English Too Easy for Hungarians

Gergo Racz:

Hungary’s government wants to dethrone English as the most common foreign language taught in Hungarian schools. The reason: It’s just too easy to learn.
“It is fortunate if the first foreign language learned is not English. The initial, very quick and spectacular successes of English learning may evoke the false image in students that learning any foreign language is that simple,” reads a draft bill obtained by news website Origo.hu that would amend Hungary’s education laws.
Instead, the ministry department in charge of education would prefer if students “chose languages with a fixed, structured grammatical system, the learning of which presents a balanced workload, such as neo-Latin languages.”

The Out-of-State Admissions Edge

Steve Cohen:

More than ever before, cash-crunched state schools are looking for out-of-state applicants to balance their budgets. Steve Cohen on which schools offer the biggest advantage.
Some kids apply to faraway colleges so they can break with their parents and party–er, study–in peace. But choosing a state school that’s not where you live isn’t just a good way to gain independence; it’s a smart admissions tactic, too.
College-admissions season is upon us, and it promises to be just as competitive as last year. And one of best-kept secrets in college admissions this year is that many top state universities will be admitting more out-of-state applicants than ever before.

Charter management group just might help Milwaukee schools

Alan Borsuk:

First, a lesson from baseball: It was roughly a year ago that Brewers fans were wringing their hands that the pitching was bad and there was little prospect for fixing that in the off-season, given a weak free agent scene and limited finances. Now, the Brewers have pitching that is basically amazing.
Sometimes, things do improve dramatically. Sometimes, that happens even when there are sound arguments for why they won’t.
I could write this entire column – if not a book – on why I’m pessimistic about things getting a lot better on the Milwaukee education scene. I would present a pretty sound case, too.
Maybe I’m wrong. In fact, I hope I’m wrong. I’d like to see things take off like a rocket ship.

What’s the link between time in school and achievement?

Jennifer Davis and Emily McCann:

There is perhaps no more eloquent statement on the essential link between time and learning than the National Education Commission on Time and Learning, which delivered its report in April 1994. In its highly-quotable declaration, the commission makes very clear that unless the education system is completely reconfigured around the objective of achieving proficiency, rather than meeting arbitrary time requirements, we will never reach the goal of serving all children well. In the commission’s words:
“Learning in America is a prisoner of time. For the past 150 years, American public schools have held time constant and let learning vary. The rule, only rarely voiced, is simple: learn what you can in the time we make available…. If experience, research, and common sense teach nothing else, they confirm the truism that people learn at different rates, and in different ways with different subjects. But we have put the cart before the horse: our schools and the people involved with them-students, parents, teachers, administrators, and staff-are captives of clock and calendar. The boundaries of student growth are defined by schedules for bells, buses, and vacations instead of standards for students and learning.”

Teacher Union Controlled Health Care Provider WEA Trust: Have to Adapt – and Fast

Karen Rivedal:

Less than two months after a new state law took health benefits off the bargaining table for public workers and required them to pay at least 12.6 percent — up from zero, in some school districts — of their health insurance premiums, WEA Trust has lost a fifth of its business.
And that means big changes could be coming for the Madison-based group health insurer of mostly school districts that employs nearly 500.
“We’re going to have to adapt and adjust,” said Mark Moody, president and CEO of WEA Trust. “You can’t absorb a 20 percent loss and not do anything.”
The Trust, a not-for-profit company, provides health insurance to just over 100,000 employees in about 60 percent of the state’s 425 school districts.
It was created in 1970 by the state’s largest teachers’ union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, or WEAC.
Critics have long accused the two bodies of working together to fleece taxpayers through over-priced contracts they say school boards have effectively been forced to sign under union pressure.

Madison School District Trying Alternatives to Large Public Hearings

Matthew DeFour:

If you didn’t get the Madison School District’s invitation to Thursday’s meeting about a controversial proposal to let police bring drug-sniffing dogs into schools, don’t take it personally; neither did School Board President James Howard.
The meeting was for minority community leaders to ask questions and provide feedback about the proposal, which the School Board is expected to vote on Aug. 29.
School Board members weren’t invited, which Howard, who learned about the meeting Wednesday from a television reporter, said is a problem.
“Board members should always be informed of these meetings,” Howard said. “I don’t know why the ball got dropped.”
The School District’s revamped communications department organized the meeting at the Urban League on South Park Street as part of a new outreach effort, said Marcia Standiford, the department’s new manager.

The Debt Crisis at American Colleges

Andrew Hacker & Claudia Dreifus:

How do colleges manage it? Kenyon has erected a $70 million sports palace featuring a 20-lane olympic pool. Stanford’s professors now get paid sabbaticals every fourth year, handing them $115,000 for not teaching. Vanderbilt pays its president $2.4 million. Alumni gifts and endowment earnings help with the costs. But a major source is tuition payments, which at private schools are breaking the $40,000 barrier, more than many families earn. Sadly, there’s more to the story. Most students have to take out loans to remit what colleges demand. At colleges lacking rich endowments, budgeting is based on turning a generation of young people into debtors.
As this semester begins, college loans are nearing the $1 trillion mark, more than what all households owe on their credit cards. Fully two-thirds of our undergraduates have gone into debt, many from middle class families, who in the past paid for much of college from savings. The College Board likes to say that the average debt is “only” $27,650. What the Board doesn’t say is that when personal circumstances go wrong, as can happen in a recession, interest, late payment penalties, and other charges can bring the tab up to $100,000. Those going on to graduate school, as upwards of half will, can end up facing twice that.

Women See Value and Benefits of College; Men Lag on Both Fronts, Survey Finds

Pew Research Center:

Half of all women who have graduated from a four-year college give the U.S. higher education system excellent or good marks for the value it provides given the money spent by students and their families; only 37% of male graduates agree. In addition, women who have graduated from college are more likely than men to say their education helped them to grow both personally and intellectually. These results of a nationwide Pew Research Center survey come at a time when women surpass men by record numbers in college enrollment and completion.
The survey also found that while a majority of Americans believe that a college education is necessary in order to get ahead in life these days, the public is somewhat more inclined to see this credential as a necessity for a woman than for a man. Some 77% of respondents say this about women, while just 68% say it about men.

Cash-strapped University of California hands out millions in raises

Nanette Asimov:

The University of California will spend $140 million raised from increased student tuition, general fund money and other UC sources to give merit raises to thousands of faculty members and nonunion employees earning up to $200,000, UC officials said Wednesday.
UC is experiencing what officials have called the worst financial crisis in its history, losing million of dollars in state funding over the last few years while steadily raising tuition and laying off employees to compensate.
But the regents also agreed in November to set aside money for merit raises. Faculty have consistently received such raises during the last few years, but the salaries of nonunion staff members have been frozen for four years.

An “Extreme Makeover” for U.S. Education — Can We? Should We?

Beverly Eakman:

A front-page August 16 Washington Times’ headline screamed: “Scores show students aren’t ready for college — 75% may need remedial classes.”
Seventy-five percent is a number that gets people’s attention. It isn’t the usual trifling stuff the U.S. Department of Education puts out about math or reading scores being up by two percent one year and down by three percent the next. Add to that another finding reported in the same article: “A 2008 report by the education advocacy group Strong American Schools found that 80 percent of college students taking remedial classes had a high school GPA of 3.0 or better.”
So are we saying that even when students score well, they don’t know much? Apparently. Readers who have been following this series (see links to other articles below) may recall U.S. Commissioner of Education Statistics’ Pascal D. Forgione, Jr., Ph.D., who famously admitted in a speech, “Our idea of ‘advanced’ is clearly below international standards.”
According to the news article, “75 percent [of college freshmen] likely will spend part of their [first] year brushing up on high-school-level course work.”

Minn. ed commissioner wants ACT to be an even higher-stakes test

Tom Weber:

The state’s education commissioner says she’s exploring ways to make the ACT college entrance exam even higher-stakes for Minnesota students than it already is.
Wednesday’s release of ACT scores shows 72 percent of Minnesota high school graduates took the test. No state with that much participation scored higher. But 72 percent isn’t enough for Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius, especially considering there are waivers available so students can take the test for free.
The problem, she said, is not enough students realize how crucial the ACT is.
“There are so many tests that they’re taking; they don’t know which is the important test,” Cassellius said. “We want to have a test that actually measures their career and college readiness.”

Sending Your Child to College? Advice from Dr. Drew

Andrew Rotherham:

With thousands of kids starting to pack for their first year at college or preparing to return after the summer break, now is a good time to talk to them about some important health and wellness issues on campus. To help parents figure out what to look for and worry about, School of Thought asked Dr. Drew Pinsky, the best-selling author and TV and radio host who has been dubbed the “surgeon general of youth culture” by the New York Times. On his college radar: prescription drugs, hook-up culture and processed food. As a practicing physician and the father of triplets, Dr. Drew isn’t fielding abstract questions — his own kids are starting university this fall.
College isn’t always a bastion of healthy living. Late nights, pizza and stress can’t be good for you. What should parents talk to their children about when they leave for college?
Start with the easy stuff — safety. In the [college] age group, accidents are a major cause of morbidity, and alcohol is often involved in some fashion. Remind students that they’re on their own and are not invincible.
I’ve been to hundreds of colleges all over the country, and almost every one has an outstanding health and mental-health service. Tell them to take advantage of the screenings, services and mental-health services that are there if they need them.

Not by The Book

University of Dayton:

Apply. Visit campus. Complete the financial aid form. Get four years of free textbooks.
First-year University of Dayton students can receive up to $4,000 over four years for textbooks by completing three steps of the fall 2012 application process by March 1.
“We want to help parents and students understand that from the very first day, a University of Dayton education is very rewarding,” said Kathy McEuen Harmon, assistant vice president and dean of admission and financial aid.
“Through this initiative, we want to underscore that a University of Dayton education is affordable and we are committed to helping families in very tangible ways,” she said.
With the economy still difficult, Harmon said the free textbook program will bring families clarity and certainty about one piece of the financial puzzle.

Recruiters at Black Colleges Break From Tradition

Sue Shellenbarger:

Katy Daugherty enrolled at Tennessee State University because of the school’s flexible daytime, evening and online classes and its new urban-studies program.
Once on campus at this historically black college, where more than 70% of the students are African-American, Ms. Daugherty, 29, who is white, became the minority.
“It was definitely different, having grown up and been in the majority, and all of a sudden you are in the minority,” she says.
In what has become a mutually beneficial relationship for schools and students, many of the nation’s 105 historically black colleges are increasingly wooing non-black students. The goals: to boost lagging enrollment and offset funding shortfalls.

The Age of Noise

Dmitry Fadeyev:

The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire–we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence.

Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy
Huxley is talking about the radio and the newspaper, the carriers of noise at the start of the 20th century, but his words could just as well have been written today. Today, silence is a thing to be shunned, with the social ecosystem of apps and devices ready to help you do just that.

Not For Profit College Board Getting Rich as Fees Hit Students

Janet Lorin

When Gaston Caperton was recruited to run the College Board, owner of the SAT entrance exam, he said he didn’t want to just run “a testing company.”
Founded by Harvard and 11 other universities in 1900 to create a standardized test to admit students based on merit rather than family connections, the College Board by 1999 was facing cash-flow problems.
Caperton turned the nonprofit company into a thriving business, more than doubling revenue to $660 million by boosting fees, expanding the Advanced Placement program and the sale of names of teenage test-takers to colleges. A former West Virginia governor, he persuaded 11 states to cover fees for a preliminary SAT in the 10th grade.

Should My Kid Learn Mandarin Chinese?

Tom Scocca:

I started to truly appreciate the power of early childhood Chinese-language education when our son, at the age of two, started speaking English wrong. “The blue of cup,” he would say, meaning his blue cup.
This wasn’t a random preschool linguistic hiccup, we realized. He was trying to use Chinese syntax: “of” was standing in for the Mandarin particle “de” to turn the noun “blue” into an adjective. And his odd habit of indicating things by saying “this one” or “that one”-he was rendering the Chinese “zhege” and “neige” in English. That is, he was speaking Chinglish.
The usual arguments in favor of Mandarin education say that he should be on his way to conquering the world. An extra language, the theory goes, supplies extra brainpower, and Chinese in particular is a skill that will prepare young children to compete in the global 21st-century marketplace of talent.

Why Public Schools Need Less Regulation

Michael Horn:

Picture the following scenario. You ask your friend to come up with a creative meal that will amaze your guests at a dinner party you are holding, but you impose some constraints. Your friend can only use the ingredients from a restrictive list and must follow the specific directions from a meal you cooked these same guests just weeks earlier.
What are the odds that your friend makes something innovative? Not good. After all, you’ve practically defined the solution by specifying nearly all of its inputs before she can even consider what she might cook.
A far better way to generate an innovative solution is to define the outcome you need — a five-course meal for eight — and then allow your friend to figure out the best way to get there.

Commentary on the Seattle School Board Races

Melissa Westbrook:

The (Seattle) Times’ editorial board is nothing if not amusing. Their current editorial on the School Board races puts forth the results without much analysis (because, of course, if they said, out loud, that the incumbents all appear to be in trouble that would hurt their cause). Here’s how they framed the results:

Frustration about Seattle School Board leadership weighed heavily on the minds of primary voters who, in all but one board race, were more generous with their votes for challengers than incumbents.

Yes, generous is one way to put it. Another would be that all the incumbents appear to be in trouble.
They can only say about the challengers that they raise valid concerns about the district and the current Board. Almost like, “thanks for pointing that out, now move along.”

Apple, Microsoft May Bid for 15 Million Turkish Tablets, AA Says

Ercan Ersoy:

Apple Inc. (AAPL), Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. (INTC) may participate in the government’s project to supply as much as 15 million tablet computers for school children over four years, state-owned Anatolia news agency said, citing Turkish Trade Minister Zafer Caglayan.
Apple officials told Caglayan during his visit to the U.S. that the Cupertino, California-based maker of smart devices may also decide to use some Turkish manufacturers to make some peripheral equipment such as covers, earphones for its iPad and iPhone models, Caglayan said at a news conference with Turkish reporters in Seattle, according to the Ankara-based agency.

More on WEAC’s Layoffs

Mike Antonucci

here are still some open questions in the aftermath of the WEAC layoffs – which the union appears reluctant to answer. WEAC executive director Dan Burkhalter wouldn’t tell the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel about membership levels, saying it was “internal information,” and a WEAC spokeswoman “refused an on-camera interview with WISC-TV Monday, and a conference call later that day was cut short after only two reporters had asked questions.”
Most media outlets have been reporting that the 42 pink-slipped staffers constitute 40 percent of the union’s workforce, but there must be some detail missing. The union’s 2008-09 filings show 151 employees, and I can guarantee you WEAC was not servicing 98,000 members with 105 staffers.

Villanova law school censured after misreporting test scores

St. Petersburg Times:

The law school at Villanova University has been censured for submitting falsified admissions data for several years to the American Bar Association. Villanova’s average Law School Admissions Test scores were padded by two to three points from 2005 to 2009, law school dean John Gotanda said. The median GPA was raised by up to 0.16 points. Both data sets often factor into law school rankings. The law school could have lost its accreditation because of the scandal. The school must post the reprimand on its website for two years. School officials described the misreporting as an “odd” scheme, considering the inflation “didn’t propel us into the top 50.”
Displaced whale dies in Calif. river
A 45-foot gray whale that delighted people for more than a month after taking up residence in Northern California’s Klamath River died Tuesday after beaching itself on a sandbar. In June, the whale and its calf took refuge in freshwater for an unknown reason while migrating north from Baja California. Scientists said it may have been escaping from killer whales. The calf swam out to sea on July 23, about the right time for it to go off on its own.

New Jersey Superintendents Call State Agency Ineffective

Winnie Hu:

Nearly three-quarters of New Jersey school superintendents said the state Education Department did not play an important role in helping districts raise students’ achievement or prepare graduates for college and careers, according to a survey the department released Monday.
Many superintendents criticized how the state set goals and evaluated districts’ progress and said they did not find school report cards or state and federal data requirements useful in improving students’ performance.
They also expressed dissatisfaction with the state’s handling of special-education services and its guidance on curriculum and instruction. For instance, 63 percent of superintendents said they had not found the department’s efforts helpful in improving math instruction, and 59 percent said the same of improving literacy.

Kids, Privacy, Free Speech & the Internet

Adam Thierer:

In the field of Internet policy, 2011 has been the year of privacy. Congress has introduced six bills related to online privacy, and the Obama administration released two major reports recommending greater federal oversight of online markets. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appears poised to step up regulatory activity on this front. State-level activity is also percolating, led by California, which floated two major bills recently.
These efforts would expand regulatory oversight of online activities in various ways. Some measures would institute “Fair Information Practice Principles” (FIPPS), governing the collection and use of personal information online. Others would limit some types data collection, ban certain data or advertising practices, or create new mechanisms to help consumers block online ad-targeting techniques. Another measure would mandate websites adopt a so-called Internet “Eraser Button,” which would allow users to purge unwanted personal information from online sites and services.

Madison teachers union files lawsuit challenging constitutionality of collective bargaining law

Ed Treleven:

Unions representing Madison teachers and Milwaukee sanitation workers sued Gov. Scott Walker on Thursday, alleging that the controversial law severely restricting the collective bargaining rights of most public workers in Wisconsin is unconstitutional.
The lawsuit, brought by Madison Teachers Inc. and AFL-CIO Local 61 in Milwaukee alleges that the state legislature passed what was originally called the budget repair bill in violation of the state constitution’s provision that governs special legislative sessions.
The lawsuit also alleges that the law places severe and unfair restrictions on what unions and their members can discuss with municipalities and school districts, and imposes severe wage increase limits that don’t apply to nonunion workers.

Cannon To Serve As Oregon Governor’s Education Policy Advisor

Glenn Vaagen:

Governor John Kitzhaber announced Tuesday that Representative Ben Cannon will join his staff as Education Policy Advisor. Representative Cannon, currently a state Representative for Portland, teaches middle school Humanities.
“Ben’s passion and expertise on education policy will be a great asset to my office and the state,” said Kitzhaber. “He’ll bring the same dedication he has shown his constituents to implementing an education improvement agenda to ensure better results for Oregon students, more resources for teachers, and a more prosperous future.”
“Serving as state Representative has been the highest honor I have ever held, and this was an incredibly difficult decision for me,” Cannon said. “But I am convinced that to advise the Governor on education policy represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a difference on the same issues that drew me to teaching and politics in the first place. The achievements of the Governor and the Legislature this year have created a rare window of opportunity to make important improvements to the Oregon’s public education system.”

Janie Har:

Oregon Rep. Ben Cannon, D-Portland, is resigning from the Legislature to become Gov. John Kitzhaber’s top education adviser.
Cannon, a Democrat now in his third term in the House, will replace Nancy Golden, a temporary hire who has returned to her position as superintendent of the Springfield School District this summer.
His resignation is effective Sept. 1. He starts his new position Sept. 6
“It was a tremendously difficult decision to leave the Legislature,” Cannon said by phone Tuesday, “but I have the opportunity now to continue to serve the people of Oregon and this governor on an issue that matters so much to me as a teacher, and to me as a father.”

The Khan Academy And The Future Of Learning

On Point @ WBUR:

Salman Khan sent a video to his young cousin online, to help her with her math homework. A simple explanation, quickly sketched out. Then another and another, up on YouTube.
The next thing you know, a lot of other kids were paying attention. Using those math videos. Millions of kids. Including Bill Gates’s kids.
Now, Salman Khan is an education rock star, with videos up on math and chemistry and the Napoleonic Wars. Teachers are keying in. Classrooms. And it’s all free.

Chinese Students Flood U.S. Grad Schools

Melissa Korn:

Thanks to a thriving economy at home, an increasing number of Chinese students are attending U.S. graduate schools, according to a study to be released on Tuesday by a graduate-school industry group.
Graduate schools saw a 21% increase in Chinese applicants from the last school year and a 23% increase in admissions offers, for students slated to start this fall, according to a study by the Council of Graduate Schools. It is the sixth year in a row of double-digit percentage increases for Chinese students.
Applications and offers were up sharply for international students overall, jumping 11% compared with 2010, according to the report. The study looked at data for a total of 591,739 applications to U.S. graduate schools by prospective international students for fall 2011.

Test scores same at Milwaukee public, voucher schools, auditors say; Vouchers Spend 50% Less Per Student

Dinesh Ramde:

State auditors on Wednesday confirmed a report that found little difference in test scores between students in Milwaukee’s school voucher program and those in the city’s public schools.
Wisconsin lawmakers had asked the state Legislative Audit Bureau to evaluate a study, conducted by privately funded education researchers, that analyzed test scores from both groups of students. The study had found no significant difference, a conclusion that state auditors also reached.
The researchers studied the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, a voucher program that allows low-income children in Milwaukee to attend private schools at taxpayers’ expense. The two-year budget signed by Gov. Scott Walker in June repealed the enrollment limit for voucher schools in Milwaukee and expanded vouchers to schools in suburban Milwaukee and Racine.

View the 950K PDF report, here.
Milwaukee Voucher School WKCE Headlines: “Students in Milwaukee voucher program didn’t perform better in state tests”, “Test results show choice schools perform worse than public schools”, “Choice schools not outperforming MPS”; Spend 50% Less Per Student.

Experts say the earlier they can treat autistic children, the better their chances of improvement. But for many youngsters the waiting list is too long

Oliver Chou:

Dannen Chan Kim-wai vividly recalls the joy he felt when his son – “a lovely and healthy child” – was born in 2005. But there was a problem. As he grew, Rex didn’t speak a word, he says.
“Friends comforted us with the usual words, saying that boys typically start talking later than girls. But when all my boy uttered was a single syllable ‘da’ at age two, we decided not to wait. We took him to the Child Assessment Centre. There he was diagnosed as having symptoms of autism.”
Hong Kong is seeing a big leap in autism cases. Last year, the Health Department diagnosed about 1,500 children under the age of 12 with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) compared with 218 children in 2000. That is a five-fold increase over the past 10 years.

Globally Challenged: Wisconsin Lags 12 States & Numerous Countries in Math Proficiency





Paul E Peterson, Ludger Woessmann, Eric A. Hanushek, Carlos X. Lastra-Anadon, via a Chan Stroman email:

Given recent school-related political conflicts in Wisconsin, it is of interest that only 42 percent of that state’s white students are proficient in math, a rate no better than the national average.
At a time of persistent unemployment, especially among the less skilled, many wonder whether our schools are adequately preparing students for the 21st-century global economy. This is the second study of student achievement in global perspective prepared under the auspices of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG).
In the 2010 PEPG report, “U.S. Math Performance in Global Perspective,” the focus was on the percentage of U.S. public and private school students performing at the advanced level in mathematics.1 The current study continues this work by reporting the percentage of public and private school students identified as at or above the proficient level (a considerably lower standard of performance than the advanced level) in mathematics and reading for the most recent cohort for which data are available, the high-school graduating Class of 2011.
Proficiency in Mathematics
U.S. students in the Class of 2011, with a 32 percent proficiency rate in mathematics, came in 32nd among the nations that participated in PISA. Although performance levels among the countries ranked 23rd to 31st are not significantly different from that of the United States, 22 countries do significantly outperform the United States in the share of students reaching the proficient level in math.
In six countries plus Shanghai and Hong Kong, a majority of students performed at the proficient level, while in the United States less than one-third did. For example, 58 percent of Korean students and 56 percent of Finnish students were proficient. Other countries in which a majority–or near majority–of students performed at or above the proficient level included Switzerland, Japan, Canada, and the Netherlands. Many other nations also had math proficiency rates well above that of the United States, including Germany (45 percent), Australia (44 percent), and France (39 percent).

Much more at www.wisconsin2.org.

Senate Hearing on College Readiness (Imaginary)

on the 17th of never, 2011
Senator, please allow me to express my thanks for including me in these vital hearings on the readiness of our high school graduates for college work.
It would be my sad duty to report to you that if high school football coaches no longer ask their athletes to learn to block and tackle, that would fail to prepare them for college teams. Oh–wait, Senator, that is not correct. (Shuffles papers, starts over).
It would be my sad duty to report that if our high school basketball coaches no longer taught their athletes to dribble, pass, and shoot baskets, then they too would fail at basketball in college.
Oh–my apologies, Senator, that is not my testimony–just a little bad joke. Of course our high school coaches take athletics much too seriously to allow that sort of thing to happen to our kids. In fact, The Boston Globe has more than 100 pages a year on high school athletes. No, Senator, there is no coverage for high school academic achievement.
But I am sorry to have to report that our History and English teachers at the high school level no longer ask our students to read complete nonfiction books or to write substantial research papers, and naturally, this unfits them for the nonfiction books they will be asked to read and the substantial research papers they will be asked to write at the postsecondary level, in what we might call Upper Education.
The famous and influential American educator, John Dewey, wrote in 1896 that: “The centrality of reading and writing was ‘one of education’s great mistakes.'” In following in his footsteps, many of our educators have pushed academic reading and writing so far to the periphery of the curriculum that, for too many of our high school students, they might just as well have fallen off the edge of the flat earth of American secondary education.
The California State College System recently reported that 47% of their Freshmen were required to take remedial reading courses. Of course they can’t handle nonfiction books as they have never been assigned one in their whole high school career.
I have had the privilege of publishing 956 serious (average 6,000 words) history research papers by secondary students from all over this country and from 38 other countries, and I have formed the opinion in the process that high school students are fully capable of reading complete nonfiction books and of writing serious research papers.
But it should be no surprise that so long as our educators never assign nonfiction books or ask students for research papers, they will continue to believe that their students may be able somehow to manage Calculus, European history, Latin, Chemistry, British Literature and the like, but they must still not be able, for some unexplained reason, to read a history book or write a real term paper.
While our colleges do complain, persistently, about the poor preparation in reading and writing of the students who come to them, what do they do in setting requirements for admission?
Senator, hard as it may be to believe, all the writing that colleges ask for is a 500-word “college” essay about the life of the applicant. It is hard to conceive of a more nonacademic task than that, or one more likely to retard the assignment of serious reading and writing at the high school level.
When we celebrate athletes and ignore scholars in our high schools, and when we set such low standards for the high school diploma and for college admission, we should not be surprised that more than one million of our high school graduates need to be in remedial courses when they get to college every year, and that more than half of those will never graduate.
Yes, Senator, I believe that until we take reading and writing more seriously at the secondary level, we can continue to push more and more students into college, but more and more of them will be sadly unprepared to take advantage of that academic opportunities there, and more and more of them will drop out before they graduate from college.
Thanks again for the opportunity to discuss these problems.
===============
“Teach by Example”
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The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
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ACT Scores Decline Somewhat in Madison, Wisconsin Slightly Up, 32% of Badger Students “Ready” for College Level Courses in 4 Areas

Matthew DeFour:

The average ACT score among the Madison School District’s 2011 graduates dipped to its lowest level in 15 years, while the gap between white and minority student scores shrank for the first time in five years.
Though Madison’s average score dipped from 24.2 to 23.9, district students still outperformed the state average of 22.2 and national average of 21.1. A perfect score on the college entrance exam is 36.
Madison’s average scores in recent years have ranged from 23.5 in 1995 to 24.6 in 2007. The average score was also 23.9 in 2003.

Amy Hetzner:

With the highest percent of students taking the ACT in state history, Wisconsin’s Class of 2011 posted an average score slightly above that from the previous year’s graduates and maintained the state’s third-place ranking among states in which the test is widespread.
Seventy-one percent of the 2011 graduates from Wisconsin private and public schools took the college admissions test, averaging a 22.2 composite score on the 36-point test, according to information to be publicly released Wednesday. The nationwide average was 21.1 on the ACT Assessment, which includes tests in English, reading, mathematics and science.
State schools superintendent Tony Evers credited the results to more high school students pursuing more demanding coursework.
“The message of using high school as preparation for college and careers is taking hold with our students,” Evers said in a news release. “Nearly three-quarters of our kids said they took the rigorous classes recommended for college entry, up from just over half five years ago.”
Even so, ACT reported that only 32% of Wisconsin’s recently graduated seniors had test results that showed they were ready for college-level courses in all four areas. Results for individual subjects ranged from 39% readiness in science to 75% in English.

A few somewhat related links:

Ruth Robarts:

When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before.
On November 7 (2005), Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.
According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.
Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

“Penelope Trunk”: (Adrienne Roston, Adrienne Greenheart(

10. Homeschool. Your kids will be screwed if you don't.
The world will not look kindly on people who put their kids into public school. We all know that learning is best when it's customized to the child and we all know that public schools are not able to do that effectively. And the truly game-changing private schools cost $40,000 a year.

Notes and links on the recent, successful Madison Talented & Gifted parent complaint.

More Student Loans are Past Due

Phil Izzo:

Student loans are on the rise, but so is the delinquency rate on them.
On Monday Real Time Economics noted that since the depths of the recession the only type of credit to notch growth was student loans. Credit to students also stands out when looking at delinquency rates.
In the second quarter, 11.2% of student loans were more than 90 days past due and the rate was steadily rising, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Only credit cards had a higher rate of delinquency — 12.2% — but those numbers have been on a steady decline for the past four quarters.

Pushy dad learns his lesson

Rupert Chan:

At a recent charity dinner to raise funds for the Charles K. Kao Foundation for Alzheimer’s disease, my son, Phoebus, and his wife, Danielle, performed an improvised version of the theme to the Japanese movie Departures on piano and flute. The music was synchronised to a video on Professor Kao’s achievements, and included a mention of his visit to my home to appraise the music that Phoebus composed for Nancy Koh’s Buddhist-themed verse musical, The First Leaf of Dream Song.
All that reminded me of the endeavours that my wife Helena and I went to as young parents two decades ago to initiate our children into the world of music.
Our daughter and son, Phoebe and Phoebus, were enrolled in music classes at the age of four, when their ears could develop best. They both eventually achieved perfect pitch. They learned to play the piano, as well as the rudiments of aural, theory, composition and improvisation.

Chicago Teachers upset enough to ask for strike vote, union chief says

Rosalind Rossi

The president of the Chicago Teachers Union said Friday on a radio show that there is a “very high” likelihood that teachers will ask her to take a strike vote, given how angry and disrespected they feel.
But clarifying later to the Chicago Sun-Times, Karen Lewis said she did not predict that teachers will ultimately go on strike, only that the probability is high that members will call for a strike vote.
“People are very upset. People feel disrespected,” Lewis told WLS- AM Radio’s Connected to Chicago, which airs at 6 a.m. Sunday.
“We have teachers who have been extremely vilified for political purposes,”

Michigan accreditation system ‘no longer has relevance’

Dave Murray:

Michigan’s school accreditation system “no longer has relevance” state educators say, as every school in the state has met state criteria despite sliding backward on federal testing goals.
The state Education Department released announced Monday that 79 percent of Michigan’s public school buildings and 93 percent of the school districts made federal testing goals – called “adequate yearly progress” – for the 2010-11 school year.
That’s down from 86 percent of schools and 95 percent of districts making AYP the previous school year.

Rhode Island Commissioner Gist’s Budget: Consultants Cash In

Dan McGowan:

The Rhode Island Department of Education’s (RIDE) consulting budget has ballooned to over $28 million for the 2012 fiscal year, nearly double what it was spending just two years ago, GoLocalProv has learned.
According to the agency, the sudden jump in consultants and vendor spending is directly related to a number of federal grants the department has received over the past several years, including the $75 million in Race To The Top funds secured last year. RIDE says the outside contractors are helping with curriculum development, data management and overseeing an inter-district transportation system for new teachers.

Student Loan Debt is Up Sharply

Justin Lahart:

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s quarterly report on debt and credit, U.S. households had $11.42 trillion in debt outstanding in the second quarter. That was down from a peak of $12.5 trillion in the third quarter of 2008, when the financial crisis took hold, and the lowest since the first quarter of 2007. Mortgage debt, home equity loans, credit card debt and auto loans are all down sharply — partly because people are being more careful, but also because many have defaulted.
But student loans are up sharply. There was $550 billion in student debt outstanding in the second quarter, up 25% from $440 billion in the third quarter of 2008.

Los Angeles teachers test a pilot evaluation program

Jason Song:

This is what one of Los Angeles Unified’s most ambitious reform efforts looks like: about 30 people gathered in a Gardena school auditorium, watching a video of a teacher trying to get her young students to understand a John Updike poem.
The viewers furiously type their observations into laptop computers and discuss their impressions of the lesson the next day. They ask open-ended questions — “What are some possible explanations for the lack of understanding of the vocabulary?” — all aimed at helping the teacher improve.
These training sessions are the school district’s first concrete steps toward replacing its age-old teacher evaluation system, which is widely regarded as a failure. The new version is based on more detailed observations, student and parent feedback, and students’ standardized test scores.

Hong Kong Eco-primary school considers a step up to secondary

Chloe Lai:

Sitting under a parasol to avoid the fierce summer sun, two teenagers at a summer camp in the New Territories debate the criteria for an ideal secondary school. Rosemary and White Cloud – adopting nature-related nicknames is a tradition at the camp – are responding to a Q&A session held earlier, when two secondary school principals were quizzed on topics ranging from the logic of school uniform design to how to prevent teachers from abusing their power.
“The school must have strict rules so every student will behave and be polite,” White Cloud says.
Rosemary has very different ideas: “It is not going to work. Strict rules will only make the disobedient even more disobedient. My ideal school is one with no penalties.”
The two friends’ contrasting views reflect their exposure to Gaia School, an alternative private primary school in Tuen Mun that emphasises personal responsibility and learning from nature.

Peter the Wild Boy

Roger Moorhouse:

A mysterious child from northern Germany, portrayed by William Kent on the King’s Grand Staircase, became one of the sensations of the Georgian age, as Roger Moorhouse explains.
In the summer of 1725 a peculiar youth was found in the forest of Hertswold near Hameln in northern Germany. Aged about 12, he walked on all fours and fed on grass and leaves. ‘A naked, brownish, blackhaired creature’, he would run up trees when approached and could utter no intelligible sound. The latest in a long line of feral children – in turn celebrated, shunned and cursed through the ages – ‘The Wild Boy of Hameln’ would be the first to achieve real fame.
After a spell in the House of Correction in Celle, the boy was taken to the court of George, Duke of Hanover and King of the United Kingdom, at Herrenhausen. There the young curiosity was initially treated as an honoured guest. Seated at table with the king, dressed in a suit of clothes with a napkin at his neck, he repelled his host with his complete lack of manners. He refused bread, but gorged himself on vegetables, fruit and rare meat, greedily grasping at the dishes and eating noisily from his hands, until he was ordered to be taken away. He was given the name of Peter, but was variously known as ‘Wild Peter’, ‘Peter of Hanover’, or, most famously, ‘Peter the Wild Boy’.

Code of Conduct – Proposed Changes and Approved Changes

At the last meeting of the full board, we voted (5-1) to make specific amendments to the existing Code of Conduct rather than accept the changes proposed by administration. In the past week, the board has received a few e-mails arguing that we should have adopted the proposed changes. Unfortunately, the description of what happened and why has been incomplete at best, so I have posted my thoughts on making the motion to amend the existing code rather than adopt the administration’s proposal.
http://lucymathiak.blogspot.com/2011/08/code-of-conduct-proposed-changes-and.html

Here’s how to get your children a great education

Greg Toppo:

Journalist Peg Tyre’s new book, The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve ($26, Henry Holt) out Aug. 16, condenses decades of education research to help parents make better choices about selecting schools for their children. Tyre, whose 2008 book The Trouble With Boys helped spark a national conversation, says, “Schools can’t reasonably be expected to both educate children and educate parents about education. Parents are going to have to get more sophisticated about what excellent education looks like — and demand it for their child.” Tyre recently spoke to USA TODAY:

Chicago Principals to Get Merit Pay

Rebecca Vevea:

Chicago Public Schools will offer merit pay to principals who perform well on a new set of evaluative metrics that may include student growth on test scores, the school climate and leadership skills, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Monday.
The performance rewards will be paid for over the next four years by a new $5 million fund created through charitable donations, Emanuel said. The district plans to create a similar incentive program for teachers, he said.
CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard said the bonuses will range from about $5,000 to $10,000 per principal.

WEAC issues layoff notices to 40% of staff

Erin Richards:

Layoff notices have been issued to about 40% of the Wisconsin Education Association Council workforce, a total of 42 employees who work for the state’s largest teachers union, Executive Director Dan Burkhalter confirmed Monday.
Burkhalter said that the layoffs and other budget cuts at WEAC are a result of Gov. Scott Walker’s “union-busting” legislation.
“Right now we’re engaged in membership continuation campaigns,” Burkhalter said in a statement. “We’ve made steady progress in signing up members and we anticipate further progress will be made as the school year resumes. Despite budget cuts and layoffs, our goal remains the same: to be a strong and viable organization that represents the voices of Wisconsin’s public school employees.”

An Open Letter to Our Young, Gifted, Talented, and Black (YGTB)

The Milwaukee Drum:

Dear Young, Gifted, Talented, and Black (YGTB),
Something has occured within our Black Community which needs to be addressed and I’m going to peel the scab off of it. The chasm has been widened between those in our community who possess knowledge, resources, wisdom, creativity, and determination and those who should be moving into the fold to advance our race. It is a slow death which if prolonged, will choke off any feasible possibility for future survival and success for our people.
YGTB, I sit positioned between you and our elders… not young enough nor mature enough to be in either category. I am transitioning and this is what I want to give you now during my journey (breadcrumbs to follow). Our (some) elders have eaten of the tree of (trick)knowledge bearing the forbidden fruit integration. The false promises of this fruit tantalized those who tasted its flesh with the hope of equality to White People, justice, freedom, legacy, and political power in America (our wilderness).
YGTB, stop!!!!! I am telling you not to follow down their path! Reject this fruit and the lies which flow from its bosom. What you need only to do is observe the plight of our people and judge if the present course (last 2 generations) of our direction produced results that have uplifted the majority of our people? If you see what I do, then you agree that our condition is getting worse. Do not continue to do what has failed us.

Stearns High School pitch to China is a failure

Associated Press:

A school district in the deep woods of Maine that sought out Chinese students to help boost its enrolment and its finances fell far short of its ambitious goal of bringing in 60 students.
Only six Chinese students will attend high school in Millinocket, in a rural part of the northeastern state, next month.
The target of five dozen was probably overly ambitious, officials said.
The efforts were also hindered by a recruiter in China who failed to deliver any students and a writer who told readers of China’s Global Times newspaper that the school was “mediocre” and that Millinocket children hang out in parking lots for fun.
Stearns High School officials said they were disappointed more Chinese students won’t be attending when classes begin on September 6 but will stick with the programme and try to expand in the years ahead.

Pulling strings into a top school: More parents are getting their children to play the harp as a way into prestigious institutions

Lana Lam:

More Hong Kong youngsters are following in the footsteps of Botticelli angels by learning the harp, with parents encouraging this special option as a way to secure a spot in a prestigious school.
Demand for harp lessons had steadily increased in the last three years and its appeal was multi-faceted, said professional harpist Joan Lee Wai-ying, who opened a home-based harp school in Sha Tin in 2008.
“Many parents want to widen the musical knowledge of their children but it’s also because of the school admission test which requires a basic instrument like the piano but also a very special instrument like the harp,” Lee said, with the number of students at her school increasing fivefold since opening.

We Can’t Teach Students to Love Reading

Alan Jacobs:

While virtually anyone who wants to do so can train his or her brain to the habits of long-form reading, in any given culture, few people will want to. And that’s to be expected. Serious “deep attention” reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit, a fact that has been obscured in the past half-century, especially in the United States, by the dramatic increase in the percentage of the population attending college, and by the idea (only about 150 years old) that modern literature in vernacular languages should be taught at the university level.
At the beginning of the 20th century, perhaps 2 percent of Americans attended a university; now the number is closer to 70 percent (though only about 30 percent get bachelor’s degrees). A particularly sharp acceleration occurred in the years after 1945, when the GI Bill enabled soldiers returning from World War II to attend college for free, thus leading universities across the country to throw up quonset huts for classrooms, and English professors to figure out how to teach 40 students at a time, rather than 11, how to read sonnets. (And those GI’s wanted their children to have the same educational opportunities they had, or better ones.) These changes have had enormous social consequences, but for our purposes here, the one that matters is this: From 1945 to 2000, or thereabouts, far more people than ever before in human history were expected to read, understand, appreciate, and even enjoy books.

Sun Prairie’s 2011-2012 Budget Pork

sp-eye:

It’s getting time to fish or cut bait. We’ve taken a good hard look at the proposed/draft 2011-12 SPASD budget, and we find a number of budget lines to be potentially low hanging fruit…ripe for the pickin’.
Download a PDF copy of SP-EYE Analysis of the 2011-12 SPASD Budget
Maybe we don’t have it right…we can admit it when we make an error…but it places the burden of proof squarely upon the district. PROVE to the community that you absolutely need all that is budgeted, and you have our support.

Why are high school grads still learning to learn?

Chris Rickert:

I’m not surprised more students are taking college-readiness and remedial courses at community and four-year colleges.
In the 1990s, I taught introductory composition at a private, career-oriented college and at a public university in Chicago, where it became clear that many of my students still hadn’t learned the difference between “it’s” and “its,” for example, or proper use of a comma. Never mind critical thinking.
It was especially evident at the private college that many of these high school graduates were forking over thousands of dollars so some master’s level English major with no formal training in education could teach them what they should have learned for free in public school.
The experience puts “Learning to Learn Camp,” Madison Area Technical College’s nine-week, $478.75 incarnation of the college preparatory class, in something of a darkly comic light.

Little Girl Found

Patti Waldmeir:

One might easily see such a thing in a Shanghai alleyway and think nothing of it: a bundle of fabric tied up with a rope. Except that this particular bundle was screaming.
I could not tell at first if the squalling child was male or female, but I knew exactly what it was doing there: a desperate mother had swaddled her newborn infant in several layers of clothing and left it alone in the winter darkness – so that it could have a chance to live.
For me, it was an all-too-familiar story: my own two daughters were abandoned at birth, left alone in a Chinese street to the mercy of strangers. But that was more than a decade ago – a decade in which China has become a powerful force in markets from natural resources to sports cars, from luxury goods to aircraft carriers. In a China of diamond iPads and gold-plated limousines were babies still ending up in anonymous alleyways?

The myth of the rational education market

Peg Tyre:

The idea that school choice is automatically better than no choice has recently been reinforced again, with the “Parent Trigger” in California. Under a law passed there last year, parents whose children attend underperforming public schools can get together, and if 51% of them sign a petition, they can demand their district change the school administrators or convert the school to a charter. So far, a parent group from Compton “pulled the trigger,” but parents from poor urban schools and well-funded suburban schools have been seeking information on how to use the Parent Trigger law to improve their schools.
Similar bills, which are supported by education reformers on both sides of the political aisle, have been passed in Connecticut, Ohio and Mississippi. About a half dozen state legislatures–including New York — are expected to consider Parent Trigger type bills this year.

What does it mean to be a proficient 8th grade reader in Georgia? Not much.

Maureen Downey:

The U.S. Department of Education released a new analysis of state standards this week that maps the standards against federal ones to assess rigor. We don’t look strong on the mapping, especially in eighth grade reading where we trail the nation.
The analysis using National Center for Educational Statistics data superimposes a state’s standard for proficient performance in reading and mathematics onto a common scale defined by scores on NAEP, a federal test administered to student samples in every state to produce a big picture view of American education. (This report offers a lot of data and great graphics.)
The most alarming mapping revealed that Georgia’s standard for proficiency in 8th grade reading is so low that it falls into the below basic category on NAEP scoring. (We don’t look in 8th grade math, either, but the feds warn that our change from QBE standards to Georgia Performance Standards undermines comparisons.)

Pre-college camps help incoming students learn how to learn

Deborah Ziff:

The fall semester hasn’t officially started yet, but this week a group of incoming Madison Area Technical College students gathered on campus to study in groups, submit homework, and take notes on lectures.
They won’t be tested. They’re just practicing.
Programs like this one at MATC — called Learning to Learn Camp — are increasingly common at colleges and universities as educators try to prepare students for the academic rigor and social stresses of college.
The courses tend to provide basic study skills such as note-taking and time management, as well as information on decidedly squishier topics, such as how to stay motivated or take personal responsibility.
“It all sounds very elementary, but particularly for community college and technical college students who often don’t have a college frame of reference, or somebody in their family who went to college, it’s really useful information,” said Melinda Mechur Karp, a senior research associate at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York.

Web site lets you compare Michigan high schools’ success

Lori Higgins:

The state will launch a Web site Monday that will eventually provide parents — and everyone else — a way to gauge how well individual high schools prepare their graduates for college.
By the end of September, the site, www.mischooldata.org , will include first-ever information on how many students from each school go to college, how many earn at least a year’s worth of college credit within two years of graduation, and how many have to take remedial courses in college.
The information could be used by parents and the public to rate high schools and for administrators to improve curricula.

Double degree adds up for Hong Kong maths prodigy

Peter So:

The wonderkid who at nine became the city’s youngest undergraduate four years ago completed his bachelor’s and master’s programme this week at the age of 13.
March Boedihardjo will now head off to the United States for a research programme and, possibly, a doctorate. The youngster was admitted to Baptist University’s double-degree programme in mathematical science in 2007, finishing it in four years – a year early. March said he really enjoyed his university years, despite earlier concerns about how such a young boy would adapt to the life.

The 15-Year-Old Creator Of The Trimit App Makes Regular Old Entrepreneurs Seem Like Slackers

Kit Eaton:

Trimit’s a recent $0.99 app for the iOS platform that does one simple thing very well: It boils down longer-form Net content into 1,000-, 500-, or 140-character summaries. The longer summaries are meant to be handy for people pressed for time to read bigger articles, perhaps during a commute, and the shorter summaries make it easy to share the body text of interesting content (more than just a “hey this is good!” introduction to a link in an email or tweet) on the web, with the 140-character limit obviously tailored for Twitter. It’s also useful for deciding if you want to, later, read a long-form article.
Its design taps into the same thinking as web acryonyms like LOL and TWSS, and there’s more than a little nod in the direction of hyper-abbreviated SMS language. Perhaps this thinking was boosted because the chap behind it is just 15.
App creator Nick D’Aloisio tells Fast Company that he came up with the idea for the app during exam studies when he was “required to research a vast amount of webpages.” Nick realized that while poring over sites was “browsing a lot of pages that were, in fact, irrelevant to the task and therefore wasting” a lot of his time. Thus the aha moment, where he realized a quick precis of a website could be invaluable in helping you decide if you wanted to browse the rest of it. D’Aloisio stressed that the intention really is to “aid users in consuming content on the web” rather than sharing it socially, though this is a natural benefit of its design.

Pell Grants Best for Buying Votes

Neal McCluskey:

Quite simply, Pell Grants are not supposed to be for the middle class. As the U.S. Department of Education’s website makes clear, Pell is supposed to be for “low-income undergraduate and certain postbaccalaureate students.”
So why characterize Pell as a benefit for the middle class? Because lots of people consider themselves to be in that group — which federal politicians rarely define — and policymakers want their votes.
Unfortunately, as Rep. George Miller (D-CA) recently demonstrated, saying Pell is intended for the middle class also makes it a valuable weapon in waging class warfare.
“Pell is the reason they are able to go to college and get ahead,” Miller said in response to congressional Republicans purportedly looking to trim the program as part of debt reduction. “It’s a shameful excuse and an attack on middle class families.”

Children With Autism, Connecting via Transit

Christine Haughney:

Ravi Greene can tell you how to get anywhere in New York City by transit — like the beach, on the 6 train.

“The 6 goes elevated from Whitlock Avenue to Pelham Bay Park,” he explains. “And at Pelham Bay Park, you can transfer for a Bx29 or a Bx12 — the Bx12 to Orchard Beach.”

Ravi has drafted elaborate proposals for expanded bus service in Brooklyn, and has memorized the exact date that the W train stopped running in 2010.

And he is only 5 years old.

Building character is a worthy subject in schools

Alan Borsuk:

Would you rather have someone graduate high school with good computer skills or good character traits?
I grant it’s a false choice. You ought to have both, and they’re not in conflict. But I ask this as a way of asking what our priorities are when it comes to educating children.
It’s hard to find a school that doesn’t have lots of computers these days. The intense push to load schools up with computers seems to have eased, compared with a decade ago. Money is tighter now, and many schools don’t need much more because they have a lot already.
But it’s not so easy to find schools that have good character education programs.
Schools are held accountable for teaching reading and math and so on. The pressure is always on for academic records for each student and for a school as a whole. But students’ character? Other than attendance and discipline for behavior problems, interest in that is pretty inconsistent.
Of course, many would say, it’s not the school’s job to civilize children. That’s the parents’ job. Absolutely correct, and I think more should be done to try to get more parents to do that job.

Handbooks replace union contracts in Wisconsin schools

Erin Richards:

Some are calling it the summer of the teacher handbook.
With the start of school approaching on Sept. 1, about two-thirds of Wisconsin’s school districts are rushing to finalize employee handbooks to replace now-extinct collective bargaining agreements that for decades outlined duties and salaries for workers.
The passage of the state’s new “Act 10” legislation – in effect for all districts that didn’t extend a contract with teachers before the passage of the law – gives administrators the ability to make sweeping changes to teachers’ pay scales, hours and working conditions without having to negotiate them with unions.
Some sacred cows are disappearing, such as teacher tenure, layoffs based on seniority and the guarantee of 10 years’ worth of post-retirement health insurance. Other big and complex changes on the horizon include new salary structures and pay-for-performance plans.

The ever-increasing burden of education

Ivan Lorentzen:

Even with all its flaws, I’m a proponent of public education in much the same way I remain committed to the fundamental principles of democracy despite recent events in D.C. having tested this commitment.
In terms of public education, there are countless books, articles, and research projects from numerous points of view and it’s clear one can find proponents and opponents to whatever perspective you may choose. One recent publication is noteworthy due to the clarity in writing and direct premise — “Schools Cannot Do It Alone” by Jamie Vollmer, former attorney, businessman, and harsh education critic, now an advocate and consultant to education. I’d like to quote and paraphrase from this book in the following column.
He argues schools need the trust, understanding, permission and support from their communities in order to improve the public education system and increase student success. In tracing his journey from critic to consultant, he weaves an interesting tale as he encounters “blueberries, bell curves, and smelly eighth graders,” and comes to two conclusions. First, we have a system problem, not a people problem. We need to modify the system in order to get the graduates we want. And second, we cannot touch the system without touching the culture of the surrounding town because everything that goes on inside a school is tied to local attitudes, values, traditions and beliefs. But in order to improve the system it’s vital that we first accurately understand the system that presently exists and how it came to be.
For the first time in history the security, prosperity, and health of our nation depend on our ability to unfold the full creative potential of every child — not just the easy ones, not just the top 20 percent of the class, and not just those who reflect our preferred values. The problem is that America’s public education system was never designed to do this. As Thomas Jefferson imagined it, schools should be designed to select and sort students into two groups: a small handful of thinkers and a great mass of obedient doers. Back then most everyone was a farmer, the pace of change was slow, options were few, and only a small handful of people were paid to think.

Partnership between Elgin school, salon a cut above

Emily McFarlan:

U46 schools won’t start class until next week, but already on Thursday, 5-year-old Nicky Moraetes of Elgin leaned forward in his chair at Harriet Gifford Elementary School with a look of intense concentration on his face.
Nicky will start dual-language kindergarten Wednesday, Aug. 24, at Gifford, and he’ll look good when he does. As he squeezed his eyes shut, a smock wrapped around his shoulders, a Salon Professionals Academy stylist clipped short the back of his blond hair.
The 5-year-old was one of many Gifford students and their siblings who got free haircuts during registration at the elementary school Thursday afternoon.

Discarding “No Child Left Behind”

John Van Hecke:

In the midst of unsettled, economically anxious times, conservative policy advocates have embraced a public chaos strategy. While they create disorder, sapping public confidence in public infrastructure, conservative policymakers pursue a policy agenda limiting public investment in public systems that serve all Minnesotans. They create cover for their true aim, directing public investment’s benefits to fewer and wealthier people.
“No Child Left Behind” is a terrific example of this strategy. By creating an impossible performance standard–every child must pass the mandated standardized exam–the results allow conservative advocates to express outrage and shock that public schools are failing the public. It’s not responsible public policy but it is a marvelously self-fulfilling prophecy, consistent with conservative traditions of defunding government while attacking it for failing to do what they’ve deliberately prevented it from doing.
In the meantime, while modest income people struggle, our country still fights two wars and gives huge tax breaks to the very richest Americans. Minnesota has its own version of this experience, revealed during the recent budget stand-off and state government shutdown. Conservative policy leaders preserved a lower effective tax rate on the richest Minnesotans while cutting state services and accelerating program costs shift to property tax payers.

10 Reasons to Skip the Expensive Colleges

Reader’s Digest:

If you’re the parent of a high-achieving high school student prepared to spend whatever it takes to send your kid to an Ivy League college, authors Claudia Dreifus and Andrew Hacker have some unlikely advice: Don’t do it.
Dreifus, a New York Times writer and an adjunct professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, and Hacker, a veteran political science professor at Queens College in New York, spent three years interviewing faculty, students, and administrators and crunching statistics for their book, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — And What We Can Do About It. Their finding? That many of America’s colleges and universities — especially the elite — aren’t worth their tuition and serve faculty over their undergrads.
More outrageous, they say, is that tuition nationwide has jumped at more than twice the rate of inflation since 1982, so many kids graduate deeply in debt. “Tuition is probably the second-largest item you’ll buy in your lifetime, after your home,” Dreifus says. Given that, the authors suggest you consider the following as you bear down on the decision of where your child will spend the next four (or more) years.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk on education

Chan Stroman:

Those favored by fortune can educate themselves in all countries: and it is for that reason that the American thinkers did not dedicate their cares to the aristocratic element of society, but rather to the lowest ranks of the great mass of the people, whom they have struggled to enlighten; comprehending that education ought not to be a privilege, but something which belongs to all, as much as the air we breathe; and that every citizen has as imprescriptible a right to the light of the Spirit as he has to the light of the sun which illuminates him.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk:

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin on The Schools, Community, Curriculum & Parenting

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin Interview 8.12.2011 from Jim Zellmer.

I am thankful that Madison Mayor Paul Soglin took the time to chat yesterday.
Mobile (iPhone, iPad, iPod and Android) visitors, please use this link.
19MB mp3 version.

Meeting test score standards – by lowering the bar

Mary McConnell:

Today’s Wall Street Journal highlights a report for the U.S. Government’s National Center for Education Statistics. In case you have trouble following the link, here’s the discouraging news:
“Eight states have raised their standards for passing elementary-school math and reading tests in recent years, but these states and most others still fall below national benchmarks, according to a federal report released Wednesday.”
The data help explain the disconnect between the relatively high pass rates on many state tests and the low scores on the national exams, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Michigan has power to reimagine education, but will it?

Tom Watkins:

There are lessons that Michigan business and government must learn from the lost decade that stripped our state of pride and nearly 1 million high-paying middle-class jobs.
If we don’t embrace and imagine a better future, instead falling back on “business as usual,” we will be relegated to the trash heap of dinosaurian, economic history.
The revisionists among us would like us to believe Michigan’s fate was pre-determined by the collapse of the domestic auto industry, capped off by a global economic meltdown in 2008.
While the perfect storm of events that hit Michigan were clearly impactful, they need not have defined us. As my dad always told me, “You have little control what happens to you in this life, you have 100 percent control over how you respond.”
Michigan responded poorly.

Judge Blocks Colorado Voucher Plan

Stephanie Simon:

A state court judge on Friday blocked a suburban school district south of Denver from using public funds to help residents pay for private and religious schools.
Judge Michael A. Martinez ruled that a voucher program designed by the Douglas County School District violated the state constitution because it sent public funds to schools that infused religion throughout their curriculum, required students and faculty to meet certain standards of faith and required students to attend religious services.
The program “provides no meaningful limitations on the use of taxpayer funds to support or promote religion, and no meaningful protections for the religious liberty of participating students,” the judge wrote in a 68-page decision. He also said it amounted to direct public aid to churches and church-sponsored schools, in violation of the Colorado constitution.

Much more on the Douglas County voucher program, here.

A Look at Sun Prairie’s Health Care Costs

sp-eye

In our last post, we made some estimates on potential savings in the 2011-12 budget due to over-budgeting for health insurance premiums in the wake of Governor Walker’s budget.
Our calculations were based on the following:
The cost to the district for a Family plan was estimated to be: $14,249
The cost to the district for a Single plan was estimated to be: $ 6,307

Sun Prairie’s website.

Parents must hold kids accountable

Laura Schubert:

The recent spate of criminal activity involving marauding bands of young people has a lot of greater Milwaukee residents wondering what is going on inside the heads of today’s teenagers and young adults.
The answer, according to current brain research, is a lot. It turns out that the adolescent brain is not fully mature, as previously believed, but is actually in a period of intense growth until children reach their late teens or early 20s. One of the last areas of the brain to mature is the prefrontal cortex.
In a nutshell, the prefrontal cortex governs impulse control. The hormonal surges of puberty kick up heightened emotional responses at a time when the brain is least equipped to regulate emotional urges, thus creating the perfect storm for poor choices.

Obama Shows Spunk Pushing Bold Education Plan: Jonathan Alter

Jonathan Alter:

Although President Barack Obama is on the ropes, with even some Democratic allies describing him as weak and passive, this week he showed boldness and imagination in one vital area: education.
Obama backed Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s announcement that he will grant waivers to states that want to be excused from the punitive provisions of No Child Left Behind , Washington’s much-maligned 2002 overhaul of elementary and secondary education policy.
Republican lawmakers complain that the White House waivers run roughshod over the legislative branch — and they’re right. But gridlock demands more robust use of presidential authority and, at least in this case, we’re getting it. Unless Duncan’s action is challenged and reversed on constitutional grounds, No Child Left Behind will be left behind for good.

College Tours: When did they become a thing?

Jeremy Singer-Vine:

Despite a lousy economy and high gas prices, college visits by prospective students increased over the last year, according to an informal poll by the New York Times. Almost three-quarters of the 41 colleges surveyed said they had more visitors this summer than last. When did the pre-enrollment campus visit become a “thing”?
The late 1960s. The college visit as we know it–with guest-lectures from the provost, tours, and occasional free goodies–dates to the Vietnam era. During this time, universities faced increased competition from a boom in two-year colleges, while cheaper airfare, the civil rights movement, and a shift to co-educational teaching gave prospective students more choice than ever among postsecondary schools. Colleges realized they needed to market themselves more vigorously, and campus visits became a big part of the pitch. (This was a smart move: A 1982 study found that about 16 percent of prospective students considered their campus visit the most influential factor in naming their first-choice college.)

Bullying climates at schools may be linked with lower test scores

Jeannine Stein:

Bullying can affect a student’s academic performance, but a school’s bullying climate may be linked with lower overall test scores, a study finds.
The study, presented recently at the American Psychological Assn.’s recent annual convention in Washington, D.C., surveyed 7,304 ninth-grade students and 2,918 teachers who were randomly chosen from 284 high schools in Virginia. Students and teachers were asked about incidents of bullying and teasing at the school. Ninth-grade students were chosen because researchers felt this first year of high school was a critical adjustment period, and because poor test scores in this grade may be linked with a higher drop-out rate.
In the study, bullying was defined as using strength or popularity to deliberately injure, threaten or embarrass another person, and that harassment can be verbal, physical or social. Two students close in strength who argue are not considered bullies.

At Dalton, a Push for Change

Sophia Hollander:

Assembling diverse classes is an oft-stated goal among New York City private schools, with brochures featuring beaming multicultural students.
But this September Dalton will approach a rare benchmark: Nearly half of the incoming kindergarten class will be students of color.
Dalton will dramatically exceed the citywide average for kindergarten diversity at New York’s private schools, which was 30% students of color last year, according to data from the National Association of Independent Schools.
It’s a milestone in an aggressive campaign by the admissions director, Elisabeth “Babby” Krents, to broaden the school’s reach since she assumed the position in 1996. The previous year, the kindergarten class was 6% diverse. This year, it will be 47% of the 97-member incoming class.

States Fail to Raise Bar in Reading, Math Tests

Stephanie Banchero:

Eight states have raised their standards for passing elementary-school math and reading tests in recent years, but these states and most others still fall below national benchmarks, according to a federal report released Wednesday.
The data help explain the disconnect between the relatively high pass rates on many state tests and the low scores on the national exams, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
In fourth-grade reading, for example, 35 states set passing bars that are below the “basic” level on the national NAEP exam. “Basic” means students have a satisfactory understanding of material, as opposed to “proficient,” which means they have a solid grasp of it. Massachusetts is the only state to set its bar at “proficient”–and that was only in fourth- and eighth-grade math.

Are school boards part of the problem or the solution?

Anne M. Byrne:

In the drama of public education, many people seem to see school boards as wearing black hats. When is the last time you heard a positive reference to school boards in our ongoing national debate? School boards are part of the problem, right?
Actually, local school boards have an essential role in education reform. More often than not, they are composed of energetic citizens who bring a passion for their communities to bear on nettlesome issues ranging from graduation rates to childhood obesity and bullying.
As a longtime school board member in New York State and chair of the student achievement committee for the National School Boards Association, I have been looking at what research says about school boards and student achievement. Does what happens in the boardroom make a difference in the classroom? The answer is yes, unequivocally.
Controlling for demographic differences, districts with high levels of student achievement have school boards that exhibit habits and characteristics that are markedly different from boards in low-achieving districts.

Robots put leadership under skills pressure

Andrew Hill:

We love robots – tireless, productive workhorses of the modern assembly line. But we also hate robots – sinister mechanical simulacra of the human workers they make redundant.
In the latest episode in our complicated relationship with automatons and automation, it is appropriate that Foxconn should have a lead role. The Taiwanese company manufactures the chattering classes’ favourite piece of science fiction come true, the Apple iPad, as well as devices for Nokia and Sony. It employs 1m people in China. It was the epicentre last year of concern about pressure on low-paid young workers, following a series of suicides at its Shenzhen factories. It is, in short, iPad users’ window on to dilemmas of assembly-line politics and management that the developed world last grappled with on this scale decades ago.

Why parents can’t save schools

Jay Matthews:

One of the summer scandals keeping us education wonks amused until school starts is a American Federation of Teachers gaffe in Connecticut. Union officials posted online an analysis of their lobbying against a parent trigger law in that state that revealed too much about their distaste for letting moms and dads decide who should run their schools.
Bloggers RiShawn Biddle and Alexander Russo exposed the union celebrating its gutting of a Connecticut version of California’s parent trigger law. School reform organizations and editorialists were aghast. AFT president Randi Weingarten disowned the Web post. Activists pushing for parent triggers in Texas and New York welcomed the attention.
This idea has already reached the Washington area and may someday inspire legislation here. That would be bad. Despite its worthy proponents and democratic veneer, the parent trigger is a waste of time. Let’s toss it into the trash with other once fashionable reform ideas like worksheets for slow students and brief constructed responses on state tests.

A balance of power in school governance is vital to ongoing improvements AND relevance.

Don’t Filter Information

Joshua Kim:

The context for this advice was some technical information about e-learning system downtime that we needed to communicate with our leadership. I was thinking of how to present this information to communicate the meaning I thought most essential, and therefore drive toward the conclusions and actions I thought we should take. Controlling the message and managing the information might be an understandable desire, but when it comes to technology (and perhaps everything else), a controlled message is sometimes the wrong approach.
Deciding not to filter information does not mean that we cease thinking about how to effectively communicate. We need to understand the recipient of the information, and have insight into the most effective manner to package our communication. We should also be aware of how the communication will be perceived, and be prepared to address concerns or questions.

School Vouchers – Panacea or Snake Oil?

Ross Meyer:

As most Coloradans know, at least those who keep up with statewide education news, the Douglas County school board recently approved — unanimously — a groundbreaking plan to help pay the tuition costs for hundreds of students so that they can attend private schools.
This plan, known colloquially as a school voucher program, enjoys ardent support from some quarters, but vigorous opposition elsewhere.
Is such a plan useful, does it seem a wise use of taxpayer provided money, and is it available to all students?
Or, as many think, should public money earmarked for education be used exclusively for public schools to benefit all students? As with so many topics dotting the American sociological landscape, the answers lie in the murky sea of the individual’s political leanings.

Education in Chile: We want the world

The Economist:

IT BEGAN on August 4th with the metallic clink of a few pots and pans. By nightfall, thousands of people were on the streets of Santiago banging kitchenware, a form of protest last heard under the dictatorship of General Pinochet. This time the cacerolazos, as they are called, are being staged in the name of educational Utopia–and in response to a cack-handed government ban on marches.
Chile’s school system is the least bad in Latin America, according to the OECD’s PISA tests, which compare educational attainment across countries. But that does not make it good. And the overall performance hides huge disparities. Analysis done in Chile of the test results in the 65 countries that took part finds that it ranked 64th in terms of the variance of the results according to social class. Rich pupils get good private education; poor ones are condemned to underfunded, dilapidated state-funded schools.

Wisconsin teachers union tops list of biggest lobbying groups for 2009-10, report shows

Scott Bauer:

The statewide teachers union led in spending on lobbying state lawmakers even before this year’s fight over collective bargaining rights.
The Wisconsin Education Association Council spent $2.5 million on lobbying in 2009 and 2010, years when Democrats were in control of all of state government, a report released Thursday by the Government Accountability Board showed.
WEAC is always one of the top spending lobbyists in the Capitol and they took a central role this year fighting Gov. Scott Walker’s plan curbing public employee union rights, including teachers.
Back in 2009, when Democrat Jim Doyle was governor and Democrats controlled the Senate and Assembly, WEAC wasn’t helping to organize massive protests but it was a regular presence in the Capitol.
Much of its lobbying in 2009 was in support of removing caps on raises for teachers during contract negotiations, a move supported by Doyle and approved by the Legislature.

The Trouble with Debt to Degree

Robert Kelchen:

I was pleased to see the release of Education Sector’s report, “Debt to Degree: A New Way of Measuring College Success,” by Kevin Carey and Erin Dillon. They created a new measure, a “borrowing to credential ratio,” which divides the total amount of borrowing by the number of degrees or credentials awarded. Their focus on institutional productivity and dedication to methodological transparency (their data are made easily accessible on the Education Sector’s website) are certainly commendable.
That said, I have several concerns with their report. I will focus on two key points, both of which pertain to how this approach would affect the measurement of performance for 2-year and 4-year not-for-profit (public and private) colleges and universities. My comments are based on an analysis in which I merged IPEDS data with the Education Sector data to analyze additional measures; my final sample consists of 2,654 institutions.
Point 1: Use of the suggested “borrowing to credential” ratio has the potential to reduce college access for low-income students.

Related: Debt to Degree.

Some Folks Have a (Really) Hard Time with Change

Peter Murphy:

Change is hard. So said many a politician trying to tackle problems confronting the state or nation.
The president of the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), Richard Iannuzzi, is a tell-tale example of someone having real difficulty with change by showing a dark side.
Yesterday’s Associated Press story on the changing landscape of public education was telling. With strengthened accountability and teacher evaluation combined with tightening resources, changes are afoot. On the one hand, Governor Andrew Cuomo is recognizing the “gravitational forces” of change and is in some ways its instigator by his focus on “improving student performance,” including his push that gave more teeth to the state Regents evaluation requirements.

Preparing Future Teachers

Melissa Westbrook:

From the Grand Rapids, Michigan Press, comes a story about Arne Duncan and what he thinks should happen for teachers and teacher training:
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says teachers should be paid between $60,000 to $150,000 – but should be held more accountable.
Duncan also told the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards last week that it should be more difficult for prospective students to enter college teacher preparation programs.
The latter sentence is part of a bigger discussion over whether colleges of education in this country do a good job of attracting good students and if they are training them properly. Indeed, a big worry expressed among some UW COE faculty about bringing in TFA is that if the COE doesn’t step up and do better they could be shut down. Some of the UW COE faculty seem to think the TFA training may be the training of the future for teachers.

Madison Schools To Start New Talented & Gifted Program

Matthew DeFour:

Spurred by a critical state audit, the Madison School District will begin a new program this year intended to better identify and provide services for talented and gifted students.
Using an approach similar to how it identifies and serves special education students, the district plans to categorize talented-and-gifted services into three tiers and identify where all students fit into those tiers based on a combination of test scores, grades, teacher and staff assessments, and parent and self-identification.
Students who qualify for the top tier could receive additional academic services outside of the classroom. The program also seeks to develop the potential talent of all students, especially those who may not have been identified in the past, such as English language learners and low-income students.
In the past, Madison schools have used a more ad hoc, less systematic, approach for identifying and serving students who demonstrate advanced abilities in intellect, academics, leadership, creativity, and the performance and visual arts. The district also has historically blanched at grouping students by ability.

Related: A group of Madison parents filed a successful complaint related to talented & gifted services with Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction.

Ravitch rallies teachers vs. ‘astroturf’

Politico:

Ravitch’s public speaking schedule over the last year included more than a dozen speeches across the country to local AFT and NEA affiliates. Brill suggested that some of those appearances carried a price tag of between $15,000 and $20,000. But Ravitch, for her part, said she has never received speaking fees approaching the sums that Brill claims.
“That is a flat out untruth,” Ravitch told POLITICO. “Most of my speaking appearances to union groups have been for free.”
“Most of the time that I speak to unions it has been for free.”
Spokesmen for NEA, AFT and the Gates Foundation all declined to comment for this story.

Super Teachers Alone Can’t Save Our Schools

Steven Brill:

A superstar teacher or charismatic principal rides to the rescue! Downtrodden public school children, otherwise destined to fail, are saved! We’ve all seen that movie–more than once, starting with “Stand and Deliver” and “Lean on Me” in the late 1980s and more recently with documentaries like “Waiting for Superman” and “The Lottery,” which brilliantly portray the heroes of the charter-school movement. And we know the villains, too: teachers’ union leaders and education bureaucrats who, for four decades, have presided over schools that provide comfortable public jobs for the adults who work there but wretched instruction for the children who are supposed to learn there.
One of the heroes of this familiar tale is Dave Levin, the co-founder of the highly regarded KIPP network of charter schools (KIPP stands for Knowledge Is Power Program). But Mr. Levin would be the first to tell you that heroes aren’t enough to turn around an American public school system whose continued failure has become the country’s most pressing long-term economic and national security threat.

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We’d All Love to See the Plan

Mike Antonucci:

On the pages of Time, Andrew Rotherham examines the various reform-minded groups that have sprung up within the ranks of the big-city teachers’ unions. Sarah Rosenberg at The Quick and the Ed follows suit. Rotherham calls them “insurgents” while Rosenberg refers to “a revolution.” While I applaud any publicly stated diversity of thought within NEA and AFT, I am considerably less sanguine about the prospects of major internal reform.

There are two problems. One is that in any corporate culture radical changes in direction are frowned upon, if not suppressed. In unions, whose very hallmark is solidarity, this reluctance to entertain unorthodox thought is ratcheted up several levels. The relative electoral success of NewTLA is remarkable, but such victories don’t usually result in further gains in subsequent elections. I admit we are operating in extraordinary times, so maybe things will be different and I’ll be surprised.

For Better Grades, Try Gym Class

Gretchen Reynolds:

If you want a young person to focus intently in school and perform well on tests, should you first send him or her to gym class? That question, which has particular relevance for school districts weighing whether to reduce or ax their physical education programs to save money, motivated a number of stimulating new examinations into the interplay of activity and attention. Some of the experiments studied children; others looked at laboratory rats bred to have an animal version of attention deficit disorder. For both groups, exercise significantly affected their ability to concentrate, although some activities seemed to be better than others at sharpening attention.

The most striking of the new studies involved 138 schoolchildren ages 8 to 11 who were living in Rome. The children were physically healthy, and none suffered from serious attention deficits. But like most children that age, they found it difficult to remain fully engaged in their lessons as the school day wore on. As the study’s authors, all affiliated with the Foro Italico campus of the University of Rome, point out, children “who undergo prolonged periods of academic instruction often reduce their attention and concentration.”

To determine whether exertion could make students less distracted, the researchers, whose study was published last week in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, had the children complete several types of gym classes, as well as a typical instructional or lecture class. Just before and immediately after the classes, the children took a written test that required them to pick out certain letters from long chains of symbols in a short time. The test is widely accepted as a good indicator of a person’s attention and ability to concentrate.

Atlanta Starts New School Year Under Cloud of Cheating Scandal

Judy Woodruff

JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, the first of two stories about the nation’s schools.
Students returned to Atlanta classrooms for the start of a new school year today. But students and teachers will be laboring under the cloud of a major cheating scandal that’s raising big questions in Atlanta and in districts across the country.
JOHN TULENKO: Parks Middle School in Atlanta, Georgia, was a beacon of hope. Located in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, it had built a reputation as a high-achieving school.
Chandra Gallashaw felt lucky to send her children to Parks.
CHANDRA GALLASHAW, mother: This was a college prep middle school. I had seen the change going on over there. And I was really impressed with that. That’s what made me want my daughter to go there more so than ever.
JOHN TULENKO: Parks had made some of the largest gains anywhere in Georgia. Pass rates on the state tests climbed from 35 percent to 78 percent in reading, and from 24 percent to 86 percent in math.

Hong Kong Teachers stand up against ‘moral lessons’; Profession’s biggest union says government’s proposed curriculum should ‘be given a fail’

Jennifer Ngo:

The city’s biggest teachers’ union has called on the government to scrap its plan to introduce mandatory moral and national education classes at schools after a survey of more than 2,000 of its members found widespread opposition to the proposal.
The pro-democracy Hong Kong Professional Teachers’ Union, which claims a membership of 80,000, or 90 per cent of all the city’s teaching professionals, says the poll found 70 per cent were against the move.
Union officials also criticised the government for carrying out consultation over the move in a “condescending” way and called for a new round of talks.
“If we have to speak in terms of grading requirements, this document [proposing the new curriculum] would be given a `fail’,” said James Hon Lin-shan, deputy director of the union’s rights and complaints department.

Hong Kong Professional Teacher’s Union website. Much more on the Moral and National Education (MNE) curriculum, here.

The Annotated No Child Left Behind Waiver Conversation

Andrew Rotherham:

I’m not opposed to a new round of waivers on No Child Left Behind, but the devil is in the details. Unfortunately, the details seem to be getting short shrift lately in favor of the same talking points. To wit, let’s take a look at today’s NYT story on the forthcoming Duncan waiver proposal. Here it is (mostly) annotated with text from the article in itals.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has announced that he will unilaterally override the centerpiece requirement of the No Child Left Behind school accountability law, that 100 percent of students be proficient in math and reading by 2014.

Well, it’s not really 100 percent, more like 92 percent or so, and it’s not 2014 in practice but really several years later. And in practice for a school to make “adequate yearly progress” often only 6 or 7 in 10 of its students need to be passing a test at the proficient level right now. And, to be proficient doesn’t mean a perfect score on a test, often more like getting half the questions on a test right. That all makes it sound too reasonable though. Besides, those are details! Nothing but details!