989--the state's lowest performers--nearly two-thirds (63.4 percent) scored in the bottom quartile again in 2009," he writes. "The odds of a bottom quartile school's rising to the top quartile were about one in seventy (1.4 percent)." Of schools in the bottom 10% in 1989, only 3.5% reached the state average after 20 years.
Conversely, the best schools tended to remain that way. Sixty-three percent of the top performers in 1989 were still at the top in 2009, while only 2.4% had fallen to the bottom. School achievement, or lack thereof, is remarkably persistent, and California's worst schools were all the subject of numerous reform attempts in "finance, governance, curriculum, instruction, and assessment," writes Mr. Loveless, a former California public school teacher.
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A 100-a-day habit isn't good for you. Everyone knows that. It's just hard, sometimes, to explain it to kids who think it's so cool.Cigarettes? Lord, no, those things smell. We're talking texting.
According to ABC News, 16-year-old Annie Levitz from Mundelein, Ill., began to sense a little disharmony in her hands. They would feel tingly, numb, or merely hurt like hell. Had she been practicing her free throws in preparation for March Madness? Had she been attempting to become Mundelein's Chopin? If only. Levitz had merely been texting her friends up to 100 times a day.
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Every job is a technology job. Technology is baked into each aspect of work. Social media means that everyone in an organization is a communicator, everyone is a salesperson.As the technical infrastructure continues an inexorable movement towards a service, sourced from without, skills to utilize technology higher up the value chain will be the only ones that pay a professional wage. Just as the word processor replaced the secretary, lightweight authoring tools and social media publishing platforms will replace Web and media specialists for all but the highest fidelity (and revenue generating) tasks.
I'm not saying the media and Web jobs will disappear, rather we will all be expected to create multimedia work in digital format and share / interact with digital tools. Today's NYTimes reporter who writes, but also podcasts and creates short videos, (think David Pogue), provides a glimpse into all of our futures.
What would you choose as the 10 competencies that every college graduate must bring to the job market?
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Does current utility bias predictions of future utility for high stakes decisions? Here I provide field evidence consistent with such Projection Bias in one of life's most thought-about decisions: college enrolment. After arguing and documenting with survey evidence that cloudiness increases the appeal of academic activities, I analyse the enrolment decisions of 1,284 prospective students who visited a university known for its academic strengths and recreational weaknesses. Consistent with the notion that current weather conditions influence decisions about future academic activities, I find that an increase in cloudcover of one standard deviation on the day of the visit is associated with an increase in the probability of enrolment of 9 percentage points.
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Facebook on Friday announced another round of changes to its privacy policy, including amendments that could allow the site to share user information automatically with third-party websites.Certain websites could soon be "pre-approved" by Facebook, so that if a user is logged into Facebook and then visits the third-party website, it would receive information including the "names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting" of a user and his or her friends.
The sites might be able to retain that information "to the extent permitted under their terms of service or privacy policies".
Facebook said it would introduce the feature with a small group of partners and offer new controls for users to opt out.
However, the company could face resistance by users and advocates who see such a move as another invasion of privacy.
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A 'culture' of hugging that reportedly got out of control led an Oregon middle school principal to outlaw the displays of affection, Oregonlive.com reported.After students would "scream and run down the hallway and jump into each other's arms," the school decided enough was enough and have halted hugs as well as other behaviors deemed detrimental to teaching and learning, Oregonlive.com reported.
Principal Allison Couch told Oregonlive.com that the ban came after a school bus incident resulted in a call to police, but did not describe what happened.
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New York city's standard-setting efforts to improve the heatlh of its citizens have provoked resistance in the past from bar owners, fastfood restaurants and global food and drink companies.But this week it was the turn of parents selling muffins, brownies and spinach empanadas on the steps of City Hall.
About 300 people turned out to oppose new city regulations that in effect ban school "bake sales" - an all-American fundraising staple where students and parents sell homebaked cakes and cookies to fund museum trips and equip their sports teams.
The sales, which can raise as much as $500 a time, have fallen foul of efforts by the Department of Education to improve the nutritional quality of foods available in schools as part of its battle against rising levels of childhood obesity.
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Parents with students in the lowest-performing elementary schools in Chicago could obtain vouchers to move their children into better-performing private schools under a plan that passed the Illinois Senate on Thursday.The voucher legislation pushed by Sen. James Meeks (D-Chicago) passed 33-20, with three voting present, could affect thousands of children in the lowest-performing 10 percent of city schools. It now moves to the House.
"By passing this bill, we'll give 22,000 kids an opportunity to have a choice on whether or not they'll continue in their failing school or go to another non-public school within the city of Chicago," Meeks said.
"Just as we came up with and passed charter schools to help children, now is an opportunity to pass this bill so we can help more children escape the dismal realities of Chicago's public schools," Meeks said.
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As the buzz continues to grow about three-year bachelor's degrees, Texas Tech University is starting a three-year M.D. program.Two Canadian institutions -- McMaster University and the University of Calgary -- offer three-year M.D. options. In the United States, the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine offers a three-year option for a D.O. degree. But the unusual Texas Tech M.D. program could represent a significant move in efforts to encourage more medical students to go into primary care and to find ways to minimize the costs of medical education. And it may raise questions about the fourth year of most medical degrees.
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Superintendent Frances Gallo combed the classrooms of embattled Central Falls High School. Teachers and students were gone for the day. Gallo was hunting for a particular item: an effigy of President Obama.
She hoped the rumor of its existence wasn't true.Gallo had fired all the high school teachers just a month earlier, igniting an educational maelstrom in Rhode Island's smallest and poorest community while winning praise from the president.
The teachers union lampooned her; hate mail flooded her inbox. For weeks, she'd prayed every morning for the soul of the man who wrote: "I wish cancer on your children and their children and that you live long enough to see them die."
It was one thing to take barbs from opponents -- another thing altogether if the division was infecting classrooms. Teachers assured the superintendent that the school battle wasn't seeping into lesson plans. So, when CNN asked her about the rumor of the effigy, Gallo took it upon herself to get to the bottom of it.
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I can't pinpoint the moment the Obama administration went wrong on the subject of education. But I can pinpoint the moment when it demonstrated it can't be taken seriously.I can't pinpoint the moment when the Obama administration went wrong on the subject of education. But I can pinpoint the moment when it demonstrated that it can't be taken seriously.
It happened on Monday, March 15, when Education Secretary Arne Duncan was expounding to reporters about revising the No Child Left Behind law. The new policy, he asserted, "is going to revolutionize education in our country."
No, it's not. We have been at the task of education for a long time, and one thing we know is that you cannot revolutionize it. The American system of schooling is vast, complicated, self-protective, slow to change and even slower to improve.
On these points, No Child Left Behind, or NCLB, leaves no doubt. It was inaugurated with grand promises eight years ago. "As of this hour, America's schools will be on a new path of reform, and a new path of results," exulted President George W. Bush upon signing it.
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S THE rich have got richer and those in work ever busier, people with children have discovered a new way of spending their money: on handymen to do the sorts of odd jobs fathers used to roll up their sleeves and take care of. Despite the recent recession, dads, it seems, would rather spend quality time with their offspring than put up shelves or fix dripping taps at the weekend. So their wives, themselves hard pressed, are hiring other men to change fuses and the like, thus making time to dine out, kick a football or visit museums en famille.Domestic help has long been a mostly female preserve, involving nannies, cleaners and laundry maids. That is changing, according to a forthcoming study by Majella Kilkey of the University of Hull and Diane Perrons of the London School of Economics. The pair reckon that nowadays 39% of domestic helpers in Britain are men, up from 17% in the early 1990s; in London, many are also migrants. Many households hiring handymen already employ a small army of nannies, cleaners and gardeners.
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To start off, I'm a sopho more in a rel a tively pres ti gious pri vate insti tu tion; I have an IQ over 180. I don't need to cheat. But why wouldn't I. Hell, I don't bother on tests, I get all the answers right before most kids in my class, but the sheer volume of home work I receive every night is absolutely ridiculous! Tell me, if I'm already investing 8 hours in school, 2 in sports, 2 in other ECs, how in the hell do my teachers expect me to add 6 more hours to homework?I'm not stupid, it's not a matter of me being slow with my work, there just aren't enough hours in a day for school, rugby practice, play rehearsal, and that much home work! I'll give a run-down of what I'm supposed to do tonight:
AP U.S. History: Take (meticulous) notes on chapters 40 - 43 (the end of the text, thank [insert deity here].) Prepare for in-class essay on anything that occurred during Roosevelt's presidency. Okay, so that's not so bad, but we still have another 6 classes to cover.
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Hilary Parker: A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.
In addition to causing significant weight gain in lab animals, long-term consumption of high-fructose corn syrup also led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides. The researchers say the work sheds light on the factors contributing to obesity trends in the United States.
"Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn't true, at least under the conditions of our tests," said psychology professor Bart Hoebel, who specializes in the neuroscience of appetite, weight and sugar addiction. "When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they're becoming obese -- every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don't see this; they don't all gain extra weight."
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Have you noticed the ways that your work patterns have changed over the past five years? Instant messaging, tweeting, SMS, email, and chat, combined with smartphones has enabled us to be "always on." It's now easy to strike up a collaborative working relationship across organizational and geographic boundaries--by messaging, emailing, conferencing, and sending pictures and files back and forth.Everyone is now reachable much of the time by mobile phone. The modalities of collaboration are becoming richer, and, at the same time, more ad hoc. You can get a quick answer via Twitter, SMS or instant messaging.
Having recently returned from rural Africa, I was amazed by my ability to stay in touch through my Blackberry email in the remotest locations.
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FOR the evolutionarily minded, the existence of fairness is a puzzle. What biological advantage accrues to those who behave in a trusting and co-operative way with unrelated individuals? And when those encounters are one-off events with strangers it is even harder to explain why humans do not choose to behave selfishly. The standard answer is that people are born with an innate social psychology that is calibrated to the lives of their ancestors in the small-scale societies of the Palaeolithic. Fairness, in other words, is an evolutionary hangover from a time when most human relationships were with relatives with whom one shared a genetic interest and who it was generally, therefore, pointless to cheat.The problem with this idea is that the concept of fairness varies a lot, depending on which society it happens to come from--something that does not sit well with the idea that it is an evolved psychological tool. Another suggestion, then, is that fairness is a social construct that emerged recently in response to cultural changes such as the development of trade. It may also, some suggest, be bound up with the rise of organised religion.
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They were too old to be high school students, but not old enough to be the parents. They were lingering near Room 236 at Stuyvesant High School, a group of 20 young people, all of them Asian, standing awkwardly together, waiting for the moment when their peripheral but crucial role would become clear to the main characters at the event, the vaunted parent-teacher night.Two big signs at the school entrance, one written in Chinese, explained their mission: Parents in need of interpreters could find them by Room 236. (Teachers supervised the writing of the signs, noted Harvey Blumm, who coordinated the event, "so we'd know they didn't say, 'Go find a bathroom and stick your head in it.' ")
Sally Liu, 26, a university graduate student in film, came because she knew what it was like to be lost in a sea of English. Lin Lin Cheng, who is 18 and studying paleontology, had some extra time during her spring break. And Ying Lin, 19, an undergraduate interested in business, had always wanted to see the inside of Stuyvesant.
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Tyler started this nice meme. I'm a bit skeptical about the reliability of introspection and memory, and I think this kind of thing generally reflects one's favorite current self-construction rather than real influence, so I'll try to avoid that, but I won't entirely. I guess I'll do this roughly chronologically, and leave out the Bible and the Book of Mormon...1. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer. This book made me realize that it is possible to play with words and ideas. I can't even remember much of the story now. (Is it Milo?) What I remember is the revelation that it is possible to get a thrill from manipulating ideas and the words that express them.
2. Dune by Frank Herbert. The Dune books connected with me deeply as a teenager. They appealed, I think, to the sense that people have profound untapped powers that discipline can draw out; e.g., Mentats, Bene Gesserit. Also, it appealed to the fantasy that I might have special awesome hidden powers, like Paul Atreides, and that they might just sort of come to me, as a gift of fate, without the hassle of all that discipline. I think this book is why I was slightly crushed when I turned 18 and realized that not only was I not a prodigy, but I wasn't amazingly good at anything. I sometimes still chant the Litany against Fear when I'm especially nervous or panicking about something.
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Joann Bruso, author of Baby Bites - Transforming A Picky Eater Into A Healthy Eater Book, a book on getting kids to overcome picky eating habits, has been blogging the half-life of a McDonald's Happy Meal that she bought a year ago. In the intervening year, the box of delight, plastic toys and food-like substances has experienced virtually no decay.
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Teenagers could become smarter just by taking a pill that stimulates a part of the brain that controls learning and memory, scientists say.Researchers claim to have discovered the brain receptor that dictates how much people can learn - especially during the all important puberty years - and armed with that knowledge they could develop a smart pill to help teenagers expand their minds.
The receptor called alpha4-beta-delta appears to slow down learning when teenagers hit puberty.
Instead of parents spending tens of thousands of pounds on private school fees, they could give their teenagers a regular dose of steroids to negate its effect, researchers say.
The brain receptor develops in the hippocampus, which controls learning and memory, when children hit puberty.
But researchers say giving children a steroid can stop the receptor and boost teenagers' memory.
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University of Maryland graduate student Anupama Kothari went into labor on a Friday afternoon two years ago. After a Caesarean section, she was a first-time mother, with a baby girl with huge brown eyes.But there wasn't much time to settle into motherhood, bond with her daughter or follow her doctor's orders to rest. Seven days later, Kothari was back at work on her doctorate in business and helping marketing professors with their research. Her body ached in protest.
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Somewhere in America's suburbs, 16-year-old Blair sits in her pink-walled bedroom and shows off a slew of recent purchases from the fast-fashion chain Forever 21. She bought a black blouse, a slouchy cardigan, and $6.99 jeans. "OK, so normally it would bother me if my jeans didn't have any detail on the rear end," Blair says.
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The legislation lets the public see the workings of teams that identify threats of violence at colleges and universities.The workings of college and university threat assessment teams would be opened to the public after violent incidents under a compromise bill passed by the General Assembly.
The compromise came after weeks of negotiations between legislators and open government advocates and now goes to Gov. Bob McDonnell, who is expected to act on it before April 21. The governor may sign, veto or amend the bill.
"It's a good outcome for everyone," Virginia Press Association Executive Director Ginger Stanley said of the legislation.
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A few months back, I wrote here at "Teacher Magazine" about RTI ("Response to Intervention") and its possible implications for and adaptations for gifted students. The response to that post has been really interesting and I've enjoyed hearing from so many of you about how RTI is being adapted to included the gifted population in your schools. I wanted to take a moment today to post a couple updates for you regarding happenings since I last wrote about the topic.First, ASCD contacted me a couple months ago wanting to interview me about RTI and Gifted Education. The transcript of the interview is now available online and includes some great new links at the bottom with relevant RTI/GT information.
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Queen Elizabeth may seem ancient to school children, but did she really invent the telephone? Ten percent of British students think so, according to a survey of science knowledge. They also believe Sir Isaac Newton discovered fire, and Luke Skywalker was the first person on the moon.It's not just the British. While on travel recently, a seatmate (probably 30) asked me where Denver and Chicago were on the map (we were flying to Denver). Another seatmate some time later mentioned that their retail business deals with many citizens who don't know the difference between horizontal and vertical...
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from The Burden of Bad Ideas Heather Mac Donald, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000, pp. 82ff.
America's nearly last-place finish in the Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study of student achievement caused widespread consternation this February, except in the one place it should have mattered most: the nation's teacher education schools. Those schools have far more important things to do than worrying about test scores--things like stamping out racism in aspiring teachers. "Let's be honest," darkly commanded Professor Valerie Henning-Piedmont to a lecture hall of education students at Columbia University's Teachers College last February. "What labels do you place on young people based on your biases?" It would be difficult to imagine a less likely group of bigots than these idealistic young people, happily toting around their handbooks of multicultural education and their exposés of sexism in the classroom. But Teachers College knows better. It knows that most of its students, by virtue of being white, are complicitous in an unjust power structure.
The crusade against racism is just the latest irrelevancy to seize the nation's teacher education schools. For over eighty years, teacher education in America has been in the grip of an immutable dogma, responsible for endless educational nonsense. That dogma may be summed up in the phrase: Anything But Knowledge. Schools are about many things, teacher educators say (depending on the decade)--self-actualization, following one's joy, social adjustment, or multicultural sensitivity--but the one thing they are not about is knowledge. Oh, sure, educators will occasionally allow the word to pass their lips, but it is always in a compromised position, as in "constructing one's own knowledge," or "contextualized knowledge." Plain old knowledge, the kind passed down in books, the kind for which Faust sold his soul, that is out.
The education profession currently stands ready to tighten its already viselike grip on teacher credentialing, persuading both the federal government and the states to "professionalize" teaching further. In New York, as elsewhere, that means closing off routes to the classroom that do not pass through an education school. But before caving in to the educrats' pressure, we had better take a hard look at what education schools teach.
The course in "Curriculum and Teaching in Elementary Education" that Professor Anne Nelson (a pseudonym) teaches at the City College of New York is a good place to start. Dressed in a tailored brown suit, and with close-cropped hair, Nelson is a charismatic teacher, with a commanding repertoire of voices and personae. And yet, for all her obvious experience and common sense, her course is a remarkable exercise in vacuousness.
As with most education classes, the title of Professor Nelson's course doesn't give a clear sense of what it is about. Unfortunately, Professor Nelson doesn't either. The semester began, she said in a pre-class interview, by "building a community, rich of talk, in which students look at what they themselves are doing by in-class writing." On this, the third meeting of the semester, Professor Nelson said that she would be "getting the students to develop the subtext of what they're doing." I would soon discover why Professor Nelson was so vague.
"Developing the subtext" turns out to involve a chain reaction of solipsistic moments. After taking attendance and--most admirably--quickly checking the students' weekly handwriting practice, Professor Nelson begins the main work of the day: generating feather-light "texts," both written and oral, for immediate group analysis. She asks the students to write for seven minutes on each of three questions; "What excites me about teaching?" "What concerns me about teaching?" and then, the moment that brands this class as hopelessly steeped in the Anything But Knowledge credo: "What was it like to do this writing?"
This last question triggers a quickening volley of self-reflexive turns. After the students read aloud their predictable reflections on teaching, Professor Nelson asks: "What are you hearing?" A young man states the obvious: "Everyone seems to be reflecting on what their anxieties are." This is too straightforward an answer. Professor Nelson translates into ed-speak: "So writing gave you permission to think on paper about what's there." Ed-speak dresses up the most mundane processes in dramatic terminology--one doesn't just write, one is "given permission to think on paper"; one doesn't converse, one "negotiates meaning." Then, like a champion tennis player finishing off a set, Nelson reaches for the ultimate level of self-reflexivity and drives it home: "What was it like to listen to each other's responses?"
The self-reflection isn't over yet, however. The class next moves into small groups--along with in-class writing, the most pervasive gimmick in progressive classrooms today--to discuss a set of student-teaching guidelines. After ten minutes, Nelson interrupts the by-now lively and largely off-topic conversations, and asks: "Let's talk about how you felt in these small groups." The students are picking up ed-speak. "It shifted the comfort zone," reveals one. "It was just acceptance; I felt the vibe going through the group." Another adds: "I felt really comfortable; I had trust there." Nelson senses a "teachable moment." "Let's talk about that," she interjects. "We are building trust in this class; we are learning how to work with each other."
Now, let us note what this class was not: it was not about how to keep the attention of eight-year-olds or plan a lesson or make the Pilgrims real to first-graders. It did not, in other words, contain any material (with the exception of the student-teacher guidelines) from the outside world. Instead, it continuously spun its own subject matter out of itself. Like a relationship that consists of obsessively analyzing the relationship, the only content of the course was the course itself.
How did such navel-gazing come to be central to teacher education? It is the almost inevitable consequence of the Anything But Knowledge doctrine, born in a burst of quintessentially American anti-intellectual fervor in the wake of World War I. Educators within the federal government and at Columbia's Teachers College issued a clarion call to schools: cast off the traditional academic curriculum and start preparing young people for the demands of modern life. America is a forward-looking country, they boasted; what need have we for such impractical disciplines as Greek, Latin, and higher math? Instead, let the students then flooding the schools take such useful courses as family membership, hygiene, and the worthy use of leisure time. "Life adjustment," not wisdom or learning, was to be the goal of education.
The early decades of this century forged the central educational fallacy of our time: that one can think without having anything to think about. Knowledge is changing too fast to be transmitted usefully to students, argued William Heard Kilpatrick of Teachers College, the most influential American educator of the century; instead of teaching children dead facts and figures, schools should teach them "critical thinking," he wrote in 1925. What matters is not what you know, but whether you know how to look it up, so that you can be a "lifelong learner."
Two final doctrines rounded out the indelible legacy of progressivism. First, Harold Rugg's The Child-Centered School (1928) shifted the locus of power in the classroom from the teacher to the student. In a child-centered class, the child determines what he wants to learn. Forcing children into an existing curriculum inhibits their self-actualization, Rugg argued, just as forcing them into neat rows of chairs and desks inhibits their creativity. The teacher becomes an enabler, an advisor; not, heaven forbid, the transmitter of a pre-existing body of ideas, texts, or worst of all, facts. In today's jargon, the child should "construct" his own knowledge rather than passively receive it. Bu the late 1920s, students were moving their chairs around to form groups of "active learners" pursuing their own individual interests, and, instead of a curriculum, the student-centered classroom followed just one principle: "activity leading to further activity without badness," in Kilpatrick's words. Today's educators still present these seven-decades-old practices as cutting-edge.
As E.D. Hirsch observes, the child-centered doctrines grew out of the romantic idealization of children. If the child was, in Wordsworth's words, a "Mighty Prophet! Seer Blest!" then who needs teachers? But the Mighty Prophet emerged from student-centered schools ever more ignorant and incurious as the schools became more vacuous. By the 1940s and 1950s, schools were offering classes in how to put on nail polish and how to act on a date. The notion that learning should push students out of their narrow world had been lost.
The final cornerstone of progressive theory was the disdain for report cards and objective tests of knowledge. These inhibit authentic learning, Kilpatrick argued; and he carried the day, to the eternal joy of students everywhere.
The foregoing doctrines are complete bunk, but bunk that has survived virtually unchanged to the present. The notion that one can teach "metacognitive" thinking in the abstract is senseless. Students need to learn something to learn how to learn at all. The claim that prior knowledge is superfluous because one can always look it up, preferably on the Internet, is equally senseless. Effective research depends on preexisting knowledge. Moreover, if you don't know in what century the atomic bomb was dropped without rushing to an encyclopedia, you cannot fully participate in society. Lastly, Kilpatrick's influential assertion that knowledge was changing too fast to be taught presupposes a blinkered definition of knowledge that excludes the great works and enterprises of the past.
The rejection of testing rests on premises as flawed as the push for "critical thinking skills." Progressives argue that if tests exist, then teachers will "teach to the test"--a bad thing, in their view. But why would "teaching to a test" that asked for, say, the causes of the [U.S.] Civil War be bad for students? Additionally, progressives complain that testing provokes rote memorization--again, a bad thing. One of the most tragically influential education professors today, Columbia's Linda Darling-Hammond, director of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, an advocacy group for increased teacher "professionalization," gives a telling example of what she considers a criminally bad test in her hackneyed 1997 brief for progressive education, The Right to Learn. She points disdainfully to the following question from the 1995 New York State Regents Exam in biology (required for high school graduation) as "a rote recall of isolated facts and vocabulary terms": "The tissue which conducts organic food through a vascular plant is composed of: (1) Cambium cells; (2) Xylem cells; (3) Phloem cells; (4) Epidermal cells."
Only a know-nothing could be offended by so innocent a question. It never occurs to Darling-Hammond that there may be a joy in mastering the parts of a plant or the organelles of a cell, and that such memorization constitutes learning. Moreover, when, in the progressives' view, will a student ever be held accountable for such knowledge? Does Darling-Hammond believe that a student can pursue a career in, say, molecular biology or in medicine without it? And how else will that learning be demonstrated, if not in a test? But of course such testing will produce unequal results, and that is the real target of Darling-Hammond's animus.
Once you dismiss real knowledge as the goal of education, you have to find something else to do. That's why the Anything But Knowledge doctrine leads directly to Professor Nelson's odd course. In thousands of education schools across the country, teachers are generating little moments of meaning, which they then subject to instant replay. Educators call this "constructing knowledge," a fatuous label for something that is neither construction nor knowledge but mere game-playing. Teacher educators, though, posses a primitive relationship to words. They believe that if they just label something "critical thinking" or "community-building," these activities will magically occur...
The Anything But Knowledge credo leaves education professors and their acolytes free to concentrate on more pressing matters than how to teach the facts of history or the rules of sentence construction. "Community-building" is one of their most urgent concerns. Teacher educators conceive of their classes as sites of profound political engagement, out of which the new egalitarian order will emerge. A case in point is Columbia's required class, "Teaching English in Diverse Social and Cultural Contexts," taught by Professor Barbara Tenney (a pseudonym). "I want to work at a very conscious level with you to build community in this class," Tenney tells her attentive students on the first day of the semester this spring. "You can do it consciously, and you ought to do it in your own classes." Community-building starts by making nameplates for our desks. Then we all find a partner to interview about each other's "identity." Over the course of the semester, each student will conduct two more "identity" interviews with different partners. After the interview, the inevitable self-reflexive moment arrives, when Tenney asks: "How did it work?" This is a sign that we are on our way to "constructing knowledge."...
All this artificial "community-building," however gratifying to the professors, has nothing to do with learning. Learning is ultimately a solitary activity: we have only one brain, and at some point we must exercise it in private. One could learn an immense amount about Schubert's lieder or calculus without ever knowing the name of one's seatmate. Such a view is heresy to the education establishment, determined, as Rita Kramer has noted, to eradicate any opportunity for individual accomplishment, with its sinister risk of superior achievement. For the educrats, the group is the irreducible unit of learning. Fueling this principle is the gap in achievement between whites and Asians, on the one hand, and other minorities on the other. Unwilling to adopt the discipline and teaching practices that would help reduce the gap, the education establishment tries to conceal it under group projects....
The consequences of the Anything But Knowledge credo for intellectual standards have been dire. Education professors are remarkably casual when it comes to determining whether their students actually know anything, rarely asking them, for example, what can you tell us about the American Revolution? The ed schools incorrectly presume that students have learned everything they need to know in their other or previous college courses, and that the teacher certification exam will screen out people who didn't.
Even if college education were reliably rigorous and comprehensive, education majors aren't the students most likely to profit from it. Nationally, undergraduate education majors have lower SAT and ACT scores than students in any other program of study. Only 16 percent of education majors scored in the top quartile of 1992-1993 graduates, compared with 33 percent of humanities majors. Education majors were overrepresented in the bottom quartile, at 30 percent. In New York City, many education majors have an uncertain command of English--I saw one education student at City College repeatedly write "choce" for "choice"-- and appear altogether ill at ease in a classroom. To presume anything about this population without a rigorous content exit exam is unwarranted.
The laissez-faire attitude toward student knowledge rests on "principled" grounds, as well as on see-no-evil inertia. Many education professors embrace the facile post-structuralist view that knowledge is always political. "An education program can't have content [knowledge] specifics," explains Migdalia Romero, chair of Hunter College's Department of Curriculum and Teaching, "because then you have a point of view. Once you define exactly what finite knowledge is, it becomes a perspective." The notion that culture could possess a pre-political common store of texts and idea is anathema to the modern academic.
The most powerful dodge regurgitates William Heard Kilpatrick's classic "critical thinking" scam. Asked whether a future teacher should know the date of the 1812 war, Professor Romero replied: "Teaching and learning is not about dates, facts, and figures, but about developing critical thinking." When pressed if there were not some core facts that a teacher or student should know, she valiantly held her ground. "There are two ways of looking at teaching and learning," she replied. "Either you are imparting knowledge, giving an absolute knowledge base, or teaching and learning is about dialogue, a dialogue that helps to internalize and to raise questions." Though she offered the disclaimer "of course you need both," Romero added that teachers don't have to know everything, because they can always look things up....
Disregard for language runs deep in the teacher education profession, so much so that ed school professors tolerate glaring language deficiencies in schoolchildren. Last January, Manhattan's Park West High School shut down for a day, so that its faculty could bone up on progressive pedagogy. One of the more popular staff development seminars ws "Using Journals and Learning Logs." The presenters--two Park West teachers and a representative from the New York City Writing Project, an anti-grammar initiative run by the Lehman College's Education School--proudly passed around their students' journal writing, including the following representative entry on "Matriarchys v. pratiarchys [sic]": "The different between Matriarchys and patriarchys is that when the mother is in charge of the house. sometime the children do whatever they want. But sometimes the mother can do both roll as mother and as a father too and they can do it very good." A more personal entry described how the author met her boyfriend: "He said you are so kind I said you noticed and then he hit me on my head. I made-believe I was crying and when he came naire me I slaped him right in his head and than I ran...to my grandparients home and he was right behind me. Thats when he asked did I have a boyfriend."
The ubiquitous journal-writing cult holds that such writing should go uncorrected. Fortunately, some Park West teachers bridled at the notion. "At some point, the students go into the job market, and they're not being judged 'holistically,'" protested a black teacher, responding to the invocation of the state's "holistic" model for grading writing. Another teacher bemoaned the Board of Ed's failure to provide guidance on teaching grammar. "My kids are graduating without skills," he lamented.
Such views, however, were decidedly in the minority. "Grammar is related to purpose," soothed the Lehman College representative, educrat code for the proposition that asking students to write grammatically on topics they are not personally "invested in" is unrealistic. A Park West presenter burst out with a more direct explanation for his chilling indifference to student incompetence. "I'm not going to spend my life doing error diagnosis! I'm not going to spend my weekend on that!" Correcting papers used to be part of the necessary drudgery of a teacher's job. No more, with the advent of enlightened views about "self-expression" and "writing with intentionality."
However easygoing the educational establishment is regarding future teachers' knowledge of history, literature, and science, there is one topic that it assiduously monitors: their awareness of racism. To many teacher educators, such an awareness is the most important tool a young teacher can bring to the classroom. It cannot be developed too early. Rosa, a bouncy and enthusiastic junior at Hunter College, has completed only her first semester of education courses, but already she has mastered the most important lesson: American is a racist, imperialist country, most like, say, Nazi Germany. "We are lied to by the very institutions we have come to trust," she recalls from her first-semester reading. "It's all government that's inventing these lies, such as Western heritage."
The source of Rosa's newfound wisdom, Donald Macedo's Literacies of Power: What Americans Are Not Allowed to Know, is an execrable book by any measure. But given its target audience--impressionable education students--it comes close to being a crime. Widely assigned at Hunter, and in use in approximately 150 education schools nationally, it is an illiterate, barbarically ignorant Marxist-inspired screed against America. Macedo opens his first chapter, "Literacy for Stupidification: The Pedagogy of Big Lies," with a quote from Hitler and quickly segues to Ronald Reagan: "While busily calling out slogans from their patriotic vocabulary memory warehouse, these same Americans dutifully vote...for Ronald Reagan...giving him a landslide victory...These same voters ascended [sic] to Bush's morally high-minded call to apply international laws against Saddam Hussein's tyranny and his invasion of Kuwait." Standing against this wave of ignorance and imperialism is a lone 12-year-old from Boston, whom Macedo celebrates for his courageous refusal to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
What does any of this have to do with teaching? Everything, it turns out. In the 1960s, educational progressivism took on an explicitly political cast: schools were to fight institutional racism and redistribute power. Today, Columbia's Teachers College holds workshops on cultural and political "oppression," in which students role-play ways to "usurp the existing power structure," and the New York State Regents happily call teachers "the ultimate change agents." To be a change agent, one must first learn to "critique" the existing social structure. Hence, the assignment of such propaganda as Macedo's book.
But Macedo is just one of the political tracts that Hunter force-fed the innocent Rosa in her first semester. She also learned about the evils of traditional children's stories from the education radical Herbert Kohl. In Should We Burn Babar? Kohl weighs the case for and against the dearly beloved children's classic, Babar the Elephant, noting in passing that it prevented him from "questioning the patriarchy earlier." He decides--but let Rosa expound the meaning of Kohl's book: "[Babar]'s like a children's book, right? [But] there's an underlying meaning about colonialism, about like colonialism, and is it OK, it's really like it's OK, but it's like really offensive to the people." Better burn Babar now!...
Though the current diversity battle cry is "All students can learn," the educationists continually lower expectations of what they should learn. No longer are students expected to learn all their multiplication tables in the third grade, as has been traditional. But while American educators come up with various theories about fixed cognitive phases to explain why our children should go slow, other nationalities trounce us. Sometimes, we're trounced in our own backyards, causing cognitive dissonance in local teachers.
A young student at Teachers College named Susan describes incredulously a Korean-run preschool in Queens. To her horror, the school, the Holy Mountain School, violates every progressive tenet: rather than being "student-centered" and allowing each child to do whatever he chooses, the school imposes a curriculum on the children, based on the alphabet. "Each week, the children get a different letter," Susan recalls grimly. Such an approach violates "whole language" doctrine, which holds that students can't "grasp the [alphabetic] symbols without the whole word or the meaning or any context in their lives." In Susan's words, Holy Mountain's further infractions include teaching its wildly international students only in English and failing to provide an "anti-bias multicultural curriculum." The result? By the end of preschool the children learn English and are writing words. Here is the true belief in the ability of all children to learn, for it is backed up by action....
Given progressive education's dismal record, all New Yorkers should tremble at what the Regents have in store for the state. The state's teacher education establishment, led by Columbia's Linda Darling-Hammond, has persuaded the Regents to make its monopoly on teacher credentialing total. Starting in 2003, according to the Regents plan steaming inexorably toward adoption, all teacher candidates must pass through an education school to be admitted to a classroom. We know, alas, what will happen to them there.
This power grab will be a disaster for children. By making ed school inescapable, the Regents will drive away every last educated adult who may not be willing to sit still for its foolishness but who could bring to the classroom unusual knowledge or experience. The nation's elite private schools are full of such people, and parents eagerly proffer tens of thousands of dollars to give their children the benefit of such skill and wisdom.
Amazingly, even the Regents, among the nation's most addled education bodies, sporadically acknowledge what works in the classroom. A Task Force on Teaching paper cites some of the factors that allow other countries to wallop us routinely in international tests: a high amount of lesson content (in other words, teacher-centered, not student-centered, learning), individual tracking of students, and a coherent curriculum. The state should cling steadfastly to its momentary insight, at odds with its usual policies, and discard its foolish plan to enshrine Anything But Knowledge as its sole education dogma. Instead of permanently establishing the teacher education status quo, it should search tirelessly for alternatives and for potential teachers with a firm grasp of subject matter and basic skills. Otherwise ed school claptrap will continue to stunt the intellectual growth of the Empire State's children.
[Heather Mac Donald graduated summa cum laude from Yale, and earned an M.A. at Cambridge University. She holds the J.D. degree from Stanford Law School, and is a John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal]
"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 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
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Marty Abbott & Michael Fisher:
You can learn a lot of things in the classroom.A lot of the knowledge you'll glean comes in the form of facts (or "laws") on how and why certain things work. A few lessons involve behaviors, such as team work. On very rare occasions, one learns a life lesson.
But there are some things you'll never learn in the classroom. Hopefully, this will fill some of the gaps:
Ethical Challenges Occur More Frequently Than You Expect - Some engineering programs and a large number of business programs offer courses on ethics, but while these courses might expose the student to certain predicaments, they seldom help the student develop the muscle memory necessary to respond to ethical dilemmas.
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As part of a Compton Adult School tutoring program, adults trying to pass the California High School Exit Examination get an assist from Palos Verdes High students.Brandy Rice eyed the test question.
She thought of what her tutor directed her to do: Read the entire sentence. Read all the answers.
Instead of playing multiple-choice roulette with the answers as she had so many times before, she followed the directions.
Rice, 26, was one of 20 Compton Adult School students in a tutoring program for the California High School Exit Examination. The tutors weren't teachers, but teenagers from Palos Verdes High School.
The tutors carpooled from the green, laid-back beach community on a hill to Compton every Saturday for five weeks. Most had never before been to Compton and weren't used to getting up at 7 a.m. on a weekend.
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Check out at the boys' basketball rosters for Friendship Collegiate and the Kamit Institute for Magnificent Achievers and the number of transfers on each team is striking. Nearly all of the players on both rosters started their high school careers elsewhere before transferring to one of the two D.C. public charter schools."We're cleaning up, we're the last stop," KIMA Coach Levet Brown said. "Do you think I could get a Eugene McCrory if he was doing well somewhere else?"
Indeed, McCrory -- who has committed to play for Seton Hall and was selected to play in the Capital Classic -- attended C.H. Flowers and Parkdale in Prince George's County and Paul VI Catholic in Fairfax during his first three years of high school.
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When the British Pound had a value of $2 and more (a couple of years ago), most American travelers -- even those in love with everything British -- found that they could no longer afford a week at Oxford University's famous summer courses for foreign adults. Those weeks each cost at least $2,000 per person, plus the cost of trans-Atlantic airfare, and the overall tab was simply too steep to consider.
We've been reminded by the PR rep for Oxford in the United States that the sharp recent decline in the value of the Pound (it now sells for about $1.50) has sharply altered the cost of a week in Oxford. Such weeks, including tuition, accommodation and all meals (everything except private bathrooms and occasional countryside excursions), usually cost £1,050, and that amount currently converts to only $1,564. Where else, Oxford asks, can you get a choice of 50 fascinating courses, accommodations, three copious meals daily, and evening entertainment, for $1,564 -- or little more than $200 a day?
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The challenges of the impending college application process made themselves far too evident when our ACT proctor instructed, "Now fill in the bubbles to select four schools to which you would like your scores sent." It was March of my junior year, and I had scarcely seen four colleges in my life, let alone reviewed their application guidelines and exact mileage away from my front door.Following standardized testing season, the deluge of information began flooding in -- from counselors, from teachers, and from students. Though the many resources available to applicants are often quite useful, at times I would have rather received one, detailed e-mail than a thousand vague ones.
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Last week's column, full of practical suggestions on how to limit cheating, did not seem controversial to me. Many teachers sent their own ideas. Many recommended small adjustments, such as having the questions in different order for different students, to hinder copying.So I was surprised to hear from Erich Martel, an Advanced Placement U.S. History teacher at Wilson High School in the District, that his principal, Peter Cahall, was critical of him doing that.
Martel's classroom, 18 by 25 feet, feels like shoebox to him. Some days he squeezes in 30 students, plus himself. That is 15 square feet per student, which Martel has been told is well below the district standard of 25 square feet. The cramped conditions led to a disagreement when Cahall assessed Martel's work under the school district's IMPACT teacher evaluation system.
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Here's how my formal education began: On a September morning in 1957, my mother and I walked the block and a half to 53rd Street School on Milwaukee's northwest side. We went to the school office, she filled out some forms, said goodbye and "see you at lunch." Here was another Kozak for the Milwaukee Public Schools to educate.
There was, of course, no choice, which made the entire process much simpler. Since we weren't Catholic, the parochial alternative wasn't an option, and if there were any private schools in Milwaukee at the time (there was one), I'm sure my parents never considered it.There was good reason for my parents' carefree attitude. The public school system in Milwaukee circa 1957 was first-rate. The teachers were committed professionals. The curriculum had not changed appreciably since my parents' day. They were satisfied with their experience and found the public schools perfectly adequate for their children.
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One by one the preschoolers washed their hands after having their milk and snacks and sat on a rug, waiting for teacher Jill Dunlop 001 ? 0008.00 00001to introduce the letter of the day.Using a Hippopotamus hand puppet, Dunlop sounded out the letter "h" and asked the five children, ages 3 to 5, to each identify words such as house, horse and hammer from various pictures on her easel. The abilities of the children ranged from 4-year-old Emma, who can write her name, to 3-year-old Kimberly, a native Spanish speaker who is so painfully shy she doesn't speak a word during the 2 1/2 hour class.
At Butler's Aaron Decker School, these preschoolers are learning to become students three days a week this year, down from five days last year. Local voters rejected the school budget last year, forcing cuts, including the preschool program. Federal stimulus funding was used to restore the limited program, so it's unclear if the program will survive next year.
"We're trying to hold on as much as we can. Three days is better than no days," said Virginia Scala, Decker's principal.
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Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
22 March 2010
In Outliers [2008], Malcolm Gladwell writes [p. 149-159] that: "...three things--autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward--are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying...Work that fulfills these three criteria is meaningful." (emphasis in the original)
One of the perennial complaints of students in our schools is that they will never make use of what they are learning, and as for the work they are asked to do, they often say: "Why do we have to learn/do/put up with this?" In short, they often see the homework/schoolwork they are given to do as not very fulfilling or meaningful.
In this article I will argue that reading good history books and writing serious history research papers provide the sort of work which students do find meaningful, worth doing, and not as hard to imagine as having some future use.
In a June 3, 1990 column in The New York Times, Albert Shanker, President of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote:
His point has value twenty years later. Even the current CCSSO National Standards recommend merely snippets of readings, called "informational texts," and "literacy skills" for our students, which, if that is all they get, will likely bore them and disengage them for the reasons that Mr. Shanker pointed out.
"...It is also worth thinking about as we consider how to reform our education system. As we've known for a long time, factory workers who never saw the completed product and worked on only a small part of it soon became bored and demoralized, But when they were allowed to see the whole process--or better yet become involved in it--productivity and morale improved. Students are no different. When we chop up the work they do into little bits--history facts and vocabulary and grammar rules to be learned--it's no wonder that they are bored and disengaged. The achievement of The Concord Review's authors offers a different model of learning. Maybe it's time for us to take it seriously."
Students who read "little bits" of history books have nothing like the engagement and interest that comes from reading the whole book, just as students who "find the main idea" and write little "personal essays," or five-paragraph essays, or short "college" essays, will have nothing comparable to the satisfaction that comes from working on and completing a serious history research paper.
Barbara McClay, a homescholar from Tennessee, while she was in high school, wrote a paper on the "Winter War" between Finland and the Soviet Union. In an interview she was asked why she chose that topic:
"I've been interested in Finland for four years or so, and I had read a book (William Trotter's A Frozen Hell) that interested me greatly on the Winter War; after reading the book, I often asked people if they had ever heard of the Winter War. To my surprise, not only had few of them heard about it, but their whole impression of Finnish-Soviet relations was almost completely different from the one I had received from the book. So there was a sense of indignation alongside my interest in Finland in general and the Winter War in particular: here was this truly magnificent story, and no one cared about it. Or knew about it, at least.Perhaps this will give a feeling for the degree of engagement a young student can find in reading a good nonfiction history book and writing a serious [8,500-word, plus endnotes and bibliography] history research paper. [The Concord Review, 17/3 Spring 2007]"And it is a magnificent story, whether anyone cares about it or not; it's the stuff legends are made of, really, even down to the fact that Finland lost. And a sad one, too, both for Finland and for the Soviet soldiers destroyed by Soviet incompetence. And there's so much my paper couldn't even begin to go into; the whole political angle, for instance, which is very interesting, but not really what I wanted to write about. But the story as a whole, with all of its heroes and villains and absurdities--it's amazing. Even if it were as famous as Thermopylae, and not as relatively obscure an event as it is, it would still be worth writing about.
"So what interested me, really, was the drama, the pathos, the heroism, all from this little ignored country in Northern Europe. What keeps a country fighting against an enemy it has no hope of defeating? What makes us instantly feel a connection with it?"
Now, before I get a lot of messages informing me that our American public high school students, even Seniors, are incapable of reading nonfiction books and writing 8,500 words on any topic, allow me to suggest that, if true, it may be because we need to put in place our "Page Per Year Plan," which would give students practice, every year in school, in writing about something other than themselves. Thus, a first grader could assemble a one-page paper with one source, a fifth grader a five-page paper with five sources, a ninth grade student a nine-page with nine sources, and so on, and in that way, each and every Senior in our high schools could write a twelve-page paper [or better] with twelve sources [or better] about some historical topic.
By the time that Senior finished that paper, she/he would probably know more about that topic than anyone else in the building, and that would indeed be a source of engagement and satisfaction, in addition to providing great "readiness" for college and career writing tasks.
As one of our authors wrote:
...Yet of all my assignments in high school, none has been so academically and intellectually rewarding as my research papers for history. As young mathematicians and scientists, we cannot hope to comprehend any material that approaches the cutting edge. As young literary scholars, we know that our interpretations will almost never be original. But as young historians, we see a scope of inquiry so vast that somewhere, we must be able to find an idea all our own.This paper [5,500 words with endnotes and bibliography; Daniel Winik, The Concord Review, 12/4 Summer 2002] seems to have allowed this student to take a break from the boredom and disengagement which comes to so many whose school work is broken up into little bits and pieces and "informational texts" rather than actual books and term papers.
In writing this paper, I read almanacs until my head hurt. I read journal articles and books. I thought and debated and analyzed my notes. And finally, I had a synthesis that I could call my own. That experience--extracting a polished, original work from a heap of history--is one without which no student should leave high school."
If I were made the U.S. Reading and Writing Czar at the Department of Education, I would ask students to read one complete history book [i.e. "cover-to-cover" as it was called back in the day] each year, too. When Jay Mathews of The Washington Post recently called for nonfiction book ideas for high school students, I suggested David McCullough's Mornings on Horseback, for Freshmen, David Hackett Fischer's Washington's Crossing for Sophomores, James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom for Juniors, and David McCullough's The Path Between the Seas for all Seniors. Naturally there could be big fights over titles even if we decided to have our high schools students read nonfiction books, but it would be tragic if the result was that they continue to read none of them. Remember the high school English teacher in New York state who insisted that her students read a nonfiction book chosen from the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, and a big group of her female students chose The Autobiography of Paris Hilton...
When I was teaching United States History to Sophomores at the public high school in Concord, Massachusetts in the 1980s, I used to assign a 5-7-page paper (at the time I did not know what high schools students could actually accomplish, if they were allowed to work hard) on the Presidents. My reasoning was that every President has just about every problem of the day arrive on his desk, and a paper on a President would be a way of learning about the history of that day. Students drew names, and one boy was lucky enough to draw John F. Kennedy, a real coup. He was quite bright, so, on a whim, I gave him my copy of Arthur Schleshinger, Jr.'s A Thousand Days. He looked at it, and said, "I can't read this." But, he took it with him and wrote a very good paper and gave the book back to me. Several years later, when he was a Junior at Yale, he wrote to thank me. He said he was very glad I had made him read that first complete history book, because it helped his confidence, etc. Now, I didn't make him read it, he made himself read it. I would never have known if he read it or not. I didn't ask him.
But it made me think about the possibility of assigning complete history books to our high school students.
After I began The Concord Review in 1987, I had occasion to write an article now and then, for Education Week and others, in which I argued for the value of having high school students read complete nonfiction books and write real history research papers, both for the intrinsic value of such efforts and for their contribution to the student's preparation for "college and career."
Then, in 2004, The National Endowment for the Arts spent $300,000 on a survey of the reading of fiction by Americans, including young Americans. They concluded that it was declining, but it made me wonder if anyone would fund a much smaller study of the reading of nonfiction by students in our high schools, and I wrote a Commentary in Education Week ["Bibliophobia" October 4, 2006] asking about that.
No funding was forthcoming and still no one seems to know (or care much) whether our students typically leave with their high school diploma in hand but never having read a single complete history book. We don't know how many of our students have never had the chance to make themselves read such a book, so that when they get to college they can be glad they had that preparation, like my old student.
As E.D. Hirsch and Daniel Willingham have pointed out so often, it takes knowledge to enrich understanding and the less knowledge a student has the more difficult it is for her/him to understand what she/he is reading in school. Complete history books are a great source of knowledge, of course, and they naturally provide more background to help our students understand more and more difficult reading material as they are asked to become "college and career ready."
Reading a complete history book is a challenge for a student who has never read one before, just as writing a history research paper is a challenge to a student who has never been asked to do one, but we might consider why we put off such challenges until students find themselves (more than one million a year now, according to the Diploma to Nowhere report) pushed into remedial courses when they arrive at college.
It may be argued that not every student will respond to such an academic challenge, and of course no student will if never given the challenge, but I have found several thousand high school students, from 44 states and 36 other countries, who did:
"Before, I had never been much of a history student, and I did not have much more than a passing interest for the subject. However, as I began writing the paper, the myriad of facts, the entanglement of human relations, and the general excitement of the subject fired my imagination and my mind. Knowing that to submit to The Concord Review, I would have to work towards an extremely high standard, I tried to channel my newly found interest into the paper. I deliberately chose a more fiery, contentious, and generally more engaging style of writing than I was normally used to, so that my paper would better suit my thesis. The draft, however, lacked proper flow and consistency, and so when I wrote the final copy, I restructured the entire paper, reordering the points, writing an entirely new introduction, refining the conclusion, and doing more research to cover areas of the paper that seemed lacking. I replaced almost half of the content with new writing, and managed to focus the thesis into a more sustained, more forceful argument. You received that final result, which was far better than the draft had been.If this is such a great idea, and does so much good for students' engagement and academic preparation, why don't we do it? When I was teaching--again, back in the day 26 years ago--I noticed in one classroom a set of Profiles in Courage, and I asked my colleagues about them. They said they had bought the set and handed them out, but the students never read them, so they stopped handing them out.In the end, working on that history paper, ["Political Machines," Erich Suh, The Concord Review, 12/4, Summer 2002, 5,800 words] inspired by the high standard set by The Concord Review, reinvigorated my interest not only in history, but also in writing, reading and the rest of the humanities. I am now more confident in my writing ability, and I do not shy from difficult academic challenges. My academic and intellectual life was truly altered by my experience with that paper, and the Review played no small role! Without the Review, I would not have put so much work into the paper. I would not have had the heart to revise so thoroughly; instead I would have altered my paper only slightly, enough to make the final paper a low 'A', but nothing very great. Your Concord Review set forth a goal towards which I toiled, and it was a very fulfilling, life-changing experience."
This is a reminder of the death of the book report. If we do not require our students to read real books and write about them (with consequences for a failure to do so), they will not do that reading and writing, and, as a result, their learning will be diminished, their historical knowledge will be a topic for jokes, and they will not be able to write well enough either to handle college work or hold down a demanding new job.
As teachers and edupundits surrender on those requirements, students suffer. There is a saying outside the training facility for United States Marine Corps drill instructors, which says, in effect, "I will train my recruits with such diligence that if they are killed in combat, it will not be because I failed to prepare them."
I do realize that college and good jobs are not combat (of course there are now many combat jobs too) but they do provide challenges for which too many of our high school graduates are clearly not ready.
Some teachers complain, with good reason, that they don't have the time to monitor students as they read books, write book reports and work on serious history research papers, and that is why they can't ask students to do those essential (and meaningful) tasks. Even after they realize that the great bulk of the time spent on complete nonfiction books and good long term papers is the student's time, they still have a point about the demands on their time.
Many (with five classes) now do not have the time to guide such work and to assess it carefully for all their students, but I would ask them (and their administrators) to look at the time put aside each week at their high school for tackling and blocking practice in football or layup drills in basketball or for band rehearsal, etc., etc., and I suggest that perhaps reading books and writing serious term papers are worth some extra time as well, and that the administrators of the system, if they have an interest in the competence of our students in reading and writing, should consider making teacher time available during the school day, week, and year, for work on these tasks, which have to be almost as essential as blocking and tackling for our students' futures.
=============
"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 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
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Temple Grandin, diagnosed with autism as a child, talks about how her mind works -- sharing her ability to "think in pictures," which helps her solve problems that neurotypical brains might miss. She makes the case that the world needs people on the autism spectrum: visual thinkers, pattern thinkers, verbal thinkers, and all kinds of smart geeky kids.
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Deep down, we know the rules of writing. Or the rule, rather, which is that there are no rules. That's it. That's the takeaway point from any collection of advice, any Paris Review interview and any book on writing, whether it be Stephen King's "On Writing" or Joyce Carol Oates's "The Faith of a Writer" (both excellent, by the way, but only as useful as a reader chooses to make them).Despite this fact, writers continue to write about writing and readers continue to read them. In honour of Elmore Leonard's contribution to the genre, "Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing", the Guardian recently compiled a massive list of writing rules from Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Annie Proulx, Jeanette Winterson, Colm Tóibín and many other authors generous enough to add their voices to the chorus.
Among the most common bits of advice: write every day, rewrite often, read your work out loud, read a lot of books and don't write for posterity. Standards aside, the advice generally breaks down into three categories: the practical, the idiosyncratic and the contradictory. From Margaret Atwood we learn to use pencils on airplanes because pens leak. From Elmore Leonard we learn that adverbs stink, prologues are annoying and the weather is boring. Jonathan Franzen advises us to write in the third person, usually.
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It is easy to get drawn into the union-management aspects of public education and forget that the schools are there for the kids. What the kids need are stars in the classroom: great teachers.With that in mind, the public should support the effort by Hartford school leaders to change from a system of district-wide teacher seniority to one of school-based seniority.
The city's Board of Education voted Tuesday to ask the State Board of Education to step in and change this contractual guarantee. The state board has the authority to intervene in low-achieving schools to alter a union contract, but to date has never done so.
Under the current rules, the least experienced teachers are the first to be laid off and can be "bumped" by more experienced teachers from any school in the district. This can result in a disruptive shuffle of teachers among various schools.
Supporters of the proposed change say this endangers the quality of specialty schools, where particular themes or methods require teachers to have special qualifications or training.
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Before the debate:
24% FOR 43% AGAINST 33% UNDECIDEDAfter the debate:
25% FOR 68% AGAINST 7% UNDECIDED
Robert Rozenkranz: Thank you all very much for coming. It's my pleasure to welcome you. My job in these evenings is to frame the debate. And we thought this one would be interesting because it seems like unions would be acting in their own self interest and in the interest of their members. In the context of public education, this might mean fighting to have the highest number of dues paying members at the highest possible levels of pay and benefits. With the greatest possible jobs security. It implies resistance to technological innovation, to charter schools, to measuring and rewarding merit and to dismissals for almost any reason at all. Qualifications, defined as degrees from teacher's colleges, trump subject matter expertise. Seniority trumps classroom performance. Individual teachers, perhaps the overwhelming majority of them do care about their students but the union's job is to advocate for teachers, not for education. But is that a reason to blame teachers unions for failing schools? The right way to think about this is to hold all other variables constant. Failing schools are often in failing neighborhoods where crime and drugs are common and two parent families are rare. Children may not be taught at home to restrain their impulses or to work now for rewards in the future, or the value and importance of education. Even the most able students might find it hard to progress in classrooms dominated by students of lesser ability who may be disinterested at best and disruptive at worse. In these difficult conditions, maybe teachers know better than remote administrators what their students need and the unions give them an effective voice. Maybe unions do have their own agenda. But is that really the problem? Is there strong statistical evidence that incentive pay improves classroom performance? Or is that charter schools produce better results? Or that strong unions spell weak educational outcomes, holding everything else constant? That it seems to us is the correct way to frame tonight's debate, why we expect it will give you ample reason to think twice.
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I guess we can agree: the world is changing at an increasingly faster pace, and the volume of information is growing at an explosive rate.Change is the name of the game these days and who lives and works off the Internet knows how true this indeed is. But... how are we preparing and equipping our younger generations to live and to cope with such fast-paced scenario-changing realities and with the vast amount of information we drink-in and get exposed to without any crap-filtering skills?
Excerpted from my guest night at Teemu Arina's Dicole OZ in Helsinski, here are some of my strong, uncensored thoughts about school and academic education in general.In this four-point recipe I state what I think are the some of the key new attitudes we need to consider taking if we want to truly help some of your younger generations move to a higher level of intellectual and pragmatical acumen, beyond the one that most get from our present academic system.
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Stephen Kreider Yoder, Isaac Yoder & Levi Yoder:
This is uncomfortable for me, but it's time we talked about adult toys.The kind we can talk about, I mean: the nonessentials in our golf bags and cellphone cases, in our kitchens and garages.
Grown-ups' toys are a parent-teen money issue, I'd argue, because we send signals to our children about financial behavior when we buy big-screen TVs or iPhones or new cars.
It's an uncomfortable issue because I'm conflicted: My upbringing makes frugality my dominant instinct, but I also like gadgets, tools, cameras and other indefensibles.
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Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain's visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism.
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Kids in China already attend school 41 days a year more than students in the U.S. Now, schools across the country are cutting back to four-day weeks. Chester E. Finn Jr. on how to build a smarter education system."He who labors diligently need never despair, for all things are accomplished by diligence and labor." --Menander
How many days a year did the future Alexander the Great study with Aristotle? Did Socrates teach Plato on Saturdays as well as weekdays? During summer's heat and winter's chill?
Though such details remain shrouded in mystery, historians have unearthed some information about education in ancient times. Spartans famously put their children through a rigorous public education system, although the focus was on military training rather than reading and writing. Students in Mesopotamia attended their schools from sunrise to sunset.
In the face of budget shortfalls, school districts in many parts of the United States today are moving toward four-day weeks. This is despite evidence that longer school weeks and years can improve academic performance. Schoolchildren in China attend school 41 days a year more than most young Americans--and receive 30% more hours of instruction. Schools in Singapore operate 40 weeks a year. Saturday classes are the norm in Korea and other Asian countries--and Japanese authorities are having second thoughts about their 1998 decision to cease Saturday-morning instruction. This additional time spent learning is one big reason that youngsters from many Asian nations routinely out-score their American counterparts on international tests of science and math.
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How has the United States responded to this global challenge in education? We continue to lower our standards. While No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was a major step in education reform, it has inadvertently created a system where states continue to lower the expectations bar. In 2007, only 18% of Mississippi students scored proficient in the standardized national reading test. However, 88% scored proficient in the standardized state reading test. While Mississippi can be considered an extreme, a Department of Education report acknowledged, "state-defined proficiency standards are often far lower than proficiency standards on the NAEP." While under this system test scores have improved slightly, our student's education level has remained constant. As states are under enormous pressure to show improvements in test scores, standards are lowered. While politicians avoid future trouble, our children inherit it.Even our once seemingly monopoly on higher education has eroded in recent years. While ranking 2nd in the world in older adults with a college diploma, the U.S. has slipped to 8th in the world in young adults with a college diploma. As other countries continue to provide numerous incentives for their students to attend universities, the United States seems content in allowing higher education to climb ever higher out of the reach of ordinary Americans. Furthermore, China and other Asian countries have created a higher education system that is far more useful in equipping its students with the needs to survive in a 21st century economy. More than 50 percent of undergraduate degrees awarded in China are in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math, compared to just 16 percent in the United States. While we are focused on creating litigators and lawyers, China and our competitors are creating the entrepreneurs and engineers of the future.
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AFP:
British and Italian doctors have carried out groundbreaking surgery to rebuild the windpipe of a 10-year-old British boy using stem cells developed within his own body, they said.In an operation Monday lasting nearly nine hours, doctors at London's Great Ormond Street children's hospital implanted the boy with a donor trachea, or windpipe, that had been stripped of its cells and injected with his own.
Over the next month, doctors expect the boy's bone marrow stem cells to begin transforming themselves within his body into tracheal cells -- a process that, if successful, could lead to a revolution in regenerative medicine.
The new organ should not be rejected by the boy's immune system, a risk in traditional transplants, because the cells are derived from his own tissue.
"This procedure is different in a number of ways, and we believe it's a real milestone," said Professor Martin Birchall, head of translational regenerative medicine at University College London.
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By age 2 Donovan Richards was kicked out of day care for hitting. At age 3, he was obsessed with dinosaurs and utterly uninterested in other children. At 4, he was hospitalized for mania after he threatened to kill himself with his toy sword. And by 5, he was on medicine for bipolar and autism spectrum disorders. One doctor told Paula Buege her son would end up in an institution. Buege vowed to help him remain at home and go to public school in Middleton instead.Followup article here.He was a handful there. School records from a grim stretch in November 2001 show Donovan, then 7, was given frequent timeouts and suspended several days in a row. "Donovan was being escorted to the calming room. When the special education aide tried to remove a ball from the room, Donovan lay on the ball and bit the EA on the wrist. He also hit her arm with the door when she was trying to get out of the room," read one report. The next school day, Donovan threw wood chips in a classmate's face and was put into the "quiet" room again. "He repeatedly kicked the wall and slammed the window with great force, spit on walls and shouted profanity," his teacher wrote.
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Via a Maggie Ginsberg-Schutz email:
Families and/or kids needed to discuss personal experience with cyber bullying. A reporter for a local print publication is putting together an in-depth look at electronic aggression and kids/teens. She is looking for real stories that go beyond the statistics. First names only (unless you're comfortable giving more), along with some general information like age and area (for example, "12-year-old John from Verona"). Unfortunately, time is crunched. If you have a personal experience with harassment, humiliation, or bullying on MySpace, Facebook, blogs, Twitter, text messaging, or something similar, please contact Maggie at 608-437-4659 or maggieschutz@gmail.com as soon as possible.
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PepsiCo Inc. said Tuesday it will remove full-calorie sweetened drinks from schools in more than 200 countries by 2012, marking the first such move by a major soft-drink producer.PepsiCo announced its plan the same day first lady Michelle Obama urged major companies to put less fat, salt and sugar in foods and reduce marketing of unhealthy products to children. Pepsi, the world's second-biggest soft-drink maker, and Coca-Cola Co., the biggest, adopted guidelines to stop selling sugary drinks in U.S. schools in 2006.
The World Heart Federation has been urging soft-drink makers for the past year to remove sugary beverages from schools. The group is looking to fight a rise in childhood obesity, which can lead to diabetes and other ailments.
PepsiCo's move is what the group had been seeking because it affects students through age 18, said Pekka Puska, president of the World Heart Federation, made up of heart associations around the world. In an interview from Finland, Dr. Puska said he hopes other companies feel pressured to take similar steps. "It may be not so well known in the U.S. how intensive the marketing of soft drinks is in so many countries,'' he said. Developing countries such as Mexico are particularly affected, he added.
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It has been, for some time now, the District's contention that they are working to "make every school a quality school". This is a significant goal of the Strategic Plan, "Excellence for All", and a pre-requisite for the New Student Assignment Plan.So one might wonder how the District defines a "quality school". In fact, many more than one might wonder about it. The entire freakin' city might wonder about it. Well, they can just go on wondering because the District doesn't have an answer.
That's right. They have been ostensibly working for two years now towards a goal that they have not defined. Although the District defines accountability as having objectively measurable goals and insists that everyone is accountable, there are no objectively measurable goals tied to the definition of a "quality school". This would appear to be an intentional effort to evade accountability. Not only are there no objectively measurable goals, there are no metrics, no benchmarks, and no assessments. Nice, eh?
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What surprised me most about a new study on cheating at MIT--which concludes that copying homework can lead to lower grades--was that students cheat at the prestigious school, which only admits brainy kids who don't need to.But of course, students cheat everywhere, even at the best schools; witness the recent grade-changing scandal at high-achieving Churchill High School, and, for that matter, the computer hacking scandal at high-achieving Whitman High School last year. Both are in Montgomery County and both are among the best secondary schools in the country.
In fact, according to the book, "Cheating in School: What we Know and What We Can Do," by Stephen F. David, Patrick F. Drinan and Tricia Bertram Gallant, there are students cheating everywhere--from elementary to graduate school, rich and poor schools, public and private.
The authors define cheating as "acts committed by students that deceive, mislead or fool the teacher into thinking that the academic work submitted by the student was a student's own work."
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via a Michelle Sharpswain email:
A group of parents is gathering information from Madison-area community members about whether or not parents would like to see another high school option in the area and, if so, what it might look like. Would it be an independent school or a charter school? Would it be a math and science academy, a performing arts school, an Expeditionary Learning school, or something else?
If you would like to share your ideas, wish list, or perspective, please join us for what is likely to be a stimulating conversation about possibilities. A discussion will take place Thursday evening, March 25th, at 7 p.m. at Wingra School (3200 Monroe St.). Please feel welcome to bring neighbors, family members, etc. who would like to participate.Note: Wingra has very generously offered space for this conversation to take place. This is not a Wingra-sponsored event, nor is it a discussion about Wingra starting a high school.
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For years, many people, including politicians and unions, have complained that Rhode Island is the only state without a school-funding formula. The public's distrust of the legislature, however, has made it difficult to proceed. Not without reason, people feared that vast amounts of money would be simply siphoned away, without accountability, to benefit teachers unions and other powerful interests, not students.But now there seems hope that Rhode Island can move beyond such cynicism. State Education Commissioner Deborah Gist and the state Board of Regents have approved a plan more focused on students. The formula is now before the General Assembly.
Under their plan, state school-aid dollars would "follow the students" -- even to charter schools, public institutions that operate outside the red tape of standard schools and are sometimes anathema to teachers unions.
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OK, mom and dad. Remember your last semester of high school? Chances are you weren't freaking out about your AP chem class. Your prom plans may have mattered more than your 12th-grade GPA. And if you were headed to college, you were probably waiting to hear from just a couple of schools.It's not like that today for college-bound high school seniors. They're cramming in AP classes for college credit. They're waiting to hear from 10 or 12 schools. And they can't shrug off homework, because many colleges make admission contingent on decent final grades.
"We have a policy to do 100 percent verification to ensure that final high school transcripts are received and reviewed," said Matt Whelan, assistant provost for admissions and financial aid at Stony Brook University in New York. "While it has been the exception, unfortunately, I have had the experience of sending letters to students informing them that because they did not successfully complete high school, they could were no longer admitted, and we rescinded both admission and financial aid."
College administrators around the country echoed Whelan's sentiments, from the University of Southern California, to Abilene Christian University in Texas, to Dartmouth, an Ivy League college in New Hampshire.
Not only do 12th graders feel pressure to keep up academically, but many also dedicate themselves to beloved teams, clubs and the performing arts.
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Education Secretary Arne Duncan said last week that the Obama Administration will ramp up investigations of civil rights infractions in school districts, which might sound well and good. What it means in practice, however, is that his Office of Civil Rights (OCR) will revert to the Clinton Administration policy of equating statistical disparity with discrimination, which is troubling.OCR oversees Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination by race, color or national origin in public schools and colleges that receive federal funding. In a speech last week, Mr. Duncan said that "in the last decade"--that's short for the Bush years--"the Office for Civil Rights has not been as vigilant as it should have been in combating racial and gender discrimination." He cited statistics showing that white students are more likely than their black peers to take Advanced Placement classes and less likely to be expelled from school.
Therefore, Mr. Duncan said, OCR "will collect and monitor data on equity." He added that the department will also conduct compliance reviews "to ensure that all students have equal access to educational opportunities" and to determine "whether districts and schools are disciplining students without regard to skin color."
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One of the world's foremost experts on comparing national school systems told lawmakers on Tuesday that many other countries were surpassing the United States in educational attainment, including Canada, where he said 15-year-old students were, on average, more than one school year ahead of American 15-year-olds.America's education advantage, unrivaled in the years after World War II, is eroding quickly as a greater proportion of students in more and more countries graduate from high school and college and score higher on achievement tests than students in the United States, said Andreas Schleicher, a senior education official at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, which helps coordinate policies for 30 of the world's richest countries.
"Among O.E.C.D. countries, only New Zealand, Spain, Turkey and Mexico now have lower high school completion rates than the U.S.," Mr. Schleicher said. About 7 in 10 American students get a high school diploma.
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Test early, test often, and make sure the results you get are meaningful to students, teachers and parents.The Madison School District's "Value Added Assessment" program uses data from the oft-criticized WKCE.Although that may sound simple, in the last three years it's become a mantra in the Monona Grove School District that's helping all middle and high school students increase their skills, whether they're heading to college or a career. The program, based on using ACT-related tests, is helping to establish the suburban Dane County district as a leader in educational innovation in Wisconsin.
In fact, Monona Grove recently hosted a half-day session for administrators and board members from Milwaukee and Madison who were interested in learning more about Monona Grove's experiences and how the school community is responding to the program. In a pilot program this spring in Madison, students in eighth grade at Sherman Middle School will take ACT's Explore test for younger students. At Memorial, freshmen will take the Explore test.
Known primarily as a college entrance examination, ACT Inc. also provides a battery of other tests for younger students. Monona Grove is using these tests -- the Explore tests for grades 8 and 9, and the Plan tests for grades 10 and 11 -- to paint an annual picture of each student's academic skills and what he or she needs to focus on to be ready to take on the challenges of post-secondary education or the work force. The tests are given midway through the first semester, and results are ready a month later.
"We're very, very interested in what Monona Grove is doing," says Pam Nash, assistant superintendent for secondary education for the Madison district. "We've heard our state is looking at ACT as a possible replacement for the WKCE (Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam), and the intrinsic reliability of the ACT is well known. The WKCE is so unrelated to the students. The scores come in so late, it's not useful.
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Ask anyone about President Obama's track record and you'll hear the same: Not much movement on global warming, the domestic economy or health care. But there is one area in which Obama has already begun to move long-dormant mountains: education reform.He has steered billions of dollars into education, which Education Secretary Arne Duncan has doled out in a carrot-and-stick approach that has forced states to promise reforms that were long thought impossible. For example, several state legislatures were "persuaded" -- okay, legally bribed -- into peeling back excessive teacher-protection laws.
Ultimately, however, Obama will be measured by his bottom line goal: for the United States to have the world's highest proportion of college graduates by the year 2020. Translated, that means jumping from the middle of the rankings of developed nations to the top in just 10 years.
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To encourage high school students to tackle tougher academic classes, many schools assign bonus points to grades in Advanced Placement or honors courses. But schools' policies on whether students should receive a grade-point boost and by how much are all over the map.My local public school district, for instance, used to add an extra third of a grade-point to students' AP course grades while the private high school on the other side of town would bump up students' grades by a full letter grade.
Since students from both schools would be applying to many of the same colleges, and essentially competing with one another, it didn't seem fair to me that the private school kids should get such a generous grade boost.
That's why I was heartened to come across a new study by a Harvard University researcher that takes a more systematic look at the practice of high school grade-weighting.
He found that for every increasing level of rigor in high school science, students' college course grades rose by an average of 2.4 points on a 100- point scale, where an A is 95 points and a B is worth 85 points and so on. In other words, the college grade for the former AP chemistry student would be expected to be 2.4 points higher than that of the typical student who took honors chemistry in high school. And the honors students' college grade, in turn, would be 2.4 points higher than that of the student who took regular chemistry.
Translating those numbers, and some other calculations, to a typical high school 1-to-4-point grade scale, Sadler estimates that students taking an honors science class in high school ought to get an extra half a point for their trouble, and that a B in an AP science course ought to be counted as an A for the purpose of high school grade-point averages.
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Of President Obama's three big takeovers--cap 'n trade, health care, and higher ed--higher ed has garnered the least public attention. That may change now that the administration is attempting to impose its wishes by legislative trickery.The health care bill that the Democrats hope to pass by "reconciliation" to avoid the normal Senatorial voting procedure is now being amended to include the administration's Big Grab on federal student loans. If this works, we will have one bill in which the federal government not only takes primary control of American health care but also simultaneously takes practical control of American higher education.
Some background: last September, The Wall Street Journal ("The Quietest Trillion") gave an early heads-up to the administration's then-plan to move the Department of Education from a 20 percent to an 80 percent share of the student loan market. A bill passed the House that month that would have eliminated private lenders from the federally guaranteed student loan market by July 1, 2010. It came with a promise that taxpayers would save some $87 billion from substituting a government-run service for the rough-and-tumble of private lenders. In October, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sent a letter to colleges and universities across the country advising them to get their institutions ready for a 2010 implementation of the new rules, dubbed "Direct Lending." College officials, some House Democrats, and a few Republicans expressed their uneasiness at the new plan.
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If you are a parent in cities such as Bellevue, Issaquah or Seattle, your kids are being short-changed--being provided an inferior math education that could cripple their future aspirations--and you need to act. This blog will tell the story of an unresponsive and wrong-headed educational bureaucracies that are dead set on continuing in the current direction. And it will tell the story of how this disaster can be turned around. Parent or not, your future depends on dealing with the problem.Related: Math Forum audio / video.Let me provide you with a view from the battlefield of the math "wars", including some information that is generally not known publicly, or has been actively suppressed by the educational establishment. Of lawsuits and locking parents out of decision making.
I know that some of you would rather that I only talk about weather, but the future of my discipline and of our highly technological society depends on mathematically literate students. Increasingly, I am finding bright students unable to complete a major in atmospheric sciences. All their lives they wanted to be a meteorologist and problems with math had ended their dreams. Most of them had excellent math grades in high school. I have talked in the past about problems with reform or discovery math; an unproven ideology-based instructional approach in vogue among the educational establishment. An approach based on student's "discovering" math principles, group learning, heavy use of calculators, lack of practice and skills building, and heavy use of superficial "spiraling" of subject matter. As I have noted before in this blog, there is no competent research that shows that this approach works and plenty to show that it doesn't. But I have covered much of this already in earlier blogs.
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The Kansas City Board of Education voted Wednesday night to close almost half of the city's public schools, accepting a sweeping and contentious plan to shrink the system in the face of dwindling enrollment, budget cuts and a $50 million deficit.In a 5-to-4 vote, the members endorsed the Right-Size plan, proposed by the schools superintendent, John Covington, to close 28 of the city's 61 schools and cut 700 of 3,000 jobs, including those of 285 teachers. The closings are expected to save $50 million, erasing the deficit from the $300 million budget.
"We must make sacrifices," said board member Joel Pelofsky, speaking in favor of the plan before the vote. "Unite in favor of our children."
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Architects and designers pick the most attractive schools.Slideshow
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The U.S. Education Department is planning to examine the Los Angeles Unified School District's low achieving English-language learning program to determine whether those students are being denied a fair education.
The department's Office for Civil Rights will investigate whether the nation's second-largest school district is complying with federal civil rights laws with regard to English-language learners, who comprise about a third of the district's 688,000 pupils, according to the Los Angeles Times.The inquiry was sparked by the low academic achievement of the district's English learners. Only 3 percent are proficient in high-school math and English.
Problems in LAUSD's English-language learning program were highlighted last fall in a study by the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute.
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Melissa Westbrook:
just finally got around to looking over the Alliance for Education survey called "Teaching Quality Community Survey". What were they thinking? (Sorry to be a little late to this party but I was out of town last week.) I'm not going to even provide a link. I answered every question "don't know" so I could read through the whole thing.Just from a survey standpoint, it's a mess. There are multiple values in questions starting with the very first one. It's about (1) redesigning the salary schedule AND (2) eliminating coursework incentives AND (3) "reallocating pay to target the district's challenges and priorities." What?!? You can't write a survey question like that.
Question two has a classic "leading the reader" form using phrases like "redouble efforts" and "as attempted by the current superintendent". How does the reader know this actually DID happen? Also, the "latest" negotiations haven't even formally started; is the district showing its hand here?
And it goes on and on. "Gather teacher data so that teachers are equitably distributed among schools." So elsewhere they want to eliminate pay for more education for teachers but at the same time in this question they want to spread the number of teachers who do have more education more equitably among the schools?
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Carl Dorvil started Group Excellence in his SMU dorm room. The son of Haitian immigrants, Carl never took his education for granted. He was the first African American president of his high school and balanced four jobs while completing a triple major and starting a business as an undergraduate.Some good advice from the founder of Macaroni Grill led Carl to pursue an MBA. But when his professor saw the revenue projection for Group Excellence, he suggested a semester off to work on the business.
Carl finished his MBA in 2008, but the break allowed him to build a great business. Today Group Excellence (GE) employs 500 people in four cities and serves over 10,000 Texas students. GE provides tutoring services to struggling low-income students. Dorvil says, "The knowledge that I gained from business school propelled GE into becoming one of the most respected tutoring companies under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act."
In one Dallas middle school, math scores shot up from 12% to more than 60% passing the state test only 8 months after activating the GE program.
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For football fans, the indelible image of last month's Super Bowl might have been quarterback Drew Brees' fourth-quarter touchdown pass that put the New Orleans Saints ahead for good. But for audiologists around the nation, the highlight came after the game - when Brees, in a shower of confetti, held aloft his 1-year-old son, Baylen.The boy was wearing what looked like the headphones worn by his father's coaches on the sideline, but they were actually low-cost, low-tech earmuffs meant to protect his hearing from the stadium's roar.
Specialists say such safeguards are critical for young ears in a deafening world. Hearing loss from exposure to loud noises is cumulative and irreversible; if such exposure starts in infancy, children can live "half their lives with hearing loss," said Brian Fligor, director of diagnostic audiology at Children's Hospital Boston.
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UNLIKE many of the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" that have sought refuge in America, the Romeike family comes from a comfortable place: Bissingen an der Teck, a town in south-western Germany. Yet on January 26th an American immigration judge granted the Romeikes--a piano teacher, his wife and five children--political asylum, accepting their case that difficulties with home schooling their children created a reasonable fear of persecution.Under Germany's stringent rules, home schooling is allowed only in exceptional circumstances. Before emigrating, Mr and Mrs Romeike had been fined some €12,000 ($17,000); policemen had arrived at their house and forcibly taken their children to school. The Romeikes feared that the youngsters might soon be removed by the state.
In September 2006 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Germany was within its rights to follow this approach. Schools represented society, it judged, and it was in the children's interest to become part of that society. The parents' right to raise their offspring did not go as far as depriving their children of the social experience of school.
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A convicted sex offender has moved into a home across the street from Wildwood Elementary School in Piedmont, infuriating parents, who are asking school officials and the police why the 2006 state law mandating a minimum distance of 2,000 feet between schools and the residences of sex offenders is not being enforced.But the Piedmont police, on the advice of county and state law enforcement officials, say there is nothing they can do.
On Feb. 12, James F. Donnelly, 71, a convicted sex offender, registered his new address as 256 Wildwood Avenue, where a blue-hued house overlooks Piedmont, Oakland's upscale, uphill neighbor.
Shortly after Mr. Donnelly filed his registration, Chief John Hunt of the Piedmont police realized that the house was almost directly across from the school.
"We said, Wait, this can't be, somebody dropped the ball," Chief Hunt said in an interview.
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At 11, the violinist Patricia Travers made her first solo appearance with the New York Philharmonic, playing Lalo's "Symphonie Espagnole" with "a purity of tone, breadth of line and immersion in her task," as a critic for The New York Times wrote in 1939.At 13, she appeared in "There's Magic in Music," a Hollywood comedy set in a music camp. Released in 1941 and starring Allan Jones, the film features Patricia, chosen by audition from hundreds of child performers, playing with passionate intensity.
In her early 20s, for the Columbia label, she made the first complete recording of Charles Ives's Sonata No.2 for Violin and Piano, a modern American work requiring a mature musical intelligence.
Not long afterward, she disappeared.
Between the ages of 10 and 23, Ms. Travers appeared with many of the world's leading orchestras, including the New York, London and Berlin Philharmonics and the Boston and Chicago Symphonies. She performed on national radio broadcasts, gave premieres of music written expressly for her and made several well-received records.
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Zachary Dupland was a kindergartner at Menasha's Gegan Elementary School when his parents split up. His dad, Eric Dupland, moved to Appleton. His mom, Tauna Carson, moved to Neenah.As part of their custody agreement, however, they opted to keep Zachary, now a third-grader, at a school in Menasha by applying for open enrollment.
His parents felt no reason existed to uproot him from his friends and teachers, at least until middle school.
"We wanted to avoid any more dramatic changes in his life," Eric Dupland said.
"This option has been wonderful for us," Carson said. "It has allowed us to do just what we need to do for Zachary."
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ittle Johnny can't read or write because, in government schools, the interests of teachers' unions prevail over the interests of children. Unions may be beneficial to educators, but they are indifferent -- if not hostile -- to the intellectual development of children.But education reformers nationwide are celebrating a rare victory for the kids. Last month in Rhode Island, Superintendant Frances Gallo fired the entire staff of Central Falls High School -- a total of 93 people. The grateful citizens of Central Falls have erected a billboard in Gallo's honor. Rightly so. Gallo, Rhode Island Education Commissioner Deborah Gist and the Central Falls school board (which approved the firings on a 5-2 vote) are an inspiration to the public school reform movement.
Central Falls High is one of the worst schools in Rhode Island. Only 45 percent of the students are proficient in reading, 29 percent in writing and, incredibly, only 4 percent in math. Compare those abysmal numbers to Rhode Island's (somewhat less embarrassing) statewide averages in the same subjects: 69, 42 and 27 percent, respectively. Furthermore, half of the students at Central Falls are failing every subject, and the school's graduation rate is 48 percent.
Only teachers' unions could defend such a spectacular failure. Several hundred bused-in, placard-waving educators and their union representatives showed up in Central Falls hours before the firings. "We are behind Central Falls teachers," proclaimed Mark Bostic of the American Federation of Teachers, "and we will be here as long as it takes to get justice." But on Tuesday, the Central Falls union publicly pledged to support Gallo's reforms, and she said she's willing to negotiate.
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Grades awarded to undergraduates attending college in the United States have gone up significantly in the past couple decades according to a report titled "Grading in American Colleges and Universities," which was published in the Teachers College Record.The article was written by UW-Madison graduate Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, an associate professor of computer science at Furman University. Rojstaczer is a retired professor of geophysics at Duke University and the creator of GradeInflation.com, a website that tracks grading trends.
Rojstaczer has posted a free copy of the article on his Forty Questions blog.
The report analyzes decades of grading patters at American four-year institutions and notes that "grading has evolved in an ad hoc way into identifiable patterns at the national level. The mean grade point average of a school is highly dependent on the average quality of its student body and whether it is public or private. Relative to other schools, public commuter and engineering schools grade harshly. Superimposed on these trends is a nationwide rise in grades over time of roughly 0.1 change in GPA per decade."
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Amidst the Race to the Top excitement this week, an important story may have gotten lost in the buzz. On Wednesday, my colleague Jamie Davies O'Leary, a 27 year-old Princeton grad, liberal Democrat, and Teach For America alumna described her surprise bookshop encounter with former Weatherman and lefty school reformer Bill Ayers.If Bill Ayers and Fred and Mike Klonsky were 22 again, they would be signing up for Teach For America. The whole thing is worth reading (it's a great story) but note this passage in particular, about Ayers' talk:
[Ayers] answered a young woman's question about New York Teaching Fellows and Teach For America with a diatribe about how such programs can't fix public education and consist of a bunch of ivy leaguers and white missionaries more interested in a resume boost than in helping students. Whoa.Almost as soon as Jamie's essay was posted, the Klonsky brothers (Fred and Mike--both longtime friends and associates of Ayers, both involved in progressive education causes) went after her. Fred posted a missive titled, "File under misguided sense of one's own importance." Mike tweeted that her depiction of the encounter was a "fantasy."And:
As someone who read Savage Inequalities years ago and attribute my decision to become a teacher partially to the social justice message, I almost felt embarrassed. But that was before I learned a bit of context, nuance, data, and evidence surrounding education policy debates. It's as if Bill Ayers hasn't been on the planet for the last two decades.
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ON A WINTER DAY five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager -- desperate, in some cases -- for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students' strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn't reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he'd seen before: "a dispiriting exercise in good people failing," as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students. They sat down with them on the floor to read and picked activities that should have engaged them. The classes were small. The school had rigorous academic standards and state-of-the-art curriculums and used a software program to analyze test results for each student, pinpointing which skills she still needed to work on.
But when it came to actual teaching, the daily task of getting students to learn, the school floundered. Students disobeyed teachers' instructions, and class discussions veered away from the lesson plans. In one class Lemov observed, the teacher spent several minutes debating a student about why he didn't have a pencil. Another divided her students into two groups to practice multiplication together, only to watch them turn to the more interesting work of chatting. A single quiet student soldiered on with the problems. As Lemov drove from Syracuse back to his home in Albany, he tried to figure out what he could do to help. He knew how to advise schools to adopt a better curriculum or raise standards or develop better communication channels between teachers and principals. But he realized that he had no clue how to advise schools about their main event: how to teach.
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When a Verona High School student had a headache last month, he asked his friends for Tylenol or Advil to relieve the pain. But what he unwittingly took was an OxyContin pill that one of his friends slipped him.The prescription painkiller sent the student to the school nurse's office, and his friend received what Verona School District Superintendent Dean Gorrell will only call "appropriate disciplinary action."
The story, disclosed in a recent note from the district to parents, underscores the cavalier attitude some teens take toward the powerful and addictive drug.
The consequences can be tragic. A 14-year-old girl in Rock County faces a possible reckless homicide charge for giving her grandmother's oxycodone-- the generic form of OxyContin -- to a friend, who died last month from an overdose of the drug.
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Federal employees earn higher average salaries than private-sector workers in more than eight out of 10 occupations, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds.
Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector.Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.
These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
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Steven Greenhouse & Sam Dillon:
A Rhode Island school board's decision to fire the entire faculty of a poorly performing school, and President Obama's endorsement of the action, has stirred a storm of reaction nationwide, with teachers condemning it as an insult and conservatives hailing it as a watershed moment of school accountability.The decision by school authorities in Central Falls to fire the 93 teachers and staff members has assumed special significance because hundreds of other school districts across the nation could face similarly hard choices in coming weeks, as a $3.5 billion federal school turnaround program kicks into gear.
While there is fierce disagreement over whether the firings were good or bad, there is widespread agreement that the decision would have lasting ripples on the nation's education debate -- especially because Mr. Obama seized on the move to show his eagerness to take bold action to improve failing schools filled with poor students.
"This is the first example of tough love under the Obama regime, and that's what makes it significant," said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, an educational research and advocacy organization.
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That's a real quote. The speaker is Asbury Park School District's new superintendent Denise Lowe, who says that "major changes have to be made to the schools or the school district will cease to exist, " according to the Asbury Park Press. Enrollment is dropping because students are leaving for parochial schools and charter schools, so she's put together a five-year plan to improve achievement.She's got her work cut out for her. Asbury Park High School, for example, with 478 kids, has a 45.7% mobility rate. (The state average is 9.6%.) 72% of students failed the 11th grade HSPA test in language arts and 86.1% failed the math portion. Average SAT scores are 325 in math and 330 in verbal. Attendance rates in 9th grade are 83%. A whopping 64.6% of kids never pass the HSPA and end up taking the Special Review Assessment, a back-door-to-diploma-route that is impossible to fail. The total comparative cost per pupil? $24,428. (DOE data here.)
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Has the time come for parents to pull the plug on mobile media?A recent study completed by the Kaiser Family Foundation brought little in the way of surprises for those who work with children. But just to set the record straight, the foundation found that daily media use among children and teens is up dramatically even when compared to just five years ago.
With mobile devices providing nonstop internet availability, it is easy to see that entertainment media has never been more accessible than it is right now. The results of the Kaiser survey reveals that children, particularly minority youth, are taking advantage of that access.
But for parents and educators, the key question should not be simply how much time is actually spent with media. Instead, the issue should center upon what effect such consumption has on the mental, emotional and academic development of our youngsters.
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I wish to take issue with some of the assumptions made by the four teachers who were interviewed concerning the Gates Foundation grant ("Teachers in transition," Views, Feb. 28).It was said several times that good parenting is essential for children's success in school. Not true! My two brothers and I grew up in a totally dysfunctional home, filled with constant criticism, hatred, anger, punishment, a mostly absent father, and one in which our mother constantly set us one against the other. There were no books, no magazines, no art on the walls and certainly no love or encouragement. Never once did we hear, "I'm proud of you!" or "Good job!"
We should have been poster children for not succeeding in school, but we weren't. Today, my older brother is a medical doctor. My younger brother has two master's degrees and is a life-long learner with a huge book collection. I started and completed my BA in English at age 25, with two toddlers to care for and no help from anyone, graduated in three years and had a successful career. We all still read voraciously.
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Mary Ellen Gabriel, via a kind reader's email:
Two dozen seventh-graders from Jefferson Middle School toil up a stony ridge on snowshoes, in the heart of the Madison School Forest. At the top they peel off into small groups and stand gazing upward at a twiggy village of giant nests, silhouetted against a pure-blue sky.The school forest is a real blessing, one in which I had an opportunity to participate in some years ago. I hope every classroom visits."How many do you see in your tree?" calls Nancy Sheehan, a school forest naturalist. The kids in her group count seven great blue heron nests in the bare branches of one towering white oak. They also record data about the tree, including its GPS location, which they'll turn over to the Department of Natural Resources as part of ongoing monitoring of this heron rookery near the Sugar River in southwest Verona.
"This is your chance to do some real science," Sheehan tells them. "Herons are extremely sensitive creatures. If this landscape continues to suit them, they'll come back again in spring. That's why your work today is important."
Seventh-grader Amos Kalder's cheeks are red with cold (and exercise) as he gazes upward at the rookery: "Dude, it'd be so cool to see these nests with all the herons in them. There'd be like 50 birds sitting in the sky."
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Last week I attended Education Industry Days in a hotel between the AFT and the NEA-a bit ironic, don't you think?. On the opening day, the front page of the USA Today reported that public sector union members now outnumber private sector members-we are well protected from ourselves.The once respected scholar Diane Ravitch has joined the unions in monopoly protection-no choice, no market, no testing. She nearly made me crash my car in Phoenix this morning during her ridiculous back-to-the future NPR interview suggesting a return to free-for-all teach what-ever-however past. A former conservative, she now shuns markets, choice, testing-basically everything necessary to drive performance at scale. Hard to follow the logic of how her proposals would make things better for low income kids.
If you care about equality and excellence, see Education Equality Project and their case for accountability. Folks like Ravitch complain about accountability but don't offer an alternative that has a reliable chance for making this significantly better for low income kids.
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Many states have made measurable progress in recent years toward the elusive goal of college readiness, according to a new report by the nonprofit Achieve.Complete report here, which mentions:Maryland, Virginia and the District have made more progress than some, but less than most. Each state has achieved only one of five college-readiness goals identified in the report.
"What started off as isolated efforts among a few states five years ago has produced a national consensus: All students should receive a quality education that prepares them to succeed in college, career and life," said Mike Cohen, Achieve's president, in a release.
Achieve's fifth annual "Closing the Expectations Gap" report finds that the majority of states, 31, now have high school standards in English and mathematics that align with the expectations of colleges and business. (Meaning that collegiate and business officials were involved in drafting the standards and approved the final product.) In 2005, by contrast, only three states had such standards.
Four additional states: new Hampshire, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Wyoming reported plans to administer college and career ready assessments, although their plans are not yet developed enough to include in the table on page 16.
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As a teacher for 20 years, I can tell parents that with their support children can flourish anywhereThe agony of waiting is over. Yesterday was national offer day, when parents learnt if their children had got into their favoured secondary schools. Unfortunately, as many as 100,000 children and their families have been bitterly disappointed.
As a teacher who has taught at various comprehensives for 20 years, I know that means a lot of tears and pain. I have seen parents who hit the bottle and come raging on to the school premises, demanding that the school takes their child; parents who do nothing but pester the school secretaries on the phone or by email; and parents who have just given up in despair, despite the fact that they have good grounds to appeal.
The main things parents should remember is not to descend into a great panic, and to review their situation dispassionately. What many don't grasp is that if they fail to meet the admissions criteria of a school, children won't get in, no matter how wonderful. The government has a strict admissions code that means schools have little room for manoeuvre: they can no longer just pick pupils they like the look of.
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Knewton, an online test prep company that uses adaptive learning to boost scores on standardized tests, announced today the launch of its new SAT prep course. The company already provides prep courses for the GMAT and LSAT, and now hopes to tap the market of high-pressure parents and overachieving high school students.The SAT prep course will include live instructors, educational videos and real-time feedback on students' performance in specific SAT concepts. Overbearing parents can also track their children's progress with a set of tools designed for them. The course costs $490, (there's a $290 intro offer).
The courses use adaptive learning technology--a method that serves up questions and resources according to students' needs based on their past performance. The concept is taken from adaptive learning tests, which serve questions that get harder or easier, depending on a student's answers. In fact, Knewton's two chief test designers, Len Swanson and Robert McKinley, helped design those tests: Swanson wrote the scoring algorithms for the adaptive learning tests used by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which administers the SAT, GRE, and AP tests, and McKinley wrote the algorithms for the ACT.
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'Who do you think made the first stone spear?" asks Temple Grandin. "That wasn't the yakkity yaks sitting around the campfire. It was some Asperger sitting in the back of a cave figuring out how to chip rocks into spearheads. Without some autistic traits you wouldn't even have a recording device to record this conversation on."As many as one in 110 American children are affected by autism spectrum disorders, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Boys are four times more likely to be diagnosed than girls. But what causes this developmental disorder, characterized by severe social disconnection and communication impairment, remains a mystery.
Nevertheless, with aggressive early intervention and tremendous discipline many people with autism can lead productive, even remarkable, lives. And Ms. Grandin--doctor of animal science, ground-breaking cattle expert, easily the most famous autistic woman in the world--is one of them.
Earlier this month, HBO released a film about her to critical acclaim. Claire Danes captures her with such precision that Ms. Grandin tells me watching the movie feels like "a weird time machine" to the 1960s and '70s and that it shows "exactly how my mind works."
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High school students who complete a new Wisconsin program to promote college attendance will be eligible for annual grants worth $250 to $2,500 for their first two years of college, Gov. Jim Doyle said Monday.Doyle also said Wisconsin Covenant scholars would be eligible for additional aid during their final two years, with the amounts depending on the availability of funding. He said he was unhappy his administration had issued a proposal while he was traveling overseas in December to limit the grants to two years.
Under the revised proposal Doyle submitted to the Legislature on Monday, the poorest Wisconsin Covenant scholars will receive $2,500 grants _ $1,000 from the state and $1,500 from a private foundation _ during each of their first two years in college.
Those with higher family incomes _ up to $80,000 in some cases _ will receive between $1,000 and $1,500, he said. All others who complete the Covenant challenge will receive $250, an amount one Republican critic mocked as paltry.
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When Rosemarie Wilson moved her family to a wealthy suburb of Raleigh a couple of years ago, the biggest attraction was the prestige of the local public schools. Then she started talking to neighbors.Don't believe the hype, they warned. Many were considering private schools. All pointed to an unusual desegregation policy, begun in 2000, in which some children from wealthy neighborhoods were bused to schools in poorer areas, and vice versa, to create economically diverse classrooms.
"Children from the 450 houses in our subdivision were being bused all across the city," said Ms. Wilson, for whom the final affront was a proposal by the Wake County Board of Education to send her two daughters to schools 17 miles from home.
So she vented her anger at the polls, helping elect four new Republican-backed education board members last fall. Now in the majority, those board members are trying to make good on campaign promises to end Wake's nationally recognized income-based busing policy.
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Introduction and Overview
1. Background and Overview Daniel A. Nerad, Superintendent of SchoolsPrior to the fall of 2008, MMSD high schools functioned as four separate autonomous high schools, with minimal focus on working collaboratively across the district to address student educational needs.
In 2008 MMSD received a Federal Smaller Learning Communities for $5.3 million dollars over a five year period. The purpose of that grant is to support the large changes necessary to:
District administration, along with school leadership and school staff, have examined the research that shows that fundamental change in education can only be accomplished by creating the opportunity for teachers to talk with one another regarding their instructional practice. The central theme and approach for REaL has been to improve and enhance instructional practice through collaboration in order to increase stndent achievement. Special attention has been paid to ensure the work is done in a cross - district, interdepartmental and collaborative manner. Central to the work, are district and school based discussions focused on what skills and knowledge students need to know and be able to do, in order to be prepared for post-secondary education and work. Systemized discussions regarding curriculum aligll1nent, course offerings, assessment systems, behavioral expectations and 21 st century skills are occurring across all four high schools and at the district level.
- Increase student achievement for all students.
- Increase and improve student to student relationships and student to adult relationships.
- Improve post-secondary outcomes for all students.
Collaborative professional development has been established to ensure that the work capitalizes on the expertise of current staff, furthers best practices that are already occurring within the MMSD high school classrooms, and enhances the skills of individuals at all levels from administration to classroom teachers needed. Our work to date has laid the foundation for further and more in-depth work to occur.
While we are at the formative stages of our work, evidence shows that success is occurring at the school level. Feedback from principals indicates that district meetings, school buildings and classrooms are feeling more collaborative and positive, there is increased participation by teachers in school based decisions, and school climate has improved as evidenced by a significant reduction in behavior referrals.
This report provides a summary of the REaL Grant since fall of2008 and includes:
1. Work completed across all four high schools.
2. School specific work completed.
3. District work completed.
4. REaL evaluation
5. Future implicationsIn addition the following attachments are included:
1. Individual REaL School Action Plans for 09-10
2. REaL District Action for 09-10
3. ACT EP AS Overview and Implementation Plan
4. AVID Overview
5. Templates used for curriculum and course alignment
6. Individual Learning Plan summary and implementation plan
7. National Student Clearninghouse StudentTracker System
8. Student Action Research example questions2. Presenters
3. Action requested of the BOE
- Pam Nash, Assistant Superintendent of Secondary Schools
- Darwin Hernandez, East High School AVID Student
- Jaquise Gardner, La Follette High School AVID Student
- Mary Kelley, East High School
- Joe Gothard, La Follette High School
- Bruce Dahmen, Memorial High School
- Ed Holmes, West High School
- Melody Marpohl, West High School ESL Teacher
The report is an update, providing information on progress of MMSD High Schools and district initiatives in meeting grant goals and outlines future directions for MMSD High schools and district initiatives based on work completed to date.
MMSD has contracted with an outside evaluator, Bruce King, UW-Madison. Below are the initial observations submitted by Mr. King:Related:The REaL evaluation will ultimately report on the extent of progress toward the three main grant goals. Yearly work focuses on major REaL activities at or across the high schools through both qualitative and quantitative methods and provides schools and the district with formative evaluation and feedback. During the first two years ofthe project, the evaluation is also collecting baseline data to inform summative reports in later years of the grant. We can make several observations about implementation ofthe grant goals across the district.
These include:
Observation 1: Professional development experiences have been goal oriented and focused. On a recent survey of the staff at the four high schools, 80% of responding teachers reported that their professional development experiences in 2009-10 were closely connected to the schools' improvement plans. In addition, the focus of these efforts is similar to the kinds of experiences that have led to changes in student achievement at other highly successful schools (e.g., Universal Design, instructional leadership, and literacy across the curriculum).
Observation 2: Teacher collaboration is a focal point for REaL grant professional development. However, teachers don't have enough time to meet together, and Professional Collaboration Time (PCT) will be an important structure to help sustain professional development over time.
Observation 3: School and district facilitators have increased their capacity to lead collaborative, site-based professional development. In order for teachers to collaborate better, skills in facilitation and group processes should continue to be enhanced.
Observation 4: Implementing EP AS is a positive step for increasing post-secondary access and creating a common assessment program for all students.
Observation 5: There has been improved attention to and focus on key initiatives. Over two- thirds ofteachers completing the survey believed that the focus of their current initiatives addresses the needs of students in their classroom. At the same time, a persisting dilemma is prioritizing and doing a few things well rather than implementing too many initiatives at once.
Observation 6: One of the important focus areas is building capacity for instructional leadership, work carried out in conjunction with the Wallace project's UW Educational Leadership faculty. Progress on this front has varied across the four schools.
Observation 7: District offices are working together more collaboratively than in the past, both with each other and the high schools, in support of the grant goals.
Is it likely that the four high schools will be significantly different in four more years?
Given the focus on cultivating teacher leadership that has guided the grant from the outset, the likelihood is strong that staff will embrace the work energetically as their capacity increases. At the same time, the ultimate success ofthe grant will depend on whether teachers, administrators, anddistrict personnel continue to focus on improving instruction and assessment practices to deliver a rigorous core curriculum for all and on nurturing truly smaller environments where students are known well.
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Five months after we are conceived, music begins to capture our attention and wire our brains for a lifetime of aural experience. At the other end of life, musical memories can be imprinted on the brain so indelibly that they can be retrieved, perfectly intact, from the depths of a mind ravaged by Alzheimer's disease.In between, music can puncture stress, dissipate anger and comfort us in sadness.
As if all that weren't enough, for years parents have been seduced by even loftier promises from an industry hawking the recorded music of Mozart and other classical composers as a means to ensure brilliant babies.
But for all its beauty, power and capacity to move, researchers have concluded that music is little more than ear candy for the brain if it is consumed only passively. If you want music to sharpen your senses, boost your ability to focus and perhaps even improve your memory, the latest word from science is you'll need more than hype and a loaded iPod.
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The system of excluding badly behaved pupils from school should be abolished because it punishes the most vulnerable children, a major new report on education has concluded, writes Anushka Asthana.The study, by the thinktank Demos, says that difficult children are being pushed out of schools too often and finds that exclusions do not solve behavioural problems. Instead, they are linked to very poor results and in three out of four cases relate to children with special educational needs who should receive additional support. The report finds that 27% of children with autism have been excluded from school.
Sonia Sodha, co-author of the report, said: "Most other countries do not permanently exclude children from school in the same way we do. Instead of helping these children, we are punishing and then banishing them."
The report comes as figures from the Conservatives show that 1,000 pupils are excluded or suspended for physical and verbal assaults every day. Speaking at the Tory party spring conference, Michael Gove, shadow children's secretary, promised that in power he would make it easier for teachers to remove violent and disruptive pupils.
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N SOFT, southern countries, snow is enough to close schools. In Sweden--a place that lives by the maxim that "There is no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes"--fresh snow is a cue to send 18-month-olds into the playground, tottering around in snowsuits and bobble hats. It is an impressive sight at any time. But it is particularly striking in a Stockholm playground filled with Somali toddlers, squeaking as they queue for sledge-rides.The playground belongs to Karin Danielsson, a headmistress in Tensta, a Stockholm suburb with a large immigrant population. Mrs Danielsson calls her municipal preschool "a school for democracy". In keeping with Swedish mores, even young children may choose which activities to join or where to play. All pupils' opinions are heard, but they are then taught that the group's wishes must also be heeded.
Swedes take preschool seriously. Though education is not compulsory until seven, more than 80% of two-year-olds are enrolled in preschool, and many begin earlier. Among European countries only Denmark has higher enrolment rates at that age.
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Mark H. Ingraham Dean Emeritus, College of Letters & Science, University of Wisconsin
Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, University of Wisconsin [Click to view this 23MB PDF "book"]:
ContentsThanks to Richard Askey for extensive assistance with this digitized book. Clusty Search Mark Ingraham.Preface
Part I Liberal Education
The Omnivorous Mind 3
Given May 16, 1962, to the University of Wisconsin Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Republished from The Speech Teacher of September 1962.Truth-An Insufficient Goal 17
The Keniston Lecture for 1964 at the University of Michi- gan; March 17, 1964. Republished from the Michigan Quarterly Review of July 1964.On the Adjective "Common" 31
An editorial for the February 1967 Review of the Wisconsin Academy of Arts, Letters, and Sciences, February 23, 1967.Part II Educational Policy
Super Sleep-A Form of Academic Somnambulism 37
First given as retiring address as President of A.A. U.P . This much revised version was given to the Madison Literary Club, March 12, 1940.No, We Can't; He Has a Committee Meeting 57
Madison Literary Club; May 11, 1953.Is There a Heaven and a Hell for Colleges? 70
Commencement address, Hiram College; June 8, 1958.The College of Letters and Science 79
Talk given to the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin, May 3, 1958.Some Half Truths About the American Undergraduate 84
Orientation conference for Whitney-Fulbright Visiting Scholars. Sarah Lawrence College, September 6, 1962.Maps Versus Blueprints 94
Honors Convocation, University of Wisconsin, May 18, 1973.
Part III To Students
A Talk to Freshmen 103
University of Wisconsin; September 18, 1951Choice: The Limitation and the Expression of Freedom 112
Honors Convocation, University of Wisconsin; June 17, 1955. Republished from the Wisconsin Alumnus."The Good is Oft Interred with Their Bones" 121
Commencement, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh; Janu- ary 19, 1968.
Talk at Honors Convocation at Ripon CollegeTalk at Honors Convocation at Ripon College 129
April 9, 1969The Framework of Opportunity 136
Thanksgiving Address, University of Wisconsin; November, 1947
Part IV A Little Fun
Food from a Masculine Point of View 149
Madison Literary Club; November 11, 1946On Telling and Reading Stories to Children 165
Attic Angel Tower, Madison, Wisconsin; March 6, 1978Three Limericks 179
Fragments 181
a. From an address given to the University oF Wyoming Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, April 26, 1965b. A comment
Part V Somewhat Personal
Letter of Resignation from Deanship 185
April 5, 1961Retirement Dinner Talk 188
May 24, 1966
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via a kind reader's email: Parent Diane Harrington:
Dear Board Members, Dr. Nerad, and Madison Alders,Parent Lorie Raihala:My 11-year-old and I visited John Muir Elementary for basketball practice one recent evening. Their gym has banners noting that for several years they've been named a "School of Excellence."
Ben's school, Orchard Ridge Elementary, had just been dubbed a "School of Promise."
Which school would YOU rather go to?
But Ben didn't need a marketing effort to tell him which school was which; he knows some John Muir kids. Ben, too, would like to go to a school where kids are expected to learn and to behave instead of just encouraged to.
Just like those banners, the very idea of your upcoming, $86,000 "branding" effort isn't fooling anyone.
You don't need to improve your image. You need to improve your schools.
Stop condescending to children, to parents and to the public. Skip the silly labels and the PR plans.
Instead, just do your #^%* job. (If you need help filling in that blank, head to ORE or Toki. Plenty of kids - some as young as kindergarten - use several colorful words in the hallways, classrooms, lunchroom and playground without even a second look, much less disciplinary action, from a teacher or principal.)
Create an environment that strives for excellence, not mediocrity. Guide children to go above and beyond, rather than considering your job done once they've met the minimum requirements.
Until then, it's all too obvious that any effort to "cultivate relationships with community partners" is just what you're branding it: marketing. It's just about as meaningless as that "promise" label on ORE or the "honor roll" that my 13-year-old and half the Toki seventh graders are on.
P.S. At my neighborhood association's annual Winter Social earlier tonight, one parent of a soon-to-be-elementary-age child begged me to tell him there was some way to get a voucher so he could avoid sending his daughter to ORE. His family can't afford private school. Another parent told me her soon-to-be-elementary-age kids definitely (whew!) were going to St. Maria Goretti instead of ORE. A friend - even though her son was finishing up at ORE this year - pulled her daughter out after kindergarten (yes, to send her to Goretti), because the atmosphere at ORE is just too destructive and her child wasn't learning anything. These people aren't going to be fooled by a branding effort. And you're only fooling yourselves (and wasting taxpayer money) if you think otherwise.
Regarding the Madison School District's $86,000 "branding campaign," recent polls have surveyed the many families who have left the district for private schools, virtual academies, home schooling or open enrollment in other districts.
Public schools are tuition free and close to home, so why have these parents chosen more expensive, less convenient options? The survey results are clear: because Madison schools have disregarded their children's learning needs.Top issues mentioned include a lack of challenging academics and out-of-control behavior problems. Families are leaving because of real experience in the schools, not "bad press" or "street corner stories."
How will the district brand that?
Lorie Raihala Madison
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Holly Otterbein
In this week's A Million Stories, we explored the messy Webcam scandal that's going down at Lower Merion School District. The district insists that it only peered through students' Webcams in order to find lost or stolen laptops, and did so using a security software called LANrev. Insanely enough, Douglas Young, the district's spokesperson, told us that it wasn't the only school district using such software: "The software feature isn't just utilized in this school district," says Young. "It's utilized by other school districts and organizations." (He said he couldn't name any offhand.)
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Inessa Volkonidina had taken precalculus once and dropped it. She needed to take it again, and quickly, to fulfill a graduation requirement at Long Island University. She went online and found a company with an odd name, StraighterLine, that offered the course on even odder terms: $99 a month.She thought it might be a scam. But StraighterLine, based in Alexandria, is a serious education company and a force that could disrupt half a millennium of higher-education tradition. The site offers students as many general-education courses as they care to take for a flat monthly fee, plus $39 per course. As college tuitions go, it is more on the scale of a cable bill.
The courses, standard freshman fare such as algebra, are cash cows for traditional schools, taught to students by the hundreds in vast lecture halls. They generate handsome profits to support more costly operations on campus.
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David Carr writes about media and culture for The New York Times, which is not why I wanted to interview him for this series. Rather, it was what Atlantic Monthly called his "joyous peculiarity" in this article.Carr tells his own story in "The Night of the Gun," a beautifully written, funny yet wrenching memoir that spares nothing about the drug addiction and madness into which he descended, but, from which, almost unbelievably, he escaped.
Before going to The Times, he was a contributing writer for Atlantic and New York Magazine and was the media writer for Inside.com. He also worked at the alternativeCity Paper in Washington D.C., as editor.
A father with three daughters, Carr and his wife now live in Montclair, N.J. Here are excerpts from our conversation about his formal and informal education.
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Mike Ivey, via a kind reader's email:
The doors at the Society of St. Vincent de Paul food pantry on Fish Hatchery Road don't open for another 30 minutes, but a line has already formed.They wait quietly, for the most part, this rainbow coalition of all ages: African-American grandmothers, Latino families, young women with pierced tongues, disabled seniors and working fathers.
What they have in common is poverty. Once a month, with a valid photo ID, clients get enough groceries to last a week.
"As my kids get older, I just keep having to cook more, so every bit helps," says Belinda Washington, 44, who has four children at home ages 4 to 17.
A Chicago native, Washington moved to Madison 17 years ago and lives in the Lake Point neighborhood off West Broadway on the city's south side. Her resume includes food service, catering and factory work but she's been unemployed since her youngest was born. "I keep applying but the jobs are hard to come by," she says.
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ne of the most firmly entrenched academic practices centers upon the use of textbooks as the fundamental drivers of curricula. Ultra-expensive, these items represent one of the largest costs for public school systems as well as those attending college.As the digital age continues to work its way into the stuffy world of academics, there are clear indications that textbooks are gradually being phased out in many areas of the country. The sheer volume of resources available on the net is leading many school districts to create and share their own materials.
Macmillan, considered one of the largest players in that old, conservative world, apparently has now also seen the "handwriting on the wall." The company recently announced it will offer academics an entirely new format: DynamicBooks.
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The Bloomberg administration has made getting rid of inadequate teachers a linchpin of its efforts to improve city schools. But in the two years since the Education Department began an intensive effort to root out such teachers from the more than 55,000 who have tenure, officials have managed to fire only three for incompetence.Ten others whom the department charged with incompetence settled their cases by resigning or retiring, and nine agreed to pay fines of a few thousand dollars or take classes, or both, so they could keep their jobs. One teacher lost his job before his case was decided, after the department called immigration officials and his visa was revoked. The cases of more than 50 others are awaiting arbitration.
Lawyers for the department said an additional 418 teachers had left the system after finding out that they could face charges of incompetence. Because no formal charges were brought in these cases, the number is hard to corroborate; officials from the teachers' union said they doubted it was that high.
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n January 2010, a 9-year old boy named Montana Lance hung himself in a bathroom at the Texas elementary school he attended. Although certainly shocking, such acts are unfortunately becoming less and less unusual. In fact, the suicide of Montana Lance is very reminiscent of what happened in April 2009 when two 11-year-old boys, one in Massachusetts and one in Georgia, likewise committed suicide just days apart. What would cause these children to end their lives? The answer in each case is the same: all three suffered extreme levels of victimization at the hands of school bullies--bullying that others have described as involving "relentless homophobic taunts." And, as we can see from the fate of these three little boys, this form of harassment was obviously very traumatic.In this article, I look at the growing problem of school bullying in America today. Now, almost all children are teased and most will even face at least some form of bullying during their childhood. However, studies reveal that some children will unfortunately become chronic victims of school bullying. Chief among that group are those children whose gender expression is at odds with what society considers "appropriate." As my article explores, the gender stereotypes that exist within our society are frequently to blame for the more extreme levels of bullying currently being carried out in our nation's schools. And the impact this bullying has on its victims is staggering. Earlier I mentioned three children who took their own lives as a result of bullying. These are but three examples of those who have lost their lives to gender-based bullying. However, there are countless other victims who, although not paying with their lives, are nonetheless paying dearly in other ways. Specifically, the psychological literature on the emotional impacts that befall these chronic victims of bullying reveals a whole host of resulting problems--debilitating consequences that can last a lifetime.
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Spring, 2010 PDF, via email:
I would like to discuss a book which helps to inform educators and parents about gifted education in other countries from developmental, family and international perspectives. It is an excellent example of the increasing worldwide interest in studying and educating the most advanced students. By using the case study research method, Hanna David, Ph.D. and Echo Wu, Ph.D. have written fascinating accounts of Israeli and Chinese students who have demonstrated giftedness in public school classrooms and at the university level. David is a professor of education at Ben Gurion University in Eliat, Israel and Echo Wu is now teaching at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. Their book, Understanding Giftedness: A Chinese-Israeli Casebook (Pearson, 2010, ISBN 981-06-8300-6), contains such research topics as a study of five gifted boys in one classroom, parental influences of three Chinese-American families on talent development, case study of a visually disabled young boy (seven years), conversation with a Chinese Nobel Laureate (chemistry), and case study of a gifted family emigrating from Russia to Israel. All of these studies are a clear demonstration of the forcefulness of gifted characteristics and behavior under sometimes severe pressures from cultural influences and learning disabilities. The book also serves as an inspiration to researchers who use the case study method for studying giftedness. In this sense, David and Wu follow the traditions of Piaget and other masters of child development who grounded their work in making systematic observations and carefully recording the individual child's intellectual development. I highly recommend that Understanding Giftedness be used as a model for further studies of the gifted mind.
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Two computer security experts, Aaron Rhodes and a man known by his pseudonym Stryde Hax, put together an eye-opening and well-researched attack on both the Lower Merion High School that's been accused of spying on students and the software that was used to do it. In the process, they reveal some disturbing school policies regarding the use of the laptops, and the unnerving nature of the software itself.More here.The writers scoured forum activity, blog posts, and publicity videos made by one Mike Perbix, the Harriton High School technical security staffer who was in charge of the use of LANRev, the software in question. They also hunted down comments from some of the more tech-savvy members of the student body, who revealed some pretty startling policies regarding the laptops.
The main points: the school-supplied (and monitored) MacBooks were required for certain classes; the included Webcams could not be disabled; the laptops could not be "jailbroken" to circumvent the security measures (and any attempt could result in expulsion); and possession of a personal computer, meaning one other than the school-supplied MacBook, was forbidden and subject to confiscation. One example, from a student:
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When Utah state Sen. Chris Buttars unveiled a cost-cutting measure this month that would have made the high school senior year optional, perhaps no one in the state Capitol Building was more surprised than 18-year-old Jake Trimble, who already opted out of the second half of senior year just weeks earlier.He has spent the past month working at the Capitol as an unpaid intern for the state Democratic Party's communications team, designing posters and writing scripts for legislators' robocalls. Trimble graduated in January, one semester early, from the nearby Academy of Math Engineering and Science (AMES).
"I'm very happy to not be in high school anymore," says Trimble, who proudly reports that he's "not rotting in my parents' basement." Actually, when the legislative session ends next month, he'll move on to another internship (this one paid) as a lab assistant at the University of Utah's Orthopedic Center.
Trimble is part of a small but growing group of students -- most of them academically advanced and, as a result, a tad restless -- who are tinkering with their senior year. A few observers say the quiet experiment has the potential to reinvent high school altogether.
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It was a pleasure to meet and visit with Fitchburg's Eagle School Co-Founder Mary Olsky recently.
We discussed a wide variety of topics, including Eagle's History (founded in 1982), curricular rigor, the importance of good textbooks and critical student thinking. I also found it interesting to hear Mary's perspective on public / private schools and her hope, in 1982, that that the Madison School District would take over (and apply its lessons) Eagle School. Of course, it did not turn out that way.
I've always found it rather amazing that Promega Founder Bill Linton's generous land offer to the Madison School District for the "Madison Middle School 2000" charter school was rejected - and the land ended up under Eagle's new facility.
Listen to the conversation via this 14mb mp3 audio file.
Read the transcript here.
Finally, Mary mentioned the term "high school" a number of times, along with $20,000,000. I suspect we'll see a high school at some point. It will take a significant effort.
Thanks to Laurie Frost for arranging this interview.
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Bruce Vinik via Valerie Strauss:
It's that time of year again. Pitchers and catchers are reporting to spring training and high school students are puzzling over which classes to take next fall. The choices students make do matter. Outside of grades, nothing is more important in college admissions than the classes kids take in high school. "Strength of Program" is a big deal.Let's start with the basics. Colleges expect students to take at least five core academic subjects every year of high school -- English, social studies, science, math and foreign language.
In a perfect world, students would take each core subject every year. But the world isn't perfect and colleges don't expect kids to be. As long as students take each core subject through eleventh grade, they should feel free to pursue their particular academic interests in greater depth during twelfth grade. There's nothing wrong with dropping social studies senior year in order to double up on science.
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A math class for students with intellectual disabilities at Paul VI Catholic High School in Fairfax practiced naming dates on a calendar one recent morning and deciphering what time it is when the big hand is on the 10 and the little hand is on the 11. But first, the teacher led them in a prayer.Father in heaven, we offer you this class and all that we may accomplish today," they said together.
Federal law requires that public schools offer a free, appropriate education for students with disabilities, and federal and state governments subsidize the higher costs of smaller classes and extra resources. Catholic schools have no such legal mandate, and financial constraints have historically made it difficult for them to offer similar specialized services.
That is starting to change.
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There are videos showing off card tricks, horsemanship, jump rope and stencils -- and lots of rap songs, including one by a young woman who performed two weeks after oral surgery, with her mouth still rubber-banded shut.There is also Rhaina Cohen's video, working off the saying "You never truly know someone until you have walked a mile in her shoes," and featuring the blue sandals from her bat mitzvah, the white sneakers she bought cheaply in Britain, and the black heels in which she "stood next to Hillary Clinton."
It is reading season at the Tufts University admissions office, time to plow through thousands of essays and transcripts and recommendations -- and this year, for the first time, short YouTube videos that students could post to supplement their application.
About 1,000 of the 15,000 applicants submitted videos. Some have gotten thousands of hits on YouTube.
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Deborah Kenny talks a lot about passion -- the passion for teaching, for reading and for learning. She has it. She wants all of her teachers to have it. Above all, she wants her students to have it.Ms. Kenny has created three phenomenally successful charter schools in Harlem and is in the process of creating more. She's gotten a great deal of national attention. But for all the talk about improving schools in this country, she thinks we tend to miss the point more often than not.
There is an overemphasis on "the program elements," she said, "things like curriculum and class size and school size and the longer day." She understood in 2001, when she was planning the first of the schools that have come to be known as the Harlem Village Academies, that none of those program elements were nearly as important as the quality of the teaching in the schools.
"If you had an amazing teacher who was talented and passionate and given the freedom and support to teach well," she said, "that was just 100 times more important than anything else."
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It's time for schools to focus on the widening gap in reading and writing skills that leaves so many boys unprepared for success in college or vocational training.As a volunteer in my daughter's kindergarten class, I was asked to help children write a "story" (a few words) to illustrate their pictures. Only one girl needed my writing help; only one boy could write for himself. Nearly all the boys seemed to be a full year behind nearly all the girls in their ability to pay attention, follow directions, control frustrations, sit still, handle a pencil or crayon and do what used to be considered first-grade work.
As reading and writing are pushed down to earlier ages, boys are struggling harder to meet higher expectations, writes Richard Whitmire, a former USA Today reporter, in Why Boys Fail.
"Each year since 1988 the gap between boys' and girls' reading skills has widened a bit more," Whitmire writes. Boys aren't wired for early verbal skills -- and teachers aren't trained in "boy-friendly" techniques to help them catch up.
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33-year-old math and science whiz kid -- working out of his house in California's Silicon Valley -- may be revolutionizing how people all over the world will learn math. He is Salman Khan, and until a few months ago he made his living as a hedge fund analyst. But he's become a kind of an unseen rock star in the online instruction field, posting 1200 lessons in math and science on YouTube, none of them lasting more than about 10 minutes. He quit his job at the hedge fund to devote full time to his Khan Academy teaching efforts, which he does essentially for free.Khan explained how the U.S. unemployment rate is calculated in a NewsHour exclusive video.
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Amazingly enough, tomorrow will mark the one-year anniversary of the start of Rough Type's Realtime Chronicles. Time flies, and realtime flies like a bat out of hell.Since I began writing the series, I have received innumerable emails and texts from panicked parents worried that they may be failing in what has become the central challenge of modern parenting: ensuring that children grow up to be well adapted to the realtime environment. These parents are concerned - and rightly so - that their kids will be at a disadvantage in the realtime milieu in which we all increasingly live, work, love, and compete for the small bits of attention that, in the aggregate, define the success, or failure, of our days. If maladapted to realtime existence, these parents understand, their progeny will end up socially ostracized, with few friends and even fewer followers. "Can we even be said to be alive," one agitated young mother wrote me, "if our status updates go unread?" The answer, of course, is no. In the realtime environment, the absence of interactive stimuli, even for brief periods of "time," may result in a state of reflective passivity indistinguishable from nonexistence. On a more practical level, a lack of realtime skills is sure to constrain a young person's long-term job prospects. At best, he or she will be fated to spend his or her days involved in some form of manual labor, possibly even working out of doors with severely limited access to screens. At worst, he or she will have to find a non-tenure-track position in academia.
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Today's idea: Since written language is merely a technology for storing and transferring information, it's likely to be replaced by a newer technology that performs the same function more effectively, a futurist says.
E Reader on empty bookshelf. This image has been manipulated using Photoshop.The Britannica Blog has a series of posts called Learning and Literacy in the Digital Age, including this one by Patrick Tucker, senior editor of The Futurist. He speculates that text could be rendered obsolete not by the "culture of the image" -- that threat is so last century -- but by the so-called "information age" itself:
... Research into cyber-telepathy has direct ramifications for the written word and its survivability. Electronic circuits mapped out in the same pattern as human neurons could, in decades ahead, reproduce the electrical activity that occurs when our natural transmitters activate. Theoretically, such circuits could allow parts of our brain to communicate with one another at greater levels of efficiency, possibly allowing humans to access data from the Web without looking it up or reading it.
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I attended Harium's Community meeting and the 43rd Dems meeting (partial) yesterday. Here are some updates (add on if you attended either or Michael DeBell's meeting).We covered a fair amount of ground with Harium but a lot on the math ruling/outcomes. Here's what he said:
- the Board will decide what will happen from the math ruling. I asked Harium about who would be doing what because of how the phrasing the district used in their press release - "In addition to any action the School Board may take, the district expects to appeal this decision." It made it sound like the district (1) might do something different from the Board and (2) the district had already decided what they would do. Harium said they misspoke and it was probably the heat of the moment.
- He seems to feel the judge erred. He said they did follow the WAC rules which is what she should have been ruling on but didn't. I probably should go back and look at the complete ruling but it seems like not going by the WAC would open her decision up to be reversed so why would she have done it? He said the issue was that there are statewide consequences to this ruling and that Issaquah and Bellevue (or Lake Washington?) are doing math adoptions and this ruling is troubling. I gently let Harium know that the Board needs to follow the law, needs to be transparent in their decision-making and the district needs to have balanced adoption committees or else this could happen again. No matter how the district or the Board feel, the judge did not throw out the case, did not rule against the plaintiffs but found for them. The ball is in the Board's court and they need to consider this going forward with other decisions.
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L.A. Unified's teachers' union organized protests today and for next week against school district administrators. The union is upset that the superintendent has tentatively allowed outside groups to assume control of new and low-performing campuses.The school district received 85 proposals to run three dozen campuses. Teachers, charter school companies and other nonprofits crafted the plans. The superintendent is recommending teacher and district-written plans for more than half the schools. Outside groups could run another quarter of the schools.
A teacher, parent and student vote earlier this month favored the teacher plans. A nonprofit run by L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa received the recommendation to run Carver Middle School.
Kirsten Ellis, a teacher there, doesn't like the idea. "We demand that the school board and the superintendent adhere to and follow the vote of the people, instead of throwing it out and ignoring it."
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Stephen Kreider, Isaac and Levi Yoder:
Time was running out, so I bought two tickets to Villahermosa, Mexico.Three planes, a bus ride and a hike later, Levi and I are finishing this column among the Mayan pyramids of Palenque. It's about 80 degrees out, and howler monkeys are bellowing from the surrounding jungle.
But this isn't a column about travel. It's about one of the loveliest fringe benefits to having kids: You can use them as an excuse to do stuff you wanted to do yourself but never would have.
Time was running out on a promise I made Levi when he was 7. He has always been keen on history, and he became fascinated with the Mayans.
"Isn't there a pyramid where you can go inside and see the king's grave?" he asked. "Yes, and I've been there!" I said. "How about you and I go there some winter break soon?"
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Most American schoolchildren learn about Islam in a social studies classroom. But at the Friends School in Baltimore, eighth-graders make their own mini-pilgrimage every year, to the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C.As their bus rattles along the highway south to Washington, most of the kids are busy making up songs about each other. But 12-year-old Julia Potter is counting off the Five Pillars of Islam on her fingers: charity, prayer, fasting, profession of faith, and the pilgrimage to Mecca.
These kids are well-versed in the basics of Islam and more: In class, they learn about Judaism, Hinduism and Christianity; about prophets, taboos and holy laws. And every year, eighth-graders visit the Islamic Center -- though every year, according to teacher Deloris Jones, they get there late. "There's absolutely nothing over the years I have been able to do to keep this thing on time," Jones says.
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Which brings us to this next item, one with twist and turns not completely understandable at this point, but certainly not held up by people like myself as a model of how to "get the job properly done" -- to use Herbert's words.None of this is terribly surprising (See the Sunlight Foundation's excellent work on the Obama Administration's insider dealings with PhRMA). Jeff Henriques did a lot of work looking at the Madison School District's foray into Small Learning Communities.Diane Ravitch, an intellectual on education policy, difficult to pigeonhole politically (appointed to public office by both G.H.W. Bush and Clinton), but best described as an independent, co-writes a blog with Deborah Meier that some of our readers may be familiar with called "Bridging Differences." This past week she highlighted a possibly disturbing development in the Race to the Top competition program of the Department of Education, that dangles $4.3 billion to the states with a possible $1.3 billion to follow. Ravitch's critique suggests that this competition is not run by pragmatists, but rather by ideologues who are led by the Bill Gates Foundation.
If this election had been held five years ago, the department would be insisting on small schools, but because Gates has already tried and discarded that approach, the department is promoting the new Gates remedies: charter schools, privatization, and evaluating teachers by student test scores.Two of the top lieutenants of the Gates Foundation were placed in charge of the competition by Secretary Arne Duncan. Both have backgrounds as leaders in organisations dedicated to creating privately managed schools that operate with public money.
Is it possible to change the current K-12 bureacracy from within? Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman spoke about the "adult employment" focus of the K-12 world:
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).I suspect that Duncan and many others are trying to significantly change the adult to student process, rather than simply pumping more money into the current K-12 monopoly structures.
They are to be commended for this.
Will there be waste, fraud and abuse? Certainly. Will there be waste fraud and abuse if the funds are spent on traditional K-12 District organizations? Of course. John Stossel notes that when one puts together the numbers, Washington, DC's schools spend $26,000 per student, while they provide $7,500 to the voucher schools.....
We're better off with diffused governance across the board. Milwaukee despite its many travails, is developing a rich K-12 environment.
The Verona school board narrowly approved a new Mandarin immersion charter school on a 4-3 vote recently These citizen initiatives offer some hope for new opportunities for our children. I hope we see more of this.
Finally, all of this presents an interesting contrast to what appears to be the Madison School District Administration's ongoing "same service" governance approach.
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I have been exchanging emails with Gabe Rose, communications director of something called the Parent Revolution in my home state, California. Rose and his organization are part of a movement that has, to my open-mouthed amazement, persuaded the state government to give parents the power to close or change the leadership of low-performing public schools.It sounds great. It has many parents excited. It could shake up the state educational establishment, including the education department, school boards and teacher unions. They could use some shaking up.
Yet I can't shake my feeling it is a bad idea, a confusing distraction that will bring parents more frustration, not less, and do little to improve their children's educations.
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After years of complaints from parents, the San Francisco Unified School District has just taken a serious step toward revamping its well-meaning but labyrinthine student-assignment system, which decides the educational homes for tens of thousands of children.The current system -- designed to meet the terms of a settlement in a long-fought federal desegregation case -- involves a complicated computer algorithm that creates student "profiles," using various economic and educational factors, with the aim of sending students of different backgrounds to the same schools.
It has resulted instead in more segregation and has aggravated parents to a point where efforts to manipulate the system have become endemic.
This month, the school district rolled out a new plan. It is designed to more closely consider proximity between a student's home and classroom. It is to be applied to every child headed for kindergarten.
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A new report on the rapid proliferation of small schools in New York City finds that while the schools have expanded students' options, most students choose to attend larger schools.Complete report: 3.4MB PDF.Commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the report is one of four that will eventually be released in order to study how the schools have multiplied, who is attending them, who is teaching in them, and whether they're succeeding. The Gates Foundation popularized and funded the small schools movement in New York, fueling the growth of nearly 200 small schools with a $150 million investment.
A New-York based research group, MDRC, conducted the report, which does not look at the schools' academic record -- that analysis will come out in spring -- but focuses on the schools' enrollment and demographics.
One of the report's key findings is that the small schools are seeing modest demand from students.
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The Public Policy Forum, via a kind reader's email:
Between the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, fewer new schools joined the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) than ever before. In addition, 14 MPCP schools closed and another three schools merged--the most year-over- year closures the program has seen (Chart 1).Milwaukee Voucher Schools - 2010.In this 12th edition of the Public Policy Forum's annual census of MPCP schools, we find 112 schools are participating in the choice program, enrolling 21,062 students using taxpayer-funded tuition vouchers. The number of full-time equivalent students using vouchers is greater than in any other year of the program's 19-year history; however, there are fewer schools participating today than earlier this decade (Chart 2, page 2).
The decline in the number of new schools and the increase in the number of closed schools are likely due to new state regulations governing the program. These regulations require schools new to the program to obtain pre-accreditation before opening and require existing schools to become accredited within three years of joining the program.
Throughout this decade, the average number of schools new to the program had been 11 per year. Under the new pre- accreditation requirement, 19 schools applied for pre-accreditation, but just three were approved. Another 38 schools had previously indicated to state regulators an intent to participate in the program in 2009-2010, but did not apply for pre -accreditation. The pre-accreditation process is conducted by the Institute for the Transformation of Learning (ITL) at Marquette University.
Complete report: 184K PDF, press release: 33K PDF
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Susan Troller, via a kind reader's email
Will Morton was a happy, creative and enthusiastic child until he went to kindergarten.Learning Differences Network and Wisconsin State Reading Association.As his classmates sounded out letters, and began reading words and simple sentences, he fell behind. His teacher was perplexed by Will's lack of progress because he was clearly bright and had plenty of exposure to books and language at home. And his parents were worried, because Will's older brother and sister had learned to read easily.
"We knew nothing about reading problems because we hadn't ever had any experience with them, but I remember wondering in kindergarten if he was dyslexic because he seemed to have trouble recognizing letters and associating them with sounds," says Chris Morton, Will's mother. "His teacher told us not to worry, that it was a little developmental delay and we needed to give him time and he'd be fine."
But she was wrong, experts on dyslexia say.Students like Will - who have persistent trouble reading because the neural pathways in their brains do not decode letters and sounds in the ways that make reading and writing natural - need specific help, they say, and the sooner the better. Without that kind of help, they will never catch up, and even if they manage to disguise their different learning style, they are likely to continue to struggle with reading, spelling, language and sometimes with math; in short, they won't ever achieve their full intellectual potential.
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According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins's child was disciplined for "improper behavior in his home" and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.If true, these allegations are about as creepy as they come. I don't know about you, but I often have the laptop in the room while I'm getting dressed, having private discussions with my family, and so on. The idea that a school district would not only spy on its students' clickstreams and emails (bad enough), but also use these machines as AV bugs is purely horrifying.
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Ninety percent of parents believe it is likely that their children will attend college, and most of them believe that any student can get the loans or financial aid required. But a new survey, reported on by my colleague, Tamar Lewin, finds that parents don't have a lot of confidence in the way colleges are managed.Increasingly, parents think colleges are too focused on their own finances, rather than the educational experience of students, the survey found.
"One of the really disturbing things about this, for those of us who work in higher education," said Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, "is the vote of no confidence we're getting from the public. They think college is important, but they're really losing trust in the management and leadership."
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Dozens of public high schools in eight states will introduce a program next year allowing 10th graders who pass a battery of tests to get a diploma two years early and immediately enroll in community college.This makes sense.Students who pass but aspire to attend a selective college may continue with college preparatory courses in their junior and senior years, organizers of the new effort said. Students who fail the 10th grade tests, known as board exams, can try again at the end of their 11th and 12th grades. The tests would cover not only English and math but other subjects like science and history.
The new system of high school coursework with the accompanying board examinations is modeled largely on systems in high-performing nations including Denmark, Finland, England, France and Singapore.
The program is being organized by the National Center on Education and the Economy, and one of its goals is to reduce the numbers of high school graduates who need remedial courses when they enroll in college. More than a million college freshmen across America must take remedial courses each year, and many drop out before getting a degree.
"That's a central problem we're trying to address, the enormous failure rate of these kids when they go to the open admission colleges," said Marc S. Tucker, president of the center, a Washington-based nonprofit. "We've looked at schools all over the world, and if you walk into a high school in the countries that use these board exams, you'll see kids working hard, whether they want to be a carpenter or a brain surgeon."
Related: Janet Mertz's enduring effort: Credit for non-MMSD Courses
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After five years of getting nowhere with Los Angeles Unified officials, fed-up parents in Sunland-Tujunga are using a new state law to force change at a long-troubled middle school.Parents and community members say problems at Mount Gleason Middle School, which has been on a federal list of under-performing campuses for a dozen years, go beyond failing test scores.
"There is an unsafe atmosphere at this school that is spilling over into the community...," said Lydia Grant, a resident and parent of a former Mount Gleason student. "People are tired of it and we want to see change."
Thanks to new legislation, known as the "parent trigger" law, they're able to do something about it.
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Here is an open letter which I sent last night to Edie Harding, Executive Director of the State Board of Education. Under the letter I have paraphrased her reply; below that is my response to her.I am responding to your comment today in the Seattle Times:
' "It's long been established that in our state, the local board is always the prime decision-maker on curriculum." ....the Seattle decision was "a surprise, and if I were the Seattle School Board, I would -- well, I might take issue with the judge," she added.'
Having been one of the plaintiffs in the recent textbook appeal in Seattle, I'm well aware that School Boards make curriculum decisions. However, Ms. Harding, what recourse do you suggest to parents when School Boards abdicate their decision making power - refusing to consider voluminous, compelling, evidence from parents and community members, and instead give school administrators carte blanch to turn math education in directions that are unacceptable to informed parents and community members?
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My colleagues at the Economix blog have put up an interesting post by an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst exploring the increasing competition for students who can help a school's bottom line.The professor, Nancy Folbre, notes that competition works when consumers "can taste before they buy," but that's difficult when making choices about higher education.
She particularly questions the marketing efforts of for-profit colleges.
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The third- and fourth-graders at Sharon Elementary know where the veggies in their soup come from because they've visited the farms. They know the nutritional value of the carrots, onions and cabbage because they've studied them in class, and they know how they're grown because they've nurtured them in raised beds out back.The 105-student school is part of the National Farm to School Network, aimed at getting healthier meals into school cafeterias, teaching kids about agriculture and nutrition and supporting local farmers.
About 40 states have farm-to-school programs, but Vermont is a leader in incorporating all three missions into its programs.
"Vermont has really taken it on in quite the most holistic way and not just in a couple of school districts, but statewide," said Anupama Joshi, director of the Farm to School program, based at the Center for Food and Justice at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
Vermont might be a step ahead of other states because a nonprofit partnership called Vermont FEED already had been working to get local foods into schools.
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As Default Rates on Borrowing for Higher Education Rise, Some Borrowers See No Way Out; 'This Is Just Outrageous Now'When Michelle Bisutti, a 41-year-old family practitioner in Columbus, Ohio, finished medical school in 2003, her student-loan debt amounted to roughly $250,000. Since then, it has ballooned to $555,000.
It is the result of her deferring loan payments while she completed her residency, default charges and relentlessly compounding interest rates. Among the charges: a single $53,870 fee for when her loan was turned over to a collection agency.
"Maybe half of it was my fault because I didn't look at the fine print," Dr. Bisutti says. "But this is just outrageous now."
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First lady Michelle Obama's new campaign against childhood obesity, dubbed "Let's Move," puts improvements to school food at the top of the agenda. Some 31 million children participate in federal school meal programs, Obama noted in announcing her initiative last week, "and what we don't want is a situation where parents are taking all the right steps at home -- and then their kids undo all that work with salty, fatty food in the school cafeteria," she explained. "So let's move to get healthier food into our nation's schools."Last month I had a chance to see up close what all the school food fuss was about when I spent a week in the kitchen of my 10-year-old daughter's public school, H.D. Cooke Elementary, in Northwest D.C. Chartwells, the company contracted by the city to provide meals to the District's schools, had switched in the fall from serving warm-up meals prepackaged in a factory to food it called "fresh cooked," and I couldn't wait to chronicle in my food blog how my daughter's school meals were being prepared from scratch.
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The proposal by state Sen. Chris Buttars would chip away at Utah's $700-million shortfall. He's since offered a toned-down version: Just make senior year optional.A good idea.Reporting from Denver - At Utah's West Jordan High School, the halls have swirled lately with debate over the merits of 12th grade:
Is it a waste of time? Are students ready for the real world at 17?
For student body president J.D. Williams, 18, the answer to both questions is a resounding no. "I need this year," he said, adding that most of his classmates feel the same way.
The sudden buzz over the relative value of senior year stems from a recent proposal by state Sen. Chris Buttars that Utah make a dent in its budget gap by eliminating the 12th grade.
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Jamie Oliver:
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The evolution of charter schools and education in Detroit is no more sharply illustrated than by these facts: It was Gov. Jennifer Granholm who went to Houston to convince the phenomenally successful YES academies to open a school in Detroit, and it was the Detroit Public Schools that sold YES the school building where it will begin holding classes this fall.Six years ago, Granholm stood in the schoolhouse door with the Detroit Federation of Teachers and said no to an expansion of charters in the city. Since then, the high performance of the city's best charter schools, the continued deterioration of the Detroit Public Schools and the demand from parents for alternative education choices has changed attitudes about charters. DPS, under the leadership of Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb, now welcomes the competition from charters as an impetus to improve its schools.
In fact, Bobb sold YES the old Winship Elementary School on the city's northwest side to use as a home for the new academy, serving grades 6-12.
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The College Board [1MB PDF file]:
Educators across the United States continue to enable a wider and more ethnically diverse proportion of students to achieve success in AP®. Significant inequities remain, however, which can result in traditionally underserved students not receiving the type of AP opportunities that can best prepare them for college success. The 6th Annual AP Report to the Nation uses a combination of state, national and AP Program data to provide each U.S. state with the context it can use to celebrate its successes, understand its unique challenges, and set meaningful and data-driven goals to prepare more students for success in college.
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MassINC, C. Anthony Broh & Dana Ansel:
Rising college costs have Americans making greater sacrifices to get their degrees. In 2008, families took on more than $86 billion in college loans and the average undergraduate finished school with more than $23,000 in debt. Higher education is now one of the most important investment decisions middle class Americans make. But far too often they're lured to colleges with the most energetic tour guide, the biggest reputation for partying, or the highest ranking in the popular press.Read the complete report here. CTRL - click to download the 2.0MB PDF file.These temptations win out because the choices are complicated and families aren't getting the information they needed to make truly informed decisions. Beyond choosing a school, families trying to find the best savings plan or the least expensive loan also face complicated choices with insufficient information.
According to the new MassINC report, "When you look at the tuition prices that middle class families are facing, together with the debt burdens graduates are taking on, it is astounding that there is such little transparency in the higher education marketplace," said Greg Torres, President of MassINC and Publisher of CommonWealth magazine. "By laying out a framework for how parents and students navigate this system, we hope to shed some light on what we can do to give more support to families making one of the biggest investments of their lives."
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The seminal coming-of-age novel, The Catcher in the Rye, came out in 1951 during a time of anxious, Cold War conformity. The book by J D Salinger, the reclusive American author who died last week at the age of 91, featured its immortal teenage protagonist - the anguished, rebellious Holden Caulfield.The book struck a chord with American teenagers who identified with the novel's themes of alienation, innocence and rebellion.
But when the novel was translated into Russian during the "Khrushchev thaw", its anti-hero's tormented soul-searching also reverberated among admirers throughout the Soviet bloc.
Nad propastyu vo rzhi was first published in the Soviet Union in the November 1960 issue of the popular literary magazine Inostrannaya Literatura (Overseas Literature). The translation became an instant sensation, and dog-eared copies of the magazine were passed from reader to reader.
Boris Paramonov, a Russian philosopher and contributor to RFE/RL's Russian Service, says he and his Russian friends and colleagues instantly recognized that it was a book that would endure.
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The mother who threw her four-year-old daughter from a shopping mall balcony before leaping to her death had recently learned that her child had failed to get a primary place at an ESF school, despite attending an ESF kindergarten. Police are still investigating the cause of the tragedy....
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It's easy to miss the school tucked into the corner of a strip mall at N. 25th St. and W. North Ave. and its sister building a few miles away, an airy gray metal and brick structure that doesn't have a sign yet.The most noticeable school of the three may be at the south end of a nonprofit building on N. King Drive, and that's because a large banner outside proclaims the high school's name.
But within these unassuming spaces, HOPE Christian Schools are quietly expanding and changing, figuring out the best way to make sure every child - from kindergarten through 12th grade - is on the path to college.
The schools are without frills because energy and resources at this point are better spent on the elements more closely tied to student success: strong teachers who want to stay year to year, innovative and empowered administrators, testing tools that provide day-to-day and week-to-week feedback about how fast kids are progressing and which ones need more attention.
"We're still focusing on what our model looks like," said Andrew Neumann, president of HOPE Christian Schools.
Neumann also is president of the umbrella nonprofit Educational Enterprises, which plans to establish schools nationwide that help populations of disadvantaged, minority children get to college. The schools in Milwaukee are a testing ground; this year, Educational Enterprises opened a HOPE-inspired college prep charter elementary school in Phoenix.
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Erica Frankenberg, Genevieve Siegel‐Hawley, and Jia Wang [1.4MB PDF] :
Seven years after the Civil Rights Project first documented extensive patterns of charter school segregation, the charter sector continues to stratify students by race, class and possibly language. This study is released at a time of mounting federal pressure to expand charter schools, despite on-going and accumulating evidence of charter school segregation.More here and here.Our analysis of the 40 states, the District of Columbia, and several dozen metropolitan areas with large enrollments of charter school students reveals that charter schools are more racially isolated than traditional public schools in virtually every state and large metropolitan area in the nation. While examples of truly diverse charter schools exist, our data show that these schools are not reflective of broader charter trends.
Four major themes emerge from this analysis of federal data. First, while charter schools are increasing in number and size, charter school enrollment presently accounts for only 2.5% of all public school students. Despite federal pressure to increase charter schools--based on the notion that charter schools are superior to traditional public schools, in spite of no conclusive evidence in support of that claim--charter school enrollment remains concentrated in just five states.
Second, we show that charter schools, in many ways, have more extensive segregation than other public schools. Charter schools attract a higher percentage of black students than traditional public schools, in part because they tend to be located in urban areas. As a result, charter school enrollment patterns display high levels of minority segregation, trends that are particularly severe for black students.
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A woman's chance of having a child with autism increase substantially as she ages, but the risk may be less for older dads than previously suggested, a new study analyzing more than 5 million births found."Although fathers' age can contribute risk, the risk is overwhelmed by maternal age," said University of California at Davis researcher Janie Shelton, the study's lead author.
Mothers older than 40 were about 50 percent more likely to have a child with autism than those in their 20s; the risk for fathers older than 40 was 36 percent higher than for men in their 20s.
Even at that, the study suggests the risk of a woman over 40 having an autistic child was still less than 4 in 1,000, one expert noted.
The new research suggests the father's age appears to make the most difference with young mothers. Among children whose mothers were younger than 25, autism was twice as common when fathers were older than 40 than when dads were in their 20s.
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Precious Holt, a 12th grader with dangly earrings and a SpongeBob pillow, climbs on the yellow school bus and promptly falls asleep for the hour-plus ride to Sandhills Community College.Once again, the MMSD and State of WI are going in the wrong direction regarding education. Much more on "Credit for non-MMSD courses.When the bus arrives, she checks in with a guidance counselor and heads off to a day of college classes, blending with older classmates until 4 p.m., when she and the other seniors from SandHoke Early College High School gather for the ride home.
There is a payoff for the long bus rides: The 48 SandHoke seniors are in a fast-track program that allows them to earn their high-school diploma and up to two years of college credit in five years -- completely free.
Until recently, most programs like this were aimed at affluent, overachieving students -- a way to keep them challenged and give them a head start on college work. But the goal is quite different at SandHoke, which enrolls only students whose parents do not have college degrees.
Here, and at North Carolina's other 70 early-college schools, the goal is to keep at-risk students in school by eliminating the divide between high school and college.
"We don't want the kids who will do well if you drop them in Timbuktu," said Lakisha Rice, the principal. "We want the ones who need our kind of small setting."
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Imagine that your stockbroker - or the friend who's always giving you stock tips - called and told you he had come up with a new investment strategy. Price-to-earnings ratios, debt levels, management, competition, what the company makes, and how well it makes it, all those considerations go out the window. The new strategy is this: Invest in companies with names that are very easy to pronounce.This would probably not strike you as a great idea. But, if recent research is to be believed, it might just be brilliant.
One of the hottest topics in psychology today is something called "cognitive fluency." Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. On the face of it, it's a rather intuitive idea. But psychologists are only beginning to uncover the surprising extent to which fluency guides our thinking, and in situations where we have no idea it is at work.
Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process - even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it - can alter people's judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement's author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities. Similar manipulations can get subjects to be more forgiving, more adventurous, and more open about their personal shortcomings.
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Imagine that driving across town, you've fallen into a reverie, meditating on lost loves or calculating your next tax payments. You're so distracted that you rear-end the car in front of you at 10 miles an hour. You probably think: Damn. My fault. My mind just wasn't there.By contrast, imagine that you drive across town in a state of mild exhilaration, multitasking on your way to a sales meeting. You're drinking coffee and talking to your boss on a cellphone, practicing your pitch. You cause an identical accident. You've heard all the warnings about cellphones and driving--but on a gut level, this wreck might bewilder you in a way that the first scenario didn't. Wasn't I operating at peak alertness just then? Your brain had been aroused to perform several tasks, and you had an illusory sense that you must be performing them well.
That illusion of competence is one of the things that worry scholars who study attention, cognition, and the classroom. Students' minds have been wandering since the dawn of education. But until recently--so the worry goes--students at least knew when they had checked out. A student today who moves his attention rapid-fire from text-messaging to the lecture to Facebook to note-taking and back again may walk away from the class feeling buzzed and alert, with a sense that he has absorbed much more of the lesson than he actually has.
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OF all the supplies at Haven Academy, a charter school in the South Bronx, none matter as much as the squishy. Like any elementary school, Haven has pencils, books and desks. But it is the squishy -- a colorful rubber ball with dozens of tentacles that can withstand the strength of any young student -- that daily absorbs a fit of anger or a mess of tears.In the office of Jessica Nauiokas, the principal, a forlorn little boy yanks at a squishy and an angry little girl tosses one like a yo-yo. When Marquis, 6, was kicking and screaming one recent morning, a purple squishy was the only thing that could calm him.
Marquis, a kindergartner, had grown so frustrated with reading that he crawled under a table while other students wrote their alphabet letters; then he threw a chair across the room. Gabriella Cassandra, the school's social worker, literally carried him to the principal's office, where he again crawled under a chair.
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Decision favors plaintiffs in court challenge of Seattle math text adoptionStatement from Laurie Rogers:
Last year, Seattle Public Schools adopted the Discovering math series despite valiant opposition from parents and math professionals, despite poor assessments of the Discovering series' rigor and adherence to the new state math standards, and despite the fact that OSPI did NOT ultimately recommend the Discovering math series.
In response, three people filed a lawsuit, saying that Seattle didn't have sufficient supporting evidence for its adoption, and also that the Discovering series was associated with an INCREASE in achievement gaps.Recently, a judge agreed with the plaintiffs and - while stopping short of telling Seattle to cease and desist in their adoption - told Seattle to revisit its adoption. The district can continue to use the Discovering series, and Seattle administrators have stated their clear intention to do so.
Nevertheless, the court decision is momentous. It sets a precedent for districts across the country. When board members can't justify their adoption decisions, the people now have legal recourse.
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Our last article summarized the current state of research on teens and risk. That research demonstrates that teenagers do not suffer from some special inability to reason. Larry Steinberg and other researchers explain the steep rise in risk-taking behavior that comes with puberty by elaborating the interplay between two brain systems. The social-emotional system, which develops robustly in early adolescence, seeks out rewarding experiences, especially the sensation afforded by novel and risky behavior, and is also activated by the presence of peers. The cognitive-control system, which undergoes its great burst of development in later adolescence, evaluates and governs the impulses of the social-emotional system.During the years of greatest risk-taking, which peak somewhere around the age of 16 and during which the presence of peers greatly increases risk-taking, the adolescent brain is like a car with a powerful accelerator (the sensation- and peer-seeking social-emotional system) and weak brakes (the risk-containing cognitive-control system). That being the case, it's clear why some common approaches to reducing risk-taking by teenagers--explaining why drunk driving is dangerous, asking them to pledge to abstain from premarital sex--don't work very well.
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Admissions officers more than a year ago started noticing something odd about the Facebook groups built around their incoming classes: The creators weren't newly admitted students. Or current students. Or alums. Or anyone with any tie to the universities.Brad J. Ward, who then worked in the Butler University admissions office, began to compare the groups from colleges across the country -- including Georgetown, Virginia Tech and George Washington University -- and realized they were all created by the same handful of people. "There's something going down on Facebook. Pay attention," he wrote on his blog, Squared Peg, in December 2008
With help from admissions workers across the country, Ward traced these individuals to College Prowler, a Pittsburgh-based company that publishes campus guidebooks, and a not-yet-launched roommate-matching Web site called MatchU, started by a recent college graduate named Justin Gaither.
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This is going to be awkward, but someone has to tell you, so it may as well be me: you're kind of a loser. You know that feeling you sometimes have that your friends have more friends than you? You're right. They do. And you know how almost everyone at the gym seems in better shape than you, and how everyone at your book club seems better read? Well, they are. If you're single, it's probably a while since you dated - what with you being such a loser - but when you did, do you recall thinking the other person was more romantically experienced than you? I'm afraid it was probably true.The only consolation in all this is that it's nothing personal: it's a bizarre statistical fact that almost all of us have fewer friends than our friends, more flab than our fellow gym-goers, and so on. In other words, you're a loser, but it's not your fault: it's just maths. (I mean, it's probably just maths. You might be a catastrophic failure as a human being, for all I know. But let's focus on the maths.)
To anyone not steeped in statistics, this seems crazy. Friendship is a two-way street, so you'd assume things would average out: any given person would be as likely to be more popular than their friends as less. But as the sociologist Scott Feld showed, in a 1991 paper bluntly entitled Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do, this isn't true. If you list all your friends, and then ask them all how many friends they have, their average is very likely to be higher than your friend count.
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Judge Julie Spector's decision [69K PDF], via Martha McLaren:
THIS MATTER having come on for hearing, and the Court having considered the pleadings, administrative record, and argument in this matter, the Court hereby enters the following Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law, and Order:Melissa Westbrook has more.FINDINGS OF FACT
1. On May 6, 2009, in a 4-3 vote, the Seattle School District Board of Directors chose the Discovering Series as the District's high school basic math materials.a. A recommendation from the District's Selection Committee;
b. A January, 2009 report from the Washington State Office of Public Instruction ranking High School math textbooks, listing a series by the Holt Company as number one, and the Discovering Series as number two;
c. A March 11, 2009, report from the Washington State Board of Education finding that the Discovering Series was "mathematically unsound";
d. An April 8, 2009 School Board Action Report authored by the Superintendent;
e. The May 6, 2009 recommendation of the OSPI recommending only the Holt Series, and not recommending the Discovering Series;
f. WASL scores showing an achievement gap between racial groups;
g. WASL scores from an experiment with a different inquiry-based math text at Cleveland and Garfield High Schools, showing that W ASL scores overall declined using the inquiry-based math texts, and dropped significantly for English Language Learners, including a 0% pass rate at one high school;
h. The National Math Achievement Panel (NMAP) Report;
1. Citizen comments and expert reports criticizing the effectiveness of inquiry-based math and the Discovering Series;
J. Parent reports of difficulty teaching their children using the Discovering Series and inquiry-based math;
k. Other evidence in the Administrative Record;
I. One Board member also considered the ability of her own child to learn math using the Discovering Series.
3. The court finds that the Discovering Series IS an inquiry-based math program.
4. The court finds, based upon a review of the entire administrative record, that there IS insufficient evidence for any reasonable Board member to approve the selection of the Discovering Series.CONCLUSIONS OF LAW
I. The court has jurisdiction under RCW 28A.645.010 to evaluate the Board's decision for whether it is arbitrary, capricious, or contrary to law;2. The Board's selection of the Discovering Series was arbitrary;
3. The Board's selection of the Discovering Series was capricious;
4. This court has the authority to remand the Board's decision for further review;
5. Any Conclusion of Law which is more appropriately characterized as a
Finding of Fact is adopted as such, and any Finding of Fact more appropriately
characterized as a Conclusion of Law is adopted as such.ORDER
IT IS HEREBY ORDERED:
The decision of the Board to adopt the Discovering Series is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.Dated this 4th day of February, 2010.
Seattle Math Group Press Release:
Judge Julie Spector today announced her finding of "arbitrary and capricious" in the Seattle School Board's May 6 vote to adopt the Discovering Math series of high school texts despite insufficient evidence of the series' effectiveness.Judge Spector's decision states, "The court finds, based upon a review of the entire administrative record, that there is insufficient evidence for any reasonable Board member to approve the selection of the Discovering series."
Plaintiffs DaZanne Porter, an African American and mother of a 9th-grade student in Seattle Public Schools, Martha McLaren, retired Seattle math teacher and grandparent of a Seattle Public Schools fifth grader, and Cliff Mass, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington, had filed their appeal of the Board's controversial decision on June 5th, 2009. The hearing was held on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
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The number of students taking Advanced Placement tests hit a record high last year, but the portion who fail the exams -- particularly in the South -- is rising as well, a USA TODAY analysis finds.Jay Matthews has more.
Students last year took a record 2.9 million exams through the AP program, which challenges high school students with college-level courses. Passing the exams (a score of 3 or higher on the point scale of 1 to 5) may earn students early college credits, depending on a college's criteria.MARYLAND: A model in AP access, achievement.
The findings about the failure rates raise questions about whether schools are pushing millions of students into AP courses without adequate preparation -- and whether a race for higher standards means schools are not training enough teachers to deliver the high-level material.
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Skylar Shafran, a turquoise headband on her brunette head and a pink princess shirt on her string-bean frame, is standing on a chair in her living room, shifting from left foot to right. She has already gulped down a glass of orange juice and nibbled on some crackers; she has also demonstrated, with extemporaneous grace, the ability to pick up Hello Kitty markers with her toes. For more than an hour, she has been answering questions to a mock version of an intelligence test commonly known to New York parents as the ERB. Almost every prestigious private elementary school in the city requires that prospective kindergartners take it. Skylar's parents, Liz and Jay, are pretty sure they know where they're sending their daughter to school next year, but they figure it can't hurt to get a sense of where she sits in the long spectrum of precocious New York children. And so, although it wasn't cheap--$350--they've hired someone to find out. Skylar has thus far borne this process with cheerful patience and determination. But every 4-year-old has her limits.David Shenk has more."What is an umbrella?" asks the evaluator, a psychology graduate student in her mid-twenties.
"To keep me dry."
"And what is a book?"
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Twelve central Ohio schools are among the worst 5 percent statewide.Their academic struggles mean they are eligible to receive federal money to help them transform or start over. A list of these schools was released yesterday by the Ohio Department of Education.
Six Columbus City Schools buildings are on the list of the worst-off, as are four in Cleveland and 16 in Cincinnati. Several charter schools -- six of them in central Ohio -- also made the "top" rung on the list.
"No one is going to like the fact that they're on this list," said Mark Real, who heads the Columbus-based nonprofit KidsOhio, which studies education issues. He's been monitoring stimulus-related spending and improvement programs. "But this is not just a 'label and leave it' approach. These schools are in for some pretty intensive care."
These schools all have a large number of poor students and have been mired in academic difficulties for several years.
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Stanford's successful effort to exempt itself from Santa Clara County's new rules on underage drinking has put a focus on the university's growing effort to curb alcohol abuse on campus.The county's new ordinance, which took effect last year, makes it easier for police to cite anyone hosting a party where underage drinking occurs. It can mean a fine of up to $1,000 plus costs anytime the police are called in.
About 95 percent of Stanford's 6,600 undergraduates, many of them younger than 21, live on campus in university-owned housing. As the landlord, the school could have found itself facing plenty of potential liability under the new county rules.
But the financial question didn't play a role in the university's attempt to persuade county officials to free Stanford from the regulations, said Jean McCown, the school's director of community relations.
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So what should children be able to do by age 12, or the time they leave elementary school? They should be able to read a chapter book, write a story and a compelling essay; know how to add, subtract, divide and multiply numbers; detect patterns in complex phenomena; use evidence to support an opinion; be part of a group of people who are not their family; and engage in an exchange of ideas in conversation. If all elementary school students mastered these abilities, they would be prepared to learn almost anything in high school and college.Imagine, for instance, a third-grade classroom that was free of the laundry list of goals currently harnessing our teachers and students, and that was devoted instead to just a few narrowly defined and deeply focused goals.
In this classroom, children would spend two hours each day hearing stories read aloud, reading aloud themselves, telling stories to one another and reading on their own. After all, the first step to literacy is simply being immersed, through conversation and storytelling, in a reading environment; the second is to read a lot and often. A school day where every child is given ample opportunities to read and discuss books would give teachers more time to help those students who need more instruction in order to become good readers.
Children would also spend an hour a day writing things that have actual meaning to them -- stories, newspaper articles, captions for cartoons, letters to one another. People write best when they use writing to think and to communicate, rather than to get a good grade.
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I enjoyed meeting and talking with Ellie Schatz recently. Listen to the conversation via this 17MB mp3 audio file CTRL-Click to download or read the transcript. Parent and activist Schatz founded WCATY and is, most recently author of "Grandma Says it's Good to Be Smart".
I enjoyed visiting with Ellie and found the conversation quite illuminating. Here's a useful segment from the 37 minute interview:
Jim: What's the best, most effective education model these days? Obviously, there are traditional schools. There are virtual schools. There are chartered schools. There are magnets. And then there's the complete open-enrollment thing. Milwaukee has it, where the kids can go wherever they want, public or private, and the taxes follow.Thanks to Rick Kiley for arranging this conversation.Ellie: [32:52] I think there's no one best model from the standpoint of those models that you just named. [32:59] What is important within any one of those models is that a key player in making that education available to your child believes that no matter how good the curriculum, no matter how good the model, the children they are about to serve are different, that children are not alike.
[33:30] And that they will have to make differences in the curriculum and in the way the learning takes place for different children.
[33:45] And I have experienced that myself. I've served on the boards of several private schools here in the city, and I have given that message: "This may be an excellent curriculum, and I believe it's an excellent curriculum. But that's not enough."
[34:05] You cannot just sit this curriculum down in front of every child in the classroom and say, "We're going to turn the pages at the same time, and we're going to write the answers in the same way." It does not work that way. You must believe in individually paced education.
[34:24] And that's why I say the WCATY model cannot change. If it's going to accomplish what I set out for WCATY to do, it must be accelerated from the nature of most of the curriculum that exists out there for kids today.
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Jacques Steinberg, via a kind reader's email:
p>Lisa Foderaro writes in The Times’s Metropolitan section that efforts by Princeton University to curb grade inflation are “now running into fierce resistance from the school's Type-A-plus student body.”The university had hoped that other institutions would follow its lead in making it harder for students to earn an A. “But the idea never took hold beyond Princeton's walls,” Ms. Foderaro writes, adding: “with the job market not what it once was, even for Ivy Leaguers, Princetonians are complaining that the campaign against bulked-up G.P.A.'s may be coming at their expense.”
How much tougher is it to earn an A at Princeton? The percentage of grades in the A range fell below40 percent last year, compared to nearly 50 percent in 2004, when the policy was adopted.
In nearly 100 comments and counting, reader response on the issue of grade inflation has been fierce. For a sense of how one important arbiter -- Yale Law School -- interprets undergraduate grades, I draw your attention to this comment, from Asha Rangappa, the dean of Yale Law (and a Princeton graduate.) -- Jacques
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A number of years ago, curious about the ownership of student work produced in a class, I asked a lawyer friend who specializes in art and design copyright law if schools had the right to reproduce student work in their recruitment publicity without the students' permission. He informed me that the student, despite advice from faculty who may have shaped the work, owns the work and that written permission must be secured before it could be reproduced. He also said such works could be considered student records and recruitment results in some benefit to the institution that exceeds any reading of the "fair use" practices of educational institutions (i.e. those that might be applied to the use of lecture slides for a class).This reading of the law is at odds with the prevailing opinion of many schools that the student would not have produced work of a particular quality under his or her own resources, and therefore, that faculty have some "ownership rights" in the output of any class. Since that time I have been very careful to ask students first about any public use of their work, even in lectures I give at other schools, and I always credit the work with their names and give students the details on the presentation venues for their resumes. My lawyer friend told me that statements in college catalogs claiming that the institution retains ownership of work produced in a class wouldn't hold up in court; unless the maker is an employee of the institution/company or has signed away rights through some explicit agreement, ownership is retained by the maker. Other attorneys may have different interpretations, and I don't profess to be a legal expert, but the ownership of work produced by students is certainly something to think about.
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Abstinence-only education has been a frequent point of contention between conservatives and liberals.Conservatives, particularly religious ones, have argued that young people need to be taught the moral dimension of sexual activity as part of abstinence education and urged to avoid sex until marriage.
For those reasons, liberals and many health and education professionals have argued against abstinence-only education. Many of them have preferred comprehensive sex education.
Now a new study indicates that abstinence-only education works even when it doesn't have a moral component.
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Why is a child born in northwest Los Angeles four times as likely to be diagnosed with autism as a child born elsewhere in California?Medical experts have pondered for years why autism rates have soared nationwide, and why the disorder appears to be much more prevalent in certain communities than in others. Now, some recent studies that zero in on California may shed some light on these baffling questions.
A new autism study shows clusters of high autism rates in parts of California. WSJ's health columnist Melinda Beck joins Simon Constable on the News Hub with more.
Researchers from Columbia University, in a study published in the current Journal of Health & Place, identified an area including West Hollywood, Beverly Hills and some less posh neighborhoods that accounted for 3% of the state's new cases of autism every year from 1993 to 2001, even though it had only 1% of the population.
Another recent study, from the University of California, Davis, published in Autism Research, also found high rates of autism in children born around Los Angeles, as well as nine other California locations. Autism, usually diagnosed before a child is 3 years old, is a developmental disorder characterized by impaired social interaction and communication and repetitive behavior.
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via a kind reader. Math 627K PDF:
This document provides grade level standards for mathematics in grades K-8, and high school standards organized under the headings of the College and Career Readiness Standards in Mathematics. Students reaching the readiness level described in that document (adjusted in response to feedback) will be prepared for non-remedial college mathematics courses and for training programs for career-level jobs. Recognizing that most students and parents have higher aspirations, and that ready for college is not the same as ready for mathematics-intensive majors and careers, we have included in this document standards going beyond the readiness level. Most students will cover these additional standards. Students who want the option of entering STEM fields will reach the readiness level by grade 10 or 11 and take precalculus or calculus before graduating from high school. Other students will go beyond readiness through statistics to college. Other pathways can be designed and available as long as they include the readiness level. The final draft of the K-12 standards will indicate which concepts and skills are needed to reach the readiness level and which go beyond. We welcome feedback from states on where that line should be drawn.English Language Arts 3.6MB PDFEnglish Language Learners in Mathematics Classrooms
English language learners (ELLs) must be held to the same high standards expected of students who are already proficient in English. However, because these students are acquiring English language proficiency and content area knowledge concurrently, some students will require additional time and all will require appropriate instructional support and aligned assessments.ELLs are a heterogeneous group with differences in ethnic background, first language, socio-economic status, quality of prior schooling, and levels of English language proficiency. Effectively educating these students requires adjusting instruction and assessment in ways that consider these factors. For example ELLs who are literate in a first language that shares cognates with English can apply first-language vocabulary knowledge when reading in English; likewise ELLs with high levels of schooling can bring to bear conceptual knowledge developed in their first language when reading in a second language. On the other hand, ELLs with limited or interrupted schooling will need to acquire background knowledge prerequisite to educational tasks at hand. As they become acculturated to US schools, ELLs who are newcomers will need sufficiently scaffolded instruction and assessments to make sense of content delivered in a second language and display this content knowledge.
A draft of grade-by-grade common standards is undergoing significant revisions in response to feedback that the outline of what students should master is confusing and insufficiently user-friendly.Writing groups convened by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association are at work on what they say will be a leaner, better-organized, and easier-to-understand version than the 200-plus-page set that has been circulating among governors, scholars, education groups, teams of state education officials, and others for review in recent weeks. The first public draft of the standards, which was originally intended for a December release but was postponed until January, is now expected by mid-February.
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After a day of knocking on doors chasing fleeting leads, Carlos Lopez and his partner finally heard welcome words: Yes, a resident confirmed, the man they were seeking lived in this house and would be home that evening.Mr. Lopez, a former police detective, now does gumshoe work for what he calls a more fulfilling cause: tracking down long-lost relatives of teenagers languishing in foster care, in desperate need of family ties and in danger of becoming rootless adults. That recent day, he was hoping to find the father of a boy who had lived in 16 different foster homes since 1995. The boy did not remember his mother, who had long since disappeared.
Finding an adoptive parent for older children with years in foster care is known in child welfare circles as the toughest challenge. Typically, their biological parents abused or neglected them and had parental rights terminated. Relatives may not know where the children are, or even that they exist. And the supply of saints in the general public, willing to adopt teenagers shaken by years of trauma and loss, is limited.
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Alliance for Excellent Education:
Few people realize the impact that high school dropouts have on a community's economic, social, and civic health.Business owners and residents--in particular, those without school-aged children--may not be aware that they have much at stake in the success of their local high schools.
Indeed, everyone--from car dealers and realtors to bank managers and local business owners--benefits when more students graduate from high school.
Nationally, more than seven thousand students become dropouts every school day. That adds up to almost 1.3 million students annually who will not graduate from high school with their peers as scheduled. In addition to the moral imperative to provide every student with an equal opportunity to pursue the American dream, there is also an economic argument for helping more students graduate from high school.
To better understand the various economic benefits that a particular community could expect if it were to reduce its number of high school dropouts, the Alliance for Excellent Education (the Alliance), with the generous support of State Farm®, analyzed the local economies of the nation's fifty largest cities and their surrounding areas. Using a
sophisticated economic model developed by Economic Modeling Specialists Inc., an Idaho-based economics firm specializing in socioeconomic impact tools, the Alliance calculated economic projections tailored to each of these metro regions.
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More than a third of sex crimes against juveniles are committed by juveniles, according to new research commissioned by the Justice Department.Juveniles are 36% of all sex offenders who victimize children. Seven out of eight are at least 12 years old, and 93% are boys, says the study by the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.
The report comes as states toughen penalties for adult sex offenders and wrestle with how to handle juveniles.
"They are different from adult sex offenders," says study co-author David Finkelhor. They are more likely than adults to commit sex offenses in groups, and their victims are younger and more likely to be male.
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I was reading the comments in an earlier post about the new assignment plan and there were many comments about the rigor or lack there of at Rainier Beach High School. I would like to dispel the myth that Rainier Beach does not offer rigor to the high achieving student. If you have a high achieving 8th grader and are in the RBHS attendance area, here is just a sample of what you can expect:In math as a Freshman, you will start in at least Honors Geometry with Ms. Lessig who is our best math teacher. Once you get through that, you will take Honors Advanced Algebra with me, then Pre Calculus with Mr. Bird (a math major in college) and then as a Senior, you take AP Calculus with Ms. Day, a highly experienced and skilled teacher. As a bonus, in either your Junior or Senior year, you get to take AP Statistics with me. All of these classes are demanding and well taught by teachers who know what they are doing and are passionate about teaching math.
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This Dallas suburb, a wealthy enclave known for its top-notch schools, is struggling to integrate a flood of poor, minority students.In a battle mirrored in other districts across the U.S., parents here have been fighting for months over which public high school their kids will attend: one under construction in an affluent corner of the Plano Independent School District, or an older school several miles away in the city's more diverse downtown.
Last month, the district's school board angered many parents when it created a Pac-Man-shaped zone that placed their children in the downtown school for grades nine and 10 instead of in the newer, closer campus.
The downtown school has the highest proportion of poor students of all high schools in the district; many are Hispanic and African-American.
"We want to go to our neighborhood school," said Kelly McBrayer, a white, 48-year-old stay-at-home mother of three who lives near the site of the new high school.
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WHEN the Federal Government's My School website goes live this morning, I will give a little internal cheer.It will be a little victory for transparency, a little win for democracy and a little tick in the box that shows the Federal Government is deadly serious about improving education standards.
It will also be a little kick in the shins for those who would rather the mountain of compiled information the Government already has - and has had for some years - remains buried under layers of bureaucracy far from public view.
I will be happy because I want to know about the statistics around the performance of the schools in my area. I want to see the spots that need addressing and the areas where they are leading the way. Like most thinking parents out there, the information made available this morning will not be the sole premise on which I will judge those schools, those teachers or those students. Those who have been bleating about the way in which the students, teachers and schools will be judged must view parents as shallow and mushroom-like.
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Online college education is expanding--rapidly. More than 4.6 million college students were taking at least one online course at the start of the 2008-2009 school year. That's more than 1 in 4 college students, and it's a 17 percent increase from 2007.Turns out it's the economy, stupid.
Two major factors for the soaring numbers in the 2008-2009 school year are the sour economy and the possibility of an H1N1 flu virus outbreak, according to the seventh annual Sloan Survey of Online Learning report, titled "Learning on Demand: Online Education in the United States in 2009." But, the survey's authors say, there is a lot more work to be done, and there's huge potential for online education to expand, especially at larger schools.
"For the past several years, all of the growth--90-plus percent--is coming from existing traditional schools that are growing their current offerings," says Jeff Seaman, one of the study's authors and codirector of the Babson Survey Research Group at Babson College. Seaman's coauthor, Elaine Allen, who is also a codirector of the Babson Survey Research Group, added that community colleges, for-profit schools, and master's programs have seen significant growth in online offerings.
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G.P. "Bud" Peterson, president of Georgia Tech, sat down with writers at the AJC today and made clear that he did not support the pending legislation in the Georgia General Assembly to allow guns on college campuses. (We talked about other education issues that I will write about later.)Under a bill in the House, Georgia gun owners with conceal carry permits could bring their guns everywhere except the courthouse and the jailhouse. The restrictions on churches and campuses would be lifted.
Georgia Tech President Bud Peterson says "absolutely not" to guns on his campus in an interview Wednesday with the AJC
"Absolutely not," said Peterson, who was appointed as the 11th president of Georgia Tech in April after serving as chancellor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and provost at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. In addition, Peterson has held various positions at Texas A&M University and taught mathematics, physics and chemistry in Kansas.
In other words, this man has been around students and on campuses all his life and he doesn't believe that guns will better protect students.
But let him do the talking.
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The federal government's controversial website giving information on the performance of all schools will go live from this Thursday.www.myschool.edu.auThe site, called My School, will provide profiles for almost 10,000 schools and will allow parents to compare schools in their area as well as statistically-similar schools in other regions.
In navigating the web page, parents will be able to look at the profiles of their child's school which includes the numbers of students, teachers, attendance rates and the percentage of indigenous students.
Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard made no apology for the introduction of the website.
"I'm passionate about this and I believe this is the right direction for this country," she told Sky News on Monday.
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Independent policy think-tank the Grattan Institute has added to growing criticism of the Federal Government's My School website, saying it will not give an adequate assessment of a school's performance.My School, scheduled to be launched tomorrow, has already come under heavy criticism.
The Education Union says it will unfairly stigmatise disadvantaged schools, and the Secondary Principals Council says it fails to include crucial data about school funding.
However, several parent groups have supported the proposal to provide information on school performance.
Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard says it will provide parents and the community with accurate information, allowing them to be their own judge.
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A year ago, the life Demetria Overstreet and her family knew slowly began to fade.
Her husband, Lenzie, was diagnosed with kidney failure and had to leave his job to begin treatment.
With its main money-maker out of work, mounting medical bills and three children to care for, the family saw its financial problems beginning to build.
At one point, their home's gas and electricity were turned off. Car payments lagged. And at times, the family survived on eating hotdogs and chips.
"It was depressing, especially when my son would come home and said 'Momma, nothing comes on,' " Overstreet said, referring to the electricity.
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39MB mp3 audio. I recorded this from Monday evening's video stream. Unfortunately, the sound level was quite low. Notes and links on the 2010 State of the Madison School District here.
566K State of the District PDF.
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Here is an interesting op-ed piece by a tenured professor of biology at Piedmont College, Robert H. Wainberg. He is alarmed because he has been told by former students who are now teachers that some schools no longer hold Honors Day to recognize the accomplishments of above average and exemplary students so they don't hurt the feelings of kids who don't earn awards.Ah, yes. One size fits all education uber alles.This piece will appear in the paper on the education page Monday. Enjoy.
By Robert H.Wainberg:
I have been a professor of Biology and Biochemistry at a regional college for over two decades. Sadly, I have noticed a continual deterioration in the performance of my students during this time. In part I have attributed it to the poor study habits of the last few generations (X, XX and now XXX) who have relied too heavily on technology in lieu of thinking for themselves.In fact, the basics are no longer taught in our schools because they are considered to be "too hard," not because they are archaic or antiquated. For example, students are no longer required to learn the multiplication or division tables since they direct access to calculators in their phones.
Handwriting script and calligraphy are now in danger of extinction since computers use printed letters. A report I recently read disturbingly admitted that many of our standardized tests used for college admission or various professional schools (MCAT, LSAT and GRE) have to manipulate their normal bell-shaped curves to obtain the higher averages of decadtudenes ago.
What we fail to realize is that the concept of "survival of the fittest" still applies even within the realm of technology. There will always be those who are more "adapted" to the full potential of its use while others will be stalled at the level of downloading music or playing games.
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A gritty industrial patch of a blue-collar Chicago suburb seems an unlikely setting for the pioneering curriculum at Morton Alternative High School. The program, which combines intensive psychotherapy with conventional studies to help gang members and emotionally troubled teenagers finish school, has reported promising results and has attracted the notice of educators nationwide.Morton Alternative High School is the last chance for students who are expelled from Morton East High School and Morton West.
Dr. Mark Smaller, a Chicago psychoanalyst, started the program at Morton Alternative three-and-a-half years ago as a contrast to schools that take a strict disciplinary approach to youths with behavioral problems. Dr. Smaller and his team of social workers conduct weekly group and individual therapy sessions to help students deal with emotional problems and social pressures common to life in neighborhoods where families struggle with job losses, crime, violence and immigration issues.
Morton Alternative in Cicero is the last chance for students who are expelled from Morton East and Morton West High Schools. An average of about 100 students are at the school at any one time -- those judged to have some chance for improvement -- though they come and go throughout the academic year.
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High school seniors are applying to selective colleges around Washington in record numbers this year, particularly to schools with reputations for meeting the full financial needs of admitted freshmen. The trend suggests that the weak economy has driven applicants to schools that offer a bigger bang for the tuition buck.A surge in applications is not what admission deans expected this year, after a fiscal downturn and a flattening population of college-age students.
But applications to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore are up 13 percent over last year, with a projected pool of 18,150 students competing for 1,235 seats in the freshman class. The University of Richmond received 8,500 applications for 805 slots, a 9 percent increase. Applications are up 6 percent at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., and 3 percent at George Washington University in the District. The University of Virginia fielded 22,396 applications, an all-time high. The College of William and Mary, too, expects a record number of applicants.
"It shouldn't be happening, should it?" said Bill Hartog, dean of admissions at Washington and Lee. "My take on it is, financial aid, financial aid, financial aid."
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My family has much experience in higher education, not all of it happy. I spent six years as an often struggling undergraduate and grad student. My journalist wife did ten years in higher ed, including three of what she considered hard labor as a visiting professor. Our kids add another 11 years, with the youngest child about to sign up for three more. Please don't ask me what that will cost.American colleges and universities are the great strength of our education system. They are revered around the world. But those schools put heavy stress on our families, since getting into, paying for and graduating from the ones we most want often exceeds our capabilities. We need to know more about what they are doing to us, so I am happy to see washingtonpost.com launch two higher education blogs: College Inc. by Daniel de Vise and Campus Overload by Jenna Johnson. Let me celebrate that event by grumbling about what I consider higher education's five biggest blind spots:
1. College privacy rules are a mess. They are difficult to understand and infuriating when they exacerbate a family crisis. I have heard many stories about students getting into trouble, and their parents being among the last to know. University officials will sometimes take pity on a frantic dad and reveal important things in the kid's personal file. But why can't we have more reasonable procedures? Academics who fear intrusive helicopter parents should read the National Survey of Student Engagement report, which reveals that the children of such people do better in college than kids like mine, who didn't hear much from us.
2. Professors know too little about what high schools are doing to prepare students for their classes.
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Liz Heron, Elaine Yau and Fox Yi Hu:
More than 30 teachers and classroom assistants have been convicted of sex offences in the past 10 years - but the Education Bureau will not say if they are still working in the city's schools.Since January 1, 2000, at least 31 staff have been convicted of offences ranging from indecent assault of their pupils to secretly filming girls getting undressed for a dance class.
The catalogue of convictions and the names of the offenders was compiled by the Sunday Morning Post (SEHK: 0583, announcements, news) and presented to the Education Bureau, which was asked what action had been taken against the offenders.
But the bureau, responsible for registering teachers and advising schools on vetting prospective staff, refused to say how many of the 31 were still registered as teachers and how many were working in schools.
A spokeswoman also refused to explain why it would not release the information to the public. She did say 13 teachers were deregistered from 2006 to 2008 and seven of these had been convicted of sex offences.
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Picture a Milwaukee Public Schools high school that college-bound students are clamoring to attend. The school has grown from 100 to 1,000 in six years. Its program is rigorous, its test scores are strong. Hundreds are on a waiting list for admission for next year.
You might think MPS leaders would look at the meteoric rise of Ronald Wilson Reagan College Preparatory School on the far south side and say, "Terrific! This is an opportunity. What can we do to satisfy the obviously huge appetite for what this program has to offer?"
Or, if you were perhaps a bit more cynical, you might think MPS leaders would look at the Reagan situation and say: "OK, who screwed up? Who allowed this school to grow so fast? Can we get a lot of these parents to switch their kids to other high schools where - for some reason - there is no waiting list?"
Reagan arguably has provided the biggest shot in the arm that MPS has gotten in the last decade or so. It provides a rigorous International Baccalaureate program for all its students - "We have one vision, one mission, one focus - IB," says Julia D'Amato, the principal and chief driver behind Reagan's success. Reagan is working with other MPS schools to develop a kindergarten through high school IB continuum in MPS.
But in recent months, Reagan has had to fend off an attempt to cap its enrollment and it has been ordered to reduce sharply the number of students next fall who do not fall into the special education category. Reagan leaders clearly feel frustrated by how much work is going into protecting their success from MPS leaders.
"All the buzzwords that are supposed to make a successful school, that's what we have here," says Mary Ellen McCormick-Mervis, one of the school's administrators. "If we're doing everything right, why not help us?"
Parent meeting set
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The person who posted this video on YouTube said this fight happened 1/5/10... that's some way to say Happy New Year.I know some of you readers cannot stand when I post video of US acting the fool... well that's life. Here's some reality for US to look at for the next 30 seconds and do something about OUR kids.
It's one thing to see these young girls fighting so viciously. It's a damn shame to see ALL the other kids are cheering on this ish. Where's the teachers and what took the security so long? I know this isn't going on everyday, but this ish is getting tired.
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The quest to get a driver's license at 16 -- long an American rite of passage-- is on the wane among the digital generation, which no longer sees the family car as the end-all of social life.The holdouts include Kat Velkoff, who turned 17 in Chantilly without a license. Focused on tough classes, the debate team, dance and color guard, she turned 18 without taking the wheel. Then 19.
"It just wasn't a priority," said Velkoff, who got her license last fall at 20. "It was just never the next thing that needed to get done in my life."
Federal data released Friday underscore a striking national shift: 30.7 percent of 16-year-olds got their licenses in 2008, compared with 44.7 percent in 1988. The downtrend is even sharper in Virginia and Maryland, state figures show. Numbers from the District, which go back to 2003, show a decline in the past two years.
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Parents wishing to send their children to a different school district next year will be able to participate in the open enrollment program the first three weeks of February.Learn more about full and part time Wisconsin open enrollment here.From Feb. 1 through Feb. 19 parents can apply for their children to attend a public school other than the one in which they live. Last school year, more than 28,000 students participated.
Participation in the program has grown each year since it began in 1998 when just 2,500 were enrolled.
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The January/February 2010 issue of The Atlantic features a noteworthy article titled, What Makes a Great Teacher? Although the article does not focus on gifted education per se, it is still worth a close read. The article discusses specific attributes that excellent teachers with exceptional track records tend to display in the classroom. (It is important to note that these attributes are based on research that was conducted by the nonprofit organization, Teach for America, which advocates for teacher reform. It is also important to note that the group's research focuses solely on teachers who work in underperforming school districts where the primary goal in the general education classroom is to get students to perform at or above grade level.) The article outlines several specific recommendations that the organization makes for recruiting and hiring successful teachers, particularly in underserved communities.For those of us in the gifted education community, the traits identified in the article may be ones that we should perhaps consider first before we consider any additional teacher characteristics that might be specific to gifted education. (See my previous blog entry titled, Training and Competencies of Teachers of the Gifted.)
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Two weeks ago I explored the possibility that high schools could challenge all students, gifted or otherwise, without having gifted programs. Quaker Valley High School outside of Pittsburgh, for instance, seemed able to create new opportunities for a variety of kids by ignoring standard procedures that had outlived their usefulness, such as homework requirements or rules against taking more than one course in the same period.One wise reader said, in effect: Yeah, but that will never work in elementary schools.
As if by fate, I received an email shortly after from Susan Ohanian, a delightful teacher, speaker, author and blogger whose work I love, even when she is portraying me as a test-addled idiot. We may disagree on policy issues, but we have shared tastes about what good teaching looks and sounds like. In her email, she described how she brought a free-form gifted non-program to an elementary school in Troy, N.Y.
Here is what she said. Don't forget to take a look at her blog at susanohanian.org.
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One out of every five U.S. teenagers has a cholesterol level that increases the risk of heart disease, federal health officials reported Thursday, providing striking new evidence that obesity is making more children prone to illnesses once primarily limited to adults.A nationally representative survey of blood test results in American teenagers found that more than 20 percent of those ages 12 to 19 had at least one abnormal level of fat. The rate jumped to 43 percent among those adolescents who were obese.
Previous studies had indicated that unhealthy cholesterol levels, once a condition thought isolated to the middle-aged and elderly, were increasingly becoming a problem among the young, but the new data document the scope of the threat on a national level.
"This is the future of America," said Linda Van Horn, a professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University who heads the American Heart Association's Nutrition Committee. "These data really confirm the seriousness of our obesity epidemic. This really is an urgent call for health-care providers and families to take this issue seriously."
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Kristy (Christiane) Henrich, Marblehead High School Class of 2010
"Civil War Medicine" paper published in the Winter 2009 Issue of The Concord Review
Before crafting my research paper on U.S. Civil War Medicine, I had never composed a piece of non-fiction literature beyond six or seven pages. Twenty pages seemed to be an unconquerable length. I remember the dread that filled me as my A.P. United States History teacher, Mrs. Melissa Humphrey, handed out the assignment for the twenty-page research paper. She also passed around copies of The Concord Review as examples of research papers done well. For us, the first deadline was only a few weeks away. We had to have a thesis. It was then that I truly realized the depth of this academic adventure. My job was not to simply report on some topic in U.S. history; I had to prove something. I had to create an arguable thesis and defend it. I was overwhelmed.Evaluating the Legacy of Civil War Medicine; Amputations, Anesthesia, and AdministrationI put the assignment in the back of my mind for about a week. Then, I began to think seriously about what I could possibly want to write about. I brainstormed a list of all times in U.S. history that fascinate me, ranging from World War II to the Civil Rights Movement. Finally, I settled on Civil War medicine because of my plans to pursue a career in medicine. I figured this would be a great opportunity to gather more knowledge on my potential future profession.
Simply choosing a topic was not enough, though. I needed a thesis. So I began to search through books and online databases for any information about Civil War medicine. I gathered so much information that my head was spinning. I realized I had to narrow down my topic, and that this would be done by creating a specific, arguable thesis. Sifting through all the data and historical articles, I noticed that Civil War medicine was not as atrocious as I had always believed it to be. I had my thesis. I wanted to defend Civil War medicine by placing it in its own historical context, something many fail to do when evaluating it with a modern eye.
A few weeks later, approved thesis in hand, I stepped into the Tufts University library, the alma mater of my mother. The battle plan: gather enough materials, particularly primary sources, to prove my thesis. The enemy: the massive amounts of possibly valuable literature. I had never previously encountered the problem of finding books so specialized that they didn't end up being helpful for my thesis nor had I ever been presented with so many options that I had to narrow down from thirty to a mere fifteen books. Actually, I had never left a library before with so many books.
For the next few months, the books populated the floor of my room. Every weekend, I methodically tackled the volumes, plastering them with Post-it notes. The deadline for the detailed outline and annotated bibliography loomed. I continued reading and researching, fascinated by all I was learning. In fact, I was so fascinated that I felt justified using it as my excuse to delay synthesizing all of my information into an outline. With thousands of pages of reading under my belt, I finally tackled the seven-page map for my twenty-page journey. That was easily the hardest part of the entire process. Once the course was charted, all I had to do was follow it. Of course, it was under construction the entire way, and detours were taken, but the course of the trip turned out much like the map.
I thought printing out the twenty-page academic undertaking, binding it, and handing it in was the greatest feeling I had ever experienced from a scholastic endeavor. I remember being overjoyed that day. I remember sleeping so soundly. I remember the day as sunny. I'm not sure if it actually was...
Clearly, I was thinking small. I had no idea what my grade would be. At that point, I did not even care. I had finished the paper. I considered that a tremendous accomplishment. Eventually, the graded research papers were handed back. What had previously been my greatest academic feeling was surpassed. The grade on my paper was a 99%. I was overjoyed and thrilled that I had not only completed such a tremendous task but had completed it pretty darn well. I thought that was the greatest feeling.
I still needed to think bigger. I submitted my paper to The Concord Review on a whim this summer. I remember Mrs. Humphrey showing us the journals and praising their quality. She is a tough teacher, and I thought since she had liked my paper so much I should give The Concord Review a go. I was not counting on being published. I knew my chances were slim, and I knew I was competing with students from around the world.
This November, I received a letter in the mail from Will Fitzhugh, the founder of The Concord Review. My paper was selected to be published in the Winter 2009 issue. That was the greatest feeling. I am a seventeen-year-old public high school student. I am also a seventeen-year-old published author. People work their whole lives to make it to this point. I feel so honored to have this recognition at my age. My hard work paid off far beyond where I thought it would. Thank you, Mr. Fitzhugh, for recognizing the true value of academic achievement and for reminding me why I love to learn.
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Youth are spending more time with nearly every form of media than ever, according to a report released Wednesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation. They spend more hours on the computer, in front of television, playing video games, texting and listening to music than an adult spends full-time at work.The only media young people aren't soaking up, the study says, are newspapers, magazines and other print publications.
Youth spend more than 7 1/2 hours a day using electronic media, or more than 53 hours a week, the 10-year study says. "And because they spend so much of that time 'media multitasking' (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into those 7½ hours."
Affirming parents' fears, the study showed those habits ripple throughout a youth's life. Those who were big media consumers were more likely than kids and teens who are only seldom in front of a screen to earn average or poor grades in school. Those who use more electronic media get in more trouble, and say they are often sad.
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A new Yale admissions video released Friday starts as most campus tours do: an uncomfortable question-and-answer session with an over-caffeinated admissions officer. Some kid asks what year the school was founded. A dowdy mom elbows a nerdy dad.And then a sultry young woman in a red sundress in the back row asks: "Why did you choose Yale?"
There's a reflective pause. A reflection piano overture. Reflective looks around the room. And then -- bam! -- the boring admissions video turns into a musical. The admissions officer serenades the no-longer-bored students: When I was a senior in high school, colleges called out my name. Every day I debate where to matriculate, but every place seemed the same. Yet after I went through the options, only one choice remained. I wanted to hail from a college called Yale . . . .
It feels like an episode of Glee, the popular TV show that overnight made it socially acceptable and even sexy to sing in the high school show chorus. Those involved admit they watched the movie "High School Musical" for inspiration. And since the video was posted on YouTube on Friday evening, it has been viewed nearly 50,000 times.
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WHY are the young so disappointing, when it comes to their manners, dress codes, or knowledge of the canon of Western civilisation? Ask a British or American conservative, and he will blame the left: the 1960s vintage teachers who disdain dead white guys like Shakespeare, the college campuses where Derrida and deconstruction have displaced reading actual literature or the egalitarian ethos of "all shall have prizes".Ask someone from the left, for example in Britain, and they will trace the rot back to Thatcherism: the hostility to pure research, the focus on commercially-driven vocational education (all those degree courses in golf course management or marketing, elbowing aside history or Ancient Greek), or the dumbing down of examinations by ministers who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Luc Ferry, a prolific French philosopher and former education minister in the conservative government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin, has a new book out, "Face à la crise: Matériaux pour une politique de civilisation", offering a distinctly Gallic view of the problem: the fault lies with globalisation.
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"Good audience skills are imperative," Danielle Johnson reminds her restless 10th-graders as one, Raquel, nervously fiddles with her laptop before holding forth on her project portfolio at City Arts and Technology High School (known as CAT), a charter school of 365 students on a green knoll above the blue-collar southern reaches of Mission Street in San Francisco."I decided to use the story of my mom getting to this country as an immigrant," Raquel says, moving into her personal-memoir segment, sniffing back tears as a blurry photo of her mother at age 18 appears on the screen. "I had never asked my mother about how she got here."
CAT exemplifies President Obama's push to seed innovative schools that demand much from all students, echoed by Sacramento's $700 million reform plan that goes to Washington this week. How to bottle the magic of CAT teachers like Johnson - listening carefully to each teen, strengthening each voice with basic skills and motivating ideals - is the challenge facing would-be reformers.
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Perhaps with business organizations behind it, a significant increase in the state's investment in education from kindergarten through college could gain some traction in the Florida Legislature.Closing the Talent Gap: A Business Perspective (January 2010) 3MB PDF.Certainly without it, there is virtually no likelihood that lawmakers in an election year will find the courage to search for ways -- not all of them monetary -- to improve public education, and therefore our state's chances for the future.
An educated population and an accomplished work force are the underpinnings of a state where, as the Florida Council of 100 and Florida Chamber of Commerce expressed in a report last week, the American dream can be successfully carried out. Where better, asked Council of 100 Chair Susan Story "than in the state of Florida?"
Both Gov. Charlie Crist and former Gov. Jeb Bush put their stamp of approval on what was described at its unveiling Thursday as the "education wish list" of these two significant Florida business groups. Last year, the two joined with education leaders to get more money for higher education, even though the Legislature went in the opposite direction, cutting $150 million from our universities. Again this year budget committees are asking universities to be prepared for across-the-board cuts as high as 10 percent, in keeping with a budget shortfall of as much as $3 billion.
The recommendations from these groups, which are coincidentally against most tax or fee increases and lifting sales-tax exemptions, include tougher graduation standards at the pre-K-12 level, virtual elimination of teacher tenure and a constitutional amendment legalizing vouchers.
Updates, via a Steven M. Birnholz email:
"Political, Business Leaders: Overhaul Education in Fla." Lakeland Ledger
"Business groups propose major changes to education," Daytona Beach News Journal.
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Ronald Reagan must be grinning in his grave.Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sends to the White House this week a colorful pastiche of education fixes, hoping to score $700 million in federal dollars. Sacramento's plan echoes Washington's own reform strategy - built on President Obama's surprising faith in market remedies for the ills facing schools.
Oddly mimicking Reagan's game plan of a generation ago, Sacramento's agenda relies on market competition by seeding more charter schools, allowing parents to shutter lousy schools and rewarding teachers who boost student performance.
"This is about parental choice in public education," said state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, a chief architect of the bipartisan plan.
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Since it began in 2004, the Baltimore Talent Development High School has posted some impressive graduation rates and achievement scores, among other things.Even more notable, efforts by educators at nearby Johns Hopkins University to replicate the school's gains in dozens of other locations have also met with some success. Slowly, the network of Talent Development High Schools is helping student groups that often seem most at risk.
But good news at the high school level is unusual. Despite vigorous calls for change and a host of major reform efforts, encouraging results have been scarce. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores - considered the "Nation's Report Card" - tend to be stagnant for high-schoolers, even when they rise for elementary school students.
Only about half of low-income and minority students in US high schools graduate, and many of those who do are unprepared for college. The isolated examples of success often fail when administrators or education reformers try to reproduce them on a large scale.
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For years, Kiplinger's has been advising parents that one way to keep higher-education costs under control is to have their kids attend community college for a year or two and then switch to a four-year school. This year, they finally listened to us -- with a vengeance.Community colleges are packed to the gills, and students are flocking to state institutions across the board. The average annual sticker price for a four-year public school remains a tad over $15,000 -- less than half the tab at a private institution. In our exclusive rankings of the 100 best values in public colleges, nearly 40 percent charge in-state students less than the average price, reports Senior Associate Editor Jane Bennett Clark.
There's nothing like a financial crisis to get families to focus on how much they're paying for big-ticket items such as college expenses. Surprisingly, they haven't always done that. In 2008, a survey of parents and students by Sallie Mae found that when deciding whether to borrow for college, a whopping 70 percent said a student's potential postgraduate income did not factor into the discussion.
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The Princeton Review's 100 "Best Value Colleges" list for 2010 is based on data compiled and analyzed by The Princeton Review, the education services and test-prep company known for its annual college listings.The analysis uses the most recently reported data from each institution for its 2009-10 academic year. The top 10 public and private "Best Values" are ranked; the rest are listed alphabetically.
FULL STORY: Can getting a degree be affordable?
The Princeton Review selected the schools based on surveys of administrators and students at more than 650 public and private college and university campuses.
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Education Secretary Arne Duncan entered some of the most contentious debates in college sports on Thursday when, in a speech at the N.C.A.A. convention, he called for stricter consequences for college teams that do not graduate their athletes and said the N.B.A.'s age-minimum policy sets up young athletes for failure."Why do we allow the N.C.A.A, why do we allow universities, why do we allow sports to be tainted when the vast majority of coaches and athletic directors are striving to instill the right values?" said Duncan, who was a co-captain of his Harvard basketball team and played in an Australian professional league from 1987 until 1991.
He said his time as a college athlete was one of the most valuable periods of his life, but feared the N.B.A.'s age rule, which requires that a player be at least 19 years old and at least one year removed from high school before entering the league, does a disservice to athletes.
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Many of the nation's top public universities are giving millions of dollars in financial aid to students from relatively wealthy families instead of to those who urgently need it, resulting in campuses that are often less diverse than those at elite private schools, a new report says.From 2003 to 2007, public research universities increased the amount of aid to students whose parents make at least $115,000 a year by 28 percent, to $361.4 million, said the Education Trust, a nonprofit advocacy group.
Those schools routinely award as much in financial aid to students whose parents make more than $80,000 a year as to those whose parents make less than $54,000 a year, according to the report, "Opportunity Adrift."
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Over the past several weeks, I have discussed the impact of attending a traditionally female college in the early 1970s. I wasn't there that long -- like most students of the time, I got on the train at 18 and disembarked at 22 with a diploma. But those four years were formative, shaping the rest of my personal and professional life in some important ways:--Valuing female friendships: Most women I know value their friendships with other women, of course. But I was raised in a time and culture that put men first. We were encouraged to break a date with a girl friend, for example, if a boy asked us out. My exposure to the brilliance, fierce loyalty, seriousness and silliness of my classmates put an end to that nonsense. My best friend from college remains one of my two best friends today. She is the person I call when I need to talk through a problem, cry without explaining myself, or share good (or bad) news. There is nothing I wouldn't do for her.
--Valuing women in the workplace: I have friends, both male and female, who complain about "women bosses": that they are petty, self-contradictory micromanagers, mostly. For a while I thought I had just been extraordinarily lucky to have a string of extremely competent, visionary, and decisive (not to mention empathetic and fun) female employers. Then I realized that we were sometimes talking about the same people. Women of my generation were trained not to raise our voices; to deliver definite pronouncements as though they were tentative questions; and to mask and deny irritation until it builds up into an explosion. This behavior is so ingrained in many of us that we don't realize we're sending out seemingly mixed signals. Working on tech crews, student committees, etc., at college, I got used to decoding "Maybe we should go with the yellow scrim; what do you think?" as "Please get started on the yellow scrim now," and this assumption that my female bosses a) knew what they wanted and b) were communicating this, if I listened hard enough, saved me many misunderstandings as a young flunky. I also, unlike many of my peers, took women's competence as a given, and thus avoided the irritating questioning and second-guessing that tends to lead to the aforementioned explosions.
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In the course of their work my brilliant children - a human rights lawyer and a freelance journalist - travel to places such as Phnom Penh and Dubai. In the course of mine Macomb, Illinois, is a more typical destination, involving five hours of flying, including a layover in Detroit and then two hours of driving through snow-covered fields barely interrupted by a couple of semi-boarded-up "towns", including the intriguingly named Preemption (population 71).After all this industrial-agricultural wasteland, Macomb is a veritable hive of human, cultural and commercial activity. There is a branch of the state university system, where I have been invited to speak, and until a few months ago, my hosts inform me, there were a total of two Italian restaurants in town, one famed for its Spam-and-Doritos-topped pizza. I'm staying at the Hampton Inn, a minimalist motel chain located opposite a Farm King, an agricultural supply store. I can't help asking whether this is where the university puts up a genuine celebrity speaker, such as Bill Cosby. "Oh no," I am told, "he flew in in his private plane and out the same night."
Ann, a congenial administrator at Western Illinois University, fills me in on the student body. They are mostly white, first-generation college students and, while about a third of them are studying law enforcement with a view to a career in police work, this does not stop them from illegal under-age drinking or, for that matter, smoking pot. We muse on the problem of binge drinking, endemic to American campuses: why go straight from sobriety to vomiting? Haven't they ever sampled the pleasures of tipsiness? Then Ann tells me one of the saddest things I've heard on the perennial subject of Young People Today: they don't know how to be "silly", she says, in the sense of whimsy and absurdity. They are strait-laced and even a little timid, unless, of course, they are utterly wasted.
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Much has been written about how two education reform bills signed into law last week might affect California's chances of qualifying for federal Race to the Top funds.As important as that funding is, the new laws' significance goes much deeper. It signals that the balance of power in education is shifting away from teachers unions and toward parents, where it belongs.
The "parent trigger," a controversial element of the legislation, is the best evidence of this turning point.
The concept was developed by the grass-roots group Parent Revolution in the Los Angeles Unified School District. If a majority of parents in a failing school petitions for an overhaul, the district must do something -- replace administrators, convert to a charter school or make other major reforms.
By law, tenured California teachers can convert their school to a charter if a majority of them vote for it, and that has happened dozens of times. But teachers unions and other groups opposed giving parents the same right. One group called it the "lynch mob" provision -- an odd choice of words, given that it would empower parents primarily in minority communities where failing schools abound.
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The greatest revolution in education in the United States today is taking place in Los Angeles. It is the mandate of the Los Angeles Unified School District School Board to convert almost a third of its schools either to charter schools, the public schools of choice that are the one shining light in an otherwise dysfunctional system, or other alternatives such as magnet schools. The change is not only a mighty one for the state's largest school district, but in time it could double the number of public schools of choice in California.What is remarkable is not just the magnitude of this earth-shaking change, but the complete shift of the paradigm about how we think about public education. The driving force behind this revolution is Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who is not only a Democrat but also a former organizer for the United Teachers of Los Angeles, Los Angeles teachers' union. Villaraigosa took his nontraditional stand because, as he noted, LAUSD was racked with violence and plagued with a dropout rate of 50 percent, and showed no signs of improving.
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Howard Blume:
At Lakeview Charter Academy, inexperienced teachers have strong support and high expectations.Eleazar and Nora Gonzalez decided to send their son Daniel to Lakeview Charter Academy because, they said, large public middle schools have a reputation for gangs and drugs. They also worried about academics.
So they warmed to the no-nonsense welcomings issued at the first monthly parents night.
"It will be a miracle the day I don't give homework because home is to review," Alexandra Aceves, 25, announced, in English and Spanish, to the Gonzalez family and others crowded into a second-floor classroom.
The scene exemplified the characteristics of the 10 schools operated by Partnerships to Uplift Communities, a locally based charter management organization that, like others in Los Angeles, has focused on serving low-income minority communities. It has taken on, in particular, the thorny challenge of middle schools, especially in the Latino neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley and downtown.
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Howard Blume Mitchell Landsberg and Sandra Poindexter:
Standardized tests show that the highest-performing charters push low-income black and Latino youth to higher levels of achievement.At their best, charter schools in Los Angeles shatter the conventional wisdom that skin color and family income are the greatest predictors of academic success.
Setting standards high and wringing long hours out of students and teachers, the highest-performing charters push low-income black and Latino youth to levels of achievement, as measured by standardized tests, more typical of affluent, suburban students.
If such schools were the norm, any debate over the value of charters would be moot. But there is no typical charter. They adhere to no single vision and vary widely in quality.
That said, a Times analysis showed that, overall, L.A. charter schools deliver higher test scores than traditional public schools. But charters lag well behind L.A. Unified's network of magnet schools.
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Catherine Candisky & Cindy Kranz:
Although charter schools come under withering criticism from some quarters, Ohio parents apparently aren't listening.A new state Department of Education report shows that charter-school enrollment is up 8 percent this year, while the number attending traditional Ohio schools has fallen.
Currently, 89,000 students attend 332 charter schools statewide. At the same time, enrollment in traditional public schools has dropped slightly to 1.75 million students.
In Greater Cincinnati, 32 charter schools enroll more than 9,000 students. Enrollment increases mirror the state trend.
T.C.P. World Academy's enrollment increased from 389 last year to 410 students this year.
"We always have a waiting list," said Superintendent/Principal Karen French, who attributed the enrollment increase to performance results and word of mouth.
The Cincinnati College Preparatory Academy enrollment numbers are at about 700 students now, compared with nearly 650 last year.
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Stephen Krieder Yoder, Isaac Yoder and Levi Yoder:
Isaac: My first semester at college was as fun and stimulating as I had hoped. Several classes already have changed my way of thinking, and I have a group of new friends.But not everything went according to plan: I went back on one decision I made before going into college -- the decision to not work a job during the college year.
Dad and I had agreed before college that if taking my studies seriously was my most important goal, spending time and energy working a job could detract from that goal. My part-time job at a tea shop in high school created many sleep-deprived days at school and made it more difficult to complete all my assignments well. Though I ended up succeeding despite the extra work, I thought that this added stress would be more problematic in college, when I would have more, and harder, schoolwork.
But after only my first semester, I've already begun to work a job in student government, in addition to my other extracurriculars.
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I recently saw the Great Depression film "The Grapes of Wrath," and while I had seen it before, this time I was reminded of what's going on in employment today. The movie starts off with Henry Fonda returning to his family farm after having been away for a few years, only to find his home abandoned. He soon learns that his family, as well as all of his Oklahoma neighbors, have been evicted and are leaving for the promise of jobs in California.We then learn that the families in Oklahoma have been hit with a perfect storm. Drought, low farm prices, and the displacement caused by farm automation had resulted in bankruptcy and foreclosure for millions of farmers. It was reported that one man with a tractor could replace 10-15 family farms, and over 100 farm workers.
Similarities to the Great Recession
Consider the tractor for a moment. The gasoline powered tractor first appeared way back in 1892. However, it didn't really catch on until the tractor was mass produced in the 1910's. Then, as tractor prices came down, its use on the farm started to take off. The result was an increase in farm productivity, falling prices for farm products, and a loss of jobs for millions of farmers. This displacement peaked 20 years later, during the Great Depression.
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he city's charter schools are providing a bigger boost to students' reading and math performance than are traditional public schools, according to a new study.The study -- by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University -- is the second in four months showing positive results for the city's charter schools. It comes as proponents of the publicly funded, privately run schools are urgently pushing officials to lift the state's charter school cap above 200.
New York's application for as much as $700 million in federal aid under a competition known as Race to the Top -- which looks favorably on states that support charter school growth -- is due by Jan. 19.
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IT WAS the kind of student conference I hate."I'll do better,'' my student told me, leaning forward in his chair. "I know I've gotten behind this semester, but I'm going to turn things around. Would it be OK if I finished all my uncompleted work by Monday?''
I sat silent for a moment. "Yes. But it's important that you catch up completely this weekend, so that you're not just perpetually behind.''
A few weeks later, I would conduct a nearly identical conversation with two other students. And, again, there would be no tangible result: No make-up papers. No change in effort. No improvement in time management.
By the time students are in college, habits can be tough to change. If you're used to playing video games like "Modern Warfare'' or "Halo'' all night, how do you fit in four hours of homework? Or rest up for class?
Teaching in college, especially one with a large international student population, has given me a stark - and unwelcome - illustration of how Americans' work ethic often pales in comparison with their peers from overseas.
My "C,'' "D,'' and "F'' students this semester are almost exclusively American, while my students from India, China, and Latin America have - despite language barriers - generally written solid papers, excelled on exams, and become valuable class participants.
Mixed reaction to 'My lazy American students' column
On Monday, The Boston Globe ran an opinion piece entitled "My Lazy American Students."In it, I wrote about how teaching in college has shown me that international students often work harder than their American counterparts. Though this is emphatically not true across the board, the work ethic and success of Asian, European, and South American students - who have to compete with a classroom of native English speakers - can be astounding.
I also noted in the column that there's too much texting in class, too much dozing off, too much e-mail-checking, too much flirting (I didn't mention flirting in the first piece, but I'll mention it here). Obviously, international students do all these things, but I have noticed them more amongst American students.
I worked hard on the column and lay in bed Sunday night hoping that - amidst the flurry of Christmas shopping - someone would read it.
And that's when the avalanche started.
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The question of what it means to be a parent has never been simple. But three recent cases highlight just how complicated things can get--and how inconsistent the courts have been in weighing genetic parenthood against the deals struck by would-be parents (gay and straight) with their partners.Case 1: Sean Hollingsworth and Donald Robinson Hollingsworth are legally married in California and are registered as civil union partners in New Jersey. The two husbands arranged for Donald's sister, Angelia Robinson, to serve as a gestational surrogate carrying embryos produced using sperm from Sean Hollingsworth and donor eggs. In October 2006, Ms. Robinson bore twin girls whom she turned over to their two fathers. In March 2007, Ms. Robinson sued for custody alleging that she had been coerced into being a surrogate. A New Jersey court ruled last week that Ms. Robinson, who has no genetic tie to the twins, is their legal mother and can sue for primary custody later this year.
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OU ARE A specialist in your field, you can see the opportunities before you, but there's little or nothing that you can do. If this place sounds vaguely familiar, it is where Dr Deirdre MacIntyre found herself almost a decade ago.She wasn't a solo traveller, either. A colleague and close friend, Dr Moya O'Brien, had also reached that bus stop. The trick was to recognise when it was time to jump off.
"We had trained in psychology together, she was my bridesmaid, I was her birth partner and we had worked together in what was the Eastern Health Board before it became the Eastern Regional Health Authority ," MacIntyre recalls. "We both had families with small kids, and very heavy clinical caseloads at work.
"I loved my career in child guidance, I loved my clinical work, but both of us felt that our impact was limited within the health board structure," MacIntyre recalls.
At this point, she had nearly 20 years' experience as a clinical psychologist and was principal in charge of the ERHA's child and adolescent psychology services. She had been involved in establishing community-based psychology services for children and their families.
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Read any newspaper or magazine and you will notice the many flavors of the one big question that everyone is asking today. Or you can just stay on the page and read recent editions of Edge ...Playwright Richard Foreman asks about the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". Is it a new self? Are we becoming Pancake People -- spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.
Technology analyst Nicholas Carr wrote the most notable of many magazine and newspaper pieces asking "Is Google Making Us Stupid". Has the use of the Web made it impossible for us to read long pieces of writing?
Social software guru Clay Shirky notes that people are reading more than ever but the return of reading has not brought about the return of the cultural icons we'd been emptily praising all these years. "What's so great about War and Peace?, he wonders. Having lost its actual centrality some time ago, the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture as well. Is the enormity of the historical shift away from literary culture now finally becoming clear?
Science historian George Dyson asks "what if the cost of machines that think is people who don't?" He wonders "will books end up back where they started, locked away in monasteries and read by a select few?".
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A report out from the Southern Education Foundation out today says the South is the first part of the country where more than half the children in public schools are minorities. That is happening in part because more Latinos and their larger families are moving in. Latinos are the fastest-growing part of the U.S. population.And as the United States tries to keep up with other countries in getting students into, and graduated from college, Latinos are getting special attention. Because they're the least likely to get college degrees. From American RadioWorks, Emily Hanford reports.
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OK, I lied about no more wonky posts. Xeni's Facebook post reminded me of something. I want to float an idea about privacy as a commodity, vs. privacy as a right.Tiger Woods, described frequently as a "very private" person, was unable to keep his private life private. Why? Because he interacted with non-private people. The reason Kim Kardashian and the Jersey Shore denizens have risen to positions of prominence in popular culture is because they each epitomize the non-private person. They have nothing to hide, so nothing that becomes public knowledge can hurt them. Ms. Kardashian can be urinated on in a sex tape and actually be helped in terms of being a public figure. My own ability to be effective as a transgender rights activist is because there's nothing anyone could expose about me that would deter me from my activism. That gives me enormous power over anonymous haters who vent their impotent fury at me to no avail. Their own fear of exposure (loss of privacy) is their greatest weakness. What does this mean for you, dear reader? Read on.
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My Dec. 10 column about that troublesome Washington area gifted child, future billionaire Warren Buffett, said our schools are never going to help such kids much. I said the gifted designation was often arbitrary and should be disposed of. Instead, we ought to find ways to let all kids explore their talents.This produced a flood of comments on my blog. Many readers thought I was callous and daft. "Unfortunately, eliminating the label generally means that the schools give up doing anything for advanced learners," wrote a reader signing in as EduCrazy. Another commenter, CrimsonWife, said "if educators are fine with giving special attention and services to kids who are far out of the mainstream on the low end of the spectrum, why is it so controversial to provide specialized services to kids who are far out of the mainstream on the high end?"
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Young people who were serious about table tennis used to have to make the trip to Beijing, Stockholm or Moscow to train with world-class coaches. Now they go no farther than the Silicon Valley suburb of Milpitas.
"I'm trying to become one of the greatest players in the nation," Srivatsav Tangirala, 14, says matter-of-factly between drills at the huge new table tennis facility in the suburb. He and three dozen players, some as young as five, sprint sideways along the edge of the tables, 45 times in a row, perfecting their footwork."Lean forward, lean, lean, lean, lean," their coach implores.
This is the largest training programme for youths in the country, run by the India Community Centre in a region that is 60 per cent Asian. Here, ping-pong parents who grew up with the sport in Sichuan province or Hyderabad are the new soccer mums and Little League dads.
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Researchers have identified a cluster of autism cases in the South Bay -- but the elevated regional incidence seems linked to parents' ability to gain a diagnosis for their child, rather than any geographic risk.UC Davis MIND Institute press release.A rigorous study of all 2.5 million births in California between 1996 and 2000 revealed 10 places where the disability is more common than elsewhere in the state -- including the Sunnyvale-Santa Clara area, the San Carlos-Belmont area and several parts of southern California and Sacramento.
The scientists found a correlation, not cause, concluding that parents of autistic children in these clusters were more likely to be white, live near a major treatment center, be highly educated and
There was a lower incidence of the diagnosis where families were Latino and less educated.
A diagnosis of autism requires considerable advocacy by parents, who must navigate the complex world of pediatrics, psychiatry and autism experts. Once diagnosed, children gain access to all types of specialized services.
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Dana Hedgpeth & Jennifer Agiesta:
The decline of the auto industry and the nation's economic slide have left many residents here trapped, without work, in houses they can't sell, in neighborhoods where they fear for their safety, in schools that offer their children a hard road out.People across the metro area are feeling the stress of an uncertain financial landscape, with majorities worried about the economy, the cost of health care and having enough money to pay their bills. The region's bleak jobs situation is residents' No. 1 concern, by a big margin. That anxiety is compounded by a widely held feeling that the community is divided by race and income.
And yet they haven't given up.
In a new Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation-Harvard University poll about Detroit, almost all residents of the main three-county metropolitan area see their economy as in ruins. About half say this is a bad place to raise a family; as many describe a declining standard of living, swelling debt, deteriorating neighborhoods and a brutal job market.
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The economy may be recovering, but the effects of the recession continue to buffet the nation's public colleges and universities. State governments, coping with shrunken tax revenues and an overwhelming demand for services, have cut funding for higher education. Universities that once relied on the income from fat endowments have yet to recoup multimillion-dollar losses to their portfolios. Families continue to apply for financial aid in record numbers. Meanwhile, enrollment at state institutions has spiked as more students go public and more people overall seek college degrees.The schools in our top 100 best values in public colleges and universities -- led by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for overall value and by Binghamton University (SUNY) for out-of-state value -- continue to deliver strong academics at reasonable prices, in many cases by offering the same or more financial aid as in previous years. But no one can say that it has been easy.
To cope with less money and more students, public institutions, including many in our rankings, have slashed operating costs and raised tuition beyond the average increase of about five percentage points over inflation in recent years. The University of California system, caught in the downdraft of a state budget meltdown, imposed a midyear tuition hike of 15%, to be followed by another 15% increase in the summer, precipitating statewide protests. (Our rankings reflect tuition and fees, including midyear increases, as of December 1, 2009.)
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laiborne Pell died at age 90 on January 1, 2009. In the weeks that followed, the former Democratic senator from Rhode Island was lauded for his many achievements, but one stood out: The first sentence of Pell's obituary in The New York Times cited "the college grant program that bears his name." Pell Grants are the quintessential progressive policy, dedicated to helping low-income students cross into the promised land of opportunity and higher education. "That is a legacy," said Joe Biden, "that will live on for generations to come."What the encomiums to Pell failed to mention is that his grants have been, in all the ways that matter most, a failure. As any parent can tell you, colleges are increasingly unaffordable. Students are borrowing at record levels and loan default rates are rising. More and more low-income students are getting priced out of higher education altogether. The numbers are stark: When Pell grants were named for the senator in 1980, a typical public four-year university cost $2,551 annually. Pell Grants provided $1,750, almost 70 percent of the total. Even private colleges cost only about $5,600 back then. Low-income students could matriculate with little fear of financial hardship, as Pell intended. Over the next three decades, Congress poured vast sums into the program, increasing annual funding from $2 billion to nearly $20 billion. Yet today, Pell Grants cover only 33 percent of the cost of attending a public university. Why? Because prices have increased nearly 500 percent since 1980. Average private college costs, meanwhile, rose to over $34,000 per year.
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For much of his life, astrophysicist George Smoot III has been what he calls a "scientific outlaw."It was his passion for searching and investigating outside the mainstream that won the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist the Nobel Prize for physics in 2006 for evidence supporting the Big Bang Theory. Even among his nerdy peers, the effusive Smoot was on the fringes, playing football in high school, trekking in Nepal, attending the Academy Awards, listening to music like Jay Z and Avril Lavigne on his iPod and volunteering as a sound tech for Jerry Garcia back in the day..
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Amy Hetzner, via a kind reader's email:
By the time the first bell rings at Brookfield Central High School, most of the students in Room 22 are immersed in college-level vector equations, reviewing for their final exam on the Friday before Christmas.Related: Janet Mertz's tireless crusade on credit for non-Madison School District classes.Senior Lea Gulotta, however, looks on the bright side of waking early every morning for the past semester so she can take a Calculus 3 class taught at the school by a college professor.
"We get to sleep in for a month," she said, noting that the regular high school semester won't end until mid-January.
There's another positive to Brookfield Central's agreement with the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha continuing education department, which brought the advanced mathematics class to the high school this year as part of the state's youth options program. Under youth options, school districts pick up the costs of courses at Wisconsin colleges if they don't have similar offerings available to students.
Instead of seeing students spend extra time commuting and attending class on a college campus, the arrangement placed the professor in the high school to teach 11 students who had completed advanced-placement calculus as juniors. Two of the students in the class come from the Elmbrook School District's other high school, Brookfield East.
Elmbrook pays UW-Waukesha the same tuition that it would pay if its students chose to attend the college campus on their own, she said.
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TWO years ago, during lunch with a second-grade teacher in the Chicago area, I mentioned that I was going to substitute teach. The teacher -- I'll call him Dan -- started into a story about his own experience with a substitute, which is easily summarized: Dan left a lesson plan; the sub didn't follow it. So, he ended by asking, how hard can substitute teaching be?I smiled, said nothing and bit into my Reuben.
Over the next two years, I would learn -- as I subbed once a week for a variety of classes, including kindergarten, sixth grade, middle-school social studies, high-school chemistry, phys ed, art, Spanish, and English as a second language -- that Dan's story is standard teacher fare. Last time I heard it, though, I didn't bite my sandwich or my tongue.
As much as I became frustrated by the lack of training and support, I was most angered by how many days teachers were out of their classrooms. Nationwide, 5.2 percent of teachers are absent on any given day, a rate three times as high as that of professionals outside teaching and more than one and a half times as high as that of teachers in Britain. Teachers in America are most likely to be absent on Fridays, followed by Mondays.
This means that children have substitute teachers for nearly a year of their kindergarten-through-12th-grade education. Taxpayers shell out $4 billion a year for subs.
I subbed for many legitimately ill teachers and for many attending educational conferences. But my first assignment was to fill in for a sixth-grade teacher who went to a home-and-garden show. My last was for a first-grade teacher who said she needed a mental health day because her class was so difficult.
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THOMAS COLLEGE, a liberal arts school in Maine, advertises itself as Home of the Guaranteed Job! Students who can't find work in their fields within six months of graduation can come back to take classes free, or have the college pay their student loans for a year.The University of Louisiana, Lafayette, is eliminating its philosophy major, while Michigan State University is doing away with American studies and classics, after years of declining enrollments in those majors.
And in a class called "The English Major in the Workplace," at the University of Texas, Austin, students read "Death of a Salesman" but also learn to network, write a résumé and come off well in an interview.
Even before they arrive on campus, students -- and their parents -- are increasingly focused on what comes after college. What's the return on investment, especially as the cost of that investment keeps rising? How will that major translate into a job?
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The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies: CACHIA Romina, FERRARI Anusca, KEARNEY Caroline, PUNIE Yves, VAN DEN BERGHE Wouter, WASTIAU Patricia - 1MB PDF:
An overwhelming majority of teachers are convinced that creativity can be applied to every domain of knowledge and that everyone can be creative. They also subscribe to the idea that creativity is a fundamental skill to be developed in schools, even if they are more ambiguous about how it can be taught, and less sure still about how it can be assessed.Survey respondents were asked to express their opinion about how they view creativity, as a general concept as well as in the school context, on a scale of 5 ranging from 'strongly agree' to 'strongly disagree'. The results are displayed in Figure 1.
Literature reports that very often people, including teachers, refer to creativity as being related exclusively to artistic or musical performances, as springing from natural talent, and as being the characteristic of a genius. These myths about creativity stifle the creative potential of students and create barriers to fostering creativity in schools.
To a large extent, the teachers that took part in our survey have an understanding of creativity which goes against such myths. Almost all teachers who took part in the survey are convinced that creativity can be applied to every domain of knowledge (95,5%) , and to every school subject. More than 60% are even strongly convinced of this. They confirm this view very clearly by disagreeing to a large extent with a statement restricting creativity to the realm of artistic and cultural expression (85%).
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Two elite English-medium schools offering the local curriculum have drawn up bold expansion plans that will enable them to admit children from non-Chinese-speaking families.St Paul's Co-educational College and Diocesan Boys School are setting up boarding houses and International Baccalaureate programmes and have devised adapted Chinese-language programmes for pupils who are not native speakers of Chinese.
The moves will permit the Direct Subsidy Scheme schools, which require all pupils to study Chinese language, to widen their nets to include children from English-speaking families, as well as foreign pupils and ethnic minority children.
Currently, almost all pupils at the schools, which are obliged to offer the local curriculum and will run the IB Diploma alongside it, have Chinese as their mother tongue and most are permanent residents.
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More minority students need to be lured into the sciences. One program has been a resounding success.At most universities, freshman chemistry, a class I've taught for nearly 40 years, is the first course students take on the road to a career in the health professions or the biological or physical sciences. It's a tough course, and for many students it's the obstacle that keeps them from majoring in science. This is particularly true for minority students.
In 2005, more than two-thirds of the American scientific workforce was composed of white males. But by 2050, white males will make up less than one-fourth of the population. If the pipeline fails to produce qualified nonwhite scientists, we will, in effect, be competing against the rest of the world with one hand tied behind our backs.
We've been able to survive for the last several decades in large measure because of the "brain drain" -- the fact that the most able students from other countries, particularly China and India, have come here to study science at our best universities and, in many cases, have stayed to become key players in our scientific endeavors.
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It was Deadline Day at YES Prep North Central, the day college applications were supposed to be finished, the day essays, personal statements and a seemingly endless series of forms needed to be slipped into white envelopes, ready for submission.The day the school's first graduating class would take one leap closer to college.
The seniors inside Room A121 were sprinting, scurrying and stumbling to the finish line. They hunched over plastic banquet tables, brows furrowed and eyed fixed on the screens of Dell laptop computers. Keyboards clattered, papers rustled and sighs swept across the room like waves of nervous energy.
So much was riding on this.
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If you're gearing up for a job search now as an undergraduate or returning student, there are several bright spots where new jobs and promising career paths are expected to emerge in the next few years.Technology, health care and education will continue to be hot job sectors, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' outlook for job growth between 2008 and 2018. But those and other fields will yield new opportunities, and even some tried-and-true fields will bring some new jobs that will combine a variety of skill sets.
The degrees employers say they'll most look for include finance, engineering and computer science, says Andrea Koncz, employment-information manager at the National Association of Colleges and Employers. But to land the jobs that will see some of the most growth, job seekers will need to branch out and pick up secondary skills or combine hard science study with softer skills, career experts say, which many students already are doing. "Students are positioned well for future employment, particularly in specialized fields," Ms. Koncz says.
Career experts say the key to securing jobs in growing fields will be coupling an in-demand degree with expertise in emerging trends. For example, communications pros will have to master social media and the analytics that come with it; nursing students will have to learn about risk management and electronic records; and techies will need to keep up with the latest in Web marketing, user-experience design and other Web-related skills.
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This report summarizes data on the use of Infinite Campus teacher tools and the Parent and Student Portal. Data come from a survey conducted among all teachers responsible for students within the Infinite Campus system and an analysis of the Infinite Campus data base. Below are highlights from the report.About half of all middle and high school teachers responsible for providing grades to students are using the grade book tool.
Grade book use has declined over the past year at the middle school level due to the introduction of standards- based grading. In addition to the change in grading approach, the grade book tool in Infinite Campus does not handle standards-based grading as efficiently as traditional grading.
Lesson Planner and Grade book use is most common among World Languages, Physical Education, and Science teachers and less common among fine arts and language arts/reading teachers.
Grade book and other tool use is most common among teachers with less than three years of teaching experience. Seventy percent ofteachers responding to the survey within these years of experience category report using the tools compared with about half of all other experience categories.
Most of the other teacher tools within Infinite Campus, e.g., Messenger, Newsletters, reports, etc., are not being used due to a lack of familiarity with them.
Many teachers expressed interest in learning about how they can use other digital tools such as the Moodie learning management system, blogs, wikis, and Drupal web pages.
About one third of parents with high school students use the Infinite Campus Parent Portal. Slightly less than 30 percent of parents of middle school students use the Portal.
Having just been introduced to elementary schools this fall, slightly more that ten percent of parents of students at this level use the Portal.
Parents of white students are more likely to use the Portal than are parents of students within other racial/ethnic subgroups.
About half of all high school students have used the Portal at one time this school year.
About one in five middle school students have used the Portal this year.
Variation in student portal use is wide across the middle and high schools.
Follow up is planned during January 2010 with staff on how we can address some ofthe issues related to enhancing the use of these tools among staff, parents, and students.
This report is scheduled to be provided to the Board of Education in February 2010.
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Across the rich world more women are working than ever before. Coping with this change will be one of the great challenges of the coming decadesTHE economic empowerment of women across the rich world is one of the most remarkable revolutions of the past 50 years. It is remarkable because of the extent of the change: millions of people who were once dependent on men have taken control of their own economic fates. It is remarkable also because it has produced so little friction: a change that affects the most intimate aspects of people's identities has been widely welcomed by men as well as women. Dramatic social change seldom takes such a benign form.
Yet even benign change can come with a sting in its tail. Social arrangements have not caught up with economic changes. Many children have paid a price for the rise of the two-income household. Many women--and indeed many men--feel that they are caught in an ever-tightening tangle of commitments. If the empowerment of women was one of the great changes of the past 50 years, dealing with its social consequences will be one of the great challenges of the next 50.
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When the government subsidizes something, we wind up with more of it. When it subsidizes something heavily--and combines that subsidy with an aggressive campaign encouraging consumption of that thing from the presidential bully pulpit--we wind up with a lot more of it.Oceans of federal money gush into higher education every day, and every administration promises more to come. That gush obscures the real demand for educated workers. The result is lots of cashiers and waitresses with B.A.s, and lots of people with student loan debt that's tough for them to repay. For most students, the federal subsides geared toward nudging them to consume more education actually result in the acquisition of more education debt.
On the corporate side (and the non-profit side, for that matter) the subsidy encourages institutions to shape their practices around grabbing as much of that "free" money as possible. As critics of for-profit education never fail to note:
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Victor Pauca will have plenty of presents to unwrap on Christmas, but the 5-year-old Winston-Salem boy has already received the best gift he'll get this year: the ability to communicate.Victor has a rare genetic disorder that delays development of a number of skills, including speech. To help him and others with disabilities, his father, Paul, and some of his students at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem have created an application for the iPhone and iPad that turns their touch screens into communications tools.
The VerbalVictor app allows parents and caregivers to take pictures and record phrases to go with them. These become "buttons" on the screen that Victor touches when he wants to communicate. A picture of the backyard, for example, can be accompanied by a recording of a sentence like "I want to go outside and play." When Victor touches it, his parents or teachers know what he wants to do.
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The end of the year is a time to count blessings. Let's start with the underappreciated fact that the Washington area is the best place in the country for children to both learn the mysteries of science, math, English and history, and to become comfortable with stark differences in race and culture.I've looked all over the country for schools--particularly high schools--that have a critical mass of committed parents and educators of various backgrounds who are determined to create a lively learning environment for every child. It was hard to find that when I lived in Pasadena, Calif., which was still reeling from massive white flight after a desegregation fight. It wasn't much better when we moved to Westchester County, N.Y., where schools were very short of minorities and low-income people.
Coming to Washington, it took time to see the difference. As usual, everyone complained about public education. That's an American pastime. But the more high schools I visited here, the more I realized this was---at least relatively speaking-- the Shangri-la of American education. There were more schools in one place than I had ever seen that fit my profile---well-mixed, well-run, with families committed to strong instruction. They shrugged off neighbors who, betraying unexamined biases, wondered how they could send their kids to THOSE schools.
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When Daniel Ottalini entered the University of Maryland in 2004, his family had an array of choices to cover the cost -- cheap student loans, a second mortgage at low rates, credit cards with high limits and their own soaring investments.By the time his younger brother, Russell, started at the University of Pittsburgh this fall, the financial crisis had left the family with fewer options. Russell has had to juggle several jobs in school, and the money he could borrow came with a much higher interest rate that could climb even further over time.
The upheaval in financial markets did not just eliminate generous lending for home buyers; it also ended an era of easy credit for students and their families facing the soaring cost of a college degree.
To pay for higher education, most Americans had come to rely on a range of financial products born of the Wall Street boom. Nearly all of these shrank or disappeared in the storm that engulfed the stock and debt markets.
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National Fatherhood Initiative:
On December 1, 2009, National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI) released Mama Says: A National Survey of Mothers' Attitudes on Fathering, the first-ever national survey taking an in-depth look at how today's mothers view fathers and fatherhood.
Conducted online by the University of Texas Office of Survey Research, Mama Says surveyed 1,533 mothers over the age of 18 with at least one child in the home under the age of 18. They were asked a series of over 80 questions dealing with a range of topics, such as their general opinions about fatherhood, views on work-family balance, and obstacles to good fathering.The study is a companion piece to NFI's 2006 study, Pop's Culture: A National Survey of Dads' Attitudes on Fathering. The report was co-authored by Dr. Norval Glenn, PhD. and Dr. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, PhD.
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Although the practice is viewed as essential to keeping babies safe, nearly a third of all caregivers still don't regularly put infants on their backs to sleep, according to a new report published Monday.Despite guidelines from pediatricians and a national educational campaign in place since the mid-1990s, researchers found that while there was a dramatic increase in back-sleeping during the first years of the push, the percentage of parents following the recommendations has been virtually unchanged since 2001 - holding at just over 70 percent - although that's still a substantial improvement from the 25 percent rate in 1993.
Pediatricians and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development called for the change in sleeping practices in the face of a large body of evidence that placing infants on their backs reduced the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, the leading cause of infant death in the first year of life in the United States.
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CAL has completed a comprehensive survey of K-12 foreign language programs nationwide, describing how our schools are meeting the need for language instruction to prepare global citizens. For comparative purposes, the survey has collected statistical data in 1987, 1997, and 2008. Elementary and secondary schools from a nationally representative sample of more the 5,000 public and private schools completed a questionnaire during the 2007-2008 school year. The 2008 survey results complement and enhance the field's existing knowledge base regarding foreign language instruction and enrollment in the United States.Jay Matthews comments.The report of the survey, Foreign Language Teaching in U.S. Schools: Results of a National Survey, provides detailed information on current patterns and shifts over the past 20 years in languages and programs offered, enrollment in language programs, curricula, assessment, and teaching materials, qualifications, and trainings, as well as reactions to national reform issues such as the national foreign language standards and the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. The survey results revealed that foreign language instruction remained relatively stable at the high school level over the past decade but decreased substantially in elementary and middle schools. Moreover, only a small percentage of the elementary and middle schools not teaching languages planned to implement a language program within the next two years. The findings indicate a serious disconnect between the national call to educate world citizens with high-level language skills and the current state of foreign language instruction in schools across the country. This report contains complete survey results, along with recommendations on developing rigorous long sequence (K-12 programs whose goals are for students to achieve high levels of language proficiency, and are of interest to anyone interested in increasing language capacity in the United States. 2009.
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We all know that securing a good education for your children is strongly influenced by clout. Do we have it or not? The mayor's kid usually gets more attention than the grocery checker's kid. If you have taken the trouble to make friends with the principal, you are more likely to get your way than if you never appear in the building, or even PTA meetings.But rarely have I seen a better illustration of this than my colleague Emma Brown's terrific piece leading the Monday Metro section about how much Army and Marine Corps families are gaining from those services' decisions to back their members when they seek help for children with disabilities.
Among other examples, she tells how Karen Driscoll, wife of a Marine Corps officer, was told by officials of a northern San Diego County school district that they could only offer a classroom aide for her son ten hours a week. The child's previous school in Fairfax County had provided 21 hours and told her that was what she deserved under federal law.
Most parents seeking special education services know what that means. They are in for a long period of testy meetings, long emails, expensive private evaluations and maybe even legal action before they get what they need, if they ever do. But because of a new Marine Corps initiative, Driscoll had the services of a caseworker and a special education attorney in her meetings with school officials, and soon got what she was looking for.
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"All I remember was landing face first on the floor," said Tina, 18.Tina - disguised for her safety - says the violence spiraled out of control during her six-month relationship with her 17-year-old boyfriend.
"I remember he got on top of me and he was slapping me back and forth," Tina said. "And he said, 'next time you walk by me, acknowledge me. Say that you love me.'"
Raped, beaten and berated on a regular basis, she stayed with him, believing the abuse was part of a normal relationship.
"I knew my aunt went through it so I thought, you know, if she stuck it out with him, with her husband for years, that I should just do the same and keep my mouth shut," she added.
When another 15-year old - who did not want to be indentified - met a cute boy in one of her high school classes - she was smitten.
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Sandy Kleffman & Suzanne Bohan:
In some hardscrabble East Bay neighborhoods, people die of heart disease and cancer at three times the rates found just a few miles away in more well-to-do communities.Children living near busy freeways in Oakland are hospitalized for asthma at 12 times the rate of young people in Lafayette's wooded housing tracts.
The East Bay's striking health inequities extend far beyond life expectancy and involve more than differences between the rich and the poor. Disparities exist up and down the East Bay's socioeconomic ladder, according to data compiled by the Alameda County Public Health Department for Bay Area News Group.
Middle-class communities in Dublin, Castro Valley and Fremont have higher heart disease death rates than wealthier neighborhoods in Walnut Creek and Berkeley, but lower rates than struggling areas of East Oakland and North Richmond.
These facts have led public-health leaders to advocate to equalize opportunities for healthful living, instead of focusing only on a never-ending battle to treat disease.
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I spent most of today tracking down some information about the history of information overload, so I though I'd blog it in case someone else is looking into this. Also, I may well be getting it wrong, in which case please correct me. (The following is sketchy because it's just notes 'n' pointers.)I started with Alvin Toffler's explanation of info overload in the 1970 edition of Future Shock. He introduces the concept carefully, expressing it as the next syndrome up from sensory overload.
So, I tried to find the origins of the phrase "sensory overload." The earliest reference I could find (after getting some help from the Twitterverse, which pointed me to a citation in the OED) was in coverage of a June, 1958 talk at a conference held at Harvard Medical School. The article in Science (vol 129, p. 222) lists some of the papers, including:
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If you recently found a shiny gold dollar coin in downtown Bellevue, thank the kindness class. Ditto if you stumbled upon a piece of glass art in Pioneer Square, or a lottery ticket taped to a bus shelter with a note saying, "This may be your lucky day."Since mid-September, the 250 people in Puget Sound Community School's online course learned about kindness by practicing it.
Along the way, they took emotional risks, repaired relationships, improved their outlook on the world, and realized that kindness is contagious.
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Children's HealthWatch Boston:
A new report by Children's HealthWatch and the Medical-Legal Partnership | Boston finds that housing plays a significant role in protecting young children from food insecurity and the health risks of being seriously underweight. This new report confirms that increased support for subsidized housing must be part of the strategy for ending childhood hunger.
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National Center for Education Statistics:
A joint effort by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and National Center for Education Statistics, this annual report examines crime occurring in school as well as on the way to and from school. It provides the most current detailed statistical information to inform the Nation on the nature of crime in schools. This report presents data on crime at school from the perspectives of students, teachers, principals, and the general population from an array of sources--the National Crime Victimization Survey, the School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the School Survey on Crime and Safety and the School and Staffing Survey. Data on crime away from school are also presented to place school crime in the context of crime in the larger society.
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Recent discussions on this blog about gender balance in colleges and universities have sparked a number of memories of my own college experiences. I thought it would be interesting to share them here and to invite you to share yours, as well.As noted previously, in 1970 I entered a small college that had, until that year, been the "sister school" of a nearby men's university. There were only a handful of men in my class, and of course none in the more advanced classes.
I had applied to only three colleges in total, all chosen by my parents, and all in the South; two private women's schools and this, a well regarded branch of a state university system. I was accepted at all three, and my parents chose to send me to the cheapest school. I was in no position, or mood to argue; I had narrowly escaped secretarial school, at which I would have been a complete failure; I had no money, and because my parents did have money I was not eligible for the juiciest scholarships. I was grateful to be going anywhere.
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An earlier generation of college students took on the Vietnam War. Now a new generation is poised to take on the mess in Sacramento.This Christmas break, students from University of California and state and community college campuses will fan out across the state to collect signatures in support of an initiative that would free the Legislature from its two-thirds vote requirement on budget and revenue matters. Their goal is to collect enough signatures by April 15 to qualify for the November 2010 ballot.
Amid a welter of sit-ins, teach-ins and building takeovers, this is a bold effort to reach beyond the campuses and address the chronic problems of a dysfunctional Legislature and the state's fiscal crisis. If it passes, the California Democracy Act will allow a simple majority in the Legislature to pass a budget and balance it if necessary with new revenue sources.
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George White, 17, knows what happens to many California kids like him when they age out of the foster-care system. One of White's eight biological siblings recently turned 18. When the payments stopped, his foster parents packed his belongings into plastic trash bags, leaving the teenager homeless while juggling work and classes at an L.A. trade school.Of the roughly 4,500 18-year-olds who will "emancipate" from care in California every year, one quarter will experience homelessness like White's brother. To drive this statistic home, White has organized a 4K run through Compton and will ride his bike 1,149 miles: each mile representing one California foster youth who will spend time on the street, in a shelter, or couch surfing. "It's not enough having people on Capitol Hill saying they will or want to help you, you have to help yourself," he says in the Compton offices of Peace 4 Kids, an organization that works to provide opportunity for foster kids in a community where services are notoriously lacking.
Last year, Congress authorized giving states matching federal funds to extend foster care until age 21. But the way that law is interpreted could mean that in 27 states, including California and the District of Columbia, 18-year-olds would still be left out in the cold.
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With the radio playing softly in the background and munching on spoonfuls of noodles and cheese, Maria Vespa sat at her family's kitchen counter to take her geography mid-term on a recent afternoon.The 15-year-old stared intently at her computer screen as test questions popped up. She'd study each for a minute, take another bite of lunch and click on an answer. When she got stumped, she pulled out her notebook.
"That's one of the great things about online school," Maria said. "You get to use your notes when you're taking tests."
Another great thing about online school: instant grades. A few moments after Maria answered the last test question, her score popped up.
"I got a B," she said. "I would have loved an A, but a B is still pretty good."
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After a year of observing their parents pinch pennies and fret about the economy, the nation's teenagers may be coming to grips with reality.Sales are down sharply in recent months at nearly every major retail chain catering to teenagers, and interviews with teenagers suggest that the reasons go beyond their own difficulty finding part-time jobs.
"I think my sister and I, throughout this year we've kind of lost an interest in getting gifts and things like that," said Morgan Porpora, 16, who in the past had a list of things she wanted for Christmas. "I guess we've noticed the economy and we just kind of even feel bad I guess asking for a lot."
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Nearly 270 Kentucky children died of abuse or neglect during the past decade -- more than half of them in cases where state officials already knew of or suspected problems.During one recent 12-month period, 41 children died -- the highest rate of any state, according to a recent report by the Every Child Matters Education Fund, a Washington child-advocacy group.
In a six-month review of the problem, The Courier-Journal found that:
-- Child-protection officials, day-care workers, and parents, friends and relatives missed signs of abuse such as suspicious bruising and evidence of previous injury, or were hesitant to act.
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Facebook, the popular networking site, has 350 million members worldwide who, collectively, spend 10 billion minutes there every day, checking in with friends, writing on people's electronic walls, clicking through photos and generally keeping pace with the drift of their social world.Make that 9.9 billion and change. Recently, Halley Lamberson, 17, and Monica Reed, 16, juniors at San Francisco University High School, made a pact to help each other resist the lure of the login. Their status might as well now read, "I can't be bothered."
"We decided we spent way too much time obsessing over Facebook and it would be better if we took a break from it," Halley said.
By mutual agreement, the two friends now allow themselves to log on to Facebook on the first Saturday of every month -- and only on that day.
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When the Marquez sisters set out to get pregnant, Edelmira was 14 and Angela was 15.Related: Between Two Worlds: How Young Latinos Come of Age in America.Having babies, the girls thought, would force their Salvadoran-born parents to stop trying to keep them and their teenage boyfriends apart.
Edelmira was the first to succeed, giving birth to a baby girl in the eighth grade. She regretted it almost immediately, and warned her sister not to get pregnant.
Angela, whose round, brown eyes and shy smile are so similar to Edelmira's they could almost be twins, stayed quiet.
"I didn't want her to know I was still trying," Angela recalls, sheepishly. "When I used to see my sister play with her baby, I was like, 'She's so cute; I want my own.' "
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WITH the construction of the railways in the 19th century, a new sociological phenomenon was born: the travelling criminal. Until then, police had relied on local communities to recognise a bad apple in their midst, but now the felons were on the move, wreaking havoc in communities which had no knowledge of their past and hence no reason to be wary. For law enforcers trying to contain the problem by sharing descriptions of known recidivists, it became imperative to answer one question: what is it that identifies someone as a particular person?This question has long troubled humanity, of course, and it is explored in all its facets in a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London. One practical application lies in the forensic arena. The first solution offered, branding, was simple and effective. But even in a society that preferred to believe that criminals were born and not made, this was soon deemed unacceptable. So there was a need to find something innate to human beings that remains constant from the cradle to the grave, and that is sufficiently differentiated in the population to make it useful in identifying individuals.
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Daniel Kahn has never lived in this city, but he has attended its legendary public schools since the fourth grade. Now in eighth grade, he is vice president of the student council, plays in two school bands and is an A student who has been preparing to tread in his sister's footsteps at Beverly Hills High School.But Daniel will almost certainly be looking for a new place to hang his backpack next fall. The school board here intends to do away with hundreds of slots reserved for nonresident children, most of whom live in nearby neighborhoods of Los Angeles where the homes are nice but the city's public school system is deeply distressed.
The students used to be a financial boon for Beverly Hills, bringing millions of dollars in state aid with them. But California's budget crisis is changing the way schools are financed in many wealthy cities, suddenly turning the out-of-towners into money losers.
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It all started with the sound of static. In May 1964, two astronomers at Bell Labs, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, were using a radio telescope in suburban New Jersey to search the far reaches of space. Their aim was to make a detailed survey of radiation in the Milky Way, which would allow them to map those vast tracts of the universe devoid of bright stars. This meant that Penzias and Wilson needed a receiver that was exquisitely sensitive, able to eavesdrop on all the emptiness. And so they had retrofitted an old radio telescope, installing amplifiers and a calibration system to make the signals coming from space just a little bit louder.But they made the scope too sensitive. Whenever Penzias and Wilson aimed their dish at the sky, they picked up a persistent background noise, a static that interfered with all of their observations. It was an incredibly annoying technical problem, like listening to a radio station that keeps cutting out.
At first, they assumed the noise was man-made, an emanation from nearby New York City. But when they pointed their telescope straight at Manhattan, the static didn't increase. Another possibility was that the sound was due to fallout from recent nuclear bomb tests in the upper atmosphere. But that didn't make sense either, since the level of interference remained constant, even as the fallout dissipated. And then there were the pigeons: A pair of birds were roosting in the narrow part of the receiver, leaving a trail of what they later described as "white dielectric material." The scientists evicted the pigeons and scrubbed away their mess, but the static remained, as loud as ever.
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Andrew Levine knew he wouldn't find a job in investment banking when he graduated with an M.B.A. from the University of Miami in 2008. Wall Street was in the midst of a financial collapse. So instead the 24-year-old focused his efforts on launching a start-up. "I figured that starting my own company was the best use of my time while I waited for the market to thaw," says Mr. Levine.Faced with an unemployment rate of 16% for 20- to 24-year-olds, a growing number of recent college and grad-school graduates are launching their own companies, according to anecdotal evidence from colleges, universities and entrepreneurship programs around the U.S.
For his part, Mr. Levine built upon a business plan for a niche social-networking company he had created for an entrepreneurship class the prior year. He showed the plan to the father of a college friend who was an angel investor and got $40,000 in seed money in exchange for an equity stake in the business.
Armed with start-up cash, Mr. Levine created audimated.com, an online social-networking site for musicians and their followers. It serves as a forum for the independent music community--both fans and musicians--to discover and promote new music. The site is in beta testing now with a launch expected in January.
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Michelle Parks & Mary Carmichael:
How did you conceive the idea for the project?At first, my editors and I were interested in childhood bipolar disorder simply because it's a controversial topic -- there's a lot of debate about how the disorder should be diagnosed and whether it even exists in kids. But then I found that most of what had already been written was focused on either the academic side of the controversy -- [such as] what is the definition of pediatric bipolar disorder -- or the dangers of medicating kids. There weren't many vivid descriptions of the actual experience of being, or raising, a child with the diagnosis. So I decided I wanted to bridge that gap -- to show as well as tell, to force the reader to think through the difficult decisions that parents have to make instead of just saying "parents of these kids have to make tough decisions."
I thought the best way to do it would be to zoom in on one family, to give the reader someone with whom to identify. I knew the Blakes were the right family when Amy [Max's mother] said to me in our first interview that "no one understands how it feels" to raise a child like Max -- after all, the whole purpose of the project was to show people how that feels.
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Many 4-year-olds cannot count up to their own age when they arrive at preschool, and those at the Stanley M. Makowski Early Childhood Center are hardly prodigies. Most live in this city's poorer districts and begin their academic life well behind the curve.
But there they were on a recent Wednesday morning, three months into the school year, counting up to seven and higher, even doing some elementary addition and subtraction. At recess, one boy, Joshua, used a pointer to illustrate a math concept known as cardinality, by completing place settings on a whiteboard."You just put one plate there, and one there, and one here," he explained, stepping aside as two other students ambled by, one wearing a pair of clown pants as a headscarf. "That's it. See?"
For much of the last century, educators and many scientists believed that children could not learn math at all before the age of five, that their brains simply were not ready.
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Adam Sell:
The Concord Review is a one-man outfit run from a cluttered office on Route 20 in Sudbury.Back issues of the academic journal featuring research by high school history students sit in stacks, and editor Will Fitzhugh keeps his computer in the corner so he can leave even more room for books.
Fitzhugh, 73, has been running the quarterly publication for 22 years in an effort to keep old-fashioned term papers alive and well. He thinks scholarly research at the high school level has declined, and students are arriving at college unprepared.
"I think we're doing the majority of public high school students a disservice,'' said Fitzhugh. "They get to college and are assigned these nonfiction books and term papers, and they flame out. The equivalent is sending kids to college math classes with only fractions and decimals.''
Yet Fitzhugh, who started the journal while on sabbatical from his teaching job in Concord (hence the name), can't find anybody to take over when he retires. He took no salary from the journal for 14 years, and even now averages only $10,000 a year.
"It's going to be really hard, there's no job security. But most people don't want to work for nothing, and they don't want to leave the classroom,'' Fitzhugh said. "I don't know how long I can keep going.''
Despite a perpetual lack of funding for his project--Fitzhugh said he's been turned down by 154 foundations--The Concord Review has persevered.
The number of subscribers has grown to more than 1,400, and its printing runs every three months range from 2,500 to 4,000 copies. Filling each issue are 11 articles that Fitzhugh picks from more than 200 submissions.Papers come in from all over the world; the most recent issue features one from the American School of Antananarivo in Madagascar. Of the other 10 articles, seven were from students in private schools, which Fitzhugh said is roughly the average proportion.
And these are no simple book reports the students are writing. This issue includes papers titled "Rise and Fall of Cahokia,'' "Andersonville Prison,'' "Arquebus in Japan,'' and "Civil War Medicine.''
"Obviously it's been difficult in some ways, but I've been inspired by the work of the kids,'' Fitzhugh said.
One of those is Jonathan Weinstein. When he started writing a research paper for his Asian studies class at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, Weinstein said, he expected it to come out around 10 pages, roughly the assigned length. But as he kept digging into information on HIV/AIDS in China, his paper grew.
"As I got into the topic, there wasn't any way to do a proper analysis without making it around 34 pages,'' Weinstein said. He started looking toward other avenues of publication, and settled on The Concord Review.
Sandra Crawford, Weinstein's teacher at Lincoln-Sudbury, hopes the recognition he got for his report might drive other students to attempt the same.
"I know it's made me think about when I have students do excellent papers, how can I bring those to a wider audience?'' Crawford said.
Though public schools contribute fewer of the papers Fitzhugh publishes, The Concord Review has a fan in Robert Furey, head of the history department at Concord-Carlisle Regional High School.
"It's an extraordinary opportunity for kids to have their work viewed by a wider audience,'' said Furey. "I think there needs to be a Concord Review to give the most serious history students the chance to have their work read.''
But not all teachers are sold. Todd Whitten, who teaches Advanced Placement courses at Burlington High School and was formerly a department head at Beaver Country Day School in Brookline, says the standards that The Concord Review sets are a throwback to a different era of teaching history.
"I think it's feeling more and more anachronistic,'' Whitten said. Term papers "are the way college works, it's a format that needs to be taught, but anecdotally, it's been taken over by English departments.''
Whitten said from his perspective, history and social studies departments aren't having students write Fitzhugh's style of paper anymore. "The focus is on being generalists, not specialists. You're trying to cover the surface of a lot of stuff,'' Whitten said.
For Fitzhugh, it boils down to showing that high school students are capable of outstanding academic work. The Concord Review is just one facet of his Varsity Academics initiative. If he can help inspire students to strive beyond their own expectations, even if The Concord Review folds, he will have done his job, Fitzhugh said.
"Athletics are performed publicly. Good academics are a secret.''
© Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
=================
"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 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
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Ten privacy groups have filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over recent changes to Facebook's privacy policy.Led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the groups criticize Facebook for changes that made previously private information public.
"More than 100 million people in the United States subscribe to the Facebook service," Marc Rotenberg, EPIC's executive director, said Thursday in a prepared statement. "The company should not be allowed to turn down the privacy dial on so many American consumers."
In response, Facebook said it was "disappointed" that EPIC took its complaints to the FTC instead of the company itself.
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Before Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, the out-of-wedlock birthrate for African-Americans was nineteen percent. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, in 2004 the illegitimate black birthrate was 69.4 percent. In contrast, the out-of-wedlock rates that year for Caucasians and Hispanics were 25 and 45 percent respectively. Consequently, in America well over half of our minority population enters the education sweepstakes with one parent tied behind their back. Our largest minorities groups have a parent gap that not only precedes the performance differential in math in reading, it guarantees it.We are living in a moment in time where otherwise reasonable people debate the merits of raising a child in a same-sex-marriage home. Consequently, it is culturally reasonable to argue whether wealthy Americans can raise children in single-parent homes without handicapping their education. That said, it is criminally insane to suggest that a single parent of limited means is doing anything other than providing a rough life for both child and mother. Frankly, I have had it with televised images of sobbing single parent mothers lamenting the demise of their fatherless children because of the misdeeds of someone else's single-parent child.
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Arriving in Christmas mail, the heaviest letter of them all: next term's school fees. A century ago, the cost of a private education at a secondary British school was about seven guineas, roughly £7.35 or one and half ounces of gold. Today, the average bill is £4,000 a term, or six ounces of gold. At the most prestigious boarding schools, such as Eton, a term's fees can reach £9,000 (before extras). That takes the total cost of a private secondary education to as much as £135,000 - about half a gold ingot.Talk about a heavy load. During the past decade, school fees have risen by three-quarters. Broader UK inflation, meanwhile, has been about 20 per cent. Everything is relative, however, and by some measures school fees have actually fallen. Take what is typically the largest asset owned by a private educating family, their home. Now match it against their largest cost. In 1999, the value of an average UK house was equivalent to five years of Eton fees. Today it would buy almost 6 years.
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Like a Lincoln Center hopeful, Aislee Nieves spends most afternoons in her cramped living room, the couch pulled aside so she can perfect her pointed toes and pirouettes. A spreadsheet tells her the tryouts she has attended, where and when the next one is and the one after that.On a recent Sunday she flitted about her apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, collecting what she needed that day: ballet slippers, leotard, footless tights, all slipped into her bright green knapsack.
"Mommy, you have the admission ticket? And my transcript?" she asked, her 13-year-old voice betraying a slight edginess.
Yes, yes, her mother, Blanca Vasquez, answered. After all, they had been auditioning for high school nearly every weekend for the last month.
The high school admission process in New York City is notoriously dizzying, with each eighth grader asked to rank up to a dozen choices, and the most competitive schools requiring tests, essays or interviews. But for hundreds of students who sing, dance, act or play an instrument, trying out for the ninth grade is now an all-consuming routine.
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Without discussion, the Milwaukee School Board voted 7-0 Thursday night to make condoms available at many of the city's high schools, paving the way to make Milwaukee Public Schools one of the relatively few districts in the nation to provide contraception to students.Somewhat related: biggovernment.com and mediamatters.org have been going back and forth on Obama Administration "safe school czar" Kevin Jenning's K-12 sex education activities.The communicable disease prevention program, as the district calls it, could be in place as soon as the 2010-'11 school year.
The proposal sparked some opposition after being made public Dec. 2, but the board approved the condom distribution without much dissent. Comments from the public are not allowed at board meetings and a board committee had voted 5-0 on Dec. 9 to recommend adopting the program.
The condoms will be available free of charge, but only to students in high schools that have school nurses and only after students request them at the nurse's office, according to a fact sheet circulated by the school district. Up to two condoms will be distributed at a time.
Thursday's vote does not authorize funding for the program, but the district has said it will not use taxpayer money to buy condoms and instead will seek other sources of funding.
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I share this secret only with recluses like myself who lack the imagination to conceive of any gift better than a book. If you are buying for a child -- particularly if you are in a last-minute Christmas shopping panic -- scan this list compiled by a company called Renaissance Learning.It is an amazing document. Parents who keep track of what their children are doing in school, particularly in this area, might be vaguely aware of Renaissance Learning and its famous product, Accelerated Reader, the most influential reading program in the country. It was started 23 years ago by Judi Paul and her husband, Terry, after she invented on her kitchen table a quizzing system to motivate their children to read.
Students read books, some assigned but many chosen on their own, and then take computer quizzes, either online or with Accelerated Reader software, to see whether they understood what they read. Students compile points based in part on the difficulty and length of each book and sometimes earn prizes from their schools.
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A Taunton, Massachusetts father is furious that his 8-year-old son was sent home from school and required to undergo a psychological evaluation.All this comes the boy drawing a picture of Jesus on the cross. It was part of a second grade Christmas assignment.
The student was ordered into counseling by his principal. After the little boy did go into counseling, and the doctor said he was fine, but his father says his son is now uncomfortable in school.
Chester Johnson, father: "I want to transfer him to another school and I want something done about this. They owe my family an apology and they owe me an apology."
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Betsey Stevenson [317K PDF]:
Previous research has found that male high school athletes experience better outcomes than non-athletes, including higher educational attainment, employment rates, and wages. However, students self-select into athletics so these may be selection effects rather than causal effects. To address this issue, I examine Title IX which provides a unique quasi- experiment in female athletic participation. Between 1972 and 1978 U.S. high schools rapidly increased their female athletic participation rates--to approximately the same level as their male athletic participation rates--in order to comply with Title IX. This paper uses variation in the level of boys' athletic participation across states before Title IX as an instrument for the change in girls' athletic participation over the 1970s. Analyzing differences in outcomes for both the pre- and post-Title IX cohorts across states, I find that a 10-percentage point rise in state-level female sports participation generates a 1 percentage point increase in female college attendance and a 1 to 2 percentage point rise in female labor force participation. Furthermore, greater opportunities to play sports leads to greater female participation in previously male-dominated occupations, particularly for high-skill occupations.
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A decade of pesky germs, from SARS to avian flu to H1N1, has given rise to dozens of products bragging about their microbe-killing properties. Everything from hand-sanitizing liquids to products like computer keyboards, shopping carts and tissues tout that they kill 99.9%, or 99.99%, of common bacteria and fungi.But some of these numbers look like the test scores in a class with a very generous grading curve. They often don't include all pesky germs, and are based on laboratory tests that don't represent the imperfections of real-world use. Human subjects, or countertops, in labs are cleaned first, then covered on the surface with a target bug. That is a far cry from a typical kitchen or a pair of grimy hands.
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About 1 in 7 American teens with cellphones say they have received nude or nearly nude photos by text message, according to a new survey on the phenomenon known as "sexting."Helping to define the little-understood trend in teen life, the poll found that 15 percent of adolescents ages 12 to 17 have received sexually suggestive photos or videos on their personal cellphones. Just 4 percent acknowledged sending out a naked image.
Older teens were more likely to report sexting, with 30 percent of 17-year-olds saying they had received such photos, compared with 4 percent of 12-year-olds, according to the report by Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project.
The provocative photos are usually sent as part of a romantic relationship -- or one that is wished-for, the study found.
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As Seattle Public Schools released new details about its latest transformation plan for perpetually-troubled Cleveland High School over the past week, there's been a collective eye roll among some teachers there.Melissa Westbrook has more.
"I've been here for 15 years and every other year we do this," says math teacher David Fisher, referring to a long string of ballyhooed overhauls that the Beacon Hill school has embarked on at the behest of the district.One thing is different: The district is promising to pour money into this reinvention of Cleveland as the School of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). It proposes to spend more than $4 million over the first three years, according to a report at last Wednesday's school board meeting by Superintendent Goodloe-Johnson. That's a lot of money for a school that is already up and running. (See the breakdown of spending on page 8 of this pdf.)
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My wife was enjoying a quiet flight back to Washington after a week off in California when I, sitting next to her, started thrashing around. I was reading a book, but in a way that any person would find disturbing. I was marking and remarking pages. I was filling margins with unreadable scrawls. I was flipping back and forth. I was talking to myself: "Whoa! No! Yes!""What is that?" she asked.
It's a good question. The simple answer is: the latest book by school improvement activist Tony Wagner: "The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need." Wagner is co-director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is also a great writer and speaker. I consider this book more of an experience than a read.
My habit is to write on the last page, next to the inside of the back cover, any column ideas that come to me from a book. The last page of my copy of Wagner's book is a maze of my jottings. I have been making fun of the 21st century skills movement as a high-cost, high-level, often incomprehensible conversation among people who have forgotten to explain what it means to teachers.
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ON THE surface, Framingham, Massachusetts looks like any other American town. Unbeknown to most who pass through this serene place, however, it is a gold mine for medical research. Since 1948 three generations of residents in Framingham have participated in regular medical examinations originally intended to study the spread of heart disease. In the years since, researchers have also used Framingham to track obesity, smoking and even happiness over long periods of time. Now a new study that uses Framingham to analyse loneliness has found that it spreads very much like a communicable disease.Feeling lonely is more than just unpleasant for those who yearn to be surrounded by warm relationships--it is a health hazard. Numerous studies show that loneliness reduces fruit-fly lifespans, increases the chances of mice developing diabetes, and causes a host of adverse effects in people, including cardiovascular disease, obesity and weakening of the immune system. Simply being surrounded by others is no cure. In people, the mere perception of being isolated is more than enough to create the bad health effects. However, in spite of its significant impact, precious little is known about how loneliness moves through communities.
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During the years Salman Khan spent scrutinizing financials for hedge funds, he rationalized the profit-obsessed work by telling himself he would one day quit and use his market winnings to open a free school.www.khanacademy.org/.It began with long-distance tutoring in late 2004. He agreed to help his niece Nadia, then a seventh-grader struggling with unit conversion, by providing math lessons over Yahoo's interactive notepad, Doodle, and the phone.
Nephews and family friends soon followed. But scheduling conflicts and repeated lectures prompted him to post instructional videos on YouTube that his proliferating pupils could watch when they had the time.
They did - and before long, so did thousands of others. Today, the Mountain View resident's 800-plus videos are viewed about 35,000 times a day, forming a virtual classroom that dwarfs any brick and mortar school he might have imagined. By using the reach of the Internet, he's helped bring education to the information-hungry around the world who can't afford private tutors or Kaplan prep courses.
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Steve Rankin - via a kind reader's email:
Dear Editor: In the article "Racial Divide," you quote the Madison School District's Kurt Kiefer as saying "We celebrate the high fliers" and state that Madison has 57 National Merit semifinalists this year.But did we "celebrate" them? Two were named last week in the Wisconsin State Journal, and they were named because of their disabilities. I could not find reference to the other 55 on the school district's website. (By searching madison.com archives, I did find a list of 62 from September, including private school students.) How many high school athletes did we celebrate this week, by posting their names, their accomplishments, and their pictures in the paper?
The State Journal names a male and female athlete of the week, and runs a feature story. When did we name a scholar of the week? A thespian? A musician? Do we cover the State Solo and Ensemble Competition as though it were newsworthy? How about math meets? Debate and forensics? Do we review high school plays with the same attention as weekly football games?
When academic and artistic pursuits are covered with even a quarter of the vigor with which we cover sports, when students of color are served by the district as gifted in fields other than athletics, when we let students know in a public way that we value them for those gifts and that hard work, then we can begin to talk about celebrating the high fliers, and then we can begin to scratch our heads about an achievement gap.
When we send the clear message to students, especially students of color, that they are of value to society for their entertainment value on an athletic field, we do not serve them or us.
Steve Rankin
Madison
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Author Beth Fertig says that as many as 20 percent of American adults may be functionally illiterate. They may recognize letters and words, but can't read directions on a bus sign or a medicine bottle, read or write a letter, or hold most any job. Her new book, Why cant U teach me 2 read, follows three young New Yorkers who legally challenged the New York City public schools for failing to teach them how to read -- and won. Host Scott Simon talks to Fertig about her book.Related: Madison School District Reading Recovery Review & Discussion.....
SIMON: The No Child Left Behind Act is often criticized. But you suggest in this book that it perhaps did force teachers to not just let a certain percentage of students slip through the cracks.
Ms. FERTIG: That is the one thing that I do hear from a lot of different people is, by not just looking at how a whole school did and saying, you know, 60 or 70 percent of our kids passed the test, they now have to look at how did our Hispanic kids do, how did our black students do, how did our special ed students do, how did English language learners do - students who aren't born to parent who speak English.
And this way, by just aggregating the data, they're able to see which kids are falling behind and hopefully target them and give them more interventions, more help with their reading. And the ideal is that a child like Umilka isn't going to be caught, you know, in high school and they're going to figure out then that they weren't reading.
SIMON: You make a point in the book you can't get a job cracking rocks these days without having to probably fill out a computer form as to how many rocks you cracked.
Ms. FERTIG: Exactly. Antonio is now working at UPS as a loader. He had to take a basic orientation test. And because he had improved his reading skills to a fourth or fifth grade level, he was able to pass that. But he feels stuck now.
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A handful of states have moved to restrict or regulate school staff members who restrain or seclude hard-to-handle children against their will in the wake of abuses exposed by congressional investigators seven months ago. But many more states have done little or nothing, advocates say.
"There has been a lot of attention, a lot of advocacy, a lot of family members involved, but it's slow going," says Jane Hudson, an attorney for the National Disability Rights Network, based in Washington, D.C.Many states still have no rules in place to address how and when school staff can restrain and seclude children, says Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. So he and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., also on the committee, are pushing legislation to set federal rules.
"Without a federal standard to set the bar, it's the Wild West," Miller says. "We believe the right approach is a balanced one that provides federal guidance to states but still allows states the flexibility to tailor their regulations to their specific needs."
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Click for a Reading Recovery Data Summary from Madison's Elementary Schools. December 2009
Madison School Board 24MB mp3 audio file. Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad's December 10, 2009 memorandum [311K PDF] to the board in response to the 12/7/2009 meeting:
Attached to this memo are several items related to further explanation of the reason why full implementation is more effective for Reading Recovery and what will happen to the schools who would no longer receive Reading Recovery as part of the administrative recommendation. There are three options for your review:Related: 60% to 42%: Madison School District's Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags "National Average": Administration seeks to continue its use.The first attachment is a one-page overview summary ofthe MMSD Comprehensive Literacy Model. It explains the Balanced Literacy Model used in all MMSD elementary schools. It also provides an explanation of the wrap around services to support each school through the use of an Instructional Resource Teacher as well as Tier II and Tier III interventions common in all schools.
- Option I: Continue serving the 23 schools with modifications.
- Option II: Reading Recovery Full Implementation at Title I schools and Non-Title I Schools.
- Option III: Serving some students in all or a majority of schools, not just the 23 schools who are currently served.
The second attachment shows the detailed K-5 Title I Reading Curriculum Description in which MMSD uses four programs in Title I schools: Rock and Read, Reading Recovery, Apprenticeship, and Soar to Success. As part of our recommendation, professional development will be provided in all elementary schools to enable all teachers to use these programs. Beginning in Kindergarten, the four instructional interventions support and develop students' reading and writing skills in order to meet grade level proficiency with a focus on the most intensive and individualized wrap around support in Kindergarten and I" Grade with follow up support through fifth grade.
Currently these interventions are almost solely used in Title I schools.
The third attachment contains three sheets - the frrst for Reading Recovery Full Implementation at Title I schools, the second for No Reading Recovery - at Title I Schools, and the third for No Reading Recovery and No Title I eligibility. In this model we would intensify Reading Recovery in a limited number of schools (14 schools) and provide professional development to support teachers in providing small group interventions to struggling students.The fourth attachment is a chart of all schools, students at risk and students with the highest probability of success in Reading Recovery for the 2009-10 school year. This chart may be used if Reading Recovery would be distributed based on student eligibility (districtwide lowest 20% of students in f rst grade) and school eligibility (based on the highest number of students in need per school).
Option I: Leave Reading Recovery as it currently is, in the 23 schools, but target students more strategically and make sure readiness is in place before the Reading Recovery intervention.
Props to the Madison School Board for asking excellent, pointed questions on the most important matter: making sure students can read.
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via a kind reader's email, who notes that Verona's video archives include very helpful topic based navigation!
At the most recent meeting on Dec. 7, the school board heard a final presentation from New Century School's site council. Developments with New Century's charter renewal are reaching a critical point, since we need approval from the school board by early January to participate in kindergarten recruitment. New Century is one of Wisconsin's oldest charter schools (established in May 1995), and our school community is fighting for the charter's continued existence. It's been a challenging journey.Click "video" for the December 7, 2009 meeting and look for "D", the New Century Presentation. Interestingly, "E" is a presentation on a proposed Chinese immersion charter school.
Unfortunately, Madison lacks significant charter activity, something which, in my view, would be very beneficial to the community, students and parents.
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New federally financed drug research reveals a stark disparity: children covered by Medicaid are given powerful antipsychotic medicines at a rate four times higher than children whose parents have private insurance. And the Medicaid children are more likely to receive the drugs for less severe conditions than their middle-class counterparts, the data shows.Those findings, by a team from Rutgers and Columbia, are almost certain to add fuel to a long-running debate. Do too many children from poor families receive powerful psychiatric drugs not because they actually need them -- but because it is deemed the most efficient and cost-effective way to control problems that may be handled much differently for middle-class children?
The questions go beyond the psychological impact on Medicaid children, serious as that may be. Antipsychotic drugs can also have severe physical side effects, causing drastic weight gain and metabolic changes resulting in lifelong physical problems.
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Pew Research Center. The results - at the end - are rather shocking.... or not.
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lexandria School Superintendent Mort Sherman has discovered that the city's gifted education program needs revision. Sherman likes to poke at beehives. Few issues inspire as much angry mail as changing gifted programs. He wants to find ways to get more black and Hispanic kids into the program, but if I were he, I would go much further than that.Start with the story of one particularly troublesome Washington area gifted child, Warren Buffett, as described in the biography "The Snowball," by Alice Schroeder. By age 13, Buffett, later to be the richest man in the world and a Washington Post Co. board member, had had it with school. I wonder whether it might have been better if his parents had let him quit right then.
At newspaper gatherings, Buffett sometimes mentions the Washington Post paper route he had as a boy. It sounds quaint and charming, until you read the book and discover that the kid had so many routes that his annual income (including proceeds from his tenant farm and other investments) was greater than that of his teachers at Deal Junior High and Wilson High in the District. His father was a congressman. His family was comfortable. But he had made all that money himself as a boy genius entrepreneur. By age 14, he had filed his first tax return.
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Americans serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are amazed at how poor these places are, and how difficult it is to make a living. On top of that, there are lots of children, who are destined to be even less well off than their parents. This is one reason for Islamic terrorism. There are too many Moslems. At least in the sense that the economies of Islamic countries cannot create enough jobs for all the young people coming of age. Consider that for the last fifty years, the population of all Moslem countries has tripled. That's population growth that is more than double the rate of the world as a whole, and about ten times the rate of Europe. It's about five times the rate in the United States.Many of those unemployed young men are angry, and making war is a typical activity of angry young men. But the women are not too happy either, and this is becoming a major threat to Islamic terrorists. In Islamic societies, women's activities are greatly restricted. One thing they are encouraged to do is have lots of children. Many women in Islamic countries are rebelling against this. You don't hear much about this, because women don't rebel in the same loud, headline grabbing way that men do. What unhappy women often do is stop having children. Not so easy to do, you think? Well, think again.
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Wisconsin DPI, via a kind reader's email:
Eighty percent of Wisconsin school districts offer 4-year-old kindergarten (4K), educational programming that has been growing throughout the state.
Sixteen school districts opened 4K programs this year. The 333 districts that provide 4K programs are serving 38,075 children, an enrollment increase of more than 4,000 from last year. Of the districts providing 4K, 101 do so through the community approach, which blends public and private resources to allow more options for the care and education of all 4-year-olds.Licensed teachers provide instruction for all public school district 4K programs. In the community approach, some districts provide a licensed 4K teacher in a private child care setting, some contract with Head Start or the child care setting for the licensed teachers, and others bring child care into the licensed 4K public school program or mesh licensed 4K services with a Head Start program. Wisconsin is one of the nation's leading models for combining educational and community care services for 4-year-olds.
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What are the implications of "tracking," or grouping students into separate classes based on their achievement? Many schools have moved away from this practice and reduced the number of subject-area courses offered in a given grade. In this new Thomas B. Fordham Institute report, Brookings scholar Tom Loveless examines tracking and detracking in Massachusetts middle schools, with particular focus on changes that have occurred over time and their implications for high-achieving students. Among the report's key findings: detracked schools have fewer advanced students in mathematics than tracked schools. The report also finds that detracking is more popular in schools serving disadvantaged populations.Valerie Strauss:
A new report out today makes the case that students do better in school when they are separated into groups based on their achievement.Chester Finn, Jr. and Amber Winkler [1.3MB complete report pdf]:Loveless found that de-tracked schools have fewer advanced students in math than do tracked schools--and that de-tracking is more popular in schools that serve disadvantaged students.
By 2011, if the states stick to their policy guns, all eighth graders in California and Minnesota will be required to take algebra. Other states are all but certain to follow. Assuming these courses hold water, some youngsters will dive in majestically and then ascend gracefully to the surface, breathing easily. Others, however, will smack their bellies, sink to the bottom and/or come up gasping. Clearly, the architects of this policy have the best of intentions. In recent years, the conventional wisdom of American K-12 education has declared algebra to be a "gatekeeper" to future educational and career success. One can scarcely fault policy makers for insisting that every youngster pass through that gate, lest too many find their futures constrained. It's also well known that placing students in remedial classes rarely ends up doing them a favor, especially in light of evi- dence that low-performing students may learn more in heterogeneous classrooms.Related: English 10.Yet common sense must ask whether all eighth graders are truly prepared to succeed in algebra class. That precise question was posed in a recent study by Brookings scholar Tom Loveless (The 2008 Brown Center Report on American Education), who is also the author of the present study. He found that over a quarter of low-performing math students--those scoring in the bottom 10 percent on NAEP--were enrolled in advanced math courses in 2005. Since these "misplaced" students are ill-pre- pared for the curricular challenges that lie ahead, Loveless warned, pushing an "algebra for all" policy on them could further endanger their already-precarious chances of success.
When American education produced this situation by abolishing low-level tracks and courses, did people really believe that such seemingly simple--and well-meanin --changes in policy and school organization would magically transform struggling learners into middling or high-achieving ones? And were they oblivious to the effects that such alterations might have on youngsters who were al- ready high-performing?
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Five months after it first announced coming privacy changes this past summer, Facebook is finally rolling out a new set of revamped privacy settings for its 350 million users. The social networking site has rightly been criticized for its confusing privacy settings, most notably in a must-read report by the Canadian Privacy Commissioner issued in July and most recently by a Norwegian consumer protection agency. We're glad to see Facebook is attempting to respond to those privacy criticisms with these changes, which are going live this evening. Unfortunately, several of the claimed privacy "improvements" have created new and serious privacy problems for users of the popular social network service.
The new changes are intended to simplify Facebook's notoriously complex privacy settings and, in the words of today's privacy announcement to all Facebook users, "give you more control of your information." But do all of the changes really give Facebook users more control over their information? EFF took a close look at the changes to figure out which ones are for the better — and which ones are for the worse.
Our conclusion? These new "privacy" changes are clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before. Even worse, the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data.
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I have argued that universities will move to a superstar market for teachers in which the very best teachers use on-line instruction and TAs to teach thousands of students at many different universities. The full online model is not here yet but I see an increasing amount of evidence for the superstar model of teaching. At GMU some of our best teachers are being recruited by other universities with very attractive offers and some of our most highly placed students have earned their positions through excellence in teaching rather than through the more traditional route of research.I do not think GMU is unique in this regard--my anecdotal evidence is that the market for professors is rewarding great teachers with higher wages and higher placements than in earlier years.
The online aspect, which enhances the market for superstars, is also growing. Here from a piece on online education in Fast Company are a few nuggets on for-profit colleges which have moved online more quickly than the non-profits.
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Eight-year-old Alex picked up a 75-cent can of fruit punch from one of the grocery store's shelves and called excitedly to his mother in Spanish.Maria, 38, gave her stocky third-grader a sympathetic smile. She'd already made Alex and his 3-year-old sister, Emelyn, walk 30 minutes under a broiling sun from their house in suburban Maryland to the Safeway, the closest place that accepts Emelyn's federal milk and cereal vouchers. Then they'd trekked 20 minutes more to this cheaper Latino grocery so Maria, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who can't afford a car and wouldn't be eligible for a driver's license anyway, could save $3.40 on chicken.
"At home, my son," Maria said soothingly. "When we get home, you can drink some water."
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Cavities have made a dismaying comeback in children in recent years, and the search is on among scientists to find new ways to fight tooth decay.The prevalence of cavities in children aged 2 to 5 decreased steadily through the 1970s and 1980s, thanks largely to the expansion of water fluoridation and to advances in treatment and prevention, dental experts say. The trend appeared to hit a low around the mid-1990s, when about 24% of young children had cavities, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But tooth decay then began heading higher. A CDC survey found that 28% of small children--a significant increase, according to the agency--had cavities in the five years ended 2004, the latest data available. The reasons for the increase aren't entirely clear. But dental experts suggest it may be due to children drinking more bottled water that doesn't contain fluoride, and to changes in dietary habits.
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Childs Walker's article "Poor, minority students lose ground in college, study says" (Dec. 4) was quite chilling for anyone who has watched the demise of our public school system. The thinking seems to be that if minorities can't pass tests than the tests must be too difficult and should be made easier. That has become American education's mindset and has produced high school graduates who can't read, write, do basic math or think for themselves. It is much easier to dumb down education than to address the real problems of lack of parenting skills and inadequate teaching methods.Of course America will be at a competitive disadvantage; while the rest of the world is raising educational standards, we are focused on making sure minority testing and graduate percentage rates are as high as non-minorities no matter how closing the gap is achieved.
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Parents at two largely Latino, bilingual schools - one on Milwaukee's south side and one in Waukesha - are waging battles to save their schools.Although Kagel and White Rock elementary schools stand 18 miles apart in separate counties, the debates at both fit into the larger, national philosophical issues about bilingualism, small schools vs. large schools, economic pressures on school districts and changing demographics.
At Kagel, a neighborhood school in the heart of Milwaukee's Latino community, more than 200 parents filled the school's small gymnasium last month when word leaked out that Kagel was on the list of schools that Superintendent William Andrekopoulos identified for possible closure because of dropping enrollment or performance issues.
Parents reacted with signs that read: "Small school - Ideal scenario" and "Our children's education is important to us."
At the meeting, Andrekopoulos assured parents that Kagel, which is 76% Latino, won't be shut down. But because of low enrollment - 334 students - and increasing district costs, some changes might be in store, such as converting it into an early child education center, he said.
Zuleika Reza, a parent and member of the school's governance council, said parents don't want that.
"We want to make it clear that we want to keep it as a small school that's within walking distance for many families," she said.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-deanza6-2009dec06,0,3692913.story?track=rss:
After-school programs at De Anza Elementary in Baldwin Park keep students, faculty and even families focused on education.The bell signaling the end of the school day at De Anza Elementary in Baldwin Park rang more than an hour ago. But hundreds of students are still at school, studying vocabulary, practicing math and completing homework under the supervision of teachers.
With the help of state grants, federal funds and teacher volunteers, nearly half of De Anza's students spend extra hours every week learning at school -- hours well beyond the traditional school day.
"Until six o'clock at night, you would think we're still in session," said Principal Christine Simmons. "Seeing the campus so alive like that, and seeing the parents and students so excited, just makes me and all the teachers want to work harder."
The result, according to the state Department of Education, is a dramatic improvement in student achievement.
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I attended the Cleveland STEM Community Meeting on December 4 with my wife and 8th grade daughter.First, the important parts.
My daughter is excited about the program. To her it looks like a good mix of the academic challenge of Garfield with the more personalized instruction (and project-based learning) of NOVA. She got most excited when she saw a list of the possible classes in the Global Health Academy.
My wife and I are much more confident about the probability that the program will actually be there and that it will be something like what has been advertised.
There was a pretty good crowd of people there - I'd say about forty to fifty (not counting staff).
The folks from Cleveland who were there are excited about the program and have a very clear picture of the idea - the project-based learning, the integration of technology, the alignment between classes, the extended school day and accelerated schedule, etc.
The STEM program looks real and, to us, it looks good. They still have some things to work out. The schedule is inspired, but needs some tinkering. They haven't figured out how to get the student:computer ratio to the promised 1:1. They are still missing a lot of the curricular elements - they haven't found the puzzle pieces but they know what they have to look like.
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The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights recently announced that it would investigate whether some colleges are discriminating against women in an effort to generate a more gender-diverse student population. Reaction was mixed, with some saying it's about time that the "crisis with boys" in higher education is acknowledged and addressed, and others expressing some disbelief and ridicule that the gender wars have come to this.
But part of the overall response really stuck in my craw--the oft-repeated claim that we "just don't know" what's going on with boys. According to many, sources for the gender differential in higher education are a complete "mystery," a puzzle, a whodunit that we may be intentionally ignoring.
Yes, there are numerous potential explanations for the under-representation of men in higher education--and in particular the growing female advantage in terms of bachelor's degree completion. For example, it could be that boys and girls have differing amounts of the resources important for college success (e.g. levels of financial resources or parental education) or that the usual incentives for college-going (e.g. labor market returns) have differential effects by gender (why, laments the Wall Street Journal, don't boys "get" the importance of attending college?). It's also possible that changes in the labor force or marriage markets, gender discrimination, or societal expectations play a role--or that the reasons have to do with the growth of community colleges, changes in college affordability, or shifts in the available alternatives to college (e.g. the military).
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Michelle Lukacs grew up in Mequon and worked as a teacher in Milwaukee. Then she was a teacher and guidance counselor in Jefferson. She got a school principal's license through a program at Edgewood College in Madison.She moved back to Milwaukee and decided to open a school as part of the publicly funded private school voucher program. She called it Atlas Preparatory Academy because she liked the image of Atlas holding the whole world up and because it was the name of a refrigeration company her husband owns.
On the first day of classes in September 2001, Atlas had 23 students in leased space in an old school building at 2911 S. 32nd St.
This September, Atlas had 814 students, a growth of 3,439% over eight years. It now uses three buildings on the south side and has grown, grade by grade, to be a full kindergarten through 12th-grade program.
Atlas' growth is explosive, even within the continually growing, nationally significant voucher program. Voucher enrollment over the same period has roughly doubled from 10,882 in September 2001 to 21,062 this fall.
The Atlas story underscores an interesting trend: The number of voucher schools in recent years has leveled off, and this year, fell significantly. But the total number of students using vouchers to attend private schools in the city has gone up, and a few schools have become particular powerhouses, at least when it comes to enrollment.
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via a kind reader's email: Sue Abplanalp, Assistant Superintendent for Elementary Education, Lisa Wachtel, Executive Director, Teaching & Learning, Mary Jo Ziegler, Language Arts/Reading Coordinator, Teaching & Learning, Jennie Allen, Title I, Ellie Schneider, Reading Recovery Teacher Leader [2.6MB PDF]:
Background The Board of Education requested a thorough and neutral review of the Madison Metropolitan School District's (MMSD) Reading Recovery program, In response to the Board request, this packet contains a review of Reading Recovery and related research, Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Reading Recovery student data analysis, and a matrix summarizing three options for improving early literacy intervention. Below please find a summary of the comprehensive research contained in the Board of Education packet. It is our intent to provide the Board of Education with the research and data analysis in order to facilitate discussion and action toward improved effectiveness of early literacy instruction in MMSD.Reading recovery will be discussed at Monday evening's Madison School Board meeting.Reading Recovery Program Description The Reading Recovery Program is an intensive literacy intervention program based on the work of Dr. Marie Clay in New Zealand in the 1970's, Reading Recovery is a short-term, intensive literacy intervention for the lowest performing first grade students. Reading Recovery serves two purposes, First, it accelerates the literacy learning of our most at-risk first graders, thus narrowing the achievement gap. Second, it identifies children who may need a long-term intervention, offering systematic observation and analysis to support recommendations for further action.
The Reading Recovery program consists of an approximately 20-week intervention period of one-to-one support from a highly trained Reading Recovery teacher. This Reading Recovery instruction is in addition to classroom literacy instruction delivered by the classroom teacher during the 90-minute literacy block. The program goal is to provide the lowest performing first grade students with effective reading and writing strategies allowing the child to perform within the average range of a typical first grade classroom after a successful intervention period. A successful intervention period allows the child to be "discontinued" from the Reading Recovery program and to function proficiently in regular classroom literacy instruction.
Reading Recovery Program Improvement Efforts The national Reading Recovery data reports the discontinued rate for first grade students at 60%. In 2008-09, the discontinued rate for MMSD students was 42% of the students who received Reading Recovery. The Madison Metropolitan School District has conducted extensive reviews of Reading Recovery every three to four years. In an effort to increase the discontinued rate of Reading Recovery students, MMSD worked to improve the program's success through three phases.
Related:
In her column, Belmore also emphasized the 80 percent of the children who are doing well, but she provided additional statistics indicating that test scores are improving at the five target schools. Thus she argued that the best thing is to stick with the current program rather than use the Reading First money.also, Seidenberg on the Reading First controversy.Belmore has provided a lesson in the selective use of statistics. It's true that third grade reading scores improved at the schools between 1998 and 2004. However, at Hawthorne, scores have been flat (not improving) since 2000; at Glendale, flat since 2001; at Midvale/ Lincoln, flat since 2002; and at Orchard Ridge they have improved since 2002 - bringing them back to slightly higher than where they were in 2001.
In short, these schools are not making steady upward progress, at least as measured by this test.
Belmore's attitude is that the current program is working at these schools and that the percentage of advanced/proficient readers will eventually reach the districtwide success level. But what happens to the children who have reading problems now? The school district seems to be writing them off.
So why did the school district give the money back? Belmore provided a clue when she said that continuing to take part in the program would mean incrementally ceding control over how reading is taught in Madison's schools (Capital Times, Oct 16). In other words, Reading First is a push down the slippery slope toward federal control over public education.
Thanks to Jason Shepard for highlighting comments of UW Psychology Professor Mark Seidenberg at the Dec. 13 Madison School Board meeting in his article, Not all good news on reading. Dr. Seidenberg asked important questions following the administrations presentation on the reading program. One question was whether the district should measure the effectiveness of its reading program by the percentages of third-graders scoring at proficient or advanced on the Wisconsin Reading Comprehension Test (WRCT). He suggested that the scores may be improving because the tests arent that rigorous.I have reflected on his comment and decided that he is correct.
Using success on the WRCT as our measurement of student achievement likely overstates the reading skills of our students. The WRCT---like the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE) given in major subject areas in fourth, eighth and tenth grades--- measures student performance against standards developed in Wisconsin. The more teaching in Wisconsin schools aims at success on the WRCT or WKCE, the more likely it is that student scores will improve. If the tests provide an accurate, objective assessment of reading skills, then rising percentages of students who score at the proficient and advanced levels would mean that more children are reaching desirable reading competence.
I'm glad Jason Shepard questions MMSD's public display of self-congratulation over third grade reading test scores. It isn't that MMSD ought not be proud of progress made as measured by fewer African American students testing at the basic and minimal levels. But there is still a sigificant gap between white students and students of color--a fact easily lost in the headlines. Balanced Literacy, the district's preferred approach to reading instruction, works well for most kids. Yet there are kids who would do a lot better in a program that emphasizes explicit phonics instruction, like the one offered at Lapham and in some special education classrooms. Kids (arguably too many) are referred to special education because they have not learned to read with balanced literacy and are not lucky enough to land in the extraordinarily expensive Reading Recovery program that serves a very small number of students in one-on-on instruction. (I have witnessed Reading Recovery teachers reject children from their program because they would not receive the necessary support from home.)Though the scripted lessons typical of most direct instruction programs are offensive to many teachers (and is one reason given that the district rejected the Reading First grant) the irony is that an elementary science program (Foss) that the district is now pushing is also scripted as is Reading Recovery and Everyday Math, all elementary curricula blessed by the district.
I wonder if we might close the achievement gap further if teachers in the district were encouraged to use an approach to reading that emphasizes explicit and systematic phonics instruction for those kids who need it. Maybe we'd have fewer kids in special education and more children of color scoring in the proficient and advanced levels of the third grade reading test.
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Standards and common assessments were introduced 15 years ago. KIPP took the expectations expressed by state tests seriously and made numerous process improvements to the old model of school. At the middle school I visited Monday, 100% of the Kipsters had passed the state math test.This KIPP school gives uniform weekly quizzes in every state tested subject and relentlessly evaluates the data from every classroom and student. The school only hires new teachers, trains them on data-driven instruction, and expects hard work (e.g., to go along with their bonus plan, a sign in the principal's office read, "New Incentive Plan: Work or Get Fired")
This is the best of the batch-print model. Kids sit obediently in rows in classrooms of 25 students. One teacher per subject per grade yields direct accountability for results. Their homegrown curriculum is mostly worksheets. Quizzes are paper based. Scores are tabulated on a spreadsheet. No fancy learning management system at work here--they just figure out what the state wants, teach it and test it. They are fantastic executors--a critical innovation in a sector that is commonly sloppy and uneven in delivery.
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CEREMONIES in the Great Hall of Parliament House in Canberra are typically attended by visiting royals, heads of state and other dignitaries. On November 16th several hundred ordinary, middle-aged Australians, with pain in their faces and tears in their eyes, packed the hall to witness a ceremony devoted to them. It seemed a miracle that many were there at all. Shipped from Britain as youngsters, or plucked from broken homes and single mothers in Australia, some suffered childhoods spent in orphanages where violence, sexual abuse and humiliation were rife. Some of their peers killed themselves.After years of campaigning, survivors gathered to hear Kevin Rudd, the prime minister, offer a formal apology for this "great evil". It was the second such apology Mr Rudd has offered in under two years. Early last year, he began his government's first term by apologising to the "stolen generations": children, many of mixed race, taken by the authorities from aboriginal families. In all, by 1970 over 500,000 "stolen", migrant and non-indigenous children had been placed in church, charity and government institutions.
Mr Rudd's latest apology has focused attention on Britain's grim "child migration" scheme, under which children as young as three were sent to the former colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, often without their parents' knowledge or consent. One motive was racial: the young countries wanted "British stock". Australia took about 10,000 children, most of them after Canada reduced its intake in the 1940s.
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South China Morning Post Editorial:
The voucher subsidy scheme for non-profit kindergartens triggered an uproar when it was announced three years ago, amid fears that an exodus of students would force profit-making schools to close and claims of discrimination against middle-class families. But critics failed to reckon with parents who believe it is never too soon to imbue the work ethic. As we reported yesterday, the voucher scheme is subsidising a new class of preschoolers, aged from three to six, who spend the entire day in two separate kindergartens - one for profit and one not.Their parents claim the vouchers for half the cost of a half day at a local non-profit kindergarten, and can also afford to enrol them in international classes at profit-making private kindergartens for the other half day. One father concerned argues that twice the time spent interacting with other children and teachers is better than half a day watching television. Moreover, these children are exposed at an early age to two languages - English and either Cantonese or Putonghua - in a school environment. Thus the obsession with grades now extends almost from the nursery door to young adulthood.
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It costs $12,000 to $20,000 to send one child to a preschool in San Francisco, a little less if you join a co-op. That's insane.I'm sure it's not the schools' fault. Schools have to pay San Francisco prices, rent San Francisco space and follow San Francisco regulations. And why shouldn't they reap the benefits of the intense competition that keeps prices high?
I'm sure it's not the regulators' fault. They need to set and enforce the rules that keep our kids safe.
I'm sure it's not the parents' fault. They - we - just want the best for our kids, and we're willing to pay for it if possible.
It's nobody's fault. Which makes it everybody's fault.
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In the category of "it makes you wonder," the student newspaper at Montgomery Blair High School reports that bathrooms on the second and third floors are now being locked during lunch.Why? The school has a security shortage and couldn't figure out a better way to deal with it.
The story, in silverchips.online says that the Alex Bae, president of the Student Government Association met with Principal Darryl Williams on Monday, and that the principal said he hopes the situation can be fixed soon.
Apparently, the story says, the bathrooms were closed during lunch because students abuse their bathroom privileges. Acts of vandalism occur during lunch and kids hide out in the bathroom to avoid going to class.
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Here's one survey colleges in California should feel proud to rank consistently low on: the average debt of their graduates.In 2008, an estimated 48 percent of students graduating from four-year public and private schools in California had debt, and their loans averaged $17,795 per person. Only six states had lower average debt.
Nationwide, about two-thirds of students graduating in 2008 came out with debt, averaging $23,200, up from $18,650 four years ago, according to a study released Tuesday by Berkeley-based Project on Student Debt.
The national numbers came from a survey of students conducted every four years by the federal government. The government does not break out debt for all states or individual schools. To get those numbers, the Project on Student Debt used unaudited data filed voluntarily by 922 public and private nonprofit schools, about half of all such schools.
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The middle school years, when nothing seems more important or more impossible than fitting in, are rough for nearly everyone. But they are particularly brutal for preteens such as Will Gilbertsen, whose mild autism makes him stand out.Less than two months into sixth grade at Arlington County's Kenmore Middle School this fall, the freckle-faced 11-year-old with a passion for skateboarding had gained a reputation for racewalking through the halls between classes. "That's so I can't hear the teasing," he told his mother.
As the number of children with autism has ballooned nationwide, so has the population of children who, like Will, are capable of grade-level academics but bewildered by the social code that governs every interaction from the classroom to the cafeteria. Not so profoundly disabled that they belong in a self-contained classroom but lacking the social and emotional skills they need to negotiate school on their own, they often spend the bulk of their day in mainstream classes supported with a suite of special education services including life-skills groups and one-on-one aides.
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My son just turned 3. He loves trains, fire trucks, tools of all kinds, throwing balls, catching balls, spinning until he falls down, chasing cats, tackling dogs, emptying the kitchen drawers of their contents, riding a tricycle, riding a carousel, pretending to be a farmer, pretending to be a cow, dancing, drumming, digging, hiding, seeking, jumping, shouting, and collapsing exhausted into a Thomas the Tank Engine bed wearing Thomas the Tank Engine pajamas after reading a Thomas the Tank Engine book.That doesn't make him unusual; in fact, in many ways, he couldn't be more typical. Which may be why a relative recently said, "Well, he's definitely all boy." It's a statement that sounds reasonable enough until you think about it. What does "all boy" mean? Masculine? Straight? Something else? Are there partial boys? And is this relative aware of my son's fondness for Hello Kitty and tea sets?
These are the kinds of questions asked by anxious parents and, increasingly, academic researchers. Boyhood studies--virtually unheard of a few years ago--has taken off, with a shelf full of books already published, more on the way, and a new journal devoted to the subject. Much of the focus so far has been on boys falling behind academically, paired with the notion that school is not conducive to the way boys learn. What motivates boys, the argument goes, is different from what motivates girls, and society should adjust accordingly.
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Anyone who has ever had to go to Saturday School knows the grind: Arrive at 9 in the morning, spend three hours sitting at a table looking as if you're doing something productive, take the usual 15-minute break and, of course, scoff at the random troublemaker who tries to set the clock ahead an hour so everyone can leave early.I'm all too familiar with this routine. During my 17th hour of my sixth session in Room 201 at Las Lomas High School on a Saturday morning, a thought struck me: How is this type of punishment possibly going to help me not disrupt class and not get more tardies in the future? Obviously, this method is not completely working for me because I've had a total of six Saturday Schools in my two years at Las Lomas.
Maybe Saturday School is a wake-up call to some impolite students, but it's not enough. Fear doesn't seem to solve the problem. Acknowledges Associate Principal Mark Uhrenholt, "As the year goes on, there will be more repeat offenders."
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Susan Troller, via a kind reader's email:
Madison's achievement gap -- driven in large part by how well white students perform on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam -- is significant compared to other urban districts in the state with high minority populations. White students here perform significantly better on the annual tests than students in Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha and Beloit and scores for Madison's black students are somewhat better than in Milwaukee or Racine. But black students' scores in Madison are lower than Kenosha's and, among younger students, lower than Beloit's, too.Related: "They're all rich, white kids and they'll do just fine" -- NOT!.The point spread between the scores of Madison's white and black sophomore students on the WKCE's 2008 math test was a whopping 50 points: 80 percent of the white students taking the test scored in the advanced and proficient categories while just 30 percent of the black students scored in those categories. It's a better performance than in Milwaukee, where just 19 percent of black students scored in the advanced and proficient categories, or Racine, where 23 percent did, but it lags behind Kenosha's 38 percent. None of the scores are worth celebrating.
Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Education Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a nationally known expert whose work has often explored issues related to the achievement gap. He says racism, overt or inadvertent, may make school feel like a hostile environment for black students, and that it needs to be recognized as a potential factor in the achievement gap.
"It would be naive to say it doesn't exist, and that it's not a problem for a certain number of students," Gamoran says. He cites disproportionate disciplinary actions and high numbers of black students referred to special education, as indicators of potential unequal treatment by race.
Green, who attended Madison's public schools, says when black students are treated unfairly it's a powerful disincentive to become engaged, and that contributes to the achievement gap.
"There's plenty of unequal treatment that happens at school," says Green who, while in high school at La Follette, wrote a weekly, award-winning column about the achievement gap for the Simpson Street Free Press that helped her land a trip to the White House and a meeting with Laura Bush.
"From the earliest grades, I saw African-American males especially get sent out of the classroom for the very same thing that gets a white student a little slap on the wrist from some teachers," she says. "It's definitely a problem."
It manifests itself in students who check out, she says. "It's easy to live only in the present, think that you've got better things to do than worry about school. I mean, it's awfully easy to decide there's nothing more important than hanging out with your friends."
But Green advocates a doctrine of personal responsibility. She encourages fellow minority students to focus on academic ambitions, starting with good attendance in class and following through with homework. She also counsels students to take challenging courses and find a strong peer group."The bottom line, though, is that no one's going to get you where you're going except you," she says
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"Is this level of recklessness something a citizen should even have to contemplate?" asked Lubar, the founder and chairman of Milwaukee investment firm Lubar & Co. In an April 2008 speech, Lubar said Milwaukee County government was such a mess it wouldn't work even "if Jesus was the county executive and Moses chaired the board of supervisors."Leah Bishop:The current system favors elected officials, public employees and unions, he said Tuesday.
"There are a lot of reasons why the unions and others who want power and want control are going to fight this," Lubar said. He said change would be difficult, but insisted that a radical overhaul of county government was possible. He called for the election of a governor and legislators who support the overhaul as the best way to bring about the change.
Lubar also endorsed mayoral control of Milwaukee Public Schools, saying he supported the plan advocated by Barrett and Gov. Jim Doyle to give the Milwaukee mayor the power to appoint the MPS superintendent.
Marshall is among a team of educators, scholars and school administrators collaborating to develop a national K-12 standard for English-language arts and mathematics.Anthony Jackson:"The reason for the initiative is that we have 50 states and 50 sets of standards, which means that a student in Mississippi isn't necessarily learning the same kind of things as students in Georgia," Marshall said.
Marshall said students in each state are learning on different levels largely because of notions of equality, access and mobility.
The set of standards provides a better understanding of what is expected of both teachers and students. Though curriculums will not be regulated, there will be a criteria for what needs to be taught.
"The standards are more statements of what students should know and be able to do, not how they are going to learn," Marshall said.
To succeed in this new global age, our students need a high level of proficiency in the English Language Arts. The ability of schools to develop such proficiency in students requires the kind of fewer, clearer and higher common core ELA standards that the Common Core State Standards Initiative is constructing. Moreover, benchmarking these standards to exemplary ELA standards from other countries appropriately sets expectations for student performance at a world-class level.My sense is, at the end of the day, these initiatives will simply increase power at the school administrative level while substantially reducing local school board governance. I understand why these things are happening, but have great doubts that our exploding federalism will address curricular issues in a substantive manner. I continue to believe that local, diffused governance via charters and other models presents a far better model than a monolith.As the comment period ends, we would like to urge that the final common core ELA standards ensure that our students learn not just from the world but about the world. Internationally benchmarked standards will ensure that U.S. students are globally comparable, but not globally competent or globally competitive. For the latter, common core ELA standards must explicitly call out the knowledge and skills that enable students to effectively read, write, listen and speak within the global context for which they will be prepared, or be passed by, in the 21st century. English language arts offers students the chance to deepen their insight into other cultures, effectively gather and weigh information from across the world, and learn how to create and communicate knowledge for multiple purposes and audiences. To support students' development of the English language skills required in a global economic and civic environment, we urge the English Language Arts Work Group to consider integrating within the common core ELA standards the following essential skills.
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He set his sights on Harvard University while in middle school, after stumbling across it in the encyclopedia. Though he lived in a nearby town, the son of a gas station owner had never visited the campus. The nuns at his Catholic high school refused to write him recommendations, proclaiming the college full of atheists, communists, and rich snobs.Not only did William Fitzsimmons get in, one of just a handful of students on a nearly full scholarship the 1960s, he has spent his nearly four-decade career in Harvard admissions helping transform a bastion of privilege into one more accessible to students from backgrounds like his.
Now, as the admissions season kicks into high gear, the 65-year-old dean traverses the country on recruiting trips, sharing his tale of how a working-class youth managed to make the trip from the modest streets of Weymouth to Harvard Yard, just 15 miles away but seemingly a world apart. It's a story line he imparts frequently to put Harvard on the radar of students who might have dismissed an Ivy League education as a pipe dream.
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All over the world, in poor and rich countries alike, families take their children out of school in order to contribute to the livelihood of the family. They're not opposed to education, but the family needs the extra hands that the child can provide in order to make ends meet. There are many educational innovations that are aimed at improving the ability of the child, once educated, to earn a decent income. But nobody has focused on the issue of replacing or improving the family's income while they send their kids to school.By contrast, the innovations that have been developed by the Uganda Rural Development and Training program and employed at the URDT Girls' School are special in that they increase the family income, not years later, but while the child is still in school. On average, the incomes of families whose children are enrolled at the URDT Girls School increase by 20% while their daughters are still in school.
Think about that for a minute. What that does is eliminate the need to have the girls drop out of school in order to contribute to the family's income. Imagine the implications for the rest of the world if all families benefited by keeping their children in school rather than by having them drop out to go to work.
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Few girls who play sports in suburban Philadelphia would recognize Robert H. Landau, but many coaches and athletic directors know that spotting him in the bleachers could spell trouble.With a sharp tongue, a refusal to compromise and a well-honed sense of injustice, Landau is that familiar breed of community activist with a knack for pushing public officials over the edge. His specialty is girls' sports, and his targets are usually wealthy public schools from the Main Line suburbs that pride themselves on being progressive and fair in offering a rich array of opportunities.
No slight to girls is too small for Landau to take on. His victories range from the momentous to the less obvious, like forcing his daughters' school district to provide more athletic choices, pressuring leagues to showcase their title games and getting a school mascot to perform at their games.
Landau's complaint against Haverford High School -- over issues like publicity for and scheduling of boys' and girls' basketball games -- has upset even those who would otherwise support him.
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Minnesota's charter school movement, which sparked a national rethinking of public schooling nearly two decades ago, has been infected by an out-of-control financing system fueled by junk bonds, insider fees and lax oversight.State law prohibits charter schools from owning property, but consultants have found a legal loophole, allowing proponents to use millions of dollars in public money to build schools even though the properties remain in the hands of private nonprofit corporations.
The key to making it all work is the state's lease aid program, which was created 11 years ago to help spur competition in public education by offering rental assistance to groups promoting alternatives to district schools. In the beginning, many charters were located in dumpy strip malls and received no real-estate grants.
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Parents for Public Schools is recruiting Pine Belt parents to attend a free, two-day leadership institute this spring designed to help parents better understand public education.Amazing...."Most of the time, they do not understand the language or acronyms used in education," said Victoria Peters, a parent coach with the organization who works in the Pine Belt.
"We know parents have something to say, but the reason we don't hear them is because they don't know what to say to give feedback."
The institute is sponsored by Parents for Public Schools, a national organization based in Jackson that promotes parent involvement and leadership in schools. It will be held Feb. 26-27, March 26-27 and April 16-17 at the Hilton in Jackson. The deadline to apply is Dec. 14.
Peters said 30 parents will be selected to attend a variety of interactive workshops and breakout sessions.
"We want a diverse group of parents," she said.
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The redrawing of school attendance zones usually upsets some parents, but a set of proposed changes in the Plano school district triggered a war of words the likes of which the district hadn't seen in years.Presentations on the proposed boundary changes: School Board 2.8MB PDF / Staff 1.7MB PDF.Parents not only lambasted the proposed changes, but they also turned on one another, accusing opponents of selfishly thinking only about their own children.
"This school-vs.-school and neighborhood-vs.-neighborhood thing saddened me," trustee Brad Shanklin said at a board meeting this month.
District officials recently put forth a new set of changes partly designed to quell the anger. And they will find out Tuesday whether they have succeeded.
That's when residents will have a chance to speak publicly about the latest proposal. The district will host a similar meeting the next night in Spanish. School board members are expected to vote on the boundary changes Dec. 15.
New boundaries are needed to balance student enrollment across Plano ISD after more families moved into the district's eastern side.
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Kimberly Hamilton arrives and leaves work in the dark so often, custodians at Winchester Elementary School are on alert not to lock her in or out."If I leave at 5 o'clock, someone's putting a hand to my forehead to see if I have a fever," she says, laughing at the absurdity, but serious about the hours it takes to move children from barely proficient to mastery.
She teaches her third-graders to get along with others, be good citizens, live in a violent society and dream for the future.
The $90 million grant the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded this month to Memphis City Schools to improve the effectiveness of its teachers offers Hamilton the biggest one-time raise she could ever hope for in public education, going from the $49,000 she earned last year to the $75,000 base pay proposed for the district's most talented teachers.
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Milwaukee Public Schools will spend some $4 million in federal stimulus money over two years to support a major parental involvement program in 35 schoolsFirst of four parts
Lennise Crampton, a 40-year-old Milwaukee mother of eight, sometimes wonders how her children would have performed in school if she'd known how to be a better parent from the start.
A single mother until she married this year, Crampton usually managed decent meals and clothing and getting her kids to class. It was up to the school, she thought, to handle the education part.
Then in December of 2005, a representative from Lloyd Street School marched up to Crampton's door and asked her to participate in a program that improves relationships between teachers, schools and families.
Crampton started coming to weekly meetings at Lloyd, where her two youngest attended. She learned about training she could get as a low-income parent. She learned how to engage in her children's academics at home and how to advocate for their needs at school.
"These little ones get the best of the best now," she said. "If it applies to my children's academics, I'm on it."
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With New Jersey high schools already facing a new mandate to teach students financial literacy, at least six school districts will be able to participate in a pilot program that establishes a class on the topic for seniors.I would hope that essential financial calculations would be covered in Math class.
The state Department of Education in June added economics and financial literacy instruction to the state's high school graduation requirements.At the same time, a bill working its way through the Legislature aimed to create a financial literacy pilot program, establishing a course on the subject in six districts. Those schools would receive advice and support from the state in establishing those classes.
Gov. Corzine signed the pilot-program bill on Nov. 20. The program, which will set up courses for high school seniors, will cover topics such as budgeting, savings and investment, and credit-card debt.
"So many young New Jerseyans find out all too late that living in a credit-card culture carries a price," said Senate Majority Leader Stephen Sweeney (D., Gloucester), one of the law's sponsors.
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Trine Tsouderos & Patricia Callahan:
James Coman's son has an unusual skill. The 7-year-old, his father says, can swallow six pills at once.Diagnosed with autism as a toddler, the Chicago boy had been placed on an intense regimen of supplements and medications aimed at treating the disorder.
Besides taking many pills, the boy was injected with vitamin B12 and received intravenous infusions of a drug used to leach mercury and other metals from the body. He took megadoses of vitamin C, a hormone and a drug that suppresses testosterone.
This complex treatment regimen -- documented in court records as part of a bitter custody battle between Coman, who opposes the therapies, and his wife -- may sound unusual, but it isn't.
Thousands of U.S. children undergo these therapies and many more at the urging of physicians who say they can successfully treat, or "recover," children with autism, a disorder most physicians and scientists say they cannot yet explain or cure.
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Time for a status report on all the different ways Milwaukee children can use public money to pay for their kindergarten through 12th grade education:With all the controversy in recent months around whether to overhaul the way MPS is run, the half dozen other routes that Milwaukee children have for getting publicly funded education have been almost entirely out of the spotlight. But Milwaukee remains a place where the term "school choice" shapes the educational landscape in hugely important ways.
- Private school voucher program enrollment: Up almost 5% from a year ago, just as it has been up every year for more than a decade.
- City kids going to suburban public schools using the state's "open enrollment" law: Up almost 11%, just as it has been up every year for about a decade.
- Enrollment in charter schools given permission to operate by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee or Milwaukee's City Hall: Up more than 19% and up substantially from a few years ago.
- Enrollment of minority students from the city into suburban schools using the state's voluntary racial desegregation law, known as Chapter 220: Up almost 5%, although the long-term trend has been downward.
- Enrollment in what you can think of as the conventional Milwaukee Public Schools system: Down, but by less than 1%, which is better than other recent years. Mainstream MPS enrollment has been slipping every year and went under 80,000 a year ago for the first time in many years.
How important?
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It was during the 1999 Maghi festival, whose revelries grip western Nepal in mid-January each year, that Asha Tharu's parents sold her. Asha, who was then five years old, fetched $40. In return for the money, Asha was sent to work for a year as a bonded labourer at the house of her new owner in Gularia, a town near her village of Khairapur."I had to get up very early and I had to clean the pots, clean the rooms and wash the clothes," recalls Asha, now a bright 15-year-old. "I worked all day and I didn't get enough sleep."
I have come along jolting, unmade roads from Nepalgunj in western Nepal to meet Asha at her sister-in-law's hut, a rather beautiful dwelling of unbaked mustard-yellow bricks, more African in appearance than Asian. In the main living area are two large, exquisitely fashioned mud urns built into the walls for storing rice. In the unfurnished room where the family sleeps, Asha sits on the dirt floor and tells me about her new life. She says she is happy in school and that, on the weekends, she works in a brick factory, earning $1.30 for an eight-hour shift. That is enough to buy rice and to help her elder sister pay for school.
More than anything, Asha remembers the petty slights she endured during her eight years of servitude, which ended last year when her "master" agreed to release her. "They would give me scraps. I used to feel very hurt by that, receiving the left-overs of guests or the elder family," she says, glancing occasionally at the dusty ground outside the mud hut where she now lives. "Sometimes I'd get rotten food, or half-stomach food, not enough to stop my hunger," she says. "They would hit me or shout at me if I dared complain."
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Educating children with disabilities is expensive.This year, the Keene School District will spend about $13.7 million for services ranging from special education teachers to speech and physical therapists.
That figure also includes funds for programs that serve children with severe disabilities, programs that are so specialized the district can't run them in Keene.
As expensive as those programs can be -- hundreds of thousands of dollars for one year, in some cases -- the cost is more easily absorbed in a city the size of Keene than in some of the neighboring towns.
Sometimes, the annual school district meeting in a small town can sound like a game of "what if":
What if a child with a severe disability moves into our town?
Paying for one student to attend a specialized program, like the school at Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center in Greenfield, could double the special education budget of some districts.
Out-of-district placements this year range from $30,000 to $375,000 in the Chesterfield, Harrisville, Marlow, Marlborough, Nelson and Westmoreland school districts, according to Timothy L. Ruehr, the districts' business manager.
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A reporter's seven-year correspondence with his 93-year-old cousin, illustrator Sam Fink, reveals a family's past and the beauty in old-fashioned letter writingShortly before Christmas 2002, I received my first letter from Sam Fink. On the envelope, he had drawn an elephant and colored it with orange, yellow, brown and blue crayons. "Good to remember. Happy New Year," he wrote above the address.
The letter was equally charming. He wrote about his son, David, who lived in Israel with a brood of grandchildren and great grandchildren. "When I visit my family in Jerusalem twice a year for a two-week stay, instead of asking about their lives, I share mine," Sam wrote. "In most instances, young people do not know how to share with old people." He signed it, "Your cousin, somehow, once removed, second, or whatever the term...Sam Fink."
That letter marked the start of a seven-year correspondence I have had with Sam, who is a family success story -- a noted illustrator who has drawn popular books about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He was my father's first cousin, and though I hadn't seen him more than a dozen times in my life, a family photo my wife had mailed as a holiday card caught his interest and prompted him to write me.
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Pamela Krys, who moved to Woodland Hills a year ago, made a confession during a school fair this month at Sutter Middle School in Canoga Park."I don't understand the points," she said, referring to one aspect of the application process for magnet programs. "They don't do points in Florida."
Understanding the points system is just one of the complications surrounding school choice in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Although its "choices" website is improving, the school system provides no central location -- online or off -- to help parents manage all their options if they don't want their children to attend their neighborhood school.
Separate programs have different application forms, processes and deadlines. Nor does the district supply some key information, such as student test scores for most magnets. Budget cuts led to the cancellation of districtwide magnet fairs, although some regional administrators have staged smaller events.
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The Rochester, N.Y., public schools do a fine job. Their leaders often have great ideas. But according to Rochester school board member Mike Reno, they are talking about doing something to their Advanced Placement courses that could be troublesome, even though I once thought it was a good idea. (Some people who know me say that is the very definition of a bad idea.)Here is what Reno revealed in an email to me:
"Our district, in an effort to increase AP participation, is proposing to lower the grading scale for AP classes. The idea is based on the notion that kids in Rochester don't want to take AP classes because they are afraid that the tougher work will lead to a lower grade, and they don't want to damage their GPA for fear it will harm their college entrance chances. The district's logic suggests by that lowering the grading scale, students will have a better chance of getting a better grade, and therefore be more willing to take the class.
"This is not their brainchild. They claim other districts are doing it. They are calling it internal weighting. They believe this is a better approach than grade weighting, where an A in an AP class would be worth, say, 5.0 instead of 4.0. The district argues that colleges strip off weighted grades, whereas an internal weight benefits the student during college entrance. (I believe grade weighting has value when calculating class ranking, vals, sals, top scholars, etc, but think colleges are free to recalculate anything they'd like). Am a crazy to think this is a bunch of nonsense?"
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If you went to my high school and weren't in attendance on the first day back from summer break -- say, you had been on vacation with your parents an extra day, or you had come down with the flu -- a rumor that you were pregnant and out getting an abortion went hastily through the locker-lined halls. In 10th grade, it happened to me (I had been sick), and, from then on, I wanted to write about a popular girl who is mistaken for pregnant by her schoolmates. The girl must hand in her homecoming crown, withdraw from student government, where she is president, and give up her football-captain/quarterback boyfriend.Years went by, and I did become a writer -- a screenwriter, not a novelist. I wrote this story to mixed reviews. "Interesting premise," said one agent. "But not much story there." I chalked it up to the particular necessities of those who buy and produce screenplays: They need shocking, cinematic events. They need things to blow up.
I decided to write the story as a young adult novel. I have always loved and admired YA novels, as much for their alternate themes of devastation and lightheartedness as for how influential they can be in their readers' lives. I sat down to write the story and finished it in a couple of months. But before I sent it to an agent who was interested, I did something I never thought I could do: I deleted it.
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When Alexandria Superintendent Morton Sherman walks the halls of the city's schools and peers into classrooms, he can often guess whether the class he's watching is gifted."Standing at the door, looking through the glass, you can tell what kind of class it is" by looking at the colors of the students, he said. "It shouldn't be that way."
Alexandria is a majority-minority school system, except in its gifted program. White students, 25 percent of the total enrollment, are 58 percent of those labeled "gifted." Hispanics and African Americans, 25 and 40 percent of enrollment, respectively, account for about 10 and 20 percent of those in gifted classes.
Sherman, at the helm for a little more than a year, is bringing fresh attention to equity issues that have long confounded the small urban school system, where half of the 11,000 students live in poverty.
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Near the end of her struggle to find the right high school for a son who did not always share her tastes, Tracey Henley was overjoyed to discover that some of her son's best friends had endorsed her choice, and his resistance had vanished. "So now we don't have to forge his signature on the form, always a plus," she said.Where had this painful sifting of options occurred? Was it some struggling urban district? No, Henley lives in Montgomery County, like much of suburban Washington a mecca for those seeking the best in public education. Her story illustrates that in even the best possible circumstances, parents often have to work very hard to find the place that fits their child. I, like Henley, wonder if there is a better way to do this.
Henley's son is an eighth grader at Sligo Middle School in Silver Spring. He has attention deficit disorder, but the meds have been effective and through elementary school he performed well above grade level in all subjects. Then he entered middle school and "we were really unprepared for just how much his already-poor executive management functions would collapse in the face of increased expectations," Henley said.
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London's 2012 Olympics logo is in trouble again. The head of the company chosen to market the games struggled last week to find anything nice to say about the logo, which has been compared to crazy paving, graffiti or a broken swastika."For us, it is irrelevant whether we like it or not," Brett Gosper, chief executive of McCann Worldgroup in Europe, told the Financial Times. Pressed on whether he would have designed a logo like that, he said: "Probably not."
When the logo, dreamt up by brand company Wolff Olins, was unveiled in 2007, its defenders said it did not matter what the older generation thought. It was aimed at the irreverent, technology-loving young.
"Move over oldies. Who is doing the running anyway?" one defender of the logo wrote to the FT. "What has been delivered is a tag, to use the language of the street...If the logo appears sprayed on walls up and down the land, so be it."
As someone who occasionally talks about journalism in schools, I find the logo useful. I show it to classes of teenagers, we discuss it and I then get them to write a column about it. They all recognise the logo - and they almost all loathe it.
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More than two million children are being taught in schools that are mediocre or failing, inspectors said yesterday.
- Half of academies are substandard
- Countless school graduates start work without 3Rs
- £5billion wasted on adult literacy classes
A 'stubborn core' of incompetent teachers is holding pupils back and fuelling indiscipline and truancy, Ofsted warned.
Despite a raft of national initiatives, a third of schools still fail to offer a good education.
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Faced with a federal lawsuit alleging gender discrimination, the Elmbrook School District has reversed an earlier decision and will allow students from both its high schools to join a girls ice hockey cooperative.Brookfield Central High School freshman Morgan Hollowell and her father, James, sued the School District last month after it refused to join a cooperative with other school districts to offer girls ice hockey, even though the district participates in a similar cooperative for boys ice hockey.
At the time, Elmbrook Superintendent Matt Gibson said the district chose not to join the girls cooperative because too few students were interested in playing the sport and it would be difficult for the district to supervise.
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nctepa2009actual From the presentation
Preparation: John Robert Wooden, revered and very successful basketball coach at UCLA, used to tell his players: "If you fail to prepare, you are preparing to fail."Download the 200K presentation PDF here.and,
Premise: The majority of U.S. public high school students now graduate without ever having read a single (1) complete nonfiction book, or written one (1) serious (e.g. 4,000+ words, with endnotes and bibliography) research paper.
and,
Elitism" is making the best form of education available to only a few. The democratic ideal of education is to make the best form of education available to all. The democratic ideal is not achieved, and elitism is not defeated, by making the best form of education available to almost nobody.
Kieran Egan, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia
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Jay Matthews:
Doris Burton taught U.S. history in Prince George's County for 27 years. She had her students write 3,000-word term papers. She guided them step by step: first an outline, then note cards, a bibliography, a draft and then the final paper. They were graded at each stage.A typical paper was often little more than what Burton describes as "a regurgitated version of the encyclopedia." She stopped requiring them for her regular history students and assigned them just to seniors heading for college. The social studies and English departments tried to organize coordinated term paper assignments for all, but state and district course requirements left no room. "As time went by," Burton said, "even the better seniors' writing skills deteriorated, and the assignment was frustrating for them to write and torture for me to read." Before her retirement in 1998, she said, "I dropped the long-paper assignment and went to shorter and shorter and, eventually, no paper at all."
Rigorous research and writing instruction have never reached most high-schoolers. I thought I had terrific English and history teachers in the 1960s, but I just realized, counting up their writing assignments, that they, too, avoided anything very challenging. Only a few students, in public and private schools, ever get a chance to go deep and write long on a subject that intrigues them.
We are beginning to see, in the howls of exasperation from college introductory course professors and their students, how high a price we are paying for this. It isn't just college students who are hurt. Studies show research skills are vital for high school graduates looking for good jobs or trade school slots.
Students who have been forced to do well-researched essays tell me those were the most satisfying academic experiences of their high school years. Christin Roach, a 2001 graduate of Mount Vernon High School in Fairfax County, glowed when she described the work she put into her 4,000-word report, "The Unconstitutional Presidential Impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton." It taught her the skills that led to her earning a joint degree in journalism and political science at Boston University.Her project was part of the International Baccalaureate program at Mount Vernon. More than 20 Washington area public high schools, and a few private ones, have IB programs. But only a few dozen students at most at each school write the 4,000-word papers to get the full IB diploma. Take away IB and a few selective private schools, and well-organized research projects largely disappear from the high school landscape.
The leading U.S. proponent of more research work for the nation's teens is Will Fitzhugh, who has been publishing high school student papers in his Concord Review journal since 1987. In 2002, he persuaded the Albert Shanker Institute to fund a study of research paper writing by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut. The results were as bleak as he expected. Sixty-two percent of the 400 high school history teachers surveyed never assigned a paper as long as 3,000 words, and 27.percent never assigned anything as long as 2,000 words.
They had no time to assign, monitor, correct and grade such papers, they said. If they assigned long projects, they could not insist on the many revisions needed to teach students the meaning of college-level work. So most new undergraduates check into their freshman courses unclear on the form and language required for academic research.
The colleges aren't great at filling the gap. A new book by Seton Hall University scholar Rebecca D. Cox, "The College Fear Factor," painfully exposes students wallowing in ignorance, and professors not understanding why. Only about half survive this torture and graduate.Why not junk some of the high school history requirements in favor of one solid month devoted to one long paper, with students bringing in their work, step by step, every day? Doris Burton and her colleagues couldn't get their students to focus, but they had little support above. If we want our students to be proud of what they did in high school, we have to insist that they do it, and no longer assume they will somehow learn it in college.
By Jay Mathews | November 18, 2009; 10:00 PM ET
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This year marks the 10th anniversary of California's Public Schools Accountability Act, an early legislative triumph of then-Gov. Gray Davis. While some good things have come out of the law, the act has failed in its two key missions: to inform parents and the public about the true performance of schools and students, and to impose widespread tough consequences on failing or underperforming schools.In contrast to funding-focused measures, such as Proposition 98, the act commendably sought to spotlight school and student outcomes, especially results on the state's standardized tests. While many educators complain about this emphasis on student testing, the real problem turned out to be how the act uses test scores to measure school performance.
The act uses the Academic Performance Index, or API, to measure the performance of schools. Based on student results on the state's California Standards Tests, the API calculates a score on a scale of 200 to 1,000 for every school, with the state designating 800 as the target to which all schools should strive to achieve.
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A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed a class-action lawsuit against the Madison School District over a student transfer policy the district has since re-written.U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb wrote in a 36-page decision that the district was following state law - a law that was later determined to be unconstitutional - when it implemented its policy for assuring that open enrollment transfers did not create racial imbalances at schools.
Crabb wrote that a municipality like the school district cannot be held liable under federal law for trying to implement a state mandate when it has no other policy choices. State or federal law is responsible for any wrongdoing, she wrote.
Madison attorney Michael Fox, who is representing the class, which he estimated to be 200 to 300 people, said the decision will be appealed to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The law in this area is unsettled, he said, and federal judicial circuits around the U.S. disagree on it.
In this case, a white East High School student, identified in court documents as "N.N.," applied for transfer to either Waunakee or Monona Grove in 2007. The district denied her application because it said her departure from East would have caused the school's minority student percentage to increase.
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The loser now will be later to win, the noted social commentator Bob Dylan predicted in 1964 in his generation-defining "The Times They Are A-changin."
In Wisconsin, both Republicans and gay rights activists can take encouragement from those words.And both can be encouraged by the results of a statewide public opinion poll conducted in September for the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute by the UW-Madison Political Science Department.
Less than a year after Barack Obama won Wisconsin in the 2008 presidential race by 17 points and Democrats captured the state Assembly after 14 years of Republican control, favorable opinions on Obama have softened, and the political affiliation of the poll respondents suggests a modest swing to the Republicans.
Furthermore, while younger voters voted heavily for Obama and Democrats in 2008, the WPRI poll shows little substantial difference among younger, middle-aged and older voters on party affiliation. Democrats continued to draw more favorable responses than Republicans, but the results suggest Republicans are gaining ground.
For example, in the November 2008 exit polls, Wisconsin voters age 18 to 29 preferred Obama over Republican John McCain by 29 points, a 64%-35% margin. But in the WPRI poll, less than a year later, sentiment on Obama was remarkably similar across age groups.
Among the 700 randomly selected Wisconsin adults for the telephone survey, 57% said they strongly approved or somewhat approved of the presidents performance. And the comparable figures by age group were 59% for the younger group, 58% for those 36 to 64, and 54% for those 65 and over.
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Keith Ripp and other Madison-area parents have spent thousands of dollars to test and tutor their children for dyslexia. They think this is something Wisconsin school districts should more aggressively pursue.But Ripp has a better-than-average ability to do something about it. A Republican state assemblyman from Lodi, he has authored a bill to require that schools perform dyslexia screening on pupils in kindergarten through second grade, as well as those from grades three to five who score low on reading tests.
Another Ripp bill would require the Department of Public Instruction to ensure that reading specialists, special education teachers and elementary school reading instructors are trained and tested in dyslexic instruction techniques.
"My youngest son, who is 13, has severe dyslexia," says Ripp. "My wife and I knew something was going on before second grade. We hired tutors. We tried to work with the school system to come up with something. We had his hearing and eyesight checked. He was very intelligent but was struggling a lot with reading."
The couple paid for the testing on their own, as well as some tutoring, at an estimated cost of about $8,000.
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A new study has found that young people feel differently about two types of parental control, generally viewing a type of control that's thought to be better for their development more positively. However, when parents are very controlling, young people no longer make this distinction and view both types of parental control negatively.The study, conducted in the United States by researchers at Örebro University in Sweden, appears in the November/December 2009 issue of the journal Child Development. Unlike a lot of prior research on parenting that's focused on control, this study looked at how adolescents view and react to parental control.
Scholars tell us that parental control falls into two categories: behavioral control (when parents help their children regulate themselves and feel competent by providing supervision, setting limits, and establishing rules) and psychological control (when parents are manipulative in their behavior, often resulting in feelings of guilt, rejection, or not being loved). It's thought that behavioral control is better for youngsters' development.
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Kayla Rosenblum sat upright and poised as she breezed through the shapes and numbers, a leopard-patterned finger puppet resting next to her for moral support.But then came something she had never seen before: a visual analogy showing a picture of a whole cake next to a slice of cake. What picture went with a loaf of bread in the same way?
Kayla, who will be 4 in December, held her tiny pointer finger still as she inspected the four choices. "Too hard," she peeped.
Test preparation has long been a big business catering to students taking SATs and admissions exams for law, medical and other graduate schools. But the new clientele is quite a bit younger: 3- and 4-year-olds whose parents hope that a little assistance -- costing upward of $1,000 for several sessions -- will help them win coveted spots in the city's gifted and talented public kindergarten classes.
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Creating a course to teach corporate social responsibility isn't as easy to do as, say, honing a curriculum for Finance 101.After all, integrating public and societal interests into corporate decision-making strategies is tricky. Teaching students to become socially responsible managers first requires dispelling previous notions about where personal values fit in the workplace, says Daylian Cain, assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management. Acting on your values is more complex than it might seem.
In an interview, Mr. Cain, who specializes in conflict of interest issues, spoke about imparting these ideals.
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Tonight, 32 young Americans will win Rhodes Scholarships. Their tenures at Oxford are funded by the legacy of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, a man whose life would not be honored today were it not for his vision that young people of outstanding intellect, leadership and ambition could make the world a better place.For more than a century Rhodes scholars have left Oxford with virtually any job available to them. For much of this time, they have overwhelmingly chosen paths in scholarship, teaching, writing, medicine, scientific research, law, the military and public service. They have reached the highest levels in virtually all fields.
In the 1980s, however, the pattern of career choices began to change. Until then, even though business ambitions and management degrees have not been disfavored in our competition, business careers attracted relatively few Rhodes scholars. No one suggested this was an unfit domain; it was simply the rare scholar who went to Wall Street, finance and general business management. Only three American Rhodes scholars in the 1970s (out of 320) went directly into business from Oxford; by the late 1980s the number grew to that many in a year. Recently, more than twice as many went into business in just one year than did in the entire 1970s.
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The insanity crept up on us slowly; we just wanted what was best for our kids. We bought macrobiotic cupcakes and hypoallergenic socks, hired tutors to correct a 5-year-old's "pencil-holding deficiency," hooked up broadband connections in the treehouse but took down the swing set after the second skinned knee. We hovered over every school, playground and practice field -- "helicopter parents," teachers christened us, a phenomenon that spread to parents of all ages, races and regions. Stores began marketing stove-knob covers and "Kinderkords" (also known as leashes; they allow "three full feet of freedom for both you and your child") and Baby Kneepads (as if babies don't come prepadded). The mayor of a Connecticut town agreed to chop down three hickory trees on one block after a woman worried that a stray nut might drop into her new swimming pool, where her nut-allergic grandson occasionally swam. A Texas school required parents wanting to help with the second-grade holiday party to have a background check first. Schools auctioned off the right to cut the carpool line and drop a child directly in front of the building -- a spot that in other settings is known as handicapped parking.We were so obsessed with our kids' success that parenting turned into a form of product development. Parents demanded that nursery schools offer Mandarin, since it's never too soon to prepare for the competition of a global economy. High school teachers received irate text messages from parents protesting an exam grade before class was even over; college deans described freshmen as "crispies," who arrived at college already burned out, and "teacups," who seemed ready to break at the tiniest stress.
This is what parenting had come to look like at the dawn of the 21st century -- just one more extravagance, the Bubble Wrap waiting to burst.
All great rebellions are born of private acts of civil disobedience that inspire rebel bands to plot together. And so there is now a new revolution under way, one aimed at rolling back the almost comical overprotectiveness and overinvestment of moms and dads. The insurgency goes by many names -- slow parenting, simplicity parenting, free-range parenting -- but the message is the same: Less is more; hovering is dangerous; failure is fruitful. You really want your children to succeed? Learn when to leave them alone. When you lighten up, they'll fly higher. We're often the ones who hold them down.
Read more about "The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting."
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Andrea Ballarin, 23, is a self-confident student hoping to graduate soon from Humboldt University in Berlin. But when she starts talking about getting a job once she graduates, her mood changes. The prospects, she said, are slim.It is not because of the economic crisis facing Germany. Ms. Ballarin, who will graduate in Slavic studies, said the reason for such poor job prospects had more to do with the new higher-education policies the government recently introduced.
"It is not that I think the reforms are bad," Ms. Ballarin said. "They are needed, but they are so ill-thought out in the way they are being introduced."
In the past week, those changes have led to student demonstrations and sit-ins in many universities in Germany, which last year turned out over 309,000 graduates. Adding to the students' anger, several universities have introduced tuition fees, €200 to €500 a semester, or about $300 to $750, to a previously free system.
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China's Ministry of Education voiced on Monday its support for the formation of C9, an academic conference comprising nine domestic prestigious universities and referred to as China's Ivy League by some experts.Xu Mei, the ministry's spokeswoman, said the establishment of the conference is a "helpful attempt that is conducive to the country's construction of high-quality colleges, cultivation of top-notch innovative talents and enhanced cooperation and exchanges between Chinese universities and their foreign counterparts."
On October 12, nine institutions of higher learning including the elite Peking University and Tsinghua Univerisity signed cooperative agreements that featured flexible student exchange programs, deepened cooperation on the training of postgraduates, and establishment of a credit system that allows students to win credits through attending classes in member universities of C9.
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Gov. Timothy M. Kaine announced Tuesday that the Virginia Education Department has launched a study of minority students' low participation in gifted education programs statewide.Related: ""They're all rich, white kids and they'll do just fine" -- NOT!"African Americans represent 26 percent of the state's 1.2 million students but 12 percent of those in gifted education programs. Hispanics are 9 percent of the state's schoolchildren, but 5 percent of gifted students.
"Virginia is proud of both the high standards of our educational system and the wealth of diversity in our communities. . . . It's critical we assess any disproportionate barriers . . . so we can ensure students of all backgrounds have the opportunity to participate," Kaine said in a release.
NAACP officials have urged Kaine in recent months to address racial and ethnic disparities in new regulations for gifted education that he is expected to sign in the next few weeks. Some said a study does not go far enough to address their concerns.
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Education should be the top national priority ahead of health care, the economy and climate change, according to Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) Chief Executive John Chambers.Education should be an issue that brings together Democrats and Republicans at a time when they can agree on little else, Chambers said. He helped present the findings of an education-focused task force at the WSJ CEO Council conference Tuesday.
The task force determined that the government should form a national council for an educated work force, linking together the secretaries of education, labor and commerce, said Accenture Ltd. (ACN) Chief Executive William Green.
"We don't have a national agenda to be tops in the world in education," Green said. "On every measure, we're slipping."
Indeed, countries are doing a better job of preparing their children for the global work force, Chambers said.
AT&T Inc. (T) Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said that the talent pool coming out high schools is getting diluted.
"Parents need to recognize that their children are falling behind," he said.
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The first thing that jumped out at me about today's Washington Post story about kids in D.C. schools eating federally funded breakfasts was "sugar."How much sugar was in the breakfast given to fourth-grader Alex Brown?
He had a bowl of Lucky Charms cereal, amount not mentioned; but a single serving, 1 cup, has 14 grams of sugar. That's not especially high in the sweetened cereal world,
but it's not great.The breakfast also included graham crackers, amount not mentioned. But the amount of sugar per serving, which is one little square, in Nabisco graham crackers is 2.2 grams.
Then there was the juice. The article said the boy had milk and juice, amount and kind not mentioned. But one serving, which is 1 cup, of Minute Maid orange juice has 22 grams of sugar.If the child had a cup of Lucky Charms, two graham cracker squares and an 8-ounce glass of Minute Maid orange juice, he would have consumed 40.4 grams of sugar for breakfast.
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There were a lot of things I was anxious about when I came out of the School of Ed. One was the switch from being the graded to the being the grader. It was really an odd sensation to grade someone else's work in black and white. All that time spent at a liberal undergraduate school attending vegan potluck dinners, talking about how terrible judging people can be, and now I was being paid to judge people every day.It gets easier with time. At first you might pour over your grades for a very long time, thinking about how many points a student really deserves based on their effort and the demonstration of their comprehension of an idea. You might come up with rubrics for the littlest assignments to ensure fairness and award points to papers only after covering up their authors. A lot of that will disappear under the shear workload that is grading. Really, looking at students' work takes forever! A very good friend of mine back in Kansas has over 150 students on her rosters. Think about it: you assign a two page paper in all of your classes and all of a sudden you have a 300 page novel to tear apart, comment on, revise and turn back to its many authors. Who has time for that?
In addition to time, it's really difficult to do any kind of grading if things are going poorly in the first year of teaching. It's unfair to fail all of the students for not learning if you've not grabbed hold of the reigns and taken control of the class. While the vast majority of the students who failed my class last year were making very poor decisions that led to that failure, fewer would have done so poorly if I'd been able to give them the structure and support they needed. How many? Who knows.
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In a grimy shack near the entrance to an orphanage in the far north of Vietnam, Hoang's mother watches anxiously - seemingly torn between instinct and obedience - as her first-born child is taken from her and given to a woman offering to sell him for US$10,000.
"Look at him - he's such a handsome little boy," baby broker Tang Thi Cai says as the two-month-old kicks his legs and blinks. "If you want him, though, you've got to be quick. We've already started the paperwork to sign him over to the orphanage, so there's no time to lose."Sensing my hesitation as she fusses around the fly-blown room, Cai adjusts her sales pitch. "If you'd prefer a girl, let me know," she says. "We have some pregnant women here about to give birth - and as soon as a girl is available, we can phone you."
When Hollywood superstars Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt adopted three-year-old Pax Thien from an orphanage in Ho Chi Minh City two years ago, it confirmed Vietnam's status as one of the world's most popular destinations for overseas adoptions. But a year later, adoptions from Vietnam to the United States were halted amid allegations of corruption, baby selling and irregularities in the way the infants were sourced. Today, the system is mired in even deeper suspicions.
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The parents of exceptionally bright students in Madison schools waited 18 years for a plan to raise the academic bar for their children. But now, they're really getting impatient.Approved by the Madison school board in August, the district's new three-year plan for talented and gifted ("TAG") students already is raising questions from parents about focus and speed. The district's TAG staff, they note, consists of only 8.5 positions in a district of 24,622 students - and three of those positions are vacant.
"Change of a large system takes time," said Chris Gomez Schmidt, the mother of three young children who serves on the district's advisory committee for talented and gifted students. "But I think there's a lot of families within the system who are frustrated when they see that their students' needs are not being met. I think that families don't feel like they have a lot of time to wait."
The district's talented and gifted plan, which replaces a 1991 document, will be spelled out for the public Tuesday night in a community forum from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Hamilton Middle School, 4801 Waukesha St. The forum is meant to make the reforms understandable and "transparent" to the public, said Lisa Wachtel, executive director for teaching and learning for the district.
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A federal judge says Chicago Public Schools must arrange for the immediate transfer of students who want to leave a South Side high school after an honor student's brutal beating death.U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman's ruling Monday came in a lawsuit filed last week against the district by 11 students who say they don't feel safe at Christian Fenger Academy High School. Along with the transfers, the students want a judge to order the district to make Fenger safer.
Derrion Albert, a 16-year-old Fenger honor student, was beaten to death in September during a sprawling fight that was caught by a cell phone video camera.
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BBC:
Cyberbullying is a growing problem in primary schools, according to the Anti-Bullying Alliance.In a small study carried out by the group in south east England, one in five children questioned said they had been bullied online or by phone.
And many of the 227 10 and 11-year olds questioned said they used social networking sites, even though users are meant to be over 13.
Campaigners say parents must learn how to help children protect themselves.
The Anti-Bullying Alliance (ABA), which is a charity bringing together 60 organisations, also released the findings of a survey of parents on cyberbullying at the start of 'Anti-bullying week'.
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Open enrollment has become part of the educational path that many families in the Boulder Valley School District follow, and this year officials have made some changes to the application process to make it both easier and greener.Related: Wisconsin part-time and full-time open enrollment.For the first time, parents can file a request for their child to attend a Boulder Valley school outside their neighborhood on the district's Web site, eliminating the need for applicants to pick up a paper form and drive it to the Boulder Valley Education Center. The online application will mirror the hard-copy version, allowing parents to choose their top choices and explain their reasoning.
"It will be more convenient, faster and it will mean that a person will not need to drop it by the education center," said district assessment director Jonathan Dings. "We think this will save paper and gas, in an effort to be as green as we can in this process."
Parents still will have the option of filling out a paper application and dropping it off, if that works best for them, Dings said. But, he said, the district is "hopeful that we will have a great deal of participation" in the inaugural online program.
"We know that if the product works well, a whole lot more people will try it," he said.
Open enrollment is a statewide option that allows families to send their kids to schools outside their neighborhoods. The option plays a substantial role in how Boulder Valley students are placed, Dings said.
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How many concussions would you allow your child to suffer before you decided that perhaps he or she should retire from the travel soccer team?In the past month alone, I have heard about several dozen injuries to young athletes, both on school and club teams, and I'm starting to wonder how so many families can be obsessed with sports to the point that a child's health suffers.
I've actually heard parents talk about their children's soccer concussions as if they were simple headaches: "He had another concussion last week but should be good to go soon." I know one child who has suffered at least three breaks in his hands from high school football and baseball. His parents know there could be long-term health consequences, but that is less important, somehow, than the glory of youth sports.
There was a story in The Washington Post this month about companies that have redesigned football helmets to cut down on concussions.
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via a kind reader's email:
The case was brought by Seattle parents who challenged the use of race in assigning students to schools, arguing it violated the Constitution's right of equal protection. The ruling was celebrated by those who favor color-blind policies, but criticized by civil rights groups as a further erosion of Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 case that outlawed school segregation."The results of this lawsuit in the Seattle Public School district are very discouraging, especially the disparity in income, race and available resources between "south end" and "north end" schools. A new school assignment plan currently being implemented for 2010-2011 will only relegate neighborhoods of color to the poorest schools in the district. The blog http://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/, while mostly dealing with "north end" problems like APP programs and such, the fact that children will be forced into neighborhood schools is dividing an already divided district. Rainier Beach High School, for instance, demographic data indicates Caucasians at less than 7% and an African American at more than 65%, a graduation rate of 37% and test scores at the bottom of the barrel.
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I got to the last page of the last icon-shattering piece Gerald W. Bracey will ever write, and felt sad and empty. As usual, he had skewered--with great erudition and insight--some of my fondest beliefs about how to improve schools. As a consequence, my thinking and writing about these issues will (I hope) be better next time. But who is going to do that for me in the future?Jerry Bracey, the nation's leading critic of unexamined assumptions in education, died Oct. 20 at age 69, apparently in his sleep, in his new home in beautiful Port Townsend, Wash. This was a shock to everyone who knew him because, although he had prostate cancer, it did not seem to have slowed him down.
The last person to receive one of his infamous emails questioning the ancestry and sanity of the recipient should frame the thing and put it on a wall. I don't know anyone else in our community of education wonks who matched him in passion, honesty and wit. The 2009 edition of the Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education proves it.
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Parents: How extensively do your children do research for school papers? Does anyone still own encyclopedias?
Teachers: What sources and how many of them do you require when you assign a research paper? Is Wikipedia acceptable as a source?Posted by: jane100000
Adam, some would say (and I would agree) that neither conducting an on-line search nor consulting an encyclopedia counts as doing a research paper. Google and wikipedia can give a student a great start in gaining some grasp of the issues s/he is planning to address in a paper, but only reading entire chapters (or entire books) and being able to consult journal articles can get you even close to confidence that you're not missing the boat.
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Its parent-teacher conferences made the evening news. So did cases of swine flu. And Sidwell Friends School has recently been the target of a few small protests that seem aimed at prominent parents, not students.The school, long a favorite of Washington's leading families, is no stranger to presidential children. But in the months since Barack and Michelle Obama decided to send their daughters there, Sidwell has been pulled into the spotlight of a distinctly 21st-century culture -- one that is increasingly celebrity-obsessed and often shockingly unmannered.
Educators and others at Sidwell have portrayed this as what their most famous parent might call a "teachable moment."
When five anti-Obama, anti-gay protesters appeared in front of the school's Wisconsin Avenue NW entrance Monday morning, they were met by 150 Sidwell students waving signs ranging from "There is that of God in Everyone" to "I Kissed a Girl and I Liked It."
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Adrienne Lu & Jonathan Tamari:
Gov.-elect Christopher J. Christie reiterated many of the themes of his campaign in an appearance at a suburban New Jersey high school yesterday, and offered glimpses of his personal life at the end of the campaign trail.Christie told a crowd of hundreds of students at Steinert High School in Hamilton, Mercer County, that his priorities were cutting taxes and government spending.
Asked by a student how he defeated Gov. Corzine - who had the advantages of wealth and the support of national Democrats, including President Obama - Christie said, "I have absolutely no idea."
Christie, who was joined by Lt. Gov.-elect Kim Guadagno and a handful of state lawmakers from the region, told students he wanted them to be able to afford to build lives in New Jersey as they grow older. Christie has four children, the eldest a teenager who now asks to be dropped off behind school so the new security detail following the family does not draw too much attention.
In a meeting with reporters after the event, Christie promised tough negotiations with labor unions representing teachers and state workers. He said the New Jersey Education Association, which represents teachers and opposes many of the urban education ideas he has backed, "has been a strong advocate for the status quo."
"They need to get realistic about the fact that change is coming," Christie said.
In dealing with state workers, Christie said he would be fair, but added, pointedly, "I'm not going to be a pushover, and that's going to be a change."
When negotiating with state workers' unions, Christie said, he and Guadagno "are there to represent the taxpayers."
Corzine was often criticized as being too close to unions.
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A longer school day can help improve student test scores, closing the achievement gap. But critics question the cost of those additional hours.Going to school from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. may sound like a student's nightmare, but Sydney Shaw, a seventh-grader at the Alain Locke Charter Academy on Chicago's West Side, has come to like it - as well as the extra 20 or so days that she's in class a year.
"I'm sure every kid at this school says bad things about the schedule sometimes," says Sydney, who was at school on Columbus Day, when most Chicago schools had a holiday. "But deep down, we all know it's for our benefit."
Finding ways to give kids more classroom time, through longer hours, a longer school year, or both, is getting more attention. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan support a lengthier timetable. Many education reformers agree that more time at school is a key step.
Charter schools like Alain Locke and KIPP schools (a network of some 80 schools that are often lauded for their success with at-risk students) have made big gains in closing gaps in student achievement, partly through expanded schedules. Other schools have been making strides, too - notably in Massachusetts and in the New Orleans system.
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Peter Mandelson wants more contact hours in higher education, but this would reduce students' ability to think for themselvesBoth the National Union of Students and Lord Mandelson, whose ministerial brief includes higher education, are making an issue of the number of "contact hours" between faculty and students, especially in the arts and humanities. It appears that Lord Mandelson wishes universities to market themselves along the lines of commercial organisations, now that students have to pay more out of their own pockets for their education. Accordingly, he wishes universities to compete with each other, among other things, over the amount of time they offer students.
The assumption that lies behind the contact hours issue is a deeply mistaken one. It is that universities are a simple extension of school, and that as at school, students should be given as much attention as possible. This misunderstanding is astonishing coming from Peter Mandelson, who read PPE at Oxford, though comprehensible enough among students first encountering a much more independent working style than they had while being prepared for the endless hoop-jumping at school. But before the unthinking campaign over contact hours gets out of hand, both the nature of a university education in the arts and humanities, and the role of faculty at universities, should be re-clarified.
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Judge Chris Freese sided with the family of Kaleb Drew, who argued that the boy's yellow Labrador retriever is a service animal allowed in schools under Illinois law. They say the dog is similar to a seeing-eye dog for the blind and is trained to help Kaleb deal with his disabilities, keeping him safe and calm in class.
The Villa Grove school district had opposed the dog's presence and argued that it isn't a true service animal.
The case and a separate lawsuit involving an autistic boy in southwestern Illinois are the first challenges to an Illinois law allowing service animals in schools.
Authorities in both school districts have said that the needs of the autistic boys must be balanced against other children who have allergies or fear the animals.
Kaleb Drew's dog, Chewey, has accompanied him to school since August under court order, pending the judge's final ruling Tuesday on the family's lawsuit against the school district.
Similar lawsuits have been filed on behalf of autistic children in other states, including California and Pennsylvania.
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[and the wordless picture books have been a big hit, too!!...Will Fitzhugh]
"The staff cobbled together an approach that incorporates methods and materials used with younger children, such as art projects and wordless picture books, into high-school-level instruction. The idea is to use engaging activities and easy-to-access materials as door-openers to more complex subject matter.
The result is a high school that 'looks more like an elementary school,' Mr. Ledbetter said, because teachers find that letting students sketch, cut out, or fold their ideas seems to work well."
Catherine Gewertz:
The sheep's-brain dissections are going rather well. Scalpels in hand, high school students are slicing away at the preserved organs and buzzing about what they find. It's obvious that this lesson has riveted their interest. What's not so obvious is that it has been as much about literacy as about science.In preparing for her class in human anatomy and physiology to perform the dissections, Karen Stewart had the students read articles on the brain's structure and use computer-presentation software to share what they learned. She used "guided notetaking" strategies, explicitly teaching the teenagers how to read the materials and take notes on key scientific concepts. She reinforced those ideas with more articles chosen to grab their interest, such as one on how chocolate affects the brain.
The class also watched and discussed a recent episode of the hit television show "Grey's Anatomy," about a patient with an injury to one side of the brain. The students' work is graded not just on their grasp of the science, but also on the quality of their research and writing about it.
Ms. Stewart isn't the only teacher who weaves literacy instruction into classes here at Buckhorn High School. It pops up on every corridor. A teacher of Spanish shows his students a self-portrait of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and asks what cues it conveys about her culture. A physical education teacher brings his class to the school library to study body mass. And a mathematics teacher burrows into the Latin roots of that discipline's vocabulary to help students see their related meanings, and uses "concept maps"--visual depictions of ideas--to help them grasp an idea's steps or parts.
Literacy is shot through everything at this 1,350-student Alabama school in a former cotton field 10 miles south of the Tennessee state line. It's been an obsession for a decade, ever since school leaders tested their students and found that one-third of the entering freshmen were reading at or below the 7th grade level, many at the 4th or 5th grade level.
"Those numbers completely changed my professional life," said Sarah Fanning, who oversees curriculum and instruction at Buckhorn High. "I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. Each of those numbers had a face, and that face went to bed with me at night."
'Relentless From the Beginning'
The Buckhorn staff immersed itself in figuring out how to improve student learning by boosting literacy skills in all subjects, something few high schools do now, and even fewer were doing then. That work has made the school a national model. Hosting visitors and making presentations--including at a White House conference in 2006--have become routine parts of its staff members' schedules.
Adolescent-literacy work such as that at Buckhorn High is taking on a rising profile nationally, as educators search for ways to improve student achievement. Increasingly, scholars urge teachers to abandon the "inoculation" model of literacy, which holds that K-3 students "learn to read," and older students "read to learn." Older students are in dire need of sophisticated reading and writing instruction tailored to each discipline, those scholars say, and without it, they risk being unable to access more-complex material. The Carnegie Corporation of New York recently released a report urging that adolescent literacy become a national priority. ("Literacy Woes Put in Focus," Sept. 23, 2009.)
Selected literacy resources at Buckhorn High School:
Professional Reading
Reading Reminders, Jim Burke
Deeper Reading, Kelly Gallagher
Content Area Reading, Richard R. Vacca and Jo Anne L. Vacca
I Read It, But I Don't Get It, Cris Tovani
Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? Cris TovaniWordless Picture Books
Anno's Journey, Mitsumasa Anno
Free Fall, David Wiesner
Tuesday, David Wiesner
Freight Train, Donald Crews
Zoom, Istvan BanyaiContent-Area Picture Books and Graphic Novels
Chester Comix series, Bentley Boyd
Just Plain Fancy, Patricia Polacco
Harlem, Walter Dean Myers
The Greedy Triangle, Marilyn BurnsHigh-Interest, Easy-to-Understand Books for Adolescents
A Child Called "It," Dave Pelzer
Hole in My Life, Jack Gantos
Crank, Ellen Hopkins
Burned, Ellen Hopkins
The "Twilight Saga" collection, Stephenie Meyer
The "Soundings" and "Currents" series, Orca Publishing
The Bluford High series, Townsend PressSource: Buckhorn High School
"We've seen a lot of focus on early literacy, but more recently people are saying, 'Wait a minute, what about kids in the upper grades?'" said Karen Wood, who focuses on adolescent literacy as a professor of literacy education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte."The days are passing by rather rapidly of middle and high school teachers' being able to say, 'Either you get the content or you don't.' I think we are starting to see a greater acceptance of the need for this," Ms. Wood said. "And it has to be a whole-school responsibility, not just something that's put off on teachers."
Sherrill W. Parris is the assistant state superintendent of education who oversees the 11-year-old Alabama Reading Initiative. Buckhorn High, she says, was on the leading edge of the state's adolescent-literacy work by enlisting in the project in its second year, 1999. It was one of the few high schools to do so.
"They have been relentless from the beginning," she said.
In Search of Expertise
When Buckhorn joined the reading initiative, its teachers and top administrators attended the state's two-week summer workshop, and were inspired by its vision of literacy instruction across the content areas. But they quickly saw they would have little guidance in putting the vision into action.
"We called the state department of education and said, 'Can you recommend some good books or programs?' and they said, 'No, but if you find some, call us,'" recalled Tommy Ledbetter, who has been Buckhorn's principal for 28 years.
Ms. Fanning said the state paid for a reading coach that first year, but Buckhorn "didn't know enough then to know how to use her."
The state program's fluctuating funding and focus, and a shortage of expertise in guiding middle and high schools, have meant that adolescent literacy has not received the consistent support in Alabama that originators of the initiative would have liked, Ms. Parris said.
On its own, Buckhorn's staff scoured the field for expertise. Gradually, they assembled a list of authors such as Kelly Gallagher and Cris Tovani, whose theories and strategies seemed to click, and who became their shining stars. ("Kelly Gallagher is our Brad Pitt," quipped Buckhorn English teacher Tracy Wilson.)
Higher Scores
Buckhorn High School has exceeded county and state averages on Alabama's 10th grade writing test. SOURCE: Alabama Department of Education
The staff cobbled together an approach that incorporates methods and materials used with younger children, such as art projects and wordless picture books, into high-school-level instruction. The idea is to use engaging activities and easy-to-access materials as door-openers to more complex subject matter.
The result is a high school that "looks more like an elementary school," Mr. Ledbetter said, because teachers find that letting students sketch, cut out, or fold their ideas seems to work well.
Colorful student work lines the school's walls and dangles from its ceilings. In one poster, a math student drew a picture of himself next to a streetlamp, and described his reasoning in deciding how to calculate its height. He included the calculation and the answer.
On a "word wall" in an English classroom, a student didn't simply write the definition of the word "ostracize." To show its meaning, he insisted that his teacher hang it several inches away from the wall, as if it had been rejected by the other words.
That teacher, Donna Taylor, said she was a skeptic when school leaders began emphasizing visual and artistic depictions of ideas a decade ago.
"It seemed kind of elementary," said Ms. Taylor, who's been teaching for 17 years. "I thought, hey, I'm a high school teacher--we need to be preparing [students] for college, doing serious, deep work, one step away from a bachelor's degree. But once I saw how this visual stuff helps the kids learn, I was on board."
Avoiding 'Assumicide'
Will Culpepper is just such a student. "It's hard for me to understand something when I write it down or read it, but if I do a picture or hands-on stuff with it, I can get it better," said the 16-year-old junior.
Teachers use a variety of strategies to build comprehension. Recognizing that many students are intimidated by vast gray stretches on textbook pages, English teacher Tracy Wilson uses shorter articles or excerpts to teach the same content. That builds students' knowledge and confidence to tackle the full versions, she says.
Taking a cue from math teachers, she uses "talk-alouds," stopping frequently as the class reads a fiction passage to discuss what is happening. Instead of only writing definitions of vocabulary words, her students often make "foldables," colorful projects with sections that open to show a word's meaning, context, origin, and use.
Math teacher Carrie Bates asks students to explain their problem-solving reasoning, in class and in homework. When a student struggles, she finds that simple picture books, like The Greedy Triangle by Marilyn Burns, can work wonders to get a concept across. Then she can build more-complex understanding onto that.
Buckhorn teachers try to avoid committing what Kelly Gallagher calls "assumicide": assuming students have the skills to access the content. They explicitly teach those skills.
Ms. Wilson walks her students through ways to get clues about meaning from context, helping them deduce from the sentence "the phlox is blooming in the garden," for instance, that phlox is a flower.
Career and technical education teacher Connie Mask helps her students get the most from their textbooks, acquainting them with the table of contents and the index, and explaining the significance of photographs and captions. "This was stuff I just thought students knew how to do," she said.
Each week, the teachers work on specific literacy strategies. One week, it's using graphic organizers or Venn diagrams to help students understand content. Another week, it's building students' retelling and summarizing skills or practicing guided-reading techniques.
A good chunk of teachers' weekly professional development focuses on such strategies as well. And in an ongoing "book group," they tackle tomes by literacy experts. Teachers also spend a lot of time scrutinizing data from state and school tests to see how their instruction needs adjusting.
Social studies teacher Jenny Barrett says she didn't used to think her job description included teaching literacy skills. But now she sees that she has to help her students learn how to spot places in the textbook to mark with Post-its, understand the common roots of words like "oligarchy" and "monarchy," and draw pictures of ideas when that helps them understand. She also has learned strategies like breaking text into "chunks" to help students parse the meanings.
Librarian's Key Role
School librarian Wendy Stephens has played a key role in Buckhorn's literacy work, revamping the library's holdings in support of both students and teachers. She helped Ms. Barrett expand the list of materials she uses, such as picture books and comic books, for instance, and works closely with her on a project in which students research aspects of Thomas L. Friedman's The World Is Flat, such as globalization or outsourcing, and make videos about them.
Ms. Stephens has built up collections that typically are popular with boys, such as manga, or Japanese cartoon, magazines, books by Edgar Allan Poe, and a series of books by Dave Pelzer recounting his abuse as a child. For girls, she makes sure to stock the "Twilight Saga" by Stephenie Meyer, and works by Maya Angelou and Ellen Hopkins.
She added wordless picture books, which many teachers use to help students construct storylines in various subjects, and content-area comic books.
Expanding the library's pop fiction collection required a shift in attitude, Ms. Stephens said.
"I had to put aside my own bias," she said recently in the school's large, airy library. "Sure, I thought everyone should be reading Hemingway. But I just want to increase their fluency."
It seems to be working. The number of books checked out of the library has soared from fewer than 200 a month when Ms. Stephens took over in 2003 to more than 1,600. About a dozen students come in early for a book group, and she has set up computer-based videoconferences for students with favorite authors.
Measuring the impact of the literacy work at Buckhorn High isn't easy, since the school no longer uses the standardized test it used in 1998. It does outpace the 19,000-student Madison County district and the state in the proportion of students who score proficient on the reading portion of the state graduation exam, but only by a small margin. (Ninety-eight to 100 percent of Buckhorn's students have been passing in recent years; statewide, the percentage is in the mid- to high 90s.)
The school's proficiency scores on the state's 10th grade writing test are significantly better than district or state averages.
Ms. Fanning points in particular to the fact that one-quarter or more of Buckhorn's freshmen enter as "struggling readers"--two or more grade levels behind--but nearly every student passes the graduation exam by 12th grade.
"We think we are really making a difference here," she said.
Coverage of pathways to college and careers is underwritten in part by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Vol. 29, Issue 10, Pages 20-23
"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 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
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It is well known that many preschool parents have become super-anxious trying to give their kids a leg up on kindergarten, but I didn't realize just how nutty things had become until I talked to several dozen preschool program directors.What child development experts know is that youngsters best learn the fundamentals of literacy through well-designed play. But lots of parents don't understand that. Here is what's going on in the preschool world of the greater Washington region and, I have no doubt, in other places across the country as well.
Parents are:
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I must have landed on an Internet marketing list, because I receive so many e-mails pitching my chances to win a scholarship to an online college. Like: "Hey, mom, apply for a full-tuition scholarship, earn your degree and have a career!" Are these scholarships for real? -- B.R.A few people will win these scholarships, but the advertised financial-aid awards are really hooks cast by companies in the lead-aggregation industry. They're marketing ploys.
Notice that virtually all the schools offering these scholarships are for-profit colleges. Higher-education experts tell me that on average, online for-profit colleges cost three times more than online nonprofit colleges.
Here' the inside story. Lead-generating marketers require scholarship seekers to provide their personal information on a scholarship application -- in reality, a "lead form." The marketers aggregate the forms and sell them to participating schools at a price of up to $100 per qualified lead. It's little wonder that you're receiving so many scholarship pitches.
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This is in response to a "Teen Rant" of Oct. 18 by Lizzie Logan, who complained about SAT tests. Lizzie believes that the tests are unfair because they give an advantage to students from rich families. Here is what I'd like to tell Lizzie:Yes, Virginia, the colleges do prefer knowledgeable students who are already fluent in trigonometry and calculus, who have a reasonably rich lexicon and who can convey their thoughts in the form of an essay. Otherwise, the students will have to spend two out of four college years taking remedial classes. Our society does not need engineers who study engineering subjects proper for only the two remaining years.
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As classes changed one recent weekday morning at Massasoit Community College in Brockton, the line of cars leaving the campus stretched more than a mile back from the lights on Route 27.As other students arrived, campus parking lots overflowed and classrooms filled to capacity. Almost two years into a national recession, this low-tuition, two-year state institution is a very busy place.
"I looked into other schools, but for classes I can take anywhere, Massasoit is a lot more affordable,'' Chelsea Gardner, 22, said as she waited between classes at the student union. A Long Island native who took a few years off after high school, Gardner commutes daily from Boston to the campus on Brockton's east side.
The scene is also crowded at Massasoit's other campus, in Canton, as well as at Quincy College's three sites in Quincy Center, North Quincy, and Plymouth.
Across Massachusetts, students are flocking to two-year public colleges, which have become refuges in the recession. The schools have open enrollment for most programs, and tuitions markedly cheaper than four-year private or public institutions. Students who earn an associate's degree at a two-year college can usually transfer the credits to four-year schools.
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Superintendent Dan Nerad [1.5MB PDF]:
Included in the 2009/10 budget is $324,123 for the implementation of activities specifically related to the approved Strategic Plan.More:Attached are:
Strategic Plan: Objectives organized by Priority 1 Action Steps
Strategic Objectives: Action Steps, Priority 1 Recommended Budget.The total identified in the Priority 1 Recommended Budget is $284,925.
We are continuing to plan in the areas of:
Budget recommendations for these areas will come to the Board at a later date.
- implementing Individual Learning Plans,
- using ACT Standards as part of assessments,
- supporting technology,
- program evaluation, and
- a possible expulsion abeyance options pilot for second semester.
The electronic based ILP (Individual Learning Plan) developed in collaboration with University of Wisconsin staff to meet the unique needs ofthe MMSD. The ILP will be based off of the WisCareers platform which will interface with Infinite Campus, the District's information management system.Related: Proposed Madison School District Strategic Plan Performance Measures.Identify a subgroup of the ILP Action Team to create an ILP implementation plan that includes a mechanism for feedback and evaluation (e.g., Survey instruments, external evaluation conducted by the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research).
Curriculum Action Plan Focus Areas
- Accelerated Learning
- Assessment
- Civic Engagement
- Cultural Relevance
- Flexible Instruction
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Doonesbury covers the Facebook pulse....
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Jeremy Tyler came to this scenic city overlooking the Mediterranean as a trailblazer. As the first American basketball player to skip his senior year of high school to play professionally overseas, Tyler signed a $140,000 deal to play for Maccabi Haifa this year. The grand plan revolves around him being a top pick, if not the top pick, in the 2011 N.B.A. draft.But after nearly three months of professional basketball in Israel's top division, Tyler is at a crossroads. Caught in a clash of cultures, distractions and agendas, he appears to be worlds away from a draft-night handshake with Stern, the N.B.A. commissioner.
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The Wisconsin Legislature passed a series of education reform bills designed to make the state compete for nearly $4.5 billion in federal stimulus money.WisPolitics:
The Assembly voted 47 to 46 in favor of the reform bills around 3 a.m. on Friday morning after a long closed door meeting among Democrats. The Senate approved the measures earlier on Thursday.The action came after President Barack Obama came to Madison on Wednesday to tout the Race to the Top grant program.
One of the bills would create a system to track student data from preschool through college. A second bill would tie teacher evaluation to student performance on standardized tests. Another bill would require all charter schools to be created under federal guidelines. The last bill would move grants awarded to Milwaukee Public Schools for student achievement to move from Department of Administration to Department of Public Instruction control.
The bills remove a prohibition in state law from using student test data to evaluate teachers.
Even with it removed, teachers could not be disciplined or removed based on student test scores. And the teacher evaluation process would have to be part of collective bargaining.
Republicans argued that means most schools won't even attempt to use the test data when evaluating teachers. Attempts by them to alter the bill were defeated by Democrats.
Senate Republicans expressed concern about the teacher evaluation portion, saying collective bargaining could become a hurdle to the Race to the Top guidelines and that teachers should also be disciplined or fired based on standardized testing results, not only rewarded."(Obama) said we have to be bold in holding people accountable for the achievement of our schools. Well, trust me, if we pass this legislation requiring mandatory negotiations we're not bold, we're a joke," said Sen. Luther Olson, R-Ripon.
Four education bills aimed at bolstering the state's application for federal Race to the Top funds were also moved through the Legislature. In the Assembly, passage of a bill allowing the use of student performance on standardized tests to be used in evaluating teachers. Republicans objected to the bill because they say it requires school districts to negotiate how the data is used in the teacher evaluations and would tie the hands of administrators who seek to discipline or dismiss poor performing teachers.It will be interesting to see how these bills look, in terms of special interest influence, once Governor Doyle signs them. I do - possibly - like the student data tracking from preschool through college. Of course, the evaluations may be weak and the content may change rendering the results useless. We'll see.The bill barely passed the Assembly on a 47-46 vote.
The Assembly session wrapped up at about 4 a.m.
In related news, Madison School Board Vice President Lucy Mathiak again raised the issue of evaluating math curriculum effectiveness via University of Wisconsin System entrance exam results and college placement at the 11/2/2009 Madison School Board meeting. This request has fallen on deaf ears within the MMSD Administration for some time. [Madison School Board Math Discussion 40MB mp3 audio (Documents and links).]
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Thomas J. Espenshade, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, used that question to answer a question about his new book, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life (Princeton University Press), co-written with Alexandria Walton Radford, a research associate at MPR Associates. In fact, he could probably use the glass image to answer questions about numerous parts of the book.While Espenshade and Radford -- in the book and in interviews -- avoid broad conclusions over whether affirmative action is working or should continue, their findings almost certainly will be used both by supporters and critics of affirmative action to advance their arguments. (In fact, a talk Espenshade gave at a meeting earlier this year about some of the findings is already being cited by affirmative action critics, although in ways that he says don't exactly reflect his thinking.)
Unlike much writing about affirmative action, this book is based not on philosophy, but actual data -- both on academic credentials and student experiences -- from 9,000 students who attended one of 10 highly selective colleges and universities. (They are not named, but include public and private institutions, research universities and liberal arts colleges.)
Among the findings:
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Natacha Andrews recently signed up her 4-year-old daughter, Anaya, with a modeling agency. Anaya says she wants to be "like Tyra"--that is, model-turned-media-personality Tyra Banks.Her mother, a 36-year-old Phoenix attorney, has another motivation. "I know people who successfully saved money this way," she says. In a weak economy, with five kids' college tuitions to plan for, Ms. Andrews says, "I want to make the most out of whatever resources we have."
More parents are signing their children up with modeling agencies and talent classes, in search of fame and, even better, a little extra money in a weak economy. Agencies like Wilhelmina International Inc.'s Wilhelmina Kids and Teens and Funnyface Today Inc. in New York City and Peak Models & Talent in Los Angeles say they have seen the numbers of child applicants grow in the past few years. Charlie Winfield, head booker at Funnyface, estimates the agency's children's division has seen a 50% increase in applicants in the past three years. Modeling Camp in Tyson's Corner, Va., saw a 30% increase in attendance at its workshops last summer from the year earlier and plans to expand to New York and Florida next year.
The economy is driving the trend, says Funnyface's Mr. Winfield. The agency is getting more calls from parents who are out of work and now have the time to take their children to auditions. With kids' modeling wages typically about $100 to $125 an hour, he says, "it's another way to subsidize their income."
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A 17-year-old boy, caught sending text messages in class, was recently sent to the vice principal's office at Millwood High School in Halifax, Nova Scotia.The vice principal, Steve Gallagher, told the boy he needed to focus on the teacher, not his cellphone. The boy listened politely and nodded, and that's when Mr. Gallagher noticed the student's fingers moving on his lap.
He was texting while being reprimanded for texting.
"It was a subconscious act," says Mr. Gallagher, who took the phone away. "Young people today are connected socially from the moment they open their eyes in the morning until they close their eyes at night. It's compulsive."
Because so many people in their teens and early 20s are in this constant whir of socializing--accessible to each other every minute of the day via cellphone, instant messaging and social-networking Web sites--there are a host of new questions that need to be addressed in schools, in the workplace and at home. Chief among them: How much work can "hyper-socializing" students or employees really accomplish if they are holding multiple conversations with friends via text-messaging, or are obsessively checking Facebook?
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William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos & Michael S. McPherson:
Long revered for their dedication to equal opportunity and affordability, public universities play a crucial role in building our country's human capital. And yet--a sobering fact--less than 60 percent of the students entering four-year colleges in America today are graduating. Why is this happening and what can be done? Crossing the Finish Line, the most important book on higher education to appear since The Shape of the River, provides the most detailed exploration ever of the crisis of college completion at America's public universities. This groundbreaking book sheds light on such serious issues as dropout rates linked to race, gender, and socioeconomic status.Chad Alderman:Probing graduation rates at twenty-one flagship public universities and four statewide systems of public higher education, the authors focus on the progress of students in the entering class of 1999--from entry to graduation, transfer, or withdrawal. They examine the effects of parental education, family income, race and gender, high school grades, test scores, financial aid, and characteristics of universities attended (especially their selectivity). The conclusions are compelling: minority students and students from poor families have markedly lower graduation rates--and take longer to earn degrees--even when other variables are taken into account. Noting the strong performance of transfer students and the effects of financial constraints on student retention, the authors call for improved transfer and financial aid policies, and suggest ways of improving the sorting processes that match students to institutions.
Crossing the Finish Line has things to say about virtually every important factor in college life, but by far the most important thing is this:The SAT and ACT do not matter in predicting college success.
I have been an unequivocal supporter of using the SAT/ACT* in making college admissions decisions (see here and here), but this sample of students and the rigor of this study are impossible to ignore. Here's what the authors found:
- Taken separately, high school GPA is a better predictor of college graduation rates than SAT/ACT score. This findings holds true across institution type, and gets stronger the less selective an institution is. High school GPA is three to five times more important in predicting college graduation than SAT/ ACT score.
- SAT and ACT scores are proxies for high school quality. When the authors factored in which high schools students attended (i.e. high school quality), the predictive power of high school GPA went up, and the predictive power of SAT/ ACT scores fell below zero.
- High school quality mattered, but not nearly as much as the student's GPA. Other research, most notably on Texas' ten percent admission rule, has proven this before. It's somewhat counter-intuitive, but it shows that a student's initiative to succeed, complete their work, and jump any hurdles that come up matters more than the quality of their high school.
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President Obama is telling tales out of school.As he promoted administration education goals today, Mr. Obama uncharacteristically departed from his prepared text to share details of a First Family situation.
He told a Madison, Wisconsin school audience that his 11-year-old daughter Malia recently "became depressed" after scoring a 73 on a sixth grade science test. According to the president, that was disappointing news in a household where "our goal is 90 percent and up" on school tests.
He went into surprising detail as he recounted his daughter's complaint that the test differed from the class study guide. The president told the audience of parents, students and teachers that Malia was determined to improve. After changing her study habits she scored a 95 on the next science exam. He quoted Malia as saying, "I like having knowledge." The audience applauded the accomplishment.
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Tough new measures, including fines to punish parents who cheat their way into securing school places for their children, were demanded by the Schools Adjudicator yesterday.Ian Craig, who is in charge of policing school admissions policies, revealed that up to 3,000 parents a year are conning their way into finding a school place by lying or bending the rules. He argued that the parents were guilty of "theft".
"They are depriving another child of their school place. It is theft of a school place which belongs to another child. The Secretary of State [Ed Balls] needs to launch a campaign to persuade parents it is wrong - it is not fair," said Dr Craig, who was charged with mounting an investigation into parental malpractice.
Among the suggested measures for tackling the "fraudulent and misleading applications" were banning younger siblings from taking advantage of their older brother or sister winning a school place, and warning councils to take tougher action by immediately expelling any child whose parents had tried to cheat the system. Fines could also be levied through civil court action. A survey of 123 authorities found 1,100 cases where a child had subsequently had a place withdrawn as a result of their parents supplying misleading information.
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Everybody knows that college is harder to get into today than ever before, right? That's why students flock to test-prep courses, and spend countless hours trying to transform themselves into what they imagine admissions deans want.Hoxby's paper:Admissions deans have tried to play down the hype, and just last week the National Association for College Admission Counseling released data showing that the acceptance rate at four-year colleges has declined from 71.3 percent in 2001 to 66.8 percent in 2007 -- hardly an impossible bar to get over. So why are so many people convinced that the story in higher education admissions is about increased competitiveness?
The problem -- according to a major research project released Monday by a leading scholar of higher education -- is that there are two trends at play.
A small number of colleges have become much more competitive over recent decades, according to Caroline M. Hoxby, an economist at Stanford University. But her study -- published by the National Bureau of Economic Research -- finds that as many as half of colleges have become substantially less competitive over time.
The key shift in college admissions isn't increased competitiveness, Hoxby writes. Rather, both trends are explained by an increased willingness by students generally, and especially the best students, to attend colleges that aren't near where they grew up. This shift increased the applicant pool for some colleges but cut it for others.
"Typical college-going students in the U.S. should be unconcerned about rising selectivity. If anything, they should be concerned about falling selectivity, the phenomenon they will actually experience," Hoxby writes.
This paper shows that although the top ten percent of colleges are substantially more selective now than they were 5 decades ago, most colleges are not more selective. Moreover, at least 50 percent of colleges are substantially less selective now than they were then. This paper demonstrates that competition for space--the number of students who wish to attend college growing faster than the number of spaces available--does not explain changing selectivity. The explanation is, instead, that the elasticity of a student's preference for a college with respect to its proximity to his home has fallen substantially over time and there has been a corresponding increase in the elasticity of his preference for a college with respect to its resources and peers. In other words, students used to attend a local college regardless of their abilities and its characteristics. Now, their choices are driven far less by distance and far more by a college's resources and student body. It is the consequent re-sorting of students among colleges that has, at once, caused selectivity to rise in a small number of colleges while simultaneously causing it to fall in other colleges. I show that the integration of the market for college education has had profound implications on the peers whom college students experience, the resources invested in their education, the tuition they pay, and the subsidies they enjoy. An important finding is that, even though tuition has been rising rapidly at the most selective schools, the deal students get there has arguably improved greatly. The result is that the "stakes" associated with admission to these colleges are much higher now than in the past.
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The Madison School Board recently passed the District's Strategic Plan. Superintendent Dan Nerad has now published a draft document outlining performance measures for the plan (this is positive). The 600K PDF document is well worth reading. Mr. Nerad's proposed performance measures rely on the oft criticized - for its lack of rigor - state exam, the WKCE. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction recently stated that "Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum".
A few highlights from the 600K PDF document:
| Grade | 2006/2007 | 2007/2008 | 2008/2009 |
| 9 | 0.3% | 0.4% | 0.2% |
| 10 | 5.5% | 7.3% | 1.9% |
| 11 | 18.0% | 18.1% | 10.6% |
| 12 | 34.1% | 34.3% | 24.3% |
Discussing these data is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, use of the WKCE does not instill much confidence, from my perspective.
via "Some States Drop Testing Bar" by John Hechinger.
Happy Halloween!
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ou would think people have better things to fight about, but across the nation people are arguing--and even going to court--over high school plays. Yes, the drama productions that high school kids stage for other high school kids.The latest instance occurred this week at Churchill High School in Potomac, Md., when administrators abruptly cancelled a production of "Chicago" three weeks before it was to be staged because it is too racy, my colleague Nelson Hernandez reported.
Never mind that these same officials had approved the production last spring when students first asked permission.
And never mind that the play is decades old and was turned into an Academy Award-winning movie, making it impossible for anybody at the school to claim they didn't know it was about murder and sex and other themes, that, come to think of it, run through Shakespeare's plays too.
But I digress.
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AND what was the Minotaur? The ten-year-olds scribble their answer onto tiny whiteboards and hold them up for the teacher to see. Once each has got a nod, they repeat together: "half-man, half-bull."By the time these fifth-graders at the BASIS school in Scottsdale, Arizona, reach 8th grade they will have the option of taking Advanced Placement (AP) exams, standardised nationally to test high-school students at college level. By the 9th grade, they must do so. As a result, says Michael Block, the school's co-founder, our students are "two years ahead of Arizona and California schools and one year ahead of the east coast."
But that, he emphasises, is not the yardstick he and his wife Olga use. Instead, their two BASIS schools, one in Tucson and this one in suburban Phoenix, explicitly compete with the best schools in the world--South Korea's in maths, say, or Finland's in classics.
They had the idea after Olga Block came to Arizona from her native Czech Republic, looked for a school for her daughter and was horrified by the mediocrity and low expectations at American public schools. So they decided to "establish a world-standard school in the desert," says Mr Block. They started the Tucson campus in 1998 and added the Scottsdale one recently.
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Nearly 30% of Los Angeles Unified School District students placed in English language learning classes in early primary grades were still in the program when they started high school, increasing their chances of dropping out, according to a new study released Wednesday.More than half of those students were born in the United States and three-quarters had been in the school district since first grade, according to the report by the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute at USC.
The findings raise questions about the teaching in the district's English language classes, whether students are staying in the program too long and what more educators should do for students who start school unable to speak English fluently.
"If you start LAUSD at kindergarten and are still in ELL classes at ninth grade, that's too long," said Wendy Chavira, assistant director of the policy institute. "There is something wrong with the curriculum if there are still a very large number of students being stuck in the system."
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Parents are being banned from playing with their children in council recreation areas because they have not been vetted by police.Mothers and fathers are being forced to watch their children from outside perimeter fences because of fears they could be paedophiles.
Watford Council was branded a 'disgrace' yesterday after excluding parents from two fenced-off adventure playgrounds unless they first undergo criminal record checks.
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What should you do if you're a high school junior who feels that spending one more year in high school would be a waste of time?A thread on College Confidential raises that question, and has generated a lot of interesting responses. Here's an excerpt from the original post:
I am a junior in high school and because I seem like I am more mature and academically way ahead of my peers (especially in the math and sciences) at the moment, am considering an early leave from high school. But the thing is, I cannot get a graduation degree unless I complete four years of high school. Nevertheless, my desire for early admission into college has never ceased because (a) I know what I want to study and roughly what I want to do in life and (b) I feel like my senior year in high school will be somewhat a waste of my time since I would have practically exhausted all the resources available to me.In a later post, the student adds: "Every day at school I cannot help but realize that I need so much more than just the classes and activities I have available to me at the moment. I don't know if I could stand senior year."
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ow much of your personal information is Google willing to turn over to a third party without a fight? We've asked a California federal court to unseal a report that would give customers of the world's largest Internet company an answer to that question.Google handed the report in question over to a judge in September to comply with a restraining order requested by Rocky Mountain Bank. The bank requested the order after it mistakenly sent the bank records for more than 1,000 customers to the wrong Gmail account. In the order granted by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco, Google was told to deactivate the Gmail account and to provide contact information about the user of the Gmail account and whether he or she had read the e-mail. Google and the Gmail account holder also were told they couldn't read the email, download the records or forward them to anyone.
A Gmail user who did nothing wrong had his or her account shut down because of the bank's monumental screw up. And Google, a company that basically prints its own cash, didn't lift a finger to protect the rights of one of its users. I love my Gmail account but this is a good reminder that there is NO privacy with any e-mail provider when push comes to shove. Public Citizen is representing Media Post Communications in this case. One of their reporters, Wendy Davis, has written extensively about the bank's bungled email and Google's lack of intestinal fortitude:
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Collectivistic cultures, which promote social harmony over individuality, protect people who are genetically predisposed to depression from experiencing the condition. So says a study published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, which looks at how genes and environment can evolve together.People living in individualistic cultures such as Western societies are more likely to suffer from a genetic tendency for depression than people in Eastern cultures, despite fewer people carrying the specific 'depression gene' being studied, say psychologists Joan Chiao and Katherine Blizinsky from Northwestern University. The research supports the idea that depression can result from both genes and the environment, and an interaction of the two.
The support offered by a collectivist attitude, "seems to buffer vulnerable individuals from the environmental risks or stressors that serve as triggers to depressive episodes," argues Chiao.
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Volume One, Number One
The Concord Review, Fall 1988
Theodore Sizer: Professor of Education, Brown University Author, Horace's Compromise, Horace's School Chairman, Coalition of Essential Schools
Americans shamefully underestimate their adolescents. With often misdirected generosity, we offer them all sorts of opportunities and, at least for middle-class and affluent youths, the time and resources to take advantage of them.================We ask little in return. We expect little, and the young people sense this, and relax. The genially superficial is tolerated, save in areas where the high school students themselves have some control, in inter-scholastic athletics, sometimes in their part-time work, almost always in their socializing.
At least if and when they reflect about it, adolescents have cause to resent us old folks. We do not signal clear standards for many important areas of their lives, and we deny them the respect of high expectations. In a word, we are careless about them, and, not surprisingly, many are thus careless about themselves. "Me take on such a difficult and responsible task?" they query, "I'm just a kid!"
All sorts of young Americans are capable of solid, imaginative scholarship, and they exhibit it for us when we give them both the opportunity and a clear measure of the standard expected. Presented with this opportunity, young folk respond. The Concord Review is such an opportunity, a place for fine scholarship to be exhibited, to be exposed to that most exquisite of scholarly tests, wide publication.The prospect of "exhibition" is provocative. I must show publicly that I know, that I have ideas, and that I can defend them resourcefully. My competence is not merely an affair between me and a soulless grading machine in Princeton, New Jersey. It is a very public act.
The Concord Review is, for the History-inclined high school student, what the best of secondary school theatre and music performances, athletics, and (in some respects) science fairs are, for their aficionados. It is a testing ground, and one of elegant style, taste and standards. The Review does not undersell students. It respects them. And in such respect is the fuel for excellence.
"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 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
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About a month ago, Deidra Hewitt, who lives in Denver, North Carolina, where she has two children in a public elementary school, wrote about how the school required her to sign off on her children's homework more than 400 times a year. Today, she writes about what happened after she wrote to the school Superintendent to tell him about the policy. Read the background here.Advocacy Can Make a Difference
by Deidra HewittI emailed a letter to the school Superintendent and the Board of Education, regarding the "sign or your child will be punished" policies, that I find so offensive. The Superintendent contacted me for a meeting. I was really pleased with the outcome of this encounter. The Superintendent of Schools completely agreed with me, about parent signatures being voluntary. He was against children being held accountable for parent behavior. He indicated that changes were in the works. Starting at the county level, he advised me that the "accountability agreements" were being phased out, and that they will be gone next year. He stated that he is actively searching for ways to engage parents of disadvantaged students. He agrees that countless signatures do not accomplish this goal. He is prepared to investigate the objectives of requests for parent signatures, and certify that signatures are voluntary.
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Contracts have helped tone down the hyper-sexed dance floor at some campuses, giving students clear guidelines on what's acceptable and what's not.Downey High School sent its homecoming queen packing, crown and all, after she was seen making sexually suggestive moves on the dance floor a few years back. Aliso Niguel High School Principal Charles Salter made good on a threat to cancel school dances in 2006 as officials there and elsewhere fretted over how to deal with freaking, grinding and other provocative dances.
Their solution: Fight explicit teen dancing with an equal dose of explicitness. Downey and Aliso Niguel are among the first schools to draft "dance contracts," binding agreements that parents and students must sign before a teenager can step onto the dance floor.
Administrators say the graphic descriptions in the contracts leave little room for arguments over interpretation and put everyone on notice about appropriate behavior.
The prom09contract.pdf, for example, specifies "no touching breasts, buttocks or genitals. No straddling each others' legs. Both feet on the floor." Students get two warnings about sexually suggestive behavior before being booted without a refund and barred from other dances.
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How will tonight's property tax increase vote play out on April 6, 2010? Three Madison School Board seats will be on the ballot that day. The seats are currently occupied by:
 |  |  | |
| Beth Moss | Johnny Winston | Maya Cole | |
| Terms | 1 | 2 | 1 |
| Regular Board Meetings > 2007 election | 28 | 28 | 28 |
| Absent | 4 (14%) | 3 (10.7%) | 3 (10.7%) |
| Interviews: | 2007 Video | 2004 Video (Election info) | 2007 Video |
What issues might be on voters minds in five months?:
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A SCHOOL headmaster once observed that he would regularly consult his prefects on the running of the establishment. When he agreed with them, he would allow their views to prevail. It was only when they disagreed that he had to impose his will. On October 19th the schools secretary, Ed Balls, closed a consultation, the outcome of which he seems to have decided already. Legislation will be introduced to force parents wishing to educate their children at home to register with the state and undergo regular inspections.Mr Balls says he is worried that children who do not attend school risk being abused by those looking after them. An earlier review by Graham Badman, a former head of children's services in Kent who is now based at London University's Institute of Education, found that in some areas a disconcertingly high proportion of home-schooled children were known to social services--ie, cause for concern.
No one is sure how many children in Britain are taught at home. York Consulting, a management outfit, put the figure at 20,000 in 2007. It could actually be more than 50,000, reckons Mike Fortune-Wood, who runs a support service for parents educating their children at home, and the total may be rising by 10% a year.
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JACKIE KLEIN is a devoted mother of two little boys in the suburbs of Portland, Ore. She spends hours ferrying them to soccer and Cub Scouts. She reads child-development books. She can emulate one of those pitch-perfect calm maternal tones to warn, "You're making bad choices" when, say, someone doesn't want to brush his teeth.
That is 90 percent of the time. Then there is the other 10 percent, when, she admits, "I have become totally frustrated and lost control of myself."It can happen during weeks and weeks and weeks of no camp in the summer, or at the end of a long day at home -- just as adult peace is within her grasp -- when the 7- or 9-year-old won't go to sleep.
And then she yells.
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Questions on whether a baby should be given a pacifier or allowed to thumb-suck have existed for generations. The concerns center on whether sucking habits will impact tooth alignment and speech development. The latest evidence, published today, suggests that long-term pacifier use, thumb-sucking and even early bottle use increases the risk of speech disorders in children.The study looked at the association between sucking behaviors and speech disorders in 128 children, ages three to five, in Chile. Delaying bottle use until at least 9 months old reduced the risk of developing a speech disorder, researchers found. But children who sucked their thumb, fingers or used a pacifier for more than three years were three times as likely to develop speech impediments. Breastfeeding did not have a detrimental effect on speech development.
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To hear his enemies talk, you might think Paul Offit is the most hated man in America. A pediatrician in Philadelphia, he is the coinventor of a rotavirus vaccine that could save tens of thousands of lives every year. Yet environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slams Offit as a "biostitute" who whores for the pharmaceutical industry. Actor Jim Carrey calls him a profiteer and distills the doctor's attitude toward childhood vaccination down to this chilling mantra: "Grab 'em and stab 'em." Recently, Carrey and his girlfriend, Jenny McCarthy, went on CNN's Larry King Live and singled out Offit's vaccine, RotaTeq, as one of many unnecessary vaccines, all administered, they said, for just one reason: "Greed."Thousands of people revile Offit publicly at rallies, on Web sites, and in books. Type pauloffit.com into your browser and you'll find not Offit's official site but an anti-Offit screed "dedicated to exposing the truth about the vaccine industry's most well-paid spokesperson." Go to Wikipedia to read his bio and, as often as not, someone will have tampered with the page. The section on Offit's education was once altered to say that he'd studied on a pig farm in Toad Suck, Arkansas. (He's a graduate of Tufts University and the University of Maryland School of Medicine).
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One of my favorite events of the year is the annual Principal for a Day event organized by the Foundation for Madison's Public Schools and sponsored by CUNA. For one thing, it's an opportunity for me to use phrases like, "Hey, hey, no running in the halls!" and, "sure, it's funny until somebody loses an eye."The southwest part of Madison, including Toki Middle School has had its share of challenges over the past few years.This year I chose to be the shadow principal at Toki Middle School. It's no secret that Toki is at the center of a neighborhood that has been in the news in recent years in part because of some changing demographics. Those changes are apparent at the school where kids eligible for free and reduced lunches have increased from about a third to about half of the school population in just a few years.
But what I saw on a typical day where most of the kids didn't know or care much who I was (just like a normal day around City Hall) was a school where a lot of learning was taking place. I visited Rhonda Chalone's Student Leadership class, Vern Laufenberg's Technology Class and Scott Mullee's Science Class. I also spent some time with Principal Nicole Schaefer and her staff. What I witnessed was dedicated teachers and engaged students in a friendly and orderly atmosphere. And the diversity that is there is a big advantage, setting those kids up for success in a world that is, if anything, even more diverse than the student body at Toki.
Every school has some challenges, but anyone that doesn't think Madison schools are doing a great job teaching our kids, should spend a day in one.
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We know that children need to eat more healthily but the message will be useless if they don't learn to cook - and enjoy doing so. Sadly, a generation has already grown up without learning to cook at school: when the National Curriculum was introduced into UK state schools in 1990, practical cookery was sidelined in favour of "food technology". Children learned to design logos for pizza boxes, rather than to make a pizza.This gaping hole in our children's education is something Katie Caldesi, director of Italian cookery school Cucina Caldesi in Marylebone, London, is keen to correct. She has two sons aged seven and nine, and says: "It's criminal that we dropped cookery from the curriculum. Italian food lends itself to cookery for children as long as they don't just have white carbohydrates; in Italy you have pasta first, then meat, vegetables, then fruit."
To help get children cooking their favourite Italian dishes, Cucina Caldesi runs classes for those aged six and over alongside its adult programme. It also has a holiday workshop for teenagers, "La Cucina dei Ragazzi", led by Caldesi head chef Stefano Borella. I went to observe, while my 13-year-old son Ben, a keen eater and occasional cook, took part in the class alongside five others.
Borella, whose teaching style is informal but authoritative, won over the young cooks from the start. The aim of the session, he said, was to prepare, cook and eat a three-course meal: gnocchi with walnut pesto, fish skewers with lemon couscous and basil pannacotta served with berries.
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There's more depressing news on the education front today. In The Times, Joanna Sugden reports that children are struggling with language skills in schools and that it's vital for parents to speak to, and read to, their children. Meanwhile in the Daily Mail, it's reported that boys are falling ever behind, even at a really young age. Many can't write their name by the end of Reception year; they're falling behind girls in vital aspects of the curriculum - and life.As regular readers of the blog will know, I am convinced that it's incredibly important to do something about boys and their under-achievement in schools. I am often asked to recommend books for boys (and there are loads), for my views on their disinterest in writing or how they won't settle at school. I've written about this a number of times (please see below) and am saddened not only that it's still an issue, but that not much seems to be taking place to address it.
There seems little point in my writing about the issues again, so I'm going to mention an initiative which hopes to get children reading again. Innocent and Francesca Simon (author of the Horrid Henry books, which are incredibly popular amongst girls and boys) have teamed up to inspire parents to tell stories.
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Via a kind reader's email [9.5MB PDF]:
The experiences of these top school systems suggest that three things matter most:
- getting the right people to become teachers,
- developing them into effective instructors, and
- ensuring that the system is able to deliver the best possible education for every child.
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t's easy to see why United Teachers Los Angeles doesn't like the new Public School Choice policy at L.A. Unified, which allows outside groups to apply to take over about 250 new or underperforming schools. Those groups are likely to include a large number of charter school operators that would hire their own teachers rather than sign a contract with the teachers union.Related: A Wisconsin State Journal Editorial on Madison's lack of charter school opportunities.What's less understandable is why UTLA would minimize its chances of keeping some of the schools within the district, along with their union jobs. Yet that's what appears to be happening. A rift has developed within the union's leadership over whether to allow more so-called pilot schools, and if so, how many and under what conditions. Pilot schools are similar to charter schools, except that they remain within L.A. Unified, staffed by the district's union employees. The staff is given more independence to make instructional and budgeting decisions in exchange for greater accountability and "thin contracts," which contain fewer of the prescriptive work rules that can stultify progress.
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No one could argue that the Cambridge Primary Review, the biggest report on primary schools for over 40 years, isn't a weighty-looking document. Six years to complete, 600 pages long, one of its main arguments is that British children are starting school far too early, around the four-year mark.Terrible, cries the report. In the manner of most European countries, children should be starting school at around six years old, in Finland's case, seven. Thereby enabling Britain to catch up in terms of child literacy, numeracy, and well-being. All of which sounds extremely exciting for British education. What a shame they forgot to factor in British parents.
Even today, when there is a report like this, we seem automatically to revert to a template of idealised British family life, circa 1955 (Mummy in her pinny, happily baking jam tarts; Daddy arriving home with his brolly) that has no bearing on modern reality.
Exchange the 1950s fantasy for parents who both have to work, and have other children to sort out. Parents, who already have to pick up, clean up, organise, and juggle, to the point where they feel as though they are trapped within a slow-motion nervous breakdown. And this is the middle class, relatively do-able, version. Into this engorged ready-to-blow scenario they want to introduce the concept of up to two to three years less primary schooling? Are they insane?
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Students entering Vincent High School will be subjected to a metal detector on a daily basis in the wake of widespread fighting at the school, Milwaukee Public Schools officials said Friday.Superintendent William Andrekopoulos confirmed Friday that Matthew Boswell, principal of Northwest Secondary School, has been appointed Vincent principal, replacing Alvin Baldwin, who is being reassigned to an elementary school.
Andrekopoulos also said two additional support staff members would be brought to Vincent to aid the administration. Three of the four assistant principals at the school also have been replaced, according to MPS officials.
Andrekopoulos said he was moved to make leadership changes after a visit to Vincent this week. He said he was struck in particular when he observed the presence of 17 adults supervising the cafeteria and not one of them was talking with students.
"I want to make sure we build a positive climate" at the school, he said.
Andrekopoulos spoke at a news conference Friday at district offices, capping off a volatile week at Vincent that began with a spate of fights and ended with some 100 students on suspension. He said eight of those students were suspected of behavior so serious that they'd be given a hearing at MPS' central office.
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As if NAFTA's dismantling of America's manufacturing base and corporate destruction of the middle class isn't enough to challenge the needs of the country's national security, now we have a systematic assault on the nation's educational system.In Michigan, it is the dumbing down of needed math standards to compete globally; at the national level, it is the drying up of funds used to harness the talent of young people who cannot afford an elitist entitlement system that's cost-prohibitive for many.
The common thread of lost manufacturing jobs, a dying middle class and an impaired educational system that promotes inferior curriculum and economic exclusion all serve to undermine the well-being and national security of the country in ways that hostile external elements could never match. The hypocrisy of weakening America while extolling patriotism is a calculated deviousness that, for the sake of the country and the working class, must be challenged.
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When Michael was in kindergarten, he missed more than 80 days of school. He was not ill and no one from Michael's family ever called to say why he was not attending school.When I was elected district attorney, I learned that 5,500 students in San Francisco were habitually truant and - shockingly - 44 percent of the truant students were in elementary school. That is when I partnered with the San Francisco Unified School District to combat school truancy. At the time, many asked why the city's chief prosecutor was concerned with the problem of school attendance. The answer was simple, and as our partnership now enters its fourth year, the reason remains the same: a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime.
Despite his young age, Michael's truancy makes him far more likely to be arrested or fall victim to a crime later in life. In San Francisco, over 94 percent of all homicide victims under the age of 25 are high school dropouts. Statewide, two-thirds of prison inmates are high school dropouts.
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Low-income children
were better prepared for success in kindergarten when their preschool teachers
incorporated educational video and games from public media, according to a new
study. The study, conducted by Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) and
SRI International, was commissioned by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
(CPB) to evaluate video and interactive games from the Ready to Learn
initiative, which creates educational programming and outreach activities for
local public television stations and their communities.The study examined whether young children's literacy skills -- the ability to
name letters, know the sounds associated with those letters, and understand
basic concepts about stories and printed words -- increased when preschool
classrooms incorporated video and games. Children with the most to learn in
the study gained the most, learning an average of 7.5 more letters than
children in a comparison group during the brief, intensive curriculum.
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Richard Garner, via a kind reader's email:
A devastating attack on what is taught in primary schools is delivered today by the biggest inquiry into the sector for more than 40 years.Too much stress is being placed on the three Rs, imposing a curriculum on primary school pupils that is "even narrower than that of the Victorian elementary schools", it says. The inquiry is recommending sweeping changes to stop children being left disenchanted by schooling at an early age.
Children should not start formal schooling until the age of six - in line with other European countries - the 600-page report on the future of primary education recommends. It was produced by a team directed by Robin Alexander of Cambridge University.
Tests for 11-year-olds and league tables based on them should be scrapped, and instead children should be assessed in every subject they take at 11.
The report is heavily critical of successive Conservative and Labour governments for dictating to teachers how they should do their jobs. Professor Alexander cites "more than one" Labour education secretary saying that primary schools should be teaching children to "read, write and add up properly" - leaving the rest of education to secondary schools. "It is not good enough to say we want high standards in the basics but we just have to take our chance with the rest," said Professor Alexander.
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How one values a college education is very different from how one places a monetary value on a college's prestige, a topic that relies more on the recognition of the school's brand than it does on the quality of its educational program (although the two are often closely entwined).Two examples: Schools that routinely play in the NCAA's Final Four basketball tournament receive large numbers of undergraduate applications not always correlated to the standing of their academic programs.
Name recognition goes hand-in-hand with television coverage of the sports and throughout the seasons of basketball and football, weekly on-air games enhance college's visibility not for the talents of their professoriate but for the strength of their full backs and power forwards.
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Community activists said the recent murder of a Fenger High School honor student exposes a problem many teens face every day: safe passage to and from school."I wonder how many more teens will be murdered while coming home from school," said Leonardo D. Gilbert, a Local School Council member in the Roseland community. "All this kid was trying to do was go home and it cost him his life. If we are going to save our children from violence we must make sure children have a safe way home from school."
According to Chicago police, Derrion Albert, 16, was murdered after school on Sept. 24 while waiting for a bus to go home."He was not in a gang but in the wrong place at the wrong time," said Michael Shields, a retired Chicago police officer who now works as director of security for Chicago Public Schools.
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Mayor Richard Riordan, your disappointment in the progress of educational reform in the Los Angeles Unified School District, after all you've done as mayor and secretary of education under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, was palpable in your Oct. 12 Times Op-Ed article, "Course outline for the LAUSD." This lack of progress breaks my heart too.At the risk of seeming presumptuous, may I make a suggestion to you and to educational reformers everywhere -- a suggestion that is based on experience, common sense and research?
I was an urban public high school English teacher for many years. I tried hard: I took courses in teaching reading and writing; I prepared for classes; I graded research papers on vacations; I won grants for my schools; I won teacher of the year awards; I got advanced degrees; I supported reform.
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Michelle Rhee's senior staff meeting has all the ceremony of lunchtime in the teachers' lounge. News is exchanged. Ideas tumble around. Rhee sits at the head of the table but doesn't run the meeting or even take the conversational lead. Staffers talk over her as often as she talks over them. If consensus is the goal, the ball is far upfield.But then, Rhee wades in with, "Here's what I think," or "What I don't want," or "This is crap," or "I want someone to figure this out," or "I'm gonna tell you what we're gonna do; we can talk about how we're gonna do it." And that is that. Next order of business, please.
Rhee's style--as steely as the sound of her peekaboo high heels on a linoleum-tile hallway--has angered much of Washington, D.C., and baffled the rest since she arrived as schools chancellor in June 2007. But it is also helping her gain control of a school system that has defied management for decades: that hasn't kept records, patched windows, met budgets, delivered books, returned phone calls, followed court orders, checked teachers' credentials, or, for years on end, opened school on schedule in the fall.
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Sir Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco, the UK's largest retailer, has slated the UK's education system, saying "woefully low" standards in too many schools leave private sector companies to "pick up the pieces".On an scathing attack, Sir Terry said that Tesco is the largest private employer in the country and therefore depends on high standards in schools.
"Sadly, despite all the money that has been spent, standards are still woefully low in too many schools. Employers like us are often left to pick up the pieces."
He added that too many educational agencies and bodies hamper the work of teachers in the classroom.
"One thing that government could do is to simplify the structure of our education system. From my perspective there are too many agencies and bodies, often issuing reams of instructions to teachers, who then get distracted from the task at hand: teaching children.
"At Tesco we try to keep paperwork to a minimum; instructions simple; structures flat; and - above all - we trust the people on the ground. I am not saying that retail is like education, merely that my experience tells me that when it comes to the number of people you have in the back office, 'less is more'," he said. Sir Terry was speaking at the Institute of Grocery Distribution's annual conference in London.
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A kind reader forward this Dutch student curriculum statement:
Lievemaria.nl was een initiatief dat begin 2006 opgezet is door alle wiskunde en natuurkunde studieverenigingen van Nederland. Naar aanleiding van deze actie heeft toenmalig minister Maria van der Hoeven op dinsdag 24 januari 2006 haar plannen met betrekking tot aanpassen van de Tweede Fase aangepast(Bekijk het nieuwste persbericht, de e-mailconversatie met een medewerker van de minister, het tentamen dat de Kamerleden voorgeschoteld kregen, lees de echte brief (pdf) of de korte versie hieronder)
Wij zijn boos. Wij merken dat wij het universitair niveau eigenlijk niet aankunnen. Er treden dagelijks situaties op waarbij we merken dat we te weinig wiskunde op de middelbare school hebben gehad. Daarom moeten wij nu bijspijkercursussen volgen, of zelfs stoppen met onze studie. Wij horen het geklaag van onze docenten, maar wat kunnen wij eraan doen? Wij zouden willen dat we meer wiskunde hadden gehad op de middelbare school.
Nu bent u bezig om het onderwijs te vernieuwen. Goed idee! Maar we hoorden dat u van plan bent om nòg minder wiskunde te geven. Als u dat doorzet, dan kunnen de nieuwe studenten straks helemaal niets meer begrijpen! Het lijkt ons een beter idee om juist méér wiskunde te geven!
We hopen dat u er nog even over nadenkt.
Groetjes, 10.000 studenten (wiskunde, natuurkunde en informatica)
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The timing could not have been much worse. The 10-year anniversary of Columbine had come and gone. We'd relearned the Columbine lessons we'd nearly forgotten -- that the questions are all too big and the answers all too small.Even worse, all that we don't know was sadly reinforced by the spate of mass shootings that arrived, as if on some deviant schedule, in the weeks leading up to the anniversary.
And just as we'd put it behind us, Dylan Klebold's mother, Susan, chose to tell her story -- "for the first time ever" -- in O, the Oprah magazine.
So it all begins again.
There has been a school of thought -- or maybe better called a school of hope -- that if the parents of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris would only talk, they could tell us something essential, that they held family secrets that would allow us to better understand what happened that day.
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All the people participating already knew that dropping out is a bad idea. He needed to invite those prison inmates, those who are unemployed, and those in poverty for the input about what would have been most helpful to have met their needs when they were in school. That's where the answers are.Indiana Superintendent's websiteMy own middle school once held annual forums with our students who had gone on to high school, and we purposely wanted to talk, not with just the A-students, but with the C students and the D-minus students. We asked them what we as a middle school could have done better in hopes of finding insights for our continual improvement.
A teacher or counselor can make his/her best "argument" to a young person that his/her life will be more successful if he/she stays in school, but that young person may drop out anyway. We need that person's input by hindsight as to what we all could have done better in the face of what the rest of us see as common sense but, nevertheless, led to a decision for which that dropout was still on his/her own responsibility.
Bennett further cites that Indiana is "raising the bar for every student" through academic standards. While we must always analyze what we expect our students to learn and continuously try to measure their success, raising standards for the sake of raising standards will not save students who are failing in school. That would be akin to requiring students to pass a test on algebra who haven't learned to multiply and divide or requiring students with limited English or learning disabilities to test at the same standards at a chonological age while saying we need, as Bennett said, "targeted, individualized improvement plans for these students."
There seems to be a contradiction here. The state has an ISTEP test that it keeps tweaking and changing, giving little comparison to previous results although those comparisons are made anyway and schools are graded in an apples-and-oranges world. Give the test some time.
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As a presidential aspirant last year, Barack Obama gained the support of the National Education Association -- and the scorn of school choice activists -- when he declared his skepticism of the school choice and accountability measures in the No Child Left Behind Act. Then in the early months of this year, the newly-elected president further pleased teachers unions when he tacitly allowed congressional Democrats to shutter the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Plan, the school voucher program that helps 1,716 Washington students attend private schools -- even though he avoided sending his own children to D.C.'s abysmal public schools.Declared Cato Institute Director Andrew Coulson this past May in the Washington Post: "[Obama] has sacrificed a program he knows to be efficient and successful in order to appease the public school employee unions."
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On any given day, nearly 23 percent of all young Black men ages 16 to 24 who have dropped out of high school are in jail, prison, or a juvenile justice institution in America, according to a disturbing new national report released today on the dire economic and social consequences of not graduating from high school.Dropouts become incarcerated at a shocking rate: 23 of every 100 young Black male dropouts were in jail on any given day in 2006-07 compared to only 6 to 7 of every 100 Asian, Hispanic or White dropouts. While young Black men are disproportionately affected, the report found that this crisis cuts across racial and ethnic lines. Male dropouts of all races were 47 times more likely to be incarcerated than their peers of a similar age who had graduated from a four-year college or university.
"For too long, and in too many ways, young people across the country have been let down by the education system and by the adults responsible for their care and development. Now is the time to increase the investments we make in young people, enhance the content, opportunities and supports we provide, and empower them to make better choices about both their individual future and the future of our nation. This report is another important step towards those ends," said Marc Morial, President and CEO of the National Urban League.
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Palo Alto Unified School District Gifted & Talented Program [219K PDF]:
Palo Alto Unified school district's Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) provides educational opportunities that recognize the performance capabilities of gifted students as well as addresses the unique needs and differences associated with having these abilities. The goals of Gifted and Talented Education can be defined as follows:Palo Alto School District Strategic Plan [780K PDF]Program Model
- To provide students with opportunities for learning that maximize each students' abilities.
- To assist and encourage students to acquire skills and understanding at advanced academic and creative levels.
- To aid students in expanding their abilities to communicate and apply their ideas effectively.
- To engender an enthusiasm for learning.
In elementary and middle school, the program model for GATE is differentiation within the mainstream classroom. In 2001, new legislation called for a change in GATE education. Rather than pull children from class for a different curriculum, all differentiation takes place within the context of standards-based instruction in the regular classroom. Teachers enrich and extend the core curriculum for gifted students by differentiating instruction, content, and process. Through differentiated assignments developed to meet their academic and intellectual needs, GATE students are able to explore and expand to their maximum potential. These differentiated curricular opportunities are available to all students, not just those who are formally identified. In middle school, students also have access to the Renzulli Learning System to allow them to individualize their education based on their needs, interests and creative abilities and to explore the curriculum in greater depth and complexity. Advanced math courses are available for the first time in 7th grade and continue through 12th grade. In high school, gifted students are able to take advanced, honors, and advanced placement courses in a wide variety of subjects.
Madison School District's Gifted & Talented Plan.
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"The philosophy behind the core is that educated people are not those who have read many books and have learned many facts but rather those who could analyze facts if they should ever happen to encounter any, and who could 'approach' books if it were ever necessary to do so."Caleb Nelson '88 (Mathematics) writing in The Atlantic Monthly, September 1990:
Even before Harvard's Core Curriculum made its debut, in 1979, Saturday Review hailed it as "a quiet revolution." The magazine was wrong on both counts: not only was the core unrevolutionary but it rapidly became one of the loudest curricula in America. Time, Newsweek, and other popular periodicals celebrated the new program, which required undergraduates to take special courses designed to reveal the methods--not the content--of the various academic disciplines. "Not since...1945," The Washington Post said, "had the academic world dared to devise a new formula for developing 'the educated man.'" The reform was front-page news for The New York Times, and even network television covered it. Media enthusiasm continues today, with Edward Fiske, the former education editor of The New York Times advising readers of The Fiske Guide to Colleges: "Back in the mid-1970s Harvard helped launch the current curriculum reform movement, and the core curriculum that emerged ranks as perhaps the most exciting collection of academic offerings in all of American higher education."The core did indeed start a movement. A 1981 report issued by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching spoke of "the Harvard lead" and recommended a general-education program that put more emphasis on "the shared relationships common to all people" than on any particular facts. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill soon adopted the Harvard approach, and other schools have instituted programs that stress skills over facts. The structures of these programs vary, but the Harvard core's singular influence is suggested by Ernest Boyer's 1987 book College: The Undergraduate Experience in America. Boyer's survey of academic deans at colleges and universities nationwide found that the Harvard core was the most frequently mentioned example of a successful program of general education.
For their part, Harvard officials seem delighted with the program. A. Michael Spence, who just finished a six-year term as dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, has labeled it "a smash hit"; President Derek Bok has heralded its "enormous success." Indeed, Bok, who will step down next year after two decades at the helm, said in 1983, when the faculty approved the continuation of the core, that the development of the program had given him more satisfaction than any other project undertaken during his presidency. In 1985 the members of Harvard's chief governing board showed that they had no complaints either when the elected the core's architect, Henry Rosovsky, to their number. (Rosovsky, who preceded Spence as dean of the faculty, has now been appointed acting dean while Harvard searches for Spence's permanent replacement.) The program recently marked its tenth anniversary, and no fundamental changes are on the horizon.
Forty-five years ago Harvard had a clear idea of its mission. In 1945 it published a 267-page book laying out goals for educators, with the hope of giving American colleges and secondary schools a "unifying purpose and idea." The thrust of this volume, titled General Education in a Free Society but nicknamed "the Redbook," was that educational institutions should strive to create responsible democratic citizens, well versed in the heritage of the West and endowed with "the common knowledge and the common values on which a free society depends." As James Bryant Conant, then the president of Harvard, once summed up his goal, "Our purpose is to cultivate in the largest possible number of our future citizens an appreciation of both the responsibilities and the benefits which come to them because they are Americans and are free."
To accomplish this goal at Harvard, the Redbook recommended that every undergraduate be required to take two full-year survey courses, tentatively called "Great Texts of Literature" and "Western Thought and Institutions," and a full-year course on the principles of either the physical or the biological sciences. The Harvard faculty balked at this specific program, but it endorsed the Redbook's essence. In each of three areas--the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences--it established a short list of approved courses. The general education program was first required in the fall of 1949 and was fully phased in two years later, when all entering students were required to do two semesters of approved coursework in each area.
At the outset the courses strongly reflected Harvard's commitment to instructing students in democratic culture. In 1949-1950 students could choose among "Humanism in the West," "Epic and Novel," "Individual and Social Values," and "Doubt, Inquiry, and Affirmation in Western Literature" to fulfill their basic humanities requirement. The options in the social sciences were "Western Thought and Institutions," "The Growth of Modern Western Society," and "Introduction to the Development of Western Civilization." In the natural sciences students could take "Principles of Physical Science," "Principles of Biological Science," or "The Growth of the Experimental Sciences."But philosophical and educational fashion moved away from the vision of President Conant and the Redbook, and Harvard let its curriculum follow the new trends. Where once the university had spoken strongly of the need to ground students in the Western tradition, in the mid-1960s the general-education program began to lose its unifying theme. Ever more courses were allowed to meet the basic requirements, until by 1969 the program included more than a hundred offerings. The character of most of these courses, moreover, was far different from that of the original group. The humanities featured titles like "The Scandinavian Cinema," "Creative Arts and Computing Machines," and "Narration in the Film: Theory and Practice." The social-sciences area came to include such classes as "Interplanetary and Intercontinental Cultural Diffusion and Contact," "Drug Use and Adolescent Development," and "The American Indian in the Contemporary United States." The natural-sciences area no longer included "Principles of Biological Science," but it did contain such "relevant" courses as "Biology and Social Issues," "Environmental Effects of Power Generation," and "Introduction to Environmental Health."
The general-education program, which had once tried to provide a Harvard education with an overarching purpose, now tried merely to broaden students by exposing them to courses that did not fit into traditional departments. Faithful to the new theories, Harvard declined to broaden its students in any particular direction; how they chose to fill their minds was their own business, and nobody could say that a course called "The Preindustrial City: Its Physical Form and Structural Characteristics" was any less worthwhile than a course on great literature. Harvard's general-education requirements had become value-free.
The general atmosphere at Harvard was reflected in the rise of independent study. As the associate dean for academic planning Phyllis Keller writes in her 1982 book Getting at the Core: Curricular Reform at Harvard, "By 1967, through student initiative, access to Independent Study had become so flexible that any faculty member could arrange for any student to do virtually anything under the sun for academic credit." Richard Norton Smith, the author of The Harvard Century: The Making of a University to a Nation (1986), reports that some students received academic credit for "evaluating the nutritional content of their own diets" and that others were similarly rewarded for scuba diving. The dilution of standards was highlighted in 1979, when Sports Illustrated reported that twenty students were studying the Harvard football team's offense under the tutelage of the quarterback.
But educational fashion changed again, the state of Harvard's undergraduate curriculum began to provoke widespread dissatisfaction, and the administration sought a suitable reform. In 1974 Henry Rosovsky, then the dean of the faculty, called for a review of the curriculum as a prelude to change.
Yet although Harvard officials wanted to reform the curriculum, they did not want to launch divisive arguments within the faculty about which subjects were most important. The Harvard administration had learned long before that to commit itself to a particular educational vision was to draw fire. In 1963, for instance, a group of Harvard professors tried to modify the general-education program, only to be met by what Phyllis Keller calls "the avalanche of faculty criticism that buried every specific proposal to change the structure of requirements." The faculty found itself unable to agree on any specific content for the general-education program, and simply threw up its hands; it encouraged the introduction of all kinds of different general-education courses by directing the program to become "quite sensitive to innovation and change."
With this experience to reflect upon, in the seventies Harvard devised a novel scheme to avoid discord while still reforming its curriculum. If "every specific proposal" for reform raised a fire storm, the college would simply avoid specifics. Rather than emphasize knowledge, the new core curriculum would stress students' critical faculties. The report of the task force that proposed the new requirements explained:
"Everything depends on what questions the faculty tries to answer. If it is asked what bodies of knowledge are more or less important, it almost surely will come to no conclusion. There are simply too many facts, too many theories, too many subjects, too many specializations to permit arranging all knowledge into an acceptable hierarchy. But if the faculty is asked instead what intellectual skills, what distinctive ways of thinking, are identifiable and important, it is not clear that either the 'knowledge explosion' or the size of the faculty has made that question unanswerable."
The intellectual style that elevates subjective process over objective fact meshed perfectly with the administration's reluctance to launch an intrinsically controversial discussion of what subjects should be at the core of a Harvard education. As Anthony Oettinger, a professor of applied mathematics, said about the resulting proposal, "This motion...cannot fail to pass; it has become totally content-free."
f the administration promoted the new core curriculum from a desire to preserve consensus, the faculty had its own reasons for going along. While the curriculum was still being debated, Yale University offered Dean Rosovsky its presidency; Rosovsky declined the invitation on the grounds that he wanted to see the core through. This decision, according to Smith's Harvard Century, had far reaching consequences.
Sociologist George Goethals, who calls the final curriculum "a farce," speaks for many of his colleagues: "It got through the faculty...because everybody loves Henry." This view was seconded by another professor, who credited the dean's refusal to leave Cambridge as a turning point in the faculty's consideration of the reform. "We felt we owed him something," he explained.
Yet it is doubtful that the faculty needed this extra spur to make it accept the core curriculum. As long as debate remained on the level of educational theory rather than course content, most professors seemed bored but acquiescent. After all, as Professor David Riesman said at the time, "a minority of the faculty is interested in educational issues"; thus Professor James Ackerman sensed that the core's passage might be due "more to indifference than enthusiasm." Whatever the motivation, in 1978 the faculty approved the new program in a three-to-one landslide.
The core, which still exists today, is a set of courses divided into ten categories--Social Analysis, Moral Reasoning, Historical Study A & B, Foreign Cultures, and Literature and Arts A, B, & C. Students are required to take at least one course from each of eight of these ten areas; they are exempt from the two areas that most closely resemble their major.
The areas themselves are odd assemblages of specialized classes watered down for the nonspecialist. The following list, drawn from the 1989-1990 course catalogue, gives a sampling of the core:
Foreign Cultures--"Building the Shogun's Realm: The Unification of Japan (1560-1650)"
Historical Study A--"The 'Eastern Question' to the 'Middle East Problem' (1774-1984)"
Historical Study B--"Power and Society in Medieval Europe: The Crisis of the 12th Century"
Literature and Arts A--"Oral Literature: An Introduction to Folklore and Mythology"
Literature and Arts B--"The Art of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent: Art,
Architecture, and Ceremonial at the Ottoman Court"
Literature and Arts C--"The Imagery of the Modern Metropolis: Pictorial and Literary Representations of New York and Berlin from 1880 to 1940"
Moral Reasoning--"Confucian Humanism and Moral Community"
Science A--"States of Matter: Order, Disorder, and Broken Symmetries"
Science B--"Plants and Biological Principles in Human Affairs"
Social Analysis--"Culture, Illness, and Healing: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Medicine in Society"
The core's esoteric course titles strongly resemble those prevalent during the waning days of the general-education program. Indeed, soon after the core made its debut, one junior faculty member called it "old garbage in new pails."
The Harvard administration, though, rejects the notion that the core is merely a strange bunch of distribution requirements. In the words of the course catalogue,
"The Core differs from other programs of general education. It does not define intellectual breadth as the mastery of a set of Great Books, or the digestion of a specific quantum of information, or the surveying of current knowledge in certain fields. Rather, the Core seeks to introduce students to the major approaches to knowledge in areas that the faculty considers indispensable to undergraduate education. It aims to show what kinds of knowledge and what forms of inquiry exist in these areas, how different means of analysis are acquired, how they are used, and what their value is."
The philosophy behind the core is that educated people are not those who have read many books and have learned many facts but rather those who could analyze facts if they should ever happen to encounter any, and who could 'approach' books if it were ever necessary to do so. Facts may change or become irrelevant, but analytic faculties will always be useful. "We live in a revolutionary era," Dean Rosovsky once explained to the undergraduate daily, The Harvard Crimson, "where theories and facts can be crammed in, but ten years later, you'll forget them." As Rosovsky later observed, "you have to prepare the mind to deal with change without emphasis on certain facts.
One suspects, however, that Harvard's philosophical commitment to emphasizing analysis over content is weak, because the core is not above stressing content when it seems politically expedient to do so. While all students can meet their core requirements without taking a single course that focuses on Western culture, most are required to study a non-Western culture. Indeed, the rhetoric surrounding the core's Foreign Cultures requirement differs fundamentally from that surrounding all the other core areas; it alone emphasizes matter over method. In the words of the course catalogue, "The Core requirement in Foreign Cultures is designed to expand the range of cultural experience and to provide fresh perspectives on one's own cultural assumptions and traditions."
Foreign Cultures courses do not pretend to teach students to think like cultural anthropologists, well versed in the analytic tools that would let them critically assess other cultures. There is reason to believe, in fact, that the courses actively exclude critical approaches. In the October, 1987, issue of The Harvard Salient, a campus political monthly that I was then editing, a student named Arthur Long wrote about his experience in Foreign Cultures 12, "Sources of Indian Civilization":
"The class strongly discouraged us from critically assessing Indian society, because--in the words of other students--doing so invariably involves looking at matters with 'our own Western preconceptions.' Hence when discussing the caste system, we overlooked how untouchability has institutionalized slavery; instead we asserted that, at least before British imperialists began to impose Western values on India, caste made for a more compassionate universe than we know in America."
The oddities of the Foreign Cultures requirement are highlighted by the absence of any corresponding Western-culture requirement. Although a Western-culture requirement was initially proposed by the task force that developed the core curriculum, it was later scrapped in the face of faculty opposition. Indeed, in the ten years after 1978--when the professor who had taught the basic Redbook course "Western Thought and Institutions" retired--no survey of Western civilization was even offered.
For a school averse to controversial educational stands, this peculiar state of affairs was predictable. Since the sixties, Western-civilization requirements have been loudly denounced as narrow-minded at best and racist at worst. Such requirements, the argument goes, slight non-Western peoples and mythologizes a West that has in fact committed its share of barbarisms. Many universities have accordingly de-emphasized the West. Only relatively recently has the spotlight shifted to the critics--as politically diverse as William Bennett and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.--who observe that whatever its faults the West is the font of freedom, and that since we must ground ourselves in one culture before we can fully appreciate others, it is both natural and necessary for Western schools to teach Western heritage.
Phyllis Keller, whose book on the core's creation staunchly defends the program's underlying philosophy, neglects ethnocentrism when she catalogues the arguments that were used to justify the omission of the Western-culture requirement. But the arguments that she does list are all unpersuasive.
First, Keller reports, "One problem with the survey of Western civilization was that it was often boring for both faculty and students." As a result, "it seemed highly improbable that faculty members would undertake responsibility for such a course with any degree of continuing enthusiasm." This claim says little for Harvard's much-vaunted faculty. If every Harvard professor would be bored by introducing students to the staples of Western literature and philosophy, then Harvard has no business dealing with undergraduates; it should confine itself to specialized graduate study. Fortunately, at least some professors do seem to be interested in teaching a Western-culture survey course. "Western Societies, Politics and Cultures" was introduced last year as a non-core elective in the history department, under the supervision of one or two professors each semester and with guest lectures by a number of other faculty members.
A related argument on Keller's list is that a Western-culture requirement was largely unnecessary: "Many students have studied 'the facts' of history in high school; while such exposure was by no means universal, it was surely widespread." Many students have also read novels in high school, yet literature remains a division of the core. Presumably college courses can treat more topics in more-sophisticated ways than can high school courses. Few ninth-graders, after all, can fully grasp Kant. If Harvard believes that it cannot cover subjects any better than a typical high school, it should shut down.
Keller's list continues:
"The utility of a Western civilization requirement would also depend entirely on strict sequencing: this course would have to be taken before all the other courses for which it was supposed to provide background. That was likely to interfere with course sequences needed for certain concentrations and with other basic college requirements."
Since all freshman are required to take an expository writing class, it is hard to believe that they could not also be required to take a Western-culture class. Columbia University, for example, manages to impose such a requirement very successfully. But, in any event, familiarity with the great works and great events of Western culture is not simply "background" for one's classes in pictorial representations of Berlin. It is important in its own right.
In Keller's opinion, "the most compelling argument" advanced against a Western-culture component of the core was that such a requirement would be inconsistent with the philosophy behind the core, with its stress on analytic methods. Under the core's rationale, "the facts of history--without derogating their importance--appear to be infinitely forgettable." But there is no reason to assume that students can develop their critical faculties only when they are studying esoteric books and events and not well-known ones. Keller's argument, moreover, is vitiated by the fact that Foreign Cultures courses have no pretensions to teaching analytic methods.
It is difficult to imagine that the arguments that Keller lists could, by themselves, have persuaded the faculty to reject a Western-culture requirement. One must suspect that the faculty was also worried that such a requirement would be, or would seem, ethnocentric--a concern that had surfaced repeatedly during the faculty's debates on the core. This suspicion is supported by the fact that when the tides shifted and vocal advocates of teaching Western culture gained prominence in the mid-1980s, the history department created its new "Western Societies, Politics, and Cultures"--the result, a professor told the Crimson, of the increased demand for such a survey course. Even so, Harvard still seems wary of charges of ethnocentrism. According to the Crimson, "History professors said...that the department intentionally refrained from naming the new class 'Western Civilization,' fearing such a title would offend some people."
If the core arose more from the administration's desire to avoid conflict than from any commitment to the ostensible philosophy behind the program, one should not be surprised that the core has failed to live up to the administration's claims. In 1987 the Salient conducted a random telephone survey of 200 undergraduates. More than 80 percent of the students said that most core courses do not "introduce students to approaches to knowledge" but simply "teach students about a particular subject." More than three quarters of the respondents rejected the course catalogue's claim that "courses within each area or subdivision of the [core] are equivalent in the sense that, while their subject matter may vary, their emphasis on a particular way of thinking is the same." The same number of respondents, furthermore, said that departmental courses are at least as good as core courses at introducing students to "approaches to knowledge," and 40 percent believed that departmental courses are better at this task.
Oddly, the college implicitly grants that departmental courses teach students just as much about analytical methods as core courses, and hence that there is no true justification for the core scheme. Since students are not required to take courses in the two core areas that most closely resemble their majors, Harvard must admit either that it lets students graduate without teaching them how to approach their chosen fields or that departmental courses are just as successful as core courses in helping students develop intellectual skills.
The administrations claims about the special nature of core courses can be assessed accurately on the basis of a single episode. In 1988, when a course on the history of jazz moved from the music department to the core, Harvard refused to grant core credit to the students who had taken the course before its move, on the grounds that it had been changed to become suitable for the core. But the administration also refused to let them take the course again, on the grounds that the new core course was not substantially different from its departmental predecessor. When the students angrily objected, Harvard quelled the incipient controversy by changing its mind and granting them core credit.
Professors have seemed equally confused ever since the core system was adopted. In 1980 the Crimson reported that "most professors, section leaders and students interviewed this week were unable to say what made their [Literature and Arts] Core courses different from any other courses."
The problem goes beyond the particular courses that are now in the core: no set of introductory courses could achieve the core's ostensible goals. One cannot think like a physicist, for example, without actually knowing a great deal of physics. To be sure, one can understand the basic steps in the scientific process--forming hypotheses, testing them, revising them--without knowing any scientific facts. But precisely for that reason, such an understanding is so superficial that it is well within the reach of most schoolchildren. To have a deeper awareness of how scientists approach problems, one must be familiar with the complex interplay of the scientific principles that underlie both the problems and their solutions. In short, on must have studied much science before one can have a useful idea of how scientists operate.
Even in the humanities the core's failure to meet its stated goals was inevitable. The core's history courses, for instance, can have little to do with historical methods. Not only must one leave analyses of historical technique to specialists but--since entering students are presumed to be ignorant of scholarly methods--the course cannot very well demand any original research. Of necessity, core history courses focus exclusively on their respective subjects.
Phyllis Keller anticipates this argument in her book , and asserts that the subjects themselves are carefully chosen to impart certain lessons about the utility and complexity of history as a discipline. Historical Study A subjects are selected to show students "how historical study helps to make sense of the great issues of our time"; according to the core planners Keller quotes, while classes in the B group reveal "the confusion of circumstance, purpose, and accident that inevitably shapes people's lives," and thereby teach students that "there are very few heroes and very few villains, and that only false history makes easy judgments possible." These lessons are not necessarily consistent; while the A group points to the patterns in history, the B group seems to deny their existence. But in any event, even students who successfully grasp the lessons acquire no new intellectual techniques. Like students in every other discipline, they can develop the relevant analytic faculties only slowly, through a coherent and comprehensive study of the subject's substance.
If the core's goals were realistic, they would still have little to recommend them. Why, for instance, are lessons about the nature of history as a discipline the most important things for students to learn in their required history course? Students certainly should recognize that history is the testing ground of public policy, and that its study can reveal much about the psychology of people and nations; as Santayana's famous aphorism goes, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But this lesson about history is useless unless one also learns the actual lessons of history--an accomplishment that requires careful attention to historical facts themselves. When Harvard suggests that its mission is finished once students learn that historical study can be useful, the college abdicates its educational responsibility at a crucial point: it lets students decide for themselves whether to study the actual substance of history, beyond the incidental amount that they find in their core courses. Regardless of their decision, Harvard willingly certifies their educational attainments by awarding them diplomas.
Indeed, the entire core is designed to let Harvard gracefully excuse itself from the controversial duty of making such decisions for students. In Literature and Arts A, for instance, Harvard does not care whether students take a class about Shakespeare or one titled "Beast Literature." The area includes such special-interest courses as "African American Women Writers," "Chivalric Romances of the Middle Ages," and "Epic Fiction International"--for Harvard is unwilling to assert that the novels of Salmon Rushdie are any less important than Shakespeare's plays or the Bible. In the words of the leader of the initial core task force, the idea "was not to make choices for students, but rather to equip them with the ability to make the choices for themselves."
Before the core can ever equip students to make choices, however, students must make an uninformed choice about which core class to take. Those who choose Rushdie learn nothing of Shakespeare; if they opt to take a subsequent course on Shakespeare's works, it is only because they have made another uninformed decision. The core is therefore ill designed even to guide students in structuring their own educations.
The core not only explicitly denies the value of giving students any particular core of knowledge but also skews the range of knowledge that students might be able to pick up. It contains no course on mathematics, a discipline better suited than most to teaching methods of analysis. The core offers no introductory foreign-language course. Its coverage of sciences--especially the more quantitative physical sciences--is widely considered laughable; as Frank Westheimer, a professor of chemistry, asserted when the core was proposed, the program represents science as having "a minor, perhaps only a trivial, place in the intellectual heritage of mankind." The core lacks a general survey of the history of even one Western nation, although it does contain survey courses on China, India, and Japan. It offers students no broad look at literature or art, at music or philosophy.
Ezekiel Emanuel, who five years ago served as the head section leader for the largest core Moral Reasoning course while he attended Harvard Medical School, wrote in a 1983 editorial in the Crimson, "Most Harvard students taking Core courses are no more likely to have read and seriously understood the philosophical, political, or cultural foundations of their own United States than if they selected 32 random courses [the number of courses required for an undergraduate degree] from the catalogue."
In 1978 Henry Rosovsky justified the core to People magazine in this way: "What's at stake is the restoration of common discourse in which all students can share." But that is exactly what Harvard has lost. Common discourse would require students to be familiar with some of the same authors, to know some of the same history, and to have learned some of the same philosophies--in short, to have gone through a program such as the one outlined by the Redbook. It would therefore require Harvard to take the controversial step of defining a canon. The administration is unwilling to do so.
As a result, students can graduate from Harvard without ever having studied the books that are commonly considered great or the events that are commonly considered most important. In the 1989-1990 catalogue, for instance, no core Literature and Arts course lists any of the great nineteenth-century British novelists among the authors studied, nor does any list such writers as Virgil, Milton, and Dostoevsky. In the core's history areas even students who did the impossible and took every single course would not focus on any Western history before the Middle Ages, nor would they study the history of the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the American Civil War, or a host of other topics that one might expect a core to cover. To be sure, students can learn about these things on their own or in the individual departments, and they can leave Harvard with a very good education. But the whole point of having a core curriculum is to make the process less chancy.
Harvard's stature and the media's lavish praise have made the core one of the most influential curricula in American, but it is hollow. It owes its existence to Harvard's willingness to sacrifice content in order to preserve consensus. A decade of experience has exposed the poverty of this approach.
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BBC:
Pupils around the world have been telling BBC News about the battle they face to get an education. But why is school worth the effort?The BBC's 'Hunger To Learn' would like you to tell us how your education changed your life. What was the most important lesson you learned at school?
Did your education transform your fortunes? Or do you feel that the things you learned outside school - with your family, your friends and in your working life - had a greater influence on your destiny?
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Zachary Christie is a six-year old student in Newark, Delaware who is facing 45 days in reform school because he brought his new Cub Scout eating utensil to school for lunch. The utensil includes a knife, and this violates the school's brainlessly, robotically enforced zero-tolerance policy on "weapons on school property."Critics contend that zero-tolerance policies like those in the Christina district have led to sharp increases in suspensions and expulsions, often putting children on the streets or in other places where their behavior only worsens, and that the policies undermine the ability of school officials to use common sense in handling minor infractions.
"Something has to change," said Dodi Herbert, whose 13-year old son, Kyle, was suspended in May and ordered to attend the Christina district's reform school for 45 days after another student dropped a pocket knife in his lap. School officials declined to comment on the case for reasons of privacy.
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written by Anti-Racist Parent contributor Deanna Shoss; originally published at Intercultural TalkVia a kind reader's email.My dad and I came to an impasse again recently. It happens whenever we get into a conversation about race. Or more specifically, a conversation about something that happened in the news or real life where people of different races were involved. As in "they believe this way" from him, and "you can't call an entire group of people they" from me.
It always ends with him thinking that I think he's racist, and with me thinking that he thinks I'm all about politically correct language with no real depth of meaning. Rather than digging for clarification, we back away from the conversation. The funny part is that this time we were agreeing about the same thing: Huckleberry Finn should not be banned.
This conversation has been lingering for a few months after my father introduced the book to my 8 year old son, who let me know by announcing that he had learned the 'N' word. I've blogged about it here and here. It reintroduced me to Mark Twain, who really is a brilliant writer, and it created an insight into institutional racism that I hadn't anticipated, when Dillon said "back then this word was okay to use."
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FAMILIES chafe at the Seattle Public Schools' wild variability on student assignments. Proposed new school boundaries and a simplified assignment plan offer promising change. [Complete Assignment/Boundary Plan - 358K PDF]Seattle Schools Strategic PlanA complex maze that used to determine what school students attended has been streamlined into an uncomplicated rule: students' addresses determine their school.
Students entering kindergarten, sixth grade and ninth grade in the 2010-11 year will be assigned to a school near their home. Students in other grades will remain at their current schools, an appropriate grandfathering that minimizes disruptions.
Many families won't notice a difference. For others, this plan is a huge change. Families living on Queen Anne and in Magnolia have long asked for a neighborhood high school so students weren't bused across the city. They're being assigned to one of the best: Ballard High School.
This shift is the correct route forward. After the district ended bussing for integration purposes, it veered into an expensive and convoluted open choice system. Families could choose any school they wanted but the result was a lack of predictability and stability. Most troubling, the system weighed heavily against less savvy families who were unable to navigate the application process.
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Last weekend, two football teams faced off in a fierce divisional rivalry. Both boasted intimidating offenses built around sumo-sized linemen; half of the two teams' centers, guards and tackles tipped the scales above 300 pounds.The teams aren't from the NFL. They aren't big-time colleges, or even Division II or III squads. They are the Central Texas high schools of McNeil and Cedar Park. The largest of their linemen is approaching 350 pounds.
Once a rarity, teenaged mega-players have become a common sight under the Friday night lights. "If you were to weigh the lines of high school football teams, they're significantly higher in recent years," said Brian Carr, a physical therapist and trainer at Georgetown High School. "Compared to just 15 years ago, there's a huge difference."
Doctors and trainers are reporting increases in certain injuries -- stress-related muscle and ligament tears, knee strains and foot fractures -- that can be directly attributed to the strains placed on developing bodies by extra bulk. Weight-related medical problems are also beginning to crop up among the giant teenagers.
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I spend seven hours each day next to metamorphosed monsters. The stresses of college applications unfortunately transform perfunctory peers into college creatures. They are predatory and are camouflaged as seniors, but with the right tactics, anyone can survive the jungle of college applications. Among the creatures lurking there:College crabs scuttle about school hoping to undercut any competition. The crab exhibits its aggressive territorial dance to discourage the approach of other UC Berkeley applicants. A stack of books clasped in its claws and a bulging backpack-induced hunch characterize the agitated crab.
Prestige parrots are like ordinary parrots, squawking the same questions day after day. But these pretentious peers are primarily hunting for a name-brand university and will eagerly cannibalize competitors. Their obnoxious calls from afar warn victims: "Squawwwk, what's your SAT score?"
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Q How has the school year been going for students at the Wisconsin Virtual Academy, the online school contracted by the McFarland School District?A Things have gone "remarkably well" so far for the virtual charter school in its first year of operation, said Leslye Erickson, the head of the school.
The McFarland School District contracted with the nonprofit Wisconsin Virtual Academy and K12 Virtual Schools to run and provide the research-based curriculum for the school, which has 488 students enrolled in kindergarten through high school.
Students come from all over the state, Erickson said, so orientations were held before school began to allow students, parents and teachers to meet face-to-face.
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Hey, kids, stay in school!Related: Late 1990's Madison School District Dropout Data and the recent Talented and Gifted Plan.That oft-used refrain soon may have new meaning. Earlier this month, President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan proposed extending the school day, lengthening the school year and adding Saturday classes. Their laudable goal is to prepare the next generation for adulthood in an increasingly complex world.
Is this the way to do it? For at least one group of students, the answer is no. Based on studies I have read, the dropout rate for gifted students is between 5 and 20 percent.
What scourge is stealing so many of our smartest kids? Extreme debilitating boredom coupled with agile minds that can't let them patiently wait for the end of class. If we lengthen their classroom hours, how many gifted kids are likely to stay?
To understand how boredom feels to these kids, imagine making a school's fastest runner sit in a chair next to the track all day, every day, while her teammates are racing past her. Imagine her frustration. Imagine how she's going to feel about running after a few days of that. Most likely, she'll walk off the field and never turn back. By dropping out, that's what these lost gifted children do. Many of the boys leave to get a job. Many of the girls leave pregnant.
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Over on Salon.com last week, senior editor Andrew O'Hehir posted the first in what will be a series of essays about home-schooling his 5-year-old twins with his wife, Leslie. It is long, but insightful and informative, filled both with the whys and the hows of this choice.What struck me most about the piece, though, was not its practical bent, but its philosophical notes, where O'Hehir describes the reactions of strangers when he mentions home schooling to them -- the judgment, spoken or not, particularly from other parents. He writes:
After various tense conversations with friends, family members and strangers, Leslie and I have concluded that earnest, heartfelt discussion of exactly how we're approaching our kids' education and why we're doing it is a bad idea. For reasons I can about halfway understand, other parents often seem to feel attacked by our eccentric choices. I guess this is what it's like to be a vegan, or a Mennonite convert. I can certainly remember having a weirdly defensive response ("You know, I hardly ever eat red meat"), one where I reacted to someone else's comment about themselves as if it were really all about me.
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Nearly nine-in-ten (89%) Latino young adults ages 16 to 25 say that a college education is important for success in life, yet only about half that number-48%-say that they themselves plan to get a college degree, according to a new national survey of 2,012 Latinos ages 16 and older by the Pew Hispanic Center conducted from Aug. 5 to Sept. 16, 2009.William McKenzie has more.The biggest reason for the gap between the high value Latinos place on education and their more modest aspirations to finish college appears to come from financial pressure to support a family, the survey finds.
Nearly three-quarters (74%) of all 16- to 25-year-old survey respondents who cut their education short during or right after high school say they did so because they had to support their family. Other reasons include poor English skills (cited by about half of respondents who cut short their education), a dislike of school and a feeling that they don't need more education for the careers they want (each cited by about four-in-ten respondents who cut their education short).
Latino schooling in the U.S. has long been characterized by high dropout rates and low college completion rates. Both problems have moderated over time, but a persistent educational attainment gap remains between Hispanics and whites.
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Daisuke Wakabyashi & Miho Inada:
Japan wants to set just the right mood to get its people to make more babies. But forget dinner and candlelight: The government's plan depends heavily on large amounts of cash.With a worried eye on declining birth rates and an aging population, Japan's new leaders propose offering new parents monthly payments totaling about $3,300 a year for every new child until the age of 15. Other initiatives include more state-supported day care, tuition waivers and other efforts designed to make parenthood more appealing.
But experts warn money alone does not a baby make. Governments have a mixed record in pushing up birth rates, as economic inducements sometimes fail to overcome other complex societal forces that affect baby-making decisions.
In Japan, they include the traditional reliance on mothers to perform the bulk of duties in the home, including child-rearing. Demographers say Japan might have more success if they also encourage more Japanese men to come home and do the dishes.
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BBC:
Forty-two per cent of the UK's top scientists and scholars were privately educated and the trend looks likely to continue, a report suggests.A study by the Sutton Trust educational charity looked at the schools and universities attended by 1,700 top scientists and scholars.
It also found 51% of medics, 70% of judges, 54% of leading journalists and 32% of MPs went to independent schools.
The charity says less-privileged children should be given equal chances.
Private schools educate about 7% of children in the UK and about 9% of 17-year-olds. About 14% of university entrants are from independent schools.
In the study, analysts looked at the educational backgrounds of 1,700 of the 2,200 fellows of the Royal Society and British Academy.
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Following the recent incident of youth violence in Chicago, the Obama administration dispatched two Cabinet officials, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, to deal with the issue. Duncan says the issue is a national one -- not just urban or rural or suburban.More on Duncan's Chicago appearance here.
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Rosa Rivera receives so many invitations to volunteer at her children's school and other activities that the dozens of daily emails and calls about various projects can be "just overwhelming," says the mother of two.At her children's stage, ages 7 and 9, her top priority is to take the projects that will help them most in school and life, says Ms. Rivera, Austin, Texas. But it can be hard to figure out which projects those are. "You're pulled and stretched in so many directions, now more than ever," she says.
Cash-strapped schools are leaning hard on parents for help this fall. Some 53% of parents plan to volunteer at their children's schools, up from 44% last year, says a poll of 1,086 parents by Harris Interactive and GreatSchools, a nonprofit parent-involvement group. The re-opening of schools this fall has triggered a 50% increase in volunteer signups at VolunteerSpot.com, a Web site for organizing volunteers, to 75,000 from 50,000 last summer, says founder Karen Bantuveris,.
Sometimes, of course, it is best to volunteer where a school needs you most. And most school volunteer projects have worthy goals. Fundraisers keep alive arts, sports or music programs. Helping out in the school office fills staffing gaps. Painting classrooms improves kids' environment. Serving on the school board helps shape schools' strategy and direction.
But for parents with limited time and energy, which roles deliver the biggest benefit for your kids? And how does the answer to that question change as a student grows up? Here's what research and experts say:
• Elementary School: Volunteer where your child can see you.
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The new chief officer of the public schools here, Ron Huberman, a former police officer and transit executive with a passion for data analysis, has a plan to stop the killings of the city's public school students. And it does not have to do with guns or security guards. It has to do with statistics and probability.The plan comes too late for Derrion Albert, the 16-year-old who was beaten to death recently with wood planks after getting caught on his way home between two rival South Side gangs, neither of which he was a member, the police said.
The killing, captured on cellphone video and broadcast on YouTube, among other places, has once again caused widespread grief over a seemingly intractable problem here. Derrion, a football player on the honor roll, was the third youth to die violently this academic year -- and the 67th since the beginning of the 2007-8 school year. And hundreds of others have survived shootings or severe beatings on their way to and from school.
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AP:
Fewer U.S. high schools and middle schools are selling candy and salty snacks to students, the federal government said in a report released Monday.The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report was based on a survey of public schools in 34 states that compared results from 2006 to 2008. The study didn't report the total number of schools that have changed. Instead, it looked at the proportion of schools in each state.
It found that the median proportion of high schools and middle schools that sell sugary or salty snacks dropped to 36% from 54%. The share of schools that sell soda and artificial fruit drinks fell to 37% from 62%.
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Sitting up straight in your chair isn't just good for your posture - it also gives you more confidence in your own thoughts, according to a new study.Researchers found that people who were told to sit up straight were more likely to believe thoughts they wrote down while in that posture concerning whether they were qualified for a job.
On the other hand, those who were slumped over their desks were less likely to accept these written-down feelings about their own qualifications.
The results show how our body posture can affect not only what others think about us, but also how we think about ourselves, said Richard Petty, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at Ohio State University.
"Most of us were taught that sitting up straight gives a good impression to other people," Petty said. "But it turns out that our posture can also affect how we think about ourselves. If you sit up straight, you end up convincing yourself by the posture you're in."
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Fewer U.S. high schools and middle schools are selling candy and salty snacks to students, the federal government said in a report released Monday.The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report was based on a survey of public schools in 34 states that compared results from 2006 to 2008. The study did not report the total number of schools that have changed. Instead, it looked at the proportion of schools in each state.
It found that the median proportion of high schools and middle schools that sell the sugary or salty snacks dropped from 54 percent to 36 percent.
The share of schools that sell soda and artificial fruit drinks dropped from 62 percent to 37 percent.
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Matthew Ladner, via a kind reader's email:
September 17 is Constitution Day, marking the day 222 years ago in Philadelphia when the Constitution of the United States was signed. Legend has it that a woman asked Benjamin Franklin, as he was leaving the constitutional convention, what sort of government had been created. Franklin's reply: "A republic, if you can keep it."A major justification for supporting a system of public schools has been the promotion of a general diffusion of civic knowledge necessary for a well-informed citizenry. America's founders, hoping to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity," knew that our system of ordered liberty would endure only if its citizens understood the nation's guiding principles. The endurance of American liberty, the founders believed, depends upon a broad knowledge of the nation's history and an understanding of its institutions.
Charles N. Quigley, writing for the Progressive Policy Institute, once explained the critical nature of civic knowledge: "From this nation's earliest days, leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams recognized that even the well-designed institutions are not sufficient to maintain a free society. Ultimately, a vibrant democracy must rely on the knowledge, skill, and virtues of its citizens and their elected officials. Education that imparts that knowledge and skill and fosters those virtues is essential to the preservation and improvement of American constitutional democracy and civic life.
"The goal of education in civics and government is informed, responsible participation in political life by citizens committed to the fundamental values and principles of American constitutional democracy."1
For its part, the State of Oklahoma also lays out the goals of social studies education. According to the state's academic standards: "Oklahoma schools teach social studies in Kindergarten through Grade 12. ... However it is presented, social studies as a field of study incorporates many disciplines in an integrated fashion, and is designed to promote civic competence. Civic competence is the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required of students to be able to assume 'the office of citizen,' as Thomas Jefferson called it.
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Who doesn't want to make parent teacher conference time go more smoothly?Let's remember: you've probably worked all day and barely had time to grab a bite to eat, and then you sit and meet with parents rapid-fire in ten or fifteen minute increments.
So here's some tips:
1. Dress professionally in welcoming colors that flatter your skin tone. I like blue or green due to my coloring. Avoid red or black. Think about matadors and bulls, here.If you can, don't wear your dressy clothes all day-- they will be wrinkled and possibly sweaty if your schools HVAC works as well as mine does. Wear comfortable clothes during the day, and then change after the kids leave.
Brush your teeth before the parents come, too.
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Anyone who wants to appreciate how strong a grip high school has on the American imagination -- and how clueless some school districts are about this -- should consider the story of Drew Gamblin, a 16-year-old student at Howard High School in Ellicott City.Drew, a child so gifted he taught himself to write at age 3, craves a high school education and all that comes with it -- debate team, music, drama and senior prom.
After a series of inexplicable decisions by Howard County school officials, such as requiring him to stay in a Howard High algebra class he had already mastered, his parents decided to home-school him and put him in college classes. But Drew insisted on his high school dream.
So he is back at Howard, although it's not clear what grade he is in, and the school district is making it hard to enjoy what the school has to offer. He is being forced to take a world history course he already took at Howard Community College and a junior-year English course he took at home, as well as classes in other subjects he has studied.
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If you have ever rolled your eyes when your child says a teacher's grade was unfair, you might want to think again. Your child might be right.Douglas Reeves, an expert on grading systems, conducted an experiment with more than 10,000 educators that he says proves just how subjective grades can be.
Reeves asked teachers and administrators in the United States, Australia, Canada and South America to determine a final semester grade for a student who received the following grades for assignments, in this order:
C, C, MA (Missing Assignment), D, C, B, MA, MA, B, A.
The educators gave the student final semester grades from A to F, Reeves said.
Why? Because, he said, teachers use different criteria for grading.
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At the end of August, Gabriel Liegey left his crisp school uniform gathering dust in his closet in favor of jeans and T-shirts. Natalie Medrano and her sister traded a long drive to private school in Frederick for a ride on the school bus with other kids on their block. And Lawson Hamilton gave up an eighth-grade class of 26 for a freshman class of almost 500.All four joined the rising number of Washington area students who have switched out of private schools this year as financial pressures and the availability of good public schools have made the option irresistible to some.
In Montgomery County, the only jurisdiction in the area that tracks movement between private and public schools, the net number of students who jumped from private to public schools rose to 727 in the 2008-09 school year, according to preliminary figures. That is more than double the number in 2006-07 and the largest total since the county began tracking the numbers in 1988.
Other public schools across the region reported a rise in the number of families transferring in.
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The increasing use of smart drugs or "nootropics," to boost academic performance, could mean that exam students will face routine doping tests in future, suggests an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics.Despite raising many dilemmas about the legitimacy of chemically enhanced academic performance, these drugs will be near impossible to ban, says Vince Cakic of the Department of Psychology, University of Sydney.
He draws several parallels with doping in competitive sports, where it is suggested that "95%" of elite athletes have used performance enhancing drugs.
"It is apparent that the failures and inconsistencies inherent in anti doping policy in sport will be mirrored in academia unless a reasonable and realistic approach to the issue of nootropics is adopted," he claims.
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I recently stopped to congratulate a young mother pushing her toddler in a stroller. The woman had been talking to her barely verbal daughter all the way up the block, pointing out things they had passed, asking questions like "What color are those flowers?" and talking about what they would do when they got to the park.This is a rare occurrence in my Brooklyn neighborhood, I told her. All too often, the mothers and nannies I see are tuned in to their cellphones, BlackBerrys and iPods, not their young children.
There were no such distractions when my husband and I, and most other parents of a certain age, spent time with our babies, toddlers and preschoolers. Like this young mother, we talked to them. We read to them and sang with them. And long before they became verbal, we mimicked their noises, letting them know they were communicating and we were listening and responding. (And we've done the same with our four grandsons, all born after the turn of this wireless century.)
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Andrew Coulson, via a kind reader's email:
The debate over No Child Left Behind re-authorization is upon us.Except it isn't.
In his recent speech kicking off the discussion, education secretary Arne Duncan asked not whether the central federal education law should be reauthorized, he merely asked how.
Let's step back a bit, and examine why we should end federal intervention in (and spending on) our nation's schools... in one thousand words or less:
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The most subversive question about higher education has always been whether the college makes the student or the student makes the college. Sure, Harvard graduates make more money than graduates of just about any other college. And most community-college students will end up making far less than graduates of flagship state universities. But of course these students didn't enter college with the same preparation and skills. Colleges don't help to clear up the situation either, because they do so little to measure what students learn between freshman and senior years. So doubt lurks: how much does a college education -- the actual teaching and learning that happens on campus -- really matter?A recession makes such doubt all the more salient. Last month, National Public Radio ran a segment called "http://www.npr.org%2Ftemplates%2Fstory%2Fstory.php%3FstoryId%3D112432364">Is a College Education Worth the Debt?" in which an economist noted that 12 percent of mail carriers have college degrees -- the point being that they could have gotten the same jobs without the degrees. In January, "20/20" ran a similar segment, in which somebody identified as an education consultant and a career counselor summed up the case against college. "You could take the pool of collegebound students and you could lock them in a closet for four years," he said, and thanks to their smarts and work ethic, they would still outearn people who never went to college. I heard a more measured version of these concerns when I recently sat down with a group of college students. They were paying tuition and studying hard, and yet they weren't sure what they would find on the other side of graduation.
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A lottery ticket or an online game of Texas Hold'em might be a little bit easier to avoid than a beer at a party, but an industry-funded panel released a report Tuesday urging colleges and universities to handle student gambling much like student drinking.In its report, "A Call to Action," the year-old Task Force on College Gambling Policies has formulated recommendations aimed at helping institutions construct their own student health and disciplinary policies on gambling. The group was created by the Harvard Medical School-affiliated Cambridge Health Alliance's Division on Addictions and funded by the American Gambling Association's charity, the National Center for Responsible Gaming.
A 2005 study conducted by the Division on Addictions and funded by the gaming center found that 22 percent of a scientifically selected group of 119 colleges had written gambling policies. In its press release on the report, the NCRG cites the study as the impetus behind the task force's creation.
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Green Dot's founder, who led the turnaround of the toughest school in Los Angeles, discusses his ideas on how to fix a failing system.This might be the moment for Green Dot founder Steve Barr.
The Obama administration has set a goal of turning around 5,000 failing schools in the next five years, supported by an expected $3 billion in stimulus funds and $2 billion in the 2009 and 2010 budgets. Known in education circles and beyond as an aggressive agent of change, Barr has been in talks with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan about how to boost failing schools and whether Green Dot's methods can serve as a blueprint for fixing schools across the country.
It was these same failing schools that inspired Barr to start Green Dot. Having known hard times in his youth, including some time as a foster child, Barr was drawn to improving schools for disenfranchised youth.
After working in politics for many years (and cofounding Rock the Vote), he began researching the push to wire all schools with technology. He saw a map that used green dots to represent schools with the necessary infrastructure to be wired and red dots for schools that lacked that foundation. Barr had the vision that every school should be a green dot, and thus began his crusade.
Green Dot consists of 19 small charter high schools in Los Angeles -- several of which were formerly part of Watts's infamous Locke High School, which Green Dot, in an unprecedented coup, broke down into smaller schools. In addition, Green Dot New York finished its first year last June.
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FOR all its grand central squares and lively cultural scene, the Belgian port of Antwerp is not always a happy town. Flemish old-timers share its gritty streets with Arabs, Africans, Asians and, in the diamond district, Hasidic Jews. Race relations are not easy: in the latest local elections, a third of the vote went to Vlaams Belang, an anti-immigrant, far-right Flemish nationalist party. The handsome stone bulk of the Royal Atheneum, a once-elite state school with a 200-year history, has produced legendary free-thinkers and radicals in its day. Now, however, it is enjoying unhappy fame: as the centre of an experiment in multiculturalism wrecked by intolerance. The story defies neat conclusions.In September 2001 Karin Heremans became headmistress of the Atheneum, which has students of 45 nationalities. The September 11th attacks on America came ten days after she took charge, and her schoolyard became the scene of "very intense" arguments. Ms Heremans responded by working hard to turn her school into a place of "active pluralism". A project about Darwin was led by science teachers but backed by a dialogue among the school's religious instructors. A local composer wrote a work with Christian, Jewish and Muslim passages for pupils to sing. There were debates on sexuality and elections. A fashion show saw girls invited to wear Muslim headscarves, or not: one teenager wore half a scarf to symbolise indecision.
In France Muslim headscarves, along with all ostentatious religious symbols, have been banned at state schools since 2004. It helps that France has a record of separating religion from the state going back more than a century (even a Christmas nativity play would be unthinkable at a French state school).
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IT HAS long been a puzzle that girls who grow up without their fathers at home reach sexual maturity earlier than girls whose fathers live with them. For years, absent fathers have taken the blame for this, because growing up quickly has negative consequences for girls. For example, early-bloomers are more likely to suffer depression, hate their bodies, engage in risky sex and get pregnant in their teen years.It could be a simple matter of not having as many eyes, particularly suspicious fatherly ones, watching over daughters. Or it could be a complicated physiological response to stress, in which girls adapt their reproductive strategy to their circumstances. If life is harsh, the theory goes, maybe they need to get their babies into the world as quickly as possible.
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Why are dads taking on more household chores and child-rearing duties than ever before? The first and best answer is necessity. More moms are working outside the home than in generations past, in turn nudging men into roles their fathers and grandfathers had little need to contemplate.But this new household order was not constructed on the stench of dirty diapers alone. Changes in attitudes and priorities have strongly contributed to the revolution.
Similar changes will be needed to bring about the kind of change championed by Education Secretary Arne Duncan at a "Conversation on Fatherhood" forum in Manchester last week. Duncan and others involved with the initiative kicked off by President Obama in June are doing a good job of stressing the need for fathers to be involved in their kids' education. Now educators and those who benefit from a well-educated populace (in short, everyone) need to help turn schools into an environment where fathers feel welcome and competent.
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Maybe this is the biggest problem facing Milwaukee Public Schools: A panel of national experts ripped reading programs overall in the city, saying they were ineffective, out of date, uncoordinated, led by teachers who were inadequately prepared and who were really doing nothing much to help struggling readers.Related:Maybe this is the biggest problem facing MPS: That report came nine months ago and the in-the-classroom response so far has been to set four priorities for this school year of breathtaking modesty. Maybe a year from now, there will be big changes, officials say.
We're talking about reading. Reading. The core skill for success in just about any part of education and in life beyond school. A sore point for MPS for at least a couple decades. Last year, 40% of MPS 10th-graders rated as proficient in reading in state tests, a number in line with a string of prior years.
"The status quo will need to be changed - sometimes dramatically," said the report from a three-person review team brought in by the state Department of Public Instruction as part of its efforts under federal law to push change in MPS. The report was issued last December, calling for an overhaul of the way reading is taught in MPS - the curriculum used, the way teachers are trained, the way the whole subject is handled from top to bottom.
Since then, an MPS work group was named. The work group got an extension on the time it had to give a draft plan to the DPI. The draft plan was submitted. DPI officials gave some feedback. MPS officials revised their plan. DPI officials took awhile to respond with requests for more changes. It's late September now. A plan has not been approved. There's a meeting scheduled in early October.
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School officials don't take it lightly when a student brings a knife to campus.But when they draw no distinction between a Bowie and a bread knife, discipline can go awry.
This year, schools throughout North Texas are implementing a new state law that ends such "zero tolerance" policies. Under House Bill 171, administrators now must consider mitigating factors such as intent and self-defense when doling out punishment.
That's welcome news for Robert Hess, whose son Taylor was briefly expelled from L.D. Bell High School in Hurst after a bread knife fell out of a 20-year-old cutlery set bound for Goodwill, and was found in his truck bed on campus.
"That certainly would have saved us an awful lot of trouble," said Hess, who holds no ill will toward school administrators over the 2002 incident. "They were bound by their own rules that they had written to dole out this ridiculous punishment, which was one year in alternative education."
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Girl-on-girl bullying or hazing is old news by now, for anyone who has seen "Mean Girls" or "Heathers" or "Gossip Girl": popular girls organize a perfectly-coiffed and designer-clothed gang; fringe girl is targeted; bullies use their meanness and power to further marginalize fringe girl and reassert their status.But news of a "slut list" at a top-ranked New Jersey high school last week highlighted two disturbing points: the increasingly explicit and sexual nature of the taunts, magnified by the Internet. And, in another twist, the perception that allegations of promiscuity -- however fictional -- are a badge of honor, a way into the cool group, and not a cause for shame.
The result is a 180-degree reversal of what a "slut list" might have meant, especially when the parents of these girls were growing up.
That the list and other hazing went on for more than 10 years at Millburn High School in New Jersey was only half the shock to parents and the national news media who set up cameras outside the school, which includes students from the affluent Essex County towns of Millburn and Short Hills. The repercussions to officials for allowing it to go on, only lightly checked over that time, are still playing out.
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Beyond TestingThe single biggest problem in American education is that no one agrees on why we educate. Faced with this lack of consensus, policy makers define good education as higher test scores. But higher test scores are not a definition of good education. Students can get higher scores in reading and mathematics yet remain completely ignorant of science, the arts, civics, history, literature and foreign languages.
Why do we educate? We educate because we want citizens who are capable of taking responsibility for their lives and for our democracy. We want citizens who understand how their government works, who are knowledgeable about the history of their nation and other nations. We need citizens who are thoroughly educated in science. We need people who can communicate in other languages. We must ensure that every young person has the chance to engage in the arts.
But because of our narrow-minded utilitarianism, we have forgotten what good education is.
DIANE RAVITCH
Ravitch is a historian. Her book ''The Death and Life of the Great American School System'' will be published in February.Do Away With B.A.
Discredit the bachelor's degree as a job credential. It does not signify the acquisition of a liberal education. It does not even tell an employer that the graduate can put together a logical and syntactically correct argument. It serves as rough and unreliable evidence of a degree of intelligence and perseverance -- that's it. Yet across much of the job market, young people can't get their foot in the door without that magic piece of paper.
As President Obama promotes community colleges, he could transform the national conversation about higher education if he acknowledges the B.A. has become meaningless. Then perhaps three reforms can begin: community colleges and their online counterparts will become places to teach and learn without any reference to the bachelor's degree; the status associated with the bachelor's degree will be lessened; and colleges will be forced to demonstrate just what their expensive four-year undergraduate programs do better, not in theory but in practice.
CHARLES MURRAY
Murray is the W. H. Brady scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of ''Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality."
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We have all seen them: adorable Chinese girls holding the hands of their (usually elderly, often overweight, but definitely doting) Caucasian parents, strolling the streets from New York to New South Wales, growing up in a white, white world, far away from the land and culture where they were born.In some ways, they are a permanent blot on the image of China: surplus daughters the country couldn't care for, unintended consequences of the 30-year-old "one-child" policy that led to the abandonment of hundreds of thousands if not millions of female infants at birth. But now, as the balance of global economic and political power shifts subtly in favour of China, Beijing is reaching out to all these lost daughters - and welcoming them back home.
China has invited thousands of foundlings back to their birthplaces for government-sponsored "homeland tours" which, like last year's Beijing Olympics or next year's Shanghai World Expo, give the country a chance to show off to the world. On one level, what the Chinese adoption authorities call "root seeking tours" - filled with extravagant expressions of love and kinship and lavish gifts for the returning orphans - are a transparent public relations exercise aimed at raising money for Chinese orphanages, justifying the decision to export surplus children and countering decades of unfair international criticism that Chinese people "hate girls".
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There is a dichotomy between the aspirations of high school students to attend college and their success once in college. Annually, over 90 percent of the nation's 2.5 million high school graduates indicate a desire to go to college, and 72 percent of them actually enroll in some form of postsecondary education within two years after graduation. Despite such high levels of aspiration and motivation, once on campus over half of those who matriculate require remedial work. Worse yet, a staggering 41 percent never complete either a two- or four-year degree (Kirst and Venezia, From High School to College). But these data understate the problem because only 68 percent of high school freshmen complete high school on time. Thus, the other 32 percent are not in the pool from which the 90 percent number is calculated (Kuh and McCarthy "Are Students Ready for College? What Student Engagement Data Say." Phi Delta Kappan Vol. 87 No 09). Moreover, other data show that 10 years after their freshmen year in high school, only 18 percent of students have completed a baccalaureate degree (Gorden "Accommodating Student Swirl", Change Magazine Vol. 36 Issue 2). Together, these figures reveal a growing personal and national tragedy that challenges educators at all levels.
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A group of 13 Madison-area kids and their families replicated the International Space Station at Elver Park Friday, using over a mile of plastic tape, and spanning nearly two soccer fields.The six families who participated in constructing the two-dimensional model are part of a network of homeschooled children and their parents in the Madison area. Each family chose sections of the space station to research and construct, and then made signs explaining their parts' size and function.
David Dexheimer, activity organizer and parent of one of the children participating, said the goal of the project was to teach the kids about how the space station works. He said he came up with the idea a few weeks ago by looking at a NASA educational website.
"I've always been into space stuff and so is my daughter," Dexheimer said. "This just worked into our curriculum well, in terms of all the math and science you need."
The families arrived at the park around 8:30 a.m. and started constructing the model with plastic barricade tape, secured to the ground with golf tees.
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We say we are buying a house. But for most of us parents, the house is not the whole story. It is the local public school we are investing in, and sometimes it can be a very daunting financial and personal decision.In the early 1990s, when my journalist wife was making what seemed to me big bucks as a television producer, we could afford to live in Scarsdale, N.Y. That village's public schools cost us about as much in real estate taxes as the tuition at the private schools our kids had attended in Pasadena, Calif. Fortunately, we got what we paid for in Scarsdale. That is not always the case.
How do parents evaluate the schools their children may attend and escape the heartbreak of buying a great house that turns out to be in the attendance zone of a flawed school? Here are 10 ways to make the right choice, in descending importance. Feel free to re-prioritize them based on your personal tendencies:
1. Go with your gut. This sounds unscientific, but I don't care. After you have analyzed all the data and had the conversations outlined below, you still have to make a decision. Consider how you react emotionally to a school. Consult your viscera. If you're not feeling it, don't send your kids there. They will sense you have doubts at a time when they need to believe that this is the place for them.
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In their quest to move out of their rented Rockville townhouse and buy a single-family home, Lisa Hollaender and her husband, Laurent, first considered the Carderock Springs neighborhood of Bethesda, then moved on to Potomac and later explored Olney. They also ventured across the Potomac to Vienna. But they haven't been to a single open house, let alone made an offer.Hollaender is first finding the school she considers best suited for her son, who is both very bright and physically challenged.
"Ultimately school fit is number one, house location a far second," said Hollaender, whose son recently started kindergarten. The family has decided to stay put in Rockville this year and send him to a private school, but that's a temporary solution. "We cannot continue to pay for private school, plus buy our 'dream home,' " Hollaender said.
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ASDA offers one for £55 ($90), Matalan for £49, and British Home Stores for £69 (including a shirt, tie and leather shoes). For a teenager needing to look smart, high-street retailers provide suits at a reasonable price. But not all pupils are allowed to shop around.Johnny, aged 16, was told to return to his private school this autumn in a "charcoal wool two-piece with a fine blue pinstripe". It is available only from the school outfitters, and costs a cool £210. His father, Edward, a writer for The Economist, spent the summer arguing with the school about the uniform. "I don't object to his being nicer and more intelligent than I am," he says. "But I draw the line at his being more expensively dressed."
Parents and teachers usually like uniforms: they stop rich children from showing off, in theory inspire a proud work ethic and in practice keep gang colours outside the gates. But state schools that ape ancient private ones by adopting fancy uniforms have had a mixed reception. It is not the clothes that raise hackles, but specifying their source.
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The post that has generated the most Comments ever is I Hate Reading Logs by FedUp Mom. If you scroll through, you'll notice that teachers have chimed in, some rethinking their own homework practice, others defending it. I was particularly struck by the openness of a teacher from Virginia, who found the post while looking for a reading log, and ended up rethinking logs altogether.I also thought the teacher made a very good point about the importance of keeping all discussions between teacher and parent as cordial and as respectful as possible.
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'Creaming" is the word critics of charter schools think ends the debate over education choice. The charge has long been that charters get better results by cherry-picking the best students from standard public schools. Caroline Hoxby, a Stanford economist, found a way to reliably examine this alleged bias, and the results are breakthrough news for charter advocates.Her new study, "How New York City's Charter Schools Affect Achievement," shows that charter students, typically from more disadvantaged families in places like Harlem, perform almost as well as students in affluent suburbs like Scarsdale. Because there are more applicants than spaces, New York admits charter students with a lottery system. The study nullifies any self-selection bias by comparing students who attend charters only with those who applied for admission through the lottery, but did not get in. "Lottery-based studies," notes Ms. Hoxby, "are scientific and more reliable."
According to the study, the most comprehensive of its kind to date, New York charter applicants are more likely than the average New York family to be black, poor and living in homes with adults who possess fewer education credentials. But positive results already begin to emerge by the third grade: The average charter student is scoring 5.8 points higher than his lotteried-out peers in math and 5.3 points higher in English. In grades four through eight, the charter student jumps ahead by 5 more points each year in math and 3.6 points each year in English.
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Tatyana Ray has more than 1,200 Facebook friends, sends 600 texts a month and participated in four student clubs during the year and a half she attended high school online, through a program affiliated with Stanford University.Although top public and private high schools abound in her affluent area of Palo Alto, the 17-year-old originally applied to the online school because she and her parents thought it looked both interesting and challenging. She enjoyed the academics but eventually found she was lonely. She missed the human connection of proms, football games and in-person, rather than online, gossip. The digital clubs for fashion, books and cooking involved Web cams and blogs and felt more like work than fun. Last winter, Ms. Ray left the online school and enrolled at a local community college for a semester.
As online high schools spread, educators are ramping up efforts to counter the social isolation that some students experience. At the same time, sociologists and child psychologists are examining how online schooling might hinder, or help, the development of social skills.
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Parents say that honesty is the best policy, but they regularly lie to their children as a way of influencing their behavior and emotions, finds new research from the University of Toronto and the University of California, San Diego.Surprisingly little scholarship has been published on the subject of parental lying, so Gail Heyman, professor of psychology at UC San Diego, Diem Luu, a former UCSD student, and Kang Lee, professor at the University of Toronto and director of the Institute of Child Study, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, set out to explore the under-researched phenomenon. They asked U.S. participants in two related studies about parents lying to their children -- either for the purpose of promoting appropriate behavior or to make them happy.
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At age 3, Aurora Ghere began to read. Now 6, she delves into books that are usually fifth-grade fare, recently finishing "The Call of the Wild'' and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.''She can also, her mother boasts, count to 1,000.
When the Gheres lived in Maryland, a screening in her school district identified Aurora as a gifted child.
But Green Meadow School in Maynard, where Aurora is in first grade, lacks programs geared toward gifted children. Though administrators have been supportive of Aurora's needs, her mother thinks schools in her town and elsewhere should do more.
"We could care less if our children got into Harvard or MIT,'' said Ghere. "We just want them to love school. School should be a joy.''
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I promised a high school counselor in California I would update a very old online column whose printout on her wall is too faded to read. It asked a question I think students immersed in college visiting and application writing should consider: Where did your heroes go to college?Most of us want our lives to have meaning. We want to add value, at least in some small way. We want to be admired.
What college do you go to for that? Where did the people we look up to get their degrees? Often it's not the best-known schools.
Let's look at government and business leaders. (I know. They have their flaws. But we are just getting started.) The past four presidents graduated from Columbia, Yale, Georgetown and Yale. But the four before them attended somewhat more modest institutions: Eureka, the U.S. Naval Academy, Michigan and Whittier.
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Do you keep phone numbers? I meticulously store contact details for everyone I meet, however random, and make notes of what they do and where I met them. My other modus operandi when meeting people is always to try to be as polite and helpful as possible (within reason).Hence, I found myself giving up an hour or so earlier this year to cast an eye over the business strategy of a small enterprise. On meeting the people behind the business, I discovered that it was a rehabilitation clinic, and one of the people presenting to me was a very impressive addiction counsellor, and herself a recovering alcoholic.
And that is where I sat up and took notice, because I have a close relative who is alcohol-dependent. It is not Mr M or any of the cost centres, but it is someone very dear to me. Those of you who have someone in their family who is alcohol- or drug-dependent will know how emotionally scarring this is. You love them, you want to help, you try to help, but they are living in another world. In their world, they are not addicts; they believe that they could give up at any time. They always have an excuse. Something is always just around the corner that will fix their problems - if only they could meet the right person/get the right job/have the right amount of money, everything would be fine. Nothing and no one ever prepared me for the self-delusion of the alcoholic. Every time they say they are going to get help, your hopes rise; and invariably they end up being crushed again
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Tucked away in an $87 billion higher education bill that passed the House last week was a broad new federal initiative aimed not at benefiting college students, but at raising quality in the early learning and care programs that serve children from birth through age 5.The initiative, the Early Learning Challenge Fund, would channel $8 billion over eight years to states with plans to improve standards, training and oversight of programs serving infants, toddlers and preschoolers.
The Senate is expected to pass similar legislation this fall, giving President Obama, who proposed the Challenge Fund during the presidential campaign, a bill to sign in December.
Experts describe the current array of programs serving young children and their families nationwide as a hodgepodge of efforts with little coordination or coherence. Financing comes from a shifting mix of private, local, state and federal money. Programs are run out of storefronts and churches, homes and Head Start centers, public schools and other facilities. Quality is uneven, with some offering stimulating activities, play and instruction but others providing little more than a room and a television.
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Museum corridors are often populated by clipboard-bearing school children enjoying a day away from the classroom. These museum trips seem like a good idea, but how much do children really learn from their day out? According to Julien Gross and colleagues, young children actually remember a great deal, especially if they are given the chance to draw as they recount their museum experience.Fifty-eight lucky New Zealand school children, aged approximately six years, were taken for a day visit to the Royal Albatross Centre and Historic Fort in Dunedin. One to two days later, the amount of information recalled by the children depended to a large degree on how they were tested. Asked to freely recall the visit, the children remembered a significant amount of factual and trivial, "narrative" information, uttering an average of ten factual clauses. Crucially, this amount of factual recall doubled when they were allowed to draw at the same time as they recounted the day's events. By contrast, the children performed relatively poorly when given a traditional comprehension test in the form of 12 questions.
A second study largely replicated these findings with a second group of children who were tested on their memory for the museum visit after seven months. The amount of information they recalled remained substantial but was reduced, as you'd expect after a longer delay. Also, the benefit of drawing now only affected recall of narrative information, not facts.
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Don Regina, via hard copy (The text is "OCR'd):
Good evening, everyone. I did not mean to burden you with more paper; after all, in life there is so much paperwork, but my administrators urged all teachers to present such a document to you. In my career I have observed that teachers feel somewhat anxious about tonight, but I don't know why.Tonight we are together for the first of three meetings, the other two being parent-teacher conferences. It seems we are here for different purposes. You care enough to hurry from work, forego a leisurely dinner, and spend a few hours here. Perhaps you are curious about what I look like, or how I dress (by the way, I am out of uniform-I rarely wear a coat and only don a tie once a week), the way I have decorated my room, what this course is about, and if I am knowledgeable, intelligent, and articulate enough to teach effectively. In other words, is it safe for you to turn your child over to me for forty-five minutes every day. But in Twenty-first Century America two lesser but very powerful gods, named "Things to Do" and "Hurry Up" harry us mercilessly, so you must base your first impressions on these brief encounters. Wouldn't it be more relaxing if we could sit around a table over coffee and share ideas and concerns? I am here to tell you who I am and my teaching goals and philosophy. In short, I want not to make myself look good but to speak truly and simply, not to put my best foot forward but my real foot forward. Despite our seemingly different purposes, you and I are here for the same reason: we are involved in the education and development of your child and my student. Whether we agree or disagree and regardless of your reactions to what I do or don't do, let us always remember we are the most influential allies in that essential and crucial process, and permit our alliance to set the tone for our relationship.
My name is Don Regina, and I am ( ) years old. I, and my son . . attended this school, so like you I believe in a private, values oriented education. I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree from St. Michael's College in Vermont, a Masters Degree in British and American literature from the UW-Madison, and a Lifetime License from the Department of Public Instruction. Yes, I am a lifer. I have taught English here at Edgewood High School for ( ) years-this is my only post-and advise the school newspaper and coach the boys cross country team.
My profession has changed somewhat in the last thirty years. When you and I were in high school, we read and wrote about the classics-A Tale of Two Cities, Crime and Punishment, and Silas Marner. During the Seventies in college I argued with my fellow student teachers about the relative or apparent merits of something called independent study. And now my subject is called Language Arts. Despite all the superficial changes and glitsy gimmicks, and the history of education is loaded with gimmicks, we are and always will be studying the two Rs-reading and writing. So, unlike math or foreign language teachers, we English teachers must fight on two fronts.
It is not surprising, then, that I have two major goals. First, I must teach students to read carefully and perceptively. They must know what happened and what the author said in the text, and use that knowledge to understand characters such as Macbeth, John Proctor from The Crucible, or Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice. They should interpret symbols such as Robinson Crusoe's island, James Joyce's Dublin, or Mark Twain's river town, Dawson's Landing, in Puddn Head Wilson. And, most importantly, they should understand the theme or message the author is conveying. What is Jonathan Swift saying about humanity in Gulliver's Travels? How is F. Scott Fitzgerald portraying his generation in The Great Gatsby? What is Alice Walker expressing about the plight of women in The Color Purple?
My second goal is multi-faceted: to teach students to write competently. They should organize and clearly express their ideas in fully developed paragraphs and complete sentences using appropriate words. And they should 3 master writing's nuts and bolts: correct spelling, grammar, usage, and punctuation. As you can see, this is a daunting task.
I can sum up my teaching philosophy, gleaned from my experience, in several points. First, I take as my ideal Chaucer's Oxford Clerk, who would gladly learn and gladly teach. Every encounter in the classroom is a chance to teach something, be it the meaning of a word, the importance or faith in life, or what to do when and electrical appliance fails to work. I think reading should totally engage your intelligence. Parents see a child moving her eyes over an open book. What they cannot see is whether that child's mind is attentive and alert to the text so he or she can retain and comprehend it. I value the hard but rewarding work of learning because you sharpen your mind by absorbing, contemplating, and drawing conclusions from information. Next, a teacher should not only challenge but also help students to succeed, because when we work hard and succeed we feel better about ourselves and are motivated to achieve our potential. I have learned that high school students are like eggs: it doesn't take much to damage their fragile personalities, even if they act hard boiled. So while I must be firm, direct, and definite, I must not be angry, sarcastic, or overly critical. In a classroom discussion every student should participate rather than letting a few answer all the questions, so I call on people by name and everyone feels involved; they even forget themselves and start volunteering answers. I strongly believe that in an English class students should not only read poems, novels, and plays but also learn about authors' lives and times. Any piece of literature starts with a man or woman seated at a table, pen in hand, trying to express something. But what an author says results from all the personal, social and even historical forces at play during the moments of inspiration. Literature is not produced in a vacuum. I mean, why did Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, two devout Puritans, write those poems?Thanks to Don for allowing me to post his words here. I added links to some of the referenced works and cleaned up the OCR scan errors.Finally, I have learned to trust my common sense and ignore my need to be right when making decisions. If there wasn't enough time for the test, then allow more time and make a shorter test next time. If the test results are not what they should be, then I must make an allowance for that problem. And if I make a mistake (that's right, teachers make mistakes) then I do what I can to rectify it and then move on. After all, toxic emotions are useless. Finally, I must act with compassion and accomodate students with special needs, but to do so I must know what those needs are. If your child-is struggling with a learning disability or emotional illness, please tell me about it as soon as possible-not after the quarter or semester has ended and irreparable damage has been done-- so that I can take effective steps to help the student succeed. I will hold in strictest confidence whatever you tell me.
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Surely if we can raise our academic standards for math and science, then, with a little attention and effort, we can restore the importance of literacy in our public high schools. Reading is the path to knowledge and writing is the way to make knowledge one's own.
Education.com
17 September 2009
by Will Fitzhugh
Source: Education.com Member Contribution
Topics: Writing Conventions
[originally published in the New Mexico Journal of Reading, Spring 2009]
For many years, Lucy Calkins, described once in Education Week as "the Moses of reading and writing in American education" has made her major contributions to the dumbing down of writing in our schools. She once wrote to me that: "I teach writing, I don't get into content that much." This dedication to contentless writing has spread, in part through her influence, into thousands and thousands of classrooms, where "personal" writing has been blended with images, photos, and emails to become one of the very most anti-academic and anti-intellectual elements of the education we now offer our children, K-12.
In 2004, the College Board's National Commission on Writing in the Schools issued a call for more attention to writing in the schools, and it offered an example of the sort of high school writing "that shows how powerfully our students can express their emotions":
"The time has come to fight back and we are. By supporting our leaders and each other, we are stronger than ever. We will never forget those who died, nor will we forgive those who took them from us."
Or look at the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the supposed gold standard for evaluating academic achievement in U.S. schools, as measured and reported by the National Center for Education Statistics. In its 2002 writing assessment, in which 77 percent of 12th graders scored "Basic" or "Below Basic," NAEP scored the following student response "Excellent." The prompt called for a brief review of a book worth preserving. In a discussion of Herman Hesse's Demian, in which the main character grows up, the student wrote,
"High school is a wonderful time of self-discovery, where teens bond with several groups of friends, try different foods, fashions, classes and experiences, both good and bad. The end result in May of senior year is a mature and confident adult, ready to enter the next stage of life."It is obvious that this "Excellent" high school writer is expressing more of his views on his own high school experience than on anything Herman Hesse might have had in mind, but that still allows this American student writer to score very high on the NAEP assessment of writing.
"Writing has never been accorded the cultural respect or the support that reading has enjoyed, in part because through reading, society could control its citizens, whereas through writing, citizens might exercise their own control."
So it has become clear to NCTE that Milton's Areopagitica, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and all those other arguments for free speech and free access to information, failed to warn us that, while it is all right for a society to provide protection for writing, reading is only a dangerous means of social control, and should be avoided at all costs. As Houston Baker warned more broadly when he was head of the Modern Language Association, "reading and writing are tools of oppression."
The 2009 NCTE report goes on to inform us, somewhat inconsistently, that:
"Reading-in part because of its central location in family and church life-tended to produce feelings of intimacy and warmth, while writing, by way of contrast, was associated with unpleasantness-with unsatisfying work and episodes of despair-and thus evoked a good deal of ambivalence."
So while, on the one hand, reading is a dangerous method for social control, and on the other hand, in contrast with writing, it is said to produce feelings of intimacy and warmth, writing is associated with unpleasantness, which would, naturally, be news to Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackery, George Eliot, and countless other authors who made it their life's work to provide feelings of intimacy and warmth, among other things, to countless readers over the centuries.
But the NCTE report has more to teach us:
"Writing has historically and inexorably been linked to testing."
Testing, the way to determine whether one has learned the tasks to be mastered, is, needless to say, not a good thing in the NCTE world. This odd and narrow "link to testing" might seem a bit far-fetched to all the historians and others whose writing has enriched our lives.
So, how does NCTE propose to free writing from its unhappy association with testing, episodes of despair, and so on? By encouraging students to do what they are doing already: texting, twitting, emailing, sending notes, sending photos, and the like-only this time it will be part of the high school "writing" curriculum. In other words, instead of NCTE encouraging educators to lift kids out of the crib, it wants them to jump in with them.
NCTE goes on to lament that: "In school and out, writing required a good deal of labor." NCTE has no doubt skipped over the advice: Labor Omnia Vincit, and has apparently come to believe that hard work and enjoyment are somehow incompatible.
To relieve our writing students of the necessity of doing the kind of hard work that is essential for success in all other human occupations, "in school and out," NCTE wants to develop "new models of composing" that will change our students from mere writers to "Citizen Composers."
This recipe for damage only adds to the harm already done, for example in high school English departments, by a truncated focus on personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay, which for most students guarantees that they will move on to college or work unable to write a serious research paper or even a good strong informative memo that makes sense and can be read by others.
Many high school English department focus on preparing their students for the 500-word "essays" about their personal lives that most college admissions departments ask for these days.
According to a survey done by the Chronicle of Higher Education, 90% of college professors think that most high school students who come to them are not well prepared in reading, research or academic writing. That may possibly be because far too few of our high schools challenge their students to do any nonfiction reading or academic expository writing, including the sort of research papers which require, after all, research.
While we do challenge many high school students to take AP Chemistry, AP Biology, AP European History, and Calculus, Chinese and Physics, when it comes to the sort of writing controlled by the English department, and recommended as "21st Century Writing" by the National Council for Teachers of English, the standards are as low as they would be if the Math department limited its students to decimals and fractions and never let them try Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, or Calculus.
Even a program for gifted students, for instance the grandaddy of them all, the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, which has very challenging summer programs in the sciences for students, when it comes to writing, it sponsors a contest for "Creative Nonfiction," which turns out to be only short diary entries by these very able students. They could challenge students to produce good history or literature research papers, but they don't.
Writing is the most dumbed-down subject in our public high schools today.
There are some exceptions. Since 1987, I have published 846 [868] exemplary history research papers by high school students from 44 states and 35 other countries. Their average length has been about 5,500 words, although in a recent [Spring 2009] issue (#77), the average length of the papers, including endnotes and bibliography, was 7,927 words.
Many of the American authors come from independent schools like Andover, Atlanta International School, Deerfield, Exeter, Groton, National Cathedral School, Polytechnic, St. Albans, Sidwell Friends School and the like. But many have also come from public high school students. Some of these students have done independent studies, hoping to be published in The Concord Review, but some very good papers have been IB Extended Essays and some have come even from students of AP teachers who do assign serious research papers, even though the College Board has no interest in them.
The Diploma to Nowhere report from Strong American Schools last summer says that more than one million U.S. high school graduates are in remedial courses in colleges each year, and if a student needs a remedial course or two, they are less likely to graduate from college.
The poor academic reading and writing skills of entering freshmen at our colleges and universities are acknowledged to be commonplace, but no one seems to have been able to increase the importance of serious writing or nonfiction reading in the high schools. The English department and the professional organizations are satisfied with preventing high school students from learning how to do research papers, so they continue to graduate students who are incompetent in academic expository writing, and unprepared for college work.
Not one of the new state academic standards asks whether students have read a single nonfiction book in high school or written a single serious research paper. All the attention is on what can be easily tested and quantified, so the skills of academic reading and writing are left out, and our students pay the price for this neglect.
In 1776, Edward Gibbon, in the first volume of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote about the importance of academic reading and writing:
"...But all this well-laboured system of German antiquities is annihilated by a single fact, too well attested to admit of any doubt, and of too decisive a nature to leave room for any reply. The Germans, in the age of Tacitus [56-120AD], were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge and reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular. Fully to apprehend this important truth, let us attempt, in an improved society, to calculate the immense distance between the man of learning and the illiterate peasant. The former, by reading and reflection, multiplies his own experience, and lives in distant ages and remote countries; whilst the latter, rooted to a single spot, and confined to a few years of existence, surpasses, but very little, his fellow-labourer the ox in the exercise of his mental faculties. The same, and even a greater difference will be found between nations than between individuals; and we may safely pronounce that, without some species of writing, no people has ever preserved the faithful annals of their history, ever made any considerable progress in the abstract sciences, or ever possessed, in any tolerable degree of perfection, the useful and agreeable arts of life...."No doubt he would be as appalled as our college professors are now to see the incompetence of our high school graduates who have not been asked to read and write before college.
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Minority kids try to enter a school. Angry adults scream at them and try to block their path.Little Rock, 1957?
Try New York City, 2009.
That was the shocking scene last week at a Harlem building shared by a traditional public school, PS 123, and a charter school, Harlem Success Academy 2.
Charter schools are public schools -- but they're mostly free of burdensome union rules. And they regularly outperform traditional schools, which is why parents are desperate to get their kids into charters.
And why it was ironic to see protesters (mostly teachers-union members) handing out flyers decrying the supposedly "separate and unequal" system that charters create.
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School's back, and so is Big Homework. Here's what my 7th grade daughter has to do tonight:1 Math review sheet
1 Science essay
French vocab for possible quiz
History reading and questionairre
English reading and note-takingAbout two hours, give or take. This is considered a pretty light load, so as to ramp up gently. Over the next few weeks, it will get up to three hours or more.
Most of us give very little thought to this long-lived combination. School and homework seem as interconnected as cars and gasoline. Kids need homework to get smarter -- right? It's supposed to be how they pick up a good work ethic.
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Parents often rely on two things when they go about the complex business of raising children: instinct and conventional wisdom. When instinct and the culture's knowledge about caring for babies don't magically kick in, new parents suffer a panic commonly referred to as "nurture shock."San Francisco writer Po Bronson and Los Angeles journalist Ashley Merryman play off this term for the title of their fascinating new book, "NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children." The jolt they're delivering is that much of the conventional wisdom about children and child rearing is based on outdated theories and studies often influenced by incorrect assumptions and wishful thinking.
The good news is that scientific research over the past 10 years has illuminated our understanding of how children develop and behave. But because these significant findings have been overlooked, unenlightened practices in parenting, education and public policy persist. The authors, who have collaborated on articles about the science of parenting for New York and Time magazines, throw open the doors on this research to create a book that is not only groundbreaking but compelling as well. Even if you don't have children, or your kids are grown, you should find the revelations about how the brain works and the rigors and frustrations of the scientific process captivating.
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As newly approved drugs harm and even kill children, more parents are fighting back.The most dramatic moment for the 70 doctors and 200 spectators attending June FDA hearings about approving new psychiatric drugs for children came when two bereaved mothers approached the open mike.
Liza Ortiz of Austin, Texas, told the advisory panel her 13-year-old son died of Seroquel toxicity in an ICU days after being put on the antipsychotic. "His hands twisted in ways I never thought possible," she said.
Next was Mary Kitchens of Bandera, Texas, who described Seroquel's lasting effects on her 13-year-old son Evan after being given the antipsychotic without her knowledge or permission by a residential treatment center.
But for Kitchens the most dramatic moment came after the hearings when she approached Dr. Robert Temple, the FDA's director of the Office of Drug Evaluation, who had officiated on the panel.
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Parents: Save those education receipts.For the first time -- and for a limited time -- upper-middle-income parents will be able to take advantage of huge tax breaks for paying college bills.
This is thanks to a law that temporarily supplants the Hope Tax Credit with the far more lucrative and inclusive American Opportunity Tax Credit.
What's this law and how can you take advantage of it?
The American Opportunity Tax Credit is one of several generous tax breaks that were passed into law in February as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aimed at stimulating the U.S. economy.
It provides a federal income tax credit equal to 100% of the first $2,000 in qualified education expenses and 25% of the next $2,000 in expenses per student for qualified families.
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Stephen Kreider Yoder and Isaac Yoder:
STEVE: I was checking our family bank-account balance online one night this summer, when my eyes slid down to another account, lower on the bank Web page."Interest Checking," it said, and beside the account number was an astounding dollar figure -- much bigger than I expected. It was Isaac's bank account.
"You should think about adding some more of this money to your Roth IRA," I told him as he worked at the desk next to me, preparing for college by organizing his most precious asset -- the music files on the family computer.
"Hmm," came the noncommittal reply. I knew how the debate would go next.
As we wrote earlier, The Wall Street Journal pays Isaac for his half of this column. Last year, he agreed to invest part of that in a retirement fund so he has a head start later in life.
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If the bear market has kept you from setting money aside for your child's college education, you're not alone.Because of the economic crisis, 47% of parents are saving less or aren't saving at all for their kids' education, according to a Gallup survey released in May by student-loan provider Sallie Mae.
While not saving for that degree may have felt like a smart move while the stock market was crashing, the need to fund your kid's college account has only grown. For the 2008-2009 school year, the average cost of attending a four-year public school for in-state residents -- including tuition and room and board -- rose 5.7% to $14,333, according to the College Board. The cost was up 5.6% to $34,132 for a private university. (These numbers aren't adjusted for inflation.)
Meanwhile, the value of 529 college-savings accounts sank 21% last year, according to Boston consulting firm Financial Research, leaving families with far less tuition money than they had counted on. A 529 plan is a tax-advantaged investment plan offered by individual states.
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f you have school-age children, you may have noticed their handwriting is terrible. They may communicate incessantly via written word--they can text with their heads in a paper bag--but put a pen in their hands and they can barely write a sentence in decent cursive. It's not going to be easy to decipher one either, if they think cursive might as well be cuneiform.My daughter is in the eighth grade, and I realized several years ago that her rudimentary block-letter printing was actually never going to improve because handwriting had been chopped from the school curriculum. Children today learn basic printing in first and second grade, then get cursory instruction in cursive in the third grade--my daughter was given a cursive workbook and told to figure it out herself. She dutifully filled in every page, but she never understood how these looping letters were supposed to become her handwriting, so they never did.
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Antique dealer Antonia White is sitting exhausted on a sofa. She's just returned from yet another three-hour stint looking at secondary schools for her 10-year-old daughter Clare. "I'm shattered," she says. "It's stressful and boring. All the chemistry labs look the same and all the parents look like people we wouldn't want to know."Her comments will strike a chord with thousands of other parents this autumn, as September and October are peak season for secondary-school open days (parents need to be on the ball as the dates are often only listed on the school's website, sometimes at the last moment). For the next few weeks, those with children approaching the next stage of their school career (both in the state and private sector) will be making their way along packed corridors, trying to spot the "best" school for their child. It can be an uncomfortable process - at some popular London secondaries the queues stretch down the street. (The public school system still has its main entrance point at 13, after prep school.)
Ideally, anyone looking for a school from age 11 should begin the search when their child has just started Year 5. This helps whittle down the choices before the final year at primary school (Year 6). Drawing up a shortlist when a child is 9 or 10 also allows for a year of coaching for 11-plus exams for selective state and private schools.
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"The more students are able to do in research and writing in high school, the more they've got a nice leg up."At the mere mention of research papers, Kelly Cronin's usually highly motivated Summit Country Day Upper School students turn listless. Some groan. The Hyde Park Catholic school requires all high school students to write lengthy research papers each year on history, religion or literature.
Cronin's sophomores write history papers. They pick a topic in late September and by May they'll have visited libraries, pawed through card catalogs, and plumbed non-fiction books and scholarly articles.
They'll turn in 200 or so index cards of notes. They'll write and revise about 15 pages.
Cronin gladly grades 35 or more papers with such titles as "The Role of the Catholic Church in European Witchcraft Trials'' and "Star Trek Reflected in President Johnson's Great Society.''
"It's time-consuming," she says. "It takes over your life. But I'm not married, and I don't have any kids."
But most high school teachers aren't like Cronin and most schools aren't like Summit. At many high schools across the country, the in-depth research paper is dying or dead, education experts say, victims of testing and time constraints.
Juniors and seniors still get English papers, says Anne Flick, a specialist in gifted education in Springfield Township. "But in my day, that was 15 or 20 pages. Nowadays, it's five."
High school teachers, averaging 150 to 180 students, can't take an hour to grade each long paper, Cronin said.
The assignment may not be necessary, says Tiffany Coy, an assistant principal at Oak Hills High in Bridgetown. "Research tells you it's not necessarily the length; it's the skills you develop," she said.
But some educators disagree.
"Students come to college with no experience in writing papers, to the continual frustration of their professors," said William Fitzhugh, a former high school teacher who publishes The Concord Review, a quarterly in Massachusetts that selects and publishes some of the nation's best high school papers. [from 36 countries so far]
"If we want students to be able to read and understand college books and to write research papers there, then we must give students a chance to learn how to do that in a rigorous college preparatory program. That is not happening," he said.
Teachers see the problem. Fitzhugh's organization commissioned a national study of 400 randomly selected high school teachers in 2002 that showed:
-95% believe research papers, especially history papers, are important.
-62% said they no longer assign even 12-page papers.
-81% never assign 5,000-word or more papers.
Cronin and others blame the testing culture. Standardized tests, the ACT and SAT, don't require research or lengthy writing. And Advanced Placement puts pressures on teachers and students to pass year-end tests for college credit, although some courses do include essays."The emphasis on testing in this country has stifled writing," Cronin wrote in EducationNews.org. "TV pundits want to talk about the latest survey that shows what percentage of high school students can't put the Civil War in the correct decade. States want to grade schools and teachers based on tests that often just want rote memorization."
Angela Castleman, who heads the English department at Simon Kenton High in Independence, agrees to an extent. Teachers are assigning writing to help students get into college, but "our greater mission is to prepare them for what's ahead" once in college, she said.
Students think nothing of texting hundreds of words a day to friends but balk at writing thousands for a research paper--until college.
Achieve Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based education reform group, surveyed nearly 1,500 high school graduates and 300 college instructors in 2005. Among graduates at college:
-56% felt they left high school with inadequate work and study habits.
-35% felt they left with gaps in writing.
-40% felt they left with gaps in research skills.
Among college instructors, 62 percent were dissatisfied with high school grads' writing and 50 percent with their research skills, Achieve's study found."We may gripe and we may whine, but we know we need to do" research papers, said Melissa Ng, a Summit junior.
Bobby Deye, a junior at Xavier University, said he learned writing at a private high school in Florida, beginning with five pages on the Bermuda Triangle.
Now, facing his first 20-page paper in theology, he wishes he had been challenged more.
At the University of Cincinnati, most of the 3,000 freshmen take an English placement test and land in English Composition classes, said Joyce Malek, director of the program at UC's McMicken College of Arts and Sciences.
"I can't fault the K-12 schools," she said, "because we don't get enough writing across in the curriculum at the university level either...The more students are able to do in research and writing in high school, the more they've got a nice leg up."
Until Sharon Draper left teaching to write books in 1997, she was known at Walnut Hills for assigning 10-page papers. Students wore "I survived the Draper Paper" T-shirts.
Now, despite access to computers and software that make papers easier to write and footnote, students are writing fewer pages, she said, but they can still learn to locate and use scholarly sources and structure their notes and writing.
"If I were king of education, all seniors would have to know how to do a research paper," Draper said.
At Miami University, freshmen come with a wide range of skills, said Martin P. Johnson, an assistant history professor. Generally, they'll get assigned long research papers later in college, he said.
But it's up to professors to motivate them, he said.
"Students often display strong knowledge and analysis," he said. "When they do not, I think it is likely more a question of how hard they have worked more than not being ready or prepared in a general way to be able to do the work.
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
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®
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Like all children, Perry Cunningham, age 4, wants friends. But until recently, he lacked the social skills to reach out to other kids.When Perry tried to make a friend at his New Haven, Conn., preschool this year, he mimicked a move he had seen his 15-year-old brother make with his buddies--he gave another, much bigger child a playful shove. The big guy's response: A punch in the face, leaving Perry with a bloody nose.
Courtney Morse Costello is a mental-health consultant at Beary Cherry preschool.
In many classrooms, Perry might simply have been regarded as a troublemaker. But Barbara Giangreco, a mental-health therapist who works in child-care centers and preschools, understood that he was just trying to be friendly, and worked with his mother and teacher on helping him use words to reach out to other kids. All the adults involved agree that Perry's social skills have improved significantly. He is making friends, and while he still has conflicts with other kids sometimes, he knows how to apologize and make peace.The idea of assigning mental-health workers to child-care centers and preschools is jarring; I was skeptical when I first heard the idea. Children so small shouldn't need mental-health help, it seems, and having therapists or counselors working in classrooms seems to risk stigmatizing them with labels, or simply interfering with the innocence of childhood.
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If you were going to come up with a list of organizations whose failures had done the most damage to the American economy in recent years, you'd probably have to start with the Wall Street firms and regulatory agencies that brought us the financial crisis. From there, you might move on to Wall Street's fellow bailout recipients in Detroit, the once-Big Three.But I would suggest that the list should also include a less obvious nominee: public universities.
At its top levels, the American system of higher education may be the best in the world. Yet in terms of its core mission -- turning teenagers into educated college graduates -- much of the system is simply failing.
Only 33 percent of the freshmen who enter the University of Massachusetts, Boston, graduate within six years. Less than 41 percent graduate from the University of Montana, and 44 percent from the University of New Mexico. The economist Mark Schneider refers to colleges with such dropout rates as "failure factories," and they are the norm.
The United States does a good job enrolling teenagers in college, but only half of students who enroll end up with a bachelor's degree. Among rich countries, only Italy is worse. That's a big reason inequality has soared, and productivity growth has slowed. Economic growth in this decade was on pace to be slower than in any decade since World War II -- even before the financial crisis started.
So identifying the causes of the college dropout crisis matters enormously, and a new book tries to do precisely that.
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The value of a university education for male students in the US in terms of future earning power is double the rich country average, research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development suggests.A male graduate in the US can expect to earn $367,000 extra over his lifetime compared with someone who has merely completed high school.
The income boost for men is higher than for any other country in the world and double the rich-country average of $186,000, suggesting that in the US going to college is particularly key to high earnings.
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David Rivera recently had someone "unfriend" him on Facebook: His own child.For months, Dr. Rivera, an obstetrician in Lombard, Ill., had been exasperated that his 25-year-old son, Nate, often complained he was broke and asked for money, yet posted photos of himself on Facebook taken at bars, restaurants, movies and concerts.
Dr. Rivera says he tried to talk to his son, a senior in college, about his spending habits, but his son refused to listen. Frustrated, he finally wrote on his son's Facebook wall: "I can see what you are blowing your money on, so don't come whining to me about money."
"I think they figure that their friends are watching but we're not, because they think we are old and decrepit and we barely know how to turn the computer on," says Dr. Rivera, 54-years-old, of being a parent.
In the new era of helicopter parenting, more and more parents and kids are meeting up, and clashing, on Facebook, MySpace and other social-networking sites.
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As the city's students return to school on Wednesday, thousands will enter classrooms led by a teacher that the Department of Education has deemed low performing on internal reports. But in a sign of how complicated and controversial the reports are, many teachers never received them, and there are no plans to release them to parents.The reports use standardized test scores to monitor how much teachers have helped students improve from one year to the next and whether they are successful with particular groups of children, such as boys or those who have struggled for years.
During the last school year, education officials distributed some 12,000 reports that considered how well teachers did in educating students, producing a report for any teacher who taught fourth through eighth grade for the last two years. The reports put New York at the center of a national debate over ways to measure the effectiveness of individual teachers and the role that test scores should play in the evaluations.
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Two Christian girls. Two sets of distraught parents. And two state courts smack in the middle of it.One of these courts is in New Hampshire, where a judge recently ordered that home-schooled Amanda Kurowski be sent to public school. The order signed by Family Court Justice Lucinda V. Sandler says the 10-year-old's Christian faith could use some shaking up--and that the local public school is just the place to do it. So while the child's lawyers at the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal outfit, filed a motion asking the judge to reconsider, last week Amanda started fifth grade at a local public school.
At about the same time Miss Kurowski was starting school in New Hampshire, a state court in Florida was considering what to do with 17-year-old Rifqa Bary. Miss Bary fled to Florida from Ohio a few weeks back, where she sought refuge with a Christian couple whose church she had learned about on Facebook. She says she ran away from home because her father discovered she'd become a Christian--and then threatened to kill her. On Thursday, Circuit Judge Daniel Dawson ordered the girl and her family to try mediation and set a pretrial hearing for the end of the month.
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Kids, remember this name: Jenny Sawyer.She may soon be American education's next "It" girl. Actually, make that its first and only "It" girl.
Only 24 and barely out of college, Sawyer has undertaken an audacious task: writing and shooting, with the help of a small band of filmmakers, more than 1,000 free, one-minute videos that help students understand and enjoy commonly assigned classic works of literature.
It'll take two years, thousands of hours on a Boston soundstage and countless outfit changes for Sawyer, the only person appearing on camera.
Her website, 60secondrecap.com, is scheduled to go live Tuesday with the first of 100 or so videos covering 10 universally loved (read: hated) works that teenagers have struggled to appreciate since English teachers first walked the Earth. Titles include: The Scarlet Letter, Of Mice and Men, Great Expectations, Hamlet and To Kill a Mockingbird.
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I would give entering freshmen two pieces of advice. First, find out who the good teachers are. Ask your adviser; poll older students; search the Internet; and consult the teacher-evaluation guides available at most colleges. (As a professor, I am against those guides; too often they are the vehicles of petty grievances put forward by people who have no long-term stake in the enterprise. But if I were a student, I would take advantage of them.)To some extent your options will be limited by distribution requirements (in colleges that still have them) and scheduling. But within these limits you should do everything you can to get a seat in the class of a professor known for both his or her knowledge of the material and the ability to make it a window on the larger universe. Years later you may not be able to recall the details of lectures and discussions, but the benefits of being in the company of a challenging mind will be yours forever.
Second, I would advise students to take a composition course even if they have tested out of it. I have taught many students whose SAT scores exempted them from the writing requirement, but a disheartening number of them couldn't write and an equal number had never been asked to. They managed to get through high-school without learning how to write a clean English sentence, and if you can't do that you can't do anything.
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About a decade ago, this newspaper ran a series of articles about the problems facing public education. In those stories, three reporters, myself included, each spent a day following typical fourth-grade students in three different school districts.In one classroom, the teacher asked students about a spinnaker, and a young man answered by explaining he had seen the sailing ship on a trip to Turkey. In another classroom, when a teacher asked what was the first thing they smelled when they went to the movies, the students fell silent. When the teacher exclaimed, ''popcorn,'' we learned many of the students had yet to step into a theater.
Students arrive at the doorsteps of schools each day burdened with backpacks and often varied experiences and economic backgrounds. They are at different learning levels, and for this reason, it is difficult to fairly assess just how much teaching is going on in individual classrooms and buildings and across districts.
During the same period these articles were appearing, the charter-school movement was starting in Ohio. The early advocates for these quasi-public schools pointed to the poor results in urban districts like Akron and especially Cleveland and proudly proclaimed they could teach these failing children better and cheaper.
Choice alone for parents and students was not the early driving force to start charter schools, and don't let anyone tell you differently. Choice would come later, when the promises to teach cheaper and better were less than fulfilled
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The mathematics committee of the junior high schools of Madison has been meeting regularly for four rears with one intention in mind -- to improve the mathematics program of the junior high school. After experimenting with three programs in the 7th grade, the Seeing Through Mathematics series, Books 1 and 2, were recommended for adoption and approved in May of 1963.Related: The recent Madison School District Math Task Force.The committee continued its leadership role in implementing the new program and began evaluation of the 9th grade textbooks available. The committee recommended the adoption of Seeing Through Mathematics, Book 3, published by Scott, Foresman and Company, and Algebra: Its Element and Structure, Book 1, published by Webster Division, McGraw-Hill Book Company, and the Board of Education adopted them on May 3, 1965.
A number of objections to the Seeing Through Mathematics textbooks were made by various University of Wisconsin professors. Dr. R. C. Buck, chairman of the University of Wisconsin Mathematics Department strongly criticized the series. A public objection to the adoption was made at the Board of Education meeting by Dr. Richard Askey of the University Mathematics Department. Later, a formal petition of protest against the adoption of Seeing Through Mathematics, Book 3, was sent to committee members. [related: 2006 Open Letter from 35 UW-Madison Math Professors about the Madison School District's Math Coordinator position]
The sincerity of the eminently qualified professional mathematicians under Dr. Buck's chairmanship was recognized by both the administration and the committee as calling for reconsideration of the committee's decisions over the past three years relative to the choice of Seeing Through Mathematics 1, 2 and 3.
Conversely, the support of the Scott, Foresman and. Company mathematics program and its instruction philosophy, as evidenced by numerous adoptions throughout the country and the pilot studies carried out in the Madison Public Schoolsvindicated that equitable treatment of those holding diametric viewpoints should be given. It was decided that the interests of the students to be taught would be best served through a hearing of both sides before reconsideration.
A special meeting of the Junior High School. Mathematics committee was held on June 10, 1965.
Meeting 1. Presentations were made by Dr. R. C. Buck, Dr. Richard Askey, and Dr. Walter Rudin of the University of Wisconsin Mathematics Department, and Dr. J. B. Rosen, chairman-elect of the University of Wisconsin Computer Sciences Department.
The presentations emphasized the speakers' major criticism of the Seeing Through Mathematics series -- "that these books completely distort the ideas and spirit of modern mathematics, and do not give students a good preparation for future mathematics courses. Examples were used to show that from the speakers' points of view the emphasis in Seeing Through Mathematics is wrong. They indicated they felt the language overly pedantic, and the mathematics of the textbooks was described as pseudo-mathematics. However, it was pointed out that the choice of topics was good the content was acceptable (except for individual instances), and the treatment was consistent. A question and answer session tollowed the presentations.
..........
After careful consideration of all points of view, the committee unanimously recommended:
- that the University of Wisconsin Mathematics and Education Departments be invited to participate with our Curriculum Department in developing end carrying out a program to evaluate the effectiveness of the Seeing Through Mathematics series and, if possible, other "modern" mathematics series in Madison and other school districts in Wisconsin;
- that the committee reaffirm its decision to recommend the use of Seeing Through Mathematics, Book 3, and Algebra: Its Elements and structure, Book 1, in grade nine with Seeing Through Mathematics, Book 1 and 2 in grades seven and eight, and that the Department of Curriculum Developnent of the Madison Public Schools continue its study, its evaluation, and its revision of the mathematics curriculum; and
- that en in-service program be requested for all junior high school mathematics teachers. (Details to follow in a later bulletin).
Britannica on deja vu.
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Notice to my friends: I love you all dearly.But I don't give a hoot that you are "having a busy Monday," your child "took 30 minutes to brush his teeth," your dog "just ate an ant trap" or you want to "save the piglets." And I really, really don't care which Addams Family member you most resemble. (I could have told you the answer before you took the quiz on Facebook.)
Here's where you and I went wrong: We took our friendship online. First we began communicating more by email than by phone. Then we switched to "instant messaging" or "texting." We "friended" each other on Facebook, and began communicating by "tweeting" our thoughts--in 140 characters or less--via Twitter.
All this online social networking was supposed to make us closer. And in some ways it has. Thanks to the Internet, many of us have gotten back in touch with friends from high school and college, shared old and new photos, and become better acquainted with some people we might never have grown close to offline.
Last year, when a friend of mine was hit by a car and went into a coma, his friends and family were able to easily and instantly share news of his medical progress--and send well wishes and support--thanks to a Web page his mom created for him.
But there's a danger here, too. If we're not careful, our online interactions can hurt our real-life relationships.
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If you have paid a college tuition bill recently, perhaps the sticker shock has abated and your children have been good enough to friend you on Facebook so you can see what they are doing on your dime.Cringely ponders education in a "alternate economice universe".What probably still lingers, however, is the desire to ask some pointed questions of the people who are doing the educating. Where does all that money go? And why can't the price tag fall for a change?
Earlier this year, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities announced with some pride that the average increase in tuition and fees at private institutions this school year would be the smallest in 37 years -- 4.3 percent, just a little higher than inflation.
Is this where we are supposed to stand up and cheer?
To get some perspective, I set out to find a college president with an M.B.A. and some experience outside the academy. I found one at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa. Its president, Daniel H. Weiss, is an expert in medieval art, but he also worked as a management consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton. So he knows his way around a corporate restructuring.
Change is in the air. Simply throwing more money at the current system is unlikely to drive material improvements.
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Four years ago I ranked all of the major college guides for Slate. My piece is still there, if you want to look. It retains some relevance at this time of year, when America has its annual ratings-o-rama. It is more entertaining than informative, but so what? A little amusement might help us better understand what we want in our colleges.I have been leafing through the guides that just arrived in the mail. There is the Newsweek-Kaplan college guide, where once again I have an article, so in the interests of modesty and objectivity we will ignore it. The granddaddy of guides, U.S. News & World Report's "America's Best Colleges," sits atop my stack, still shiny and proud despite all the abuse it has gotten over the years. "The Best 371 Colleges," a thick book by The Princeton Review, is a favorite because of its playfulness.
I am also fond of the Washington Monthly college guide. It has found a way to deepen and broaden each year what I once thought was a one-time gimmick--ranking colleges by how well they serve America. I am excited by a new guide, at least new to me, the "Military Friendly Schools" list published by G.I. Jobs magazine. The "What Will They Learn?" report, an unconventional guide by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, shows how the lists might look if we cared about what our colleges were teaching.
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KAI RYSSDAL: College students, and their parents, who have yet to write this fall's tuition checks may want to bear the following statistic in mind. According to the Department of Education, more students are going deeper into debt to pay for school. Last year, total federal student loan payments increased 25 percent. Are students getting what they borrowed for? Commentator Tyler Cowen says yeah they are, sort of.TYLER COWEN: There's lots of evidence that placebos work in medicine; people get well simply because they think they're supposed to.
But we're learning that placebos apply to a lot of other areas and that includes higher education. Schooling works in large part because it makes people feel they've been transformed. Think about it: college graduates earn a lot more than non-graduates, but studying Walt Whitman rarely gets people a job. In reality, the students are jumping through lots of hoops and acquiring a new self-identity.
The educators and the administrators stage a kind of "theater" to convince students that they now belong to an elite group of higher earners. If students believe this story, many of them will then live it.
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THERE are plenty of interesting factoids in this post, on a study examining the well-known U.S. News and World Report annual college rankings. Despite the best efforts of well-intentioned administrators to reduce the influence of the publication's extremely popular and rather superficial league tables, the rankings get results; movement into or within the top 50 produces dividends in the quality of the following year's applicant pool.But this is particularly curious:
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Here's the latest exhibit on how polarized the country is and how much distrust exists of President Obama.Eric Kleefeld:He plans what seems like a simple speech to students around the country on Tuesday to encourage them to do well in school.
But some Republicans are objecting to the back-to-school message, asserting that Obama wants to indoctrinate students.
Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer said in a statement that he is "absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology" and "liberal propaganda."
Wednesday, after the White House announced the speech, the Department of Education followed up with a letter to school principals and a lesson plan.
Critics pointed to the part of the lesson plan that originally recommended having students "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president."
The Department of Education has now changed their supplementary materials on President Obama's upcoming address to schoolchildren on the importance of education -- eliminating a phrase that some conservatives, such as the Florida GOP, happened to have been bashing as evidence of socialist indoctrination in our schools.Alyson Klein:In a set of bullet points listed under a heading, "Extension of the Speech," one of the points used to say: "Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals."
However, that bullet point now reads as follows: "Write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short‐term and long‐term education goals. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals."
om Horne, Arizona's superintendent of public instruction, put out his own statement, with an education-oriented critique of the speech and its lesson plans.Eduwonk:Here's a snippet from his statement:
The White House materials call for a worshipful, rather than critical approach to this speech. For example, the White House communication calls for the students to have 'notable quotes excerpted (and posted in large print on the board),' and for the students to discuss 'how will he inspire us,' among other things. ...In general, in keeping with good education practice, students should be taught to read and think critically about statements coming from politicians and historical figures.
Just as it quickly became impossible to have a rationale discussion about health care as August wore on, we could be heading that way on education. If you haven't heard (don't get cable news?), President Obama plans to give a speech to the nation's schoolchildren next week. To accompany it the Department of Education prepared a - gasp - study guide with some ideas for how teachers can use the speech as a, dare I say it, teachable moment.Michael Alison Chandler & Michael Shear:
Conservatives are screaming that this is unprecedented and amounts to indoctrination and a violation of the federal prohibition on involvement in local curricular decisions. Even the usually level-headed Rick Hess has run to the ramparts. We're getting lectured on indoctrination by the same people who paid national commentators to covertly promote their agenda.
Please. Enough. The only thing this episode shows is how thoroughly broken our politics are. Let's take the two "issues" in turn.
The speech, which will be broadcast live from Wakefield High School in Arlington County, was planned as an inspirational message "entirely about encouraging kids to work hard and stay in school," said White House spokesman Tommy Vietor. Education Secretary Arne Duncan sent a letter to principals nationwide encouraging them to show it.I think Max Blumenthal provides the right perspective on this political matter:But the announcement of the speech prompted a frenzied response from some conservatives, who called it an attempt to indoctrinate students, not motivate them.
Although Eisenhower is commonly remembered for a farewell address that raised concerns about the "military-industrial complex," his letter offers an equally important -- and relevant -- warning: to beware the danger posed by those seeking freedom from the "mental stress and burden" of democracy.Critical thinking is good for kids and good for society.The story began in 1958, when Eisenhower received a letter from Robert Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran. Biggs told the president that he "felt from your recent speeches the feeling of hedging and a little uncertainty." He added, "We wait for someone to speak for us and back him completely if the statement is made in truth."
Eisenhower could have discarded Biggs's note or sent a canned response. But he didn't. He composed a thoughtful reply. After enduring Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who had smeared his old colleague Gen. George C. Marshall as a Communist sympathizer, and having guarded the Republican Party against the newly emergent radical right John Birch Society, which labeled him and much of his cabinet Soviet agents, the president perhaps welcomed the opportunity to expound on his vision of the open society.
"I doubt that citizens like yourself could ever, under our democratic system, be provided with the universal degree of certainty, the confidence in their understanding of our problems, and the clear guidance from higher authority that you believe needed," Eisenhower wrote on Feb. 10, 1959. "Such unity is not only logical but indeed indispensable in a successful military organization, but in a democracy debate is the breath of life."
I attended a recent Russ Feingold lunch [mp3 audio]. He spoke on a wide range of issues and commendably, took many open forum questions (unlike many elected officials), including mine "How will history view our exploding federalism?". A fellow luncheon guest asked about Obama's use of "Czar's" (operating outside of Senate review and confirmation). Feingold rightly criticized this strategy, which undermines the Constitution.
I would generally not pay much attention to this, but for a friends recent comment that his daughter's elementary school (Madison School District) teacher assigned six Obama coloring projects last spring.
Wall Street Journal Editorial:
President Obama's plan to speak to America's schoolchildren next Tuesday has some Republicans in an uproar. "As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology," thunders Jim Greer, chairman of Florida's Republican Party, in a press release. "President Obama has turned to American's children to spread his liberal lies, indoctrinating American's [sic] youngest children before they have a chance to decide for themselves." Columnists who spy a conspiracy behind every Democrat are also spreading alarm.This is overwrought, to say the least. According to the Education Department's Web site, Mr. Obama "will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning"--hardly the stuff of the Communist Manifesto or even the Democratic Party platform. America's children are not so vulnerable that we need to slap an NC-17 rating on Presidential speeches. Given how many minority children struggle in school, a pep talk from the first African-American President could even do some good.
On the other hand, the Department of Education goes a little too far in its lesson plans for teachers to use in conjunction with the speech--especially the one for grades 7 through 12. Before the speech, teachers are urged to use "notable quotes excerpted (and posted in large print on board) from President Obama's speeches about education" and to "brainstorm" with students about the question "How will he inspire us?" Suggested topics for postspeech discussion include "What resonated with you from President Obama's speech?" and "What is President Obama inspiring you to do?"
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I'd like to welcome you all to the Washington Monthly's College Guide website and blog. Our aim is for this site to be your one-stop-shop for information about higher education reform. Since 2005, the Washington Monthly has sought to steer the national conversation about higher education away from a maniacal focus on elite schools that is the abiding obsession of the mainstream press and towards the less selective (but often wonderful) rank-and-file colleges and universities where most Americans actually get their educations. This site is the latest step in that effort.We're looking to do a few different things here:
· Highlight the Monthly's annual college rankings, which rate schools not based on crude and easily-manipulated measures of money and prestige, like certain other magazines do, but rather on their contributions to society. Are they producing cutting-edge scientific research and PhDs? Do they steer their graduates into public-service jobs? Do they recruit economically disadvantaged students and help them graduate, or merely cater to the affluent? On these measures, the elite schools don't do so well. For instance, only one of U.S. News & World Report's top ten universities--Stanford--makes the Washington Monthly's top ten, while some institutions that rank high on our list, like South Carolina State (#6) and Jackson State (#22), are buried in the bottom tier of the U.S. News list. We hope you'll take the time to look at some of the surprising results our methodology led to.
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Former Madison Alder Brenda Konkel summarized the meeting:
The Madison School District shared their data with the group and they decided when their next two meetings would be. Compton made some interesting/borderline comments and they have an interesting discussion about race and how housing patterns affect the schools. There was a powerpoint presentation with lots of information, without a handout, so I tried to capture it the best I could.A few interesting notes:GETTING STARTED
The meeting was moved from the Mayor's office to Room 260 across the street. The meeting started 5 minutes late with Brian Munson, Marj Passman, Mark Clear, Judy Compton, Dave Porterfield, Brian Solomon and Marsha Rummel were the quorum. Judy Olson absent, but joined them later. City staff of Bill Clingan, Mark Olinger, Ray Harmon and Helen Dietzler. Kurt Keifer from the School District was here to present. (Bill Clingan is a former Madison School Board member. He was defeated a few years ago by Lawrie Kobza.
Clear asks if this reflects white flight, or if this just reflects the communities changing demographics. He wants to know how much is in and out migration. Kiefer says they look more at private and parochial school attendance as portion of Dane County and MMSD. Our enrollment hasn't changed as a percentage. There has been an increased activity in open enrollment - and those numbers have gone up from 200 to 400 kids in the last 8 - 10 years. He says the bigger factor is that they manage their enrollment to their capacities in the private and parochial schools. Even with virtual schools, not much changes. The bigger factor is the housing transition in Metropolitan area. Prime development is happening in other districtsFascinating. I wonder how all of this, particularly the high school "small learning community initiatives" fit with the District's strategic plan and recently passed Talented and Gifted initiative?
......
Kiefer says smaller learning communities is what they are striving for in high schools. Kiefer says the smaller learning initiative - there is a correlation in decrease in drop out rate with the program. Compton asks about minority and Caucasian level in free lunch. She would like to see that.
.......Kiefer says that Midvale population is not going up despite the fact that they have the highest proportion of single detached units in Midvale - they are small houses and affordable, but also highest proportion of kids going to private and parochial schools. He says it was because of access because to parochial schools are located there. Kiefer says they think the area is changing, that the Hilldale area has been an attractor for families as well as Sequoya Commons. Family and school friendly areas and he tells the city to "Keep doing that". He is hopeful that Hill Farms changes will be good as well.
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Although top-tier business schools such as Harvard, Wharton, Stanford and MIT Sloan have decided to adopt the GRE test as well as the GMAT, there is little appetite for the test in the majority of the US's top business schools, according to a report by Kaplan, the test preparation company.Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions conducted a survey of admissions officers at 260 of the top MBA programmes in the US. Some 24 per cent already accept GRE (Graduate Record Exam) test scores in addition to GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test) scores. Of the remaining schools, however, only 4.3 per cent said they were considering adopting GRE.
The GRE test is the entry test to a range of post-graduate degrees, whereas the GMAT is designed specifically for business students and so gives more accurate predictions of MBA success, says Dave Wilson, president of GMAC, which administers the GMAT test..
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An increase in the number of students seeking financial aid has prompted the University of Texas at Austin to phase out its multimillion-dollar National Merit Scholarship program starting next year so it can use the money for need-based scholarships.The university enrolled 281 National Merit Scholars last year -- second only to Harvard University -- and says it will honor all current scholarships but not offer them to freshmen next year.
Coming amid the recession and climbing college costs, the move by the state's largest university could signal a renewed emphasis on need-based aid by the country's colleges, experts said. Many schools have spent the past decade using scholarship money to attract high-performing students.
"This gets back to equity in college -- which should be the primary goal of student aid," said Justin Draeger, vice president of public policy at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.
The National Merit Scholarships are awards that go to about 8,200 students a year, based in part on their scores on the College Board's PSAT exam, a standardized test typically taken during the junior year of high school. The program gives winners $2,500 apiece, but corporations and some colleges also finance merit scholarships through the program. The University of Texas at Austin was one of about 200 universities that paid for merit awards, promising $13,000 over four years.
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heir faces gaze from billboards and the backs of buses everywhere: well-groomed, serious-looking professionals, often with catchy nicknames. The accompanying text spells out their expertise in various school subjects, such as maths and English.They may be sitting serenely in their office suites or surrounded by beaming youngsters holding up handfuls of "A" result slips. But this highly public face of the celebrity tutors - who make as much as HK$1 million a month from the desperate desire of parents to ensure their children get good grades at all cost - is only part of the publicity machine Hong Kong's frenzied cram-school industry has built up to lure pupils.
Schools use a web of incentives including star performances, free gifts and gift-redemption points that have children pressing their parents to send them to tutors who have become as much of a status symbol as a designer handbag, and just as expensive.
The stakes will get higher still as uncertainties over the new secondary school curriculum - which Form One pupils will follow for the first time when classes resume this week - and, in due course, the increase in senior secondary pupils it will produce stokes demand for tuition.
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NPR:
A college degree has long been considered a golden ticket to success in this country. But with the current economic recession, some question whether obtaining a college degree is worth going into debt. Boyce Watkins, a professor of finance at Syracuse University; author Richard Vedder, a professor of economics at Ohio University, discuss how many are rethinking their high hopes of a college education. The men are joined by Hunter Walker, a recently-enrolled graduate student at Columbia School of Journalism, who recently wrote about his educational debt worries on the tabloid Web site Gawker.com.
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One day in January 1986, fourth-grade girls at Marie Murphy School in Wilmette, Ill., were called down to the principal's office.A stranger was waiting there to ask each girl a question: "Are you on a diet?"
Most of the girls said they were.
"I just want to be skinny so no one will tease me," explained Sara Totonchi.
"Boys expect girls to be perfect and beautiful," said Rozi Bhimani. "And skinny."
I was the questioner that day. As a young Wall Street Journal reporter, I had gone to a handful of Chicago-area schools to ask 100 fourth-grade girls about their dieting habits. Researchers at the University of California at San Francisco were about to release a study showing 80% of fourth-grade girls were dieting, and I wanted to determine: Was this a California oddity, or had America's obsession with slimness reached the 60-pound weight class?
My reporting ended up mirroring the study's results. More than half of the 9-year-old girls I surveyed said they were dieting, and 75%--even the skinniest ones--said they weighed too much. I also spoke to fourth-grade boys and learned what the girls were up against. "Fat girls aren't like regular girls," one boy told me. "They aren't attractive."
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Let's have a show of hands: How many of you have sent a child to school when you have suspected (I'm being polite here) that he/she was not well and might be contagious?Maybe it will help if I tell you that my hand is up.
I know that you had your excuses: Your son didn't have fever when you dropped him off at school at 8 a.m.--even if the nurse says he has 102 degrees Fahrenheit an hour later... You thought your daughter was sneezing and coughing because of her allergies... It is sometimes hard to tell when your kid's physical complaint is an excuse to get out of a test.
I believe all of that. And I also believe that some people will keep sending their kids to school sick even if the secretary of Health and Human Services personally comes to their door and begs them not to.
But for those of us who are capable of changing our behavior, this is the time. Here's why:
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In September 2008, when Nielsen Mobile announced that teenagers with cellphones each sent and received, on average, 1,742 text messages a month, the number sounded high, but just a few months later Nielsen raised the tally to 2,272. A year earlier, the National School Boards Association estimated that middle- and high-school students devoted an average of nine hours to social networking each week. Add email, blogging, IM, tweets and other digital customs and you realize what kind of hurried, 24/7 communications system young people experience today.Unfortunately, nearly all of their communication tools involve the exchange of written words alone. At least phones, cellular and otherwise, allow the transmission of tone of voice, pauses and the like. But even these clues are absent in the text-dependent world. Users insert smiley-faces into emails, but they don't see each others' actual faces. They read comments on Facebook, but they don't "read" each others' posture, hand gestures, eye movements, shifts in personal space and other nonverbal--and expressive--behaviors.
Back in 1959, anthropologist Edward T. Hall labeled these expressive human attributes "the Silent Language." Hall passed away last month in Santa Fe at age 95, but his writings on nonverbal communication deserve continued attention. He argued that body language, facial expressions and stock mannerisms function "in juxtaposition to words," imparting feelings, attitudes, reactions and judgments in a different register.
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Maybe our whole back-to-school tradition is the problem.We think of education as a year-to-year thing. Start school in late summer. Finish in late spring. Then repeat. Learning doesn't work like that. Our fixation on the calendar is getting in the way.
When I was young, I didn't understand that. I accepted the rhythms set by my parents and teachers. So it was a shock to leave school and discover that when working and raising a family, it no longer mattered so much what time of year it was. I had to get that kid potty-trained, and soon! I had to write that story. I had to convince the foreign editor I could succeed overseas. I had to find a publisher for that book idea. I had to master new skills and absorb new information quickly and competently, or my plans for myself and my family were in jeopardy.
The Post tried giving standard job evaluations, sort of grown-up June report cards, but they didn't last. My job was to produce stories that interested readers, a real-world test not tied to the calendar.
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Some cities up near the fire have canceled the first day of school, it was supposed to have been today.A lot of college students around the country have either started classes already, or are about to. And as they choose their course loads for the semester amid rising tuition costs, there's less and less enthusiasm for the old stand-by majors like history or political science or biology. Marketplace's Steve Henn reports that today's students want something that sells.
STEVE HENN: Mark Taylor is a tenured religion professor at Columbia University. But he compares higher education to the Detroit Big Three.
MARK TAYLOR: They are producing a product for which there's no market.
Which wouldn't be so bad if these students also had skills valued outside academia but...
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I remembered from my first go-round to bring necessities not listed in the college dormitory's move-in guide: plastic hangers, scented drawer liners, tools to un-jam a balky closet door.But what I didn't remember when my daughter and I arrived last week at San Francisco State is how difficult it can be to drop off your kid, leave campus and get on with your life.
I'd been through the drill in 2003 with my oldest daughter. Then, we wandered wide-eyed through every reception and information session that Stanford offered. Two days later, we said tearful goodbyes and I headed home, confident that my child would be well cared for.
This time, my youngest daughter and I joined an endless sea of families jostling for 20-minute parking spots to unload computers and microwaves and cases of water bottles. Then we hauled our stuff up four flights of stairs.
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This online column, now in its ninth year, used to be called "Class Struggle." When we shifted that name to my blog, including all three of my weekly columns plus my various rants and outbursts, and the more reasoned discourse of my Post education writer colleagues, we renamed it "Trends." It is a simple name, useful mostly to access our left-side-of-the-page archive of Friday online columns, but proves to be quite apt.I love following trends in education, particularly those that involve favorite topics such as high-performing charter schools, college admissions practices, great teachers, weak-minded curricular fads and college-level courses in high school. We have two interesting trends in this last category, both having to do with the rise in influence of Advanced Placement, and to a lesser extent International Baccalaureate.
I have been accused of uncritically promoting AP and IB. I insist it's not true. I have written three books looking at these programs in detail. I think that makes me credible when I say they have done more to raise the level of high school instruction than anything else in the last two decades. But they have their flaws, such as the odd ways some schools motivate students to take the courses and tests. One of the two trends is the use of cash bonuses. That approach raises participation and achievement, both good things, but I still consider it troubling.
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The Question:Is it better for college admissions to take an IB or AP class and receive a C or D or take a standard class and receive an A or B? Our office is decidedly split on this matter. The majority of us feel that it is better to make the grade since GPA is the first cut often for college admissions. We usually advise our students that if they are going to take an IB or AP class they need to get an A or B in the class, and to take an IB or AP class in their strength area.My Answer:The high school educators and college admissions officers I know best have convinced me that EVERY student going to college should take at least one college-level course and exam in high school. AP, IB or Cambridge are the best in my view, although a dual enrollment course and test given by the staff of a local college is also good. Students need that taste of college trauma to be able to make a smooth transition their freshman year.
When you consider actual situations, the threat of a bad grade from taking AP or IB fades away. A student strong enough to have a chance of admission to a selective college, the only kind that pays close attention to relative GPAs of their applicants, will be strong enough a student to get a decent grade in an AP or IB class, and a decent score on the exam. If they do NOT get a good grade in the course or the exam, then they are, almost by definition, not strong enough to compete with other students trying to get into those selective colleges. Their SAT or ACT score will show that, even if they don't take AP or IB, and I suspect their overall GPA even without AP or IB will not be that great. If you know of a straight-A, 2100 SAT student who did poorly in an AP course, let me know, and I will revise my opinion. But I have never encountered such a student in 20 years of looking at these issues.
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As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can't write--and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into "bleak, bald, sad shorthand" (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?Andrea Lunsford isn't so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples--everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.
"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it--and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom--life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.
It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.
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Trekaroo (www.trekaroo.com) aims to answer the parental cry for a more family-oriented, review-centric travel site.What works: When it comes to traveling with kids, sometimes the only people moms can trust for advice are other moms. Trekaroo is focused solely on family travel and offers tips, hotel reviews and destination information for children of all ages.
It's well on its way to becoming the Yelp.com of family travel. Users can dive into the latest reviews from the home page or look for what other parents (and some kids) have said about the hotels, theme parks, zoos and other attractions they've visited.
Two features are especially convenient for time-stretched moms and dads - the age filter that allows you to amend your search results to a specific age range and the amenities search for a quick look at accommodations with cribs, adjoining rooms, child care programs, laundry facilities and more.
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In March, an independent hearing officer made official what Shnette Tyler already knew: Her 11-year-old son, who has severe learning and behavioral disabilities, had not been receiving a proper education from Chicago Public Schools.Detailing how the school system had repeatedly failed Devon Mallard, the hearing officer wrote: "Despite a history of disability as well as documented behavioral difficulties, it took two years of decreasing reading scores, increasingly aggressive behaviors, and the filing of a due process complaint for the district to take notice of this student and focus on his specific needs for special education services."
Within 45 days, the school district was ordered to set up a proper education plan for Devon -- who attends Ray Elementary School in Hyde Park -- and provide him with an array of weekly services including psychological counseling, occupational therapy and a reading tutor.
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A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college's composition program. What, I wondered, could possibly be going on in their courses?I decided to find out, and asked to see the lesson plans of the 104 sections. I read them and found that only four emphasized training in the craft of writing. Although the other 100 sections fulfilled the composition requirement, instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues -- racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.
As I learned more about the world of composition studies, I came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. This advice was contemptuously dismissed by the composition establishment, and I was accused of being a reactionary who knew nothing about current trends in research. Now I have received (indirect) support from a source that makes me slightly uncomfortable, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which last week issued its latest white paper, "What Will They Learn? A Report on General Education Requirements at 100 of the Nation's Leading Colleges and Universities."
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A critical safety net for working parents is unraveling, and many are bracing to pay a hefty price.As schools open their doors this month and next, closings and cutbacks at thousands of after-school programs nationwide have parents scrambling to make alternative arrangements. Some are forging new child-care alliances with neighbors, or turning their work or sleep schedules upside down to watch their children after school. A growing number will leave young schoolchildren home alone, or in the care of siblings.
Taken together, the trend will mark a significant shift this fall in the quality of family and neighborhood life in some locales, forcing parents to find new ways of coping
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Four out of 10 students who take the SAT are racial or ethnic minorities, the College Board reported Tuesday morning, a milestone for the nation's most widely used college admissions test. But some performance gaps are widening in comparisons of scores by race and family income.For the 1,530,128 students in the high school Class of 2009 who took the 3-hour 45-minute test, the composite scores were 501 in critical reading, down one point from the year before; 515 in mathematics, unchanged; and 493 in writing, down one point. The grading scale is 200 to 800 points for each section.
Over the past decade, math scores have risen four points and reading scores dropped four.
The College Board, a nonprofit organization based in New York that oversees the test, stressed participation trends, not the scores. The 40 percent minority share of test-takers was up from 38 percent a year ago and 29.2 percent in 1999.
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Felicia Harvey has two reasons for sending her children to the Detroit Academy of Arts & Sciences: They are learning at the charter school and she doesn't trust their education - or safety - to the city's historically poor public schools.Detroit Public Schools emergency financial manager Robert Bobb is walking some of the city's toughest neighborhoods to bring back Harvey and other parents who have abandoned the district by the thousands.
It's an imposing sales job, especially with the district's $259 million deficit and his decision to close 29 schools and lay off more than 1,000 teachers before classes start Sept. 8.
"You hear all the negative," Harvey said this week following a surprise visit from Bobb to her west side home. "My theory is change doesn't come overnight. I'm not saying I'm willing to put my foot in the door. I have to wait and see."
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Most students try not to think about school during the summer. But a number of them took to the streets on a sweltering August day to talk up public education to people who might normally enroll their children in private or parochial schools.More here.Clad in T-shirts promoting "The Choice," about 100 students, parents and administrators went door-to-door on a recent Saturday, asking Richmond homeowners to give their neighborhood schools a second look. Joining them was Virginia's first lady Anne Holton, a product of city schools.
The $50,000 campaign by a school system still trying to rebound from a long history of racial segregation and white flight is an example of efforts under way in several cities to retain students. School districts are highlighting improvements to halt declining head counts so they can retain their funding, especially in light of drastic state budget cuts.
"People are still stuck with perceptions of yesteryear, and are not really aware of what we have to offer today," Richmond Superintendent Yvonne Brandon said. "It's not perfect, but be a part of the solution and become invested now."Like other urban school districts, Richmond, where 88 percent of students are black, 7 percent are white, and 71 percent are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, has struggled on many fronts.
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For years, colleges have asked applicants for their grade-point averages and standardized test scores.Now, schools like Boston College, DePaul University and Tufts University also want to measure prospective students' personalities.
Using recently developed evaluation systems, these schools and others are aiming to quantify so-called noncognitive traits such as leadership, resilience and creativity. Colleges say such assessments are boosting the admissions chances for some students who might not have qualified based solely on grades and traditional test scores. The noncognitive assessments also are being used to screen out students believed to be at a higher risk of dropping out, and to identify newly admitted students who might need extra tutoring.
Big nonprofits that administer standardized admissions tests, including the College Board, the Educational Testing Service and ACT Inc., are also getting in on the trend. ETS, for instance, which administers the Graduate Record Examination, or GRE, recently unveiled a "personal potential index" designed for schools that want to replace traditional letters of recommendation for prospective grad students with a standardized rating.
"There is quite a bit of demand for these [noncognitive] instruments," says David Hawkins, director of public policy for the National Association of College Admissions Counseling. Educators say the use of such assessments is likely to grow as some schools search for new tools to recruit more minority and low-income students. At the same time, budget pressures are forcing public institutions in states like California and Florida to find new tools for selecting incoming students.
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Madison school district parents dissatisfied with local schools got a boost after a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision which trumped state law and made it easier for students living in the district to attend schools in other districts, a practice known as open enrollment.The Private/Parochial, Open Enrollment Leave, Open Enrollment Enter, Home Based Parent Survey, including School Board discussion, can be found here. David Blask comments.The case was brought by Seattle parents who challenged the use of race in assigning students to schools, arguing it violated the Constitution's right of equal protection. The ruling was celebrated by those who favor color-blind policies, but criticized by civil rights groups as a further erosion of Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 case that outlawed school segregation.
Last year it became easier in Madison, and in school districts across the country, for white students to transfer even if it meant increasing the district's racial imbalance.
After a flood of local students left the district last year, Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad decided to investigate why."We had an interest in knowing ideas from people that had made the decision for open enrollment," Nerad says. "We are attempting to learn from those experiences to see if there are some things as a school district that we can constructively do to address those concerns."
To that end, the district surveyed households of district residents who left Madison schools and transferred to another district for the 2008-09 school year to find out why the families left. The majority of parents who took their kids out of the Madison school district last year under open enrollment said they did so for what the district classifies as "environmental reasons": violence, gangs, drugs and negative peer pressure. Other reasons were all over the map. Many cited crowded classrooms and curriculum that wasn't challenging enough.
Only a few responses pointed directly to white flight.
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A high-priced college may not be worth the price of admission.As the economy forces more students out of the classroom and graduates into under- or unemployment, a college enrollment bubble may be starting to deflate.
The recession, combined with rising college costs, has accelerated a college affordability crunch that is exacerbated by shrinking family incomes, diminished home equity and reduced household wealth.
As many as one-third of all private colleges surveyed by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (Complete Report) said they expected enrollment to drop in the next academic year.
Almost 40 percent of those colleges said some of their students dropped out due to personal economic reasons and a quarter said full-time attendees switched to part time. Half said families had to cut back their expected contributions as the value of college savings plans dropped 21 percent last year.
The job market is so awful that I have encountered several graduates this summer who weren't able to line up full-time employment, even though they had sound academic records. Some are even "taking the year off" or doing internships.
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In an interview to be broadcast on the Tavis Smiley program on PBS, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan predicts that as tuition continues to rise, students will increasingly turn to schools that are "smarter and more creative" about lowering the cost of a college education.But let me tell you Tavis, what I think is going to happen is parents of students are really smart, and those schools where tuition is going up exponentially high, folks have a lot of options out there. You've seen some other universities be smarter and more creative and go to three-year programs, and go to no-frills programs, I think you are going to see them capture a larger share of the marketplace. Again, parents of students are going to vote with their feet and when costs are skyrocketing, we think those colleges are going to pay a price for it.Mr. Duncan also describes the Obama administration's efforts to make a college education more accessible, including more money for Pell grants, Perkins loans and tuition tax credits.
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ANN COOPER has made a career out of hammering on the poor quality of public school food. The School Nutrition Association, with 55,000 members, represents the people who prepare it.A meal from the cafeteria at P.S. 89 in Manhattan does not contain processed food.
Imagine Ms. Cooper's surprise when she was invited to the association's upcoming conference to discuss the Lunch Box, a system she developed to help school districts wean themselves from packaged, heavily processed food and begin cooking mostly local food from scratch."All of a sudden I am not the fringe idiot trying to get everyone to serve peas and carrots that don't come out of a can, like that's the most radical idea they have ever heard of," she said.
The invitation is a small sign of larger changes happening in public school cafeterias. For the first time since a new wave of school food reform efforts began a decade ago, once-warring camps are sharing strategies to improve what kids eat. The Department of Agriculture is welcoming ideas from community groups and more money than ever is about to flow into school cafeterias, from Washington and from private providers.
"The window's open," said Kathleen Merrigan, the deputy secretary of agriculture. "We are in the zone when a whole lot of exciting ideas are being put on the table. I have been working in the field of sustainable agriculture and nutrition all my professional life, and I really have never seen such opportunity before."
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Weeks or even days before classes start, hundreds of thousands of college students nationwide still don't know whether they'll be able to cover their tuition bills this year.In Michigan, the state legislature continues to battle over the Michigan Promise Grant, a merit award of up to $4,000 given to 96,700 students. The State Senate recently passed a bill to cut it entirely and eliminate another $56 million in need-based aid for this school year.
In Illinois, the need-based Monetary Award Program was halved last month, leaving about 145,000 students without a spring-semester payout. The full award used to total nearly $5,000.
In Utah, the state cut the tuition subsidy to 40% from 75% in its New Century Scholarship, a merit program in which students earn their associates degrees while in high school.
And in Pennsylvania, a state budget impasse is leaving 172,000 students unsure what funding they will get from the state Higher Education Assistance Agency. The maximum award is slated to be $4,700 for students who attend in-state schools.
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If you're going to do something, do it right.Such has been the longstanding philosophy of Suzanne Rheault, a 39-year-old mother of two who now lives with her family downtown. A Type-A -- make that A-plus -- overachiever, even by New York standards, she skated competitively as a kid, finished M.I.T. in three and a half years, and tested out of a chunk of her courseload at Columbia Business School. She conquered the marathon.
She logged long hours and worked on holidays for Morgan Stanley, once flying, with pneumonia and against doctor's orders, across the country for a technology conference (she paid with a burst eardrum). After marrying and having children, she kept up a grueling schedule, typically traveling two weeks a month.
The key to her success in picking stocks, she always felt, was extensive research. Then came the personal challenge that defied all research, her own Moby Dick: getting her daughter into private school. No Excel spreadsheet would unlock the formula that would guarantee results; all her expertise in statistics and economics failed her.
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A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education, has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: "On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction."The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.
Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.
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In 1995, I was sure that the explosion of the web would result in a good deal of online learning competition -- and fast. I may have been right about the first but not the second. It took a dozen years for online learning to get big and competitive, but it is finally a force to be reckoned with. Next month there will be close to two million students learning online at home and at school.Back then I was superintendent in Federal Way Washington, between Seattle and Tacoma. We were a founding district in Microsoft's Anytime Anywhere Learning initiative and began rolling out laptop programs to all of our secondary schools. The brave new world of education blending the best of online and onsite learning seemed right around the corner.
In September 1996, we opened the Internet Academy, the nation's first K-12 virtual school. It was a bootstrapped operation; a group of intrepid teachers staying a day ahead of the kids and testing the application of the state's seat time requirements.
Enrollment quickly grew to over 1,000 students with about half new to public education (i.e., home and private school students) with an even split between students seeking acceleration and those seeking credit recovery. For most of a decade, Internet Academy had Washington's virtual space to itself.
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Federal law first insisted in 1975 that public schools educate disabled students. Since then, the portion of students receiving special education services has increased 64%. Today, 13.5% of all public school students have been diagnosed with a disability. Special education, it turns out, is no longer particularly special at all.Taxpayers pay a substantial price for the growth in special education. In New York state, for instance, in 2007, the average special education student cost $14,413 more to educate than a regular-enrollment student.
What has produced such rapid growth in the percentage of American students identified as disabled? Don't worry--it's not "something in the water."
Better means of identification explain part of special education's expansion. However, a growing body of research points to a less benign cause: Schools see a financial incentive to designate low-achieving students as disabled, while they may not actually be disabled at all.
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Miguel Landeros is a lanky, well-spoken 12-year-old about to begin seventh grade in Stafford County. He is severely learning disabled, with reading, writing and math skill levels at least two years below his peers, and needs special teaching, according to a licensed clinical psychologist at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore and other specialists.Last February, Stafford officials refused to accept that evaluation and left him in regular classes. He performed poorly, failing all core subjects. Recently, they promised to give him more specialized services, but not the ones the experts who examined him say he needs.
I admit that education writers in general, and I in particular, write very little about learning disabilities and the many failures of federally mandated public school programs to help students who have them. I often say the cases are so complicated I have difficulty translating them into everyday language, and even then readers struggle to understand.
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The biggest problem for consumers of American higher education is that many of them must take on a mountain of debt to get the degree they want. That intimidating quandary has inspired some unique, though often unsuccessful, attempts to make student loans more affordable over the years.One of the most innovative sprang from a handful of trailblazers, including an economist who later won a Nobel and some entrepreneurs barely out of school themselves, who tried to persuade undergraduates to sell a portion of their future income to investors in exchange for money for college. Critics fretted about "indentured servitude," and the idea never amounted to much.
Others have tried to let strangers finance students' fixed-rate loans via Web sites. The idea of "peer to peer" lending hasn't gained much traction either so far.
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The new program would help meet the needs of students through better identification and enrichment.Lorie Raihala had planned for her kids to attend public school -- but over the years, the lack of programming for talented and gifted students proved too frustrating.
"We tried very hard for six years to make it work for them, and we're very supportive of the public school system, so we really wanted it to work," Raihala said. But it affected their emotional well-being, that their needs weren't being met in the classroom."
So Raihala's children moved to a private school. And Raihala joined a group of parents pushing for a commitment by the Madison School District to improve programming for its talented and gifted, or TAG, students.
That group will score a victory Monday night when a plan drafted by the district that would overhaul how TAG students are identified and supported through their school careers comes before the Madison School Board. The three-year plan would replace current TAG policy, which has been out of compliance with state statutes since 1990.
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Let's say you find out that your child is being bullied by a schoolmate. Naturally, you want to do something right now to make it stop. Depending on your temperament and experience, one or more of four widely attempted common-sense solutions will occur to you: telling your child to stand up to the bully, telling your child to try to ignore and avoid the bully, taking matters into your own hands by calling the bully's parents or confronting the bully yourself, or asking your child's teacher to put a stop to it.These responses share three features:
1) They all express genuine caring, concern, and good intentions.
2) You will feel better for taking action.
3) They are likely to be ineffective.
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The voluntary school drug test would go ahead in Tai Po as scheduled at the end of the year despite reservations about it in various sectors, the chief secretary said yesterday.Speaking after attending an anti-drug seminar for secondary teachers in Kowloon, Henry Tang Ying-yen said he had heard the community's different opinions about the plan.
"Our current goal is still to have [the pilot project] launched at the end of the year," he said. "We still have plenty of time ... when we can discuss details of the programme and how to improve it."
His comment came a day after the Professional Teachers' Union said schools should have more flexibility over when and how to conduct the drug-testing programme.
Three youth groups - the Youth Union, the Hong Kong Christian Institute and Ytalk! - have accused the government of not planning the scheme properly and urged students in Tai Po to boycott it. Social workers and the Catholic Church have also raised concerns about the programme, saying more resources should be deployed for it.
Mr Tang said: "We are serious about the scheme and will allocate an appropriate level of resources so it can be carried out successfully."
Deputy Education Secretary Betty Ip Tsang Chui-hing told yesterday's seminar she believed many students and parents supported the test.
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You may have heard about Trina Thompson. Unable to find work, she's suing her alma mater, Monroe College, to recover $70,000 in tuition. The Thompson case may not turn out to be the precedent-setter that some theorize, because Monroe makes unusually bold promises to students about post-college success.But the sad truth is this: Practically all colleges are failing their students nowadays, and in most cases at far greater expense than Monroe failed Thompson.
Historically, criticism of education in America has targeted grade-school and secondary education. Indeed, perhaps the best thing about the K-12 is that in these polarized times, it is the great uniter: Maligned by liberals and conservatives, Christians and Jews, Red Sox fans and Yankee fans, and just about everyone else in the grand American cultural stew.
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Andrea Byrd, mother of two boys, had enough with her son's school. After she and her older son, Andrae, moved from Mississippi to Memphis a year ago, the formerly straight-A student "started dumbing himself down," she says, to fit in with the other boys at his new school."I needed to get my child into a school where there were high expectations," Ms. Byrd says. A charter school had recently opened nearby, but the 34-year-old single mom hesitated over getting an application since Tennessee law required her son to either be considered low-performing--which he wasn't--or attend a low-performing school--which he didn't--in order to get in. But all that changed a few weeks ago, when the state enacted a law for charter schools to also include students from low-income families. Two weeks ago, Ms. Byrd went into the Power Center Academy for an application. Later that same day, she got a call to say Andrae had been accepted.
The U.S. Education Department is engaged in a high-pressure campaign to get states to lift limits on charter schools through a $4 billion education fund, Race to the Top, that encourages more charters as one of the criteria for states to qualify for a piece of the pie. A total of 40 states and the District of Columbia permit charter schools.
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Matthew Emmerling was just three days old and barely home from the hospital when his mother noticed his feet were unusually cold to the touch. Hours later, doctors determined that he was born with a critically narrowed aortic valve that prevented his heart from getting an adequate supply of blood to the rest of his body. He was in shock, and without quick intervention, his life was in danger.To avoid risky open-heart surgery on the infant, doctors figured they could thread a tiny balloon into his heart and inflate it to stretch open the obstructed valve. The problem was that a balloon designed and approved to treat heart defects in patients as tiny as Matthew didn't exist. Instead, Robert Beekman, a pediatric cardiologist at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, chose an angioplasty balloon that normally serves a different function: opening up clogged kidney arteries in adults.
The adult kidney balloon "is the right size for a newborn's aortic valve, so we use it," Dr. Beekman says. But, he adds, using a device in small children that wasn't designed for that purpose puts them at heightened risk for procedural complications and medical errors.
Matthew's situation highlights an enduring reality for children born with life-threatening heart defects: Hardly any of the myriad drugs and devices developed for the multibillion-dollar market for cardiovascular disease are designed with kids in mind. Children with heart disease represent too small a segment of that market to justify companies' investing the time and resources needed to develop specialized products. Litigation worries over products intended for children--and the challenge of conducting clinical trials for treatments often administered to newborns--are other impediments.
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Forbes' list of public and private colleges and universities ranks the best schools--from the students' point of view.The best college in America has an 11:30 p.m. curfew. It doesn't allow alcohol in the dorms, which must be kept meticulously clean. Students have to keep their hair neat, their shoes shined, their clothes crisply pressed. They also receive a world-class education, at no cost, and incur no debt--except for a duty to their country.
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We've published more than 100 comments on our post yesterday about Kate McLaughlin, the California teenager who has already graduated from college and is en route to law school.Some of you applauded her accomplishments, and her family's willingness to allow her to fast-track her education. Others saw it as too much too soon. And still others weighed in on whether the law was an appropriate career choice. Many of you wrote that you could identify with Ms. McLaughlin.
Missing from the conversation -- other than in the original article in the Orange County Register -- were the voices of Ms. McLaughlin and her parents. Earlier today, though, we received a comment sent by Kate's father, John McLaughlin. We then had a brief phone conversation in which he told me that some of the criticisms posted by readers echoed those that have been lobbed at the family for much of his daughter's life.
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After doing some research, including sitting in on classrooms, Valerie Gilbert thought she knew which third-grade teacher would be perfect for her son, Stanley.Ms. Cornelius has more.Impressed by that teacher's creative, visually stimulating style, the Berkeley, Calif., mother lobbied on Stanley's behalf. "I did my best to make my opinion known," Gilbert said.
The school, however, placed Stanley in a different class. And to his mother's surprise and delight, the year wound up being so successful for him that Gilbert said she is approaching his pending entry into fourth grade in a new way: by vowing to stay out of the process.
"I'm learning to be more open-minded," she said.
With parents becoming increasingly involved in their children's lives and educations, Gilbert's foray into her son's classroom placement process is not unique, particularly around this time of year when anxieties about the coming school year run high.
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Via a kind reader's email. mp3 audio.
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Anne Katz & Barbara Schrank, co-chairwomen, MMSD Arts Task Force, via a kind reader's email:
Kudos and thanks to the Madison School District Board of Education and Superintendent Dan Nerad for their support of arts education opportunities for all students, with additional thanks to members of the Arts Education Task Force.The task force of art teachers and citizens has worked since 2007 with Board members and administrative and teaching staff on a plan that supports, enhances and sustains arts education in Madison's public schools. The Board approved the plan on July 20.
In adopting the plan, the Board showed support of the arts as a priority for a quality public education.
The process took hard work by committee members, administrative and teaching staff and input from over 1,000 community members who have been thoughtful, inquisitive and dedicated to nurturing students' talent and creativity through the arts. These plans will move forward with leadership, support and a strong partnership between the district and the community.
We are proud to live in a community with educational leaders who understand that arts and creativity are essential components of a 21st century education.
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Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad's memo [100K PDF] on the Proposed Talented & Gifted Plan [1.2MB PDF]:
Background
Wisconsin Administrative Rule 8.01 (2)(t)2 states that each school district shall establish a plan and designate a person to coordinate the gifted and talented program. The previous Talented and Gifted (TAG) Plan approved by the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Board was in 1991. 2008-09 highlighted several independent yet related events which served to underscore both the urgency of and District-wide benefit for an updated Plan. Among the events that converged to result in the need to update the Talented and Gifted Plan were:Process In response to the events described above, the Superintendent charged the Teaching & Learning TAG Division to develop a process to create an updated Plan. The TAG Division met on a regular basis to define major areas for improvement in alignment with the National Association for Gifted Children standards. A Talented and Gifted Advisory Committee comprised of 30 members was convened in early spring. This group met five times between February and June to provide input and critique the evolving draft. The Superintendent and TAG Coordinator hosted a community input session on March 26. Senior Management, Instructional Council and Principals reviewed drafts and provided input. In order to ensure a timely and high quality Plan, a subcommittee of the Talented and Gifted Advisory Committee was invited to continue to work with TAG staff to complete the Plan during June and July.
- Superintendent Dr. Daniel Nerad was hired in July 2008. Dr. Nerad recognized the need for addressing the issues related to Talented and Gifted programming;
- The last TAG Plan (1991) approved by the District was found by the DPI to be out of compliance;
- An increase in open enrollment leaving the District spurred conversation regarding strategies to attract and retain students;
- Families leaving the District were surveyed to gather information regarding their reasons for leaving MMSD. A desire for improved Talented and Gifted programming was one of several emerging themes; and
- A new Strategic Plan was developed through extensive community involvement. The Strategic Plan clearly demands a rigorous and challenging education for all students.
There have been significant challenges in the process leading to the development of the enclosed plan. These challenges include communication, changes in leadership and an evolving level of District and community trust in MMSD's commitment to providing high quality education for all stUdents. Overcoming these challenges is an on-going process, one captured in the language of the plan with respect to continual improvement. Although there are aspects of current MMSD talented and gifted programming that are sound and valued, the need for overall structural improvements and re-vitalization is recognized byal!.
In addition to the TAG Division staff, we sincerely appreciate the members of the TAG Advisory Committee for their extraordinary gift of time and dedication toward creating this plan. Special recognition goes to TAG Advisory Subcommittee members Kerry Berns, Bettine Lipman, Laurie Frost, Chris Gomez Schmidt and Carole Trone for their continuing support and input through the final draft of this plan.MMSD Strategic Planning The enclosed TAG Plan aligns, supports and strengthens important aspects of the Strategic Plan. In particular, the TAG Plan undergirds District-wide efforts to: enhance assessments to guide appropriate levels of instruction; accelerate learning for all students; embed differentiation as core practice in all classrooms; and map and develop a comprehensive and articulated curriculum K-12 in order to increase curricular rigor for all students.
Executive Plan Summary Based upon the framework set forth by the National Association for Gifted and Children standards and areas identified by MMSD for improvement, eight key goal areas addressed in this Plan are:
Goal 1. Comprehensive Identification Process. Develop and maintain an equitable and inclusive identification process for students who exhibit gifted characteristics in the 5 domains.
Action Steps -Expand repertoire of assessment tools and improve use and implementation of existing tools. Ensure identification process is non-biased and serves to equitably identify students from underserved populations
Goal 2. Programming Options for Identified Students. Design and implement a continuum of systematic and continuous K-12 curricula and programming options in the five domains of giftedness in order to meet individual student needs.
Action Steps -Increase curricular rigor in all classes and increase advanced course options at the secondary level. Develop District-wide consistent grouping practices.
Goal 3. Individualized Student Planning. Develop and maintain a Differentiated Education Plan (DEP) for each identified student that systematically records assessments and plans.
Action Steps -Design a DEP with expanding capability for each TAG domain and corresponding program options.
Goal 4. Socio-emotional Support. Develop and maintain a system for meeting the socio-emotional needs of identified students.
Action Steps -Research, develop and collaboratively pilot non-academic supports to address the socio-emotional needs of identified students including underserved populations.
Goal 5. Professional Development. Facilitate the design and implement professional development opportunities for teachers, administrators and staff to support research-based best practices, expand the knowledge of current talented and gifted research and Wisconsin state laws and dispel misconceptions about talented and gifted education and students.
Action Steps -Facilitate collaborative professional development for target audiences including administrators and teacher leaders at all levels.
Goal 6. Use of Available Technology -Expand relevant technological capabilities to increase ease and efficiency of identification, creation and maintenance of DEP's and monitoring program accountability.
Action Steps -In collaboration with Research and Evaluation, design and implement an electronic DEP to interface with student data.
Goal 7. Consistent and Effective Communication Develop and maintain consistent and effective systems for communicating about talented and gifted education throughout the District and community.
Action Steps -Design Resource Guide, enhance web-based communications and provide regular updates to target audiences.
Goal 8. On-going Program Evaluation -Conduct an on-going evaluation to ensure program effectiveness and program alignment with the MMSD Strategic Plan, State of Wisconsin statutes and administrative rules and the National Association for Gifted Children standards.
Action Steps -Design an evaluation process to determine quality and effectiveness of TAG programming. Provide review and updates to target audiences at specified intervals.
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Very soon, parents everywhere will start gearing up for a new school year: plotting schedules, reorganizing desks and going though drawers and closets to remove items their children no longer use. In some cases, parents may find that it's not only clothes their children have outgrown, it's their bedroom, too.Pastels, primary colors, firetrucks and fairy princesses: all sensible choices for a baby or toddler's room but not so cool for a tween or teen. Unfortunately, a makeover every few years isn't budget-friendly. Nor is it practical, says D.C. designer Annie Elliott. "If you're running around with kids, you're not going to have the energy to update their rooms," she says. "You're just going to be too exhausted to want to deal with it."
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Q: What happens to a boy when he reaches puberty?
A: He says goodbye to childhood and enters adultery.Q: How can you prevent milk turning sour?
A: Keep it in the cow.We've all been there. You've been studying hard, the day of the BIG test arrives, you turn over the paper, and 'what the *&%@ does that mean?!' Not a clue.
Some students, rather than admit defeat, choose to adopt a more creative approach to answering those particularly awkward exam questions.
Packed full of hilarious examples, this book will bring a smile to the face of teachers, parents and students alike - and anyone who's ever had to sit a test.
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A new survey suggests that President Obama's victory last November had a positive effect not just on the academic expectations of black Americans -- it may have raised parents' interests in volunteerism.
The "Obama Effect," documented last winter, showed that Obama's rise during the 2008 presidential election helped improve African Americans' performance on skills tests, which helped narrow a black-white achievement gap.In the new findings, African-American parents of children in K-12 schools say they're much more likely to volunteer in a classroom this fall, in effect narrowing a volunteering gap.
The survey, being released today by GreatSchools, a San Francisco non-profit that promotes parental involvement, finds a jump of 37 percentage points in the portion of African-American parents who say they'll volunteer in their child's school -- 60% vs. 23% a year ago.
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Kate Washburn didn't know what to make of the email a friend sent to her office with the abbreviation "NSFW" written at the bottom. Then she clicked through the attached sideshow, titled "Awkward Family Photos." It included shots of a family in furry "nude" suits and of another family alongside a male walrus in a revealing pose.After looking up NSFW on NetLingo.com--a Web site that provides definitions of Internet and texting terms--she discovered what it stood for: "Not safe for work."
"If I would have known it wasn't safe for work, I wouldn't have taken the chance of being inappropriate," says Ms. Washburn, 37 years old, a media consultant in Grand Rapids, Mich.
As text-messaging shorthand becomes increasingly widespread in emails, text messages and Tweets, people like Ms. Washburn are scrambling to decode it. In many offices, a working knowledge of text-speak is becoming de rigueur. And at home, parents need to know the lingo in order to keep up with--and sometimes police--their children.
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What is going on in teenagers' brains as their drive for peer approval begins to eclipse their family affiliations? Brain scans of teens sizing each other up reveal an emotion circuit activating more in girls as they grow older, but not in boys. The study by Daniel Pine, M.D., of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of National Institutes of Health, and colleagues, shows how emotion circuitry diverges in the male and female brain during a developmental stage in which girls are at increased risk for developing mood and anxiety disorders."During this time of heightened sensitivity to interpersonal stress and peers' perceptions, girls are becoming increasingly preoccupied with how individual peers view them, while boys tend to become more focused on their status within group pecking orders," explained Pine. "However, in the study, the prospect of interacting with peers activated brain circuitry involved in approaching others, rather than circuitry responsible for withdrawal and fear, which is associated with anxiety and depression."
Pine, Amanda Guyer, Ph.D., Eric Nelson, Ph.D., and colleagues at NIMH and Georgia State University, report on one of the first studies to reveal the workings of the teen brain in a simulated real-world social interaction, in the July, 2009 issue of the Journal Child Development.
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Washington, D.C.'s public school system has 45,000 students and an abysmal dropout rate of about 50%, typical of large cities. With a goal to remedy this dropout "catastrophe" (Gen. Colin Powell's term), while being constrained by a tight economy, D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee is looking to--in her words--"leverage opportunities for the greatest change."To this end, Rhee believes that one of the best investments that D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) has made in the past year is its partnership with City Year DC. In 2008/09, City Year corps members proved themselves in a pilot program in 4 of Washington's most challenging elementary schools.
Jeff Franco, Executive Director of City Year DC explained that "we offered to help the Chancellor to solve her worst headaches." After rigorous training, corps members coached, tutored, and mentored children in grades K to 2, and successfully demonstrated that they could help improve children's reading ability. This achievement will be instrumental in changing the life trajectory of these kids--ultimately increasing the likelihood that they will graduate from high school, go to college, and later, earn greater incomes.
"I've been thrilled with the results of this first year," Rhee told me. So thrilled that she and Franco plan a "feeder pattern" strategy to have corps members continue working with these same children all through elementary school, middle school, and high school, while also expanding City Year's involvement with additional schools. The end game: reduce the dropout rate.
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At Harvard, Carrie Grimes majored in anthropology and archaeology and ventured to places like Honduras, where she studied Mayan settlement patterns by mapping where artifacts were found. But she was drawn to what she calls "all the computer and math stuff" that was part of the job."People think of field archaeology as Indiana Jones, but much of what you really do is data analysis," she said.
Now Ms. Grimes does a different kind of digging. She works at Google, where she uses statistical analysis of mounds of data to come up with ways to improve its search engine.
Ms. Grimes is an Internet-age statistician, one of many who are changing the image of the profession as a place for dronish number nerds. They are finding themselves increasingly in demand -- and even cool.
"I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians," said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. "And I'm not kidding."
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Getting an education is vital to financial stability and future success but the cost of education beyond high school continues to rise. Luckily Federal Student Aid offers financial aid programs that help millions of students attend college, universities and trade schools each year.The billions of dollars of help from Federal Student Aid is administered by the U.S. Department of Education and comes in the forms of grants such as the Pell and National SMART Grant and work-study and low interest loans such as the Federal Perkins Loan and the Stafford Loan. Some grants require a cumulative GPA of 3.0 while loans have interest rates around 5%.
Each year, millions of students benefit from federal financial aid programs. For information on programs you might qualify for visit FederalStudentAid.ed.gov or call 800-4Fed-Aid. Applying for federal aid is free and the application is called FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid). Free help is available throughout the application process. The College Scholarship Fraud Protection Act protects people from financial aid fraud.
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Royal Statistical Society: Significance:
Many parents in Britain make huge financial sacrifices to send their children to private schools. Are those sacrifices worthwhile? What return, if any, do they get? Do their children end up in better careers, earning more, than if they have been educated at the expense of the state?Francis Green, Stephen Machin, Richard Murphy and Yu Zhu examine who exactly benefits from the privileges of the Old School Tie.Via Mrs. Moneypenny.
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The recession is starving the government of tax revenue, just as the president and Congress are piling a major expansion of health care and other programs on the nation's plate and struggling to find money to pay the tab.Channel3000.com recently spoke with Dane County Treasurer Dave Worzala on the growing property tax delinquencies:The numbers could hardly be more stark: Tax receipts are on pace to drop 18 percent this year, the biggest single-year decline since the Great Depression, while the federal deficit balloons to a record $1.8 trillion.
Other figures in an Associated Press analysis underscore the recession's impact: Individual income tax receipts are down 22 percent from a year ago. Corporate income taxes are down 57 percent. Social Security tax receipts could drop for only the second time since 1940, and Medicare taxes are on pace to drop for only the third time ever.
The last time the government's revenues were this bleak, the year was 1932 in the midst of the Depression.
"Our tax system is already inadequate to support the promises our government has made," said Eugene Steuerle, a former Treasury Department official in the Reagan administration who is now vice president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.
While there aren't any figures for this year, property tax delinquencies have been on a steep climb the last few years, WISC-TV reported.Resolution of the Madison School District - Madison Teachers, Inc. contract and the District's $12M budget deficit will be a challenge in light of the declining tax base. Having said that, local schools have seen annual revenue increases for decades, largely through redistributed state and to a degree federal tax dollars (not as much as some would like) despite flat enrollment. That growth has stopped with the decline in State tax receipts and expenditures. Madison School District revenues are also affected by the growth in outbound open enrollment (ie, every student that leaves costs the organization money, conversely, programs that might attract students would, potentially, generate more revenues).Delinquencies increased 11 percent in 2006, 34 percent in 2007 and 45 percent in 2008, where there is now more than $16 million in unpaid taxes in the county.
"It affects us in that we have to be sure that we have enough resources to cover county operations throughout the year even though those funds aren't here. And we do that, we are able to do that, but 40 percent increases over time become unsustainable," said Dane County Treasurer David Worzala.
"I can see that there are probably some people that either lost their jobs or were laid off, they're going to have a harder time paying their taxes," said Ken Baldinus, who was paying his taxes Thursday. "But I'm retired, so we budget as we go."
Big portions of those bills must go to school districts and the state. Worzala said the county is concerned about the rise in delinquencies because if the jumps continue the county could run into a cash flow issue in paying bills.
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"If we want to become a strong economy again, the best thing we can do is have an educated workforce." Few would object to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's explanation of why Washington is funneling $100 billion to schools and universities as part of February's giant stimulus package. Indeed, other countries are following suit, with Britain, Germany, Canada, China, and others making new education funding part of their anticrisis strategies.What's far less clear is that this money is going where it's most needed--or likely to have the greatest social and economic payoff. In Germany, the bulk of nearly €10 billion in new school spending is being used to renovate buildings--a bonanza for construction companies and popular with parents and teachers, but unlikely to have much effect on the quality of German graduates. In Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown is pushing for more PCs and Web access in schools--another policy that's popular but considered irrelevant by educators. In the United States, a July audit by the Government Accountability Office found that schools were not using the stimulus money to boost student achievement, as promised by Duncan, but to fund their general budgets. And in still other countries, governments are using money to help build new world-class universities--projects that a World Bank study in July warned risk bleeding resources away from more desperately needed areas. "I'm not sure that the people making these decisions even realize the trade-offs involved," says Jamil Salmi, author of the study.
That's particularly unfortunate today, given the economic stakes. According to an April report by McKinsey, the United States' GDP would have been 9 to 16 percent--or $1.3 trillion to $2.3 trillion--higher in 2008 had U.S. high-school graduates attained the average skills of their peers in Canada, Finland, or South Korea. This fall, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) will unveil a similar study in Paris detailing the losses suffered by other laggards. Andreas Schleicher, author of the OECD study, says that "in a whole row of countries, the economic losses of educational underperformance are significantly higher than the costs of the financial crisis." What's worse, he says, countries pay the price for their mistakes year after year.
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Because of their emphasis on job skill development and professional certification programs, community colleges have been the traditional province of working people. But as the recession bites deeper, many middle- and upper-class youths are finding their entree to exclusive private colleges or prestigious public universities limited by depleted family funds. The community colleges have become a practical option for the first two years of study for a bachelor's degree.Jack Scott, the California Community Colleges chancellor and past president of Cypress College and Pasadena City College, cites the tuition cost differential between the first two undergraduate years at the University of Southern California and two years at nearby Pasadena City College.
"Assuming that you're taking transferable courses at Pasadena, you can go to USC your junior year after spending no more than $1,200 total tuition for your freshman and sophomore years," Scott said. "That's compared with roughly $50,000 for the initial two years of tuition at USC. If you lived at home while attending Pasadena, your savings were even greater."
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At the end of the school day, as their classmates pile into cars for the commute home, 50 students at the Woodside Priory, near Stanford University, turn and lug their backpacks uphill. These 30 high school boys and 20 girls are already home. They call themselves the "dormers," and they are the last of their kind between San Francisco and Monterey."I have roommates instead of a mom. It's better, I think," says sophomore Allegra Thomas, 14, as she sits in a vinyl booth in the mock '50s-style diner in her residence hall. It is 5 p.m., which is right about when she would be getting home to the Santa Cruz Mountains, with her mother shuttling.
"Before being in the dorms, I never really had an opportunity to hang out with people after school because it was such a long drive home," says Thomas, who started the Priory as a freshman day student, then became a boarder midyear. "Because I'm on foot, I can do more things around the school, be part of the community. I like the structure. My grades have been better."
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Getting that college tuition and housing bill under control is only the first step. Then comes the comforter and refrigerator and textbooks and -- well, the College Board has a list of 118 to-buy items on its off-to-college checklist.And don't forget the pizza money.
The bill to outfit a freshman can run to thousands of dollars if you're not careful, financial advisers say. As recession losses have whittled down college funds and as part-time jobs have become more elusive, families are finding creative ways to stretch each dollar.
In recent weeks, Sharon Okolicsanyi of Manassas has scoured the Web for deals on a laptop for her daughter, Helena, who will be a freshman at George Mason University. They finally found a bargain: It cost $499, marked down from $700. A security and software upgrade cost $100, and a printer cost $30, marked down from $70.
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Abigail Call corrects her mother's grammar when they speak Italian and has started to teach her father the language, sometimes making up nonexistent words just to toy with him a bit. She is not quite 4 years old."When she's by herself with her dolls, she sings all these songs in Italian," said Abigail's mother, Jessica Hall. "I'm a parent, so of course it makes me want to cry - to think that her little brain, in those unprompted moments of alone time, chooses to do that."
Abigail doesn't know it yet, but she is part of a trend.
Italian playgroups, preschools and language centers for children are proliferating in the Bay Area these days in a manner unequaled anywhere in the country, according to Marco Salardi of the Italian Consulate in San Francisco.
"It's just exploding," said Salardi, director of the consulate's office of education. "It's very new. And it's becoming bigger and bigger. It's a very nice surprise."
La Piccola Scuola Italiana on Potrero Hill in San Francisco. Spazio Italiano Language Center in North Beach. The tiny Vittoria Italian Preschool in the Mission District. Girotondo Italian School and Parliamo Italiano, both in Marin County. Mondo Bambini in Berkeley, purchased a few months ago by Girotondo so it can expand to meet a swelling demand in the East Bay.
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As the job market grows softer and less nourishing than a jelly doughnut, reports show more people are returning to school to immunize their careers and feed their souls. But "school" is not necessarily the idyll of leafy campuses and long afternoons arguing philosophy in oak-paneled rooms.Online education, long an ugly duckling of the ivory towers of the world, is coming into its swan years.
In its annual report on the state of online education, the Sloan Consortium reported in 2008 that online education continues to grow at a much faster rate than its brick-and-mortar competitors. Anecdotal evidence suggests that 2009's economic woes will only accelerate the pattern.
"We have seen our small university double in size this year," says Scott Stallings, director of marketing and admissions for California InterContinental University, a for-profit "distance education" university in Diamond Bar (Los Angeles County). "I believe this can be attributed to our low cost of tuition and the large influx of students who need their degrees to remain competitive."
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General knowledge, from capital cities to key dates, has long been a marker of an educated mind. But what happens when facts can be Googled? Brian Cathcart confers with educationalists, quiz-show winners and Bamber Gascoigne ...One day last year a daughter of Earl Spencer (who is therefore a niece of Princess Diana) called a taxi to take her and a friend from her family home at Althorp in Northamptonshire to see Chelsea play Arsenal at football. She told the driver "Stamford Bridge", the name of Chelsea's stadium, but he delivered them instead to the village of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire, nearly 150 miles in the opposite direction. They missed the game.
Such stories are becoming commonplace. A coachload of English schoolchildren bound for the historic royal palace at Hampton Court wasted an entire day battling through congested central London as their sat-nav led them stubbornly to a narrow back street of the same name in Islington. A Syrian lorry driver aiming for Gibraltar, at the southern tip of Spain, turned up 1,600 miles away in the English east-coast town of Skegness, which has a Gibraltar Point nearby.
Two complementary things are happening in these stories. One is that these people are displaying a woeful ignorance of geography. In the case of Stamford Bridge, one driver and two passengers spent well over two hours in a car without noticing that instead of passing Northampton and swiftly entering the built-up sprawl of London, their view continued to be largely of fields and forests, and they were seeing signs for Nottingham, Doncaster and the North. They should have known.
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Parents and teachers often expect less of students who are the children of Dominican immigrants. This causes their grades and ambitions to suffer.Now, why some immigrants' children do better in school than others. Yesterday, we heard about the kids of Chinese immigrants and the tensions between what their parents want for them academically and what they want. Today, the achievement gap between Chinese-American students and students of Dominican background. In Boston, researchers have zeroed-in on that gap. They've looked at whether one culture values education more than the other and what role do schools play. NPR's Claudio Sanchez has the second of two reports.
CLAUDIO SANCHEZ: Carmen Merced has had two sons in the Boston Public Schools. Fernando, an eighth grader, and Wildo, her oldest, just finished high school. They were born in Boston and grew up speaking English. In school, though, both were tagged learning disabled. Merced is convinced that it's because they're Latino.
Ms. CARMEN MERCED: (Foreign language spoken)
SANCHEZ: Latinos, even if they know English, are always discriminated, says Merced. It's not something schools even try to hide. Like the time one of Wildo's teachers told him he was never going to amount to anything in life.
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Students frequently rent DVDs to watch in their dorm rooms, but soon they may start checking out something much heavier and pricier: textbooks.Saying they offer an alternative to the textbook industry's bloated prices, a growing number of companies are renting new and used titles at reduced prices. Among them are Chegg, BookRenter and the Follett Higher Education Group, which will test drive a rental service at campus bookstores this fall. They join a number of colleges that have already started their own on-campus programs.
With all of them, the concept is essentially to pay to check out textbooks as if they're out of a library -- only there are more copies and titles, and they can be used for longer periods of time. Through Chegg, for instance, a student searches for a book and rents it for up to a certain number of days, such as up to a quarter or a semester. Users are promised discounts of 65 to 85 percent off the list price, but if they don't return a book on time, they are charged full price. The same punishment applies to doodling in the margins, since the books are meant for reuse. As a disclaimer on Chegg warns: "Highlighting in the textbook is OK -- to a certain extent. Writing in the book is not accepted."
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Thanks to the Virginia Department of Education and the Professor Garfield Foundation, you -- and your kids, of course -- can get an Introduction to Comics on iTunes U. The 15 video episodes encourage children to draw, sculpt, and carve. In fact, Jim Davis -- who created Garfield -- gets the course off to a great start, showing us all how he draws his famous lasagna-loving feline.
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I don't much like the SAT. When the SAT-optional movement began to gain momentum a few years ago, I cheered. Dozens of colleges told their applicants that if they didn't want to submit their SAT or ACT scores, they didn't have to. Some restricted this choice to students with high grade point averages, but it seemed to me a step in the right direction.In my view the SAT does not reflect very well what students learn in high school. It seems more influenced by how much money their parents make. Indeed, SAT prep classes (such as those offered by Kaplan Inc., the Washington Post Company's leading revenue source) give kids from affluent families an advantage.
So I was impressed and pleased when the SAT-Optional movement grew so strong that FairTest (the National Center for Fair & Open Testing), a non-profit group that supports the change, noted that 32 of the top 100 colleges on the U.S. News & World Report liberal arts college list no longer require every applicant to submit an SAT or ACT score.
When I started reading Jonathan P. Epstein's article on SAT-Optional schools in the summer edition of the Journal of College Admissions, I expected a careful history of these developments, with no surprises. Epstein is a senior consultant with Maguire Associates in Boston, who specialize in advising college admissions offices. He is not a journalist, and sees no need to deliver the big news at the top of the story.
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This will be the first in an occasional series of blog postings on little-known colleges that prove their worth. My 2003 book Harvard Schmarvard argued that the big name schools don't provide a better education than the little name schools. Research indicates that qualities that bring success---persistence, humor, kindness, patience---are acquired before we ever take an SAT test. The brand name schools look good because they lure lots of students with those qualities, but students with similar character strengths who go to unknown schools often do just as well, particularly if they pick colleges with great strengths in areas that interest them.I tend to ramble about this topic a lot. Parents who write and seek my advice on college selection get an email-full of such Jayisms. In many cases they go away realizing I am a bore. But occasionally I say the right thing, and years later they let me know that. Here is a message I received today from Michael Bledsoe, pastor of the Riverside Baptist Church in southwest D.C. and an adjunct at the Howard University Divinity School. Four years ago, when he and his wife were agonizing over where to send their first child, Kelley, off to college, they read some of my columns and wrote for more advice. Kelley was attracted to Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga., I told them that in many ways that school would be better for her than an Ivy League university. In his new message, Bledsoe said this:
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In 1996, an investor named Henry de Kwiatkowski sued Bear Stearns for negligence and breach of fiduciary duty. De Kwiatkowski had made--and then lost--hundreds of millions of dollars by betting on the direction of the dollar, and he blamed his bankers for his reversals. The district court ruled in de Kwiatkowski's favor, ultimately awarding him $164.5 million in damages. But Bear Stearns appealed--successfully--and in William D. Cohan's engrossing account of the fall of Bear Stearns, "House of Cards," the firm's former chairman and C.E.O. Jimmy Cayne tells the story of what happened on the day of the hearing:Their lead lawyer turned out to be about a 300-pound fag from Long Island . . . a really irritating guy who had cross-examined me and tried to kick the shit out of me in the lower court trial. Now when we walk into the courtroom for the appeal, they're arguing another case and we have to wait until they're finished. And I stopped this guy. I had to take a piss. I went into the bathroom to take a piss and came back and sat down. Then I see my blood enemy stand up and he's going to the bathroom. So I wait till he passes and then I follow him in and it's just he and I in the bathroom. And I said to him, "Today you're going to get your ass kicked, big." He ran out of the room. He thought I might have wanted to start it right there and then.
At the time Cayne said this, Bear Stearns had spectacularly collapsed. The eighty-five-year-old investment bank, with its shiny new billion-dollar headquarters and its storied history, was swallowed whole by J. P. Morgan Chase. Cayne himself had lost close to a billion dollars. His reputation--forty years in the making--was in ruins, especially when it came out that, during Bear's final, critical months, he'd spent an inordinate amount of time on the golf course.
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One of the most biting scenes in The Group, Mary McCarthy's acerbic sendup of female friendship and aspiration, takes place on a play date. Priss Crockett, the grind of the Vassar class of 1933 and now a doctor's wife, is walking through Central Park with her toddler Stephen. She runs into a fellow alum, Norine Schmittlapp, and her 3-month-old baby, Ichabod. "Aren't you afraid he'll be called 'Icky' in school?" Priss asks before barely resisting the urge to tell Norine to raise the hood of the baby's carriage, to shield his head from the sun.The two women are off and running for an afternoon of sniping and clashing. Norine mentions letting Ichabod sleep in the bed with her at night. Priss can't believe she doesn't know that "under no circumstances, not even in a crowded slum home, should a baby be permitted to sleep with an adult." Stephen sees Ichabod sucking on a pacifier and reaches up to touch the unknown object. Priss snatches his hand away. Norine brings up toilet training, the source of Priss' most bitter shame, since Stephen is not performing properly. Norine's theory is that children should train themselves. "Where in the world did you get such ideas?" Priss asks. The women repair to Norine's apartment, where a butler whisks Stephen away. The butler later returns to whisper in Norine's ear. "Stephen shat," she casually reports, to Priss' humiliation, even as she lets Stephen's nursemaid clean up the mess.
In the last minutes in this strange apartment, Stephen plunges his hand into the neck of the nursemaid's dress, and Priss, desperate to distract him, gives him a piece of chocolate cake. Stephen, a chocolate virgin, doesn't now what to do with it. "Look! It's good," Priss tells him, chewing. McCarthy makes Stephen's corruption complete with this last line of the chapter: "Soon he was greedily eating chocolate cake, from a Jewish bakery, with fudge frosting."
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Two years ago, Taishia Jenerette was holding down two jobs, caring for her 6-year-old daughter and struggling as a single mother with too little time and too many bills. Then a friend told her about an unusual Fairfax County program that provides low-income single parents with career counseling and professional certificate courses -- free."I would have never been able to go to school if not for the Education for Independence program," said Jenerette, 32, who quit her part-time job at Macy's to make time for night classes. "I had looked into it so many times, but I didn't have the money."
In a ceremony last week at the Fairfax County Government Center, Jenerette graduated with a medical assistant certificate that will help her qualify for a promotion, and a raise, at the Virginia Department of Rehabilitative Services, where she prepares disability cases for review. But more important than the certificate, Jenerette said, the program has given her confidence.
"I was so scared to go back to school because I didn't want to fail," said Jenerette, of Centreville. "I said if I can get through this two years, I can do anything."
That attitude is what Education for Independence is meant to engender, said Lorraine Obuchon, one of two career counselors who work with the program's approximately 120 participants.
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In 1975, Congress passed legislation giving students with disabilities the right to an appropriate education at public expense. But having a right is only as good as your ability to enforce it. In New York City and elsewhere, public schools regularly delay and frustrate disabled students seeking appropriate services--everything from tutoring to speech therapy to treatment of severe disabilities--making their federally protected right all but meaningless. Rather than compelling families with disabled children to contend with obstinate public school systems, we should give them the option of purchasing the services they need for their children from a private provider. That is, we should give them special-ed vouchers--good for the same amount of money that we already spend on them in the public school system--that they could then use to pay for private school. Not only would this bring better services to disabled New York students; it could also save the public money.Many parents of disabled students have a lot of trouble ensuring that public schools give their kids an appropriate education. The parents have to know what they're entitled to, and most do not. They must negotiate services from the local schools--but the schools are experienced in these negotiations, while the parents generally aren't, so the schools often get away with minimizing their responsibilities. And even if parents win at the negotiating table, getting the schools actually to deliver on their promises is enormously difficult.
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The Chronicle Review
July 27, 2009
A Rescue Plan for College Composition and High-School English
By Michael B. Prince:
The new administration in Washington promises fresh resources for our failing school systems. The need is great. Yet at a time when every penny counts, we had better be sure that new investments in education don't chase after bad pedagogical ideas.I propose a rescue plan for high-school English and college composition that costs little, apart from a shift in dominant ideas. For the sake of convenience and discussion, the rescue plan reduces complex matters to three concrete steps.
First, don't trust the SAT Reasoning Test, especially the writing section of that test, as a college diagnostic, and don't allow the writing test to influence the goals of high-school English.
The news last year that Baylor University paid its already admitted students to retake the SAT in order to raise the school's ranking in U.S. News and World Report would be funny if it weren't so sad. The test is a failure.
Even the manufacturer of the SAT admits that the new test, which includes writing, is no better than the old test, which didn't. As The Boston Globe reported on June 18, 2008: "The New York-based College Board, which owns the test, released the study yesterday showing that the current SAT rated 0.53 on a measure of predictive ability, compared with 0.52 for the previous version. A result of 1 would mean the test perfectly predicts college performance. Revising the SAT 'did not substantially change' its capacity to foretell first-year college grades, the research found."
How could this happen? College professors frequently ask their students to write. Shouldn't a test that includes actual writing tell us more about scholastic aptitude than a test that doesn't? Yes, unless the test asks students to do something categorically different from what college professors generally ask their students to do. Is that the problem with the SAT? You be the judge.
The following essay question appeared on the December 2007 SAT. It was reprinted on the College Board's Web site as a model for high-school students to practice; it was subsequently disseminated by high schools and SAT-prep Web sites. The question runs as follows:
"Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below.
"'Our determination to pursue truth by setting up a fight between two sides leads us to believe that every issue has two sides--no more, no less. If we know both sides of an issue, all of the relevant information will emerge, and the best case will be made for each side. But this process does not always lead to the truth. Often the truth is somewhere in the complex middle, not the oversimplified extremes.'
"[Adapted from Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture]
"Assignment:"Should people choose one of two opposing sides of an issue, or is the truth usually found 'in the middle'? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations."
Take a stand on where truth is found and support it with reasons. Could anything be more straightforward? Here is a question that promises not to exclude a single thinking student based on cultural bias. No reading imposes itself to the advantage of some students and detriment of others. There are no instructions about writing correctly, proofreading, and the like, and graders are advised to play down surface errors. The prompt threatens no one and nothing, least of all standard operating procedures in high-school English and college composition, where the brief argument essay is the coin of the realm. As the Globe article reports, "the College Board had said the SAT changes were meant to make the test 'more closely aligned with current high-school curricula.'"
Yes, and that's exactly the problem: The College Board bought stock in the ideas it was supposed to regulate.
Most college professors--especially those outside the humanities--would view the SAT essay prompt as significantly unlike their own writing assignments. First and foremost, we ask students to read. Though we may not say so directly, we also expect students to weave faithful renditions of other writers' ideas into their own papers. A student who can whip up an argument about where truth is located is not necessarily a student who can read Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (or any other challenging text) with understanding sufficient to frame an intelligent response. The SAT writing test fails for the simple reason that it ignores reading comprehension, overrates argument, and plays down grammar and prose mechanics. My advice: Toss the test; upgrade the skills it neglects.
But that's not enough. We owe it to our students to trace the influences shaping this failed test. My second remedy for high-school English and college composition is also inexpensive: to examine the assumptions of the critical-thinking movement, which underlie the SAT essay prompt and the field of composition generally--indeed, to think critically, about critical thinking.
Consider the question more closely. What does it ask our students to do? State and support an opinion about how the truth is discovered. This is a question about the methodology of inquiry. Is a dialectical procedure taking in opposing viewpoints a good way to locate the truth? Or does this dialectical procedure cause an oversimplified focus on extreme views at the expense of more nuanced positions in between?
Those of us who pursued advanced degrees in the humanities in the 1980s and 1990s will be familiar with the assumption behind the question: Humanistic confidence in the value of dialogue is naïve in contrast to a more strenuous exercise of critical reason. The question unmasks the pretensions of dialogue and invites students to apply their critical-thinking skills reflexively to think about thinking. You might assume a standardized test administered to millions of high-school juniors and seniors would be an odd place to rehearse an old theoretical battle, long since won by the anti-humanist camp. Yet the critical thinking, reading, and writing movement is obsessed with the process of thinking, and we see that fascination visited upon our students here. The theory seems to be that students become more literate, better able to succeed in school and profession, when they learn rhetorical techniques of critical analysis and reflect on their own thinking processes.
What if it has all been a huge mistake?
The assumptions of the critical-thinking movement have had a deleterious effect on college composition and its forced imitator, high-school English. Anyone concerned with the fate of English composition should know that the fourth edition (1996) of the best-selling and often-imitated Ways of Reading, by David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky, begins this way:
"Reading involves a fair measure of push and shove. You make your mark on a book and it makes its mark on you. Reading is not simply a matter of hanging back and waiting for a piece, or its author, to tell you what the writing has to say. In fact, one of the difficult things about reading is that the pages before you will begin to speak only when the authors are silent and you begin to speak in their place, sometimes for them--doing their work, continuing their projects--and sometimes for yourself, following your own agenda...We have not mentioned finding information or locating an author's purpose or identifying main ideas, useful though these skills are, because the purpose of reading in our book is to offer you occasions to imagine other ways of reading."
Note the order: Students make their mark on the book before it has made its mark on them. The priority is response, not understanding. Note how dismissively the authors treat "useful" skills as opposed to "occasions to imagine other ways of reading." The portentous repetition of the book's title signals its iconic status for the movement.
Let's say our students actually learn what we teach them. What result might we expect from their taking to heart this kind of aggressive constructivism mixed with promise of empowerment? Might not the elixir produce habits of fast judgment from little evidence, of looking away from challenging texts in order to opine--habits, in other words, that predict failure instead of success in academic and professional writing?
High-school systems have had little choice but to follow the movement's strong dictates about what "ready for college" means. To grasp the consequences in a nutshell, just consult one of the most successful suppliers of ideas and texts for K-12 education, America's Choice. According to its promotional material, this nonprofit organization provides thousands of schools across America with "a coherent, comprehensive [educational] design that offers exceptional instructional materials and strategies with first-rate coaching and professional development." For ninth-grade English, America's Choice distributes a rhetoric to teach argumentation. It is divided into two multistage, process-based units. The first asks students to read six biographical sketches with the knowledge that all of the people need an immediate heart transplant, and there's only one heart to go around. Who gets the heart? The second unit excerpts chapters from a popular college textbook, Andrea Lunsford and John Ruszkiewicz's aptly named Everything's an Argument, in order to teach ninth-graders how to critique advertisements.
The ideas standing behind both the SAT essay examination and the critical-thinking textbooks received their most powerful institutional formulation in 2000, when the Council of Writing Program Administrators issued a proclamation describing "the common knowledge, skills, and attitudes sought by first-year composition programs in American postsecondary education." The purpose of the document was to consolidate existing practice and regulate the teaching of composition throughout America. The first three stated goals are as follows:
"Rhetorical Knowledge
"By the end of first-year composition, students should:
Focus on a purpose.
"Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing- Respond to the needs of different audiences.
- Respond appropriately to different kinds of rhetorical situations.
- Use conventions of format and structure appropriate to the rhetorical situation.
- Adopt appropriate voice, tone, and level of formality.
- Understand how genres shape reading and writing.
- Write in several genres.
"By the end of first-year composition, students should:
- Use writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating.
- Understand a writing assignment as a series of tasks, including finding, evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing appropriate primary and secondary sources.
- Integrate their own ideas with those of others.
- Understand the relationships among language, knowledge, and power.
"Processes
"By the end of first-year composition, students should:
Many of those goals are worthy in themselves. Consider their net effect, however. Taken together, they load composition/rhetoric with an elaborate vocabulary for describing itself. The group statement does not say that these theoretical and pedagogical ideas should stand in the background, informing practice. They should be among the topics of study. They are what composition/rhetoric is about. Process becomes its own product; rhetorical knowledge trumps content knowledge; critical thinking geared to ideological critique of texts and images replaces open inquiry and accumulation of knowledge through reading and experiment. The omissions are also glaring: not a word about the quality of readings, or the modest work of arriving at an accurate idea of the meaning of texts. Although the fourth outcome goal, "Knowledge of Conventions," lists "control such surface features as syntax, grammar, punctuation, and spelling," grammar is a subheading of a subheading, as it is for the critical-thinking movement generally.
- Be aware that it usually takes multiple drafts to create and complete a successful text.
- Develop flexible strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proofreading.
- Understand writing as an open process that permits writers to use later invention and rethinking to revise their work.
- Understand the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.
- Learn to critique their own and others' works.
- Learn to balance the advantages of relying on others with the responsibility of doing their part.
- Use a variety of technologies to address a range of audiences."
Just as critical thinking has passed into policy without losing its rakish edge, so the practices it proscribes--grammar, imitation, précis writing, explication, recitation, reading great works in their entirety--have quietly dropped from view. I urge those charged with leading us out of our educational deficit to consider that ideas long dominant in composition and rhetoric may be detrimental.
I mean no disrespect to those in the trenches teaching high-school English and college composition. Their work is as essential to our schools as it is undervalued in society. But we need to face the possibility that the failure of the SAT essay examination is the canary in the coal mine alerting us to a discrepancy between the skills being emphasized in high-school English and college composition, and the skills most in need in college courses and in all professions. Lisa Delpit has made this same point in defense of students on the margins. She was one of the first to point out a deep confusion among well-intentioned educators who thought they were taking their students' side by lowering expectations, watering down reading lists, ignoring the basics, and emphasizing "process" as much as "product." In The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children (1988), Delpit says the following about process pedagogy:
"Although the problem is not necessarily in the method, in some instances adherents of process approaches to writing create situations in which students ultimately find themselves accountable for knowing a set of rules about which no one has ever directly informed them. Teachers do students no service to suggest, even implicitly, that 'product' is not important. In this country, students will be judged on their product...and that product, based as it is on specific codes of a particular culture, is more readily produced when the directives of how to produce it are made explicit."
Like most educators, Delpit accepts the idea that teachers should present assignments in a coherent way, building from easier to more difficult tasks ("the problem is not necessarily in the method"). However, she objects to current theories of process as undemocratic. They focus too much attention on the way and not enough on the destination (see the seven bullet points after "Processes" in the proclamation above). Supposedly idealistic and egalitarian, process pedagogy enacts the snobbery of those who climb the educational ladder, and then denounce ladders as hierarchical.
That brings me to the third inexpensive change that faculty and administrators can make to foster the success of their high-school English and college composition programs. In addition to ignoring the SAT and re-examining the tenets of critical thinking in composition, I urge all concerned to grasp the continuing relevance of practices that critical thinking dismisses as teacher-centered and traditional. I refer to imitation-based pedagogies that view students less as budding cultural critics and more as apprentices to a craft.
The idea of "craft" is meant to invoke common sense. What are the ordinary ways that ordinary people learn to install a water heater, shoot a free throw, play a musical instrument, perform a dance routine, or conduct an experiment? Answer that question, and you will have your own justification for applying the practices of grammar, recitation, paraphrase, summary, explication, and imitation to the teaching of writing. In The Creative Habit, the dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp puts the point this way:
"The great painters are incomparable draftsmen. They also know how to mix their own paint, grind it, put in the fixative; no task is too small to be worthy of their attention. The great composers are usually dazzling musicians...A great chef can chop and dice better than anyone in the kitchen. The best fashion designers are invariably virtuosos with a needle and thread...The best writers are well-read people. They have the richest appreciation of words, the biggest vocabularies, the keenest ear for language. They also know their grammar. Words and language are their tools, and they have learned how to use them."
So-called basic skills are the muscle and sinew of the best academic writing. Less glamorous than critique, perhaps, they provide the foundation on which any plausible critical interpretation stands. Depriving students of those basics in a rush to make them critical doesn't make sense.
Once high schools and colleges make the changes suggested above, they will be free to uncouple the teaching of writing from the vocabulary of rhetorical analysis. Process will not substitute for content.
What, then, should writing courses be about? Enlightened instructors and administrators will respond that they should be about what all other college courses are about--not writing itself, but a learnable body of information: literature, art history, biology, political science, or any other substantial topic that furthers a students' real education. Yes, there are rhetorical strategies that good writers know and weak writers lack, but those are best taught in every class, by faculty members who themselves have mastered not only a body of knowledge but also the skills for writing publishable work and sharing those skills with apprentices to their craft.
Michael B. Prince is an associate professor of English at Boston University, where he directed the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program from 2000 to 2008.
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1) I hope you can join me a week from Wednesday at the REACH Awards Day from 10-12:30 on Aug. 5th at the Chase branch on 39th and Broadway (see full invite at the end of this email).
REACH (Rewarding Achievement; www.reachnyc.org) is a pay-for-performance initiative that aims to improve the college readiness of low-income students at 31 inner-city high schools in New York by rewarding them with up to $1,000 for each Advanced Placement exam they pass. I founded it, with funding from the Pershing Square Foundation and support from the Council of Urban Professionals.
This past year was the first full year of the program and I'm delighted to report very substantial gains in the overall number of students passing AP exams at the 31 schools, and an even bigger gain among African-American and Latino students (exact numbers will be released at the event). As a result, more than 1,000 student have earned nearly $1 MILLION in REACH Scholar Awards! Next Wednesday, the students will come to pick up their checks, Joel Klein will be the highlight of the press conference at 11am, and there will be a ton of media. I hope to see you there! You can RSVP to REACH@nycup.org.
2) STOP THE PRESSES!!! Last Friday will go down in history, I believe, as a key tipping point moment in the decades-long effort to improve our K-12 educational system. President Obama and Sec. Duncan both appeared at a press conference to announce the formal launch of the Race to the Top fund (KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg also spoke and rocked the house!). Other than not being there on vouchers, Obama and Duncan are hitting ALL of the right notes, which, backed with HUGE dollars, will no doubt result in seismic shifts in educational policy across the country.
Here's an excerpt from Arne Duncan's Op Ed in the Washington Post from Friday (full text below -- well worth reading):
Under Race to the Top guidelines, states seeking funds will be pressed to implement four core interconnected reforms.-- To reverse the pervasive dumbing-down of academic standards and assessments by states, Race to the Top winners need to work toward adopting common, internationally benchmarked K-12 standards that prepare students for success in college and careers.
-- To close the data gap -- which now handcuffs districts from tracking growth in student learning and improving classroom instruction -- states will need to monitor advances in student achievement and identify effective instructional practices.
-- To boost the quality of teachers and principals, especially in high-poverty schools and hard-to-staff subjects, states and districts should be able to identify effective teachers and principals -- and have strategies for rewarding and retaining more top-notch teachers and improving or replacing ones who aren't up to the job.
-- Finally, to turn around the lowest-performing schools, states and districts must be ready to institute far-reaching reforms, from replacing staff and leadership to changing the school culture.
The Race to the Top program marks a new federal partnership in education reform with states, districts and unions to accelerate change and boost achievement. Yet the program is also a competition through which states can increase or decrease their odds of winning federal support. For example, states that limit alternative routes to certification for teachers and principals, or cap the number of charter schools, will be at a competitive disadvantage. And states that explicitly prohibit linking data on achievement or student growth to principal and teacher evaluations will be ineligible for reform dollars until they change their laws.
3) Here's the article from Friday's Washington Post, before the press conference:
President Obama is leaning hard on the nation's schools, using the promise of more than $4 billion in federal aid -- and the threat of withholding it -- to strong-arm the education establishment to accept more charter schools and performance pay for teachers.4) And here's the article afterward:The pressure campaign has been underway for months as Education Secretary Arne Duncan travels the country delivering a blunt message to state officials who have resisted change for decades: Embrace reform or risk being shut out.
"What we're saying here is, if you can't decide to change these practices, we're not going to use precious dollars that we want to see creating better results; we're not going to send those dollars there," Obama said in an Oval Office interview Wednesday. "And we're counting on the fact that, ultimately, this is an incentive, this is a challenge for people who do want to change."
On Friday, Obama will officially announce the "Race to the Top," a competition for $4.35 billion in grants. He wants states to use funds to ease limits on charter schools, tie teacher pay to student achievement and move for the first time toward common academic standards. It is part of a broader effort to improve school achievement with a $100 billion increase in education funding, more money for community colleges and an increase in Pell Grants for college students.
President Obama launched a competition Friday for $4.35 billion in federal education funds, urging states to ease restrictions on charter schools, link teacher pay to student achievement and adopt common national academic standards to be eligible for the money.5) As an example of the impact this will likely have at the state level, here's an editorial in today's NY Daily News:In a speech at the Education Department, Obama joined Education Secretary Arne Duncan in announcing draft criteria for the "Race to the Top" fund, which the administration is billing as the "largest-ever federal investment in education reform."
"America will not succeed in the 21st century unless we do a far better job of educating our sons and daughters," Obama said. "In a world where countries that out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow, the future belongs to the nation that best educates its people."
Acknowledging that "our education system is falling short," he said that for years, "we've talked these problems to death . . . while doing all too little to solve them." Now, he said, he is challenging the nation's governors, schools boards, teachers, parents, students and others to meet "a few key benchmarks for reform" in order to compete for and win Race to the Top grants.
"That race starts today," Obama said. He pledged that "this competition will not be based on politics or ideology or the preferences of a particular interest group" but on "whether a state is ready to do what works."
Taken to school: Obama funding plan must force Legislature to accept education reforms. www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2009/07/26/2009-07-26_taken_to_school.html6) Obama sat with reporters from the Washington Post for more than 20 minutes. The transcript is below and you can see the video at: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/education/interview.html?sid=ST2009072303922. Interesting comments about the unions:President Obama has dealt a much-deserved slap to lawmakers in New York and other states who kowtow to teachers unions:They must get rid of anti-reform limits on holding teachers accountable and opening charter schools, or they will kiss hundreds of millions in federal education grants goodbye.
The choice for Albany could not be clearer: Repeal those now.
The Legislature was dead wrong when it voted last year to bar school officials from even looking at students' test scores when deciding whether a teacher is effective enough to get tenure.
The Legislature was also wrong to cap how many privately operated, publicly funded charters schools could open across the state - first at 100, then at a still-too-stingy 200.
Albany enacted both laws at the behest of teachers unions, which bathe legislators in campaign cash. Union members recoil at being held accountable for progress - or lack thereof - in their classrooms as measured by the objective standards of tests. The unions have also battled charters because they are mostly nonunion and consistently get better results with less money.
But Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are demanding that kids' needs come first. Unveiling a $4.35 billion grant program last week, Duncan warned that states that cap charter schools will put themselves at a "competitive disadvantage" for funding. And schools that block the use of test data in evaluating teachers will be flatly ineligible.
And Duncan made plain his attitude toward New York in a speech last month, saying:
"Believe it or not, several states, including New York, Wisconsin and California, have laws that create a firewall between students and teacher data. I think that's simply ridiculous. We need to know what is and is not working and why."
This gives Albany lawmakers a huge financial incentive to do the right thing.
It's an offer they must not refuse.
Q And one more question on this. You say you want to work with teachers unions and not impose a program on them. But there are critics who say, well, if you work with the teachers unions, those are the same entities that are obstacles to reform. How can you work with them and reform at the same time?THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, I mean, I think that there is a cynical view, oftentimes ideologically driven, that says teachers unions inherently are going to be opposed to reform in our school system. I just don't believe that, maybe because my sister is a teacher and I know how hard she works and how deeply she cares about her kids.
I think teachers, understandably, in the past have been suspicious of reform measures that seem to make them into a scapegoat and don't take into account the extraordinary challenges that they face day in, day out -- everything from having to dig into their own pocket to buy school supplies, to not having the kinds of support services for kids who may have trouble outside of the classroom, to bureaucratic rules that get in the way of them teaching creatively.
So there are a whole range of very legitimate concerns that teachers have. And what we want to do is to assume that teachers want to see kids succeed, solicit their best ideas, and then shape and craft reforms that have their buy-in and have their ownership, because that's going to -- there's going to be greater success.
Now -- but I want to be realistic. There are going to be elements within the teachers union where they're just resistant to change because people inherently are resistant to change. Teachers aren't any different from any politicians or corporate CEOs. There are going to be certain habits that have been built up that they don't want to change.
And what we're saying here is if you can't decide to change these practices, we're not going to use precious dollars that we want to see creating better results; we're not going to send those dollars there.
And we're counting on the fact that, ultimately, this is an incentive, this is a challenge for people who do want to change.
I think it's important to note, just in terms of the politics of it, the same notion that somehow teachers unions would not accept reform -- the fact is, is that we got this passed. And you've got national teachers unions, both the NEA and the AFT, that have been consulted even as we've been putting this together.
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EVER wondered why the pundits who failed to predict the current economic crisis are still being paid for their opinions? It's a consequence of the way human psychology works in a free market, according to a study of how people's self-confidence affects the way others respond to their advice.The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record. Moore argues that in competitive situations, this can drive those offering advice to increasingly exaggerate how sure they are. And it spells bad news for scientists who try to be honest about gaps in their knowledge.
In Moore's experiment, volunteers were given cash for correctly guessing the weight of people from their photographs. In each of the eight rounds of the study, the guessers bought advice from one of four other volunteers. The guessers could see in advance how confident each of these advisers was (see table), but not which weights they had opted for.
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It was sometime in the 1980s, I think, that a basic transformation of the aims of literary criticism was complete. Not the spread of political themes and identity preoccupations, which struck outsiders and off-campus critics like William Bennett, a former secretary of education turned radio host, as the obvious change, but a deeper adjustment in the basic conception of what criticism does. It was, namely, the shift from criticism-as-explanation to criticism-as-performance. Instead of thinking of scholarship as the explication of the object--what a poem means or a painting represents--humanists cast criticism as an interpretative act, an analytical eye in process.The old model of the critic as secondary, derivative, even parasitical gave way to the critic as creative and adventuresome. Wlad Godzich's introduction to the second edition of Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight (1983) nicely caught the mood in its title: "Caution! Reader at Work!" People spoke of "doing a reading," applying a theory, taking an approach, and they regarded the principle of fidelity to the object as tyranny. In a 1973 essay in New Literary History titled "The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis," Geoffrey H. Hartman chastised the traditional critic for being "methodologically humble" by "subduing himself to commentary on work or writer"; then he declared, "We have entered an era that can challenge even the priority of literary to literary-critical texts." A writer has a persona, he stated. "Should the interpreter not have personae?"
Older modes of criticism were a species of performance as well. But they claimed validity to the extent to which the object they regarded gave up to them its mystery. The result, the clarified meaning of the work, counted more than the execution that yielded it. By the late 1980s, though, the question "What does it mean?" lost out to "How can we read it?" The interpretation didn't have to be right. It had to be nimble.
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1) If you read anything I send out this year, let this be it. One of my friends responded to the survey I sent around a couple of weeks ago by emailing me this story of his experience as a TFA teacher in the South Bronx a decade ago (though he's no longer there, he is still (thankfully) very much involved with educating disadvantaged kids). It is one of the most powerful, heart-breaking, enraging things I have ever read -- and perfectly captures what this education reform struggle is all about. Stories like this about what REALLY goes on in our failing public schools need to be told and publicized, so please share yours with me:
Whitney,Thanks so much for putting this survey together. It brought back some memories well beyond the few questions about what it was like to teach in the South Bronx with TFA back in the late nineties. I want to emphasize here that I no longer teach in the Bronx, so I have little idea how things have changed and have seen the current Administration take a number of important steps that may be making a great impact. I'm not close enough to the ground to know, but my guess is that there are still plenty of schools in the Bronx and in every other low-income community in the country that reflect some of the miserable stuff I saw in my school. You should really start collecting a book of stories like these. Among all the people I know who've done TFA, these stories are just a few among many sad ones.
As I filled out the survey, I was first reminded of the art teacher in our school. She was truly a caricature of bad teaching. Like something out of the movies. She spent almost every minute of every day screaming at the top of her lungs in the faces of 5-8 year olds who had done horrible things like coloring outside the lines. The ART teacher! Screaming so loud you could hear her 2-3 floors away in a decades old, solid brick building. When she heard I was looking for an apt, she sent me to an apt broker friend of hers. I told the friend I wanted to live in Washington Heights. "Your mother would be very upset with me if I let you go live with THOSE PEOPLE. We fought with bricks and bats and bottles to keep them out of our neighborhoods. Do you see what they have done to this place?" This same attitude could be heard in the art teacher's screams, the administration's ambivalence towards the kids we were supposed to be educating and the sometimes overt racism of the people in charge. The assistant principal (who could not, as far as I could tell, do 4th grade math, but offered me stop-in math professional development for a few minutes every few months with gems like "these numbers you see here to the left of the zero are negative numbers. Like when it is very cold outside.") once told me "I call them God's stupidest people" referring to a Puerto Rican woman who was blocking our way as we drove to another school. She also once told me I needed to put together a bulletin board in the hallway about Veteran's Day. I told her we were in the middle of assembling an Encyclopedia on great Dominican, Puerto Rican and Black leaders (all of my students were Dominican, Black or Puerto Rican). "Mr. ____, we had Cin-co de May-o, and Black History Month, and all that other stuff. It is time for the AMERICAN Americans."
Not everyone in the school was a racist. There were many hard working teachers of all ethnicities who did not reflect this attitude at all. But the fact that the leadership of the school and a number of the most senior teachers was either utterly disdainful of the students they taught, or has completely given up on the educability of the kids, had a terrible effect on overall staff motivation. And many of the well-meaning teachers were extremely poorly prepared to make a dent in the needs of the students even if they had been well led. The Principal told more than one teacher there that "as long as they are quiet and in their seats, I don't care what else you do." This was on the day this person was HIRED. This was their first and probably last instruction. He never gave me a single instruction. Ever. And I was a new teacher with nothing but TFA's Summer Institute under my belt. The Principal proceeded to get a law degree while sitting in his office ignoring the school. When we went to the Assistant Superintendent to report that the school was systematically cheating on the 3rd grade test (i.e., the third grade team met with the principal and APs, planned the cheating carefully, locked their doors and covered their windows and gave answers) she told the principal to watch his back. A few months later, inspectors came from the state. After observing our mostly horrible classes for a full day, they told us how wonderful we were doing and that they had just come down to see what they could replicate in other schools to produce scores like ours. And the list goes on and on.
Like when I asked the principal to bring in one of the district's special education specialists to assess two of my lowest readers, both of whom had fewer than 25 sight-words (words they could recognize on paper) in the 3rd grade, he did. She proceeded to hand one of the students a list of words that the child couldn't read and tell her to write them over again. Then she went to gossip with the Principal. After explaining to him in gory detail, IN FRONT OF THE STUDENT, that she had just been "dealing with a case where a father had jumped off a roof nearby and committed double-suicide with his 8 year old daughter in his arms", she collected the sheet with no words on it, patted the child on the head and left. No IEP was filed nor was I allowed to pursue further action through official channels (I lobbied the mother extensively on my own). I never asked for her to come back to assess the other student.
Our Union Rep was said to have tried to push another teacher down a flight of stairs. The same Union Rep, while I was tutoring a child, cursed out a fellow teacher in the room next door at the top of her lungs so the child I was tutoring could hear every word. When I went to address her about it, the other teacher had to restrain the Rep as she threatened to physically attack me. And when the cheating allegations were finally take up by city investigators, the same Union Rep was sent to a cushy desk job in the district offices. I hear that most of the people I'm referencing here are long gone now, and some of them actually got pushed out of the system, but how rare can this story really be given the pitiful results we see from so many of our nation's poorest schools and how far the system goes to protect horrible teachers and administrators like the ones I worked with?
At the same time as all of this was happening, by the way, the few good teachers in the building often became beaten down and disillusioned. One of the best in my building was consistenly punished for trying to make her corner of the school a better place for learning. They put her in a basement corner with no ventilation, no windows and nothing but a 6-foot-high cubicle-style partition separating her from the other 5 classrooms in the basement. After fighting the good fight she went to teach in the suburbs. When I got a financial firm to donate 20 computers, the principal said he didn't have the resources to get them setup for use and refused to allow them into the school. When I had my students stage a writing campaign to get the vacant lot behind the building turned into a playground, the principal wanted me silenced.
The saddest thing about the whole damn mess was that our K-3 kids still REALLY WANTED TO LEARN. Every day they came eager for knowledge. And every day this cabal of cynicism, racism and laziness did everything within their powers to drain it out of them. It was unreal. Don't get me wrong. There were some good teachers there. And some well meaning, but poor teachers. But in many classrooms, the main lesson learned was that school became something to dread, many adults thought you were capable of very little, and some adults couldn't be bothered to lift a finger.
I hope if any of the good, hard-working teachers who fought so hard to rid the school of this mess read this, they'll know I'm not lumping them in with the rest. But the problem was, when I addressed the worst practices in the school at a staff meeting, the bad teachers laughed and the good teachers took it the hardest and thought I was criticizing them.
Thanks again for the survey. Let's make these stories known.
2) Some INCREDIBLE news from NY State: education reform warrior David Steiner was elected NY State Education Commissioner!!!
The New York State Board of Regents voted today to elect Dr. David Milton Steiner as New York State Education Commissioner and President of the University of the State of New York. The Regents took this action at their July meeting held today in Buffalo.3) I've blogged about Dean Steiner in the past:Currently the Dean of the Hunter College School of Education at the City University of New York, Dr. Steiner is best known for his leadership of the national effort to transform teacher preparation and improve teacher quality....
...At Hunter, Dr. Steiner led a national partnership with the KIPP Academies, Uncommon Schools, Achievement First and Teach for America to create a dedicated teacher preparation program for charter and non-charter school teachers geared to the unique challenges of urban schools. Known as Teacher U at Hunter, the partnership has gained national attention for rethinking what rigorous teacher preparation looks like. This year Teacher U at Hunter will begin a new partnership with the New York City Department of Education to prepare 90 New York City Teaching Fellows in Special Education.
Dr. Steiner, in conjunction with the New York City Department of Education and New Visions for Public Schools, has just launched a Teacher Residency Program aimed at preparing public secondary school teachers in the sciences and English Language Arts.
Comments on Ed School Quality
http://edreform.blogspot.com/2007/11/coments-on-ed-school-quality.html
In my email last night, I didn't say every school of education is pathetic. One very notable exception is the Hunter College School of Education under the leadership of Dean David Steiner. Dean Steiner has been the skunk at the ed school garden party ever since he published a study a few years ago documenting (according to one article, "the depth to which ed schools impart a leftist leaning "edu-dogma," where discourse is dangerously limited, where there is a lack of important historical and contemporary perspectives, and where pedagogical approaches are championed for their ideology rather than their effectiveness.") To read his article in Education Next about his study, see: http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/3252116.html
Dean Steiner is on my email list and wrote the following in response (shared here with his permission):
Whitney:For more on ed school idiocy, see this City Journal article: http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_3_ed_school.html and this book, Ed School Follies (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0595153240/tilsoncapitalparAs you may know, I have been an outspoken critic of ed. schools. My research of "top" ed. schools showed programs stuffed with required courses that used little or no research-based material, treated student teaching as if it were a side-show rather than the central element of a serious teacher preparation program, and used required reading materials from only one side (the left) of the political spectrum.
But before throwing contempt on ed. schools, note that Art Levine in his full report cites a number that in his view are doing a serious job. At the school of education at Hunter College, I am proud that three of the best charter school networks -- KIPP, Uncommon Schools and Achievement First -- are partnering with us to co-design and co- teach a certification and masters program. The program, currently in its pilot year, integrates student-teachers' work in their schools with their study of that work in our classrooms, and has its goal as nothing less than demonstrated, measurable impact on student learning. As a whole, we at Hunter are shifting what we do as a school of ed. from inputs to outputs. One example: within three years every one of our students will be videotaped in their student teaching and have those videos rigorously analyzed. At the same time we are indexing those videos so that our entire faculty can use them as case studies. We will use weaknesses we see in the performance of our student-teachers in these videos to back-engineer our programs, focusing on what matters.
Soon we expect that all teacher education programs in New York City will be told where their graduates rank in terms of the value-added they produce in the city's classrooms. The data -- produced in a major study by Pam Grossman, Jim Wyckoff and their team -- currently focuses on childhood education, where the numbers are great enough to generate robust statistics. No matter where Hunter comes out (and the first full data will be at least four years old), I welcome this study as a critical step toward getting serious about holding ed. schools accountable for the quality of their teacher preparation. I cannot wait until our current programs, for which I have responsibility, are measured, and the results made available to me so that I know where improvements to our programs are most immediately required. If any school of ed. consistently graduates teachers who fail to perform effectively in the classroom, then indeed that school of education should be closed down.
If outstanding teacher preparation were not needed, top charter schools would not pour vast resources of time and effort into professional development. I think your readers should know that some of us are indeed working to transform schools of education into true partners in this effort. We are moving deliberately towards becoming results-oriented, accountable institutions dedicated to graduating only effective teachers.
4) A story in today's NYT about union efforts at charter schools around the country:
Here in Chicago, where students at several Chicago International campuses have scores among the city's highest for nonselective schools, teachers began organizing last fall after an administrator increased workloads to six classes a day from five, said Emily Mueller, a Spanish teacher at Northtown Academy.5) A spot-on editorial in the Baltimore Sun:"We were really proud of the scores, and still are," Ms. Mueller said. "But the workload, teaching 160 kids a day, it wasn't sustainable. You can't put out the kind of energy we were putting out for our kids year after year."
Some teachers disagreed. Theresa Furr, a second-grade teacher at the Wrightwood campus, said she opposed unionization.
"Every meeting I went to," Ms. Furr said, "it was always 'What can we get?' and never 'How is this going to make our students' education better?' "
For Joyce Pae, an English teacher at Ralph Ellison, the decision was agonizing. Her concerns over what she saw as chaotic turnover and inconsistency in allocating merit pay led her to join the drive. But after school leaders began paying more attention to teachers' views, she said, she voted against unionization in June.
Union teachers won the vote, 73-49.
"If nothing else," Ms. Pae said, "this experience has really helped teachers feel empowered."
Baltimore's KIPP Ujima Village Academy is an unqualified success. Despite serving a poor, inner-city population, the charter school routinely posts some of the highest standardized test scores, not just in the city but in the state.6) Some good news from the public schools in Baltimore, no thanks to the union there:...But a dispute with the Baltimore Teachers Union threatens to derail that. KIPP teachers have been paid 18 percent more than their peers at other schools because of the extra hours they work. But the union says they're being shortchanged. KIPP teachers work nine hours and 15 minutes a day rather than the standard seven hours and five minutes, and the union insists that they should be paid 33 percent more than other teachers. (That doesn't even count compensation for Saturdays or the three weeks of summer classes.) Union officials had let the matter slide for the first seven years of KIPP's existence, but they say they got some complaints from teachers and are now simply trying to enforce the contract.
What that means for KIPP is this: The school day is being shortened to 8 hours, and Saturday classes have been eliminated. Art and music teachers have been fired, along with some administrative staff. Summer school is still in the budget, but it might not be next year.
Will that jeopardize the school's high performance? It's hard to know, but KIPP has good reason to believe that the extra time its students spend at school has been crucial to their success. KIPP Baltimore Executive Director Jason Botel says his students typically come to middle school two to three grade levels behind in reading and math, and there's no shortcut to making up that difference. Furthermore, many of the students come from tough neighborhoods, and the more time they spend in school, the less time they're subjected to the pressure of the streets.
"We know we have a lot of catching up to do. If we want them to perform on the level with their peers from wealthier communities, we need more time to do it," Mr. Botel says. "We're going to work very hard to maintain the level of performance we've been able to lead students to in the past, but we're very concerned about it."
Isn't it ironic? When Andres Alonso moved to Baltimore City two years ago to turn around a failing public school system, the Baltimore Teachers Union fought him over practically everything except which color tie he should wear.7) Mike Antonucci, with a report from the NEA convention, with his usual trenchant comments:Forget about radical items like merit pay. Marietta English, BTU president, called for his resignation because the union didn't want teachers to give up some individual planning time for group planning. Neither was the union enthused by his decision to move 300 people from school headquarters to schools or out of the system -- or to give more power to principals.
But earlier this week English and a host of other "dignitaries" and a packed house of principals, teachers and other onlookers celebrated what was previously unthinkable two years ago: Students learning in Baltimore City schools.
Whether it was Chanin's retirement, Van Roekel's new emphasis, or a spontaneous paradigm shift, this year NEA finally embraced the labor union label it has downplayed for 25 years...) A great story about a 50-year-old woman whose daughter joined TFA -- and then she did as well!...He finished by reminding the delegates that NEA's power derived not from its noble mission or righteousness of its cause, but because 3.2 million members send hundreds of millions of dollars in dues money to NEA to fight their battles.
Whatever you think of Chanin, he is to be applauded for his clarity in an age where obfuscation is the norm in politics. We shall not see his like again.
At 50, Paula Lopez Crespin doesn't fit the Teach for America demographic of high-achieving college senior. The program rarely draws adults eligible for AARP membership. In fact, just 2 percent of recruits are over 30.9) Advice for people who want to switch to do a mid-career switch to teaching:But what Ms. Crespin lacks in youth, she makes up for in optimism, idealism and what those in Teach for America call "relentless pursuit of results." Ms. Crespin beat out tens of thousands of applicants to get where she is: fresh off her first year teaching math and science at Cole Arts and Science Academy in a gang-riddled section of Denver.
Many friends thought she was crazy to give up a career in banking for a $32,000 pay cut teaching in an urban elementary school. But the real insanity, Ms. Crespin insists, would have been remaining in a job she "just couldn't stomach anymore," and surrendering a dream of doing "something meaningful with my life."
These days, crazy never looked so normal. Teaching has always been a top choice for a second career. Of the 60,000 new teachers hired last year, more than half came from another line of work, according to the National Center for Education Information. Most bypassed traditional teacher education (for career changers, a two-year master's degree) for fast-track programs like Teach for America. But unemployment, actual or feared, is now causing professionals who dismissed teaching early on to think better of its security, flexibility (summers off, the chance to be home with children) and pension. Four of Ms. Crespin's colleagues at Cole are career changers, ages 46 to 54, including a former information technology executive and a psychologist.Teach for America, the teacher-training program that has evolved into a Peace Corps alternative for a generation bred on public service, is highly competitive and becoming more so: this year, a record 35,178 applied -- a 42 percent increase over 2008 -- to fill 4,100 slots. Eleven percent of all new Ivy League graduates applied.
Teach for America is a young person's game. But that perception may be shifting.
WHAT TO KNOW
Career changers hoping for admission to a competitive alternative teacher-training program should worry less about academic and job accomplishments and more about the personal traits that helped them succeed. Problem-solving skills, emotional intelligence, a belief in the power to create change: these are a few of the elements that generate success in underprivileged classrooms.Timothy Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, which helps career changers get teaching positions across the country and runs the New York City Teaching Fellows program, says he is looking for candidates who are "in it for the right reasons" and not, say, waiting for the current economic wave to pass.
He suggests career changers visit a classroom, observe good teaching and ask, "Is this something I really see myself doing?"
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Running Start provides academically motivated students an opportunity to take college courses as part of their high school education.Smart.
Students may take just one class per quarter, or take all of their courses on the BC campus. If you are eligible for the program, you will earn both high school and college credit for the classes you take.Classes taken on the college campus as part of the Running Start program are limited to "college level" courses (most classes numbered 100 or above qualify).
Tuition is paid for by the school district. Books, class related fees and transportation are the responsibility of the student.Running Start was created by the Washington State Legislature in 1990 and is available at all community and technical colleges in the State of Washington.
Related: The ongoing battle: Credit for Non-MMSD Courses.
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David Page says the problem is that parents are on their own. Teachers have a union. So do principals. School board members get to vote plans up or down and top administrators make decisions in the salmon-pink offices of San Diego Unified.But parents are often too intimidated to speak up or too star-struck with school staffers to question them, Page said. Education is a world loaded with its own numbing lingo -- categorical funding, supplement not supplant, program improvement -- and it seems overwhelming to understand it, let alone to fight it.
"They think, 'They make six figures and they're educated. Who am I to second guess them?'" Page said.
Yet Page has done just that. If parents at the poorer schools in San Diego Unified did have a union, he might be their leader, with all the fans and foes that entails. Seventeen years after the father of six first walked into a parents' meeting at Ross Elementary in Kearny Mesa, unsure of his rights and unfamiliar with the jargon, Page has become a human encyclopedia on the rules that govern funds for disadvantaged kids and a dogged fighter for parents in communities sometimes left out of decisions.
He is one of the few parents across the state that jets to Sacramento for meetings of the state Board of Education, pores over complex regulations on education spending, and explains it all to befuddled parents at the school district committee that oversees funds for children in poverty, which he has led for six years. Page also leads the nonprofit California Association of Compensatory Education and sits on the board of the Family Area Network, which advises the state on parent involvement.
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Beyond the celebration of the 40-year-old lunar landing, the big science news this week came Thursday from a group of Chinese researchers who figured out how to grow healthy mice from mouse stem cells.The breakthrough is a huge step for research into induced pluripotent, or iPS, stem cells, which is taking adult stem cells and converting them into embryonic stem cells. But the Chinese discovery is causing some to worry that we're a lot closer to human cloning than we should be.
This story in Friday's Los Angeles Times frames the debate well.
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Kimberly Kauer was worried about her 6-year-old daughter's math skills. Her school doesn't assign homework, and Ms. Kauer wasn't sure which math concepts her daughter fully understood.To quell her fears, Ms. Kauer started her daughter on an online educational program for young children called DreamBox Learning. DreamBox uses interactive games to teach math and analyzes users' progress as they complete lessons.
"It was really well-geared to her age," says Ms. Kauer, a 38-year-old stay-at-home mom in Emerald Hills, Calif. "They really tailored their questions to meet her needs." After monitoring her daughter's progress, Ms. Kauer concluded that her daughter was up to par for her age.
DreamBox is one of a number of companies, with names like SmartyCard, Brightstorm and Grockit, that are pitching a new generation of online educational products aimed at supplementing students' education at home. The programs, which parents pay for by subscription, target learners from kindergartners to high-school seniors. The companies hope their interactive programs will draw students wanting to get ahead at a lower cost than hiring a professional tutor.
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Yet try to find any mention of charter schools in the Madison School District's new strategic plan and you'll feel like you're reading a "Where's Waldo?" book. You almost need a magnifying lens to find the one fleeting reference in the entire 85-page document. And the words "charter school" are completely absent from the strategic plan's lengthy and important calls for action.I agree. I believe that diffused governance, in other words a substantive move away from the current top down, largely "one size fits all" governance model within the Madison public schools is essential.It's more evidence that much of liberal Madison clings to an outdated phobia of charter schools. And that attitude needs to change.
Nearly 10 percent of Wisconsin's public schools are charters. That ranks Wisconsin among the top five states. Yet Madison is below the national average of 5 percent.
Charter schools are public schools free from many regulations to try new things. Parents also tend to have more say.
Yet charters are held accountable for achievement and can easily be shut down by sponsoring districts if they don't produce results within a handful of years.
One well-known Madison charter school is Nuestro Mundo, meaning "Our World" in Spanish. It immerses kindergartners, no matter their native language, in Spanish. English is slowly added until, by fifth grade, all students are bilingual. My daughter attends Nuestro Mundo.
It was a battle to get this charter school approved. But Nuestro Mundo's popularity and success have led the district to replicate its dual-language curriculum at a second school without a charter.
The School Board has shot down at least two charter school proposals in recent years, including one for a "Studio School" emphasizing arts and technology.
Madison School Board President Arlene Silveira told me Friday she supports adding charter schools to the district's action plans in at least two places: under a call for more "innovative school structures," and as part of a similar goal seeking heightened attention to "diverse learning styles."
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Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago
June 2009
KEY FINDINGS 150K PDF
Most of Chicago's students drop out or fail. The vast majority of Chicago's elementary
and high schools do not prepare their students for success in college and beyond.
There is a general perception that Chicago's public schools have been gradually
improving over time. However, recent dramatic gains in the reported number of CPS
elementary students who meet standards on State assessments appear to be due to
changes in the tests made by the Illinois State Board of Education, rather than real
improvements in student learning.
At the elementary level, State assessment standards have been so weakened that most
of the 8th graders who "meet" these standards have little chance to succeed in high
school or to be ready for college. While there has been modest improvement in real
student learning in Chicago's elementary schools, these gains dissipate in high school.
The performance of Chicago's high schools is abysmal--with about half the students
dropping out of the non-selective-enrollment schools, and more than 70% of 11th
grade students failing to meet State standards. The trend has remained essentially flat
over the past several years. The relatively high-performing students are concentrated
in a few magnet/selective enrollment high schools. In the regular neighborhood high
schools, which serve the vast preponderance of students, almost no students are
prepared to succeed in college.
In order to drive real improvement in CPS and fairly report performance to the public,
a credible source of information on student achievement is essential. Within CPS
today, no such source exists. CPS and the State should use rigorous national
standardized tests. Also, the Board of Education should designate an independent
auditor with responsibility for ensuring that published reports regarding student
achievement in CPS are accurate, timely and distributed to families and stakeholders
in an easily understood format.
Efforts to provide meaningful school choices to Chicago's families must be aggressively
pursued--including expanding the number of charter and contract schools in
Chicago. Most of these schools outperform the traditional schools that their students
would otherwise have attended; and the choices that they offer parents will help spur
all schools in CPS to improve.
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Michele Kerr (she tells me it is pronounced "cur") is a hard-working educator and Web surfer who is often mean to me. This is probably a good thing. When I post something stupid, Kerr--using her nom de Internet, "Cal Lanier"--is on me like my cat chasing a vole in the backyard.Her acidic humor is so entertaining, however, and her command of the facts so complete, that I have come to look forward to her critiques. She tends to eviscerate me whenever I embrace anti-tracking or other progressive gospel preached in education schools these days, but I learn something each time.
I wish the supervisors of the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP) at that university's School of Education had checked with me before they decided Kerr's views and her blogging were inappropriate for a student in their program. They appeared to have decided her anti-progressive views were disrupting their classes, alienating other students and proving that she and Stanford were a bad fit. Kerr says they tried to stifle both her opinions and her blog, and threatened to withhold the Masters in Education she was working toward, based on their expressed fear that she was "unsuited for the practice of teaching."
Kerr's eventual triumph over such embarrassingly wrong-headed political correctness is a complicated story, but worth telling. In her struggle with STEP, she exposed serious problems in the way Stanford and, I suspect, other education schools, treat independent thinkers, particularly those who blog.
STEP retains the right to decide if a student is suited to teaching, and can deny even someone as smart and dedicated as Kerr, who has a splendid record as a tutor, a chance to work in the public schools.
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"States and Provinces and curricula around the world track students by age. This practice is so common that we do not think of it as tracking. With few exceptions, a six year old must go into first grade even if that six year old is not ready or was ready for the grade one year earlier" (Usiskin 98)Introduction
One of the many challenges facing schools is the decision on how to allocate students to classrooms. Research confirms the empirical observations of many parents and educators that students learn at greatly varying rates (Walberg 1988). These different learning rates are explained by (among other things) differing learning styles, aptitudes and levels of motivation (NECTL 1994). Unfortunately for visions of "equal outcomes," due to differences in understanding, among other things, these differences in learning rates tend to increase as the child moves through the educational system (Arlin, 1984, P. 67). Given the wide variations in knowledge, motivation, and aptitude, schools must choose methods of allocating students to classes, and curriculum to classes and students.
Unfortunately, school administrators face not only conflicting messages in regard to the educational implications of various decisions, but significant pressure to base decisions either partly or mainly on nonacademic factors(1) (Oakes 1994 a, b and Hastings, 1992 for example). Hastings declares ability grouping to be wrong as a "philosophic absolute" and declares its use to be "totally unacceptable." The National Education Commission on Time and Learning, on the other hand, labels the act of providing the same amount of learning time to students who need varying amounts "inherently unequal" (94). They state "If we provide all students with the same amount of instructional time, we virtually guarantee inequality of achievement" (emphasis in original). The Draft for "Standards 2000' from the NCTM (NCTM 98) calls for increased equity by exposing all students, not just the elite, to challenging mathematics. There is no apparent awareness that many students do not find existing materials, whether consistent with the 1989 standards or not, challenging.
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Last year, my daughter's school backpack got so heavy, she would sometimes just drag it behind her rather than hoist it onto her shoulders. Backpacks with wheels are too bulky for her locker, so next year I'm thinking about buying an extra set of textbooks to keep at home.In its latest rating of the most durable school backpacks, Consumer Reports has conducted its own survey to determine how much weight kids are carrying as a result of overloaded packs. The researchers visited three New York City schools and weighed more than 50 children's backpacks. They found that kids in the 2nd and 4th grades are carrying about 5 pounds worth of homework and books. But once kids reach the 6th grade, the homework load gets heavier. On average, 6th graders in the study were carrying backpacks weighting 18.4 pounds, although some backpacks weighed as much as 30 pounds.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that a child's backpack weigh no more than 10 to 20 percent of a child's weight. Consumer Reports recommends keeping the weight closer to 10 percent of a child's weight. But one Texas study found that most parents don't check the weight of their child's backpack. According to Consumer Reports:
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THE EXECUTIVEDon Williams
It is a rare joy to see such a stir caused by a document written by someone who resides in the real world and that isn't based on ubiquitous, spurious statistics. It is terrifying that the glimpse of the bleeding obvious that is Matthew Robson's report has senior executives going into meltdown. "Teenagers see adverts on websites as extremely annoying and pointless." I'm gobsmacked! I thought we all went into rapture when screen infestations do their best to disrupt what you're trying to do. Low price (or no price) seems to be critical to all aspects of teenage consumption . . . really? "Teenagers don't use Twitter . . . tweets are pointless" - well actually, not just pointless, a smidgeon tragic unless you don't have anything resembling a life. The near panic caused by Mr Robson beautifully demonstrates that industry is awash with people who try to impose old-world thinking, methods and tools on new-world technology and lifestyles. To make even basic decisions they surround themselves with reports, advisers, consultants and, scariest of all, research. The 15-year-old's work proves there is a canyonesque gap in the market for a "common sense" consultancy.
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Dorothy Flint knew soon after her son William was born that she had a difficult child. He cried often and nursed nonstop. He slept so poorly that Ms. Flint took him on midnight drives in the car to calm him. He had separation anxiety so severe that she rarely left him. "He was really a tough baby," says the Crofton, Md., mother.Later she found a silver lining. Ms. Flint took pains to choose an excellent child-care center for William, now 4, and he quickly surpassed other kids, sharing his toys and learning classroom rules. He wins praise from his teacher for his social skills. As high-maintenance as William was, Ms. Flint says, he has also been high-reward.
Working parents struggling with difficult children--marked by excessive crying, fussiness, emotional volatility, fear of strangers and clinginess--often worry about how they will fare in child care. Research has shown that sensitive, vulnerable kids can be at higher risk of problems later if they're mistreated or face other adversity early.
But new studies are discovering an upside: these difficult babies also have a significantly higher chance of surpassing other kids later if placed in the right kind of child care. The findings offer new guidance for parents in predicting how child care is likely to affect a child.
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Middle School is where parents begin to lose touch with what is going in in their child's education. The child is old enough to manage his or her own assignments, and also mature enough to suffer the consequences should they not follow through. There really is no need for the parent to continue to manage the students education, right? Wrong.Middle school is also where students become more interested in having a social life and less interested in getting an education. Without the watchful eye of the parents, the student can begin a downhill spiral that the parents won't be able to control.
Here are some things parents must do to take charge of a middle school child's education:
Make your presence known in the school. Speak to teachers and administrators to find where they can use your talents within the school. Whether you have a job or not, make it a point to spend at least one day a month at the school, or perhaps a couple of long lunch breaks a month.
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Based on your experience working in a traditional public school serving primarily low-income and/or minority students, what percentage of the teachers you worked with were (the numbers in the three boxes must add up to 100):46 people responded and here were the results:
- Good/great (you would be happy to have your child in the class)
- Fair, but improvement is possible (you would have reservations having your child in the class)
- Horrible and unlikely to ever improve (you would NEVER permit your child to be in the class)
2) Here's a comment from one person who responded to the survey:
Good/great: 50%
Fair: 30%
Horrible: 20%
I taught in NYC for 5 years, from 2002-2007; I taught 5th grade, all subjects, and I was not TFA, but was NYCTF. One quibble with your survey and its framing: I would not want my daughter in any classroom in my school, regardless of the teacher quality. The curriculum (Teacher's College reading and writing; Everyday Math, virtually zero science, social studies, art and music) was either bad or nonexistent, and the social environment (harsh, chaotic) was not fit for any child. I agree that teacher quality is huge, but it's not enough to overcome all other problems. Great schools are great schools when all or most of the moving parts (teachers, administrators, curriculum, accountability, environment, seriousness of purpose, parental involvement, et al) are working. Planes can fly if they lose an engine, even two. They can't fly on one. At least not for very long.
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For years, top Manhattan public schools have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from parents to independently hire assistants to help teachers with reading, writing, tying shoelaces or supervising recess. But after a complaint by the city's powerful teachers union, the Bloomberg administration has ordered an end to the makeshift practice.Principals have been told that any such aides hired for the coming school year must be employees of the Department of Education, their positions included in official school budgets.
But such employees can command nearly double the pay of the independently hired assistants, and several schools on the Upper East Side either have told current employees they will probably not have jobs in the fall or have put off hiring new employees. That has incensed many parents, who see the aides less as a perk than as a necessity to cope with growing class sizes in well-regarded schools like the Lower Lab School for gifted children, where the average class size is now 28, and Public School 290, where broom closets are used as offices and the cafeteria doubles as a gym.
"The reason the teaching assistants are here is because they've been stuffing so many kids in these classes," said Patrick J. Sullivan, co-president of the Parent-Teacher Association at the Lower Lab School (P.S. 77), where parents spend $250,000 a year on the teaching assistants. "Nobody wants to break any rules, but 28 is just too many kids for one teacher."
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Long before the US began shedding millions of jobs last year, American politicians were obsessed with retraining people cast off by the global economy. "The average worker will change jobs six or seven times in a lifetime," Bill Clinton said in an address to the Cleveland City Club in 1994. That was not much help: how do you train people for tomorrow's jobs if you do not know what tomorrow's jobs will be?President Barack Obama's call for $12bn (£7.4bn, €8.5bn) of investment in "community colleges" is evidence that the flux Mr Clinton alluded to is ending. Community colleges offer a range of short-term credentialing courses along with two-year and four-year degrees. They are where you go to become a dental hygienist, a cyber-security expert, a nurse or a solar-energy technician. If job-specific training is making more sense, then the job market is probably growing more predictable. The economy may be in a terrible rut, but we are, to a degree, re-entering the world of stable, credentialed work.
Community colleges now accommodate half the nation's undergraduates. Enrolment has leapt by a million students in the past decade, to more than 6m. Most are funded by individual states, which have had to cut their budgets even as demand for spaces has risen, and no one has picked up the slack. The Chronicle of Higher Education notes that "community colleges receive less than one-third the level of federal support per full-time-equivalent student ($790) that public four-year colleges do ($2,600)."
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The free fashion show at a Greenwich, Conn., boutique in June was billed as a crash course in dressing for a college admissions interview.
Katherine Cohen has a Web site called ApplyWise that puts prospective college applicants through a 12-step presentation.Yet the proposed "looks" -- a young man in seersucker shorts, a young woman in a blue blazer over a low-cut blouse and short madras skirt -- appeared better suited for a nearby yacht club. After Jennifer Delahunty, dean of admissions at Kenyon College, was shown photos of those outfits, she rendered her review.
"I burst out laughing," she said.
Shannon Duff, the independent college counselor who organized the event, says she ordinarily charges families "in the range of" $15,000 for guidance about the application process, including matters far more weighty than just what to wear.
Ms. Duff is a practitioner in a rapidly growing, largely unregulated field seeking to serve families bewildered by the admissions gantlet at selective colleges.
No test or licensing is required to offer such services, and there is no way to evaluate the counselors' often extravagant claims of success or experience. And Ms. Duff's asking price, though higher than many, is eclipsed by those of competitors who may charge upwards of $40,000 -- more than a year's tuition at many colleges.
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Holly Bates, an eight-year-old Florida girl, has such bad allergies that being near nuts or nut-based products--or even being near someone who has recently eaten nuts--can trigger anaphylactic shock. With peanut peril ubiquitous, young Holly is not enrolled in a traditional public school; instead, she attends Florida Connections Academy, a full-time "virtual" school that she accesses from her home computer. Her mother, a former public school teacher, loves the program. "The curriculum is unbelievable," she told the Tampa Tribune in 2007. "It would astound you, the progress these children make."Joanne has more.The Sunshine State is something of a virtual education pioneer. Since the 2003-04 school year, Florida has partnered with two for-profit companies--Connections Academy and K12 Inc.--to provide pupils with the option of attending school online, full-time, for free. But years before that, Florida was promoting other types of virtual education. Florida Virtual School is a statewide program that allows students to take individual courses online, often in subjects not offered at their local school, like Latin or Macroeconomics. It began in 1997 as a small grant-based project with just 77 course enrollments. Today, Florida Virtual School is its own school district and has an annual budget near $100 million. In the 2008-09 school year, according to Education Next, some "84,000 students will complete 168,000 half-credit courses, a ten-fold increase since 2002-03." A newly-minted Florida Virtual School Connections Academy, announced in August 2008, will further expand online learning options and access.
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Home-schoolers in Virginia are now eligible for state financial aid that they were previously not allowed to receive.The Virginia Guaranteed Assistance Program, which provides need-based scholarships for tuition, fees and books at the state's two- and four-year public institutions, required recipients to have graduated from high school with at least a 2.5 grade-point average.
The state's approximately 30,000 home-schoolers were ineligible for the aid, which offered an average grant of $3,671 in the 2007-08 school year.
Under rules the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia approved this week, home-schoolers may qualify by submitting SAT scores of at least 900 and ACT scores of at least 19.
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The first things you need to know about cyberbullying are that it's not an epidemic and it's not killing our children. Yes, it's probably one of the more widespread youth risks on the Internet and yes there are some well publicized cases of cyberbullying victims who have committed suicide, but let's look at this in context.Bullying has always been a problem among adolescents and, sadly, so has suicide. In the few known cases of suicide after cyberbullying, there are other contributing factors. That's not to diminish the tragedy or suggest that the cyberbullying didn't play a role but--as with all online youth risk, we need to look at what else was going on in the child's life. Even when a suicide or other tragic event doesn't occur, cyberbullying is often accompanied by a pattern of offline bullying and sometimes there are other issues including long-term depression, problems at home, and self-esteem issues. And the most famous case of "cyberbullying"--the tragic suicide of 13-year-old Megan Meier--was far from typical. Cyberbullying is almost always peer to peer, but this was a case of an adult (the mom of one of Megan's peers) being accused of seeking revenge on a child who had allegedly bullied her own child.
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It's getting harder for parents to raise financially independent young adults.Many banks refuse to open individual checking accounts for 16- and 17-year-olds, requiring parents to jointly own the account, even if the youngsters have a job. Colleges urge parents to link their bank accounts or credit cards to the prepaid cash cards that double as their students' ID cards, to ensure a regular flow of funds from the Bank of Mom and Dad.
And under the new credit-card law that goes into effect early next year--part of a broader move toward aggressive consumer protection--parents of those under 21 will have to agree to take responsibility for their kids' credit cards unless the young applicants can show they have the income to qualify.
All of this seems to encourage parents to interfere with--and maybe even bail out--these young adults. And it comes at an age when the youngsters themselves should be taking on personal responsibility and making their own financial decisions.
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A law designed to keep college students' grades private often is used for a much different purpose -- to shield universities from potentially embarrassing situations.Some critics say a number of schools are deliberately misreading the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act in order to keep scandals and other unflattering news from hitting the media. "Some schools have good-faith misunderstandings of the law, but there are others that simply see this as a handy excuse to hide behind," says Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, which provides student journalists with legal help.
Legal experts say part of the problem is that the law is loosely defined. In addition, the potential consequences of violating the law -- namely, that schools would lose their federal funding -- prompt university officials to be conservative in their decisions about releasing information.
Those complaints rankle advocates of student privacy, who say that, if anything, the three-decade-old law should be expanded. "Most of these kids are adults, and they should be able to make their own decisions," says Daren Bakst, president of the Council on Law in Higher Education.
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Sam Dillon: Connecticut is another Northern state where achievement gaps are larger than in states across the South, the federal study shows. That is partly because white students in Connecticut score above the national average, but also because blacks there score lower, on average, than blacks elsewhere".
This validates my personal belief, and something that I have been saying for several years now, that Connecticut does not have great public schools, rather, it has one of if not the highest percentages of households with 4-year and advanced college degrees (CT, NJ and MA are always at the top of this list). This high percentage of well educated households makes Connecticut's public schools look good -- it is the household that is the difference maker, not the public schools. To prove my point, why is it that not one DRG B school does not outperform just one DRG A school?...or just one DRG C school out perform just one DRG B school?...makes no sense if the school were in fact the difference maker. DRG = Demographic Reference Group which is how the Dept. of Ed. here in CT groups all of its school districts to rate performance and other statistical data. It is generally rated by median household income but size of the community and other socioeconomic factors are part of the equation too. A = the most wealthy communities (also the "best" schools) and it goes down form there.
...it is all about socio-economics not how great Connecticut's public schools are, which they are not.
Connecticut's high-performing, public charter schools are making a difference, and that is an objective statement based on proven data.
We should do everything in our powers to embrace the proven Achievement First (Amistad Academy) model and replicate it far and wide. Why it is being stiff-armed by our legislators and the teachers union is simply bewildering. But then again both have proven to put their interests (political careers and pay checks) first and Connecticut's children second -- the teachers union is particularly good at that.
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It's getting harder for parents to raise financially independent young adults.Many banks refuse to open individual checking accounts for 16- and 17-year-olds, requiring parents to jointly own the account, even if the youngsters have a job. Colleges urge parents to link their bank accounts or credit cards to the prepaid cash cards that double as their students' ID cards, to ensure a regular flow of funds from the Bank of Mom and Dad.
And under the new credit-card law that goes into effect early next year--part of a broader move toward aggressive consumer protection--parents of those under 21 will have to agree to take responsibility for their kids' credit cards unless the young applicants can show they have the income to qualify.
All of this seems to encourage parents to interfere with--and maybe even bail out--these young adults. And it comes at an age when the youngsters themselves should be taking on personal responsibility and making their own financial decisions.
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Facing shrunken savings and borrowing options, parents and students are making some tough trade-offs in choosing and paying for college, suggesting some shifting attitudes toward higher education may endure beyond the recession.Old dreams of adult children earning degrees from elite, door-opening colleges or "legacy" schools attended by relatives are falling away in some families, in favor of a new pragmatism. Other parents and students are doing a tougher cost-benefit analysis of the true value of a pricey undergraduate degree. As parents wrestle privately with such emotional issues, many say they wish they'd begun years earlier to assess their values and priorities, long before their children's college-decision deadline was upon them.
Mustafah Abdulaziz for The Wall Street Journal
Throughout her childhood, Sarah Goldstein imagined attending New York University, says her mother, Rose Perrizo of Sharon, Mass. Sarah's grandmother is an NYU alum; Sarah lived near campus with her parents when she was small. "In her mind, Sarah was always headed there," Ms. Perrizo says.
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When you start searching for that perfect college for your child, you might think there's plenty of information to help you with your decision. Just for starters, every college has a website that will give you all the essentials.Take Stephens College, a private, four-year women's school in Columbia, Missouri. A quick tour of its website will tell you that the college offers more than 50 major and minors, everything from English to event planning to equestrian science. Class sizes average just 13 students. Annual costs total $32,250, but nearly all students get some kind of financial aid. And the campus looks nice.
But what you won't see without diligent searching is that half of Stephens students fail to graduate, even after six years. Not to pick on Stephens, which does mention that statistic deep in its website. Point is, little of the data that colleges provide really tell you much about the value of your investment: the quality of the education, the experience of the students, or how the graduates fare later in life. Instead parents have long accepted the value of the diploma on faith. And many assume that a college that charges $50,000 a year will give their child a better education than one that charges $25,000.
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No matter how many people come unstuck after posting inappropriate details of themselves on the internet, people just keep on doing it.We had the case of Sir John Sawers, the UK's incoming head of MI6 and his wife's Facebook account. Some of the details we learnt about the new head spook were innocuous enough (he wears Speedos), others less so (the location of his flat and details of friends and family). He is not the only one. From Republicans making racist remarks to bankers slagging off their bosses, it is a long and sorry list.
"Everyone knows that a lot of companies make a beeline for Facebook when they're looking at potential recruits," says Charlotte Butterfield, managing director of Law Absolut, the legal recruitment firm. "It's a form of due diligence and your profile on Facebook should be broadly the same as the person you present at interview."
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On a hot day last August, Max Gilpin, a high-school sophomore from Louisville, Ky., collapsed during a preseason football practice. Three days later, he died from complications of heatstroke. His coach, Jason Stinson, was later indicted for reckless homicide in the first known criminal case of its kind.With high-school football season set to get under way in many parts of the country next month, Max's story, which received widespread media attention, has spurred a nationwide debate about how far high schools should go to prevent heat-related injuries among their athletes.
Last month, the National Athletic Trainers' Association, which represents accredited trainers with a background in sports medicine, issued new heatstroke-prevention guidelines for high schools. These included recommendations to limit the duration and intensity of practice sessions early in the season and in hot weather.
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When it comes to choosing the foods we eat, we have so many choices that it often becomes confusing. As Americans, we are blessed with almost every kind of food imaginable, available right next door at the supermarket. There are, however, some very specific foods that help improve athletic performance. The foods listed below are particular important to keep in your diet. The following foods, in alphabetical order, provide premium fuel for the active athlete.
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Andy Slater, a 22-year-old delivery driver in London, appears oblivious to the fact that the UK is suffering its worst recession since the second world war."You gotta have new trainers ain't you? Nike, Adidas, Lacoste - whatever looks good," he says, eyeing up the latest models in the Westfield shopping mall in west London.
He is not alone in his opinion. In a survey conducted by the US-based Westfield group in May, 70 per cent of its shoppers aged between 18 and 35 said they were spending the same or more on clothes and eating out.
Slaves to fashion and free of most financial commitments, young people have kept spending in economic downturns when others have cut back. But today's younger generation is particularly flush with cash and, after growing up during the credit boom, spending is deeply ingrained.
As a result, retailers geared towards the youth market - particularly clothing chains - have been basking in their good fortune.
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Like many girls, I began my adventures in babysitting when I was 11 years old. It was in the late 1980s, after I had taken a Red Cross course to become "babysitter certified," acquiring expertise in dislodging an object from a choking baby's throat and learning to ask parents for emergency phone numbers. During my roughly four-year career, there were highs, like using my babysitting contacts to co-found a lucrative summer day camp in my neighborhood, and lows: bratty children and stingy parents, such as one mom who would have me come over 45 minutes early but wouldn't start the clock until she left and always wrote out a check when she got back -- even though, considering my $2-per-hour rate, she probably could have paid me from change in the bottom of her purse.My experiences were fairly typical of those encountered by millions of young women, as I might have suspected at the time and as I am thoroughly convinced after having read "Babysitter: An American History," a scholarly examination of the subject by Miriam Forman-Brunell. Ms. Forman-Brunell is a history professor at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, but she is also a mother who reports that she has hired a bevy of babysitters.
Babysitting, the author says, has always been a source of tension: "Distressed parent-employers have suspected their sitters of doing wrong ever since the beginning of babysitting nearly one hundred years ago." Before that, extended families or servants ensured that someone was watching the kids, but with the rise of the suburban nuclear family, parents looking to preserve adult intimacy in their marriages were forced to seek help elsewhere. Since most either weren't willing to or couldn't pay adult wages, the labor supply was reduced to young teens who wanted money but didn't have other ways of earning it.
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Thanks to the financial crisis many people will have to reconsider the legacy they'll leave behind.Ross Schmidt, a financial advisor in Denver, sat down with a well-to-do client last fall, just after the stock market had collapsed. The client was in her sixties, divorced, with two adult sons. "We were scrambling to stem losses in her portfolio" and re-evaluate retirement plans, Mr Schmidt recalls. He asked his client how much she wanted to leave her sons.
"Well, now, nothing," she replied.
She will not be the last to reach this decision -- especially if the stock market stays down.
Millions of families are struggling with new financial realities, including heavy losses in many retirement accounts, and more prosaic expectations for future investment returns. Those near retirement face the hardest choices. Should they keep working for longer? Revise their retirement plans? Scale back their standard of living now to conserve money for later?
One idea that should be in the mix, much to the dismay of your children: Leave less to your heirs. Or even nothing at all.
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On October 31 2006, Orange County teen Nikki Catsouras had an argument with her father. When Mr. Catsouras left for work, the his daughter "borrowed" his Porsche 911. Approaching a tollbooth, Catsouras rear-ended a Honda at 70 mph. The California Highway Patrol took photographs of the gruesome results. The photos hit the net and went viral. Catsouras sued the police for invasion of privacy. Lost in the shuffle: why was Miss Catsouras-a young, inexperienced driver-- legally entitled to drive the Porsche?The issue is pretty easy to understand: should young, inexperience motorists be allowed to drive high-powered cars? Australia says no. This despite a 2006 study by the University of Australia (funded by red light camera income) that concluded that only three percent of young driver crashes involved vehicles with a high power to weight ratio. The state of Victoria, for example, has instituted a power-to-weight related graduated license program for young drivers. Since July 2007, a probationary driver can't drive a car which has:
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Some wounds never heal. In 1968, at the age of 15, Do Van Du lost a leg and part of an arm while serving as a combat interpreter for the US Special Forces near the Cambodian border. He moved to the US in 1971 and became a successful software engineer and systems analyst. Then, seven years ago, Du returned to his homeland to help found a college-level programme run by Catholic Relief Services to train disabled young people to be software engineers and tech workers - a first for Vietnam.
"People with disabilities don't have a voice in Vietnam," he says. "You are basically thrown away. You are not 'normal'. You can't work. You are a leech on society," he says, before walking into a classroom full of eager students on crutches and in wheelchairs. "In Asia, because of the belief in reincarnation, people think you have done something in a prior life and now you are paying for it."Grim evidence of the harsh treatment of Vietnam's disabled citizens is easy to find among the students in Du's programme.
Duong Anh My was pelted with rocks because his leg was deformed.
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arly childhood mathematics is vitally important for young children's present and future educational success. Research has demonstrated that virtually all young children have the capability to learn and become competent in mathematics. Furthermore, young children enjoy their early informal experiences with mathematics. Unfortunately, many children's potential in mathematics is not fully realized, especially those children who are economically disadvantaged. This is due, in part, to a lack of opportunities to learn mathematics in early childhood settings or through everyday experiences in the home and in their communities. Improvements in early childhood mathematics education can provide young children with the foundation for school success.
Relying on a comprehensive review of the research, Mathematics Learning in Early Childhood lays out the critical areas that should be the focus of young children's early mathematics education, explores the extent to which they are currently being incorporated in early childhood settings, and identifies the changes needed to improve the quality of mathematics experiences for young children. This book serves as a call to action to improve the state of early childhood mathematics. It will be especially useful for policy makers and practitioners-those who work directly with children and their families in shaping the policies that affect the education of young children.
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Ralph and Robin Burns have three teenage boys, each one armed with a driver's license.Nick, Zach and Lucas Burns are good drivers, but like most other relatively inexperienced motorists, they have yet to hit a slick patch of ice on the road or to hydroplane on rain-soaked pavement. When any driver faces such road hazards for the first time, the outcome is usually determined more by luck than skill.
If a young driver hits a patch of ice for the first time and loses control of the car, it could be the last mistake he or she ever makes.
Ralph took a special driving class sponsored by Lexus a few years ago at Texas Motor Speedway and remembered being impressed with the program as it simulated emergency conditions in a controlled environment. When a friend recently told him that he had sent his daughter to a similar program geared for teen drivers, Ralph's ears perked up.
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The federal program is complex and won't apply to every borrower, but it could dramatically reduce monthly payments for some.The 32-year-old father of two just graduated from architecture school with $125,000 in debt. He and his wife, an audiologist, expect to make good money someday -- more than enough to pay the loans. But between the rotten economy and a new baby, the Savannah, Ga., couple have only been able to find part-time work. They're struggling to make ends meet, so the $1,200 a month that Jeff's lenders want on his loans doesn't seem feasible.
Fortunately for the Zollingers, a new federal student loan repayment plan goes into effect this month that could dramatically reduce payments for highly indebted borrowers. Called "income-based repayment," the plan limits the monthly payments to a percentage of the borrower's monthly income.
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AP:
A task force asked to suggest ways to design an accountability system for Minnesota high schools is seeking suggestions itself.The panel created this spring by the Legislature is soliciting advice through July 15 on the key issues it should tackle.
From there, the task force plans to produce a report on high school assessments and accountability. Preliminary recommendations could be out this fall, and the goal is to deliver a final report to the state education commissioner and lawmakers by year's end.
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A few weeks ago, Jay Mathews asked readers a tough question in his Admissions 101 forum - which is better: an A or B in a regular course or a C in a more challenging course like an AP or IB class? Jay sided with AP, saying that all students interested in tier 1 or tier 2 schools should take at least 2 AP or IB courses. Even if that means a C on a high school transcript, Jay argued, colleges will appreciate a student who is willing to take on a challenge. Reader reactions have been pouring in ever since:eloquensa: "My strategy suggestion is a little different from yours - I don't know about the college front in the C-in-AP/IB-or-A-in-regular argument, but if the student is a little more strategic in course and teacher selection it's a lot easier to avoid that dreaded C.Posted by Jim Zellmer at 6:12 PM Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom:
Catharine Bellinger, a Princeton sophomore who has plans to start a campus journal on education policy.
I suggested she practice with a topic provocative enough to get her in trouble, a good place for all writers to be. My question to her, inspired by her experiences in the D.C. schools, is: "Should middle class parents send their kids to KIPP?"
I have written a great deal about that successful network of public charter schools, known for raising the achievement of low-income students in our poorest urban and rural neighborhoods. I am hearing from some middle-class parents who would like some of that teaching for their own children. Here is Bellinger's take on whether that will work. Her email address is cbelling@princeton.edu. Let her, and me, know what you think.
By Catharine Bellinger">:
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The Educational Testing Service wanted to help graduate school applicants prove they are more than a set of test scores. So it developed a tool to rate students across a broad sweep of traits -- creativity, teamwork, integrity -- that admission tests don't measure.The Personal Potential Index, unveiled this week, looks suspiciously like another set of scores. An applicant's personality is distilled into six traits, and the applicant is rated on each of them by various professors and former supervisors on a scale of 1 to 5.
Officials with the nonprofit organization, based in Princeton, N.J., say the index marks the first large-scale attempt to codify the elusive, subjective attributes that make up a successful grad student. The goal is to raise the share of students who finish graduate school. Non-cognitive, or "soft," skills are considered crucial to success in higher education.
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This memo is a summary of the results from the surveys completed during the past school year with various parent groups whose children reside within the MMSD attendance area but receive certain alternative education options. Also included are results of the survey conducted with non-residents who attend MMSD schools via the Open Enrollment program (Le., Open Enrollment Enter).This document will be discussed at Monday evening's Madison School Board meeting. UPDATE:
Background
Groups were surveys representing households whose students were enrolled in one of four different educational settings: MMSD resident students attending private/parochial schools, MMSD resident students attending other public schools via the Open Enrollment program, non-resident students attending MMSD schools via the Open Enrollment program, and MMSD resident students provided home based instruction.
The surveys were conducted between December 2008 and February 2009. The surveys were mailed to households or they could complete the survey online. Two mailings were conducted - the initial mailing to all households and a second to non-respondents as a reminder request. Total group sizes and responses are provided below.
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Transportation is clearly a consideration to be factored into any discussion of school choice. Yet we know very little about how much it matters in family’s decisions about their children’s school, and almost nothing about how much of a barrier it is to school choice, especially for low-income families. How far does the average family want their child to travel to school? Would they be as comfortable letting their younger children travel as far as they might a middle or high school student? What transportation options are available to low-income families? These are the kinds of questions we tried to address in this study, in order to obtain meaningful data to help shape school transportation policy.
This project first surveyed the landscape of transportation and school choices. It examined the density of large districts in the U.S. The project team contacted large school districts to find out their policies on transportation and choice, then examined district budgets to see how much they actually spend on transportation. Most importantly, the project surveyed families in two cities—Denver and Washington, D.C.—to find out their travel patterns and school choice options. The study breaks down that data, collected from households earning less than $75,000 in annual income, to determine how much transportation is a barrier to choice.
This report addresses the following questions:
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Blogs, Twitter, Facebook: these outlets are supposedly cheapening language and tarnishing our time. But the fact is we are all reading and writing much more than we used to, writes Anne Trubek ...The chattering classes have become silent, tapping their views on increasingly smaller devices. And tapping they are: the screeds are everywhere, decrying the decline of smart writing, intelligent thought and proper grammar. Critics bemoan blogging as the province of the amateurism. Journalists rue the loose ethics and shoddy fact-checking of citizen journalists. Many save their most profound scorn for the newest forms of social media. Facebook and Twitter are heaped with derision for being insipid, time-sucking, sad testaments to our literary degradation. This view is often summed up with a disdainful question: "Do we really care about what you ate for lunch?"
Forget that most of the pundits lambasting Facebook and Twitter are familiar with these devices because they use them regularly. Forget that no one is being manacled to computers and forced to read stupid prose (instead of, say, reading Proust in bed). What many professional writers are overlooking in these laments is that the rise of amateur writers means more people are writing and reading. We are commenting on blog posts, forwarding links and composing status updates. We are seeking out communities based on written words.
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Let's introduce interesting poster about train manner in Tokyo subway. You may see this interesting poster in Japanese Tokyo subway.
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America's community colleges suffer from an image problem at home, but some are experiencing a boom -- especially when it comes to foreign student enrollments.Take Houston Community College. Thanks in part to an aggressive outreach campaign, the school has the highest percentage of international students of any community college in the U.S.
Betting On An American Education
Even if there were ivy on the walls of Houston Community College, it would wither in the Texas heat. The drab buildings of the school's Gulfton neighborhood campus are typical community college architecture, but that doesn't scare anyone away.
Sejal Desai came here after the college's fame spread -- via word of mouth -- to the small city she comes from in India.
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The wife of the new head of MI6 has caused a major security breach and left his family exposed after publishing photographs and personal details on Facebook.Sir John Sawers is due to take over as chief of the Secret Intelligence Service in November, putting him in charge of all of Britain's spying operations abroad.
But entries by his wife Shelley on the social networking site have exposed potentially compromising details about where they live and work, their friends' identities and where they spend their holidays. On the day her husband was appointed she congratulated him on the site using his codename "C".
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Despite almost 50 years of large and accelerating efforts to improve the school achievement of African-American students, the gap between their achievement and that of whites and Asians remains about as large as ever.Yet proposals for what to do about it seem basically unchanged: Spend more money and divert existing money to reduce class size and train teachers better, have more students take a rigorous college prep curriculum, work on improving self-esteem, eliminate ability-grouped classes, use cooperative-learning techniques, and reassign top teachers to schools with a high percentage of African-American students.
I have become especially doubtful about whether those approaches will work better in the future than they have in the past when I read this report from the trenches. Usually, we hear only from politicians and education leaders (who also are politicians) spouting lofty rhetoric. Occasionally, we hear of a promising program, but which never turns out to be scalable. Or we see a Hollywood movie about some amazing teacher.
We rarely, however, hear from a more typical teacher who, day to day, teaches low-achieving African-American kids. So it was with interest that I read this truly depressing account from a teacher. I've edited out a couple of unnecessarily snarky sentences, which are irrelevant to the issue. Nonetheless the essay is long yet, I believe, worth your time.)
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Michael Laser, via a kind reader's email:
IF I could change public education, here's what I'd do first: reward the best teachers with higher pay and stature, and fire the worst teachers, because they shouldn't be in the classroom.My children have gone through a total of 16 years of public schooling in New Jersey. Over the years, I've seen outstanding teachers, and outstandingly bad ones. Our kids have had teachers who introduced them to everything under the sun, and made every day different and fascinating. Some of our daughter's teachers gave up their lunch and stayed late to help her find her way through the maze of math. Two of our son's teachers comforted him when traumatic events laid him low. My daughter's sixth-grade teacher made students feel like real scientists; her language arts teacher covered everyone's papers with useful suggestions. These people put everything they have into teaching. They light sparks that stay lit for years.
But we've also seen teachers who put dents in our children's spirits, day after day, teachers who barely taught anything at all, who, I suspect, chose the profession because they wanted summers off.
My father used to come home from his post office job railing about co-workers who didn't do their share of the work, but couldn't be fired. Watching bad teachers fail to do their jobs, I'm even angrier than he was. How can anyone justify protecting the jobs of teachers who:
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Dan Bontrager is a 54-year-old Amish man with flecks of gray in his long beard. He's also treasurer of the Tri-County Land Trust, an Amish lending cooperative created to support the Amish maxim that community enhances faith in God.This past spring, Mr. Bontrager was startled when a number of men he has known most of his life tied their horses to the hitching post outside his office and came inside to withdraw their money from the Land Trust.
"We had a run," Mr. Bontrager says. "I don't know if you know anything about the Amish grapevine, but word travels fast. Somebody assumed it was going to happen, and it started a panic."
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The right and wrong ways to get more poor youngsters into the world's great universitiesLOTS of rich people and crummy state schools, especially in the big cities where well-off folk tend to live: these common features of America and Britain help explain the prominence in both countries of an elite tier of private schools. Mostly old, some with fat endowments, places like Eton, Harrow and Phillips Exeter have done extraordinarily well. Fees at independent schools have doubled in real terms over the past 25 years and waiting lists have lengthened. Even in the recession, they are proving surprisingly resilient (see article). A few parents are pulling out, but most are soldiering on and plenty more are clamouring to get their children in.
Row, row together
All sorts of class-based conspiracy theories exist to explain the success of such institutions, but the main reason why they thrive in a more meritocratic world is something much more pragmatic: their ability to get people into elite universities. For Britain and America also have the world's best universities. Look at any of the global rankings and not only do the Ivy League and Oxbridge monopolise the top of the tree, British and (especially) American colleges dominate most of the leading 100 places. This summer graduates will struggle to find jobs, so a degree from a world-famous name like Berkeley or the London School of Economics will be even more valuable than usual. The main asset of the private schools is their reputation for getting children into those good universities.
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In both America and Britain recession has so far done little to dent the demand for private education.
"COMPARED with last year, applications are up 14%," says Mark Stanek, the principal of Ethical Culture Fieldston, a private school in New York. All through the application season he and his board of governors had been on tenterhooks, waiting to see if financial turmoil would cut the number of parents prepared to pay $32,000-34,000 a year to educate a child. Requests for financial help from families already at Fieldston had been rising fast, and the school had scraped together $3m--on top of the $8m it spends on financial aid in a normal year--in the hope of tiding as many over as possible. Nothing is certain until pupils turn up in the autumn. Some parents could get cold feet and sacrifice their deposits. Yet so far the school is more popular than ever.
Across America the picture is patchier, but there is little sign of a recession-induced meltdown in private schooling. Catholic parochial schools and some in rural areas are finding the going harder--but this is merely the acceleration of existing trends. Private schools in big cities with rich residents, and those with famous names and a history of sending graduates to the Ivy League, seem to be doing rather well. "Some parents weighing up their options may be worried about what recession will do to public-school budgets," says Myra McGovern of the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), which represents around 1,400 of the country's 30,000-odd private schools. "And some may think that if other people are struggling, that will mean their children are more likely to get in."
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Choosing a school for one's child must be one of life's toughest decisions. The consequences can last a lifetime - for one's offspring - and have enormous effects upon their wealth and happiness.FT Top 1000 Schools.The data on which to base a decision are incomplete - even academic league tables such as our own are only a partial measure of a school's "success" in preparing pupils for adult life - and money, or the lack of it, may limit the range of options.
But if money were no object, would it be better to send your child to an independent, or a state school?
On the face of it, evidence in favour of independent schools looks strong. Independent schools educate only 7 per cent of children in the UK, yet they dominate our rankings. Parents who have the financial resources also vote with their pockets.
According to studies by MTM Consulting, a specialist adviser to independent schools, almost a quarter of families who can afford the fees send one or more children to independent schools.
They are therefore spending a lot of cash to buy a private-sector service in preference to one that, in theory, is available free from the state. These parents clearly believe they are buying some added value.
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It just can't be a very good sign that when someone raises serious questions about one of the liveliest and controversial issues in our field those questions are ignored or distorted and caricatured. I've heard Checker Finn's new book on pre-kindergarten education referred to as an anti-pre-k book (it's not), an intemperate attack on the pre-k movement (it's critical, sure, but let's assume they're not as vulnerable as the kids they serve), or dismissed as simply too conservative to be taken seriously by the field (again it's not).That doesn't mean it's a flawless book. Sara Mead has engaged with it and points out some problems with the analysis (in particular Finn overstates current participation levels - especially from a quality standpoint - and that's no small thing given his underlying point) and she also rounds up the other writing on it. But in general there hasn't been a lot of discussion of Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut's points about current program coordination, costs and how to think about costs, quality, and universality. These are not small matters; they cut to the heart of what is likely to be a massive public investment in an important strategy to improve outcomes for economically disadvantaged youngsters.
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The issue of escalating compensation and rising ticket prices in professional sports has been around for years. But next month it could reach a boiling point when 21-year-old Stephen Strasburg, the No. 1 pick in this year's Major League Baseball draft, signs for at least $15 million. And that's just a bonus before salary is even discussed.The blogosphere and radio call-in shows are already buzzing, with people saying things like "Man, the [Washington] Nationals" -- or whatever team ends up signing Mr. Strasburg -- "are sure going to have to raise prices to pay for this guy. You'll be lucky to afford a beer when you go out to the ballpark to see him pitch."
Well, if you can't afford to buy a beer at the ballpark then it didn't do the team much good to sign the player, did it? Sportswriters and radio guys delight in reminding fans that every time a team acquires an expensive player the cost of everything goes up. But that's just not the way economics works.
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BBC:
The Trust for America's Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found adult obesity rates rose in 23 of the 50 states, but fell in none.
In addition, the percentage of obese and overweight children is at or above 30% in 30 states.The report warns widespread obesity is fuelling rates of chronic disease, and is responsible for a large, and growing chunk of domestic healthcare costs.
Obesity is linked to a range of health problems, including heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes.
Dr Jeff Levi, TFAH executive director, said: "Our health care costs have grown along with our waist lines. "The obesity epidemic is a big contributor to the skyrocketing health care costs in the US.
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Vinod Khosla is one of Silicon Valley's most successful VCs. I was at the recent SDForum Visionary Awards where Mr Khosla was one of four winners of the 2009 awards.His acceptance speech was short and very good. Excellent advice for entrepreneurs.
Also, he talks about failure, which I have long advocated is Silicon Valley's strength.
A couple of years ago I met with a delegation of Russian diplomats, VCs, and government officials. They were visiting Silicon Valley and wanted to meet with me as part of their tour. They were looking for ways to create several silicon valley-like regions in Russia.
During our meeting, I told them I would tell them the secret of Silicon Valley. I paused. They all leaned in a little closer...
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The state of Illinois is embroiled in yet another political scandal. This one involves the University of Illinois and allegations that students with political clout were admitted to the school over other, more qualified applicants.A Shoo-In
When William Jones graduated from high school three years ago, he thought he had done what he had to do to get into University of Illinois that fall.
"I was mostly an A student. A's, with a couple of B's. I got a 29 on my ACT," Jones said. "So when I originally applied to U of I, I guess I cockily thought I was a shoo-in, but apparently not."
Jones scored high enough to get on Illinois' waiting list before ultimately being denied. His Plan B was to go to the University of Iowa, where he paid out-of-state tuition.
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BBC:
Complications during pregnancy and giving birth later in life may increase the risk of having a child with autism, a review of dozens of studies suggests.Researchers found the bulk of studies into maternal age and autism suggest the risk increases with age, and that fathers' age may play a role too.
The mothers of autistic children were also more likely to have suffered diabetes or bleeding during pregnancy.
The US review of 40 studies appears in the British Journal of Psychiatry.
The recorded number of children with autism has risen exponentially in the past 30 years but experts say this is largely due to improved detection and diagnosis, as well as a broadening of the criteria.
The cause of the condition is unclear, and the review team from the Harvard School of Public Health said there was "insufficient evidence" to point to any one prenatal factor as being significant.
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• Historical videos from the Library's moving-image collections such as original Edison films and a series of 1904 films from the Westinghouse Works;Slick. Download iTunes here. MIT's open courseware, among many others is also available on iTunes U.
- Original videos such as author presentations from the National Book Festival, the "Books and Beyond" series, lectures from the Kluge Center, and the "Journeys and Crossings" series of discussions with curators;
- Audio podcasts, including series such as "Music and the Brain," slave narratives from the American Folklife Center, and interviews with noted authors from the National Book Festival; and
- Classroom and educational materials, including 14 courses from the Catalogers' Learning Workshop
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Tacked to my wall is a lithograph of the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington. For many years, it graced my mother's one-room schoolhouse in Lime Rock, N.Y. Antiquarian relic or enduringly relevant image? The same question may be asked of the "little red schoolhouse" itself, whose reality and legend are the subject of "Small Wonder." Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor at New York University, sets out to tell "how -- and why -- the little red schoolhouse became an American icon." Mr. Zimmerman proves a thoughtful and entertaining teacher.First, the chromatic debunking: One-room schools were often white and seldom red. The teachers were usually young unmarried females, pace the most famous one-room schoolteacher in literature, Ichabod Crane. They swept the floor, stoked the stove, rang the hand-bell and taught their mixed-age students by rote and recitation. The schools could be a "cauldron of chaos," in Mr. Zimmerman's alliteration, as tyro teachers were tormented by Tom Sawyers dipping pigtails in inkwells and carving doggerel into desks.
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When Animal House first came out just over 30 years ago, it dominated the cultural landscape. College students were nostalgic for the "raunchy, pre-1960s undergraduate ideal," says Peter Rollins, who has been studying pop-culture academically for over 30 years. Mr. Rollins, who attended Dartmouth in the 1960s, says that students back then tried to live "the fantasy" on their own campuses. Some still do, taking Bluto's counsel to heart: "My advice to you is to start drinking heavily."Take Alpha Delta, the Dartmouth College fraternity that the infamous Delta house of the movie is based on. The movie, co-written by Dartmouth graduate and Alpha Delta brother Chris Miller, still inspires some of the fraternity's traditions today.
In spring 2008, a band covering Otis Day and the Knights played on Alpha Delta's front lawn to an audience of boozers, brawlers and, probably, future U.S. senators. This past spring, Alpha Delta organized an Animal House-themed party with the preppy brothers Sigma Alpha Epsilon, the inspiration for the sadomasochistic Omega house in the film. And on any given Friday night, it's not just beer making the basement floor of Alpha Delta sticky. Paying tribute to the movie that made their fraternity famous, the brothers of Alpha Delta relieve themselves in plain sight along their basement wall.
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ust past dawn one morning last August, I pulled myself from bed, bleary from ragged sleep. I headed downstairs to make coffee and settle at my computer. There, I booted up Firefox and accessed an online card room, Full Tilt Poker, from which I downloaded a program to play Texas Hold 'Em and other games. Once the program was open, I tried to log on with the screen name my 18-year-old son, Dan, had shown me on a different site called PokerStars. Full Tilt Poker, unsurprisingly, rejected the name.Following the plan I outlined as I lay awake in the wee hours, I opened up Dan's college e-mail account. Weeks before, he read his e-mail via my computer and asked Firefox to save the password. I clicked "Enter." There before me were all the e-mail messages from university officials, from his tennis coach, from teachers. Most prevalent were e-mail messages from Full Tilt Poker, addressed to a screen name I did not recognize. Grimly satisfied, I read none of these. I simply returned to Full Tilt, entered the screen name from the e-mail and clicked "Forgot my password." I expected the program to ask me the name of my favorite rock band, at which point my foray into the role of Internet spy would cease. To my surprise, the window on the screen read, "We have sent your new password to the e-mail address on record." I re-entered Dan's e-mail account, fetched the new password and entered it into the Full Tilt log-in window.
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The Public Policy Forum's latest report, released today, finds that of the 10 career clusters predicted to grow the most over the next five years, seven include occupations requiring strong backgrounds in science, math, technology, or engineering (STEM). Of the 10 specific jobs predicted to be the fastest growing in the state, eight require STEM skills or knowledge and six require a post-secondary degree.Amy Hetzner has more.Do Wisconsin's state educational policies reflect this growing need for STEM-savvy and skilled workers? Are Wisconsin education officials focusing on STEM in a coherent and coordinated way? Our new report probes those issues by examining state workforce development data and reviewing state-level policies and standards that impact STEM education.
We present several policy options that could be considered to build on localized STEM initiatives and establish a greater statewide imperative to prioritize STEM activities in coordination with workforce needs. Those include:
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Paul Tudor Jones, via a kind reader's email:
When I was asked to give the commencement address to a graduating class of 9th graders, I jumped at the chance. You see, I have four teenagers of my own and I feel like this is the point in my life when I am supposed to tell them something profound. So thank you Buckley community for giving me this opportunity. I tried this speech out on them last night and am happy to report that none of them fell asleep until I was three quarters done.
When composing this message I searched my memory for my same experience back in 1969 when I was sitting right where you are. I realized that I could hardly remember one single speaker from my junior high or high school days. Now that could be my age. I'm old enough now that some days I can't remember how old I am. But it could also have been a sign of the times. Remember, I was part of the student rebellion, and we did not listen to anything that someone over 30 said because they were just too clueless. Or so we thought.
Anyway, as I sat there considering this speech further, I suddenly had a flashback of the one speaker who I actually did remember from youthful days. He was a Shakespearean actor who came to our school to extol the virtues of William Shakespeare. He started out by telling us that Shakespeare was not about poetry or romance or love, but instead, was all about battle, and fighting and death and war. Then he pulled out a huge sword which he began waving over the top of his head as he described various bloody conflicts that were all part and parcel of Shakespeare's plays. Now being a 15-year old testosterone laden student at an all boys school, I thought this was pretty cool. I remember thinking, "Yea, this guy gets it. Forget about the deep meaning and messages in the words, let's talk about who's getting the blade."
As you can see, I have a similar sword which I am going to stop waving over my head now, because A) I think you are permanently scarred, and B) the headmaster looks like he is about to tackle me and C) some of you, I can tell, are way too excited about this sword, and you're scaring me a little.
I'm here with you young men today because your parents wanted me to speak to you about service--that is, serving others and giving back to the broader community for the blessings that you have received in your life. But that is a speech for a later time in your life. Don't get me wrong, serving others is really, really important. It truly is the secret to happiness in life. I swear to God. Money won't do it. Fame won't do it. Nor will sex, drugs, homeruns or high achievement. But now I am getting preachy.
Today, I want to talk to you about the dirtiest word that any of you 9th graders know. It's a word that is so terrible that your parents won't talk about it; your teachers won't talk about it; and you certainly don't ever want to dwell on it. But this is a preparatory school, and you need to be prepared to deal with this phenomenon because you will experience it. That is a guarantee. Every single one of you will experience it not once but multiple times, and every adult in this room has had to deal with this in its many forms and manifestations. It's the "F" word.
FAILURE. Failure that is so mortifying and so devastating that it makes you try to become invisible. It makes you want to hide your face, your soul, your being from everyone else because of the shame. Trust me, boys--if you haven't already tasted that, you will. I am sure most of you here already have. AND IT IS HARD. I know this firsthand, but I also know that failure was a key element to my life's journey.
My first real failure was in 1966 in the 6th grade. I played on our basketball team, and I was the smallest and youngest kid on the team. It was the last game of the season and I was the only player on the squad that had not scored a point all season. So in the second half the coach directed all the kids to throw me the ball when I went in, and for me to shoot so that I would score. The problem was that Coach Clark said it loud enough that every person in the stands could hear it as well as every member of the opposing team. Going into the fourth quarter, our team was well ahead, Coach Clark inserted me and thus, began the worst eight minutes of my life up until that point. Every time I got the ball, the entire other team would rush towards me, and on top of that, that afternoon I was the greatest brick layer the world had ever seen. The game ended. I had missed five shots, and the other team erupted in jubilation that I had not scored. I ran out of the gym as fast as I could only to bump into two of the opposing team's players who proceeded to laugh and tease and ridicule me. I cried and hid in the bathroom. Well, that passed, and I kept trying team sports, but I was just too small to really compete. So in the 10th grade, I took up boxing where suddenly everyone was my size and weight. I nearly won the Memphis Golden Gloves my senior year in high school and did win the collegiate championship when I was 19. Standing in the middle of that ring and getting that trophy, I still remember looking around for those two little kids who had run me into that bathroom back in the 6th grade, because I was going to knock their blocks off. That's one problem with failure. It can stay with you for a very long time.
The next time the dragon of failure reared his ugly head was in 1978. I was working in New Orleans for one of the greatest cotton traders of all time, Eli Tullis. Now, New Orleans is an unbelievable city. It has the Strawberry Festival, the Jazz Festival, the Sugar Bowl, Mardi Gras, and just about every other excuse for a party that you can ever imagine. Heck, in that town, waking up was an excuse to party. I was still pretty fresh out of college, and my mentality, unfortunately, was still firmly set on fraternity row. It was a Friday morning in June, and I had been out literally all night with a bunch of my friends. My job was to man the phone all day during trading hours and call cotton prices quotes from New York into Mr. Tullis' office. Around noon, things got quiet on the New York floor, and I got overly drowsy. The next thing I remember was a ruler prying my chin off my chest, and Mr. Tullis calling to me, "Paul. Paul." My eyes fluttered opened and as I came to my senses, he said to me, "Son, you are fired." I'd never been so shocked or hurt in my life. I literally thought I was going to die for I had just been sacked by an iconic figure in my business.
My shame turned into anger. I was not angry at Mr. Tullis for he was right. I was angry at myself. But I knew I was not a failure, and I swore that I was going to prove to myself that I could be a success. I called a friend and secured a job on the floor of the New York Cotton Exchange and moved to the City. Today, I will put my work ethic up against anybody's on Wall Street. Failure will give you a tattoo that will stay with you your whole life, and sometimes it's a really good thing. One other side note, to this day, I've never told my parents that I got fired. I told them I just wanted to try something different. Shame can be a lifetime companion for which you better prepare yourself.
Now, there are two types of failure you will experience in life. The first type is what I just described and comes from things you can control. That is the worst kind. But there is another form of failure that will be equally devastating to you, and that is the kind beyond your control. This happened to me in 1982. I had met a very lovely young Harvard student from Connecticut, dated her for two years then asked her to marry me right after she graduated from college. We set a date; we sent out the invitations; and all was fantastic until one month before the wedding when her father called me. He said, "Paul, my daughter sat me down this afternoon, and she doesn't know how to tell you this, but she is really unhappy and thinks it's time for you two to take a break." At first I thought he was joking because he was a very funny guy. Then he said, "No, she is serious about this." I thought to myself, "Oh, my God, I am being dumped at the altar." I'm from Tennessee. Getting dumped at the altar was the supreme social embarrassment of that time. It was a big deal. When all my family and friends found out, they were ready to re-start the Civil War on the spot. I had to remind them that the last Civil War didn't go so well for our side, and I didn't like our chances in a rematch. The reality was that I was a 26-year old knucklehead, and since all my friends were getting married, I kind of felt it was time for me to do the same thing. And that was the worst reason in the world to get married. I actually think she understood that and to a certain extent spared me what would have been a very tough marriage. Instead, I've had an incredible marriage for twenty years to a wonderful wife, and we have four kids that I love more than anything on Earth. Some things happen to you that at the time will make you feel like the world is coming to an end, but in actuality, there is a very good reason for it. You just can't see it and don't know it. When one door closes, another will open, but standing in that hallway can be hell. You just have to persevere. Quite often that dragon of failure is really chasing you off the wrong road and on to the right one.
By now you are thinking, how much longer is this loser going to keep on talking. My kids are all teenagers, and whenever I'm telling them something I think is important, they often wonder the same thing. But the main point I want you to take away today is that some of your greatest successes are going to be the children of failure. This touches upon the original reason I was invited here today. In 1986, I adopted a class of Bedford Stuyvesant 6th graders and promised them if they graduated from high school, I would pay for their college. For those of you who don't know, Bed-Stuy is one of New York City's toughest neighborhoods. Even the rats are scared to go there at night. Statistically about 8% of the class I adopted would graduate from high school, so my intervention was designed to get them all into college. For the next six years, I did everything I could for them. I spent about $5,000 annually per student taking them on ski trips, taking them to Africa, taking them to my home in Virginia on the weekends, having report card night, hiring a counselor to help coordinate afternoon activities and doing my heartfelt best to get them ready for college. Six years later, a researcher from Harvard contacted me and asked if he could study my kids as part of an overall assessment of what then was called the "I Have a Dream" Program. I said sure. He came back to me a few months later and shared some really disturbing statistics. 86 kids that I had poured my heart and soul into for six years were statistically no different than kids from a nearby school that did not have the services our afterschool program provided. There was no difference in graduation rates, dropout rates, academic scores, teenage pregnancies, and the list went on. The only thing that we managed to do was get three times as many of our kids into college because we were offering scholarships whereas the other schools were not. But in terms of preparing these kids for college, we completely and totally failed. Boy, did this open my eyes. That was the first real-time example for me of how intellectual capital will always trump financial capital. In other words, I had the money to help these kids, but it was useless because I didn't have the brains to help them. I had tried to succeed with sheer force of will and energy and financial resources. I learned that this was not enough. What I needed were better defined goals, better metrics, and most importantly, more efficient technologies that would enable me to achieve those goals. What that whole experience taught me was that starting with kids at age 12 was 12 years too late. An afterschool program was actually putting a band-aid on a much deeper structural issue, and that was that our public education system was failing us. So in 2000, along with the greatest educator I knew, a young man named Norman Atkins, we started the Excellence Charter School in Bedford Stuyvesant for boys. We set the explicit goal of hiring the best teachers with the greatest set of skills to be the top performing school in the city. Now that was an ambitious goal but last year in 2008, Excellence ranked #1 out of 543 public schools in New York City for reading and math proficiency for any third and fourth grade cohort, and our school was 98% African American boys. We never would have done that had I not failed almost 15 years earlier.
So here is the point: you are going to meet the dragon of failure in your life. You may not get into the school you want or you may get kicked out of the school you are in. You may get your heart broken by the girl of your dreams or God forbid, get into an accident beyond your control. But the point is that everything happens for a reason. At the time it may not be clear. And certainly the pain and the shame are going to be overwhelming and devastating. But just as sure as the sun comes up, there will come a time on the next day or the next week or the next year, when you will grab that sword and point it at that dragon and tell him, "Be gone, dragon. Tarry with me and I will cut your head off. For I must find the destination God and life hold in store for me!" Young men of Buckley, good luck on your journey...
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New friendships bloom as an L.A. judge and his college professor wife decide to foot the bill for a talented boy to attend the private school, which his mom can't afford.When David and Jacki Horwitz read an article in The Times about Lorelei Oliver's struggle to find a good school for her son Kamal Key, their response was immediate: Perhaps, they inquired, there was a fund to which they could contribute to help the 12-year-old, who had been admitted to a prestigious but costly private campus?
Three weeks and several phone calls and e-mails later, Kamal and his family sat in the backyard of the Horwitzes' spacious Pacific Palisades home, laughing as if they had known each other for years. The couple's initial offer of a modest donation for a little boy who was a complete stranger has led to the unexpected meeting of two families whose lives may now be intertwined for years.
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Transitioning from full-time student to working professional is challenging enough, but in this turbulent job market, what's a student to do? Our experts have help
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IN GERMANY a mother who neglects her children is known as a Rabenmutter (raven's mother). Many older Germans slap that label on women with small children who go out to work. Young women in Germany, as elsewhere, are torn. They enjoy their jobs but find it hard to combine them with having a family, for a host of practical reasons such as school hours and lack of child care as well as public disapproval. Faced with that dilemma, some give up work. Others give up having children. About a quarter of the current generation of German women in their 40s have remained childless. The country's fertility rate (the number of children a woman can expect to have in her lifetime) is now a rock-bottom 1.3--the same as in Japan and Italy, where similar attitudes prevail (see chart 3). The chancellor, Angela Merkel, has acknowledged that her country needs to be more child-friendly.
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To make classes more manageable, administrators have enrolled some especially challenging students in Locke 4, an academy whose Opportunities program consists of three classrooms set aside for students who are doing poorly or displaying serious behavior problems. The program also accepts students returning after being convicted of crimes.Jerry Pournelle has more.On a recent Monday, 14 students sat in an Opportunities class with one teacher and an aide -- Green Dot wanted especially small adult-to-student ratios for these youths. The posted class rules were simple: Stay seated during class; complete all of your work; be polite and respectful.
These expectations failed to achieve traction with several students, including a recently arriving freshman.
"Do you need help?" the teacher asked him.
"You need help," he retorted, looking around for admiration from his peers. "You know, lady, I don't like you."
The group was assigned to organize an essay on juvenile justice after reviewing case studies of four young offenders. If students actually write the essay, they'll get extra credit.
One table over from the ninth-grader, a wiry boy with slicked-back hair said he had landed in Locke 4 after punching a school security guard. He considers gang membership necessary to survive: "That's almost part of life."
Then he paused and offered something close to an endorsement of the new Locke: "Other schools, you have your enemies all the time. In this school everybody gets along. People talk to Bloods and Crips."
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resident Obama, in his May 21 speech at the National Archives Museum in Washington said that "we can defeat Al Qaeda ...if we stay true to who we are...anchored in our timeless ideals." A much more somber note, however, was in a warning by retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter the day before at Georgetown University Law Center.I complete agree with Hentoff. These words are particularly relevant when elected officials, such as Democrat Charles Schumer advocate biometric ID cards for all workers:Deeply concerned at how little knowledge Americans have of how this republic works, Justice Souter cited as an example that the majorities of the public can't name -- according to surveys -- the three branches of government.
Who we are, Souter continued, "can be lost, it is being lost, it is lost, if it is not understood." What is needed, he said, "is the restoration of the self-identity of the American people. ... When I was a kid in the eighth and ninth grades, everybody took civics. That's no longer true. (Former Justice) Sandra Day O'Connor says 50 percent of schools teach neither history nor civics." Justice Souter continued that when he was in school, "civics was as dull as dishwater, but we knew the structure of government."
This alert to the citizenry was almost entirely ignored by the press.
Admirably, O'Connor is trying to engage students in learning who they are as Americans through her Web site: Our Courts - 21st Century Civics (www.ourcourts.org). The site asks students what part of government they would most want to be a part of. And she invites teachers to click and "find lesson plans that fit your classroom needs."
"I'm sure the civil libertarians will object to some kind of biometric card -- although . . . there'll be all kinds of protections -- but we're going to have to do it. It's the only way," Schumer said. "The American people will never accept immigration reform unless they truly believe their government is committed to ending future illegal immigration."The Obama Administration is advocating easy sharing of IRS data... (not good).
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Most of us have had the experience of receiving e-mail with an attachment, trying to open the attachment, and finding a corrupted file that won't open. That concept is at the root of a new Web site advertising itself (perhaps serious only in part) as the new way for students to get extra time to finish their assignments.Corrupted-Files.com offers a service -- recently noted by several academic bloggers who have expressed concern -- that sells students (for only $3.95, soon to go up to $5.95) intentionally corrupted files. Why buy a corrupted file? Here's what the site says: "Step 1: After purchasing a file, rename the file e.g. Mike_Final-Paper. Step 2: E-mail the file to your professor along with your 'here's my assignment' e-mail. Step 3: It will take your professor several hours if not days to notice your file is 'unfortunately' corrupted. Use the time this website just bought you wisely and finish that paper!!!"
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Many school choice supporters are discouraged after having suffered a series of setbacks on the voucher front, ranging from the loss of Utah's nascent voucher program last year to the recent death sentence handed to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. A rambling and inaccurate article in the normally supportive City Journal got the chorus of naysayers rolling more than a year ago with the cry "school choice isn't enough."The bright spot for vouchers in recent years has been the success of special-needs programs. Yet the Arizona Supreme Court ruled recently that school vouchers for disabled and foster children violate the state constitution, which forbids public money from aiding private schools.
Naturally, the pessimists and opponents of choice are forecasting the death of the voucher movement. They're wrong, because there never was a voucher movement to begin with. It has always been movement for educational freedom, and it is still going strong.
Over the past several years, there has been a gradual shift in focus from vouchers to an alternative mechanism: education tax credits. Illinois, Minnesota and Iowa already provide families with tax credits to offset the cost of independent schooling for their own kids. Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona and three other states provide tax credits for donations to nonprofit scholarship organizations that subsidize tuition for lower-income families.
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Vineet Nayar is reported to have called Americans graduates "unemployable"; the CEO of IT services vendor HCL Technologies was speaking recently in New York. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers debate racism, stereotyping, sweatshops, and H1B visas.via Lou Minatti.By Richi Jennings, your humble blogwatcher, who has selected these bloggy tidbits for your enjoyment. Not to mention the best gaming toilets...
Rob Preston reports inflammatory comments with dignity:
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For the past nearly two months I've been working towards some sort of new normal as I recover from and work with my doctors to figure out how to live with the illness I never dreamed would turn our family life so utterly on its head. Since then we've been taking one day at a time, each day assessing whether I need to spend extra time in bed on pain killers to get over a bad migraine and whether my husband has to once again skip his work obligations to take the children to one of their activities or take me to a doctor's appointment. Our parents have all spent time with us, each taking a one to two week shift caring for our household. It's been an unexpected silver lining for us to have so much time with them, and they give my husband a break to get some of his own work done and get back to academic life. He's taken over as principle provider of domestic services and chauffer, as well as breadwinner, and he said recently that he's looking forward to going back to work full-time so he can have a vacation -- he's exhausted! With our families here, I get many greatly appreciated offers to "just go lie down, I'll take care of this" though it makes it a little more difficult to find 'normal!'Since my last post, my illness has been diagnosed at different times as brain stem migraine and viral encephalitis, for which I spent 12 days in hospital on a course of intra-venous anti-viral drugs. I should add that despite my tongue-and-cheek tone about the diagnoses, I've been very happy with the excellent medical care I've received and the thoughtful consideration my doctors have made for the fact that I'm the mother of two young children. When they saw how difficult it was for our family to be separated with me in hospital, they arranged for day passes and made accommodations for me to be temporarily unplugged from the IV to visit home. Yesterday was a long awaited appointment with a second neurologist who weighed in on my crazy collection of symptoms with yet a new diagnosis: syndrome of headache, neurological deficits, and cerebrospinal fluid lymphocytosis (or HaNDL, which almost sounds like it was invented as a catch-all for me and my symptoms). Along with the white blood cells in my spinal fluid, migraines, and dizziness, I also have entertaining colorful hallucinations (fairies, dragons, iridescent butterflies, and hammering cartoon characters) which have become an unlikely family source of creativity as I describe the latest over breakfast and my son later reproduces them, based on my descriptions, in his drawing journal at school. Fortunately his teacher is aware of my neurological problems, since I've not yet received any worried phone calls or visits from social workers to investigate my seven-year-old son's involvement with mind-altering drugs as the inspiration for his art.
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Byron G. Auguste, Bryan Hancock, and Martha Laboissière:
A persistent gap in academic achievement between children in the United States and their counterparts in other countries deprived the US economy of as much as $2.3 trillion in economic output in 2008, McKinsey research finds.1 Moreover, each of the long-standing achievement gaps among US students of differing ethnic origins, income levels, and school systems represents hundreds of billions of dollars in unrealized economic gains. Together, these disturbing gaps underscore the staggering economic and social cost of underutilized human potential. Yet they also create room for hope by suggesting that the widespread application of best practices could secure a better, more equitable education for the country's children--along with substantial economic gains.How has educational achievement changed in the United States since 1983, when the publication of the seminal US government report A Nation at Risk2 sounded the alarm about the "rising tide of mediocrity" in American schools? To learn the answer, we interviewed leading educational researchers around the world, assessed the landscape of academic research and educational-achievement data, and built an economic model that allowed us to examine the relationships among educational achievement (represented by standardized test scores), the earnings potential of workers, and GDP.
We made three noteworthy assumptions: test scores are the best available measure of educational achievement; educational achievement and attainment (including milestones such as graduation rates) are key drivers in hiring and are positively correlated with earnings; and labor markets will hire available workers with higher skills and education. While these assumptions admittedly simplify the socioeconomic complexities and uncertainties, they allowed us to draw meaningful conclusions about the economic impact of educational gaps in the United States.
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Every three years, the Program for International Student Assessment ranks the education levels of 15-year-olds around the world. The most recent test, in 2006, brought back results from 30 industrialized nations that were hardly inspiring for U.S. teachers and parents. American students' science scores lagged behind those of their counterparts in 20 countries, including Finland, Japan, Germany and Belgium. The numbers from the math test were even worse: The U.S. came in 25th. The "rising tide of mediocrity" in American schools -- famously so described in 1983 by a government report called "A Nation at Risk" -- would now appear to be about chin-high.In response to "A Nation at Risk," Terry Moe and John Chubb in 1990 published "Politics, Markets and America's Schools," which identified special-interest groups -- mainly teachers unions -- as the culprits in preventing the reforms urged in the report. Now Messrs. Moe and Chubb have returned to the subject with "Liberating Learning," a more optimistic sequel. The authors believe there exists a magic bullet that is capable of shattering the unions' political power and, at last, bringing the sort of reform and excellence to U.S. K-12 education that might make U.S. students competitive with Finnish teenagers. The ammunition? Technology.
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Robert Barnes & Nelson Hernandez:
By a 6 to 3 vote, the court settled an emotional and contentious issue that has divided frustrated parents and financially strapped school officials, often ending in legal battles. In writing the opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens said Congress intended for the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act to provide an appropriate educational experience for all children, no matter whether they had ever received special-education services from a school system.The issue has emerged as one of the fastest-growing components of local education budgets, threatening to "seriously deplete public education funds," according to a brief filed by the nation's urban school districts.
Local school systems in the Washington area spend millions of dollars each year on private school reimbursement. And the D.C. public schools allocated $7.5 million of this year's $783 million budget just for the legal costs of hearing officers or judges to decide whether the system can provide appropriate services for children with disabilities.
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A cane-cutter's son from Aguada, Puerto Rico, Antonio Pérez barely made it out of high school in Washington Heights in 1964. But he went on to earn a doctorate by age 27 and become a college dean by 29. Since 1995, Dr. Pérez, now 62, has been president of Borough of Manhattan Community College on Chambers Street, now the largest unit of the City University of New York, with 22,500 matriculated students plus 10,000 in continuing education.
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The Supreme Court on Monday made it easier for parents of special education students to get reimbursement for private school tuition. School administrators fear the 6-3 ruling will lead to a jump in private school placements.The student in the case is known simply as "T.A." The Forest Grove School District, outside of Portland, Ore., noticed that he was having problems in high school, but suspected marijuana use and refused to give him special education services. Toward the end of his junior year, T.A.'s parents pulled him out of public school and sent him to a private residential academy.
The parents then sued the school district to recover the $65,000 they spent on private tuition. The school district argued the parents stepped over the line and lost the ability to seek reimbursement when they transferred him without first giving public special education a try.
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MEN are doomed to uncertainty. Women know who their children are, but the ubiquity of sexual cheating makes it difficult for males of many species, humans included, to be sure which youngsters actually belong to them. If a male's reproductive strategy amounts to little more than "Wham, bam, thank-you ma'am", this may not matter to him much. But if, as in the human case, he takes an interest in his offspring, it matters a lot. There are few more foolish actions, from an evolutionary point of view, than raising another male's progeny.This line of reasoning led Alexandra Alvergne and her colleagues at the University of Montpellier, in France, to wonder if human fathers recognise features of children that might give away whose offspring they really are, and use those to guide the amount of attention doled out to each putative son and daughter. To find out, they established an experiment among villagers in the Sine Saloum region of Senegal, where polygynous marriages (ie, men with multiple wives) are common. In such societies the incentives for unmarried men and the opportunities for neglected women to engage in what zoologists who study other harem-forming species refer to as "sneaking" are particularly high. It gives the men a chance to reproduce and the women a chance to spread their bets.
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This is a lucky thing for the Ventura County Public Libraries -- because among Mr. Bradbury's passions, none burn quite as hot as his lifelong enthusiasm for halls of books. His most famous novel, "Fahrenheit 451," which concerns book burning, was written on a pay typewriter in the basement of the University of California, Los Angeles, library; his novel "Something Wicked This Way Comes" contains a seminal library scene.Mr. Bradbury frequently speaks at libraries across the state, and on Saturday he will make his way here for a benefit for the H. P. Wright Library, which like many others in the state's public system is in danger of shutting its doors because of budget cuts.
"Libraries raised me," Mr. Bradbury said. "I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."
Property tax dollars, which provide most of the financing for libraries in Ventura County, have fallen precipitously, putting the library system roughly $650,000 in the hole. Almost half of that amount is attributed to the H. P. Wright Library, which serves roughly two-thirds of this coastal city about 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles.
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Khadijah Williams stepped into chemistry class and instantly tuned out the commotion.She walked past students laughing, gossiping, napping and combing one another's hair. Past a cellphone blaring rap songs. And past a substitute teacher sitting in a near-daze.
Quietly, the 18-year-old settled into an empty table, flipped open her physics book and focused. Nothing mattered now except homework.
"No wonder you're going to Harvard," a girl teased her.
Around here, Khadijah is known as "Harvard girl," the "smart girl" and the girl with the contagious smile who landed at Jefferson High School only 18 months ago.
What students don't know is that she is also a homeless girl.
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Newspaper reporters, a group to which I belonged until recently, usually don't write about old reports, unless of course the documents have been suppressed for years by nefarious government minions. If a reporter tells her editor she has found a neat piece of research from 2007 in the bottom of her drawer, the editor will tell her it isn't news and advise that she put a calendar in her cubicle.We columnists, on the other hand, are free to roam the past, particularly when we stumble across something as remarkable as "Investigating the Alignment of High School and Community College Assessments in California," a 41-page report by Richard S. Brown & David N. Niemi, published by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education in June 2007.
I know. The title is sleep-inducing. But for the millions of people who care about community colleges -- including the nearly half of all U.S. college students who attend them -- it is a must-read.
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Dear Extra Credit:I am a former Montgomery County public schools employee, a parent of two in the system and a lifelong educator. An accelerated math program is presenting a unique challenge for the whole system.
As a parent, I addressed the issue first with the principal, then at a PTA meeting and then to the director of school performance when I thought that no satisfactory resolution was being looked into. There is still no resolution, and I do not believe the problem is unique to my small school.
Approximately 25 children in my son's fourth grade have been accelerated two grade levels in math instruction. They took what's called Math A (usually for sixth-graders) this year. They are slated to take Math B (usually for seventh-graders) next year, when they are in fifth grade.
In the past couple of years, the few students who qualified for this level of acceleration were bused to a middle school, then returned to the elementary school for the remainder of their day. This year, so many students have been found eligible that parents have requested that instead of sending them to the middle school, a Math B teacher be brought to the elementary school to teach them. This would reduce disruption and be better for their development.
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Thong panties and padded bras for seven-year-old girls are sold these days at major department stores. Tiny pink high-heeled shoes are advertised for babies. Risqué Halloween costumes for children (such as "Pimp Daddy" and "Child Ho") fly off the shelves. T-shirts for toddler boys proclaim "Chick Magnet" and "Pimp Squad." Little girls go to makeover parties and spas, and teenagers are encouraged to dress and behave like strippers and porn stars. F.C.U.K. is the name of an international clothing chain popular with young people.Some of the cover stories for recent issues of magazines popular with young teenage girls include "15 Ways Sex Makes You Prettier" and "A Shocking Thing 68% of Chicks Do in Bed." "Grand Theft Auto," a video game especially popular with teenage boys, allows the gamer to have sex with a prostitute in a stolen car and then murder her. The latest version sold six million copies in its first week and grossed five hundred million dollars.1
I started talking about the sexualization of children way back in the late 1960s, when I began my work on the image of women in advertising. The first version of my film "Killing Us Softly," made in 1979, included an ad featuring a sexy little girl and the slogan "You're a Halston woman from the very beginning." I knew something was happening, but I had no idea how bad it was going to get.
Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D., senior scholar at the Wellesley Centers for Women, is internationally recognized for her pioneering work on alcohol and tobacco advertising and the image of women in advertising. Her newest book, So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids, co-authored with Diane E. Levin, was published in 2008. Her book, Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel, won the Distinguished Publication Award from the Association for Women in Psychology in 2000. She is also known for her award-winning documentaries Killing Us Softly, Slim Hopes, and Calling the Shots.
More at wcwonline.org.
Our family is reading Laura Sessions Stepp's "Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both," a book about the "hook-up" culture that currently prevails on our college campuses, so this commentary in a recent professional mailing caught my eye. Of course, I have long been a fan of Jean Kilbourne's work.
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It's called "the summer brain drain" because during those long, hot months away from school, kids supposedly forget a lot of what they had learned in class.Research, however, tells a more nuanced story: Some learning is lost among some groups, and others gain.
Here's what experts from Johns Hopkins University, the University of Tennessee, the University of Virginia and elsewhere say happens over the summer:
-- Most students -- regardless of family income or background -- lose 2 to 2 1/2 months of the math computational skills that they learned during the school year.
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My father and I were waiting in the director's office for our tour to begin. With a recent haircut, he looked almost dapper despite the two hearing aids.I admired the way he'd put together a life since my mother died. He had good friends, played cards several nights a week, faithfully attended services at his synagogue, shopped and cooked for himself. With prescriptions to keep his cholesterol and blood sugar in line, he was relatively healthy.
Yet how long could we be this fortunate? He was 83 then. Sooner or later, my sister and I knew, he'd need more help.
Nobody wants to have to face such questions. Yet we want to do the best we can for the people who did the best they could for us. Maybe this assisted-living place was where Dad would want to be, when the time came.
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I supported use of the term "revolutionize curriculum" as part of the proposed Madison School District Strategic Plan. The words contained in the document can likely be used to support any number of initiatives.
The term "revolutionize" appealed to me because I believe the School District should get out of the curriculum creation business (generally, the "Teaching & Learning Department").
I believe, in this day and age, we should strive to hire the best teachers (with content knowledge) available and let them do their jobs. One school district employee could certainly support an online knowledge network. Madison has no shortage of curricular assets, including the UW Math Department, History, Physics, Chemistry, Engineering, Sports and Languages. MATC, Edgewood College, UW-Milwaukee, UW-Whitewater and Northern Illinois are additional nearby resources.
Finally, there are many resources available online, such as MIT's open courseware.
I support "revolutionizing" the curriculum by pursuing best practices from those who know the content.
Dictonary.com: "revolutionize".
Britannica on revolution.
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Your guide to understanding education in Illinois [PDF Bingo Cards], via a kind reader's email, referring to the Madison School District's proposed Strategic Plan:
You and a friend can now pass the time at a progressivist education seminar with these handy EDUCRAT BINGO cards. Decide your game beforehand, such as simple five-in-a-row for a "brown bag" lunch, all the way to a coverall for an in-service. Cover a square when you hear the matching catch-phrase. Good luck!
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AMERICA'S PARENTS AND politicians obsess over getting kids to go to college. But the delivery of a decent education, once the kids are on campus, is at least as large a challenge. Only about half of all college entrants earn degrees within six years. And many who do aren't learning much: one study indicates, for instance, that only 38 percent of graduating college students can successfully compare the viewpoints of two newspaper editorials.The conventional wisdom is that you get what you pay for--that the larger the price tag, the better the product. But that's not true in higher education. Tuition has been skyrocketing for years, with little evidence that education has improved. Universities typically favor research and publishing over teaching. And influential college rankings like the one published by U.S. News & World Report measure mostly wealth and status (alumni giving rates, school reputation, incoming students' SAT scores); they reveal next to nothing about what students learn.
We need to shed more light on how well colleges are educating their students--to help prospective students make better decisions, and to exert pressure on the whole system to provide better value for money.
Reliable measures of the quality of undergraduate teaching already exist. The National Survey of Student Engagement gathers data on factors proven to correlate with learning--things like the number of books and lengthy papers assigned in courses. (The organization reports little relationship between having a prominent brand name and teaching students well.) The Collegiate Learning Assessment tests students' critical thinking and measures progress over a college career.
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The Food and Drug Administration on Monday said children shouldn't stop taking drugs that treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, despite a study showing the stimulants may be associated with sudden death.A study released in the American Journal of Psychiatry found an association between the stimulants, which include drugs such as Ritalin, and sudden death in children who take the medicines.
The FDA, which partly funded the study, said there isn't enough evidence to conclude the drugs are dangerous and recommends people continue taking their medications. The study compared 564 healthy children who died suddenly to 564 who died in a motor vehicle accident. The study found that two patients in the motor vehicle group were taking stimulants, while 10 in the group of those who died suddenly were taking the medicines. The children died between 1985 and 1996, before certain stimulants, such as Adderall, became more commonly used.
"Given the limitations of this study's methodology, the FDA is unable to conclude that these data affect the overall risk and benefit profile of stimulant medications used to treat ADHD in children," FDA said.
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Breastfed babies seem more likely to do well at high school and to go on to attend college than infants raised on a bottle, according to a new U.S. study.Professors Joseph Sabia from the American University and Daniel Rees from the University of Colorado Denver based their research on 126 children from 59 families, comparing siblings who were breastfed as infants to others who were not.
By comparing siblings, the study was able to account for the influence of a variety of difficult-to-measure factors such as maternal intelligence and the quality of the home environment.
The study, published in the Journal of Human Capital, found that an additional month of breastfeeding was associated with an increase in high school grade point averages of 0.019 points and an increase in the probability of college attendance of 0.014.
"The results of our study suggest that the cognitive and health benefits of breastfeeding may lead to important long-run educational benefits for children," Sabia, a professor of public policy who focuses on health economics, said in a statement.
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Via a kind reader's email:
Culturally Relevant/Cultural Relevance 40The free Adobe Reader includes a text search field. Simply open the proposed document (773K PDF) and start searching.Standards 24
Content 21
Measure (including measurement) 28
DPI 2
TAG 17
Special Education 8
ELL 2 (it comes up 45 times, but the other 43 were things like ZELLmer)
inclusion 0
differentiation 0
science 2
mathematics 0
literacy 4
reading 7 (of these, three were in the appendix with the existing 'plan')
African American 7
Hmong 1 (and not in any of the action plans)
Latino or Latina 0
Hispanic 0
Spanish speaking or Spanish speakers 0
Anyone see a problem here?????
The Proposed Strategic Plan, along with some comments, can be viewed here.
Interested readers might have a look at this Fall, 2005 Forum on Poverty organized by Rafael Gomez (audio/video). Former Madison School Board member Ray Allen participated. Ray mentioned that his daughter was repeatedly offered free breakfasts, even though she was fed at home prior to being dropped off at school. The event is worth checking out.
I had an opportunity to have lunch with Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad last summer. Prior to that meeting, I asked a number of teachers and principals what I should pass along. One of the comments I received is particularly relevant to Madison's proposed Strategic Plan:
Notes and links on Madison's Strategic Planning Process.I know these are general, but they are each so glaringly needy of our attention and problem solving efforts.
- Curriculum: greater rigor
- Discipline: a higher bar, much higher bar, consistent expectations district wide, a willingness to wrestle with the negative impact of poverty on the habits of mind of our students and favor pragmatic over ideological solutions
- Teacher inservice: at present these are insultingly infantile
- Leadership: attract smart principals that are more entrepreneurial and less bureaucratic, mindful of the superintendent's "inner circle" and their closeness to or distance from the front lines (the classrooms)
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The logic of school choice seems obvious. If parents selected their children's schools, they would not choose bad ones, so bad schools would not be able to survive. Schools would have to improve or close, just as a store that offers poor service will lose business to a store that offers better service.Here's my problem with that logic: I think it's highly likely that many parents will choose bad schools.
People often make irrational decisions. The decisions most often studied by psychologists over the last 40 years are financial, but in the last 20 years research has explored decisions made about sex, medicine, and a great many other subjects (see Dan Ariely's wonderful book, Predictably Irrational, for an account.)
Financial decisions offer a useful analogy because the success or failure of the decision seems straightforward: you make money or you don't; similarly, it would seem, schools teach kids or they don't.
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A scholarship tax credit provision inserted into Gov. Mitch Daniels' budget proposal has ignited a philosophic debate about public and private education in Indiana.And some opponents say the timing of the move is inconvenient, as lawmakers are trying to pass a new state budget in a special legislative session amid plummeting state tax collections.
Opponents call the provision a back door to vouchers, but supporters say it simply provides an opportunity for low-income students struggling in traditional schools to attend a private school.
"It's scholarship money. Call it vouchers. Call it what you want," said Sen. Marlin Stutzman, R-Howe. "I'd call it an opportunity for a child."
During the regular season, Stutzman was the co-author of a bill authorizing the program. Even though it passed the Republican-controlled Senate on several occasions, the Democratic-led House declined to move it forward.
The idea surfaced again in late budget negotiations but ultimately was left out of a compromise between the House and Senate.
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Milwaukee officials got a hit when they went to bat for a better deal for city taxpayers on how the private school voucher program is paid for, but they definitely didn't hit a home run.That's one way to summarize state budget deliberations when it comes to fixing the so-called voucher funding flaw.
Decisions by the state Legislature's Joint Finance Committee endorsed last week by the Assembly, would give the city a better deal when it comes to paying for the program, which is costing the state and city about $130 million this year for about 20,000 students to go to about 120 private schools.
But the outcome will not make a sharp difference in the forecast for property taxes to pay for schools for next year - which is to say, there remains a definite possibility that the Milwaukee School Board will wrestle with the prospect of a double-digit increase in the tax levy this fall.
The budget now goes to the Senate, which is expected to vote this week.
Jennifer Gonda, senior legislative fiscal manager for the city, estimated that provisions in the new state budget would save a typical Milwaukee homeowner $20 next year and $38 the next year. That's based on the average home assessment in the city, $127,500.
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The New York Times reports that the Stamford, Connecticut public schools may finally achieve the goal of eliminating academic tracking, putting students of mixed academic ability in the same classes at last. The Times reports that "this 15,000-student district just outside New York City...is among the last bastions of rigid educational tracking more than a decade after most school districts abandoned the practice."
If that newspaper thinks Stamford has taken too long to get rid of academic tracks for K-12 students, how would they report on the complete dominance of athletic tracking in schools all over the country? Not only does such athletic tracking take place in all our schools, but there is, at present, no real movement to eliminate it, unbelievable as that may seem.
Athletes in our school sports programs are routinely tracked into groups of students with similar ability, presumably to make their success in various sports matches, games, and contests more likely. But so far no attention is paid to the damage to the self-esteem of those student athletes whose lack of ability and coordination doom them to the lower athletic tracks, and even, in many cases, may deprive them of membership on school teams altogether.
It is also an open secret that many of our school athletic teams ignore diversity entirely, and make no effort to be sure that, for example, Asians and Caucasians are included, in proportion to their numbers in the general population, in football, basketball, and track teams. Athletic ability and success are allowed to overwhelm other important measures, and this must be taken into account in any serious Athletic Untracking effort.
In Stamford, some parents are opposed to the elimination of academic tracking, and have threatened to enroll their children in private schools. This problem would no doubt also arise in any serious Athletic Untracking program which could be introduced. Parents who spend money on private coaches for their children would not stand by and see the playing time of their young athletes cut back or even lost by any program to make all school sports teams composed of mixed-ability athletes.
The New York Times reports that "Deborah Kasak, executive director of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform, said research is showing that all students benefit from mixed-ability classes."
Perhaps it will be argued that all athletes benefit from mixed-ability teams as well, but many would predict not only plenty of losing seasons for any schools which eliminate Athletic Tracking programs, but also very poor scholarship prospects for the best athletes who are involved in them. Just as students who are capable of excellent academic work are often sacrificed to the dream of an academic (Woebegone) world in which all are equal, so student athletes will find their skills and performance severely degraded by any Athletic Untracking program.
Nevertheless, when educators are more committed to diversity and equality of outcomes in classrooms than they are in academic achievement, they have eliminated academic tracking and set up mixed-ability classrooms.
Surely athletic directors and coaches can be made to see the supreme importance of some new diversity and equity initiatives as well, and persuaded, at the risk of losing their jobs, to develop and provide non-tracked athletic programs for our mixed-ability student athletes. After all, winning games may be fun, but, in the long run, people can be led to realize that being politically correct is much more worthwhile than real achievement in any endeavor in our public schools. As the Dean of a major School of Education recently informed me: "The myth of individual greatness is a myth." [sic] The time for the elimination of Athletic Tracking has now arrived!
15 June 2009
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
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For the past year, Liu Qichao has focused on one thing, and only one thing: the gao kao, or the high test.Some prepare for the test at a strict Tianjin boarding school.
Fourteen to 16 hours a day, he studied for the college entrance examination, which this year will determine the fate of more than 10 million Chinese students. He took one day off every three weeks.He was still carrying his textbook from room to room last Sunday morning before leaving for the exam site, still reviewing materials during the lunch break, still hard at work Sunday night, preparing for Part 2 of the exam that Monday.
"I want to study until the last minute," he said. "I really hope to be successful."
China may be changing at head-twirling speed, but the ritual of the gao kao (pronounced gow kow) remains as immutable as chopsticks. One Chinese saying compares the exam to a stampede of "a thousand soldiers and 10 horses across a single log bridge."
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While her classmates were signing yearbooks and preening for the prom, Vicheka Chres was experiencing a different kind of senioritis as she approached Friday's graduation.As she had since she started high school, Vicheka, 17, was studying six hours a night. After school and on weekends, she was making apple turnovers in her uncle's bakery - for no pay. At home, she was translating for her mother, whose English is poor and who has a sixth-grade education.
"Fun? I don't really have fun," Vicheka said recently while taking a break from swabbing tables at Rio Vista Bakery, where her mother also works. "I know American kids go see movies, concerts. Go shopping. But that's not what I do."
Vicheka has reason to be motivated. She knows that if her family had stayed in their native Cambodia, which they left in 2003, she wouldn't have had the luxury of studying trigonometry and literature six hours a night. She'd be working in a factory, sewing clothes 12 hours a day for $50 a month.
Instead, she's bound for UC Davis. She plans to study biochemistry so she can eventually be a pharmacist and support her family, those in Rio Vista as well as in Phnom Penh.
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Until recently, the young-adult fiction section at your local bookstore was a sea of nubile midriffs set against pink and turquoise backgrounds. Today's landscape features haunted girls staring out from dark or washed-out covers. Current young-adult best sellers include one suicide, one deadly car wreck, one life-threatening case of anorexia and one dystopian universe in which children fight to the death. Somewhere along the line our teenagers have become connoisseurs of disaster.Jay Asher's "Thirteen Reasons Why," which is narrated by a dead girl, came out in March 2007 and remains on the bestseller list in hardcover. The book is the account of a fragile freshman named Hannah Baker who kills herself by overdosing on pills and sends audiotapes to the 13 people she holds responsible for making her miserable in the last year of her life. There may be parents who are alarmed that their 12-year-olds are reading about suicide, or librarians who want to keep the book off the shelves, but the story is clearly connecting with its audience--the book has sold over 200,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan.
For those young readers who find death by pill overdose inadequately gruesome, there's Gayle Forman's "If I Stay," which takes as its subject a disfiguring car wreck. The book has sold a robust 17,000 copies in its first two months on sale, and was optioned by Catherine Hardwicke, the director of the film "Twilight." The story follows an appealing cellist named Mia who goes on a drive to a bookstore with her unusually sympathetic ex-punk-rocker parents. When a truck barrels into their Buick, Mia hovers ghost-like over the scene. She sees her family's bodies crushed, then watches on as her own mangled body is bagged and rushed to the hospital. Lingering somewhere between this world and the next, Mia must decide whether to join her parents in the afterlife or go it alone in the real world. The brilliance of the book is the simplicity with which it captures the fundamental dilemma of adolescence: How does one separate from one's parents and forge an independent identity?
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Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the former Chicago Public Schools chief and basketball buddy of President Obama, says the "marketplace" will work to keep university costs down.And he seems intrigued with the notion of developing "no-frills" campus options for financially strapped students.
Duncan has moved his family from Hyde Park in Chicago to the northern Virginia suburbs, where his kids go to a public school. I caught up with Duncan at a breakfast with reporters last week.
He has been on his own "listening tour" of the nation to figure out what needs to be changed in the No Child Left Behind law. He said he has no timetable for asking Congress to rewrite the controversial Bush-era program.
The economic stimulus measure has given Duncan $10 billion in discretionary spending. By comparison, President George W. Bush's first education secretary, Rod Paige, had only $17 million in the cash drawer to pass around.
Duncan said he wants to use some of the federal money as an incentive to "change behavior" when it comes to college expenses.
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Jorge Hirsch had been getting screwed. For years. At a scientific conference in 1989, he presented a paper arguing that the generally accepted theory of low-temperature superconductors--the BCS theory--was wrong. Most researchers at the time held that under certain low-temperature conditions, vibrations in a metal's crystal lattice can allow electrons to become attracted to one another, which drops electrical resistance to zero--a superconducting state. Hirsch said this "electron-phonon interaction" in fact had nothing to do with superconductivity. He was a youngish up-and-comer then, but physics rarely forgives apostasy. After his fateful presentation, similar conferences stopped inviting him to speak. Colleagues no longer sought him out for collaboration. Grants dried up. High-visibility journals shunned his papers.It's not that Hirsch wasn't getting his work published. He was. And other physicists were still citing his research, implying some acceptance of his views. Hirsch just wasn't able to get his papers into the really high-visibility journals--places like Science, Nature, and, for a solid-state physicist, Physical Review Letters. There's a clear pecking order, established and reinforced by several independent rating systems. Chief among them: the Journal Impact Factor.
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Volunteering as a GED program tutor continues to be one of my most gratifying experiences, but it also has been sobering to realize how many in our community lack basic - high school - education. (GED is the acronym for general equivalency degree, a recognized substitute for a high school diploma.)Students in GED programs range in age from the mid-20s to the late 40s; many are minorities. They say they've recommitted themselves to furthering their education in order to enhance job skills, to help their children succeed with their education or simply, but profoundly, to regain some self-esteem. GED programs are a lifeline to those who have the courage to "go back" later in life to achieve these goals, but the programs currently serve just a fraction of those who lack a high school education.
You get a sense of the magnitude of the problem by reading a 2008 publication of the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center called "Cities in Crisis." The study, which was funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, looks at the 50 largest cities in the United States (Milwaukee is No. 25) and the number of kids enrolled in high school in the "focal" district of each city (in our case Milwaukee Public Schools). In the year studied - 2006 - MPS's high school population (grades nine through 12) was estimated to be 25,000.
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Annie Osborn in the Boston Globe:
Teen's lessons from China. I am a product of an American private elementary school and public high school, and I am accustomed to classrooms so boisterous that it can be considered an accomplishment for a teacher to make it through a 45-minute class period without handing out a misdemeanor mark. It's no wonder that the atmosphere at Yanqing No. 1 Middle School ("middle school" is the translation of the Chinese term for high school), for students in grades 10-12, seems stifling to me. Discipline problems are virtually nonexistent, and punishments like lowered test scores are better deterrents for rule breaking than detentions you can sleep through.But what does surprise me is that, despite the barely controlled chaos that simmers just below the surface during my classes at Boston Latin School, I feel as though I have learned much, much more under the tutelage of Latin's teachers than I ever could at a place like Yanqing Middle School, which is located in a suburb of Beijing called Yanqing.
Students spend their days memorizing and doing individual, silent written drills or oral drills in total unison. Their entire education is geared toward memorizing every single bit of information that could possibly materialize on, first, their high school entrance exams, and next, their college entrance exams. This makes sense, because admission to public high schools and universities in China is based entirely on test scores (although very occasionally a rich family can buy an admission spot for their child), and competition in the world's most populous country to go to the top schools makes the American East Coast's Harvard-or-die mentality look puny.
Chinese students, especially those in large cities or prosperous suburbs and counties and even some in impoverished rural areas, have a more rigorous curriculum than any American student, whether at Charlestown High, Boston Latin, or Exeter. These students work under pressure greater than the vast majority of US students could imagine.
And yet, to an American student used to the freedom of debate during history or English class, to free discussion of possible methods for solving different math problems, the work seems hollow and too directed. The average class size is about 45 students (compared with the limit of 28 in Boston that is exceeded by three or four students at most), which severely limits the amount of attention a teacher can give a student.It isn't that the curriculum is blatant propaganda, or that the answer to every math problem is Mao Zedong. It's more that there is very little room to maneuver: There is one good way to solve a math problem, or one way to program a computer, or one good way to do homework. Every class has the same homework, a worksheet printed on wafer paper, and essays are rare.• Novels are not taught in class, and teachers encourage outside reading of histories rather than fiction. The only fiction texts read in class are excerpts from the four classics (Imperial texts that are not considered novels) and Imperial poetry. The point of class is to cram as much information into the students in as little time as possible, all in preparation for entrance exams.
Students lack the opportunity to discuss and digest what they learn. Most rarely participate in political discussions outside class. During a weekend dinner at a classmate's house, I brought up the issue of Tibet and heard my classmate's father complain first about how Tibet wanted independence and second about how his daughter didn't know anything about it. The recent Tiananmen anniversary was a nonissue; the students say they are too busy with work to talk much about politics. Chinese high school students therefore have little practice in the decision-making and circumspection that Americans consider an integral part of education.
Chinese schools have many strengths, but they do not foster many broadly philosophical thinkers.
Annie Osborn is a Boston Latin School student. She recently completed her junior year at School Year Abroad in Beijing.
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
• [Boston Latin School no longer assigns "traditional" history research papers, they told me...in any case, they have never sent me any...Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review]
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Rising above IQ
Nicholas Kristoff
In the mosaic of America, three groups that have been unusually successful are Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks -- and in that there may be some lessons for the rest of us. Asian-Americans are renowned -- or notorious -- for ruining grade curves in schools across the land, and as a result they constitute about 20 percent of students at Harvard College. As for Jews, they have received about one-third of all Nobel Prizes in science received by Americans. One survey found that a quarter of Jewish adults in the United States have earned a graduate degree, compared with 6 percent of the population as a whole. West Indian blacks, those like Colin Powell whose roots are in the Caribbean, are one-third more likely to graduate from college than African-Americans as a whole, and their median household income is almost one-third higher.
These three groups may help debunk the myth of success as a simple product of intrinsic intellect, for they represent three different races and histories. In the debate over nature and nurture, they suggest the importance of improved nurture -- which, from a public policy perspective, means a focus on education. Their success may also offer some lessons for you, me, our children -- and for the broader effort to chip away at poverty in this country.
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During difficult economic times, the cost of higher education leaves many students wondering if they can afford to go to college. For those who want to avoid being saddled with huge loans, the U.S. government offers one of the best deals around: Enroll at one of the five service academies tuition-free and receive free room and board. (And you thought the Grand Slam promotion at Denny's was cool.) But if military service isn't for you, here are eight other schools that offer tuition-free educations:1. College of the Ozarks
Several schools share the "Linebacker U" and "Quarterback U" monikers in reference to the NFL talent that their college football programs produce, but the only "Hard Work U" is located in Point Lookout, Missouri. In 1973, a Wall Street Journal reporter bestowed that title on the College of the Ozarks, where students pay no tuition and work at least 15 hours a week at a campus work station. Jobs are taken seriously at the school of 1,400; students are graded on their work performance in addition to their academics.History: In 1906, Presbyterian missionary James Forsythe helped open the School of the Ozarks to provide a Christian high school education to children in the Ozarks region, which spans parts of Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. The school added a two-year junior college 50 years later and completed its transition to a four-year college program in 1965. The school was renamed College of the Ozarks in 1990 and has established itself as one of the top liberal arts colleges in the Midwest.
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Monday evening's Madison School Board meeting included approval of another year of Infinite Campus along with (and this is quite important) a motion requiring that within six months, administration document use of IC and identify barriers to use where they exist, with the purpose of achieving 100% implementation by the end of 2012 or sooner.
Successful implementation of this student and parent information portal across all schools and teachers should be job one before any additional initiatives are attempted.
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The Swiss essayist Alain de Botton has cultivated a following by unpacking the psychological and philosophical underpinnings of our everyday lives.His 1997 breakout book "How Proust Can Change Your Life" imparted practical lessons to be found in Marcel Proust's classic "In Search of Lost Time."
He has also written books and hosted television programs on travel, love, and architecture. In his latest book, "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work," he examines of the activity we spend most of our waking hours doing: our jobs.
To research this project, Mr. de Botton, who lives in London, shadowed members of various professions including an accountant, a rocket scientist, a cookie manufacturer, and an inventor. He answered our questions by email.
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I spend much time with aggressive Advanced Placement teachers. They tell me, quite often, that students must be stretched beyond their assumed capabilities. Whenever I try to pass on this advice, however, I become a target for ridicule and disbelief from readers.Here comes more of that stuff. Newsweek unveils this week my annual rankings of America's Top High Schools, with a new twist that skeptics will find even less congenial.
The latest list, to appear on newsweek.com, will include about 1,500 schools that have reached a high standard of participation on college-level AP, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests. The bad news is they represent less than 6 percent of U.S. public high schools. The good news is that 73 percent of Washington area schools are on the list. The interesting news is that some of those schools have begun to require AP courses and tests for all students, even those who struggle in class.
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Samara Brinkley dozed off just for a moment as she was watching cartoons on TV with her 4-year-old daughter.Then "I heard the boom, and I woke up and I [saw] my child laying on the floor, and I [saw] a pool of blood coming out in the back of her head," said Brinkley, 26, of Jacksonville, Fla.
Dymounique Wilson, one of Brinkley's two daughters, died last Wednesday when the family's 27-inch television fell over on her.
Nearly 17,000 children were rushed to emergency rooms in 2007, the last year for which complete figures were available, after heavy or unstable furniture fell over on them, a new study reported this month. The study, published in the journal Clinical Pediatrics by researchers at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, found that the such injuries had risen 41 percent since 1990.
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uring the last century--since the Progressive Era and the first White House Conference on Children in 1909--the federal government has vastly expanded its role in promoting the welfare of America's children and youth. While families remain the bulwark for successful child development, and states, localities, and a host of private entities provide services to infants, children, youth, and their families, the federal government has long supported and provided services ranging from health care to education and enforces a wide range of laws and regulations to protect and enhance the well-being and rights of Americans under age 21.3This essay offers a brief survey of the development of federal policies affecting children and families from the early 20th century to the early 21st century. The focus is on federal legislation and important federal court decisions; state policy developments largely are excluded.
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An Ohio school district says it uncovered a cheating scheme so pervasive that it had to cancel graduation ceremonies for its 60 seniors -- but will still mail their diplomas.Related: Cringely on Cyber Warfare.A senior at Centerburg High School accessed teachers' computers, found tests, printed them and distributed them to classmates, administrators said.
Graduation was canceled because so many seniors either cheated or knew about the cheating but failed to report it, said officials of the Centerburg School District.
Superintendent Dorothy Holden said the district had to take a stand and let students know that cheating can't be tolerated.
"I am alarmed that our kids can think that in society it's OK to cheat, it's a big prank, it's OK to turn away and not be a whistle-blower, not come forth," Holden said.
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State education leaders have come up with their own analysis in response to our KSL Schools high school rankings. In April, KSL unveiled a comprehensive database on Utah high schools. The state's findings pertain to every parent.Our KSL Schools research project ranked the top Utah high schools as Park City, Davis, Skyline, Viewmont, Lone Peak and Timpview. State Education leaders compared our rankings to census data showing communities ranked with the percentage of adults who have college degrees.
Superintendent Larry Shumway said, "I thought there would be some correlation, but what I was surprised to see was almost perfect correlation."
The State Office of Education found Park City had the most college educated adults, with 52 percent. The communities that follow virtually mirror our list.
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AMERICAN education was once the best in the world. But today, our private and public universities are losing their competitive edge to foreign institutions, they are losing the advertising wars to for-profit colleges and they are losing control over their own admissions because of an ill-conceived ranking system. With the recession causing big state budget cuts, the situation in higher education has turned critical. Here are a few radical ideas to improve matters.Raise the age of compulsory education. Twenty-six states require children to attend school until age 16, the rest until 17 or 18, but we should ensure that all children stay in school until age 19. Simply completing high school no longer provides students with an education sufficient for them to compete in the 21st-century economy. So every child should receive a year of post-secondary education.
The benefits of an extra year of schooling are beyond question: high school graduates can earn more than dropouts, have better health, more stable lives and a longer life expectancy. College graduates do even better. Just as we are moving toward a longer school day (where is it written that learning should end at 3 p.m.?) and a longer school year (does anyone really believe pupils need a three-month summer vacation?), so we should move to a longer school career.
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Keith Hennig has a 3-year-old boy named Trevor and a 1-year-old named Brady. He wants to watch them grow up. Not in the brief moments between school and basketball practice. Not in the late-night hours when he would get home from a game or an open gym."I hate it during the winter season because I leave when it's dark out, and when I come home it's dark out," Hennig says. "It's almost depressing."
Long before he led the Kentwood High girls basketball team to the state championship in March, Hennig, only 32, had decided that it would be his last season. But Hennig discovered that, as with any addiction, it's one thing to decide to quit. It's quite another to go through with it.
For two weeks after the championship game, he walked past the state championship trophy every day and saw his girls in the halls at Kentwood, where he is a history teacher. He remembered all those moments that made the late nights and early mornings worth it. He was going through withdrawal.
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Though women still do more of the housework and child care, the so-called second shift scenario--in which working women are stuck doing all the work at home too--is less widespread than a decade or so ago.The fact that men can do the grunt work at home doesn't mean that they will "naturally" do it though--usually the wife has to exert some leverage. Sometimes that leverage is her earnings; other times it's her ability to negotiate.
Unfortunately, the fear that abounds now is that the punishing economic climate may eviscerate a positive trend of more decision making by women.
Women Are Often the Deciders
The Pew Research Center conducted a study in 2008 of 1,260 people who were married or living together as couples and found striking equality in decision making in finances, weekend activities and big-ticket purchases.
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3 June 2009
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
Although many high school students do realize it, they all should be helped to understand that their education is not all about them, their feelings, their life experiences, their original ideas, their hopes, their goals, their friends, and so on.
While it is clear that Chemistry, Physics, Chinese, and Calculus are not about them, when it comes to history and literature, the line is more blurred. And as long as many writing contests and college admissions officers want to hear more about their personal lives, too many students will make the mistake of assuming the most important things for them to learn and talk about in their youth are "Me, Myself, and Me."
Promoters of Young Adult Fiction seem to want to persuade our students that the books they should read, if not directly about their own lives, are at least about the lives of people their own age, with problems and preoccupations like theirs. Why should they read War and Peace or Middlemarch or Pride and Prejudice when they have never been to Russia or England? Why should they read Battle Cry of Freedom when the American Civil War probably happened years before they were even born? Why should they read Miracle at Philadelphia when there is no love interest, or The Path Between the Seas when they are probably not that interested in construction projects at the moment?
Almost universally, college admissions officers ask not to see an applicant's most serious Extended Essay or history research paper, to give an indication of their academic prowess, but rather they want to read a "personal essay" about the applicant's home and personal life (in 500 words or less).
Teen Magazines like Teen Voices and Teen People also celebrate Teen Life in a sadly solipsistic way, as though teens could hardly be expected to take an interest in the world around them, and its history, even though before too long they will be responsible for it.
Even the most Senior gifted program in the United States, the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, which finds some of the most academically promising young people we have, and offers them challenging programs in Physics, Math, and the like, when it comes to writing, it asks them to compose "Creative Nonfiction" about the events and emotions of their daily lives, if you can believe that.
The saddest thing, to me, is that I know young people really do want to grow up, and to learn a lot about their inheritance and the world around them, and they do look forward to developing the competence to allow them to shoulder the work of the world and give it their best effort.
So why do we insist on infantilizing them with this incessant effort to turn their interests back in on themselves? Partly the cause is the enormous, multi-billion-dollar Teen market, which requires them to stay focused on themselves, their looks, their gear, their friends and their little shrunken community of Teen Life. If teens were encouraged to pursue their natural desires to grow up, what would happen to the Teen Market? Disaster.
In addition, too many teachers are afraid to help their students confront the pressure to be self-involved, and to allow them to face the challenges of preparing for the adult world. Some teachers, themselves, are more comfortable in the Teen World than they think they would be "out there" in the Adult World, and that inclines them to blunt the challenges they could offer to their students, most of whom will indeed seek an opportunity to venture into that out-of-school world themselves.
We all tend to try to influence those we teach to be like us, and if we are careful students and diligent thinkers as teachers, that is not all bad. But we surely should neither want nor expect all our students to become schoolteachers working with young people. We should keep that in mind and be willing to encourage our students to engage with the "Best that has been said and thought," to help them prepare themselves for the adulthood they will very soon achieve.
For those who love students, it is always hard to see them walk out the door at the end of the school year, and also hard when they don't even say goodbye. But we must remember that for them, they are not leaving us, so much as arriving eagerly into the world beyond the classroom, and while we have them with us, we should keep that goal of theirs in mind, and refuse to join with those who, for whatever reason, want to keep our young people immature, and thinking mostly about themselves, for as long as possible.
"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®
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We spend some time with a family whose little boy is newly diagnosed.
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via email:
It's time to move away from "differentiated curriculum" which is really segregated learning, to student-centered cooperative education.It's time to embrace what the children have to teach our world: their cooperative, creative, and compassionate spirit.
It's a shame we continue to spend more money to prevent children from sharing learning and ideas with each other and our world.
Us adults would stand to learn much on how to alleviate economic woes, if we cooperated with the regenerative spirit that children keep trying to impart in our world.
I've been a sub for a while in this district that continues to bow down to parents who care only about self-serving educational models while exploiting resources, schools, and our community.
Since I've resolved that I probably will never be hired as a full-time teacher, I've written a book recently published called The Power of Paper Planes: Co-Piloting with Children to New Horizons.
Dave Askuvich, daskuvich@hotmail.com
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Roughly four million American-born children have at least one parent who is in this country illegally, and life for these immigrant families can be complex. Immigration status determines who can work and drive a car, as well as who can leave the country to rush to a dying relative's bedside. The situation is at the heart of the debate over immigration reform. Advocates are pushing for a way to keep families together; opponents say people should not be rewarded for sneaking across borders.
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57K PDF, via a kind reader's email:
The School Improvement Committee has spent this year investigating academic support models in other schools to begin to develop an effective model for West High School. The committee visited Memorial High School, Evanston High School, Wheeling High School, and New Trier High School, in IL. Some of the common themes that were discovered, especially in the Illinois schools, were as follows:Related topics:Recommendations from the SIP Committee
- Many schools have an identified academic team who intervene with struggling students. These teams of support people have clearly defined roles and responsibilities. The students are regularly monitored, they develop both short and long term goals and the students develop meaningful relationships with an adult in the building. The academic support team has regular communication with teaching staff and makes recommendations for student support.
- There are mandatory study tables in each academic content areas where students are directed to go if they are receiving a D or F in any given course.
- Students who are skill deficient are identified in 8th grade and are provided with a summer program designed to prepare them for high school, enhanced English and Math instruction in 9th grade, and creative scheduling that allows for students to catch up to grade level.
- Some schools have a family liaison person who is able to make meaningful connections in the community and with parents. After school homework centers are thriving.
- Social privileges are used as incentives for students to keep their grades up.
- Design more creative use of academic support allocation to better meet the needs of struggling students.
- Create an intervention team with specific role definition for each team member.
- Design and implement an after school homework center that will be available for all students, not just those struggling academically.
- Design and implement student centers and tables that meet specific academic and time needs (after school, lunch, etc.)
- Identify a key staff person to serve in a specialized family liaison role.
- Develop a clear intervention scaffold that is easy for staff to interpret and use.
- Design and implement enhanced Math and English interventions for skill deficient students.
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"There still appears to be a constant flow of expats being relocated to Budapest compared to last year," says Lena Sarnblom, relocation coordinator for Move One Relocations. "But April and May have also been busy with departure services and we have been informed that this will continue to rise."Ingrid Lamblin, branch manager at AGS Budapest Worldwide Movers, confirms that AGS is also seeing an increase in expatriate departures, and she says that "incoming expatriates are more often single people with less belongings, or couples without children, or whose children are already grown."
But János Prihoda, general manager of Inter Relocation Group, says that while he thinks it likely that there will be a decrease in expatriates in manufacturing industries, such as telecommunications and the automotive industry, he has in fact seen an increase in expatriates coming in to work for financial organisations and as consultants.
"Our main clients come from the service centre market," he says, "and despite the economic situation, the number of expats have grown rather then decreased."
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Sherylls Valladares and Kristin Anderson Moore:
In the minds of many people, poor families equal problem families. Indeed, that perception is not surprising, giving compelling evidence of the harsh effects that poverty can have on family life and child well-being. However, far less attention has been paid to the strengths that many poor families have and the characteristics that they may share with more affluent families. This Research Brief
examines these issues.To explore the similarities and contrasts between poor and non-poor families, Child Trends analyzed data for more than 100,000 families from the 2003 National Survey of Children's Health (NSCH). Our results suggest that, although poor families experience socioeconomic disadvantages, these families may be enriched by the strengths found in their family routines and relationships. Specifically, we found that poor families are at a disadvantage when it comes to receiving services and benefits and are more likely to express concerns about their neighborhoods. On the other hand, we found that poor families do not differ from more affluent families in many ways, such as in the closeness of their relationships and the frequency of outings together or attending religious services.
Also, while parents in poor households express concerns about neighborhood safety in general, they are just as likely to report feeling that their child is safe at home or at school as are parents who are better off. Moreover, we found that families in poverty are somewhat more likely to eat meals together.
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Perhaps you know it by its other names: helicoptering, smothering mothering, alpha parenting, child-centered parenting. Or maybe there's a description you've coined on your own but kept to yourself: Overly enmeshed parenting? Get-them-into-Harvard-or-bust parenting? My-own-mother-never-breast-fed-me-so-I-am-never-going-to-let-my-kid-out-of-my-sight parenting?There are, similarly, any number of theories as to why 21st-century mothers and fathers feel compelled to micromanage their offspring: these are enlightened parents, sacrificing their own needs to give their children every emotional, intellectual and material advantage; or floundering parents, trying their best to navigate a changing world; or narcissistic parents, who see their children as both the center of the universe and an extension of themselves.
But whatever you call it, and however it began, its days may be numbered. It seems as though the newest wave of mothers is saying no to prenatal Beethoven appreciation classes, homework tutors in kindergarten, or moving to a town near their child's college campus so the darling can more easily have home-cooked meals. (O.K., O.K., many were already saying no, but now they're doing so without the feeling that a good parent would say yes.) Over coffee and out in cyberspace they are gleefully labeling themselves "bad mommies," pouring out their doubts, their dissatisfaction and their dysfunction, celebrating their own shortcomings in contrast to their older sisters' cloying perfection.
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While the debate continues about school systems and which type of school works best, thousands of children and families decide that no school provides what they want.Special needs, bullying, philosophical views or dissatisfaction with a particular school offered are all typical reasons behind home education.
Parents and children talk about why they have chosen this option - or a combination of home and school - for the education they find most appropriate.
Jamie McDonald's mother June founded a home education group in Bedford which was the first to obtain any form of state funding.
Six years ago, her group decided to collaborate with a local secondary school to use the resources of school but keep the autonomy of home education.
The only condition of joining the group is that the children sit national exams.
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NPR:
Mothers who fall victim to drug abuse, domestic violence, and other life altering circumstances are often vulnerable and need help starting over. Regular parenting contributor Jolene Ivey is joined by Malika Saada Saar and Imani Walker to discuss how families can find paths to stability and safety. Saar and Walker are co-founders of The Rebecca Project for Human Rights.
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As Nicole Marshall posed for photos on the eve of her commencement, someone joked, "Smile - think of all the loans you took out for this!" She says she chose St. Michael's, a Catholic liberal arts college near Lake Champlain in Colchester, Vt., because it offered the biggest aid package, "but I'm still leaving with quite a bit of loans" - about $20,000.Her debt is a little lighter than the national average for graduates of private, four-year schools who borrow: nearly $23,800 as of 2007, according to the College Board in New York.
But if there's any time that students and parents can take such costs in stride, it's during the heady rush of commencement, when the campus is fragrant with fresh blossoms and abundant hope. For added inspiration to help them focus on the value of learning, these families heard a commencement speech Thursday from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
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Those who don't know their past are bound to repeat it," reads the billboard in the entry hall of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. When I first came here, it was for an interview with two institute researchers who co-authored the book Victims of the Occupation about the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion.Note: Email Newsletter visitors: This article was incorrectly link to a headline on outbound open enrollment from the Madison School Districts.After the interview, I asked one of the researchers, Milan Bárta, to find my parents' old communist secret police (StB) file. I wanted to see if there were any pictures of their wedding Jan. 13, 1979, just days before they emigrated to West Germany. My family has no pictures of that day, but my father had always joked that the StB had taken some.
A month later, I was invited to the institute to take a look at my parents' documents.
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"Will Higher Education be the Next Bubble to Burst?" So asks a recent op-ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The question is powerful. Data points:Authors Joseph Cronin and Howard Horton (respectively a past Massachusetts secretary of Education and the president of the New England College of Business and Finance) comment:
- Over the past quarter-century, the average cost of higher education has risen at a rate four times faster than inflation--twice as fast as the cost of health care.
- Tuition, room, and board at private colleges can cost $50,000 per year or more.
- The market crash of 2008 inflicted terrible damage on college endowments. The Commonfund Institute reports that endowments dropped by an average of 23 percent in the five months ending Nov. 30, 2008.
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Seniors at for-profit colleges are more than twice as likely to have accumulated dangerous amounts of education loans as seniors at other kinds of four-year colleges, according to a new report.Almost 30 percent of seniors at for-profit universities in 2008 owed at least $40,000 in college loans, an amount that could be excessive, according to a new analysis of the latest federal data by Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of Finaid.org and Fastweb.com. For comparison, only about 11 percent of seniors at private nonprofit colleges--many of which charge higher sticker prices than typical for-profits--graduate with excessive debt, Kantrowitz found. And excessive debt was a problem for only about 6 percent of seniors at public universities, which are typically comparatively lower priced. That means new graduates of for-profit schools are about five times as likely to have borrowed heavily as new graduates of public universities.
The levels of excessive debt are already overwhelming hundreds of thousands of new graduates. In March, the federal government released a preliminary report showing that almost 200,000 borrowers whose federal student loans came due in 2007 were already in default. The schools with the highest share of defaulters--11.3 percent--were the for-profit colleges. Only 6.8 percent of public university students had defaulted within two years. And just 3.9 percent of students who'd left private, nonprofit schools in 2007 had defaulted on their federal loans.
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Decades worth of gains in health, safety and education for children in the United States are in danger as the country's economic crisis continues, according to an annual report sponsored by the Foundation for Child Development that measures economic, health, safety and social factors affecting children and teens. Based on current estimates, the report projects that the current recession will pare median annual family incomes back to $55,700 by 2010, down from $59,200 in 2007. While households run by single women will see their annual incomes fall to $23,000 in 2010, down from $24,950 in 2007, the steepest drop will be among single households headed by men, where median annual family income is expected to drop to $33,300 in 2010, from $38,100 in 2007.
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Parents who homeschool their children are increasingly white, wealthy and well-educated -- and their numbers have nearly doubled in less than a decade, according to findings out today from the federal government.Chad Alderman has more.What else has nearly doubled? The percentage of girls who homeschool. They now outnumber male homeschoolers by a wide -- and growing -- margin.
As of the spring of 2007, an estimated 1.5 million, or 2.9% of all school-age children in the USA, were homeschooled, up from 850,000 (or 1.7%) in 1999.
Of the 1.5 million, just under 1.3 million are homeschooled "entirely," not attending public or private school classes of any type.
The new figures come compliments of the latest Condition of Education, a massive compilation of statistics being released today in Washington by the U.S. Education Department.
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After several months of delays, a Web site that offers an interactive portfolio of public school students' test scores, grades and attendance rates will be available for all parents by the end of June, the Department of Education said on Thursday.The announcement came at a critical moment for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg: lawmakers in Albany are weighing whether to renew the law giving the mayor control over city schools, which expires June 30, and chief among their concerns has been the way the mayor and his schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, have treated parents.
Critics have said Chancellor Klein in particular has consistently turned a deaf ear to voices from the outside, including parents' complaints that the pressures to prepare for tests have supplanted quality instruction in schools.
On Thursday, Mr. Klein sought to show a sweeter side of his accountability efforts with a colorful, sometimes whimsical Web site that was created for the city school system, under a city contract. It features cartoon characters explaining the difference, for instance, between performance levels 3 and 4 on state math tests.
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CBS:
The students at Montclair High School in Southern California are learning the three Rs, but many of them are living the lessons of a fourth R: Recession."Hi, my name is Brenda and what the recession means to me is stop wanting what I want and start wanting what I need," said one student in school project where students videotaped themselves.
"Hi, my name is Dulce and what the recession means to me is wearing $10 shoes," another said.
More than 80 percent of the nearly 34 million teenagers nationwide say they are concerned about the economy, reports CBS News correspondent Seth Doane.
"Hi, I'm Kristen Beltran," said Kristen, shooting herself at home. "And what the recession means to me is not being able to afford the things that I really need."
Kristen's dad, a welder, has a quarter of the work he had this time last summer. The mortgage is three months behind. Fifteen-year-old Kristen wishes her parents would let her get a job.
"Are we going to have enough money for groceries? Are my parents going to be able to pay the bills?" Kristen asked.
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My colleague Dan de Vise's wonderful piece Tuesday about the Darnestown, Md., student who never missed a day of school has had a terrific reaction. Like me, readers appreciated Dan's tribute to old-fashioned values, such as dependability and persistence, which some of us thought had died out in the younger generations.The research shows that absenteeism is a major educational problem, particularly in impoverished neighborhoods. The fewer days a student spends in school, the lower their level of achievement. But there is a related problem that is more difficult to measure in a way that would allow us to celebrate those students who overcome it. What do we do about students who are forced to miss school when they are in school?
Many people assume that if the kid shows up before the first bell and stays until the final bell, he has gotten a good education that day. If only that were so. Here are some bad habits of modern school administration that, when added up, significantly reduce learning time:
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To the 1.5 million teenagers who will fret, cram and agonize over taking the most widely used college-entrance exam, the SAT, over the next 12 months, I have something to say: I'm right there with you.On a challenge from my teenage son, I took the SAT earlier this month to see how a 57-year-old mom would do. My son says today's teens have to be smarter, faster and more competitive to succeed. I suspect he's right; I haven't been able to help my kids with their math homework since eighth grade. Moreover, in the 41 years since I took the SAT, our culture and the expectations surrounding the exam have changed drastically. To see how I'd measure up, I swallowed my fears, crammed for six weeks and took the test May 2.
Life for teens is indeed harder, my experiment taught me, but not in the way I expected. Aging took a toll on my mental abilities, to be sure, but I was able to erase most of the losses by studying. What surprised me more were the psychological hurdles. Coping with the ramped-up expectations and competitiveness that infuse the SAT process -- a reflection of our entire culture -- sent me into a tailspin of adolescent regression, procrastination and sloppy study habits, all the behaviors I've taught my children to avoid. What I learned will make me a more tolerant parent.
Some reflections from a diary I kept:
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Karen Kaldenbach, an 18-year-old high school senior in Arlington County, remembers vividly what life was like when she was 11: "I saw Social Services almost as much as I saw my mother, who was always drunk. Her best friends, alcohol and money, were always there for her. She spent so much time with them, she couldn't raise my little sister and me. Social Services always came to talk to me at school. They asked questions about my family. My response? A lie, always."Such stories are not uncommon in the Washington area. They often end unhappily. Yet these days, Kaldenbach is thriving, with a supportive adoptive mother, plus awards, scholarships and an acceptance letter from George Mason University.
We are in the midst of a national debate, its outcome uncertain, over what should be the emphasis of efforts to fix public schools. Some say the focus should be on improving teaching. Only in the classroom, they say, is there a chance to give students -- particularly those in poverty -- the tools they need to succeed. Others say teachers cannot reach those children until their family lives, shaken by parental joblessness or mental or physical illness, are straightened out by government action.
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They do it late at night when their parents are asleep. They do it in restaurants and while crossing busy streets. They do it in the classroom with their hands behind their back. They do it so much their thumbs hurt.Spurred by the unlimited texting plans offered by carriers like AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company -- almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.
The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation.
Dr. Martin Joffe, a pediatrician in Greenbrae, Calif., recently surveyed students at two local high schools and said he found that many were routinely sending hundreds of texts every day.
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As tragedies go, not getting what you want is the straightforward kind, and getting it can be the ironic variety. But there is also the existential tragedy of not knowing what you want to begin with. That's the species of catastrophe recounted in Walter Kirn's memoir, "Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever," the witty, self- castigating story of the author's single-minded quest to succeed at a series of tests and competitions that took him from one of the lowest-ranked high schools in Minnesota to Princeton. As Kirn, a noted critic and novelist, tells it, in childhood he leapt onto a hamster wheel baited with "prizes, plaques, citations, stars," and kept rattling away at it until his junior year in the Ivy League, when he suffered a breakdown that left him nearly speechless.
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One of the state's oldest and largest virtual charter schools is scheduled to make big changes this year affecting hundreds of students.Yet there have been no noticeable protests and no parental complaints as students from throughout Wisconsin prepare to attend a different school this fall without changing facilities, principal or staff.
Starting July 1, Wisconsin Virtual Academy and Honors High Online, the two online schools for students in grade school and high school now housed at the Northern Ozaukee School District, will move to the McFarland School District with mostly new employees. The schools will be run by the same company that now operates them - K12 Inc. - as one school: Wisconsin Virtual Academy (WIVA).
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In an era when college students commonly take longer than four years to get a bachelor's degree, some U.S. schools are looking anew at an old idea: slicing a year off their undergraduate programs to save families time and money.Advocates of a three-year undergraduate degree say it would work well for ambitious students who know what they want to study. Such a program could provide the course requirements for a major and some general courses that have long been the hallmark of American education.
The four-year bachelor's degree has been the model in the United States since the first universities began operating before the American Revolution. Four-year degrees were designed in large part to provide a broad-based education that teaches young people to analyze and think critically, considered vital preparation to participate in the civic life of American democracy.
The three-year degree is the common model at the University of Cambridge and Oxford University in England, and some U.S. schools have begun experimenting with the idea. To cram four years of study into three, some will require summer work, others will shave course lengths and some might cut the number of credit hours required.
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Southern Florida Business Journal:
For the first time in three years, more parents are putting their children's education ahead of their own retirement, according to a new survey by Country Financial.The survey of 1,241 Americans found 61 percent of parents are not letting the recession change their plans for their children's college education. Forty-seven percent said college plans are a higher priority than retirement savings.
Last year, 47 percent of parents favored building their nest eggs over paying.
Men are more likely to put their children's education (50 percent) ahead of their retirement than women (38 percent) .
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Families can spend thousands of dollars on coaching to help college-bound students boost their SAT scores. But a new report finds that these test-preparation courses aren't as beneficial as consumers are led to believe.
The report, to be released Wednesday by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, criticizes common test-prep-industry marketing practices, including promises of big score gains with no hard data to back up such claims. The report also finds fault with the frequent use of mock SAT tests because they can be devised to inflate score gains when students take the actual SAT. The association represents 11,000 college admissions officers, high-school guidance counselors and private advisors.
"It breaks my heart to see families who can't afford it spending money they desperately need on test prep when no evidence would indicate that this is money well-spent," says William Fitzsimmons, Harvard University's dean of undergraduate admissions, who led a group at the college admissions association that prompted the report.
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In more than 40 years of studying this city's street gangs as a social psychologist, Malcolm Klein says his home was burglarized nine times. Now, the retired University of Southern California professor is offering the city what he hopes one day will help stem crime: A test that he says could predict if a child is destined to join a gang.The multiple-choice screening, some 70 questions long, shows how closely Los Angeles has begun to examine the work of social scientists to tackle complex policy issues like gang violence. Last year, city officials turned to Dr. Klein and his colleagues at USC to design a test that they hope will empirically identify which children are headed toward a life on the street. This year, the test will help decide the direction of the millions of dollars the city spends annually on gang-prevention efforts.
Los Angeles is relying more on data to stop youths from joining gangs.
The screening, intended for children between 10 and 15 years old, asks a range of questions on issues ranging from past relationships to drug use to attitudes toward violence. One question asks test takers if they recently had a breakup with a boyfriend or girlfriend; another asks test takers if they are kind to younger children.In order to avoid stigmatizing children with the label of potential criminal, Dr. Klein says test takers aren't told that the questions are intended to screen for future gang involvement.
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The neighborhoods of Southeast Washington, D.C., are among the poorest in the city. There, the grocery stores, banks, restaurants, and other institutions that suburbanites take for granted have long been in short supply. In recent years, however, government and nonprofit agencies have begun turning things for the better. A brand new, government-subsidized shopping center recently opened on Alabama Avenue, providing one of the few full-service grocery stores in the area, along with a new sit-down restaurant and mainstream bank branch.But reformers are finding that such initiatives won't fix decades of market dysfunction overnight. Not far from the new Super Giant grocery store and Wachovia Bank are older businesses that continue to draw a steady stream of customers--corner stores that sell little fresh food, fast-food outlets that serve meals low in nutritional value, and tax preparation firms and check-cashing outlets that charge high fees. Markets are complicated, and improving them requires more than just creating incentives for new providers to set up shop.
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Toni Price was at work that afternoon in 2002 when she got the call from her foster son Cedric's eighth-grade teacher: Paramedics were at his middle school in Killeen, Texas. Cedric wasn't breathing.
When Price arrived at school, there he was, lying on the floor. "I'm thinking he's just laying there because he didn't want to get in trouble," she says, fighting back tears.Actually, Cedric was dead.
A 14-year-old special-education student who'd arrived at the school with a history of abuse and neglect, Cedric had been taken from his home five years earlier with his siblings.
He'd just been smothered by his teacher, police said, after she placed him in a "therapeutic floor hold" to keep him from struggling during a disagreement over lunch.
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The growth in antipsychotic-drug prescriptions for children is slowing as state Medicaid agencies heighten their scrutiny of usage and doctors grow more wary of the powerful medications.The softening in sales for children is the first sign that litigation, reaction to improper marketing tactics, and concern about side effects may be affecting what had been a fast-growing children's drug segment.
The six so-called atypical antipsychotics that dominate the market have limited approval from the FDA to treat patients under 18 years of age. Only one is cleared for children under age 10 -- risperidone, branded by Johnson & Johnson as Risperdal -- to treat irritability associated with autism.
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The son of an acquaintance of mine has recently landed a good job on a national newspaper. For the past few months I've been reading the articles written by this boy - let's call him Derek - and thinking how delightfully original they were. Last week I ran into Derek's mother and told her that her son was brilliant and that she must be proud of him. She rolled her eyes and said he hadn't always been a star. He had been expelled from his state comprehensive school at 15, failed dismally academically and had spent his teenage years off the rails. So how, I asked, did he land this most sought after of jobs, one that Oxbridge graduates kill for?She said that Derek had decided in his early 20s that he wanted to be a journalist and simply refused to take no for an answer. He more or less took up residence outside the newspaper of his choice, bombarding it with e-mails, until eventually he was allowed in as an unpaid intern. He financed his journalism by working night shifts as a hospital porter, until eventually he was offered a job.
We all love an underdog story, and this one vastly cheered me up. All the more so because it seems to belie the conviction of every pushy parent that if a child puts one foot wrong academically they have blown it for life. Both in London and New York there is this feverish notion that the journey to success starts at around three years old. It is vital to get a child into the right nursery school that will get them into Harvard or Cambridge or wherever. And if the child does not land up with straight A grades then clearly their chances of success in life are very low indeed.
This tiresome hysteria has got worse in one generation. When I was at school and at university there was a lot of opportunity for screwing up, and most of us availed ourselves of it at one point or another. In fact, if you cruised effortlessly from one academic triumph to another you were regarded as rather dull. As a schoolgirl, not only did I fail to get straight As, I didn't get any As at all - though I did get an F and even a U (for unclassified).
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In January, Catherine Johnson, a senior at Fairfax High School in Northern Virginia, was trying to decide between her dream school -- Hampton University -- and a university half as expensive and just down the street -- Old Dominion.Rebecca Roberts catches up with Catherine and her mother, Pearl Johnson, about which path she decided to take, and how the daughter and mother talked through the decision.
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Via a Barry Garelick email:
"The article describes my experience tutoring my daughter and her friend when they were in sixth grade, using Singapore Math in order to make up for the train wreck known as Everyday Math that she was getting in school. I doubt that the article will change the minds of the administrators who believe Everyday Math has merit, but it wasn't written for that purpose. It was written for and dedicated to parents to let them know they are not alone, that they aren't the only ones who have shouted at their children, that there are others who have experienced the tears and the confusion and the frustration. Lastly it offers some hope and guidance in how to go about teaching their kids what they are not learning at school."
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They were 11 girls growing up together in Ames, Iowa. Now they are 10 women in their mid-40s, spread all over the country. And they remain the closest of friends.Whenever "the Ames girls" get together, it's as if they've stepped into a time machine. They feel like they are every age they ever were, because they see each other through thousands of shared memories.
As 12-year-olds, they'd sit in a circle, combing each other's hair. As 17-year-olds, they'd go to parties together deep in the cornfields outside Ames. As 30-year-olds, they'd commiserate over the challenges of marriage and motherhood.
Like the Ames girls, millions of us have nurtured decades-long friendships, and we don't always stop to recognize the power of these bonds. As we age, friendships can be crucial to our health and even our sanity. In fact, a host of scientific studies show that having a close group of friends helps people sleep better, improve their immune systems, stave off dementia and live longer.
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Emulating a controversial practice at many colleges, two high-achieving public school districts in California are giving preference to the children of alumni.The Beverly Hills Unified School District and the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District have adopted legacy admissions policies for children of former students who live outside their enrollment boundaries. The policies appear to be the first in the nation at public schools, education experts said.
The programs vary slightly, but leaders of both districts say they hope to raise money by forging closer ties with alumni who may be priced out of their hometowns as well as with grandparents who still live there. In each district, nonresident legacy students will make up a tiny percentage of the student population, officials said.
"I'm taking a page out of the university or college playbook," said Steve Fenton, a Beverly Hills Unified trustee. "Alumni are the lifeline for any academic institution."
Critics argue that such policies are antithetical to American public education.
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Michael Shoultz, writing in MMSD Today:
Inclusive schools are places where children and young adults of all abilities, races, and cultures share learning environments that build upon their strengths while supporting their diverse needs.Utilizing inclusive practices, school staff create flexible goals, methods, materials, and assessments that accommodate the interests and needs of all of their learners. Inclusive schools also allow for the development of authentic relationships between students with and without identified differences.
The MMSD's Dept. of Educational Services is committed to building the capacity of school district staff to provide inclusive educational practices. To address this departmental priority, school district staff have been provided with two unique opportunities to further develop their knowledge and skills in this area.
First of all, in honor of Inclusive Schools Week (December, 2008), the Department provided a year-long opportunity for schools to highlight the accomplishments of educators, families and communities in promoting inclusive schools.
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The commencement speeches will soon be over. The graduation caps and gowns put away, the gift cards used.The one thing that won't go away is the tens of thousands of dollars graduates owe in student loans. For most college graduates, the cost of their educations will finally be a reality.
So now what?
With unemployment continuing to climb and good-paying jobs hard to find, many recent graduates will be looking for refuge from their loans.
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It's the last class of the day Friday at Community High School, but instead of a lot of fidgeting and clock-watching, 24 teenagers are engaged in a spirited discussion about sex and "sexting" with a lawyer and a former journalist.
It is a five-year-old course that aims to prepare students to "talk about social issues at a cocktail party with their boss," according to Jason O'Brien, a co-teacher of the class at Community, a charter school in Milwaukee.
Students have a lot of questions for their professional visitors: Why is sexting, or sending sexually explicit photos of oneself over a mobile phone, a crime? Why shouldn't adults face charges as well if they take and send similar nude material of themselves to their peers?
It's a big diversion from your typical lecture environment, but O'Brien and co-teacher Roxane Mayeur believe in the value of exposing kids to multiple viewpoints on various topics through debate, essay writing and discussions with local experts.
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Trying to make sure social workers are up to their thankless jobTHE case of Baby P, a toddler tortured and killed by his supposed carers, shocked Britain after the conviction last year of his mother, her lover and a lodger. The grim tale now turns out to have a horrible coda. On May 1st verdicts were returned in the trial of the mother and her boyfriend for the rape of a two-year-old. The mother was acquitted of cruelty--the victim told police she had seen the rape, and failed to intervene. The boyfriend was convicted and may get a life sentence.
The case made legal history. The child, aged three at the time of the trial and cross-examined via video link, was the youngest ever to give evidence in a British court. Also unusual was the decision to use false names for the defendants, and to ban all reporting until after the verdict. The fear was that the defendants would not be tried fairly if the jury made the connection with Baby P--or Peter, as he can now be called after his father asked for him to be dignified with his name.
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One by one, the students who will soon compete at the state forensics championship take the stage in the small theater at Memorial High School. Their timing is flawless, their gestures are fluid, their skill level is professional. Some of the performances, which last four to 12 minutes, make audience members laugh; some make them cry; a surprising number do both.Dressed in black, deadly serious and totally in control, forensics coach Tom Hardin, an English teacher at Memorial, announces the program, then guards the door. As at any legitimate theater, stragglers are barred from entering during each act.
Sophomore Ben Mau performs a devastating roast of Oprah Winfrey.
"Oprah saved my life," he testifies. "If not for her, I would not know about all the random crap that nobody cares about."
Sophomore Naman Siad, the daughter of Somali immigrants, likens her head scarf to the traditional attire of nuns, and asks why Americans see the one as a sign of modesty and the other as an emblem of all we don't like -- or don't understand -- about Islam.
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Heading west into a Texas sunset, the rented RV clatters along Interstate 20, rolling past cotton fields, windmills and oil derricks that glint gold in the last of the light. Tom Davidson is at the wheel, doing 80 and fighting fatigue.The former three-term Maine legislator has spent the past two weeks barnstorming the country: schmoozing with economic development officials and community advocates in hardscrabble Trenton; donning a tuxedo for the National Black Chamber of Commerce's inaugural ball at the French embassy in Washington, D.C.; and spending time in Alabama with families of the Tuskegee Airmen, who served in World War II as America's first black fighter pilots.
Yesterday, Davidson presented commemorative certificates to a dozen high school kids in DeSoto, Texas. Tomorrow he'll meet tribal officials at the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo reservation in El Paso. Back east, Davidson's wife is eight months pregnant with their second child; he jokes that she'll probably divorce him by the time he gets home. There's still a week and more than 1,200 miles to go before he wraps up his whistle-stop tour in Long Beach, Calif.
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In the late 1930s, a group of 268 promising young men, including John F. Kennedy and Ben Bradlee, entered Harvard College. By any normal measure, they had it made. They tended to be bright, polished, affluent and ambitious. They had the benefit of the world's most prestigious university. They had been selected even from among Harvard students as the most well adjusted.And yet the categories of journalism and the stereotypes of normal conversation are paltry when it comes to predicting a life course. Their lives played out in ways that would defy any imagination save Dostoyevsky's. A third of the men would suffer at least one bout of mental illness. Alcoholism would be a running plague. The most mundane personalities often produced the most solid success. One man couldn't admit to himself that he was gay until he was in his late 70s.
The men were the subject of one of the century's most fascinating longitudinal studies. They were selected when they were sophomores, and they have been probed, poked and measured ever since. Researchers visited their homes and investigated everything from early bed-wetting episodes to their body dimensions.
The results from the study, known as the Grant Study, have surfaced periodically in the years since. But they've never been so brilliantly captured as they are in an essay called "What Makes Us Happy?" by Joshua Wolf Shenk in the forthcoming issue of The Atlantic. (The essay is available online today.)
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Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice?If so, do you tell this person he is "too serious," or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant, rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out?
If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that you have an introvert on your hands--and that you aren't caring for him properly. Science has learned a good deal in recent years about the habits and requirements of introverts. It has even learned, by means of brain scans, that introverts process information differently from other people (I am not making this up). If you are behind the curve on this important matter, be reassured that you are not alone. Introverts may be common, but they are also among the most misunderstood and aggrieved groups in America, possibly the world.
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Question: why are we giving our nine-year-old a marijuana cookie?Answer: because he can't figure out how to use a bong. My son J has autism. He's also had two serious surgeries for a spinal cord tumor and has an inflammatory bowel condition, all of which may be causing him pain, if he could tell us. He can say words, but many of them--"duck in the water, duck in the water"--don't convey what he means. For a time, anti-inflammatory medication seemed to control his pain. But in the last year, it stopped working. He began to bite and to smack the glasses off my face. If you were in that much pain, you'd probably want to hit someone, too.
Question: why are we giving our nine-year-old a marijuana cookie?
Answer: because he can't figure out how to use a bong. My son J has autism. He's also had two serious surgeries for a spinal cord tumor and has an inflammatory bowel condition, all of which may be causing him pain, if he could tell us. He can say words, but many of them--"duck in the water, duck in the water"--don't convey what he means. For a time, anti-inflammatory medication seemed to control his pain. But in the last year, it stopped working. He began to bite and to smack the glasses off my face. If you were in that much pain, you'd probably want to hit someone, too.
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Summer is coming, a time in which many colleges seek instructors to teach online courses. These are cash cows for campuses, a way to enhance the revenue stream without having to keep facilities open. (Or better yet, making those facilities available for outside groups to rent.) Math, business, and computer science professors have blazed the trail, but online teaching remains problematic in word-heavy disciplines such as the humanities, and it has a mixed record in hands-on laboratory-based sciences. (Biologists often complain that computer simulations are, at best, simulacra.) Teaching online can be rewarding, but be wary before you agree to tackle such a course.There are several seemingly counterintuitive experiences I've had with online courses. In summary:
* Older students generally perform better than younger ones.
* The range of achievement is much narrower.
* Online courses work best when they mirror live classes.
* Discussion is generally more robust online.
* An online course definitely will not run itself!Younger students love the idea of online courses, but they are often the worst students -- despite their greater facility with technology. Yahoo! runs ads for "Why online college is rocking," and that's part of the problem. Online education is being sold as if it's for everyone, when those finding real success are those who are self-motivated, highly organized, and in possession of well-developed study habits. And how many of your young undergrads fit that profile? Younger students approach online classes as if they're just another "cool" thing to do on the Web. Be prepared to badger them if you want them to get through your course.
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Often we find that students, and their parents, tend to focus on bells and whistles when making their college selections. They fixate on things like the looks of the campus, the size of the library, the honors and study-abroad programs, even the quality of the football team. Hey, these are all fine and good. But we urge you to also think about some things that, while often overlooked, constitute the bread and butter of your college experience. Before you decide, here are 10 things you might not have thought to consider:1. The number of requirements . These vary widely from school to school. And while it might look very impressive to see a long list of required courses, it's not so great to find yourself mired in courses that don't interest you, while you're unable to take electives in areas that do. It's even less great when you realize that some of these most unpleasant requirements were instituted by some legislator who insisted that everyone in the state needs to take State History 101. Or by some pushy department in 1950, which couldn't get students to take its courses in any other way.
2. How flexible those requirements are . Schools that require specific courses, with no substitutions allowed, can really put you in a bind if you'd rather take more advanced courses--or need to take more remedial courses--to fulfill that requirement. So check to see that the school allows a choice of levels to satisfy the various requirements. Also, keep in mind that anytime a school needs to route hundreds or thousands of students through Course X, Course X is going to become a sort of factory that neither the students taking the course nor the teachers teaching the course are going to like much.
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One of my favorite parts of this job is being invited to speak at schools. I spent time at the Masters School earlier this year, with a group of sixth graders who were learning to interview as part of their writing curriculum. Turns out I was their interview subject for the day, and one student, Isis Bruno, wrote her final project based on that group interview.
What does this have to do with parenting? Only that it takes a village, and I am honored to have the chance to be that for other parents’ children once in a while.
Here is what Isis wrote about me for her class, just as she wrote it. (She kindly made me younger than I am; in fact I have been writing for the Times for more than 20 years.) Her guiding question was whether children her age should already know what they want to be when they grow up, and from where I sit she got the answer just right.
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In a downturn firms can acquire resources that would be too expensive or unavailable in a boom. This logic applies to human resources as well as brand or hard assets. A recent survey found that hiring stars is among the most effective ways to enhance a firm's talent pool during a recession.Research has consistently found that stars outperform average employees. For highly complex tasks, the top 1% of workers are more than twice as productive as the average employee. Top research scientists and software programmers are five to ten times more productive than average. Markets recognize the value of hiring stars. A study of twenty General Electric alumni appointed as CEOs between 1989 and 2001found the hiring company's stock price increased in all but three cases when the company announced the new hire, boosting shareholder value more than $1 billion on average.
In a series of excellent studies, Professor Boris Groysberg (with colleagues including Nitin Nohria and Ashish Nanda) has demonstrated that a star's performance often suffers after switching employers. Star equity analysts (i.e., those earning the highest rankings from Institutional Investor magazine) suffer an average decline in performance of 20% when they shift firms, and do not return to their previous form for five years. Groysberg, who also conducted the study on CEOs from GE, found that several of the new CEOs, including Paolo Fresco at Fiat and Gary Wendt at Conseco, failed to create shareholder value in their new firms.
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Early in his career, Paul Romer helped solve one of the great puzzles of economics: What makes some economies grow faster than others? His "new growth theory" might one day earn him a Nobel prize.Locally, the Madison School Board is discussing a proposed technology plan this evening. Ideally, before any more is spent, the Infinite Campus system should be fully implemented, and used by teachers, staff and students. Once that is done, there are many possibilities, including this example.
Then a decade ago, Romer, by then a professor at Stanford University, decided to tackle what may be an even tougher puzzle: Why were so many of his students coming to class unprepared and disengaged?
Romer's quest began with the proposition that the more time students put into their studies, the more they learn. As Malcolm Gladwell demonstrates in his new book, "Outliers," that's certainly true in many other areas of human endeavor -- the more you practice scales or swing a club, the better you are at playing piano or hitting a decent golf shot. Why should learning economics be any different?
It took some noodling around, but two years later, Romer raised $10 million in venture capital to start a software company he called Aplia. The idea was to develop interactive exercises that students could do in conjunction with the most widely used college economics textbooks. Students would answer questions, then get immediate feedback on what they got right and wrong, along with some explanations that might help them get it right on a second and third try. Aplia's team of young Ph.D. economists and software programmers also devised laboratory experiments in which the entire class could participate in simulated markets that give students a practical understanding of concepts like money supply and demand curves.
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The most ambitious US presidency in living memory hardly needs to extend its list of tasks, you might think. Yet the country's long-term economic prospects turn on something that is all too easy to neglect, just as it has been neglected in the past. The US is failing calamitously in primary and secondary education. The average quality of its workforce is falling, and its schools are adding to the problem rather than mitigating it.Much of what ails the country - including growing economic inequality - can be traced to this source. Politicians recognise the fact, and prate about it endlessly. Barack Obama puts improving the schools alongside health reform and alternative energy whenever he lays out his long-term goals.
The trouble is, fixing the schools is not something that a crisis ever forces you to do. The consequences of a third-rate education system creep up on you and, experience shows, can be tolerated indefinitely. Many vested interests prefer it that way. Talk about the issue and move on is the line of least political resistance.
Just how badly is the US school system failing? A new study by McKinsey bravely attempts to come up with some numbers - and its estimates, though arrived at conservatively, are pretty startling*.
According to the Programme for International Student Assessment, a long-term comparison project from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the US lags far behind the industrial-country average in a standardised measure of maths and science skills among 15-year-olds. It sits among low-achievers such as Portugal and Italy, and way behind the best performers, such as South Korea, Finland, Canada and the Netherlands. It scores worse than the UK, which is about average on both measures.
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The economic downturn has made financial aid an even more urgent concern for many families. Reporter Beth Kowitt talked with education financing expert Mark Kantrowitz, the founder of FinAid.org, about how the system works and how to get the most out of it.Q: How is the recession affecting the availability of financial aid?
A: Colleges recognize that a time of economic distress is the worst time to be cutting student aid. On the other hand, there are many more people applying for aid - applications are up 20% this year. Schools are trying to protect their student aid budgets - they've been doing things like laying off faculty and freezing salaries to avoid cutting aid. Some schools that offer both merit- and need-based aid are reducing the academic scholarships and redirecting that money into need-based aid. And they are focusing on the families that need it most. If your 529 plan went down 40% last year, you're probably not going to get an increase in financial aid, because everybody's went down 40%. The schools are more likely to offer additional help to parents who lost a job.
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The bad news for this spring's college graduates is that they're entering the toughest labor market in at least 25 years.The worse news: Even those who land jobs will likely suffer lower wages for a decade or more compared to those lucky enough to graduate in better times, studies show.
Andrew Friedson graduated last year from the University of Maryland with a degree in government and politics and a stint as student-body president on his résumé. After working on Barack Obama's presidential campaign for a few months, Mr. Friedson hoped to get a position in the new administration. When that didn't pan out he looked for jobs on Capitol Hill. No luck there, either.
So now, instead of learning about policymaking and legislation, he's earning about $1,250 a month as a high-school tutor and a part-time fundraiser for Hillel, a Jewish campus organization. To save money, he's living with his parents.
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Fighting to save the District's popular school-voucher program, some 1,000 parents, pupils and politicians gathered near Mayor Adrian Fenty's office on Wednesday to protest Congress' plans to end school choice in Washington.That same day, the Senate approved a $4,500 voucher for cars, encouraging citizens to trade in their old automobiles for newer ones that burn less fuel.
So, Congress thinks that vouchers for schools are bad, but vouchers for cars are good.
Slashing school vouchers spares teachers' unions from competition. On the other hand, car vouchers are supposed to boost demand for cars built by the United Auto Workers. The obvious explanation for this schizophrenia: Congress does whatever helps unions.
A closer look reveals that Congress has it wrong in both cases - which is what happens when lawmakers let interest groups trump common sense.
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Obama seeks student aid hike, falls short on cost control.To look at higher education these days, it seems that no one cares about financially strapped students.
On the one hand, colleges have long been raising tuition at a rate faster than the cost of living. On the other, lenders have treated families' increased borrowing needs as an invitation to easy profits.
To address this, President Obama wants to expand federal Pell Grants for low- and middle-income students. The expansion would be financed by ending the private, scandal-plagued Federal Family Education Loan Program and replacing it with direct government lending.
The obvious question is: Will all this actually make college more affordable? In the past, universities have driven up costs through lavish building, money-losing sports, swelling bureaucracies and a tolerance of professors who barely teach. Simply throwing more money at them isn't going to prompt necessary belt-tightening.
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Bill Turque & Shailagh Murray:
President Obama will propose setting aside enough money for all 1,716 students in the District's voucher program to continue receiving grants for private school tuition until they graduate from high school, but he would allow no new students to join the program, administration officials said yesterday.The proposal, to be released in budget documents today, is an attempt to navigate a middle way on a contentious issue. School choice advocates, including Republicans and many low-income families, say the program gives poor children better access to quality education. Teachers unions and other education groups active in the Democratic Party regard vouchers as a drain on public education that benefits relatively few students, and they say the students don't achieve at appreciably higher levels at their new schools.
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Living and working in the New York region's financial-media complex in 2009 means daily, compulsory attendance at a gathering of the glum. The economy may be shrinking at a 6 percent annual rate, but finance and media have contracted by about 30 percent. For the past year, the daily routine has meant sitting in a depopulated office (assuming you still have a job); following the latest grim news of magazine closings, buyouts, and layoffs; and commiserating with friends, family, and neighbors. And, of course, the angst extends far beyond directly affected companies. Finance dominates the area's economy to such a degree that everybody--lawyers, accountants, real estate brokers, waiters, retailers, and cab drivers--have all been affected.Of course, one can try to get away to sunnier, more mellow climes. But the usual havens aren't offering much succor. Florida--like New York, except the catastrophe is real estate. Mexico? Um, not now. But last month, I found an unexpected haven: the Midwest. Each semester, the University of Wisconsin School of Business brings in a journalist-in-residence for a week, usually from New York. The theory: Students and professors benefit from the perspective of someone who is chronicling the workings of the world they are studying remotely.
But the benefit was greater for me than for the students. The four days in Madison functioned as a kind of detox. I left thinking the university should turn the Fluno Center for Executive Education into a sort of clinic. It could do for stressed-out financial and media types what Minneapolis' Hazelden does for the drugged-out: offer a safe, friendly (if chilly) place to escape the toxic influence of New York.
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This spring's college grads are heading out into a world where jobs are tough to come by. The economic outlook is uncertain and all the older people they know are feeling the pain of stock-market losses.Worse, there are all kinds of nitty-gritty details to deal with: opening bank accounts, choosing health insurance, finding an apartment, lining up transportation and figuring out how to invest. How is a young person supposed to get ahead in this environment?
It's not easy to master money management during the best times and it's especially hard to navigate the challenges of a recession. Still, many of the same basic principles apply in good times and bad. And getting a taste of a downturn at the start may make current graduates smarter and more thoughtful than those who graduate during boom times.
Here are five broad financial lessons that can pay dividends for a lifetime:
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Some metro Atlanta public high schools that don't grade rigorously produce more graduates lacking the basic English and math skills needed for college, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has found.Georgia remedial class database - very useful.Many graduates of those high schools are sent to freshmen remedial classes to learn what high school didn't teach them. As many as a third or more college-bound graduates from some high schools need the extra instruction.
Problems with classroom grading came to light in a February state study that showed some high schools regularly awarded good marks to students who failed state tests in the same subject.
The AJC found that metro high schools where classroom grading appeared lax or out-of-step with state standards tended to have higher rates of students who took remedial classes. And at dozens of high schools, most graduates who received the B average needed for a state HOPE scholarship lost it in college after a few years.
Unprepared high-school graduates are a growing problem for the public university system, where remedial students are concentrated in two-year colleges.
Statewide, the remedial rate has climbed to 1 in 4 first-year students after dropping in the 1990s, said Chancellor Erroll Davis Jr. of the University System of Georgia. The cost to the system: $25 million a year.
Students such as Brandon Curry, 20, a graduate of Redan High in DeKalb County, said they were surprised to learn decent high school grades don't always translate into college success.
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Washington, D.C.'s school voucher program for low-income kids isn't dead yet. But the Obama Administration seems awfully eager to expedite its demise.
About 1,700 kids currently receive $7,500 vouchers to attend private schools under the Opportunity Scholarship Program, and 99% of them are black or Hispanic. The program is a huge hit with parents -- there are four applicants for every available scholarship -- and the latest Department of Education evaluation showed significant academic gains.
Nevertheless, Congress voted in March to phase out the program after the 2009-10 school year unless it is reauthorized by Congress and the D.C. City Council. The Senate is scheduled to hold hearings on the program this month, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has promised proponents floor time to make their case. So why is Education Secretary Arne Duncan proceeding as if the program's demise is a fait accompli?
Mr. Duncan is not only preventing new scholarships from being awarded but also rescinding scholarship offers that were made to children admitted for next year. In effect, he wants to end a successful program before Congress has an opportunity to consider reauthorizing it. This is not what you'd expect from an education reformer, and several Democrats in Congress have written him to protest.
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Well, it's just about showtime. Soon you will face that grueling week of finals on which the fate of this semester's GPA rests. Sorry, we can't make final's week into a piece of cake. Only your professors can, and we wouldn't be counting on it. But how well you prepare will, in no small measure, determine how well you'll do. So here are our 10 best suggestions on how to prepare for those all-important final exams (together with a brief glance into the professor's mind that will show you why the tips work):1. Spend a week. Start studying for each exam a week before you are due to take it. This will give you time to divide the material into manageable portions that you can digest over a number of study sessions. This is especially important in the case of a cumulative final in a course with tons of material. Whatever you do, don't try to swallow the whole elephant--the whole course, we mean--in one cram session. (Works because, in most courses, the prof is expecting you to have processed and digested the material--something you can't do in one fell swoop).
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Teachers, students, employees, employers, everyone these days, it seems, is being exhorted to think, act, imagine and perform "Outside the Box."
However, for students, there is still quite a bit that may be found Inside the Box for them to learn and get good at before they wander off into OutBoxLand.
Inside the Box there still await grammar, the multiplication tables, the periodic table, Boyle's Law, the Glorious Revolution, the Federalist Papers, Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Bach, Mozart, Giovanni Bellini, recombinant DNA, Albrecht Durer, Edward Gibbon, Jan van Eyck, and a few other matters worth their attention.
Before the Mission Control people in Houston could solve the unique, immediate, and potentially fatal "Out of the Box" problems with the recovery of Apollo 13 and its crew, they had to draw heavily on their own InBox training and knowledge of mechanics, gases, temperatures, pressures, azimuth, velocity and lots of other math, science, and engineering stuff they had studied before. They may have been educated sitting in rows, and been seen in the halls at Mission Control wearing plastic pocket protectors, but in a very short time in that emergency they came up with novel solutions to several difficult and unexpected problems in saving that crew.
It seems clear to me that a group of ignorant but freethinking folks given that same set of novel tasks would either have had to watch Apollo 13 veer off into fatal space or crash into our planet with a dead crew on board, in a creative way, of course.
Many situations are less dramatic demonstrations of the clear necessity of lots of InBox education as preparation for any creative endeavor, but even high school students facing their first complete nonfiction book and a first history research paper when they arrive in college would have been much better off if they had been assigned a couple of complete nonfiction books and research papers before they left high school.
Basketball coach John Wooden of UCLA was of course happy with players who could adapt to unexpected defenses on the court during games, but according to Bill Walton, when he met with a set of new freshmen trying to make his team, the first thing he taught them was how to put on their socks...Perhaps some of his (and their) success came because he was not above going back into the Old Box to lay the groundwork for the winning fundamentals in college basketball.
Many teachers and edupundits decry the insufficiency of novelty, creativity and freethinking-out-of-the-box in our schools, but I have to wonder how many have realized the overriding importance of the education equivalent of having students put on their socks the right way?
Basic knowledge in history, English, physics, Latin, biology, math, and so on is essential for students in school before they can do much more than fool around with genuine and useful creativity in those fields.
True, they can write about themselves creatively, but if the teacher has read Marcel Proust, and would share a bit of his writing with the students, they might come to see that there is creativity in writing about oneself and there is also fooling around in writing about oneself.
Samuel Johnson once pointed out that: "The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight a-while, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest, but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted..."
The pleasures of foolish playacting Outside of the Box of knowledge and skill by students (and their teachers: witness the damage shown in Dead Poets Society) may delight them for a time because they are tired of the hard work involved in learning and thinking about new knowledge in school, but the more they indulge and are indulged in it, the lower our educational standards will be, and the worse the education provided students in our schools.
Novelty and innovation have their place and there they are sorely needed, but the quality of that innovation depends, to a great extent, on the quality of the knowledge and skill acquired while students were still working hard Back in the Box.
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I read Outliers and The Element back to back last week.Net-net is that people aren't successful from passion alone, usually there are other factors or "flukes" that lead to them living in their element. You may have heard successful people say that what made them great is that they were at the right place at the right time. There is some truth to that but they also had enormous passion, put in many hours and were in their "element".
In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell contends that passion alone doesn't equate success; the environment, innovation and generational culture shape our success. Below is an Outlier story of my own.
I have two kids. When Rachel started school, she was like a fish to water. She started kindergarten in an accelerated classroom, worked very hard, loved school and recently finished her teaching credential for the sciences. She's planning to spend her adult life in the classroom teaching.
Anthony on the other hand didn't like school enough to even pull his completed homework out of his backpack. In middle school he was a strong D-student,and an exceptional pianist. We contacted the school to see if he could remove Orchestra and PE classes from his schedule so he could devote 4 to 6 hours towards piano practice, they said they'd check with the School District because they "do that kind of thing for athletes". They said, " No," so I pulled him out of public school that very day.
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More than a decade ago, when I began investigating the odd uses of Advanced Placement courses and tests in our high schools, I tried to find out why AP participation was so much lower than I expected in my neighborhood public school, Walt Whitman High of Bethesda. At least one high school in neighboring D.C., and many more in suburban Maryland, had higher participation rates than Whitman, even though it was often called the best school in the state.Related: Growing Pains in the Advanced Placement Program: Do Tough Tradeoffs Lie Ahead?
That is how I stumbled on what I call the Mt. Olympus syndrome. There were, I discovered from talking to students, a few AP teachers at that school who didn’t want to deal with average students. One of them actively discouraged juniors who were getting less than an A in a prerequisite course from taking his AP course when they were seniors. He only wanted students who were going to get a 5, the equivalent of an A on the three-hour college-level AP exam, where a score of 3 and above could earn college credit. That test, like all AP exams, was written and graded by outside experts, mostly high school and college instructors. The only way that teacher thought he could control the number of 5s was to make sure only top quality students--the academic gods of the Whitman High pantheon--were allowed into his course.
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Computing skills will be put on an equal footing with literacy and numeracy in an overhaul of primary education that aims to slim down the curriculum - but not lose the basics.John Sutherland has more.
Children will be taught to read using internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo in the first few years of school, it is announced.
Pupils in English primary schools will learn to write with keyboards, use spellcheckers and insert internet "hyperlinks" into text before their 11th birthday under the most significant reform of timetables since the National Curriculum was introduced in 1988.
The review by Sir Jim Rose, former head of inspections at Ofsted, also recommends the use of Google Earth in geography lessons, spreadsheets to calculate budgets in maths, online archives to research local history and video conferencing software for joint language lessons with schools overseas.
Sir Jim insisted the changes would not replace come at the expense of traditional teaching, saying: "We cannot sidestep the basics".
He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "We've let the curriculum become too fat. We need to give teachers the opportunity to be more flexible."
His report, which will be accepted in full by ministers, also proposes more IT training for teachers to keep them ahead of "computer savvy pupils".
Google is to privacy and respect for intellectual property rights what the Taliban are to women's rights and civil liberties: a daunting threat that must be fought relentlessly by all those who value privacy and the right to exercise, within the limits of the law, control over the uses made by others of their intellectual property. The internet search engine company should be regulated rigorously, defanged and if necessary, broken up or put out of business. It would not be missed.We must also keep in mind the excesses of Powerpoint in the classroom.
In a nutshell, Google promotes copyright theft and voyeurism and lays the foundations for corporate or even official Big Brotherism.
Google, with about 50 per cent of the global internet search market, is the latest in a distinguished line of IT abusive monopolists. The first was IBM, which was brought to heel partly by a forty-year long antitrust regulation (which ended in 1996) and partly by the rise of Microsoft.
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The Boston Globe has been publishing for 137 years, and the news that it may have to fold has distressed its many readers. Each Fall, Winter and Spring the paper publishes a special section, of 14 pages or so, on notable local public high school athletes and their coaches. There is a mention of athletes and coaches at local prep schools as well.
The latest Boston Globe's Winter "ALL-SCHOLASTICS" section arrived, with the "ten moments that stood out among the countless athletic stories in Massachusetts." There are reports on the best athletes and coaches in Skiing, Boys' Basketball, Girls' Basketball, Boys' Hockey, Girls' Hockey, Boys' Track, Girls' Track, Boys' Swimming, Girls' Swimming, Preps, Wrestling, and Gymnastics. The Preps and Gymnastics parts consolidate boys' and girls' accomplishments, perhaps to save space (and cost).
Each full-page section also features photographs of 9-16 athletes, with perhaps a twitter-sized paragraph on their achievements. In addition, there are 30 photos and tweets about some coaches, spread among the various sports. There are 26 "Prep" athletes mentioned, from various sports, but I didn't see any "Prep" coaches profiled. For each high school sport there are two "athletes of the year" identified, and all the coaches are "coaches of the year" in their sport.
There may be, at this time, some high school "students of the year" in English, math, Chinese, physics, Latin, chemistry, European history, U.S. history, biology, and the like. There may also be high school "teachers of the year" in these and other academic subjects, but their names and descriptions are not to be found in The Boston Globe, perhaps the most well-known paper in the "Athens of America" (Boston).
It may be the case, indeed it probably is the case, that some of the athletes featured in the Winter "All-Scholastics" section today are also high school students of math, history, English, science, and languages, but you would not know that from the coverage of The Boston Globe. The coaches of the year may in many, if not all, cases, also be teachers of academic subjects in the Massachusetts public and private schools, but that remains only a guess as well.
When the British architect Christopher Wren was buried in 1723, part of his epitaph, written by his eldest son, Christopher Wren, Jr., read: "Lector, si monumentum requiris, Circumspice." If you wanted to judge his interest, efforts and accomplishments, all you had to do was look around you. His work was there for all to see.
The work of Massachusetts high school athletes and coaches is all around us in The Boston Globe on a regular basis, but the work of our high school scholars and teachers is nowhere to be seen in that public record.
If one seeks a monument to anti-academic and anti-intellectual views and practices in Boston today, one need look no further than The Boston Globe. I read it every day, and I will be sorry to see it fold, if it does, but I will not miss its attention to and recognition of the academic efforts and accomplishments of Massachusetts secondary students and their teachers, because there is none now, and never has been any, no matter how many reports on education reform and academic standards it may have published over the years. If you ask how much The Boston Globe editors (and I am sure The Globe is not alone in this) cares about the good academic work now actually being done by high school teachers and their students in Massachusetts, the answer is, from the evidence, that they do not.
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igh school students, beware! College admissions and financial aid officers in California and elsewhere may be peeking over your digital shoulder at the personal information you post on your Facebook or MySpace page.And they might decide to toss out your application after reading what you wrote about that cool party last week or how you want to conduct your romantic life at college.
According to a new report by the National Assn. for College Admission Counseling, about a quarter of U.S. colleges reported doing some research about applicants on social networking sites or through Internet search engines. The study, which included 10 California colleges, did not specify which schools acknowledged the practice or how often scholarships or enrollment offers might be nixed because of online postings.
David Hawkins, director of public policy and research for the counselors group, said the moral is clear: "Don't post anything that you don't want your mother or father or college admission officer to see," he said.
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Members of this year's record-size high-school graduating class applied to more colleges than ever -- and now, that's resulting in a heavier than usual flurry of rejection letters.Hundreds of students at high schools from Newton, Mass., to Palo Alto, Calif., have created cathartic "Wall of Shame" or "Rejection Wall" displays of college denial letters. On message boards at CollegeConfidential.com, students critique, attack and praise missives from various schools, elevating rejection-letter reviews to a sideline sport.
Even with impressive test scores and grades, abundant extracurricular activities, good recommendations and an admission essay into which "I poured myself heart and soul," Daniel Beresford, 18, of Fair Oaks, Calif., netted 14 rejection letters from 17 applications, he says. Among the denials: Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago. (He's bound for one of his top choices, Pepperdine University.) When he "realized it was going to be so much harder this year," he started calling in reinforcements, asking teachers and friends to open the rejections for him.
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The federal school lunch program, which subsidizes meals for 30 million low-income children, was created more than half a century ago to combat malnutrition. A breakfast program was added during the 1960s, and both were retooled a decade ago in an attempt to improve the nutritional value of food served at school.More must now be done to fight the childhood obesity epidemic, which has triggered a frightening spike in weight-related disorders like diabetes, high-blood pressure and heart disease among young people. And the place to start is the schools, where junk foods sold outside the federal meals programs -- through snack bars, vending machines and à la carte food lines -- has pretty much canceled out the benefits of all those healthy lunches and breakfasts.
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When Wakefield High School first required senior projects 12 years ago, students suspected it was a plot to drain the last precious drops of joy from their teenage years. "We were pretty disgruntled," Shelby Sours, who was student government president, said at the time. "We felt abused and neglected."This school year, Wendy Ramirez and many classmates were similarly resentful. They could not believe such a wrong-headed effort to make their lives miserable had survived so long. But after finishing her report on forensic science, Ramirez had a change of heart. Now she sees her teachers as farsighted. "It's an experience that I will never forget that will help me so much in my future," she said.
That's mushy and nice, but it doesn't explain something odd. The program's success at the Arlington County school shows senior projects are a good idea. So why are they so rare in area public schools?
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In interviews with The Wall Street Journal, Bill Gates Sr., Bill Gates and their family shared many details of the family's story for the first time, including Bill Gates Jr.'s experience in counseling and how his early interest in computers came about partly as a result of a family crisis. The sometimes colliding forces of discipline and freedom within the clan shaped the entrepreneur's character.The relationship between father and son entered a new phase when the software mogul began working full-time seven months ago at the Gates Foundation. For the past 13 years, the father has been the sole Gates family member with a daily presence at the foundation, starting it from the basement of his home and minding it while his son finished up his final decade running Microsoft. They now work directly together for the first time.
At six-foot-six, Bill Gates Sr. is nearly a full head taller than his son. He's known to be more social than the younger Bill Gates, but they share a sharp intellect and a bluntness that can come across to some as curt. He isn't prone to introspection and he plays down his role in his son's life.
"As a father, I never imagined that the argumentative, young boy who grew up in my house, eating my food and using my name would be my future employer," Mr. Gates Sr. told a group of nonprofit leaders in a 2005 speech. "But that's what happened."
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Q. What are you listening for as somebody describes their family, where they're from, etc.?A. You're looking for a really strong set of values. You're looking for a really good work ethic. Really good communication skills. More and more, the ability to speak well and write is important. You know, writing is not something that is taught as strongly as it should be in the educational curriculum. So you're looking for communication skills.
You're looking for adaptability to change. You're looking at, do you get along well with people? And are you the sort of person that can be a part of a team and motivate people? You know, do you have the emotional I.Q.?
It's not just enough to be able to just do a nice PowerPoint presentation. You've got to have the ability to pick people. You've got to have the ability to communicate. When you find really capable people, it's amazing how they proliferate capable people all through your organization. So that's what you're hunting for.
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If you wanted to help a Martian understand this sliver of the planet in Rockland County, you might do two things.First, you would take him (or her or it) to the cavernous Foodmart International on the main drag, Route 59.
The shoppers chatter in the broad, chilly aisles in every language under the sun. The wares include Cuban bread, Thai jasmine rice, Vietnamese chili-garlic sauce, Chinese kidney and liver herb extract, Haitian sugar, Salvadoran pickled vegetables, Honduran cream, Malaysian papaya pudding -- like the provisions for some modern ark.
Then, you would head a mile or so down the road toward Monsey, where you would see gaggles of observant Jews in traditional garb walking on the street, pushing strollers, popping into shops offering kosher pizza, falafel and ice cream.
This would be helpful in understanding not just this area, but disputes along sensitive cultural fault lines that are playing out in several suburban communities. In fact, the East Ramapo school district here is going through the same drama as the district in Lawrence, on Long Island.
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WHEN Barack Obama met Hu Jintao, his Chinese counterpart, at the G20 summit in London, it was an encounter not just between two presidents, but also between two professions and mindsets. A lawyer, trained to argue from first principles and haggle over words, was speaking to an engineer, who knew how to build physical structures and keep them intact.The prevalence of lawyers in America's ruling elite (spotted by a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, in the 1830s) is stronger than ever. Mr Obama went to Harvard Law School (1988-91); his cabinet contains Hillary Clinton (Yale Law, 1969-73) as secretary of state, Eric Holder (Columbia Law, 1973-76) as attorney-general, Joe Biden (Syracuse University law school, 1965-68) as vice-president and Leon Panetta (Santa Clara University law school, 1960-63) as director of the CIA. That's the tip of the iceberg. Over half of America's senators practised law. Mr Obama's inner circle is sprinkled with classmates from Harvard Law: the dean of that school, Elena Kagan, is solicitor-general; Cass Sunstein, a professor there, is also in the administration.
President Hu, in contrast, is a hydraulic engineer (he worked for a state hydropower company). His predecessor, Jiang Zemin, was an electrical engineer, who trained in Moscow at the Stalin Automobile Works. The prime minister, Wen Jiabao, specialised in geological engineering. The senior body of China's Communist Party is the Politburo's standing committee. Making up its nine members are eight engineers, and one lawyer. This is not a relic of the past: 2007 saw the appointments of one petroleum and two chemical engineers. The last American president to train as an engineer was Herbert Hoover.
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The five-year-old flips back and forth, mulling over his choices before settling on a chess set.Ho-hin and his mother Man Ting are among the crowd gathered outside a toy library at the weekend, eagerly waiting for it to open. The Love Pleasure Community Toy Library has been hugely popular since it opened last year in Prime View estate, Tuen Mun.
Man, a housewife, says her son looks forward to their visit to the library every week. "There are so many things to play with. To him, it's just like a toy shop," she says.
The Tung Wah Group of Hospitals set up the library as part of its neighbourhood services centre, with more than 500 toys donated by companies and individuals. Alerted in 2007 to a dearth of facilities for young families in the area, organisers aimed to give parents and children a chance to do things together while people whose homes are overflowing with toys can share them with families in need, says Heung Yin-kwan, a social worker at the Tuen Mun centre.
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Thursday may have been "take your child to work" day, but Paul Holley couldn't do that. He lost his job in December.So Holley and fellow job seekers Andy Krumrai and Dotty Posto instead took their daughters along to the Barnes & Noble Café, where they meet each week with other unemployed professionals to encourage and advise one another as they look for new jobs.
It's a new twist on the annual Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day, which aims to expose young people to careers and help them make connections between the classroom and the workplace.
Since last year's event, 4.5 million more Americans are out of work, according to the latest government numbers.
The scene at the café Thursday - amid Starbucks coffee, cappuccinos and cocoa - was a reminder that unemployment also rattles children.
Clare Posto, 9, said three or four of her friends have parents out of work; one is worried about the parents' marriage. Clare's mom, an organizational development manager who left Harley-Davidson as part of a downsizing in February, recently expanded her job search nationwide.
"I don't really want to move, because I have a lot of friends here," Clare said.
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Oh, those text charges. No, not the fees for pecking out text messages on a cellphone, but the cost of every college student's must-buy: textbooks.Students spend about $1,000 a year on their texts, according to the College Board. And that most likely will increase: Over the past 20 years, textbook prices have increased at twice the inflation rate, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. One solution may be renting. Several companies offer textbook rentals that could save cash-poor college students more than 50% of the cost of a book.
To see how the process works, we ordered textbooks from three rental companies: Book Renter, Campus Book Rentals and Chegg; and one textbook seller, Textbooks.com, which doesn't rent books, but offers guaranteed buybacks on some texts, making those books a quasi-rental.
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A group of fourth-graders at Nuestro Mundo Elementary School had planned to remain in their classroom through lunch and recess Friday, enjoying a meal of fresh fruit, vegetables and homemade pasta at cloth-covered tables with flower centerpieces.
The group from Joshua Forehand's class, which calls itself BCSL ("Boycott School Lunch") formed to protest what they see as unhealthy food offered in the school's cafeteria, but they scrapped their plan to host a "Good Real Food" picnic after Assistant Superintendent Sue Abplanalp called school administrators and parents to discourage it.
"There were too many obstacles," Abplanalp said in an interview, citing the possibility of allergy-causing ingredients in shared homemade food, lack of adequate supervision, and the presence of the news media as major concerns.
"We want students' voices to be heard. This just seemed to come together too fast, without various issues being addressed."
When asked if the district feared negative publicity, Abplanalp said no. Instead she cited student privacy as a major concern.
"We have strict guidelines about the media interviewing students on school grounds. The principal maintains a list of kids whose parents have given permission for media exposure."
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young man I'll call Alex recently graduated from Harvard. As a history major, Alex wrote about a dozen papers a semester. He also ran a student organization, for which he often worked more than forty hours a week; when he wasn't on the job, he had classes. Weeknights were devoted to all the schoolwork that he couldn't finish during the day, and weekend nights were spent drinking with friends and going to dance parties. "Trite as it sounds," he told me, it seemed important to "maybe appreciate my own youth." Since, in essence, this life was impossible, Alex began taking Adderall to make it possible.Adderall, a stimulant composed of mixed amphetamine salts, is commonly prescribed for children and adults who have been given a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But in recent years Adderall and Ritalin, another stimulant, have been adopted as cognitive enhancers: drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted. (Such use is "off label," meaning that it does not have the approval of either the drug's manufacturer or the Food and Drug Administration.) College campuses have become laboratories for experimentation with neuroenhancement, and Alex was an ingenious experimenter. His brother had received a diagnosis of A.D.H.D., and in his freshman year Alex obtained an Adderall prescription for himself by describing to a doctor symptoms that he knew were typical of the disorder. During his college years, Alex took fifteen milligrams of Adderall most evenings, usually after dinner, guaranteeing that he would maintain intense focus while losing "any ability to sleep for approximately eight to ten hours." In his sophomore year, he persuaded the doctor to add a thirty-milligram "extended release" capsule to his daily regimen.
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Over the last two decades, colleges and universities doubled their full-time support staff while enrollment increased only 40 percent, according to a new analysis of government data by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, a nonprofit research center.Stephen Dubner has more.During the same period, the staff of full-time instructors, or equivalent personnel, rose about 50 percent, while the number of managers increased slightly more than 50 percent.
The data, based on United States Department of Education filings from more than 2,782 colleges, come from 1987 to 2007, before the current recession prompted many colleges to freeze their hiring.
Neither the report nor outside experts on college affordability went so far as to argue that the increase in support staff was directly responsible for spiraling tuition. Most experts say that the largest driver of tuition increases has been the decline in state financing for higher education.
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The Audit Commission did not spare the rod when it looked over the nutrition and exercise programs of primary schools and found things amiss.Nearly a quarter of primary school children are obese - 120 percent heavier than the median weight for peers - compared with one-sixth in 1997, government statistics show.
Found wanting were better coordination and promotion from education, health and sports authorities to tackle obesity among primary school children.
According to the audit report released yesterday, students at nearly 100 primary schools were only managing 45 to 65 minutes of physical education a week, instead of the stipulated 70 minutes.
Compiled though 426 questionnaires and six school visits, the report revealed nearly one-third of 423 primary schools did not have physical activity policies compared with 42 which had undocumented polices and 28 percent with documented policies.
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I AM in Newark, New Jersey's largest town and long a byword for urban decay. I've been invited by KIPP (the "Knowledge is Power Programme"), the biggest and best known of America's charter-school chains, which has three schools in Newark, with a fourth to open this autumn. Founded by two Teach for America alumni (how familiar that story is getting) in 1994, there are now 66 KIPP schools nationwide, mostly middle schools (ie, with students between 10 and 14 years old). Oddly, none of Newark's KIPP schools are called that: under the state's charter law "brand" names are banned, which reflects early fears that big chains would come in and take over. Those fears have dissipated, and Cory Booker, Newark's mayor since 2006, is a good friend of charters, and wants to see more of them.I'm actually a bit nervous. KIPP has a fearsome and to my mind not entirely attractive reputation in England for a zero-tolerance approach to discipline--insisting that children keep their gaze on teachers who are speaking, and nod and say "yes" in response to teachers' requests; giving detentions for minor transgressions; and "benching"--that is, seating naughty children separately in class and forbidding other pupils to speak to them during breaks. A certain type of English politician practically drools when talking about KIPP--the ones who, like many of their compatriots, dislike and fear children, and love all talk of treating them harshly. I'm half-expecting to find dead-eyed Marine-sergeant types with crewcuts barking orders at children one-third their size. If it turns out that the only way to maintain order and calm in a tough urban school is to run it like a boot camp, it will make me very sad.
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Policies that give parents the ability to exercise private-school choice continue to proliferate across the country. In 2009, 14 states and Washington, D.C., are offering school voucher or education tax-credit programs that help parents send their children to private schools. During the 2007 and 2008 legislative sessions, 44 states introduced school-choice legislation.[1] In 2008, private-school-choice policies were enacted or expanded in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Utah[2]--made possible by increasing bipartisan support for school choice.[3]Washington Post editorial: "Only for the Privileged Few?":
On Capitol Hill, however, progress in expanding parental choice in education remains slow. Recent Congresses have not implemented policies to expand private-school choice. In 2009, the 111th Congress has already approved legislative action that threatens to phase out the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), a federal initiative that currently helps 1,700 disadvantaged children attend private schools in the nation's capital.
Congress's Own School Choices
At the same time, many Members of Congress who oppose private-school-choice policies for their fellow citizens exercise school choice in their own lives. Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL), the chief architect of the language that threatens to end the OSP, for instance, sends his children to private school[4] and attended private school himself.[5]
NEW SURVEY shows that 38 percent of members of Congress have sent their children to private school. About 20 percent themselves attended private school, nearly twice the rate of the general public. Nothing wrong with those numbers; no one should be faulted for personal decisions made in the best interests of loved ones. Wouldn't it be nice, though, if Congress extended similar consideration to low-income D.C. parents desperate to keep their sons and daughters in good schools?
The latest Heritage Foundation study of lawmakers' educational choices comes amid escalating efforts to kill the federally funded D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program that helps 1,700 disadvantaged children attend private schools. Congress cut funding beyond the 2009-10 school year unless the program, which provides vouchers of up to $7,500, gets new federal and local approvals. Education Secretary Arne Duncan cited that uncertainty as the reason for his recent decision to rescind scholarship offers to 200 new students. Senate hearings on the program's future are set for this spring, and opponents -- chiefly school union officials -- are pulling out all the stops as they lobby their Democratic allies.
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Concerns about the safety of popular crib designs have led to 21 recalls of 4.2 million cribs over the past two years because of hazardous defects. Products involved in the recalls have been linked to at least five infant deaths and 16 cases in which babies were trapped by parts of a crib, said the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Drop-side cribs, popular because sliding down one side of the crib makes it easier for a parent to pick up a baby, have proved to be particularly problematic."There are enough concerns raised about drop-side cribs that we're moving forward and we're going to phase them out," Mr. Storch said in an interview. While Mr. Storch said he doesn't necessarily believe newer drop-side cribs are dangerous, he's concerned about the amount of time consumers are keeping their cribs, especially in this economy. "It adds in an element of risk that we don't want to take, particularly over time," he said. "It seems that the strongest cribs are ones where the four sides attach to each other and have less complicated hardware."
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I recently received a letter from a Vanguard shareholder who described the global financial crisis as "a crisis of ethic proportions." Substituting "ethic" for "epic" is a fine turn of phrase, and it accurately places a heavy responsibility for the meltdown on a broad deterioration in traditional ethical standards.Commerce, business and finance have hardly been exempt from this trend. Relying on Adam Smith's "invisible hand," through which our self-interest advances the interests of society, we have depended on the marketplace and competition to create prosperity and well-being.
But self-interest got out of hand. It created a bottom-line society in which success is measured in monetary terms. Dollars became the coin of the new realm. Unchecked market forces overwhelmed traditional standards of professional conduct, developed over centuries.
The result is a shift from moral absolutism to moral relativism. We've moved from a society in which "there are some things that one simply does not do" to one in which "if everyone else is doing it, I can too." Business ethics and professional standards were lost in the shuffle.
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The group of anxious parents crowded around District Attorney George Skumanick Jr. as he sat behind a table in a courtroom here and presented them with an ultimatum.Photos of their semi-nude or scantily clad teenage daughters were stacked before him. Mr. Skumanick said the images had been discovered on cellphones confiscated at the local high school. They could either enlist their kids in an education program or have the teens face felony charges of child pornography. "We could have just arrested them but we didn't," said Mr. Skumanick in an interview.
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The tactics of District Attorney George Skumanick Jr., left, in the county courthouse, prompted the family of 15-year-old Marissa Miller to sue him.
Mustafah Abdulaziz for the Wall Street JournalThe tactics of District Attorney George Skumanick Jr., left, in the county courthouse, prompted the family of 15-year-old Marissa Miller to sue him.
The tactics of District Attorney George Skumanick Jr., left, in the county courthouse, prompted the family of 15-year-old Marissa Miller to sue him.
The tactics of District Attorney George Skumanick Jr., left, in the county courthouse, prompted the family of 15-year-old Marissa Miller to sue him.The practice of teens taking naked photos of themselves and sending them to friends via cellphones, called "sexting," has alarmed parents, school officials and prosecutors nationwide, who fear the photos could end up on the Internet or in the hands of sexual predators. In a handful of cases, authorities have resorted to what one parent here called "the nuclear weapon of sex charges" -- child pornography.
But some legal experts say that here in Wyoming County, Pa., Mr. Skumanick has expanded the definition of sexting to such an extent he could be setting a dangerous precedent. He has threatened to charge kids who appeared in photos, but who didn't send them, as well as at least one girl who was photographed wearing a bathing suit. One of the accused is 11 years old.
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QUITE a few Economist journalists have children in private schools, and whenever I write about the astronomical fees they read my articles with keen interest. More than one has asked me, hopefully and with a certain Schadenfreude, whether the global recession means that schools finally have to start cutting their fees? In London, that's doubtful; I want to find out whether Manhattan is any different.One reason fees in both places have been so high is limited supply: opening a new school in either of these crowded, pricey cities is difficult. So my first stop is Claremont Prep, one of the rare ones that has managed it. It opened just five years ago, in an old Bank of America building just off Wall Street. P.D. Cagliastro, the school's flack, shows me around.
It cost $28m just to open the doors, Ms Cagliastro tells me, and another $7m has been spent since--and I can easily believe it. The former banking hall, its murals carefully restored, is now a grand auditorium; in the student cafeteria the old vault door is still visible, protected behind glass. There is an indoor swimming pool, and a basketball court on the 9th floor. The rooftop garden is surreal--an adventure playground on Astroturf, surrounded by skyscrapers and overlooked by the New York Stock Exchange.
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Parentonomics: An Economist Dad Looks at Parenting By Joshua GansWhat happens when Mr Spock meets Dr Spock? The answer is Parentonomics, an autobiographical account of how an economist used his professional training in game theory to bring up his three children.
Joshua Gans describes his experiences in the labour wards, changing nappies and dealing with tantrums, spousal absences and sibling rivalry - all the while explaining what he did or did not do, the economic principles involved, and whether any of it worked as a parenting strategy.
The obvious question is whether this is supposed to be good advice or some kind of joke. There is no ambiguity in Parentonomics: Gans is not joking. Thankfully, he can be very funny. Although he is an academic - a professor at Melbourne Business School - his writing has a professional snap. While the advice is intended to be useful, readers will come to their own conclusions about that. It does at least tend to be thought-provoking.
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Just in from the department of not-so-surprising news: a study has found that young teenagers tend to be fatter when there are fast-food restaurants within one block of their schools.The report found an increased obesity rate of at least 5.2 percent among teenagers at schools where fast-food outlets were a tenth of a mile -- roughly one city block -- or less away.
To remedy that, Eric N. Gioia, a city councilman from Queens, wants to stop fast-food restaurants from opening so close to the city's schools.
"With the proliferation of fast-food restaurants directly around schools, it's a clear and present danger to our children's health," said Mr. Gioia, who proposed the ban at a news conference at a school opposite a McDonald's in TriBeCa on Sunday.
"A fast-food restaurant on the corner can have a terrible impact on a child's life," he said. "Obesity, diabetes, hypertension -- it's a step toward a less healthy life."
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THAT genius is unusual goes without saying. But is it so unusual that it requires the brains of those that possess it to be unusual in others ways, too? A link between artistic genius on the one hand and schizophrenia and manic-depression on the other, is widely debated. However another link, between savant syndrome and autism, is well established. It is, for example, the subject of films such as "Rain Man", illustrated above.A study published this week by Patricia Howlin of King's College, London, reinforces this point. It suggests that as many as 30% of autistic people have some sort of savant-like capability in areas such as calculation or music. Moreover, it is widely acknowledged that some of the symptoms associated with autism, including poor communication skills and an obsession with detail, are also exhibited by many creative types, particularly in the fields of science, engineering, music, drawing and painting. Indeed, there is now a cottage industry in re-interpreting the lives of geniuses in the context of suggestions that they might belong, or have belonged, on the "autistic spectrum", as the range of syndromes that include autistic symptoms is now dubbed.
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A Canadian researcher who has studied the early education of some of the smartest people in the world has uncovered a link that may confound even the most dedicated parent.According to the research, the most important quality determining intellectual prowess is not at all connected to familiarity with the latest brainy baby toys, involves no amount of flash-card drilling and may, in fact, have little to do with parental involvement in the child's early academic development.
After examining the backgrounds of more than 50 Nobel laureates, Larisa Shavinina, a gifted-education expert from the Université du Québec en Outaouais, found that what they all had in common was at least one teacher who played "an exceptional role" and went beyond the ordinary classroom practice. "They all had at least one exceptional teacher who acted as a role model."
In a paper presented at a conference on academic excellence in Paris last summer, Prof. Shavinina said the laureates all talked about how these formative teachers taught in a way that was enthusiastic, inspiring and used "a playful spirit" that sparked their charges' enthusiasm for science.
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Jeffrey Miron & Elina Tetelbaum:
For the past 20 years, the U.S. has maintained a Minimum Legal Drinking Age of 21 (MLDA21), with little public debate about the wisdom of this policy. Recently, however, more than 100 college and university presidents signed the Amethyst Initiative, a public statement calling for "an informed and dispassionate public debate over the effects of the 21-year-old drinking age."The response to the Amethyst Initiative was predictable: Advocates of restricted access and zero tolerance decried the statement for not recognizing that the MLDA21 saves lives by preventing traffic deaths among 18- to 20-year-olds. The president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, for example, accused the university heads of "not doing their homework" on the relationship between the drinking age and traffic fatalities.
In fact, the advocates of the MLDA21 are the ones who need a refresher course. In our recently completed research, we show that the MLDA21 has little or no life-saving effect.
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When Chynna Haas was about 10 years old, her father asked if she had hopes of one day going to college."Yes," she answered.
"OK, then start saving," her dad told her.
Haas took that advice to heart and now is a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But making ends meet while coming from a family of modest means has not been easy.
"I'm kind of in this bubble where I don't qualify for a lot of money, but I don't have a lot of money -- so I'm basically on my own," said Haas.
To pay for school, Haas works 35 hours per week during the school year and about 60 a week over the summer. Even so, she figures she'll be about $23,000 in debt when she graduates next May.
It is these financial struggles -- as well as an awareness of what money can buy in terms of access to power and opportunities -- that prompted her in the fall of 2007 to found a student organization that gives a voice to working-class students at UW-Madison.
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I don’t think it would be possible to make things any more confusing for Milwaukee parents. Their children have become political pawns in a political chess match and it will surprise no one to learn that this group of poor, minority parents is being treated quite shabbily.
The politics that these people are caught up in is being run out of the State Capitol. Governor Doyle went out of his way to tuck a decidedly non-fiscal item into his budget that stands to affect all school choice children. Specifically, he added a long list of regulatory requirements that the schools participating in the Milwaukee’s school choice program would have to follow. Governor Doyle’s list of regulations is torn directly out of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association play book. After all, MTEA worked hard to deliver a totally Democrat state government and they expect a pay off for their effort. And to the glee of MTEA, Governor Doyle delivered.
Lest anyone be deceived, the aim of MTEA has always been to shut down the private school choice program. They want to get all of the kids back into public schools. Their hope is that these new regulations the Governor put in his budget will make it onerous enough for the choice schools that they will be forced to opt out of the choice program. There is logic to the MTEA reasoning given that choice schools operate on tiny budgets that are already strained.
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On a recent soggy morning, Mark Theissen covered a lot of ground fast in his first-grade classroom at Vadnais Heights Elementary School. He sprang from station to station, encouraging students to finish and focus -- sound words out, craft Lego configurations mathematically, grip Crayolas in the correct way.
He asked questions but didn't back-pat; he prodded but didn't praise. Nor did he carry the ball, merely offering assists. That's because when Theissen, 36, began teaching in 2000, the backlash against overpraising children was in full swing.
"I try to avoid complimenting them all the time," he said. "If they get strokes for everything, they expect it, they think everything they do is great -- and they don't want to push themselves. I think they need to develop self-drive and the need to perform for personal satisfaction, not recognition from others."
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AP:
Authors of an ambitious survey of hazing in colleges and universities have turned their attention to high schools and discovered that many freshmen arrive on campus with experience -- with 47 percent reporting getting hazed in high school.As in college, high school hazing pervaded groups from sports teams to the yearbook staff and performing arts, according to professors Elizabeth Allan and Mary Madden of the University of Maine's College of Education and Human Development.
The hazing included activities from silly stunts to drinking games, with 8 percent of the students drinking to the point of getting sick or passing out, they said.
Just like college students, high schoolers are susceptible to getting swept up in group activities and doing things they might not otherwise do, the authors said.
"That group dynamic can lead to the escalation where you have the hazing that's been reported in the news, some horrendous incidents," Madden said.
Among them: a "powder puff" event in which several seniors at a suburban Chicago high school were suspended or charged with roughing up junior girls, and junior varsity football players being sodomized by teammates at their New York high school.
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When Rupert Isaacson decided to take his autistic son, Rowan, on a trip to Mongolia to ride horses and seek the help of shamans two years ago, he had a gut instinct that the adventure would have a healing effect on the boy. Mr. Isaacson's instinct was rewarded after the trip, when some of Rowan's worst behavioral issues, including wild temper tantrums, all but disappeared.Now the publisher of Mr. Isaacson's book about the journey, "The Horse Boy," has a similar instinct about the market potential of his story, and is hoping for its own happy ending.
Little, Brown & Company, which released "The Horse Boy" on Tuesday, has a lot riding on its success: the publisher paid more than $1 million in an advance to Mr. Isaacson before he and his family had even taken their Mongolian trip.
Michael Pietsch, publisher of Little, Brown, said booksellers had already placed orders high enough to justify a first printing of 150,000 copies.
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A researcher at Ohio State University has developed a course on learning and motivation strategies that actually increases the odds that struggling first-year students will graduate.Students in academic difficulty who took the "Learning and Motivation Strategies" course in their first quarter at Ohio State were about 45 percent more likely to graduate within six years than similar students who didn't take the class.
Average-ability students who took the course were also six times more likely to stay in college for a second year and had higher grade point averages than those who didn't take the class.
"We are taking the students who are least likely to succeed in college and teaching them the skills they need to stay in school and graduate," said Bruce Tuckman, a professor of education at Ohio State, and creator of the course.
"Just taking this one class has made a big difference in how well below-average students do at Ohio State."
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Psychologists used to blame the unpleasant characteristics of adolescence on hormones.However, new brain imaging scans have revealed a high number of structural changes in teenagers and those in their early 20s.
Jay Giedd, at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, led the researchers who followed the progress of 400 children, scanning them every two years as they grew up.They found that adolescence brings waves of so-called 'brain pruning' during which children lose about one per cent of their grey matter every year until their early 20s.
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13 April 2009
John Robert Wooden, the revered UCLA basketball coach, used to tell his players: "If you fail to prepare, you are preparing to fail." According to the Diploma to Nowhere report last summer from the Strong American Schools project, more than one million of our high school graduates are in remedial courses at college every year. Evidently we failed to prepare them to meet higher education's academic expectations.
The 21st Century Skills movement celebrates computer literacy as one remedy for this failing. Now, I love my Macintosh, and I have typeset the first seventy-seven issues of The Concord Review on the computer, but I still have to read and understand each essay, and to proofread eleven papers in each issue twice, line by line, and the computer is no help at all with that. The new Kindle (2) from Amazon is able to read books to you--great technology!--but it cannot tell you anything about what they mean.
In my view, the 19th (and prior) Century Skills of reading and writing are still a job for human beings, with little help from technology. Computers can check your grammar, and take a look at your spelling, but they can't read for you and they can't think for you, and they really cannot take the tasks of academic reading and writing off the shoulders of the students in our schools.
There appears to be a philosophical gap between those who, in their desire to make our schools more accountable, focus on the acquisition and testing of academic knowledge and skills in basic reading and math, on the one hand, and those who, from talking to business people, now argue that this is not enough. This latter group is now calling for 21st Century critical thinking, communication skills, collaborative problem solving, and global awareness.
Neither group gives much thought, in my view, to whether any of our high school students have read one complete nonfiction book or written one serious research paper before they are sent off to their college remedial courses.
Of course, reading history books and writing term papers can seem so 19th Century, but as long as higher education and good jobs require people to be able to read and understand quantities of nonfiction material, and to write fairly serious academic research papers, memos, legal opinions, status reports, legislation and the like, it might be a good idea to try to do a better job of preparing our students for those tasks.
The College Board's writing test is a joke (there are lots of prep services helping students write their essays in advance), and the colleges themselves, through their admissions offices, are asking students for 500-word personal statements about their lives and their feelings. The NAEP writing test for 2011 (I was on the Steering Committee, but couldn't influence anyone) asks students for two 25-minute responses to prompts, perhaps on the level of "What is your opinion of school uniforms?" These efforts could hardly do more to convince high schools not to prepare students for actual academic writing tasks now or in their future.
The NAEP argument is that the college, business and military worlds want people who can "write on demand." That is, sit down for 25 minutes and respond to some short shallow prompt, as this "skill" is to be tested. I was a division training manager for Polaroid, back in the day, and it is my understanding that even if a boss comes to an employee and asks on Friday for a report Monday, it is not due in 25 minutes, for a start, but also any such report will be based on lots of knowledge of the subject, coming from doing the job over a period of time and having had time to gather information and reflect on what should be in the report. An impromptu skit may be just what the Second City ordered, but it is no recipe for critical thinking or academic (or business/military) expository writing.
There are a number of problems with trying to persuade high schools to assign complete nonfiction books and serious research papers. Many teachers, if they graduated from teacher education programs, may not have read that many books and may not have been asked to do research papers themselves, so they have little idea how to coach students to do them. But even those teachers who know enough and would be willing to assign serious papers, have no time to assign, guide or assess them. While almost all high schools would say they want students to be able to do academic essays, they set aside no time for teachers to work on them. More time is available in most high schools for tackling practice on the football field and layup drills on the basketball court than for working on term papers in English and history classes.
The 21st Century Skills people and the Core Knowledge people could get together, and agree, perhaps, that students need more knowledge than can appear on multiple-choice tests, and that they need to be able to write more than 500 words about themselves. Standardized testing will not prepare students for college, even if if provides some accountability for basic reading and math skills. And mooning over technology and industry will not raise standards for academic reading and writing, nor will it prepare students to skip remedial work at the college level.
Having published 846 history research papers by high school students from 36 countries since 1987, and having received thousands more as submissions, I know that high school students will rise to the challenge of real preparation for further education. Many of our authors have even been inspired to do long serious (8,000-13,000-word) papers on their own as independent studies, much as high school basketball players and other athletes spend long hours practicing on their own, because they are aware of the high standards that are out there.
If students are willing to meet higher standards, as so many have told Achieve and the National Governors' Association and the Great City Schools that they are, we should be willing to set them, if only to leave fewer of them condemned to remedial courses when they move on.
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®
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The carnage at Columbine High on April 20, 1999, prompted a swift and aggressive response around the U.S.Hundreds of millions of dollars flooded into schools after two seniors stalked the halls of Columbine in trench coats, killing 12 students and a teacher before committing suicide in the school library.
The money -- federal, state and local -- bought metal detectors, security cameras and elaborate emergency-response plans. It put 6,300 police officers on campuses and trained students to handle bullying and manage anger.
Ten years later, the money is drying up. The primary pot of federal grants has been cut by a third, a loss of $145 million. The Justice Department has scrapped the cops in schools program, once budgeted at $180 million a year. States are slashing spending, too, or allowing districts to buy textbooks with funds once set aside for security measures.
Money is so tight that the Colorado district that includes Columbine High, which reopened four months after the shootings, has canceled its annual violence-prevention convention. Miami can afford to send just half as many students as it used to through anger-management training. Many educators and security consultants find the cutbacks frightening.
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Charter schools offer hope for the future of our public education system. Charter schools promise options and opportunities for students and their parents that include diverse curricula -- arts and humanities, career and vocational choices. They have unique delivery systems -- distance learning, Montessori programs, special needs, and a mix of accelerated traditional and university courses. All meet high standards; all are accountable; all are independent and are defined as public schools, although with a new, expanded concept of public schools.There are 25 charter schools in Nevada, two in Carson City, several in Washoe, Douglas and Lyon counties. (Nationally there are over 3,000 charter schools and the movement is fast growing.) Charter school growth has not been as robust in this state as in others, but it continues to receive support from the Legislature. In this legislative session there is a bill (AB489), that if passed will create an 18th school district for charter schools and will enable this new school district to authorize new charters.
I serve on the Silver State Charter High School Board in Carson City. This charter, a public school sponsored by the State Board of Education, is a distance learning school in which students interact with their teachers online as well as meet with them in person. The state has identified the school as "exemplary." It is well managed and has a dedicated, licensed faculty and support staff. This charter school is a life-saver for over 500 kids and their parents.
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When her two young sons first started walking, Lisa Moricoli-Latham, a mother in Pacific Palisades, Calif., would gently push them over. For the sake of their development, she thought it would be better for them to crawl first. A physical therapist had told her so. She kind of enjoyed it, she says. "It gave me this sort of nasty thrill..."
Ms. Moricoli-Latham is featured in a video promoting "True Mom Confessions," a compilation of admissions of imperfect parenting that arrived in bookstores last week. Landing next month are Ayelet Waldman's "Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace" and Michael Lewis's "Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood," two memoirs that focus on the parental failings of the authors. In the fall, parenting Web site Babble.com will publish a compilation of essays from its most popular feature: a column called "Bad Parent."
Critiquing other people's parenting has become a sport for many mothers and fathers, aided by the Internet and the sheer volume of available expert advice. Now some parents, hoping to quiet the chorus of opinions, judgments and criticism, are defiantly confessing to their own "bad parenting" moments. They say that sharing their foibles helps relieve the pressure to be a perfect parent -- and pokes fun at a culture where arguments over sleep-training methods and organic baby foods rage on. Critics say it's the latest form of oversharing online -- the equivalent of posting your every move on Twitter or Facebook -- and only reinforces parents' worst habits.
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Jonathan Leake & Georgia Warren:
FACEBOOK users may feel socially successful in cyberspace but they are more likely to perform poorly in exams, according to new research into the academic impact of the social networking website.The majority of students who use Facebook every day are underachieving by as much as an entire grade compared with those who shun the site.
Researchers have discovered how students who spend their time accumulating friends, chatting and "poking" others on the site may devote as little as one hour a week to their academic work.
The findings will confirm the worst fears of parents and teachers. They follow the ban on social networking websites in many offices, imposed to prevent workers from wasting time.
About 83% of British 16 to 24-year-olds are thought to use social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, to keep in touch with friends and organise their social lives.
"Our study shows people who spend more time on Facebook spend less time studying," said Aryn Karpinski, a researcher in the education department at Ohio State University. "Every generation has its distractions, but I think Facebook is a unique phenomenon."
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Anne McCracken Ehlers's third-grade daughter was not doing well in accelerated fourth-grade math at Whetstone Elementary School in Gaithersburg. Becca was spending far too long on her assignments. She was confused. She was unhappy. Ehlers is a teacher herself, in the English department at Rockville High School. So she was polite when she asked for a change, but nothing happened.Finally, the 8-year-old in the drama decided that enough was enough, prompting this e-mail from her teacher to Ehlers on the afternoon of Feb. 5: "I just wanted to let you know that math bunch was held today from 1:00-1:30. Rebecca chose not to come. I asked her several times to please join us and she refused saying that she would come next week. We went over rounding, estimating, and adding decimals. We also reviewed word problems that include fractions. Please encourage Rebecca to take part in these extra math sessions. Thank you very much for your support."
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A new study conducted by researchers at Michigan State University suggests that playing video games helps foster the development of visual-spatial skills among middle school students. Cultivating the ability to think visually is crucial to excelling in fields like engineering and surgery, and the hand-eye coordination attained through gaming is increasingly important in our digital world. But the total lack of games tailored to girls could be providing boys with an academic advantage over their female counterparts.
"Girls are at a disadvantage by not having that three-dimensional experience," according to a statement by professor Linda Jackson, who led the three-year long study. "So when they get to medical school and they're doing surgery in the virtual world, they're not used to it."
It's hard to argue with Jackson's point. If you had to run out and buy a 12-year-old girl a game for Xbox 360, what title would you purchase? It can be argued that games like Halo 3 are not gender-specific, but they clearly attract a predominantly male audience, and are marketed accordingly. Phone calls to six video game retailers around the country to ask about games designed specifically for girls yielded nothing more than a handful of confused clerks.
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India's lowest castes, the Dalits, are known for their illiteracy and deep poverty. But in rural India, something remarkable is happening: Dalit children are attending elementary school. Peter Wonacott reports from India.
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Education pays. That's the lesson of study after study on the income effects of going to college and graduate school. In general, you make more money if you get a higher degree. Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz have written that since 1980, "[t]he increase in the relative earnings of college graduates and those with advanced degrees has been particularly large."
The studies that show this finding typically crunch broad swaths of data. They look at the census, or other large population samples, and show a positive correlation between income and years of education. This means that college and graduate school are generally a good bet. But it doesn't tell you that every single degree pays off financially at every single point in time.
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Legions of high school students equipped with No. 2 pencils have done battle with the SAT, but a new policy is easing the stress for college-bound teenagers. If they take the test more than once, they can send their favorite set of scores with applications and ignore the rest.Before the policy took effect last month, students had no option: All their SAT scores were reported when they applied to college.
The first time Gabby Ubilla took the test, she said, she fared well on the verbal section but was dissatisfied with her math score. The College Board's "score choice" policy will allow her to push the reset button with most colleges. "Now that I know what I need to study and what's on the test, I can study different types of math questions" without worrying about the old score, said Ubilla, 16, an 11th-grader at Dominion High School in Sterling.
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It seemed like more troubling evidence that kids these days engage in behavior they wouldn't want to write home about. Researchers recently found that one in five teenagers have shared nude or semi-nude photos of themselves by cellphone or online. That statistic has become a fixture in articles about "sexting" and its social and legal implications.But that number may be inflated, because the same teenagers who have engaged in such behavior could be the ones most likely to say they have done so in an online poll. To find out how many teenagers are sharing personal information over new media, researchers last year asked teenagers personal questions using one of those new media, skewing the sample.
"These kinds of samples select Internet cowboys and cowgirls," says David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, who has used the telephone for his studies of teens and online behavior. "These are more likely to be the kind of people who engage in this kind of activity." He guesses that online poll-takers might be two to four times more likely to send nude photos of themselves than the average teen.
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April Redding was waiting in the parking lot of the middle school when she heard news she could hardly understand: Her 13-year-old daughter, Savana, had been strip-searched by school officials in a futile hunt for drugs.
It's a story that amazes and enrages her still, more than six years later, though she has relived it many times since.
Savana Redding was forced to strip to her underwear in the school nurse's office. She was made to expose her breasts and pubic area to prove she was not hiding pills. And the drugs being sought were prescription-strength ibuprofen, equivalent to two Advils.
"I guess it's the fact that they think they were not wrong, they're not remorseful, never said they were sorry," April Redding said this week, as she and Savana talked about the legal fight over that search, which has now reached the Supreme Court.
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The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) within U.S. Department of Education released a study on April 3 of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides up to a $7,500 annual voucher for students from low-income families in the District of Columbia to attend private schools. Notably, the study found that students who won the lottery to receive the limited number of available vouchers had significantly higher reading achievement after three years than students who lost the lottery.David Harsanyi:Yet last month Congress voted to eliminate funding for the program. Columnists for the Wall Street Journal and the Denver Post, accompanied by the blogosphere, have alleged that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sat on the evidence of the program's success. The WSJ writes that, "... in November preliminary results were presented to a team of advisers who work with the Education Department to produce the annual evaluation. Since Education officials are intimately involved in this process, they had to know what was in this evaluation even as Democrats passed (and Mr. Obama signed) language that ends the program after next year." The Denver Post questions the Secretary's denial of having known the results of the study prior to congressional action, asserting that he was, "at best ... willfully ignorant."
As director of IES through November 2008, I was responsible for the evaluation that is at the center of the controversy. Given the established procedures of IES it is extremely unlikely that Secretary Duncan would have known the results of the study until recently.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan argues that we have an obligation to disregard politics to do whatever is "good for the kids."Well then, one wonders, why did his Department of Education bury a politically inconvenient study regarding education reform? And why, now that the evidence is public, does the administration continue to ignore it and allow reform to be killed?
When Congress effectively shut down the Washington, D.C., voucher program last month, snatching $7,500 Opportunity Scholarship vouchers from disadvantaged kids, it failed to conduct substantive debate (as is rapidly becoming tradition).
Then The Wall Street Journal's editorial board reported that the Department of Education had buried a study that illustrated unquestionable and pervasive improvement among kids who won vouchers, compared with the kids who didn't. The Department of Education not only disregarded the report but also issued a gag order on any discussion about it.
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More than 800 students gathered yesterday to hear Nobel prize-winning mathematician, John F. Nash, Jr. (American mathematician), share stories about his early life.Fascinating.Professor Nash, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in economic sciences in 1994 and whose life was dramatised in an Oscar-winning film, A Beautiful Mind, told a hall packed with students at the Polytechnic University yesterday how problem-solving fascinated him from an early age.
"From a very young age, when we would start working with addition and subtraction calculations ... when the standard kids were working with two digits, I was working with three or four digits ...
"I got some pleasure from that," the professor said.
Professor Nash is in Hong Kong for a week-long speaking tour. Yesterday's talk, organised by the university and the Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups, was designed to give students an opportunity to pose questions.
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n the 1990s, the Math Wars pitted two philosophies against each other. One side argued for content-based standards - that elementary school students must memorize multiplication tables by third grade. The other side argued for students to discover math, unfettered by "drill and kill" exercises.Related: Math Forum.When the new 1994 California Learning Assessment Test trained test graders to award a higher score to a child with a wrong answer (but good essay) than to a student who successfully solved a math problem, but without a cute explanation, the battle was on. New-new math was quickly dubbed "fuzzy crap." By the end of the decade, repentant educators passed solid math standards.
Yet the Math Wars continue in California, as well as in New Jersey, Oregon and elsewhere. In Palo Alto, parent and former Bush education official Ze'ev Wurman is one of a group of parents who oppose the Palo Alto Unified School District Board's April 14 vote to use "Everyday Mathematics" in grades K-5. Wurman recognizes that the "fuzzies" aren't as fuzzy as they used to be, but also believes that state educators who approve math texts "fell asleep at the switch" when they approved the "Everyday" series in 2007.
The "Everyday" approach supports "spiraling" what students learn over as long as two or more years. As an Everyday teacher guide explained, "If we can, as a matter of principle and practice, avoid anxiety about children 'getting' something the first time around, then children will be more relaxed and pick up part or all of what they need. They may not initially remember it, but with appropriate reminders, they will very likely recall, recognize, and get a better grip on the skill or concept when it comes around again in a new format or application-as it will!" Those are my italics - to highlight the "fuzzies' " performance anxiety.
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American schoolchildren need to be in class more -- six days a week, at least 11 months a year -- if they are to compete with students abroad, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Tuesday.It is indeed, time to move away from the current, 19th century agrarian model."Go ahead and boo me," Duncan told about 400 middle and high school students at a public school in northeast Denver. "I fundamentally think that our school day is too short, our school week is too short and our school year is too short."
"You're competing for jobs with kids from India and China. I think schools should be open six, seven days a week; eleven, twelve months a year," he said.
Instead of boos, Duncan's remark drew an unsurprising response from the teenage assembly: bored stares.
The former Chicago schools superintendent praised Denver schools for allowing schools to apply for almost complete autonomy, which allows them to waive union contracts so teachers can stay for after-school tutoring or Saturday school.
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When teacher Deena Randle took over a Portland, Ore., preschool class three years ago, behavior problems were so bad that "kids were bouncing off the walls, pushing and shoving, not listening -- it was wild," she says.You'd never know it now. When Ms. Randle calls out, "Eyes up here! I need your attention," one recent day, all 16 pairs of eyes in her class of 3- to 5-year-olds turn toward her. Beyond Ms. Randle's considerable teaching skill, she and school officials credit a fast-growing curriculum that builds deliberate training in self-control right into the daily routine.
Behavior problems among small children are a growing issue. The possible causes are many: pressure on teachers to stress math and reading over emotional skills; family instability; a decline in playtime; heavy use of child care; or a rise in learning problems such as attention-deficit disorder. Based on preliminary findings from a federal child-care study, discussed last week at a conference for the Society for Research in Child Development in Denver, the slight increase in behavior problems found in children who spent lots of early time in child care persists all the way to age 15, in the form of more impulsivity and risk-taking.
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Before the economy collapsed and thrift became a national watchword, a high school senior named Wei Huang was already scouring New York City for bargains, determined to support herself on the $10 a month she had left after she paid her rent.Ms. Huang, 20, one of 12 high school seniors named New York Times Scholars this year, immigrated to New York from China with her parents in 2007. But when her parents found the transition to American life too hard and returned to China last year, she decided to stay here alone, entranced by the city's streetscapes and the thought of attending college here one day.
She found a job at a florist paying $560 a month, and a house to share in Ridgewood, Queens, for $550. That leaves $10 a month, which she spends carefully on large bags of rice, chicken leg quarters at 49 cents a pound, and whatever vegetables are cheapest. Throw in the two free meals a day at school, a student MetroCard and the unexpected kind act -- her English teacher, for instance, gave her $100 -- and she manages to get by.
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They say there are two things you should never discuss on a first date or at a dinner party: religion and politics. But there has always been another subject that is so taboo that most people would rather arm wrestle over the other two than dare mention it.That subject is class.
Americans have never liked discussing class status. Unlike our founding cousins over in England where your status is something bestowed upon you by birth, here we believe in a little something called the American Dream; the idea that any person regardless of race, religion or socio-economic background can become anything they want to be, including president.
But unfortunately that Dream is becoming increasingly out of reach for millions of Americans.
Though Madoff and the Wall Street meltdown have forced some of us to finally become more aware of the world beyond our comfortable middle and upper-middle class bubbles, another issue has been lurking for years that threatens to bring about even greater financial Armageddon for our country down the road: America's burgeoning dropout epidemic. Before you decide that this issue has nothing to do with you (and therefore decide to move on from this blog post) consider these facts for a moment:
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Are you stuck on a college waiting list? Frustrating, isn't it? You feel disrespected, unlucky. But you are not alone. Some selective schools send more wait-list letters than acceptance letters. This year's economic uncertainties might produce the largest number of wait-listed applicants ever.
What can you do about it? I have some ideas. There is only one job other than newspapering that I would be even remotely qualified for: college admissions consultant. I have written a lot on the subject, including a guidebook. My clients would be careerist, overinvolved parents just like me. In truth, I couldn't take the pressure, but for fun, let's pretend that you are paying me $300 an hour to get you off that waiting list. Here's the plan:
Winning the wait-list game, like getting to the Final Four, is all about commitment. You must decide if a college that wait-listed you is still your first choice. If so, then go after it. (Pick just one school. No others allowed. Otherwise, someone will tell on you, and you will be dead.)
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FOR some young families who bought during the housing boom, having it all meant an affordable brood-sized apartment in possession of a good public school zone. But other parents in pursuit of real estate never even thought about schools. They assumed they would send their children to private school, often because they too had followed that route.
That was before the economic crisis. Now, as many would-be private school parents scramble for a good public school, there is a despairing recognition that in this respect, geography is destiny: With odds of being accepted into a popular school in another zone slimmer than ever, they either live in a neighborhood with a decent elementary or they don't.Renters and first-time buyers are in the best position to light out for better school zones with their young offspring. Meanwhile, landlocked owners -- unable or unwilling to sell in a down market or to spend around $33,000 a year to send their child to private school -- are panicking.
Trapped by their real estate, these parents are swallowing a bitter pill: had they sold their apartments a year ago, their profits might have financed an entire private school education.
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A U.S. Education Department study released yesterday found that District students who were given vouchers to attend private schools outperformed public school peers on reading tests, findings likely to reignite debate over the fate of the controversial program.
The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, the first federal initiative to spend taxpayer dollars on private school tuition, was created by a Republican-led Congress in 2004 to help students from low-income families. Congress has cut off federal funding after the 2009-10 school year unless lawmakers vote to reauthorize it.
Overall, the study found that students who used the vouchers received reading scores that placed them nearly four months ahead of peers who remained in public school. However, as a group, students who had been in the lowest-performing public schools did not show those gains. There was no difference in math performance between the groups.
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The commute is just long enough to be useful. Over the speakers comes the reflective voice of Harold Bloom, telling the businessman as he sits in traffic about the "The Art of Reading a Poem". Across town on the subway, a student spends the first day of spring break on a visit to the Guggenheim. And overhead, as a plane clears the skyline, a woman unpacks her Oprah edition of "Light in August".As a still life, the "Age of Mass Intelligence" is compelling. No one doubts that reality TV and gossip journalism increasingly share mental space with Joyce and Ravel. But intelligence is not a matter of pressing more pieces of culture into the great jigsaw puzzle of the mind. Unless operas and concerts are prophylactics against a churlish existence, we are not wising up. We are merely trying to buy wisdom.
This is an Age of Commodified Intelligence, a time of conspicuously consumed high culture in which intellectual life is meticulously measured and branded.
Equal measures success and hubris are to blame. By the end of the last century, exponential gains in science and in living standards made advancement seem inevitable, progress a matter of putting one scientific foot in front of the other. The intellectual horizon felt flatter, more intelligible, more accessible. A rise in intellectual exuberance is therefore unsurprising. Enrichment has certainly been on the march.
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There is a priceless exchange in the 20th episode of "The Sopranos"--the soap-opera about a New Jersey mobster whose stressful career brings him to the couch of a psychotherapist, Jennifer Melfi. Tony Soprano is annoyed with his teenage son, who has been moaning about the ultimate absurdity of life:Melfii: Sounds to me like Anthony junior may have stumbled onto existentialism.
Tony: F____' internet!
Melfi: No, no, no. It's a European philosophy.Quite so; one cannot blame the internet for everything. Existentialism has roots in the 19th-century thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, but it is most famously linked with restless French students in the 1960s and the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Sure enough, Anthony junior has been assigned Camus's novel "L'Etranger" in class. It also doesn't help his precarious state of mind when his grandmother bitterly tells him "in the end, you die in your own arms... It's all a big Nothing."
Well, plus ça change. It is not only on television that nihilist strains of existentialism continue to tempt young minds, and no doubt the minds of some grandmothers. Last autumn I taught a seminar about ideas of nothingness at the New School, a university in New York. Most of the students were already keen on Sartre and Camus, and among the many facets of nothingness that we looked at in science, literature, art and philosophy, it was death and the pointlessness of life that most gripped them. They showed a polite interest in the role of vacuum in 17th-century physics and in the development of the concept of zero. But existentialist angst was the real draw.
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A federal court may have changed the public discourse about the safety of vaccines in February, when it dismissed the theory that they cause autism. But vaccine damage is still the reigning paradigm for a rump caucus of thousands of parents who turn to physicians with a remarkable set of beliefs and practices in hope of finding recourse for their children's ills.
To sift through the 15,000-page record of the Autism Omnibus hearings and the decisions by the three special masters who considered the evidence is to peek into a medical universe where autism is considered a disease of environmental toxicity, rather than an inherited disorder, and where doctors expose children to hundreds of tests simply to justify the decision to "detoxify" them. In some cases, the judges found, doctors simply ignored data that didn't fit the diagnosis.
The court came down hard on the alternative medical practitioners who tailor their treatments to fit theories of vaccine damage. Among the doctors criticized was Jeff Bradstreet, a former Christian preacher in Melbourne, Fla., who has treated 4,000 children with neurological disorders. Among the children was Colten Snyder, whose case was one of those considered by the court.
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Success in life depends on intelligence, which is measured by I.Q. tests. Intelligence is mostly a matter of heredity, as we know from studies of identical twins reared apart. Since I.Q. differences between individuals are mainly genetic, the same must be true for I.Q. differences between groups. So the I.Q. ranking of racial/ethnic groups -- Ashkenazi Jews on top, followed by East Asians, whites in general, and then blacks -- is fixed by nature, not culture. Social programs that seek to raise I.Q. are bound to be futile. Cognitive inequalities, being written in the genes, are here to stay, and so are the social inequalities that arise from them.Intelligence and How to Get It.What I have just summarized, with only a hint of caricature, is the hereditarian view of intelligence. This is the view endorsed, for instance, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray in "The Bell Curve" (1994), and by Arthur R. Jensen in "The g Factor" (1998). Although hereditarianism has been widely denounced as racism wrapped in pseudoscience, these books drew on a large body of research and were carefully reasoned. Critics often found it easier to impugn the authors' motives than to refute their conclusions.
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There haven't been many upsets in this year's NCAA men's basketball tournament, as big name basketball powerhouses have dominated the hardwood. But evaluate the Sweet Sixteen based on the most important academic competition of studying for and obtaining a meaningful degree and you'll find that most of the top teams wouldn't even come close to cutting down the nets in Detroit early next month.
Higher Ed Watch's third annual Academic Sweet Sixteen examines the remaining teams in the NCAA men's basketball tournament to see which squads are matching their on-court success with academic achievement in the classroom. And for the third consecutive year, academic indicators produce a championship game match-up that isn't on anyone's radar: Purdue versus Villanova, with Purdue's 80 percent graduation rate trumping Villanova's 67 percent. The University of North Carolina and Michigan State, meanwhile, round out the Final Four with graduation rates of 60 percent.
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Wisconsin is not making as much progress raising student achievement and closing the gaps between have and have-not students as the nation as a whole, according to a report released Tuesday by the Education Trust, an influential, Washington-based nonprofit group.This pdf chart compares the 50 States and the District of Columbia.
As with other reports in recent years, the analysis showed the achievement of African-American students remains a major issue overall and that the gaps between black students and white students in Wisconsin are among the largest in the United States.
But it also analyzed the progress made in recent years and found Wisconsin lagging when it came to all racial and ethnic groups - and the news was generally not good across a wide range of measures.
Daria Hall, director of kindergarten through 12th-grade policy for the Education Trust, said, "What you see is when you look at any of the critical milestones in education - fourth-grade reading, eighth-grade math, high school graduation, collegiate graduation - Wisconsin and African-American students in particular are far below their peers in other states. This shows that while there has been some improvement, it is not nearly fast enough for the state's young people, communities or the economy as a whole."
For example, consider reading scores for fourth-graders in 1998 and in 2007 in the testing program known as the National Assessment of Education Progress. White students nationwide improved their scores seven points over the nine-year period (on a scale where average scores were in the low 200s), while in Wisconsin, the improvement was one point. For black fourth-graders, the nationwide gain was 11 points, while in Wisconsin it was four. And for low-income students in general, the national gain was 10 points, while in Wisconsin it was two points.
Wisconsin lagged the nation when it came to similar comparisons involving the graduation rate for black students, the percentages of black and Hispanic students graduating college within six years of finishing high school and the degree to which there had been improvements in recent years in the size of black/white achievement gaps.
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c Schools, he was seen by some liberal critics as a right wing-toady who had betrayed his old ideology by getting in bed with conservative school choice supporters. That view was always simplistic, as his bold call for reform of school choice, announced last week, proved once again. His new position – which could greatly alter the politics of school choice – raises many questions.
For starters, why the seeming flip-flop by Fuller? The answer is that he’s never been an ideologue. The old Fuller, after all, was a Democrat. He worked to get Democrat Tony Earl elected in 1982 and was rewarded with a position running the state’s Department of Employment Relations. And his commitment to public schools was personified by his work as MPS superintendent from 1991-1995, which included championing an über-liberal referendum to spend some $400 million to construct new schools, which was defeated by the taxpayers.
But Fuller was more often a critic of MPS, among other things proposing (in the late 1980s) to create an all-black school district that would be carved out of MPS. (That idea, too, went down in flames.) Fuller was always a supporter of alternative schools – or any schools, really – that would provide a good education for minority and low-income students. And he was always willing to work with business leaders and politicians of either party to accomplish his ends. For at least the last 10 years, that has meant mostly Republicans, as he embraced school choice as the solution to urban education in Milwaukee.
But the latest results of the five-year study on school choice, reported last week in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, showed there is no statistically significant difference in achievement between MPS and voucher schools. The schools are cheaper, but because of the partisan legislation battles over voucher funding, the program’s complicated funding formula awards most of the savings (some $82 million a year) to every place in the state but Milwaukee. This city’s property taxpayers are paying $45 million more annually for a program that appears to be having little positive impact on education.
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Rachel Bennett, 12, loves playing soccer, spending time with her grandparents and making jewelry with beads. But since she entered a magnet middle school in the fall -- and began receiving two to four hours of homework a night -- those activities have fallen by the wayside."She's only a kid for so long," said her father, Alex Bennett, of Silverado Canyon. "There's been tears and frustration and family arguments. Everyone gets burned out and tired."
Bennett is part of a vocal movement of parents and educators who contend that homework overload is robbing children of needed sleep and playtime, chipping into family dinners and vacations and overly stressing young minds. The objections have been raised for years but increasingly, school districts are listening. They are banning busywork, setting time limits on homework and barring it on weekends and over vacations.
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Growing up poor isn't merely hard on kids. It might also be bad for their brains. A long-term study of cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory. The findings support a neurobiological hypothesis for why impoverished children consistently fare worse than their middle-class counterparts in school, and eventually in life.
"Chronically elevated physiological stress is a plausible model for how poverty could get into the brain and eventually interfere with achievement," wrote Cornell University child-development researchers Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
For decades, education researchers have documented the disproportionately low academic performance of poor children and teenagers living in poverty. Called the achievement gap, its proposed sociological explanations are many. Compared to well-off kids, poor children tend to go to ill-equipped and ill-taught schools, have fewer educational resources at home, eat low-nutrition food, and have less access to health care.
At the same time, scientists have studied the cognitive abilities of poor children, and the neurobiological effects of stress on laboratory animals. They've found that, on average, socioeconomic status predicts a battery of key mental abilities, with deficits showing up in kindergarten and continuing through middle school. Scientists also found that hormones produced in response to stress literally wear down the brains of animals.
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Schools with cafeterias can reduce food wastage and save about 2.14 million disposable lunch boxes heading for landfills every year, Greeners Action project officer Yip Chui-man said yesterday.
Roughly 380,000 primary school students take lunch everyday, according to Yip, who said over one-third of 13,000 disposable lunch boxes went straight into the garbage, a February to March survey of 212 primary schools showed.
The survey suggested most primary schools want more funding to introduce canteens in a bid to cut down on waste.
With a mere 5 percent drop in the amount of disposable lunch boxes being junked, compared to seven years ago, Yip is calling on the Education Bureau and the Environmental Protection Department to set up regulations to control lunch-time garbage.
A resounding 95 percent of primary schools want public money to outfit them with a cafeteria.
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Clever children are saving themselves from being branded swots at school by dumbing down and deliberately falling behind, a study has shown.
Schoolchildren regarded as boffins may be attacked and shunned by their peers, according to Becky Francis, professor of education at Roehampton University, who carried out a study of academically gifted 12- and 13-year-olds in nine state secondary schools.
The study, to be published in the Sociological Review next year, shows how difficult it is for children, particularly boys, to be clever and popular. Boys risk being assaulted in some schools for being high-achievers. To conform and escape alienation, clever boys told researchers they may "try to fall behind" or "dumb down".
One boy told researchers: "It is harder to be popular and intelligent. If the subject comes naturally ... then I think it makes it easier. But if the subject doesn't come naturally, they work hard and other people see that and then you get the name-calling." This may in part explain boys' perceived underachievement, Francis said.
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Like most principals, Dave Levin believed that parental support was essential to a school's success. So when many families pulled their kids out of his struggling South Bronx charter school after its first year, he thought he was in trouble.Some parents called him and his teaching partner, Frank Corcoran, "crazy white boys." The two had recruited 46 fifth-graders, barely enough to start the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) Academy, and 12 failed to return for sixth grade. Test scores were somewhat better than at other local schools, but Levin's discipline methods weren't working. By March of his second year he believed that he had no choice but to close the school.
That was 1997. Twelve years later, the academy, saved by a last-minute change of mind, is considered a great success and a model for the 66 KIPP schools in 19 states and the District. Together, they have produced the largest achievement gains for impoverished children ever seen in a single school network.
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Saying it was time "for a fresh look" at the Philadelphia School District, Gov. Rendell and Mayor Nutter yesterday named two lawyers and an educator who was trained as an artist to the School Reform Commission.With the appointments, Rendell and Nutter have remade the five-member commission - established after the 2001 state takeover of the schools - signaling a new era in leadership of the 167,000-student district.
They announced their selections at a briefing packed with politicians and educational activists at the High School of the Future in West Philadelphia.
Rendell also announced he had nominated Sandra Dungee Glenn, the former commission chairwoman, to the state Board of Education.
"Your work is not done," Rendell told Dungee Glenn, who had been part of the district's governance for nearly a decade and attended the briefing.
Nutter named Robert L. Archie Jr., a partner at Duane Morris L.L.P., and Johnny Irizarry, director of the Center for Hispanic Excellence at the University of Pennsylvania, to four-year terms.
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Alan Zarembo and Kimi Yoshino :
Not even jail could keep Nanette Delp out of the surrogacy business.In 2006, she was arrested on allegations that she stole tens of thousands of dollars from couples who had paid her to find women to carry their babies, according to court records.
While she was behind bars awaiting trial in Sacramento, she continued to sign up more couples, using a new business name and a new website, state records show. Ultimately, she was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading no contest to seven counts of grand theft.
In the surrogacy industry, there are no consumer guarantees. A website is not a professional license -- in fact, there is no such thing. Even in California, widely considered the friendliest place in the world for people seeking surrogates, contracts tend to favor the broker agencies, not the clients.
Signing with an agency is frequently an act of faith, sometimes with bitter results. Often, aspiring parents must pay the entire bill -- $50,000 or more -- in advance. The money is nonrefundable, placing them at the mercy of the agency.
In recent days, Modesto-based SurroGenesis and Beverly Hills-based B Coming have been accused by attorneys or through lawsuits of misusing more than $2.5 million in clients' funds -- in some cases without ever helping couples choose a surrogate or conceive a child.
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The "education president" remained silent when his congressional Democrats essentially killed the Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) in the city where he now lives and works.
Of the 1,700 students, starting in kindergarten, in this private-school voucher program, 90 percent are black and 9 percent are Hispanic.
First the House and then the Senate inserted into the $410-billion omnibus spending bill language to eliminate the $7,500 annual scholarships for these poor children after the next school year.
A key executioner in the Senate of the OSP was Sen. Dick Durbin, Illinois Democrat. I have written admiringly of Durbin's concern for human rights abroad. But what about education rights for minority children in the nation's capital?
Andrew J. Coulson, director of the Cato Institute (where I am a senior fellow) supplied the answer when he wrote: "Because they saw it as a threat to their political power, Democrats in Washington appear willing to extinguish the dreams of a few thousand poor kids to protect their political base."
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Bonnie Miller Rubin & Tara Malone:
Anyone who has ever proudly carried Junior's papier-mache heart into the science fair--only to run into the cardiologist's kid with the medical school model--has seen what happens when the line between parental involvement and parental takeover gets crossed.Science fair season is in full swing, but meddling by mom and dad is not limited to budding scientists. It spans childhood, from the Cub Scouts Pinewood Derby to college essays.
Parents may try to help a struggling child, allow a perfectionist streak to get the best of them or get carried away by their own interest in the topic. But one way or another, dad's or mom's work gets turned in, giving the student an unfair advantage.
In response, several school districts are opting for more in-class assignments, studying the meaning of grades and flat-out reminding parents not to do their child's homework.
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I am an optimist, maybe too much of one. I believe, for instance, that our school dropout problem in many instances takes care of itself. Often teenagers leave school because they just cannot bear sitting in class. Eventually they mature, return to school, graduate and have productive lives. Data show that of the 30 percent of students who do not graduate on time, about half have acquired high school diplomas or General Educational Development certificates (GED) by their late 20s.Many people find my congenital sunniness on this and other issues annoying. My wife, who married me nearly 42 years ago, has always called me "the Pollyanna From Hell." She might have a point. Optimism can lead to error. For instance, I have found a impressive new report on dropouts that suggests my laissez faire attitude toward the issue might keep many young people from being yanked back into school in ways that would do them good.
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According to the results of a citywide survey released today, the parents of Illinois and Chicago public school students are poorly informed about the real problems and challenges faced by local students. The survey report, Parent Perceptions, Student Realities in Chicago Schools, released by the Citywide Education Organizing Campaign (the Campaign), a coalition of 13 community groups convened by Target Area DevCorp, explores ways to better engage parents in decisions regarding public education.Jason Knowles has more."It is imperative that parents play a leadership role in serious reform efforts affecting public education in Illinois," said Rev. Patricia Watkins, Executive Director of Target Area DevCorp. "In order to perform well, parents need accurate, timely information from unbiased sources. Unfortunately, the Campaign research suggests many parents are not being given all the information they need to make informed decisions about the educational futures of their children. We must unite ourselves now and create a remedy that speaks to this important matter because the price of ignorance on this issue is too high."
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Janine, Derek, Henry and Grandma Cate:
Mission statement: On this blog we explore why homeschooling can be a better option for children and families than a traditional classroom setting. We'll also explore homeschooling issues in general, educational thoughts, family issues, and some other random stuff.
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..A 16-by 10.875-inch rectangle containing precisely 174 square inches of possibility, made from two sheets of paper glued and bound together. Legendary magazine art director and Pentagram partner D. J. Stout calls the science of filling this box with artful compositions of type and images "variations on a rectangle." That is, in any given issue of a magazine--this one, for example--subjects and stories will change, but as a designer, you're still dealing with the same ol' blank white box.At Wired, our design team sees this constraint as our daily bread. On every editorial page, we use words and pictures to overcome the particular restrictions of paper and ink: We can't animate the infographics (yet). We can't embed video or voice-over (yet). We can't add sound effects or music (yet). But for all that we can't do in this static medium, we find enlightenment and wonder in its possibilities. This is a belief most designers share. In fact, the worst thing a designer can hear is an offhand "Just do whatever you want." That's because designers understand the power of limits. Constraint offers an unparalleled opportunity for growth and innovation.
Think of a young tree, a sapling. With water and sunshine, it can grow tall and strong. But include some careful pruning early in its development--removing low-hanging branches--and the tree will grow taller, stronger, faster. It won't waste precious resources on growth that doesn't serve its ultimate purpose. The same principle applies to design. Given fewer resources, you have to make better decisions.
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Chester E. Finn, Jr., Christina M. Hentges, Michael J. Petrilli and Amber M. Winkler [458K PDF]:
Of all the arguments that critics of school voucher programs advance, the one that may resonate loudest with the public concerns school accountability. Opponents say it's not fair to hold public schools to account for their results (under No Child Left Behind and similar systems) and then let private schools receive taxpayer dollars--however indirectly--with no accountability at all. We at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute don't buy that argument entirely. Private schools participating in voucher programs, tax-credit programs, scholarship programs and such are accountable to parents via the school choice marketplace. But we don't dismiss it, either. For both substantive and strategic reasons, we believe it's time for school choice supporters to embrace accountability, done right.For too long, school choice supporters have been stuck in a tired internal debate that hobbles the advance of vouchers and other worthy forms of school choice. Staunch free-marketers say "leave the schools alone and let the parents decide." More left-leaning critics say "if they won't play by the same rules as public schools don't give them any assistance at all." Yet this debate has become ever more archaic in a society preoccupied with student achievement, school performance, results based accountability, international competitiveness and institutional transparency.
It's time for the school choice movement to wake up--and catch up to the educational demands and expectations of the 21st century. It's paradoxical to us that even as the demands on K-12 education are escalating and important new forms of choice are emerging (not just vouchers for choice's sake but private schooling as a decent option for kids otherwise stuck in failing public schools, means-tested scholarships for low-income families, corporate and individual tax credit and deduction programs, specialized vouchers for disabled youngsters, and more) the accountability and-transparency discussion seems mired in the 1970s.
Let's restart the discussion. But what does "accountability, done right" looklike in practice? To find out, we sought the assistance of 20 experts in the school choice world--scholars, advocates, program administrators, private school representatives--to help us wrestle with the thorny issues that together embody the accountability question writ large. In this paper, we present their insights, opinions, and advice about how accountability for voucher programs should be structured. We then synthesize their views and offer our own take. Here's an overview.
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The school-voucher movement is under assault, as opponents have cut federal funding and states move to impose new restrictions on a form of school choice that has been a cornerstone of the conservative agenda for education overhaul.Vouchers -- which give students public money to pay private-school tuition -- have grown since a 2002 Supreme Court decision upheld their use in religious schools. About 61,700 students use them in the current school year, up 9% from last year, according to the Alliance for School Choice, a voucher advocate.
But earlier this month, Congress voted to stop funding a voucher program for the District of Columbia. Two other prominent voucher programs -- in Milwaukee and Cleveland -- are facing statehouse efforts to impose rules that could prompt some private schools to stop taking voucher students.
Pressure is mounting from other corners as well. President Barack Obama has said he opposes vouchers, and the stimulus bill he signed in February bars its funds from being used to provide financial aid to students attending private schools. On Wednesday, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that two state voucher programs, benefiting foster children and disabled students, violated Arizona's state constitution.
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As hard as it is, as much as I'd like to avoid it, it's time to have The Talk with my kids.I'm not talking about the birds and the bees. I'm talking about the need to cut spending -- to downsize my budget to reduce debt and gird for higher-than-expected college costs. I'm finding it surprisingly hard to communicate with my children, 18 and 21, about this. Based on my email and comments on our blog, TheJuggle.com, other parents are struggling too. Some spouses are fighting about how much to tell their children about financial setbacks. Others are just not saying why Daddy or Mommy has suddenly started driving the daily car pool.
In truth, the information we're trying so hard to hide or dress up for our kids probably doesn't matter nearly as much to them as how they see us behaving and feeling. "In conversations with kids of any age, how you say it is more important than what you say," says Ralph E. Cash, president of the National Association of School Psychologists.
In my own case, at least, providing well for my kids has gotten tangled up in my mind with showing my love for them. Separating the two is making The Talk harder.
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Legal Pad (Cal Law) via a kind reader's email:
That's the gist we got out of the First District's ruling today, in a constitutional challenge to Berkeley's way-complicated system for assigning students to different elementary schools, and to different programs in high school. The upshot: The appeals court unanimously said Berkeley's system is A-OK, despite Prop 209, because it doesn't consider a student's own race at all. Instead, all students in a neighborhood are treated the same -- and the way the neighborhood is treated is based on a bunch of things, like average income level, average education level, and the neighborhood's overall racial composition. The court's opinion calls things like this "affirmative policies" fostering social diversity. That term doesn't sound familiar at all.The Opinion 49K PDF
Perhaps this is what new Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad had in mind:
Still, Nerad has clearly taken notice. Given the new numbers, he plans to ask state lawmakers to allow Madison to deny future requests based on family income levels, rather than race, to prevent disparities from further growing between Madison and its suburbs.2009/2010 Madison Open Enrollment information. Much more on Wisconsin Open Enrollment here.
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There is no more A for effort at Prospect Hill Elementary School.Much more on standards based report cards here.Parents have complained that since the new grading system is based on year-end expectations, 4s are generally not available until the final marking period.
In fact, there are no more A's at all. Instead of letter grades in English or math, schoolchildren in this well-to-do Westchester suburb now get report cards filled with numbers indicating how they are faring on dozens of specific skills like "decoding strategies" and "number sense and operations." The lowest mark, 1, indicates a student is not meeting New York State's academic standards, while the top grade of 4 celebrates "meeting standards with distinction."
They are called standards-based report cards, part of a new system flourishing around the country as the latest frontier in a 20-year push to establish rigorous academic standards and require state tests on the material.
Educators praise them for setting clear expectations, but many parents who chose to live in Pelham because of its well-regarded schools find them confusing or worse. Among their complaints are that since the new grades are based on year-end expectations, 4s are generally not available until the final marking period (school officials are planning to tweak this aspect next year).
"We're running around the school saying '2 is cool,' " said Jennifer Lapey, a parent who grew up in Pelham, "but in my world, 2 out of 4 is not so cool."
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When Mateus Bontempo started preschool at a public school in Long Branch, N.J., he rarely talked and was so shy he'd stand in the classroom doorway until a teacher came to escort him inside.Anna Dasilva, his mother, says educators worked with Mateus on his social skills, sometimes taking him to other classrooms to meet new children. Four years later, the eight-year-old third grader plays trumpet, participates in math competitions and performs in plays. "They really helped him along," says Mrs. Dasilva, who thinks all children should have the same preschool opportunity.
So does President Barack Obama. As one of the main goals of his education plan, he wants to spend $10 billion to encourage states to offer universal preschool and expand federal early-learning programs like Head Start. The recently passed stimulus bill includes half that spending goal, or $5 billion, for Head Start and related early-childhood efforts.
But the current economic crisis may blunt state-level efforts to broaden access to preschool. Even in better times, building a "universal" preschool system would likely be a slow and expensive proposition, given the patchwork nature of what currently exists.
And as state and federal efforts target early learning programs toward disadvantaged students, some middle-class parents feel that their children are being left out. According to a recent study by Pre-K Now, families earning more than about $40,000 a year are already ineligible for free preschool in most of the 20 states that use income to determine eligibility.
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After school on a recent afternoon, Allonzo Trier, a sixth grader in Federal Way, outside Seattle, came home and quickly changed into his workout gear -- Nike high-tops, baggy basketball shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt that hung loosely on his 5-foot-5, 110-pound frame. Inside a small gymnasium near the entrance of his apartment complex, he got right to his practice routine, one he has maintained for the last four years, seven days a week. He began by dribbling a basketball around the perimeter of the court, weaving it around his back and through his legs. After a few minutes, he took a second basketball out of a mesh bag and dribbled both balls, crisscrossing them through his legs. It looked like showboating, Harlem Globetrotters kind of stuff, but the drills, which Trier discovered on the Internet, were based on the childhood workouts of Pete Maravich and have helped nurture his exquisite control of the ball in game settings -- and, by extension, his burgeoning national reputation.One of the Web sites that tracks young basketball prospects reports that Trier plays with "style and punch" and "handles the pill" -- the ball -- "like a yo-yo." He is a darling of the so-called grass-roots basketball scene and a star on the A.A.U. circuit -- which stands for Amateur Athletic Union but whose practices mock traditional definitions of amateurism.
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Like any successful negotiator, Randi Weingarten can sense when the time for compromise is nigh. On Nov. 17, after the Election Day dust had cleared, Weingarten, the president of both the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and its New York City affiliate, the United Federation of Teachers, gave a major speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. In attendance were a host of education-policy luminaries, including Weingarten's sometimes-foe Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City, Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern, National Education Association (NEA) President Dennis van Roekel, and Rep. George Miller of California.
"No issue should be off the table, provided it is good for children and fair for teachers," Weingarten vowed, referencing debates within the Democratic coalition over charter schools and performance pay for teachers -- innovations that teachers' unions traditionally held at arm's length.The first openly gay president of a major American labor union, Weingarten is small -- both short and slight. But she speaks in the commanding, practiced tones of a unionist. In speeches, newspaper op-eds, and public appearances, Weingarten, once known as a guns-blazing New York power broker, has been trying to carve out a conciliatory role for herself in the national debate over education policy. It is a public-relations strategy clearly crafted for the Obama era: an effort to focus on common ground instead of long-simmering differences.
Notably absent from the audience for Weingarten's post-election speech was D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. In the summer of 2007, Rhee, a Teach For America alumna and founder of the anti-union New Teacher Project, took office and quickly implemented an agenda of school closings, teacher and principal firings, and a push toward merit pay. These actions met with their fair share of outrage from both parents and teachers and especially from the local teachers' union. At the time of Weingarten's speech, Rhee and the AFT-affiliated Washington Teachers' Union (WTU) were stalemated over a proposed new contract for teachers.
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State Sen. Robert Ford is putting a new face on the long-running fight over whether to spend public education dollars to pay for private schools.To the dismay of his African American colleagues, the Charleston Democrat is hawking a bill that would give students a publicly paid scholarship or tuition grant to go to a private school.
So far, the push for school choice has had mostly white faces out front. But Ford, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor, is making the case that the students who would benefit most from a voucher-style program in South Carolina are African Americans who attend poorly performing schools.
He dismisses those who say his program would hurt already struggling public schools, framing the argument as a choice between protecting schools or giving children the lifeline they need to succeed.
"You're damn right I'm hurting public education, because public education is hurting our kids," Ford said.
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Becta has warned that a three-way communication breakdown between schools, parents and kids could have a harmful affect on individuals' educational performance.Unsurprisingly the UK government's technology agency, which published a new report today, was keen to underline what it sees as the importance of IT in the classroom to help improve parent dialogue with their children.
Becta surveyed 1,000 school kids aged seven to 14 and 1,000 parents to find out the level of ill communication that existed between adults and children when it comes to talking about school.
It found more than a third (37 per cent) of kids had difficulty speaking to their parents about their education, while 43 per cent of parents questioned admitted they struggled to get information from their child about their school day.
According to the Oh, Nothing Much report, eight in ten parents confessed they didn't know as much about their kids' day at school as they would like.
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An online debate at The Economist:: Professor Arthur Caplan:
Emmanuel and Robert Hart Professor of Bioethics and Director, Centre for Bioethics, Penn UniversityCraig Venter, Against:There are, it is increasingly said, plenty of reasons why people you know and many you don't ought to have access to your DNA or data that are derived from it. Have you ever had sexual relations outside a single, monogamous relationship? Well then, any children who resulted from your hanky-panky might legitimately want access to your DNA to establish paternity or maternity.
As we progress from the first human genome to sequence hundreds, then thousands and then millions of individual genomes, the value for medicine and humanity will only come from the availability and analysis of comprehensive, public databases containing all these genome sequences along with as complete as possible phenotype descriptions of the individuals.
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Over the next two weeks my eldest son will be rejected by some colleges, accepted by others. And then we'll likely have to make a hard choice, between cheap state schools and expensive prestigious ones. A colleague told me the best econ paper on this found it doesn't matter. From its 1999 abstract:We matched students who applied to, and were accepted by, similar colleges to try to eliminate this bias. Using the ... High School Class of 1972, we find that students who attended more selective colleges earned about the same [20 years later] as students of seemingly comparable ability who attended less selective schools. Children from low-income families, however, earned more if they attended selective colleges.
A 2006 NYT article confirms this:
Higher education experts have this message ... Pay less attention to prestige and more to "fit" -- the marriage of interests and comfort level with factors like campus size, access to professors, instruction philosophy. ... A 1999 study by Alan B. Krueger ... and Stacy Dale ... found that students who were admitted to both selective and moderately selective colleges earned the same no matter which they attended.
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I'm not trying to be a hypocrite. I have supported D.C. school vouchers. The program has used tax dollars well in transferring impoverished students to private schools with higher standards than D.C. public schools. But it has reached a dead end. Congress should fund the 1,713 current voucher recipients until they graduate from high school but stop new enrollments and find a more promising use of the money.That exasperation you hear is from my friend and former boss, the brilliant Washington Post editorial writer who has been eviscerating Democrats in Congress for trying to kill D.C. vouchers. We don't identify the authors of our unsigned editorials, but her in-your-face style is unmistakable and her arguments morally unassailable.
My problems with what is formally known as the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program are political and cultural, not moral. The program provides up to $7,500 a year for private-school tuition for poor children at an annual cost of about $12 million. Vouchers help such kids, but not enough of them. The vouchers are too at odds with the general public view of education. They don't have much of a future.
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You've been waiting for this moment for nearly 18 years: Your baby is almost ready for college. Your finances, not so much. The market's protracted free fall means that your college fund is now worth just a fraction of what you need. Your home's value has no doubt dropped sharply too - no help there. The only thing that keeps going up, you guessed it, is college tuition. So it's goodbye, Dream School U., hello, Central State, right?Wrong. While there's no denying times are tough, you have more options to help pay for that BA than you think. From targeting the right schools to taking advantage of new financial aid rules and tax breaks, you can get the price to a manageable level. These steps will ensure your kid ends up at a great school you can really afford.
1. Use your savings strategically
The typical 529 college savings plan of a high school junior or senior has dropped 12.5% in value over the past year. And if you didn't invest in an age-based portfolio that automatically shifted into safer investments as your child got older, your losses may be far worse. The big question before you: Should you try to hold off withdrawing money from the account to give your savings time to bounce back?
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Eric Sandow is poised to graduate with a geography degree in May, but career plans A and B - graduate school or a land-planning job - aren't panning out.So the 28-year-old University of Wisconsin-Parkside student is seriously considering a pursuit he's had in the back of his mind for years: the Peace Corps.
The troubled economy and President Barack Obama's call to service are helping create a surge of interest in the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps and other service opportunities. Meanwhile, the U.S. House last week approved the largest expansion of government-sponsored service programs in years.
Both Peace Corps and AmeriCorps provide modest compensation, student loan deferment and a small scholarship at the end that members can use to pay off debt or pursue more schooling.
"With the job market being the way it is, and my situation, I could definitely do that for two years, then see what the economy's like and in the process maybe help some people out," said Sandow, who has contacted a Peace Corps recruiter and is mulling over an application.
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It's about 9 a.m. on a Friday morning and history teacher Howard Wilen is lecturing on President Theodore Roosevelt's relationship with labor unions.Roosevelt, Wilen told the class, helped secure better work hours for coal miners but coal prices increased as a result.
Wilen's Advanced Placement U.S. history students have brokered a deal of sorts too, taking a tough class in high school that could earn college credit. For those who do well on the placement exam, many colleges will give credit for the AP history class, saving students money and time down the road.
Participation in AP courses has skyrocketed in recent years as many school districts have adopted open-enrollment policies, allowing any student willing to take on the work a chance to try the college-level courses.
But at Alamo Heights High School, where Wilen chairs the social studies department, admission remains restricted to top students. The district is rethinking that policy now.
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Douglas M. Newman:
It's irresponsible that Erick Ekholm doesn't mention well publicized research citing teen pregnancy being tied to racy TV in his article ('07 U.S. Births Break Baby Boom Record, Mar. 18, 2009).Lindsay Tanner:In the widely published Nov. 3, 2008 Associate Press news release by Lindsy Tanner, Rand Corp. published a study in the November 2008 issue of Pediatrics, linking TV viewing habits and teen pregnancy.
Paraphrasing the AP's press release and Anita Chandra, lead author of Rand's study, "teens who watched the raciest shows were twice as likely to become pregnant as those who didn't. Previous research found that watching lots of sex on TV can influence teens to have sex at earlier ages. Shows highlighting only the positive aspects of sexual behavior without the risks can lead teens to have unprotected sex."
Perhaps 2007 birth rates just might have been influenced by racy television shows teens are viewing - with parental consent and produced by adults in the name of corporate profits I might add.
Douglas M. Newman
Guilford, Connecticut
Cell: (203) 516-1006
Word count: 148 (after the hyphen in the last sentence, the word count is 166).
Groundbreaking research suggests that pregnancy rates are much higher among teens who watch a lot of TV with sexual dialogue and behavior, compared with those who have tamer viewing tastes.ABC-TV:"Sex in the City," anyone? That was one of the shows used in the research.
The new study is the first to link those viewing habits with teen pregnancy, said lead author Anita Chandra, a Rand Corp. behavioral scientist. Teens who watched the raciest shows were twice as likely to become pregnant over the next three years as those who watched few such programs.
Previous research by some of the same scientists had already found that watching lots of sex on TV can influence teens to have sex at earlier ages.
Shows that only highlight the positive aspects of sexual behavior without the risks can lead teens to have unprotected sex "before they're ready to make responsible and informed decisions," Miss Chandra said.
The more sexual content in television and magazines that teens are exposed to, the more likely they are to have sexual intercourse at an early age, a new study says.The University of North Carolina study, published in today's issue of the journal Pediatrics, concludes that white adolescents who view more sexual content than their peers are 2.2 times more likely to have sexual intercourse by the time they are 14 to 16 years old.
"Some, especially those who have fewer alternative sources of sexual norms, such as parents or friends, may use the media as a kind of sexual superpeer that encourages them to be sexually active," the study authors state.
And, as similar past studies have noted, "one of the strongest protective factors against early sexual behavior was clear parental communication about sex."
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Veterinary and medical professionals in Wisconsin said Friday that they have been warned about a potentially alarming practice among the state's rural youth: teenage girls ingesting livestock drugs to cheaply and discreetly end their unwanted pregnancies.So far, the professionals in animal and human health and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction are treating the reports of girls inducing their own abortions with prostaglandins - drugs commonly used by cow breeders to regulate animals' heat cycles - as rumors, because no cases have been officially confirmed by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.
But Anna Anderson, the executive director of Care Net Pregnancy Center of Green County in Monroe, maintains that she has identified at least 10 girls ages 14 to 18 in a three-county area who admitted to taking some form of cow abortifacient in the past year.
Anderson said the girls told her they took it because they found it to be a cheap and easy way to end their pregnancies without their parents finding out.
At the American Veterinary Medical Association, Assistant Director Kimberly May said Friday that her organization first heard the rumor about the teenagers in mid-February from the Wisconsin Veterinary Medical Association. Since then, the American Animal Hospital Association has also posted an advisory about the issue on its Web site.
Injected properly in livestock, prostaglandins shorten a heat cycle so a female animal can be bred again, May said.
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The rate at which teenage girls in the United States are having babies has risen for a second year in a row, government statistics show, putting one of the nation's most successful social and public health campaigns in jeopardy.The birth rate among 15- to 19-year-olds rose 1.4 percent from 2006 to 2007, continuing a rise that began a year earlier when the rate jumped 3.4 percent, reversing what had been a 14-year decline. Although researchers will have to wait at least another year to see whether a clear trend emerges, the two consecutive increases signal that the long national campaign to reduce teen pregnancies might have stalled or possibly even reversed.
"We may have reached a tipping point," said Stephanie J. Ventura of the National Center for Health Statistics, which issued the report today. "It's hard to know where it's going to go from here."
Other experts said the two-year data probably represent a trend and fit with other research showing a stall in the long drop in sexual activity among teens, as well as a decrease in condom use.
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Summit Middle School in Frisco, Colo., is a tobacco-free campus. Students who smoke cigarettes are suspended.But when a lunchtime crew of sixth-graders last fall started "smoking" Smarties, the tart, chalky candy discs wrapped in cellophane, lunchroom monitors and the school nurse were flummoxed.
The children didn't light the candy. They crushed it into a fine powder in its wrapper, tore off one end, poured the powder into their mouths and blew out fine Smarties dust, mimicking a smoker's exhale.
"It was freaky," says Corinne McGrew, a nurse for Summit School District. "My biggest concern was that they would aspirate the wrapper or a whole Smarties and it would be a choking hazard."
The fad at Summit Middle School died down after a few days and some harsh words from the lunchroom staff. But at other schools and across the Internet, "smoking Smarties," as the activity has been labeled, is gaining popularity. Some children have even taken to snorting it, all to the horror of parents, teachers and the 60-year-old company that manufactures the candy.
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A $4.1 million computer program designed to put Prince George's County students' grades, attendance and discipline data online has been plagued with errors in its first year, leading to botched schedules, an over-count of students and report cards that were delayed or, in some cases, simply wrong.Since going online Aug. 19, SchoolMax has crashed four times, once for 17 hours, said W. Wesley Watts Jr., the school system's chief information officer. Errors led to the duplication of 3,600 student identification numbers in the 128,000-student system; almost 300 were double-enrolled, leading to an inaccurate count of the student population. The delivery of report cards was delayed last semester, and some students have found they've gotten E's instead of A's. There have been problems doing things as straightforward as printing an alphabetical directory of students.
The latest hit is a six-day delay in the distribution of third-quarter progress reports, which will be distributed Thursday "due to the closure of schools because of snow on March 2 and a recent computer network outage," administrators said in a statement.
"There are a lot of issues with SchoolMax. Some of them are technical. Some of them are data-related," Watts told the school board. "If there is an issue, we need to know what that issue is. Telling us the grade book doesn't work, or it stinks, doesn't help me or our team."
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The first generation comes to America and struggles, but their children do better and the third generation does even better. That's how it's supposed to work. But scholars are trying to understand the "immigrant paradox," reports Education Week. The Americanized children of immigrants often do worse in school than the foreign-born generation, despite fewer English problems. American-born children have more health problems and are more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs and act violently.
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When Trevor Patzer was growing up in Ketchum, Idaho, he received an unusual offer from family friend Ric Ohrstrom: get admitted to New Hampshire's prestigious St. Paul's School, and Mr. Ohrstrom would foot the entire bill for his schooling there.Mr. Patzer was accepted and graduated three years later. He says the experience of someone offering to pay for his high-school education had a profound effect on him, and the gift was always in the back of his mind, even as he moved to college and into the work world.
After graduating from Brown University, Mr. Patzer, now 35, headed off to Andersen Consulting to be a systems integration consultant. "It was that or investment banking," he says. But it didn't take him long to realize that there was more to life than "coding someone else's computers," he says. "I knew it wasn't the best fit for me. I'm a people person." Still, he kept plugging away in consulting for two more years.
During one of his vacations in 1998, he decided to visit Nepal and see "the biggest mountain in the world." While there, Mr. Patzer had another life-changing experience and it had little to do with the majestic awe of Mount Everest. His tour guide for the trip was Usha Acharya, an author and the wife of Nepal's former ambassador to the United Nations. While they took in various historic sites together, she talked to Mr. Patzer about the plight of poor children in Nepal. He decided on the spot that he wanted to fund the education of a Nepalese child, in the same spirit Mr. Ohrstrom had funded his education. When Mr. Patzer asked Ms. Acharya if she knew of such a child, she spoke of a young girl who could benefit from his philanthropy.
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Ayub Abdi is a cute 5-year-old with a smile that might be called shy if not for the empty look in his eyes. He does not speak. When he was 2, he could say "Dad," "Mom," "give me" and "need water," but he has lost all that.He does scream and spit, and he moans a loud "Unnnnh! Unnnnh!" when he is unhappy. At night he pounds the walls for hours, which led to his family's eviction from their last apartment.
As he is strapped into his seat in the bus that takes him to special education class, it is hard not to notice that there is only one other child inside, and he too is a son of Somali immigrants.
"I know 10 guys whose kids have autism," said Ayub's father, Abdirisak Jama, a 39-year-old security guard. "They are all looking for help."
Autism is terrifying the community of Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, and some pediatricians and educators have joined parents in raising the alarm. But public health experts say it is hard to tell whether the apparent surge of cases is an actual outbreak, with a cause that can be addressed, or just a statistical fluke.
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"Education is so important that you cannot leave it to just one producer" - Sweden's former Education Minister, Per Unckel; Video by Lance Izumi. Izumi is co-author of "Not as Good as You Think: Why the Middle Class Needs School Choice".
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Garçon! A glass of red.Teenagers under the age of 18 could soon lose the right to drink wine in France because of a new bill that would tighten restrictions on alcohol sales.
The government of President Nicolas Sarkozy has drafted the bill, which would raise France's minimum drinking age for wine and beer to 18 from 16. The government says it would reduce a dangerous addiction among youths. A vote on the bill is expected to take place Wednesday at the National Assembly, where it is likely to pass, as Mr. Sarkozy's center-right coalition has a majority of the votes. A final vote in the Senate could take place in April.
France has had a liberal approach to alcohol thus far. Unlike most other countries, France has two drinking ages: Young people can drink or purchase wine and beer from the age of 16 and hard liquor from 18. Bartenders and shopkeepers don't usually check the identification cards of their customers, however young.
The powerful lobby of French winemakers says it won't try to derail the law, but thinks the government is making a big mistake. A stricter law, winemakers say, could reverse the age-old French custom of parents teaching children how to taste and appreciate wine at the family meal.
The risk of the new law, they say, is a habit of binge drinking imported from the U.S., where the drinking age is 21, and the U.K., where studies show one in four adult men and one in three adult women are heavy drinkers.
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A simple tool lets you opt out of advertising programs that track your Web clicksHundreds of thousands of Web sites show ads provided by Google, such as those little text ads that offer you everything from diets to dog training. Now Google has announced plans to track your clicks across all these sites, and then serve up ads personalized to your tastes. Visit a bunch of electronics-related sites, say, and the next site you view may show you an ad for the latest must-have gadget, even if you're now reading about ways to reduce stress through yogic meditations.
As Big Brother as it sounds, this is actually something that many advertising companies already do. But don't worry: There's a way to stop Google--and all the others--from prying.
First, Google has offered up several ways to change and reduce the info it stores about you. Using its new Ads Preferences Manager, you can delete any of the interests that Google believes you have, such as Entertainment or Travel. You can even add interests, if you happen to like personalized advertising.
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Create a budget and stick to it. Shop around for the best price. Pay off credit-card balances each month.Roy Kobert set aside his work as a bankruptcy attorney one Friday morning to teach these and other personal-finance lessons at Boone High School. He starts by showing the 11 students of this senior-level business class a Saturday Night Live sketch in which Chris Parnell touts a book called, "Don't Buy Stuff You Can't Afford." He garners laughs then delves into the basics.
The students listen up. Three say they already have credit cards. One says his dad makes him read books by personal finance expert Suze Orman. All say most of their friends have no idea how to manage money.
"They spend stuff on little stuff," says Hillary Haskins, a 17-year-old senior. "It adds up."
Mr. Kobert knows many adults never will master what he's teaching. But with the economy spiraling, interest in financial literacy is growing. Nationwide, a movement is spreading, with the emphasis on children and young adults who advocates want to reach before credit-card companies do.
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Congressional Democrats succeeded this week in crippling a school choice program operating in the nation's capital. For the last five years, the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships have made private schooling affordable to 1,700 poor children. Rather than reauthorizing the program for another five-year term, Democrats have all but ensured it will die after next year.House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey, Wisconsin Democrat, has asked D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to prepare for the return of voucher students to the city's broken public schools.
Sen. Ted Kennedy's office claims the senator opposed the voucher program from the start because it "takes funds from very needy public schools to send students to unaccountable private schools." (The House Budget Committee holds hearings today on the U.S. Education Department budget).
But just how needy are D.C. public schools? To find out, I added up all the K-12-related expenditures in the current D.C. budget, excluding preschool, higher-education and charter school items. The total comes to $1.29 billion. Divide that by the official enrollment count of 48,646 students, and it yields a total per-pupil spending figure of $26,555.
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Debra Gwartney was trying to escape a failed marriage when she moved from Tucson, Ariz., to Eugene, Ore., in the early '90s with her four daughters in tow. What the newly single mother didn't foresee was that, as she fled from her past to a different city and job, her relationship with her girls would be forever transformed, too. Enraged by the divorce and the move, her two oldest daughters, Amanda and Stephanie, soon ran away, seeking adventure on the streets and shelter in abandoned buildings with other teenagers like them.In "Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love," Gwartney relives the private desperation and shame of being a mother whose teenage daughters disappear for days at a time, only dropping in occasionally when no one else is home to stock up on supplies, leaving empty beer cans, fetid clothes, empty cigarette boxes and puddles of brilliant Manic Panic hair dye behind. As the girls' absences stretch to weeks and months, Gwartney recalls her frantic searches for them, first in Eugene and then in San Francisco. Along the way, she delves into her own culpability in the family dynamic that drove them away.
A former correspondent for the Oregonian and Newsweek, Gwartney wrote about her relationship with her eldest daughter, Amanda, in Salon back in 1998. Debra, Amanda and Stephanie also appeared together on "This American Life" in March 2002, in an episode tellingly titled "Didn't Ask to Be Born."
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In a speech on education this morning at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, President Obama repeats questionable statistics in support of his bid to expand the government's monopoly on education back to the womb, asserting that "$1 of early education leads to $10 in saved social services."Unfortunately he's referring to small-scale programs that involved extensive and often intensive total-family intervention rather than simple "early education."
In contrast to the- real-world school choice programs have been tested extensively with solid, random-assignment studies. Nine out of ten of these studies find statistically significant improvement in academic achievement for at least one subgroup.
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I was born in April. I used to have positive feelings about the month, notwithstanding T. S. Eliot's observation about its cruelty, although lately my birthday has become just another reminder of my rapid decline into irrelevancy and ruin. The other problem with April is that it is, by far, the worst month for college-bound high school seniors. Twelfth-graders are among my best sources, so I sense their pain and want to help ease it.Everything piles up in April. The month starts with often frightful news about which colleges accepted you and your friends, and which didn't. By the end of the month you have to decide which school should get your unrefundable deposit to reserve a place in its freshman class. Your favorite school may have wait-listed you, and you have to figure out what to do about that. Your Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate final exams are just a month away, and you don't want to embarrass yourself. It's spring, so your social life may be heating up, maybe for the first time in your adolescence if you were a bookworm like me. You have to worry about your parents interfering in all these important personal decisions. They will be concerned about how college is going to fit into the family finances, which don't look so good this year.
Here is my helpful guide to surviving April. Since it is still March, you have time to think and prepare. Let me know how it works for you.
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Obesity used to be a privilege reserved for wealthy people in wealthy countries. Now, however, this and other lifestyle diseases also afflict better-off people in poorer countries and poorer people in richer ones, particularly the United States. In 2007, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation--the biggest US philanthropy devoted solely to health care and health, with roughly $8 billion in assets--announced that it would award $500 million in grants to reverse the soaring incidence of US childhood obesity over the past 40 years. These grants support programs designed to raise levels of physical activity and improve nutrition for kids; to identify other levers for reversing the childhood obesity epidemic; and to determine, advocate, and implement the requisite policy and environmental changes. The foundation also focuses on issues such as improving the quality of the US health care system; increasing access to stable, affordable health care; strengthening the public-health system; and addressing the health needs of vulnerable populations.Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, who holds both an MD and an MBA, has been president and CEO of the foundation since late 2002. Matt Miller, a senior adviser to McKinsey, and Lynn Taliento, a principal in the Washington, DC, office, interviewed her at the foundation's headquarters,...
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It's not enough to just worry about how your revenues are going to look at the end of this quarter, and it's also not enough to be thinking about how your business is going to adapt to new realities in the coming years. We need to take a serious step back and also analyse the state of education, and what it's going to mean (and look like) in the future.None of us are going to have any modicum of success if we can't hire, develop and nurture the right talent out of school. It's also going to be increasingly challenging if those young people are not prepared for the new realities of the new workplace.
While in New York City recently for a series of meetings, I was introduced to a senior publishing executive who was intrigued by the topic of my forthcoming book (Six Pixels of Separation, expected in September). It turns out said executive has a son who is about to complete his MBA at an Ivy League school. The problem (according to this industry executive) is: "Where is he going to work? All of those jobs are either gone, or people with tons more experience are willing to do them for a fraction of what they were paying only six months ago." It's not an uncommon concern, and the obvious fear in this father's tone of voice is becoming much more apparent in conversations with other business professionals who have young adult children about to enter the workforce.
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Last summer, Lisa Bailey put down a $650 deposit each to send two of her children this year to Camp Saginaw in Oxford, Pa. She and her husband, Doug, planned to pay the $12,100 total in camp fees out of the bonus and stock options they expected from his job as finance director at a pharmaceutical company.Then, about six weeks ago, Ms. Bailey, a 41-year-old communications worker for a Philadelphia cancer center, withdrew her deposit. "Options aren't worth what they were, and bonuses are lower," she says. "We are just trying to get by paying for what we have to." The family has applied to the camp for financial assistance but hasn't heard back.
For many families, camp is an annual tradition that teaches kids independence, keeps them busy during slow summer months and gives parents some alone-time in the house. But in this year of recession, some parents are still on the fence about whether they can afford the expense. Other families are seeking discounts and cheaper alternatives -- or even skipping camp altogether.
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Parents have another way to control their teens' spending.Today, Discover Financial Services launched a new prepaid debit card aimed at teens. The card, dubbed the Current Card, works like a standard debit card. Parents can deposit funds directly onto the card at no cost from their credit card, bank account or through recurring deposits.
Sure, most teens could open their own checking account or parents could give them a debit card linked to their own checking accounts. But Discover's Mike Boush says the card eliminates the risk of overdraft fees, since teens can't spend more than is loaded into their account. "The spend is limited and the control is established by the parent," he says. Although the cards are aimed at teens, there are no eligibility requirements, so consumers can use the cards for other people, such as elderly parents or babysitters.
One drawback: Unlike credit cards, debit cards don't help users establish a credit history, which may hurt teens once they leave school and need to shop around for a loan.
Nevertheless, prepaid cards can be an alternative for parents who are worried about their teens accumulating thousands of dollars in credit-card debt. The cards generally allow parents to track spending online, block certain merchant categories such as bars and liquor stores and get email or text-message alerts when certain spending limits are reached.
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Travis Henry was rattling off his children's ages, which range from 3 to 11. He paused and took a breath before finishing.This was no simple task. Henry, 30, a former N.F.L. running back who played for three teams from 2001 to 2007, has nine children -- each by a different mother, some born as closely as a few months apart.
Reports of Henry's prolific procreating, generated by child-support disputes, have highlighted how futile the N.F.L.'s attempts can be at educating its players about making wise choices. The disputes have even eclipsed the attention he received after he was indicted on charges of cocaine trafficking.
"They've got my blood; I've got to deal with it," Henry said of fiscal responsibilities to his children. He spoke by telephone from his Denver residence, where he was under house arrest until recently for the drug matter.
Henry had just returned from Atlanta, where a judge showed little sympathy for his predicament during a hearing and declined to lower monthly payments from $3,000 for a 4-year-old son.
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Tax dollars intended to help parents improve their children's academic achievement have for years routinely been spent by Milwaukee public schools on everything from roller skating to bowling to water-park field trips, an investigation by Wisconsin Interest has found.Thousands of dollars were also spent on fast food, DJs, prizes, gift certificates and other goodies and giveaways. One school spent $556 in parental-involvement money to buy 250 pumpkins. Another spent $686 for a Milwaukee Bucks "Family Night."
Even when a clear academic purpose is evident, there are often questions about excess. Two schools, according to invoice descriptions, spent more than $17,000 to rent hotel and banquet-hall space for student recognition ceremonies.
Research, as well as common sense, has long shown that having engaged and informed parents is one of the most important ways to increase a child's success in school - and in life. Recognizing that, the federal government has funneled "parental involvement" tax dollars to many school districts across the country.
This year alone, schools run by MPS will receive $38.2 million from the federal government's Title I program. Like other large districts, MPS must set aside at least 1% for parental-involvement initiatives. The district goes further and sets aside 2% - which would amount to about $764,000 in the 2008-2009 school year.
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I am not a digital native. I was born 1975 and didn't send my first e-mail until I was a sophomore in college. I spent my junior year abroad, where e-mail came in handy and Internet porn would have, if only I had known about it. Don't get me wrong, I'm no Luddite. These days I love the Web like Joanie loves Chachi. (That's a pre-digital cultural reference for all you youngsters.) But I came of age at a time when most photographs ended up in a shoe box or a photo album. I never spent hours snapping self-portraits with a digital camera trying to get that perfect profile pic. And I always assumed that any pictures taken of me before I had graduated from college were forever safe from Google's tentacles.That was until Caroline, a high-school friend's little sister, joined Facebook. She scanned a batch of her pics from the late '80s and early '90s, posted them to her page, and tagged them--identifying the people in pictures and, if they were on Facebook, announcing to their entire networks that these photos had been uploaded. I signed on one day to find that she had posted a picture of our friend Dan in all of his 1990 glory: blousy white shirt, jeans that may or may not have been acid-washed, righteous mullet. He is standing beside Kim, who is wearing a floral print dress and a scrunchie around her wrist. Of course I left a comment, something to the effect of "HAHAHAHAHAHA!" Caroline commented back, ominously, "ur next braiker."
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The internet is an invaluable resource to self-educated learners. Below is a list of some of the most helpful sites out there including opencourseware materials, free libraries, learning communities, educational tools, and more.Including links to individual classes would make this list too long. So, I've added umbrella links that will help you find the material you need with just a little searching. For example, instead of listing individual classes, I've provided links to college opencourseware websites and course directories. From there, you'll be able to find the individual subjects you're interested in.
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Intel has announced the winners of the pre-college Intel Science Talent Search 2009.Philip Streich, 18, of Platteville, Wis placed third (home school) and Gabriela Farfan of Madison placed tenth (Madison West High School). Congratulations all around!The winner, Eric Larson, 17, of Eugene, Ore., was awarded a $100,000 Intel Scholarship. Larson won for his research project "classifying mathematical objects called fusion categories. Eric's work describes these in certain dimensions for the first time," Intel said in a statement.
Larson's background is described on this Siemens Foundation site, which discussed his project and his background last year. The Siemens post states that Larson, in addition to his mathematics prowess, is a piano player and a four-time winner of the Oregon Junior Bach Festival.
He is the son of Steven Larson and Winifred Kerner of Eugene, both members of the music faculty at the University of Oregon, according to the The Oregonian newspaper.
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When C. Stephen Guyer's three children were growing up, he told them stories about how his grandfather, a banker, lost all in the 1930s, but didn't lose sight of what he valued most. In one of the darkest times, Mr. Guyer says, when his grandfather was nearly broke, he loaded his family into the car and took them to see family members in Canada. The message: "There are more important things in life than money," says Mr. Guyer, of Littleton, Colo.The tale took on new relevance recently, when Mr. Guyer downsized to a small house from a more luxurious one. He was worried that his children, a daughter, 15, and twins, 22, would be upset. To his surprise, they weren't. Instead, their reaction echoed their great-grandfather's. "What they care about," Mr. Guyer says his children told him, "is how warm are the people in the house, how much of their heart is accessible."
As parents cut budgets, many are finding family stories have surprising power to help children through hard times. Storytelling experts say the phenomenon reflects a growing national interest in telling tales, evidenced by a rise in storytelling events and festivals. New research bears out the value of family stories, linking teens' knowledge of them to better behavior and mental health.
An Emory University study of 65 families with children ages 14 to 16 found kids' ability to retell parents' stories was linked to a lower rate of depression and anxiety and less acting-out of frustration or anger, says Robyn Fivush, a psychology professor. Knowing family stories "helps children put their own experience in perspective," Dr. Fivush says.
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The children of older fathers scored lower than the offspring of younger fathers on I.Q. tests and a range of other cognitive measures at 8 months old, 4 years old and 7 years old, according to a study released Monday that added to a growing body of evidence suggesting risks to postponing fatherhood.The study is the first to show that the children of older fathers do not perform as well on cognitive tests at young ages. Although the differences in scores were slight and usually off by just a few points on average, the study's authors called the findings "unexpectedly startling."
"The older the dads were, the slightly worse the children were doing," said Dr. John J. McGrath, the paper's senior author and a professor of psychiatry at the Queensland Brain Institute in Brisbane, Australia. "The findings fit in a straight line, suggesting there may be some steady beat of mutations happening in the dad's sperm."
Earlier studies have found a higher incidence of schizophrenia and autism among the offspring of men who were in their mid-to-late 40s or older when they had children. A study published in 2005 reported that 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds with older fathers scored lower on nonverbal I.Q. tests, as did the offspring of teenage fathers.
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The video below aired a couple of weeks ago, but it's a pretty good look at the drinking age debate, with lots of camera time for Amethyst Initiative founder John McCardell.(Note: If video isn't working below, you can watch it here.)
One quibble: At one point in the segment, Lesley Stahl suggests that the "conundrum" for policymakers is that raising the drinking age has reduced alcohol-related traffic fatalities, but may be contributing to fatalities associated with underage binge drinking.
But there may not be a conundrum at all. When I interviewed McCardell for the February issue of Reason, he explained why the argument that raising the drinking age is responsible for the 20-year drop in highway deaths doesn't hold water:
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Chris and Vickie Cox's health insurance never covered the full cost of treating their children's bone-marrow disorder. They relied on donations from their church, neighbors and family to plug the holes in their coverage, which ran as high as $40,000 a year.That safety net is now unraveling. The slumping economy is pulling down fragile networks of support that in better times could keep families with insurance but big bills from falling into a financial hole.
The three Cox children have a rare disease called Shwachman Diamond Syndrome, which curtails the production of bacteria-fighting blood cells and digestive enzymes needed to absorb nutrients properly. It can lead to life-threatening infection, bone-marrow failure or a deadly form of leukemia.
After Samuel, 7, Grace, 12, and Jake, 15, were diagnosed with the genetic disease earlier this decade, landing a job with good health benefits became the biggest priority for Mr. Cox. He gave up plans to run his own home respiratory-care business to work as a salaried medical-equipment salesman. In 2006, the family moved to North Carolina from Kansas City to be closer to specialists at Duke University.
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Our urban and suburban school districts are under tremendous pressure to be all things for all students. Special learning needs and unique learning styles complicate the process of providing each student with a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE).I have served in conventional schools and public charter schools in the Milwaukee area. I've found that every school has its strengths as well as its needs to improve.
I am currently a speech therapist in two Milwaukee public charter schools, the Downtown Montessori Academy and Inland Seas High School. Yes, charter schools are actually public schools. Yes, many public charter schools provide special education services for frequently occurring disabilities.
Teaching at a charter school allows me to think outside the box as I serve my students. Public charter schools can offer teachers greater autonomy to be innovative in the classroom. For example, if a school's reading program is not serving the needs of a classroom, charter schools have the autonomy to make changes as needs are identified. I think the ability to initiate necessary changes is where the "can-do" attitude of fellow teachers in charter schools comes from.
Many of Milwaukee's charter schools are based on cutting-edge curriculums that serve a variety of learning styles. One option is referred to as "project based," where students design and carry out a learning project of their particular interest. Another option is the student-led, teacher-guided Montessori environment. Direct instruction is a teacher-led style of learning that uses the repetition of very small, specifically targeted learning goals.
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Economic uncertainties prompt private institutions to admit more students in order to meet enrollment targets. But public schools, including UC and Cal State, are taking fewer students.It's not much solace for nervous college applicants awaiting acceptance or rejection letters, but there is plenty of anxiety this month inside college admissions offices as well.
Many colleges and universities in California and around the country report unprecedented uncertainty about how the depressed economy and state budget cuts could affect fall enrollments. As a result, they say they cannot rely this year on the admission formulas that typically help them hit enrollment targets without overcrowding dorms.
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via MMSDTV. Much more on the proposed Middle School Spanish immersion charter school here.
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Social workers feed in data on suspected abuse and neglect, and a decision pops out. Officials say the system eliminates the previous scattershot approach. Critics say the human element is slighted.There's no time to wash away the smell of sour milk from the baby's skin, so the mother wipes the dozing infant's face with the filthy bib hanging from his neck. "WIC cares about me," it reads, a reference to the free food program for poor women and children.
Social worker Ladore Winzer has just told the mother she will detain the 11-month-old boy and process him this night into foster care.
It's after dusk and the slim, efficient social worker is late returning home to her own family, stuck for now in the middle of this ghetto vista. Cars swerve around a lampshade; a graffiti tribute to a dead man runs across a cinder block wall; a hunched homeless man pushes his cart across the grass-tufted sidewalk.
"If I'm good, can I get my baby back in three months?" the mother asks, conjuring a weak smile in an attempt to seal the proposal.
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If you're paying for a college education, you may need an advanced degree to figure out how to claim federal tax breaks for those expenses.Congress in recent years has approved myriad special credits, deductions and other tax breaks for people paying tuition bills and related costs, and new breaks and twists were added in the recent stimulus bill.
The tax breaks can be generous, saving you as much as $2,500 per student. But how much you can claim depends on your income, the student's educational status and how and when you paid the bill.
"We call it complexification," said Jackie Perlman, an analyst at H&R Block's Tax Institute in Kansas City, Mo. "We hear people saying that they would like the tax law simplified, but simplifying means eliminating tax breaks. It's really simple when there's nothing to claim."
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Five high schools in each state that represent the qualities of a great schoolvia Prashant Gopal:
Kimberly Lynch, a redhead with freckles, had a keen interest in sunblock. So much so that she spent the past year developing a new method to test the effectiveness of sunscreens and recently submitted the results to a medical journal.The 17-year-old senior at Bergen Academies in Hackensack, N.J., is quite a bit younger than most scientists submitting papers to accredited medical journals. Then again, Lynch doesn't go to a typical public high school.
Bergen Academies, a four-year high school, offers students seven concentrations including science, medicine, culinary arts, business and finance, and engineering. It even has its own stem-cell laboratory, where Lynch completed her experiments under the guidance of biology teacher Robert Pergolizzi, a former assistant professor of genetic medicine at Cornell University.
The stem-cell lab, where students work with adult stem cells and mouse stem cells, and the nanotechnology lab down the hall, which has a high-powered scanning electron microscope, have hundreds of thousands of dollars of cutting-edge equipment.
"I've done internships at different labs in the area, and none of them had the equipment we have here," Lynch said.
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Wisconsin State Journal Editorial, via a kind reader's email:
Madison needs to get past its outdated phobia of charter schools.I continue to believe that our community and schools would be better off with a far more diffused governance structure, particularly in the management of more than $415,699,322 (current 08/09 budget) for a 24,189 student district. Related: the failed Madison Studio Charter School application.Charter schools are not a threat to public schools here or anywhere else in Wisconsin. They are an exciting addition and asset to public schools -- a potential source of innovation, higher student achievement and millions in federal grants.
And when charter schools do succeed at something new, their formula for success can be replicated at traditional schools to help all students.
That's what's starting to happen in Madison with the success of a dual-language charter elementary school called Nuestro Mundo. Yet too many district officials, board members and the teachers union still view charters with needless suspicion.
Madison's skeptics should listen to President Barack Obama, who touts charter schools as key to engaging disadvantaged students who don't respond well to traditional school settings and curriculums. Obama has promised to double federal money for charter school grants.
But Madison school officials are ignoring this new pot of money and getting defensive, as if supporting charter schools might suggest that traditional schools can't innovate on their own.
Of course traditional schools can innovate. Yet charter schools have an easier time breaking from the mold in more dramatic ways because of their autonomy and high level of parent involvement.
Several School Board members last week spoke dismissively of a parent-driven plan to create a dual-language charter school within a portion of Sennett Middle School. Under the proposal, Nuestro Mundo would feed its bilingual students into a charter at Sennett starting in the fall of 2010.
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A family's federal court victory over the Madison School District in a disability rights lawsuit could push forward efforts in the district to start a 4-year-old kindergarten program, the attorney representing the family predicts.On Feb 25, U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb ruled that the district violated the federal law governing children with disabilities when it refused to pay a portion of the private preschool tuition for a 4-year-old with a learning disability.
The child needed to participate in activities with non-disabled peers to improve his social behavior, according to the lawsuit filed by his parents.
The preschool was an appropriate setting for this to happen, and the district did not offer any alternatives, Crabb ruled.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires districts to provide disabled 3- and 4-year-olds with an appropriate preschool education at no charge
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Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
7 March 2009
In gymnastics, performances are judged not just on execution but also on the degree of difficulty. The same system is used in diving and in ice skating. An athlete is of course judged on how well they do something, but their score also includes how hard it was to do that particular exercise.
One of the reasons, in my view, that more than a million of our high school graduates each year are in remedial courses after they have been accepted at colleges is that the degree of difficulty set for them in their high school courses has been too low, by college standards.
Surveys comparing the standards of high school teachers and college professors routinely discover that students who their teachers judge to be very well prepared, for instance in reading, research and writing, are seen as not very well prepared by college professors.
According to the Diploma to Nowhere report issued last summer by the Strong American Schools project, tens of thousands of students are surprised, embarrassed and depressed to find that, after getting As and Bs in their high school courses, even in the "hard" ones, they are judged to be not ready for college work and must take non-credit remedial courses to make up for the academic deficiencies that they naturally assumed they did not have.
If we could imagine a ten point degree-of-difficulty scale for high school courses, surely arithmetic would rank near the bottom, say at a one, and calculus would rank at the top, near a ten. Courses in Chinese and Physics, and perhaps AP European History, would be near the top of the scale as well.
When it comes to academic writing, however, and the English departments only ask their students for personal and creative writing, and the five-paragraph essay, they are setting the degree of difficulty at or near the bottom of the academic writing scale. The standard kind of writing might be the equivalent of having math students being blocked from moving beyond fractions and decimals.
Naturally, students who have achieved high grades on their high school writing, but at a very low level of difficulty, are likely to be shocked when they are asked to write a 10-20-page research paper when they enter college. They have never encountered that degree of difficulty in their high school careers.
It would be as if math students were taking only decimals and fractions, and then being asked to solve elementary calculus problems when they start their higher education.
I was shocked to discover that even the most famous program for gifted students in the United States, the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, which began as a search for mathematically precocious youth, and has very challenging programs for bright students in the summer, when it comes to writing, has sponsored a contest for "Creative Minds" to have students do "Creative Nonfiction." This genre turns out to be like a diary entry about some event or circumstance in the author's life, together with their feelings about it.
This may fit very well with the degree of difficulty in many if not most high school English classes, but, even if is done well (and wins the contest, for example) it falls very short of the expectations for academic writing at the college level.
My main experience for the last thirty years or so, has been with high school writing in the social studies, principally history. I started The Concord Review in 1987, as the only journal in the world for the academic papers of high school students. My expectation was that students might send me their 4,000-word history research papers, of the sort which the International Baccalaureate requires of its Diploma students.
I did receive some excellent IB Extended Essays, and I have now published 846 papers by secondary students from 44 states and 35 other countries, but as time went by, the level-of-difficulty in submissions went up, as did the excellence in their execution.
These students who sent me longer and better essays, did so on their own initiative, inspired, by the chance for recognition, and the example of their peers, to raise the degree of difficulty themselves, even as each set of gymnasts, divers, and ice skaters do for the Olympics ever four years. I began receiving first-class 8,000-word papers, then 13,000-word papers from high school history scholars. The longest I have published was 21,000 words, on the Mountain Meadows Massacre in Utah in 1857, by a girl who had also taken time to be a nationally-ranked equestrian, an activity which also features a degree-of-difficulty measure. Students like the ones I publish find themselves mobbed when they get to college, by their peers who have never had to write a research paper before.
We now require too few of our high school students to read nonfiction books--another failure in setting an appropriate degree of difficulty--and we set the degree-of-difficulty level far too low when it comes to academic writing. We should consider giving up this destructive practice of holding the performance of our students to such a low standard, and one that disables too many of them for early success in higher education. Lots of our high school students can and will meet a higher standard, if we just offer it to them.
"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®
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Andrew Coulson, via a kind reader's email:
This week, education secretary Arne Duncan referred to DC public schools as a district with " more money than God." Perhaps he was thinking of the $24,600 total per-pupil spending figure I reported last year in the Washington Post and on this blog. If so, he's low-balling the number. With the invaluable help of my research assistant Elizabeth Li, I've just calculated the figure for the current school year. It is $28,813 per pupil.In his address to Congress and his just-released budget, the president repeatedly called for efficiency in government education spending. At the same time, the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate have been trying to sunset funding for the DC voucher program that serves 1,700 poor kids in the nation's capital. So it seems relevant to compare the efficiencies of these programs.
According to the official study of the DC voucher program, the average voucher amount is less than $6,000. That is less than ONE QUARTER what DC is spending per pupil on education. And yet, academic achievement in the voucher program is at least as good as in the District schools, and voucher parents are much happier with the program than are public school parents.
In fact, since the average income of participating voucher families is about $23,000, DC is currently spending about as much per pupil on education as the vouchers plus the family income of the voucher recipients COMBINED.
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In schoolyards across the country, all it takes to attract a crowd are the words "Fight! Fight! Fight!"But students are increasingly showing up with cameras to record the brawls, then posting the footage on the Internet. Some of the videos have been viewed more than a million times.
Now school officials and cyberspace watchdogs are worried that the videos will encourage violence and sharpen the humiliation of defeat for the losers.
"Kids are looking for their 15 megabytes of fame," said Parry Aftab, executive director of the Internet safety group WiredSafety.org. "Kids' popularity is measured by how many hits they get, how many people visit their sites."
Not all of the fights are spontaneous or motivated strictly by animosity. Some are planned ahead of time by combatants who arrange for their own brawling to be recorded.
Scores of bare-knuckled fights appear on YouTube or on sites devoted entirely to the grainy and shaky amateur recordings, which are usually made with cell phones or digital cameras.
In one recent video, two girls are egged on by friends and soon begin punching and choking one another. In other videos, a boy appears to be knocked unconscious by a well-placed haymaker, and a second boy spits out blood after suffering a blow to the mouth.
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WKOW-TV via a kind reader's email:
Parents of students at a Madison middle school worry about safety after a child was beat up in one the school's bathroom.Toki Middle School Restorative Justice Plan [82K PDF]:The incident happened last week Thursday.
According to a letter sent home to parents Monday, a group of students followed a male student into the boy's bathroom where another student assaulted him.
The group blocked entrance to the bathroom.
Surveillance cameras show the beating along with a group of witnesses cheering on the violence.
Toki [Map] Principal Nicole Schaefer says the school sent the letter to alert parents that the proper actions were taken and assure them the school is safe.
Schaefer would not tell 27 News if any students were suspended or if the victim is back in school.
Judicious discipline is a three pillared process set on a solid educational foundation. The first pillar is prevention through education and positive behavior supports; the second pillar is equity through fair and consistent consequences, and the third pillar is restoration through empathy, forgiveness and conflict resolution. The educational foundation that these pillars stand on is curriculum, instruction and assessment practices that are engaging, rigorous, culturally responsive, and individualized. In summary, kids who are engaged in learning are less likely to engage in misconduct.40 students ( 2008/2009 student population is 538) open enrolled out of Toki Middle school for the 2009/2010 term according to this Madison School District document. Much more on Toki here.
The backbone of our discipline policy is that all staff and students must be treated with dignity and respect, including those who harm others. We want everyone to know that misconduct is never acceptable, but always fixable. We will be warm but strict, and follow through with clear, fair and consistent consequences, but also encourage students to repair the harm they caused, earn forgiveness, and restore their reputations.
When a student engages in misconduct, we must care for two interests:Therefore, when a student engages in misconduct, he or she has two options:
- The student who misbehaves - We teach the student how to repair the harm, earn forgiveness, and restore his or her reputation
- All other students - We protect their health, safety, property, and opportunity to learn in an environment free from distractions
- Fix the harm (ex: Apology, Mediation, Repair or Replace, Community service, Extended learning)
- Accept a consequence (ex: Lunch detention, After school detention, In school suspension, Out of school suspension, Suspension alternatives)
The consequences for misconduct will vary, depending on how the behavior harms the health, safety, property and learning opportunities of other students. Although choosing to "fix the harm" may reduce or replace consequences for less harmful misconduct, behaviors that significantly or severely harm others will result in mandatory suspension days, up to a recommendation for expulsion.
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Bill Gates has been quoted as saying (before iPhone) "The computer of the future will be the cellphone". The implications for educators is profound, and should have us re-thinking are attitudes and acceptance of cell phones in the school. I am not blind to the fact that there are sometimes problems associated with the cellphone in the schools, but we should address those by addressing the behavior, not the object. We don't take away a pencil the student is tapping, we address the tapping behavior.As an administrator for highly at-risk students in a Cincinnati charter high school, I found it much easier to have students use Google SMS to look up words and definitions when they were struggling with reading than using a book. Very few of these students would be caught carrying books home, but they would use their cell phone to help complete assignments.
As we look at HOW cellphones may be implemented today, we also look at Adobe and their role. Captivate lets us easily create microcontent with quizzes, saved in Flash. Flash itself let's students see, create and engage with interactive simulations and games that can have a profound effect on learning. Many Web 2.0 sites are built in Flash, and extend the capabilities of the cellphone beyond what we would have thought possible a few years ago.
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Last fall I wrote a post on this blog titled Hacking Education. In it, I outlined my thoughts on why the education system (broadly speaking) is failing our society and why hacking it seems like both an important and profitable endeavor.The Economist recently published a piece on Frederick Taylor "The Father of Scientific Management", whose work had a significant effect on our current education system.Our firm, Union Square Ventures, has been digging deeply into the intersection of the web and the education business in search of disruptive bets we can make on this hacking education theme.
My partner Albert led an effort over the past few months to assemble a group of leading thinkers, educators, and entrepreneurs and today we got them all together and talked about hacking education for six hours.
The event has just ended and my head is buzzing with so many thoughts.
We will post the entire transcript of the event once the stenograpger gets it to us. That usually takes about a week. In the meantime you can see about ten or twenty pages of tweets that were generated both at the event and on the web by people who were following the conversation and joining in.
But here's a quick summary of my big takeaways:
1) The student (and his/her parents) is increasingly going to take control of his/her education including choice of schools, teachers, classes, and even curriculum. That's what the web does. It transfers control from institutions to individuals and its going to do that to education too.
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"Even before students learn to write personal essays." !!!
[student writers will now become "Citizen Composers," Yancey says.]
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Eschool News
NCTE defines writing for the 21st century
New report offers guidance on how to update writing curriculum to include blogs, wikis, and other forms of communication
By Meris Stansbury, Associate Editor:
Digital technologies have made writers of everyone.The prevalence of blogs, wikis, and social-networking web sites has changed the way students learn to write, according to the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)--and schools must adapt in turn by developing new modes of writing, designing new curricula to support these models, and creating plans for teaching these curricula.
"It's time for us to join the future and support all forms of 21st-century literacies, [both] inside...and outside school," said Kathleen Blake Yancey, a professor of English at Florida State University, past NCTE president, and author of a new report titled "Writing in the 21st Century."
Just as the invention of the personal computer transformed writing, Yancey said, digital technologies--and especially Web 2.0 tools--have created writers of everyone, meaning that even before students learn to write personal essays, they're often writing online in many different forms.
"This is self-sponsored writing," Yancey explained. "It's on bulletin boards and in chat rooms, in eMails and in text messages, and on blogs responding to news reports and, indeed, reporting the news themselves...This is a writing that belongs to the writer, not to an institution."
Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.
