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.
Category Archives: Lifelong Learning
Do College Students Get Well-Rounded General Education?
Before choosing where to go for college, high school students and their parents usually spend time shopping around, evaluating various colleges and universities. Many also consult the college rankings published by a number of magazines and organizations. Those lists rate schools on such criteria as tuition, student SAT scores, and teacher to student radio. This year, a new ranking considered a different criterion.
“What Will They Learn?” compares educational requirements, not academic reputation
What are students at this school expected to learn? That was the question posed by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni to 100 colleges and universities across the country. ACTA is an independent nonprofit dedicated to academic freedom, quality and accountability. Its president, Anne Neal, says ACTA wanted to compare educational requirements… not academic reputation.
The report looked at seven key subjects: math, science, composition, U.S. history or government, economics, foreign languages and literature. Courses in these key areas of knowledge are necessary for students to be successful in their careers and life, Neal says.
Human Resource
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.
Judge tells Chicago to let students transfer
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.
The Last Days of the Polymath
Edward Carr @ Intelligent Life:
CARL DJERASSI can remember the moment when he became a writer. It was 1993, he was a professor of chemistry at Stanford University in California and he had already written books about science and about his life as one of the inventors of the Pill. Now he wanted to write a literary novel about writers’ insecurities, with a central character loosely modelled on Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and Gore Vidal.
His wife, Diane Middlebrook, thought it was a ridiculous idea. She was also a professor–of literature. “She admired the fact that I was a scientist who also wrote,” Djerassi says. He remembers her telling him, “‘You’ve been writing about a world that writers know little about. You’re writing the real truth inside of almost a closed tribe. But there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who know more about writing than you do. I advise you not to do this.’ ”
Even at 85, slight and snowy-haired, Djerassi is a determined man. You sense his need to prove that he can, he will prevail. Sitting in his London flat, he leans forward to fix me with his hazel eyes. “I said, ‘ok. I’m not going to show it to you till I finish. And if I find a publisher then I’ll give it to you.’ ”
Eventually Djerassi got the bound galleys of his book. “We were leaving San Francisco for London for our usual summer and I said ‘Look, would you read this now?’ She said, ‘Sure, on the plane.’ So my wife sits next to me and of course I sit and look over. And I still remember, I had a Trollope, 700 pages long, and I couldn’t read anything because I wanted to see her expression.”
Diane Middlebrook died of cancer in 2007 and, as Djerassi speaks, her presence grows stronger. By the end it is as if there are three of us in the room. “She was always a fantastic reader,” he says. “She read fast and continuously. And suddenly you hear the snap of the book closing, like a thunder clap. And I looked at her, and she then looked at me. She always used to call me, not ‘Carl’ or ‘Darling’, she used to call me ‘Chemist’ in a dear, affectionate sort of way. It was always ‘Chemist’. And she said, ‘Chemist, this is good’.”
Carl Djerassi is a polymath. Strictly speaking that means he is someone who knows a lot about a lot. But Djerassi also passes a sterner test: he can do a lot, too. As a chemist (synthesising cortisone and helping invent the Pill); an art collector (he assembled one of the world’s largest collections of works by Paul Klee); and an author (19 books and plays), he has accomplished more than enough for one lifetime.
Cyberbullies hit primary schools
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’.
Boulder Valley open-enrollment process goes online
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.
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.
Related: Wisconsin part-time and full-time open enrollment.
No fit way to treat young athletes
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.
WISCONSIN CHARTER SCHOOL AWARDS HIGHLIGHT EXCELLENCE IN PUBLIC EDUCATION ACROSS THE STATE
Wisconsin Charter Schools Association (Video – What is a Charter School), via email [88K PDF]:
The Wisconsin Charter Schools Association (WCSA) has announced the winners of annual awards in four categories, as well as three career achievement honorees:
Charter School Person of the Year:
First Place: Dennis Conta
Second Place: Jan Bontz
Third Place: Lynne Sobczak & Kristi Cole (Milwaukee Public Schools)
Distinguished Merit: Robert Rauh (Milwaukee College Prep)
Distinguished Merit: Dr. Joe Sheehan and Ted Hamm (Sheboygan Area School District)
Charter School Teacher of the Year:
First Place: Victoria Rydberg (River Crossing Environmental Charter School, Portage)
Second Place: Erin Fuller (Carmen School of Science and Technology, Milwaukee)
Third Place: Kim Johnsen (WINGS Academy, Milwaukee)
Distinguished Merit: Darlene Machtan (Northwoods Community Secondary School, Rhinelander)
Distinguished Merit: Kirby Kohler (Rhinelander Environmental Stewardship Academy)
Charter School Innovator of the Year:
First Place: Department of Public Instruction (Project Based Learning Network)
Second Place: Danny Goldberg
Third Place: Seeds of Health Distinguished Merit: Valley New School (Appleton)
Overall Charter School of the Year: (overall winner, and 2 sub-categories within)
First Place (Platinum Award): Tenor High School (Milwaukee)
Seattle Race Based School Assignment Policy Legal & Community Issues
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.
Bracey’s last report–trashing our educational assumptions
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.
Are Too Many Students Going to College?
With student debt rising and more of those enrolled failing to graduate in four years, there is a growing sentiment that college may not be the best option for all students. At the same time, President Obama has called on every American to receive at least one year of higher education or vocational training. Behind the rhetoric lies disagreement over a series of issues: which students are most likely to succeed in college; what kind of college they should attend; whether the individual or society benefits more from postsecondary education; and whether college is worth the high cost and likely long-term debt. The Chronicle Review asked higher-education experts to weigh in.
Who should and shouldn’t go to college?
Alison Wolf: Anyone who meets the entry criteria and is willing to pay the fees should be able to go. In one sense, that just passes the buck–politicians then have to decide how much subsidy they are willing to provide. But it shouldn’t be up to them to decide how many people go, what they study, and why.
Charles Murray: It has been empirically demonstrated that doing well (B average or better) in a traditional college major in the arts and sciences requires levels of linguistic and logical/mathematical ability that only 10 to 15 percent of the nation’s youth possess. That doesn’t mean that only 10 to 15 percent should get more than a high-school education. It does mean that the four-year residential program leading to a B.A. is the wrong model for a large majority of young people.
Teaching at universities: A sense of entitlement
A COMIC novel, “Lucky Jim”, published by Kingsley Amis in 1954, portrayed life as a university lecturer as a grubby, tiresome slog, for all that it was shot through with humour. A somewhat drier study of university life has now found that academics no longer devote as much time to teaching as they did because of the bureaucratic burdens they are now forced to carry.
The study, by Malcolm Tight of Lancaster University, examined surveys of academic workloads since 1945. He found that university staff have worked long hours, typically 50 hours a week, since the late 1960s. Academics fiercely protect the time they spend on research. They also do more administrative work than in the past. As a result, he concludes, “the balance of the average academic’s workload has changed in an undesirable way… [making] it more difficult to pay as much attention to teaching as most academics would like to do.”
The finding suggests that new ideas for promoting better university teaching may be addressing only half the problem. On November 3rd Peter Mandelson, the business secretary, whose department’s wide remit includes universities, came up with a series of proposals for modernising them. He wants English universities to compete for students by publishing information on a whole host of issues, including how much direct contact they can expect to have with academic staff.
At N.J. school, Governor-Elect Christie’s remarks political, personal
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.
Will a longer school day help close the achievement gap?
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.
Universities are not there to spoon-feed
Peter Mandelson wants more contact hours in higher education, but this would reduce students’ ability to think for themselves
Both 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.
Education & Copyright
An Alabama High School Makes Literacy a Schoolwide Job
An Alabama school that is seen as a national model shows how to teach reading and writing in every subject.
[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 Tovani
Wordless Picture Books
Anno’s Journey, Mitsumasa Anno
Free Fall, David Wiesner
Tuesday, David Wiesner
Freight Train, Donald Crews
Zoom, Istvan Banyai
Content-Area Picture Books and Graphic Novels
Chester Comix series, Bentley Boyd
Just Plain Fancy, Patricia Polacco
Harlem, Walter Dean Myers
The Greedy Triangle, Marilyn Burns
High-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 Press
Source: Buckhorn High School
Parental anxiety is ruining playtime
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:
Wisconsin Governor Doyle’s “Race to the Top” Press Conference Today @ Madison’s Wright Middle School
Via a kind reader’s email. It will be interesting to see the intended and unintended consequences of the recently passed (47-46 in the Wisconsin Assembly) legislation. The news conference is scheduled for today @ 12:45p.m. at Madison’s Wright Middle School.
A reader mentioned that the Madison School District’s budget, has, in the past been approved by the City’s “Board of Estimates“. A return to this practice has its pros and cons. However, it may actually improve financial transparency, which, in my view has declined recently. Susan Troller’s recent MMSD budget article mentions a $350M 2009/2010 budget while the District’s budget site does not include the November, 2009 budget update 1.1MB PDF, which mentions a $418,415,780 2009/2010 Budget ($412,219,577 2008/2009 and $399,835,904 in 2007/2008).
Related: Doug Newman – For Debate: Who Picks School Board?. Greg Bump covered Doyle’s most recent press conference, which included a relevant discussion.
What’s Really up With Online Study Scholarships?
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.
Blame parents, not SATs, for inequities
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.
Community colleges: credit where it is due
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.
University-industrial complex corrupts meaning of education
According to the established wisdom, President Joseph Chapman‘s tenure at North Dakota State University has been a fabulous success. He’s the fellow who made everything grow – enrollments, sports, construction, institutional status, research and graduate programs to suit the quirkiest of tastes.
It was all so extravagantly admired that to ask whether any of it had anything to do with education would have seemed impertinent; indeed, over the past 11 years, Chapman himself never, so far as I know, uttered a single word about issues that are related to education, such as student quality, the dissolution of the core curriculum, the adjunctification of the faculty, and so on. That didn’t seem odd because no one else ever talks about them, either – not the governor, not the Legislature, not the State Board of Higher Education, not the trustees and not the leaders of other institutions.
It isn’t entirely their fault, because the anti-intellectualism that has always been a part of American life makes education a dangerous topic. Much, perhaps most, of the public expects education to yield a direct material payoff, and when it doesn’t, there are mutterings about public resources being wasted on something that is plainly “useless.”
“Dad, You Make it Sound Like Social Media is Ruining My Life! It’s Not!
Doonesbury covers the Facebook pulse….
Young, Talented and Unhappy Playing Basketball Overseas
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.
Has Federal Involvement Improved America’s Schools?
The No Child Left Behind Act is up for renewal. It costs taxpayers tens of billions of dollars every year but the Obama administration is giving its reauthorization less serious attention than most people pay to their phone bill. Families facing tight budgets actually consider cancelling a service that doesn’t benefit them. (“Do I really need a landline if I already have a cell phone?”) But ending federal involvement in k-12 schooling is not something that education secretary Arne Duncan is even willing to talk about.
Here are three good reasons why we need to have that conversation:
First, we have little to show for the nearly $2 trillion dollars spent on federal education programs since 1965. As the chart demonstrates, federal education spending per pupil has nearly tripled since 1970 in real, inflation-adjusted dollars — but achievement has barely budged. In fact, the only subject in which achievement at the end of high school has changed by more than 1 percent is science, and it has gotten worse.
This overall average masks some tiny gains for minority children, such as a 3 to 5 percent rise in the scores of African American 17-year-olds. But even these modest improvements can’t be attributed to federal spending. Almost all of the gain occurred between 1980 and 1988, a period during which federal spending per pupil actually fell. And the scores of African American 17-year-olds have declined in the twenty years since, even as federal spending has shot through the roof.
Wisconsin Legislature Passes (47-46!) Education “Reform” Bills: Teachers Cannot Be Disciplined or Removed using Test Data
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.
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.
The bill barely passed the Assembly on a 47-46 vote.
The Assembly session wrapped up at about 4 a.m.
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.
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).]
How best to add value? Strike a balance between the individual and the organization in school reform
Two developments in public education converged near the turn of the century to bring rare prominence to the issue of teacher policy. First, several researchers reported with confidence that teachers are the single most important school-level factor in students’ learning. Although schools could not influence the prior experience or socioeconomic status of a student, they could decide who the child’s teachers would be, and those decisions would have long-term consequences for students’ academic success. Meanwhile, school officials faced the challenge of replacing an enormous cohort of retiring veterans with new teachers. The demand for teachers in low-income schools was especially great.
Recognizing this pressing need for new, effective teachers, policy makers and administrators began to adopt strategies for recruiting, hiring, supporting, motivating, assessing, and compensating the best possible individuals. Their efforts succeeded in highlighting for the public the importance of teachers. Over the past decade, however, this sharpened focus on the individual teacher has eclipsed the role that the school as an organization can and must play in enhancing the quality and effectiveness of teachers and teaching. As a result, teachers are getting less support than they should and schools are less successful than they might be.
Race & Elite Colleges
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:
75% of Potential Military Recruits Too Fat, Too Sickly, Too Dumb to Serve
More than three-quarters of the nation’s 17- to 24-year-olds couldn’t serve in the military, even if they wanted to. They’re too fat, too sickly, too dumb, have too many kids, or have copped to using illegal drugs.
The armed services are willing to grant waivers for some of those conditions – asthma, or a little bit of weed. But the military’s biggest concern is how big and how weak its potential recruits have become.
“The major component of this is obesity,” Curt Gilroy, the Pentagon’s director of accessions, tells Army Times’ William McMichael. “Kids are just not able to do push-ups… And they can’t do pull-ups. And they can’t run.”
23 percent of 18- to 34-year-old are now obese, up from just six percent in 1987.
The group of potential enlistees is further slimmed by the “propensity to serve” among American youths, which social scientists say also is declining. According to Gilroy, research shows that about 12 percent of all U.S. military-eligible youth show an interest in military service.
How Tough Times Yield Model Children
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.”
Will State Education Reforms Get a Boost from Obama?
When, if ever, has a president of the United States inserted himself as directly into a legislative issue in Wisconsin as President Barack Obama is doing by visiting Madison on Wednesday? Obama’s visit to a middle school a couple miles from the State Capitol will focus on education – and it comes as Gov. Jim Doyle and others are ramping up their push for a series of educational reforms, including giving much of the power over Milwaukee Public Schools to Milwaukee’s mayor.
Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who will be with him, are firm supporters of many of the ideas being incorporated into the legislative package. Wisconsin clearly has to make changes such as these if it wants a decent chance at a share of the $5 billion in the Race to the Top money and other incentive funds Obama and Duncan will distribute over the next couple years.
It appears highly likely a special session of the Legislature will be called in November to consider the education proposals. The outcome is not clear.
The Greatest Generation (of Networkers)
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?
Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities
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.
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.
Schooling for Sustainability
SMART By NATURE: Schooling for Sustainability — a new book from the Center for Ecoliteracy. It describes the significance of the emerging green schools sector across the country.
Bringing Bioneers to Wisconsin
Green Schools National Conference
Tales From Planet Earth
Going GREEN?
Education / Evolving Disrupting Class
Network of EdVisions Schools
Audubon Center Charter Schools
NewSchoolsAmerica
Alliance for the Great Lakes
Collaborative for Sustainability Education
What’s NEXT?
Join the Green Charter Schools Network as an organization member and we’ll send you a FREE copy of SMART By NATURE. Click organization membership form.
“Smart by Nature is must reading for teachers, school administrators, parents, and the concerned public,” writes leading environmental educator David W. Orr. “It is an encyclopedia of good ideas, principles, and case studies of some of the most exciting developments in education.”
The Green Charter Schools Network and River Crossing Environmental Charter School are featured in Smart By Nature. “We’re all concerned about the environment and sustainability,” says Jim McGrath, GCSNet President. “That’s why we’re doing it — because, really, what could be more important than preparing young people for a sustainable future.”
Obama Shares Story About Malia’s Test Scores
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.
Teacher Performance: White House Press Gaggle by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan Aboard Air Force One 11/4/2009
Q Secretary Duncan, can you articulate why it’s important to link student achievement data with teacher performance, and also why it’s important to lift these caps on the charter schools?
SECRETARY DUNCAN: I’ll take one at a time. On the first one — it’s amazing, I always use the California example because California is a big state — California has 300,000 teachers — 300,000 teachers. The top 10 percent, the top 30,000 teachers in California, would be world-class, would be among the best teachers in the world. The bottom 10 percent in California, the bottom 30,000, probably need to find another line of work, another profession. And nobody can tell you of those 300,000 teachers who’s in what category. There’s no recognition.
And so what I fundamentally believe is that great teaching matters and we need to be able to identify those teachers who routinely are making an extraordinary difference in students’ lives. And to say that teaching has no impact on student performance, on student achievement, just absolutely makes no sense to me. It absolutely degrades the profession.
So the counterargument — so right now as a country basically zero percent of student achievement relates to teacher evaluation. I think that’s a problem. I also think 100 percent — if all you do is look at a test score to evaluate a teacher, I think that’s a problem. So zero is a problem; 100 is a problem. As a country, we’re here, we’re trying to move to a middle point where you would evaluate teachers on multiple measures — that’s really important — not just on a single test score, but, yes, student achievement would be a part of what you look at in evaluating a teacher.
And so whether it’s an individual teacher, whether it’s a school, whether it’s a school district, whether it’s a state, the whole thing as a country we need to do is we need to accelerate the rate of change. We have to get better faster. And there are teachers every single year — just to give you an illustration — there are teachers every single year where the average child in their class is gaining two years of growth — two years of growth per year of instruction. That is herculean work. Those teachers are the unsung heroes in our society. And nobody can tell you who those teachers are.
There are some schools that do that, not just one miraculous teacher or one miraculous student. There are schools that year after year produce students that are showing extraordinary gains. Shouldn’t we know that? Isn’t that something valuable? Shouldn’t we be learning from them?
And the flip side of it, if you have teachers or schools where students are falling further and further behind each year, I think we need to know that as well. And so we just want to have an open, honest conversation, but at the end of the day, teachers should never be evaluated on a single test score. I want to be absolutely clear there should always be multiple measures. But student achievement has to be a piece of what teachers are evaluated on.
And there’s a recent study that came out, The New Teacher Project, that talked about this Widget Effect where 99 percent of teachers were rated as superior. It’s not reality.
On your second point, on charter caps, I’ve been really clear I’m not a fan of charter schools, I’m a fan of good charter schools. And what we need in this country is just more good schools. We need more good elementary, more good middle, more good high schools. No second grader knows whether they’re going to a charter school, or a gifted school, or traditional school, or magnet school. They know, does my teacher care about me? Am I safe? Is there high expectations? Does the principal know who I am?
We need more good schools. And where you have — where you have good charters, we need to replicate them and to learn from them and to grow. Where you have bad charters, we need to close them down and hold them accountable. And so this is not let a thousand flowers bloom, this is trying to take what is being successful and grow.
And what I would say is if something is working, if you reduce — we talked about the graduation rate, if you’re doing something to reduce the dropout rate and increase the graduation rate, would you put a cap on that strategy? Would you ever say that we’re going to cap the number of students who can take AP classes this year? We’re going to limit the number of kids who take — we’re going to limit the number of kids that graduate? We would never do that.
So if something is working, if that innovation is helping us get better, why would you put an artificial cap on it? So let’s let that innovation flourish, but at the same time actually have a high bar and hold folks accountable.
So I was a big fan of successful charter schools in Chicago when I was a superintendent there, but I also closed three charter schools for academic failure. And you need both. Good charters are a big piece of the answer. Bad charters perpetuate the status quo and we need to challenge that.
Prior to the President’s visit, I emailed a number of elected officials and education stakeholders seeking commentary on the Wright Middle School visit. One of my inquiries went to the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association. I asked for a statement on charters in Madison. They declined to make a public statement, which, perhaps is a statement in and of itself.
Remarks by The President and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in Discussion with Students
1:05 P.M. CST
SECRETARY DUNCAN: Well, we’re thrilled to be here and this is a school that’s getting better and better, and you guys are working really, really hard. And we’ve been lucky. We have a President here who has got a tough, tough job. Being President is tough without the — he’s fighting two wars, a really, really tough economy — I like your shirt.
STUDENT: Thanks. (Laughter.)
SECRETARY DUNCAN: And what amazes me is that week after week, month after month, he just keeps coming back to education, and he’s absolutely passionate about it. He and his wife, the First Lady Michelle Obama, received great educations. Neither one was born with a lot of money, but they worked really hard and had great teachers and great principals and made the most of it. And now he’s our President. So it’s a pretty remarkable journey. The only reason he’s the President is because he got a great education.
So we’re thrilled to be here. He might want to say a few things, and looks like you guys have questions for him. And so we’ll be quick and we’ll open up to your questions.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, it is good to see all of you. Thanks so much for having us.
First of all, I’ve got a great Secretary of Education in Arne Duncan. So he helps school districts all across the country in trying to figure out how to improve what’s going on in the schools. And let me just pick up on something that Arne said earlier.
I was really lucky to have a great education. I didn’t have a lot of money. My parents weren’t famous. In fact, my father left when I was two years old, so I really didn’t grow up with a father in the house; mostly it was my mom and my grandparents. But they always emphasized education and they were able to send me to good schools, and by working hard I was obviously in a position to do some good stuff.
My wife, Michelle, same thing. She grew up on the South Side of Chicago. Her dad was actually disabled, he had multiple sclerosis, but he still worked every day in a blue collar job. And her mom didn’t work, and when she did she was a secretary. But because she worked really hard in school she ended up getting a scholarship to Princeton and to Harvard Law School and ended up really being able to achieve a lot.
So that’s the reason why we are spending a lot of time talking to folks like you, because we want all of you to understand that there’s nothing more important than what you’re doing right here at this school. And Wright has a great reputation, this school is improving all the time, but ultimately how good a school is depends on how well you guys are doing.
And the main message that I just wanted to deliver to you is, every single one of you could be doing the same kinds of things that Arne is doing or I’m doing or you could be running a company or you can be inventing a product or you could — look, anything you can imagine, you can accomplish, but the only way you do it is if you’re succeeding here in school. And we are spending a lot of money to try to improve school buildings and put computers in and make sure that your teachers are well trained and that they are getting the support they need.
So we’re working really hard to try to reform the schools, but ultimately what matters most is how badly you want a good education. If you think that somehow somebody is just going to — you can tilt your head and somebody is going to pour education in your ear, that’s just not how it works. The only way that you end up being in a position to achieve is if you want it, if inside you want it.
And part of the reason why we wanted to talk to you guys is, you’re right at the point now in your lives where what you do is really going to start mattering. My daughters are a little younger than you — Malia is 11, Sasha is eight — but when you’re in grade school, you’re playing — hopefully somebody is making sure you’re doing your homework when you get it, but to some degree you’re still just kind of learning how to learn.
By the time you get to middle school, you’re now going to be confronted with a lot of choices. You’re going to start entering those teenage years where there are a lot of distractions and in some places people will say you don’t need to worry about school or it’s uncool to be smart or — you know, all kinds of things. And, look, I’ll be honest, I went through some of that when I was in high school and I made some mistakes and had some setbacks.
So I just want everybody to understand right now that nothing is going to be more important to you than just being hungry for knowledge. And if all of you decide to do that, then there are going to be teachers and principals and secretaries of education who are going to be there to help you. So hopefully you guys will take that all to heart.
All right. Okay. Now we’re going to kick out everybody so I can let you — you guys can ask me all the really tough questions without having the press here.
END
1:09 P.M CST
Much more on the President’s visit to Madison’s Wright Middle School.
No Child Left Behind: New evidence that charter schools help even kids in other schools.
Opponents of school choice are running out of excuses as evidence continues to roll in about the positive impact of charter schools.
Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby recently found that poor urban children who attend a charter school from kindergarten through 8th grade can close the learning gap with affluent suburban kids by 86% in reading and 66% in math. And now Marcus Winters, who follows education for the Manhattan Institute, has released a paper showing that even students who don’t attend a charter school benefit academically when their public school is exposed to charter competition.
Mr. Winters focuses on New York City public school students in grades 3 through 8. “For every one percent of a public school’s students who leave for a charter,” concludes Mr. Winters, “reading proficiency among those who remain increases by about 0.02 standard deviations, a small but not insignificant number, in view of the widely held suspicion that the impact on local public schools . . . would be negative.” It tuns out that traditional public schools respond to competition in a way that benefits their students.
Call to punish parents who ‘steal’ places at best schools
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.
Teach Your Teachers Well
Susan Engel, via a kind Barb Williams email:
ARNE DUNCAN, the secretary of education, recently called for sweeping changes to the way we select and train teachers. He’s right. If we really want good schools, we need to create a critical mass of great teachers. And if we want smart, passionate people to become these great educators, we have to attract them with excellent programs and train them properly in the substance and practice of teaching.
Our best universities have, paradoxically, typically looked down their noses at education, as if it were intellectually inferior. The result is that the strongest students are often in colleges that have no interest in education, while the most inspiring professors aren’t working with students who want to teach. This means that comparatively weaker students in less intellectually rigorous programs are the ones preparing to become teachers.
So the first step is to get the best colleges to throw themselves into the fray. If education was a good enough topic for Plato, John Dewey and William James, it should be good enough for 21st-century college professors.
These new teacher programs should be selective, requiring a 3.5 undergraduate grade point average and an intensive application process. But they should also be free of charge, and admission should include a stipend for the first three years of teaching in a public school.
Once we have a better pool of graduate students, we need to train them differently from how we have in the past. Too often, teaching students spend their time studying specific instructional programs and learning how to handle mechanics like making lesson plans. These skills, while useful, are not what will transform a promising student into a good teacher.
Barb Williams is a teacher at Madison’s Hamilton Middle School.
Education reform long troubled in Washington, DC
When Kathy Patterson learned about Thursday’s D.C. Council hearing, during which Chairman Vincent C. Gray and Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee pelted each other with accusations of law-breaking and secret meetings, she had one immediate reaction.
“Here we go again,” said Patterson, a former council member and chairwoman of its education committee. It looked as if another attempt at public school reform was disintegrating in a hail of recriminations and rhetoric, with Rhee destined to join Franklin L. Smith, Lt. Gen. Julius Becton, Arlene Ackerman, Paul L. Vance and Clifford B. Janey, the school leaders who preceded her in the past two decades.
It was supposed to be different this time. The 2007 legislation that disbanded the old D.C. Board of Education and gave control of the school system to Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) was designed to minimize the push-and-pull of ward politics, making a single executive accountable. But Thursday’s hearing vividly illustrated that no legislation can completely account for the mix of personalities who come together to execute it.
NCES High School Longitudinal Study 2009
National Center for Educational Statistics:
The High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09) is a nationally representative, longitudinal study of more than 23,000 9th graders in 944 schools who will be followed through their secondary and postsecondary years. The study focuses on understanding students’ trajectories from the beginning of high school into postsecondary education or the workforce and beyond. What students decide to pursue when, why, and how are crucial questions for HSLS:09, especially, but not solely, in regards to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses, majors, and careers. This study features a new student assessment in algebraic skills, reasoning, and problem solving and includes, like past studies, surveys of students, their parents, math and science teachers, school administrators, as well as a new survey of school counselors. The first wave of data collection for HSLS:09 begins in the fall of 2009 and will produce not only a nationally representative dataset but also state representative datasets for each of ten states.
The study’s basic facts are here.
Notes and Links: President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan Visit Madison’s Wright Middle School (one of two Charter Schools in Madison).
Background
President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan will visit Madison’s Wright Middle School Wednesday, November 4, 2009, purportedly to give an education speech. The visit may also be related to the 2010 Wisconsin Governor’s race. The Democrat party currently (as of 11/1/2009) has no major announced candidate. Wednesday’s event may include a formal candidacy announcement by Milwaukee Mayor, and former gubernatorial candidate Tom Barrett. UPDATE: Alexander Russo writes that the visit is indeed about Barrett and possible legislation to give the Milwaukee Mayor control of the schools.
Possible Participants:
Wright Principal Nancy Evans will surely attend. Former Principal Ed Holmes may attend as well. Holmes, currently Principal at West High has presided over a number of controversial iniatives, including the “Small Learning Community” implementation and several curriculum reduction initiatives (more here).
I’m certain that a number of local politicians will not miss the opportunity to be seen with the President. Retiring Democrat Governor Jim Doyle, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Tony Evers, Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk (Falk has run for Governor and Attorney General in the past) and Madison School Superintendent Dan Nerad are likely to be part of the event. Senator Russ Feingold’s seat is on the fall, 2010 ballot so I would not be surprised to see him at Wright Middle School as well.
Madison’s Charter Intransigence
Madison, still, has only two charter schools for its 24,295 students: Wright and Nuestro Mundo.
Wright resulted from the “Madison Middle School 2000” initiative. The District website has some background on Wright’s beginnings, but, as if on queue with respect to Charter schools, most of the links are broken (for comparison, here is a link to Houston’s Charter School Page). Local biotech behemoth Promega offered free land for Madison Middle School 2000 [PDF version of the District’s Promega Partnership webpage]. Unfortunately, this was turned down by the District, which built the current South Side Madison facility several years ago (some School Board members argued that the District needed to fulfill a community promise to build a school in the present location). Promega’s kind offer was taken up by Eagle School. [2001 Draft Wright Charter 60K PDF]
Wright & Neustro Mundo Background
Wright Middle School Searches:
Bing / Clusty / Google / Google News / Yahoo
Madison Middle School 2000 Searches:
Bing / Clusty / Google / Google News / Yahoo
“Nuestro Mundo, Inc. is a non-profit organization that was established in response to the commitment of its founders to provide educational, cultural and social opportunities for Madison’s ever-expanding Latino community.” The dual immersion school lives because the community and several School Board members overcame District Administration opposition. Former Madison School Board member Ruth Robarts commented in 2005:
The Madison Board of Education rarely rejects the recommendations of Superintendent Rainwater. I recall only two times that we have explicitly rejected his views. One was the vote to authorize Nuestro Mundo Community School as a charter school. The other was when we gave the go-ahead for a new Wexford Ridge Community Center on the campus of Memorial High School.
Here’s how things happen when the superintendent opposes the Board’s proposed action.Nuestro Mundo:
Bing / Clusty / Google / Google News / Yahoo
The local school District Administration (and Teacher’s Union) intransigence on charter schools is illustrated by the death of two recent community charter initiatives: The Studio School and a proposed Nuestro Mundo Middle School.
About the Madison Public Schools
Those interested in a quick look at the state of Madison’s public schools should review Superintendent Dan Nerad’s proposed District performance measures. This document presents a wide variety of metrics on the District’s current performance, from advanced course “participation” to the percentage of students earning a “C” in all courses and suspension rates, among others.
Education Hot Topics
Finally, I hope President Obama mentions a number of Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s recent hot topics, including:
- Lift caps on charter schools.
- End mediocre School of Education teacher training [The University of Wisconsin School of Education Grade Distribution Reports can be found here.]
- Trace test scores to Education Schools
This wonderful opportunity for Wright’s students will, perhaps be most interesting for the ramifications it may have on the adults in attendance. Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman recent Rotary speech alluded to school district’s conflicting emphasis on “adult employment” vs education.
Wisconsin State Test Score Comparisons: Madison Middle Schools:
WKCE Madison Middle School Comparison: Wright / Cherokee / Hamilton / Jefferson / O’Keefe / Sennett / Sherman / Spring Harbor / Whitehorse
About Madison:
- City of Madison Demographics
- Madison Police Calls – reported by the MPD
Wisconsin teachers couldn’t be fired over test scores.- Should the President and his entourage have time for a meal, I recommend Himal Chuli, Campus Biryani or Curry in the Box
- Local Media Sites
UPDATE: How Do Students at Wright Compare to Their Peers at Other MMSD Middle Schools?
Madison School District: School Enrollment & Capacity Planning
Superintendent Dan Nerad [1.75MB PDF]:
Attached to this memo are several items related to enrollments, both actual and projections, as well as school capacities. We also include data on the enrollment data for students on the basis of their residence. Additional enrollment data will be provided in summary for the Board of Education at the December meeting.
The first attachment is a one-page overview summary of the past five years of enrollment history, the current year enrollment, and five years of projected enrollment by grade level. Overall, enrollment is generally flat for the district as a whole. However, the projections begin to show a slight increase starting in 2012-13 into 2014-15 at which time we will have increased enrollment to its highest level over the past ten years. By level, elementary and middle schools will continue to see increases in enrollment during the next five years whereas high schools will decline in enrollment.
The second attachment shows the detailed K-12 enrollment history and projections for each school. Historical data go back to the 1989-90 school year. Projections are through 2014-15. Projection years are boldfaced. The precision of projections at a school level and for specific grade levels within a school are less accurate when compared to the district as a whole. Furthermore, projections are much less reliable for later years in the projection timeline. Also, the worksheet reflects various program and boundary changes that were implemented and this accounts for some large shifts within schools and programs from one year to the next.
The third attachment contains two sheets – one for elementary and one for middle and high combined – and details the maximum capacities for each school, the current enrollment and capacity percentage, and the projected 2014-15 enrollment and capacity percentage. The sheets are organized by attendance area. Summaries are provided for levels. From the data, it appears elementary schools that have long term capacity constraints include Gompers,.Lake View, Sandburg, Allis/Nuestro Mundo, Kennedy, Orchard Ridge, and Van Hise. However, the schools that share a building with a middle school have access to other space. Among middle schools, Jefferson Middle School is the only school that may experience capacity concerns. None of the high schools are expected to have capacity issues for the foreseeable future.
College Competitiveness Reconsidered
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.
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.
Madison School District Strategic Plan: Nirvana by 2014/2015?
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:
- By 2014/2015 every Madison School District Student will be 100% proficient on the WKCE. “Flexible Instruction” is referenced for all students.
- The percentage of Madison School District high school students “participating in” advanced courses has declined over the past three years:
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% Related: WKCE Scores Document Decline in the Percentage of Madison’s Advanced Students.
- The percentage of students scoring “C” or above for all courses will rise from 45 to 64% (6th to 12th grade; 2008/2009 school year) to all students (100%) in 2014-2015.
Related:
- Are MMSD Programs Effective, Who Knows?
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. - West High Math teachers on curriculum reduction.
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!
The Best Writing in Educational Technology
The single best piece of writing in recent memory on the large scale structural forces shaping higher education and the role of technology in impacting these forces is the first chapter of The Tower and the Cloud, “The Gathering Cloud: Is This the End of the Middle?”
You can read Katz’s chapter here, or better yet go and get the whole volume. I’m focussing on Katz’s introductory chapter, but the whole book contains a series of wonderful essays that flush out the ideas raised by Katz in his chapter and are worth the investment to read.
Rarely does a piece of writing stick with me like Katz’s chapter has, one-year on from when I first picked up the Tower and the Cloud at last year’s EDUCAUSE conference. We live in such a fast world of micro information, tweets, disposable blog posts, quick YouTube videos, online presentations, and RSS feeds. We ed. tech. people like the new new, we like innovation, we are suspicious of the status quo and firmly believe that if technology has changed everything else it should (and can) change the academy as well.
Katz’s writing is an important antidote to the “right now” nature of much of our information consumption, communication and work in learning technology. He takes the time to tell the long story of the development and growth of higher education, and then situates the disruptive innovations slamming into our institutions as part of this larger story.
Public-school education Desert excellence: “horrified by the mediocrity and low expectations at American public schools”
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.
Charter Schools ‘Market Share’ Growing; Exceeds 20% in 14 Communities
Public charter schools’
presence in K-12 schooling continues to grow, according to the latest Top 10 Charter Communities by Market Share report by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. In fact, charters now enroll more than one in five public school students in 14 communities – including major cities like Detroit, St. Louis, and Kansas City.
Demand remains strongest in urban areas – and as a result, charter “market share” is growing rapidly in cities and adjacent suburbs, even while the overall number of students remains a modest portion of nationwide enrollment.
“Charter schools are working at scale in a growing number of American cities,” according to Nelson Smith, President and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “Chartering is becoming well-established as a key component of the public education delivery system,” he added.
E. D. Hirsch’s Curriculum for Democracy
A content-rich pedagogy makes better citizens and smarter kids.
At his Senate confirmation hearing in February, Arne Duncan succinctly summarized the Obama administration’s approach to education reform: “We must build upon what works. We must stop doing what doesn’t work.” Since becoming education secretary, Duncan has launched a $4.3 billion federal “Race to the Top” initiative that encourages states to experiment with various accountability reforms. Yet he has ignored one state reform that has proven to work, as well as the education thinker whose ideas inspired it. The state is Massachusetts, and the education thinker is E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
The “Massachusetts miracle,” in which Bay State students’ soaring test scores broke records, was the direct consequence of the state legislature’s passage of the 1993 Education Reform Act, which established knowledge-based standards for all grades and a rigorous testing system linked to the new standards. And those standards, Massachusetts reformers have acknowledged, are Hirsch’s legacy. If the Obama administration truly wants to have a positive impact on American education, it should embrace Hirsch’s ideas and urge other states to do the same.
Hirsch draws his insights from well outside traditional education scholarship. He started out studying chemistry at Cornell University but, mesmerized by Nabokov’s lectures on Russian literature, switched his major to English. Hirsch did his graduate studies at Yale, one of the citadels in the 1950s of the New Criticism, which argued that the intent of an author, the reader’s subjective response, and the text’s historical background were largely irrelevant to a critical analysis of the text itself. But by the time Hirsch wrote his doctoral dissertation–on Wordsworth–he was already breaking with the New Critics. “I came to see that the text alone is not enough,” Hirsch said to me recently at his Charlottesville, Virginia, home. “The unspoken–that is, relevant background knowledge–is absolutely crucial in reading a text.” Hirsch’s big work of literary theory in his early academic career, Validity in Interpretation, reflected this shift in thinking. After publishing several more well-received scholarly books and articles, he received an endowed professorship and became chairman of the English department at the University of Virginia.
Children’s Educational Records and Privacy
Joel R. Reidenberg, Jamela Debelak and others [Complete Report: 888K PDF]:
A Study of Elementary and Secondary School State Reporting Systems
Following the No Child Left Behind mandate to improve school quality, there has been a growing trend among state departments of education to establish statewide longitudinal databases of personally identifiable information for all K-12 children within a state in order to track progress and change over time. This trend is accompanied by a movement to create uniform data collection systems so that each state’s student data systems are interoperable with one another. This Study examines the privacy concerns implicated by these trends.
The Study reports on the results of a survey of all fifty states and finds that state educational databases across the country ignore key privacy protections for the nation’s K-12 children. The Study finds that large amounts of personally identifiable data and sensitive personal information about children are stored by the state departments of education in electronic warehouses or for the states by third party vendors. These data warehouses typically lack adequate privacy protections, such as clear access and use restrictions and data retention policies, are often not compliant with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, and leave K-12 children unprotected from data misuse, improper data release, and data breaches. The Study provides recommendations for best practices and legislative reform to address these privacy problems.
The Ever-Expanding U. of Phoenix
In the world of for-profit higher education, and higher education in general, the University of Phoenix has historically been viewed as the 800-pound gorilla.
As of Tuesday, it may be more like a 1,000-pound gorilla. As Phoenix’s parent company, the Apollo Group, reported its fourth quarter and annual earnings Tuesday, it announced that the university’s enrollment of degree-seeking students grew to 443,000 as of August 2009, up 22 percent from 362,000 in August 2008. The biggest growth in Phoenix’s enrollments, by far, came among students seeking associate degrees, which rose by 37 percent, to 201,200 from 146,500 in 2008.
About two-thirds of the university’s new students as of August are female, 27.7 percent are African-American, and about half are 30 or over.
The university attributed the sizable increases to a range of factors, including increased efforts in retaining students, expanded marketing, and the “current economic downturn, as working learners seek to advance their education to improve their job security or reemployment prospects.” Many community colleges and several of Phoenix’s major peers in for-profit career education, including Kaplan Higher Education (21.9 percent) and Corinthian Colleges, Inc. (24.4 percent), have reported sharp upturns in student enrollments this fall.
Number-Crushing: When Figures Get Personal
Everyone can agree that 1+1=2. But the idea that 7 is greater than 13 — that some numbers are luckier than others — makes no sense to some people. Such numerical biases can cause deep divisions.
And that is what happened earlier this month in Hong Kong. Property developer Henderson Land Development Co. made news for selling a condominium for $56.6 million, a price the developer called a residential record in Asia. But after that sale was announced, the property began making news for other unusual numbers. Henderson is labeling the floors of its property at 39 Conduit Road with numbers that increase, but not in the conventional 1-then-2 way. The floor above 39, for example, is 60. And the top three floors are consecutively labeled 66, 68 and 88.
This offended some people’s sense of order. At a protest Sunday against high housing prices, Hong Kong Democratic Party legislators expressed dissatisfaction with the numbering scheme’s tenuous relationship to reality. “You could call the ground floor the 88th floor, but it’s meaningless,” says Emily Lau. “When you say you live on the 88th floor, people expect you to be on the 88th floor, not the 10th floor or something.”
Illinois Prosecutors Turn Tables on Student Journalists
For more than a decade, classes of students at Northwestern University’s journalism school have been scrutinizing the work of prosecutors and the police. The investigations into old crimes, as part of the Medill Innocence Project, have helped lead to the release of 11 inmates, the project’s director says, and an Illinois governor once cited those wrongful convictions as he announced he was commuting the sentences of everyone on death row.
But as the Medill Innocence Project is raising concerns about another case, that of a man convicted in a murder 31 years ago, a hearing has been scheduled next month in Cook County Circuit Court on an unusual request: Local prosecutors have subpoenaed the grades, grading criteria, class syllabus, expense reports and e-mail messages of the journalism students themselves.
The prosecutors, it seems, wish to scrutinize the methods of the students this time. The university is fighting the subpoenas.
Parents banned from watching their children in playgrounds… in case they are paedophiles Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1223528/Parents-banned-supervising-children-playgrounds–case-paedophiles.html#ixzz0VI3l2cFH
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.
Debating the Merits of Leaving High School Early to Go to College
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.”
Paul Solman Answers Students’ Economic Questions
Economics correspondent Paul Solman takes his Business Desk blog inside classrooms across the United States to respond to high school students’ most pressing questions about Wall Street, the recession and unemployment.
Question: How does it happen that the whole world is in a recession? –Kavion, senior, Central High School, Phoenix, Ariz.
Paul Solman: The whole world isn’t in a recession. China is growing; so is India; so is Brazil. Among them, those three countries alone have something like two-thirds our GDP and maybe nine times as many people as we do.
As to the parts of the world that are in recession — largely in Europe — it looks like the reason is because their citizens borrowed and spent “beyond their means.”
In Google we trust? Think again
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:
INTRODUCTION by Theodor Sizer
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®
Success – Parent’s Advocacy Makes a Difference in Denver, North Carolina
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 Hewitt
I 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.
Schools putting the moves on hold
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.
Pervasive PowerPoint Culture: Former Detroit Bailout Czar Looks Back
Steven Rattner:
Everyone knew Detroit’s reputation for insular, slow-moving cultures. Even by that low standard, I was shocked by the stunningly poor management that we found, particularly at GM, where we encountered, among other things, perhaps the weakest finance operation any of us had ever seen in a major company.
For example, under the previous administration’s loan agreements, Treasury was to approve every GM transaction of more than $100 million that was outside of the normal course. From my first day at Treasury, PowerPoint decks would arrive from GM (we quickly concluded that no decision seemed to be made at GM without one) requesting approvals. We were appalled by the absence of sound analysis provided to justify these expenditures.
The cultural deficiencies were equally stunning. At GM’s Renaissance Center headquarters, the top brass were sequestered on the uppermost floor, behind locked and guarded glass doors. Executives housed on that floor had elevator cards that allowed them to descend to their private garage without stopping at any of the intervening floors (no mixing with the drones).
Dyslexia Awareness Videos & We can and must help kids with dyslexia
To promote greater knowledge and understanding of dyslexia and related learning disabilities, The International Dyslexia Association (IDA) designated the month of October as National Dyslexia Awareness Month. “Awareness is key with learning disabilities because if identified early enough, their impacts can be minimized through intervention and effective teaching.”
In order to increase awareness of dyslexia, Wisconsin Literacy posted two videos on its website created by Sun Prairie Cable Access. You will need Quicktime installed on your computer to view the video files. Download it for free here: www.apple.com/quicktime/download.
Living and Learning with Dyslexia: Hope and Possibilities
(Time 36:59)
Dr. Julie Gocey leads a panel discussion on dyslexia with Cheryl Ward (Wisconsin Branch of the International Dyslexia Association), Layla Coleman (Wisconsin Literacy, Inc.), Pam Heyde (Dyslexia Reading Therapist) and Margery Katz (Dyslexia Reading Therapist). The program covers a variety of topics including science-based, multisensory instruction for kids and adults; obstacles for identifying individuals with dyslexia; and lack of training of teachers. A college student with dyslexia shares strategies for academic success.
Educators, parents and health professionals must work together to improve literacy for ALL students in Wisconsin. It is well known that early literacy is one of the most powerful predictors of school success, gainful employment and many measures of health.
For that reason, the sincerest expression of child advocacy is to ensure that ALL students in Wisconsin have the opportunity to become proficient readers. In my experience as a pediatrician, co-founder of the Learning Difference Network, and as a parent, current policies and practices do not routinely provide the 10 percent to 17 percent of our students who have some degree of dyslexia with adequate opportunities for literacy.
Dyslexia is a language-based learning problem, or disability if severe. The impact that this neurobiological, highly heritable condition has on learning to read, write and spell cannot be underestimated.
Dyslexia is the best understood and most studied of all learning difficulties. There is clear evidence that the brains of dyslexic readers function differently than the brains of typical readers. But the good news is this: Reading instruction from highly skilled teachers or tutors who use evidence-based techniques can change how the brain processes print and nearly ALL students can become proficient readers.
Early intervention is critical to successful outcomes, but there is a disconnect between research and practice on many levels.
Current obstacles include myths about dyslexia, lack of early identification and a need for educators to be given training in the science of reading and multi-sensory, systematic, language-based instruction. This is critical for students with dyslexia, but can be beneficial to all learners. For those of us who are able to pay for private testing and instruction for our children, the outcomes can be phenomenal. Unfortunately, where poverty and its associated ills make daily life a struggle, this expert instruction is not routinely available.
Families who ask school personnel about dyslexia are often referred to a physician, who in turn sends them back to school for this educational problem. Educational testing is often denied coverage from insurance companies, though the implications for health and wellness are clear. Unfortunately, parents may be left without useful information from anyone, and appropriate treatment – excellent reading instruction – is further delayed.
October is Dyslexia Awareness Month. On Thursday, Oct. 22, there will be a noon rally in the Capitol rotunda to raise awareness about the need to improve reading instruction for students with dyslexia and for all struggling readers in Wisconsin.
State Rep. Keith Ripp, R-Lodi, is introducing bills this week to help identify and help children with dyslexia. One bill calls for screening for specific skills to find kids with a high chance of struggling to learn to read. The other bill aims to improve teacher training to deal with reading problems.
There is too much evidence describing the science of reading, dyslexia and the costs of illiteracy to continue without change. Parents who suspect dyslexia must not be dissuaded from advocating for their children; keep searching until you find help that works.
Health professionals must seek the latest information on this common condition in order to support families and evaluate for related conditions. Educators must seek out training to understand this brain-based condition that requires educational care. The information is solid. We must work together to give ALL our kids the opportunity to read and succeed.
Dr. Julie Gocey is a pediatrician and a clinical assistant professor in the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and also a co-founder of the Learning Difference Network
via a Margery Katz email.
Theodore R. Sizer, Leading Education-Reform Advocate, Dies at 77
Theodore R. Sizer, one of the country’s most prominent education-reform advocates, whose pluralistic vision of the American high school helped shape the national discourse on education and revise decades-old ideas of what a school should be, died on Wednesday at his home in Harvard, Mass. He was 77.
A former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Professor Sizer was later the headmaster of Phillips Academy, the preparatory school in Andover, Mass., and chairman of the education department at Brown University. He returned to Harvard as a visiting professor in 1997.
Professor Sizer was best known as the father of the Essential Schools movement, which he founded in 1984. The movement’s umbrella organization, the Coalition of Essential Schools, spans a diverse array of public and private schools united by their adherence to a set of common principles.
His progressive ideas about how schools should be organized and what students should learn helped drive the debates that rattled parents, government officials and educators in the 1980s and ’90s.
Ted Sizer, a former prep school headmaster and Harvard University dean who built an education reform movement that has endured for two decades despite its unfashionable opposition to government- imposed standards and emphasis on deep learning over memorization and regurgitation, has died. He was 77.
Sizer died Wednesday at his home in Harvard, Mass., after a long battle with cancer, according to a statement by the Coalition of Essential Schools, the organization of 600 private and public schools he founded at Brown University in 1984 with the goal of restructuring the American high school.
Online Education’s Great Unknowns
Distance learning has broken into the mainstream of higher education. But at the campus level, many colleges still know precious little about how best to organize online programs, whether those programs are profitable, and how they compare to face-to-face instruction in terms of quality.
That is what Kenneth C. Green, director of the Campus Computing Project, concludes in a study released today in conjunction with the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications.
The study, based on a survey of senior officials at 182 U.S. public and private nonprofit colleges, found that 45 percent of respondents said their institution did not know whether their online programs were making money. Forty-five percent said they had reorganized the management of their online programs in the last two years, with 52 percent anticipating a reshuffling within the next two years. And while a strong majority of the administrators surveyed said they believed the quality of online education was comparable to classroom learning, about half said that at their colleges the professors are in charge of assessing whether that is true.
Regulating home schooling: An inspector calls
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.
More Testing, Less Logic?
The Graduate Management Admission Test has for years been the dominant standardized test when it comes to getting into M.B.A. programs.
This week, Business Week reported on an interesting trend: Some employers are starting to ask M.B.A. grads for their GMAT scores, using them as one measure of a job candidate’s potential. In this tight market, business schools are worried about their graduates’ job prospects, so a number of them are now advising — informally or formally — some of their students to retake the GMAT in hopes of a higher score. The article, as one would expect for a business publication, focuses on why some businesses are using the GMAT in this way and other employers are not.
What the article doesn’t address is an educational issue: The employers who are using the GMAT in this way are doing so in direct violation of the guidelines issued by the test’s sponsors. And those sponsors include business schools that are apparently going along with the use of the test scores in this way.
The Graduate Management Admission Council, the association of business schools that runs the GMAT, has never claimed that it is a valid tool for employers. The council says that its research shows the test to have predictive value of first-year grades in an M.B.A. program. The council maintains a list of “inappropriate uses” of the GMAT, including as a requirement for employment.
Based on the Business Week article (and additional reporting by Inside Higher Ed), it appears that there is plenty of inappropriate use going around — and that the council (which benefits financially when people take the GMAT) isn’t objecting.
Learn the Law Before Signing NDAs, Filing Class Actions
“I would say more, but I don’t want somebody knocking on my door and asking for $50,000 back. It’s almost like bribery; I felt that I was supposed to sign the agreement, take the money and keep all their secrets.”
-former Freddie Mac employee who worked on internal financial controls.
>
I find this fascinating: Some people simply do not understand basic contractual freedoms between consenting adults. Others do not understand the concept of ethics. And, they want the free lunch, no personal responsibility, having it both ways. They want the money but not the obligations it comes with.
Sorry, that ain’t how it works.
Here’s the story: Former Freddie Mac employees, who upon departing FMC, were required to sign nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) as part of the severance package. These employees are now being requested to violate those agreements in civil — not criminal — litigation. Under the law, you cannot privately contract not to answer questions from government prosecutors and investigators in any criminal case or in a regulatory proceeding. Really smart class action lawyers try to get a criminal case going simultaneously.
Related: Our Struggling Public Schools “A Critical, but unspoken reason for the Great Recession”.
Lengthy pacifier use can lead to speech problems
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.
An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All
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).
Teaching for a Living: How Teachers See the Profession Today
Jean Johnson, Andrew Yarrow, Jonathan Rochkind and Amber Ott:
Two out of five of America’s 4 million K-12 teachers appear disheartened and disappointed about their jobs, while others express a variety of reasons for contentment with teaching and their current school environments, new research by Public Agenda and Learning Point Associates shows.
The nationwide study, “Teaching for a Living: How Teachers See the Profession Today,” whose results are being reported here for the first time, offers a comprehensive and nuanced look at how teachers differ in their perspectives on their profession, why they entered teaching, the atmosphere and leadership in their schools, the problems they face, their students and student outcomes, and ideas for reform. Taking a closer look at the nation’s teacher corps based on educators’ attitudes and motivations for teaching provides some notable implications for how to identify, retain, and support the most effective teachers, according to the researchers.
This portrait of American teachers, completed in time for the beginning of the 2009-10 school year, presents a new means for appraising the state of the profession at a time when school reform, approaches to teaching, and student achievement remain high on the nation’s agenda. It also comes as billions of economic-stimulus dollars pour into America’s schools focused on ensuring that effective teachers are distributed among all schools, and Congress will have to consider reauthorization or modification of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act., the nearly 8-year-old latest version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
Pedagogy Across Three Continents
Aside from having capital Ps in their names, Pittsburgh, Prague and São Paolo might seem to have little in common.
The first has an industrial heritage as a US steel hub. The second, in central Europe and once part of the Soviet bloc, has an historic district that is a World Heritage Site, and the third, founded by Jesuit priests, is the capital of Brazil’s most populous state and one of the most dynamic cities in Latin America.
What links all three is the global executive MBA delivered by the Joseph M Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh.
Katz has been running an EMBA programme since 1972, a time when Pittsburgh had one of the US’s highest number of Fortune 500 companies headquartered in the city. In 1990, the school started offering an EMBA programme in the Czech Republic, in Prague and, since 2000, in São Paolo, Brazil.
Until 2003, the three programmes operated as independent entities. Students from the Prague and Brazil campuses would come to Pittsburgh for two-week periods, but because they were at different stages in the curriculum, they did not interact with each other or with the other students from Pittsburgh.
Cooking classes for children
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.
Blair Sheppard on the legacy of Kurt Lewin
Though he died in 1947 aged 56, even a cursory review of modern management practices reveals the enduring influence of Kurt Lewin, the German-American psychologist.
The source of his influence can be found in the confluence of three aspects of his personal career.
The first was his early training in mathematically-oriented psychology, focused on the study of human perception. From this he developed a view that it was possible to apply the disciplines of the physical sciences to psychological phenomena.
The second was his rejection of reductionist ideas, which hold that complex phenomena can be explained in terms of simpler building blocks. This formed the tradition of German psychology.
Prof Lewin was much more interested in Gestalt psychology, which implied that psychological phenomena are related to the interaction of the person with their environment and the result of the interplay of many forces within the person.
Once Convicts’ Last Hope, Now a Students’ Advocate
“Pick your head up, buddy,” Tom Dunn said to Darius Nash, who had fallen asleep during the morning’s reading drills. “Sabrieon, sit down, buddy,” he called to a wandering boy. “Focus.”
Mr. Dunn’s classroom is less than three miles from his old law office, where he struggled to keep death row prisoners from the executioner’s needle. This summer, after serving hundreds of death row clients for 20 grinding, stressful years, he traded the courthouse for Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School.
The turmoil of middle school turns many teachers away, said the school’s principal, Danielle S. Battle. Students’ bodies and minds are changing, and disparities in learning abilities are playing out.
“A lot of people will say, ‘I’ll do anything but middle school,’ ” she said.
But this is precisely where Mr. Dunn chose to be, having seen too many people at the end of lives gone wrong, and wanting to keep these students from ending up like his former clients. He quotes Frederick Douglass: “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
School District Strategic Planning: How the World’s Best Performing School Systems Come Out On Top
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.
In some classrooms, books are a thing of the past
The dread of high school algebra is lost here amid the blue glow of computer screens and the clickety-clack of keyboards.
A fanfare plays from a speaker as a student passes a chapter test. Nearby, a classmate watches a video lecture on ratios. Another works out an equation in her notebook before clicking on a multiple-choice answer on her screen.
Their teacher at Agoura High School, Russell Stephans, sits at the back of the room, watching as scores pop up in real time on his computer grade sheet. One student has passed a level, the data shows; another is retaking a quiz.
“Whoever thought this up makes life so much easier,” Stephans says with a chuckle.
United Teachers Los Angeles: Absent from reform
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.
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.
Related: A Wisconsin State Journal Editorial on Madison’s lack of charter school opportunities.
Pack children off to school as soon as you can
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?
Milwaukee Vincent High School to start daily metal detector checks
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.
Dumbing down education weakens U.S.
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.
Beware The Reverse Brain Drain To India And China
I spent Columbus Day in Sunnyvale, fittingly, meeting with a roomful of new arrivals. Well, relatively new. They were Indians living in Silicon Valley. The event was organized by the Think India Foundation, a think-tank that seeks to solve problems which Indians face. When introducing the topic of skilled immigration, the discussion moderator, Sand Hill Group founder M.R. Rangaswami asked the obvious question. How many planned to return to India? I was shocked to see more than three-quarters of the audience raise their hands.
Even Rangaswami was taken back. He lived in a different Silicon Valley, from a time when Indians flocked to the U.S. and rapidly populated the programming (and later executive) ranks of the top software companies in California. But the generational difference between older Indians who have made it in the Valley and the younger group in the room was striking. The present reality is this. Large numbers of the Valley’s top young guns (and some older bulls, as well) are seeing opportunities in other countries and are returning home. It isn’t just the Indians. Ask any VC who does business in China, and they’ll tell you about the tens of thousands who have already returned to cities like Shanghai and Beijing. The VC’s are following the talent. And this is bringing a new vitality to R&D in China and India.
Why would such talented people voluntarily leave Silicon Valley, a place that remains the hottest hotbed of technology innovation on Earth? Or to leave other promising locales such as New York City, Boston and the Research Triangle area of North Carolina? My team of researchers at Duke, Harvard and Berkeley polled 1203 returnees to India and China during the second half of 2008 to find answers to exactly this question. What we found should concern even the most boisterous Silicon Valley boosters.
Truancy costs us all
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.
Study Finds Preschool Use of Educational Video and Games Prepares Low-Income Children for Kindergarten
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.
Generation of pupils being put off school, report says
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.
Homework Day
Meet us here on October 21, 2009, for the first Wolfram|Alpha Homework Day. This groundbreaking, live interactive web event brings together students and educators from across the country to solve your toughest assignments and explore the power of using Wolfram|Alpha for school, college, and beyond.
A few links:
- How Computational Knowledge Helps Your Homework.
- Highlighted Topics in Calculus
- Algebra II Lesson Plan
- Highlighted Topics in Biology
- Creative Writing Lesson Plan
- Highlighted Topics in Geography
Worth checking out.
When a College’s Reputation Trumps Its Quality
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.
Digital reading technology makes its way into UW-Madison classrooms
Alongside music, television and the news media, books are surging into the new technology era with digital reading devices.
UW-Madison Libraries were quick to get on board with the latest in electronic reading.
“The cost and convenience factor is really significant,” says UW-Madison Libraries director Ken Frazier. “There’s an enormous amount of content and book titles that are becoming available.”
Frazier says the library has been monitoring the wireless technology since it first emerged, but when Amazon introduced its new Kindle DX in May, Frazier knew it was time to take paperless reading into the classrooms.
Going to school can be a deadly journey
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.
Make Parenting Education Part of Public School Reform
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.
D.C.’s Braveheart: Can Michelle Rhee wrest control of the D.C. school system from decades of failure?
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.
Tesco’s Sir Terry Leahy attacks ‘woefully low’ education standards
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.
Lieve Maria: A SIS Quiz – Translate!
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.
http://www.lievemaria.nl
Groetjes, 10.000 studenten (wiskunde, natuurkunde en informatica)
Essay by Klebold’s mother reveals little
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.
Open Courses: Free, but Oh, So Costly
Steven T. Ziegler leapt to MIT off a mountain.
He was on a hang glider, and he slammed the ground hard on his chin. Recovery from surgery on his broken back left the 39-year-old high-school dropout with time for college courses.
From a recliner, the drugged-up crash victim tried to keep his brain from turning to mush by watching a free introductory-biology course put online by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hooked, he moved on to lectures about Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian from an English course at Yale. Then he bought Paradise Lost.
A success for college-made free online courses–except that Mr. Ziegler, who works for a restaurant-equipment company in Pennsylvania, is on the verge of losing his job. And those classes failed to provide what his résumé real ly needs: a college credential.
“Do I put that I got a 343 out of 350 on my GED test at age 16?” he says, throwing up his hands. “I have nothing else to put.”
(Indiana) Education revisions must be well planned
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.
My 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.
School Choice Even Obama Supports
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.”
Black Male Dropouts Lead Nation in Incarceration
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.