The students at Montclair High School in Southern California are learning the three Rs, but many of them are living the lessons of a fourth R: Recession.
“Hi, my name is Brenda and what the recession means to me is stop wanting what I want and start wanting what I need,” said one student in school project where students videotaped themselves.
“Hi, my name is Dulce and what the recession means to me is wearing $10 shoes,” another said.
More than 80 percent of the nearly 34 million teenagers nationwide say they are concerned about the economy, reports CBS News correspondent Seth Doane.
“Hi, I’m Kristen Beltran,” said Kristen, shooting herself at home. “And what the recession means to me is not being able to afford the things that I really need.”
Kristen’s dad, a welder, has a quarter of the work he had this time last summer. The mortgage is three months behind. Fifteen-year-old Kristen wishes her parents would let her get a job.
“Are we going to have enough money for groceries? Are my parents going to be able to pay the bills?” Kristen asked.
Public health advocates and the fast-food industry are preparing to go head-to-head over proposed federal legislation that would require restaurants to post calorie counts alongside prices. A patchwork of such laws at the state level have been enacted in recent years, and the restaurant industry has countered with proposing federal legislation on the issue – but public health advocates say the industry’s proposed solution is too weak.
Attached to this e-mail is the Proposed Strategic Plan and a cover memorandum to the Board of Education. We invite all of you to the June 15 Special Board of Education meeting at 6:00 p.m. The Plan, along with a way to respond, is on the district’s website (www.mmsd.org) on the home page, under Hot Topics. This is the direct link: http://drupal.madison.k12.wi.us/node/2246
Thanks to all of you for your hard work and willingness to participate.
After Bethany Martin graduated from high school here last June, she was surprised when the local community college told her that she had to retake classes like basic composition, for no college credit. Each remedial course costs her $350, more than a week’s pay from her job at a Chick-fil-A restaurant.
Ms. Martin blames chaotic high school classes. “The kids just took over,” she recalls. But her college instructors say that even well-run high school courses often fail to teach what students need to know in college. They say that Ms. Martin’s senior English class, for instance, focused on literature, but little on writing.
Like Ms. Martin, more than a million college freshmen across the nation must take remedial courses each year, and many drop out before getting a degree. Poorly run public schools are a part of the problem, but so is a disconnect between high schools and colleges.
“We need to better align what we expect somebody to be able to do to graduate high school with what we expect them to do in college,” said Billie A. Unger, the dean at Ms. Martin’s school, Blue Ridge Community and Technical College, who oversees “developmental” classes, a nice word for remedial. “If I’m to be a pro football player, and you teach me basketball all through school, I’ll end up in developmental sports,” she said.
My colleague Dan de Vise’s wonderful piece Tuesday about the Darnestown, Md., student who never missed a day of school has had a terrific reaction. Like me, readers appreciated Dan’s tribute to old-fashioned values, such as dependability and persistence, which some of us thought had died out in the younger generations.
The research shows that absenteeism is a major educational problem, particularly in impoverished neighborhoods. The fewer days a student spends in school, the lower their level of achievement. But there is a related problem that is more difficult to measure in a way that would allow us to celebrate those students who overcome it. What do we do about students who are forced to miss school when they are in school?
Many people assume that if the kid shows up before the first bell and stays until the final bell, he has gotten a good education that day. If only that were so. Here are some bad habits of modern school administration that, when added up, significantly reduce learning time:
ABC will do a fine job tonight introducing you to the 11 remaining Spelling Bee finalists (and yes, you will watch the Bee instead of, or at worst in addition to, the Cavs-Magic game. There are more than a dozen NBA conference final games most years, but only one Spelling Bee. You know it’s true.)
Anyhow, ABC will do a fine job tonight introducing you to the 11 remaining finalists, but still, I wanted to make a few points.
* All day I’ve been referring to Serena Skye Laine-Lobsinger as Bee Goes Punk, and she sort of was ok with that description.
“I’m kind of adventurous with what I like to wear,” the 13-year old from West Palm Beach told me. “I’ll wear pretty much anything.”
She’s particularly fond of bandanas, was sporting some sparkled-out Chuck Taylors, and had four shades of nail polish on (black and white alternating on her right hand, and silver and pink on her left). So, punk?
“You probably could say that,” she said. “That’s probably how a lot of people look at me.”
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spent billions of dollars exploring the idea that smaller high schools might result in higher graduation rates and better test scores. Instead, it found that the key to better education is not necessarily smaller schools but more effective teachers.
Some people might cringe while recounting how much money the foundation spent figuring this out. But the foundation’s new CEO, Jeff Raikes, smiles and uses it as an example to explain that the charity has the money to try things that might fail.
“Almost by definition, good philanthropy means we’re going to have to do some risky things, some speculative things to try and see what works and what doesn’t,” Raikes said Wednesday during an interview with The Associated Press.
The foundation’s new “learner-in-chief” has spent the nine months since he was named CEO studying the operation, traveling around the world and figuring out how to balance the pressures of the economic downturn with the growing needs of people in developing nations.
The former Microsoft Corp. executive, who turns 51 on Friday, joined the foundation as its second CEO after Patty Stonesifer, another former Microsoft executive, announced her retirement and his friends Bill and Melinda Gates talked Raikes out of retiring.
For a decade and a half, the state’s teachers union has been hammering away at Republican state lawmakers for failing to repeal the Qualified Economic Offer law (QEO), which essentially allowed school districts to grant a 3.8% increase in salary and benefits to teachers without going to arbitration.
In the state budget he submitted in February, Governor Jim Doyle proposed repealing the QEO. Since Democrats hold both houses of the Legislature, it seemed to be a sure thing that they would go along with Doyle’s suggestion.
But then yesterday, a funny thing happened. WEAC, the state’s largest teachers’ union, offered up a “compromise” plan to the Legislature instead of simply doing away with the QEO.
Your first question is probably obvious: “Exactly with whom are they compromising?” They own the Wisconsin Legislature. They can get whatever they want – why would they feel the need to “compromise” with anyone, seeing as the thing they have hated most for 15 years is a couple of votes from being history? And who exactly represents the taxpayers in this “compromise?”
The “compromise” they offered essentially delays repeal of the QEO for one year. So they’ve been ripping on Republicans for years for not eliminating the QEO, but then when it comes time to actually do it, they want to push it off for a year – when they have the votes to eliminate it immediately.
What they’ve done is put into writing what most others have realized over the years – the QEO is actually a pretty good deal, especially in a bad economy. They have recognized that if you pull away the QEO now, they could end up with a lot less than a 3.8% pay and benefits increase. In tough economic times, it’s a floor rather than a ceiling – ask any of the 128,000 private sector workers who have lost their jobs in Wisconsin in the past year if they’d settle for a guaranteed 3.8% increase.
Nineteen area high school seniors are among the 2,800 winners of 2009 National Merit Scholarships financed by colleges and universities. This first wave of the annual awards, valued from $500 to $2,000 for up to four years, will be followed by another group announced in July.
Madison scholarship winners include: Amy Callear (Univ. of Pittsburgh scholarship), Molly Farry-Thorn (Carleton College) and Yang He (UW-Madison) of West High School; Hannah Conley (Univ. of Minnesota) and George Otto (Univ. of Minnesota) of East High School; and Rachel Underwood (UW-Madison) of Edgewood High School.
Stelios Fourakis (Univ. of Chicago) and Annie Steiner (Carleton College) of Middleton High School also are recipients, along with Jennifer Anderson (Univ. of Oklahoma) of Sun Prairie High School, and Amanda Spencer (Washington University in St. Louis) of Verona Area High School.
Other area winners are: Kendall Schneider (Univ. of Minnesota) of DeForest Area High School; Samuel Cahill (Arizona State University) and Megan Wasley (Univ. of Minnesota) of Dodgeville High School; Barry Badeau (Univ. of Minnesota) of Evansville High School; Leah Laux (Washington University in St. Louis) of Kettle Moraine High School; Ewain Gwynne (Northwestern University) of Lodi High School; and Jonathan Means (St. Olaf College) of Watertown High School.
Nita Kopan (Case Western Reserve), of Middleton, who attends Corona Del Sol High School in Tempe, Ariz., and James Foster (Univ. of Chicago), of Verona, who attends Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., also were awarded.
To the 1.5 million teenagers who will fret, cram and agonize over taking the most widely used college-entrance exam, the SAT, over the next 12 months, I have something to say: I’m right there with you.
On a challenge from my teenage son, I took the SAT earlier this month to see how a 57-year-old mom would do. My son says today’s teens have to be smarter, faster and more competitive to succeed. I suspect he’s right; I haven’t been able to help my kids with their math homework since eighth grade. Moreover, in the 41 years since I took the SAT, our culture and the expectations surrounding the exam have changed drastically. To see how I’d measure up, I swallowed my fears, crammed for six weeks and took the test May 2.
Life for teens is indeed harder, my experiment taught me, but not in the way I expected. Aging took a toll on my mental abilities, to be sure, but I was able to erase most of the losses by studying. What surprised me more were the psychological hurdles. Coping with the ramped-up expectations and competitiveness that infuse the SAT process — a reflection of our entire culture — sent me into a tailspin of adolescent regression, procrastination and sloppy study habits, all the behaviors I’ve taught my children to avoid. What I learned will make me a more tolerant parent.
Some reflections from a diary I kept:
The reigning national spelling champion is a 14-year-old kid whose one-liners kept everyone laughing a year ago. His parents moved to the United States from central India, and he wants to be a neurosurgeon when he grows up.
Last year’s runner-up _ and one of this year’s favorites at the Scripps National Spelling Bee _ is an all-business 13-year-old Indian-American boy from Michigan. He’s also set his sights on neurosurgery.
Another favorite expected to be onstage for Thursday night’s nationally televised finals is a 13-year-old Kansas girl with a sweet smile and a last name that’s a spelling challenge unto itself. You guessed it: Her family comes from India, and she wants to be a neurosurgeon.
When Scott Brooks got laid off by American Express in February he decided to turn his back on finance and revive a dream he gave up on many years ago — to become a math teacher.
He happens to live in New Jersey, where state education authorities have long worried about a dearth of math teachers.
Last week he heard about a new program called “Traders to Teachers” being set up at Montclair State University to retrain people in the finance industry who have been laid off in the deepest crisis to hit Wall Street since the Great Depression.
“You get really comfortable with your career, and I was making six figures, and it was nice,” Brooks said shortly after an interview at the university to determine his eligibility for the program, which starts classes in September.
“Sometimes the house has to be on fire before you leave its comfort and start on your journey. The credit card business and Wall Street overall is like that house on fire,” he said.
Like the rest of higher education, elite universities have grown increasingly reliant on non-tenure-track faculty members. Leaders of those institutions are frequently unaware of the role played by adjuncts or how they have come to make up a larger share of the teaching force. The causes for this shift — while related to money — go far beyond the savings from hiring off the tenure track, and the blame may need to be shared by senior professors and graduate student unions. At the most celebrated institutions of higher education in the United States, the teaching quality of the adjuncts is many times better than that of those on the tenure tack.
These are among the conclusions of Off-Track Profs: Nontenured Teachers in Higher Education, being released this week by the MIT Press. Amid the growing literature of research about adjuncts, this book is different in some key ways that are likely to make some of it controversial, and may also make it influential. The focus of the book is on elite research universities, ten of which gave data and access to senior administrators so that the authors (themselves administrators) could examine the issues.
While the book is consistent with many of the recent studies of adjuncts in documenting their growing use and many cases of abuse, the tone is notably different, as are some conclusions. While the book sees the treatment of adjuncts as a real issue both for the adjuncts and their institutions, it suggests that there is much blame to share — and that this situation did not arise from the actions of administrators looking to cut costs. And while much of the research about adjuncts has come from unions or groups sympathetic to unions, this book is decidedly not.
Mayor David Cicilline wants the state to allow cities to assess private colleges $150 per student.
Under his unusual proposal, it would be up to the colleges to decide whether to pay the fee or pass it on to their students.
Cicilline originally suggested cities be allowed to levy a $150-per-semester tax on full-time students at private colleges, but he amended his proposal Wednesday.
The measure is included in legislation that state lawmakers plan to consider.
The Wisconsin Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee on Wednesday night is debating the allocation of state money for schools.
With cuts in state school aid and caps on how much schools may raise taxes both on the agenda, some schools are preparing for the worst and considering drastic measures such as consolidation.
The cuts come at a time when many schools have been begging for school funding formula changes. Now they’re looking at possible cuts of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Two rural school districts in Marquette County said that giving students a quality education is becoming increasingly difficult in tough budget times.
“We have been making some significant cuts over a period of time. I’ve been in this district for five years and during that time we’ve been reducing our budget by about $250,000 a year on average, and that’s a significant amount of money,” said Westfield District Administrator Roger Schmidt.
Westfield schools have cut back on staff, among other changes.
he WEAC memo urges JFC members to support the governor’s original recommendation to repeal the QEO. But in lieu of that, the memo offers the alternative of keeping the QEO in place until July 1, 2010, and provide a one-year “hiatus” on interest arbitration proceedings for resolving contract issues.
Administrators still have concerns that changes to arbitration proposed by the governor will lead to unmanageable compensation increases. Doyle’s proposals would de-emphasize school district revenues in arbitration with employees.
The WEAC memo urges the committee members to keep these modifications intact.
WEAC lobbyist Dan Burkhalter said the alternative was offered as districts deal with a tough economic climate.
It would keep management from being able to impose arbitration in the first year without a union’s consent, Burkhalter said.. If a contract would go to arbitration in the first year, the contract would be settled under the new arbitration rules under the compromise offered by WEAC.
Burkhalter said the reaction of lawmakers was positive to the compromise, but he didn’t know what the committee would ultimately put forward.
See the memo here.
Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, said: “Senior officials of the Chinese government grilled me about whether or not we are going to monetise the actions of our legislature.”
“I must have been asked about that a hundred times in China. I was asked at every single meeting about our purchases of Treasuries. That seemed to be the principal preoccupation of those that were invested with their surpluses mostly in the United States,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
His recent trip to the Far East appears to have been a stark reminder that Asia’s “Confucian” culture of right action does not look kindly on the insouciant policy of printing money by Anglo-Saxons.
Mr Fisher, the Fed’s leading hawk, was a fierce opponent of the original decision to buy Treasury debt, fearing that it would lead to a blurring of the line between fiscal and monetary policy – and could all too easily degenerate into Argentine-style financing of uncontrolled spending.
However, he agreed that the Fed was forced to take emergency action after the financial system “literally fell apart”.
Nor, he added was there much risk of inflation taking off yet. The Dallas Fed uses a “trim mean” method based on 180 prices that excludes extreme moves and is widely admired for accuracy.
School districts often find it challenging to provide their School District Performance Reports (SDPRs) to the public at their websites, as is legally required (under s.115.38, Wis. Stats.).
The job is easier now that the DPI has created an on-line version of (most of) the SDPR. By simply linking to this page, districts can fulfill almost all of their Internet-based data reporting obligations under the statute.
The Web report covers those SDPR categories which are reported by athletic conference, including achievement, Advanced Placement participation, graduation rates, post-secondary plans, extra-/co-curricular activities, staffing, and financial information. Districts still hold the responsibility for reporting suspension and expulsion data, which are not yet available on the SDPR webpage. The DPI is planning to add that data to the on-line report in the future.
Karen Kaldenbach, an 18-year-old high school senior in Arlington County, remembers vividly what life was like when she was 11: “I saw Social Services almost as much as I saw my mother, who was always drunk. Her best friends, alcohol and money, were always there for her. She spent so much time with them, she couldn’t raise my little sister and me. Social Services always came to talk to me at school. They asked questions about my family. My response? A lie, always.”
Such stories are not uncommon in the Washington area. They often end unhappily. Yet these days, Kaldenbach is thriving, with a supportive adoptive mother, plus awards, scholarships and an acceptance letter from George Mason University.
We are in the midst of a national debate, its outcome uncertain, over what should be the emphasis of efforts to fix public schools. Some say the focus should be on improving teaching. Only in the classroom, they say, is there a chance to give students — particularly those in poverty — the tools they need to succeed. Others say teachers cannot reach those children until their family lives, shaken by parental joblessness or mental or physical illness, are straightened out by government action.
They do it late at night when their parents are asleep. They do it in restaurants and while crossing busy streets. They do it in the classroom with their hands behind their back. They do it so much their thumbs hurt.
Spurred by the unlimited texting plans offered by carriers like AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company — almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.
The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation.
Dr. Martin Joffe, a pediatrician in Greenbrae, Calif., recently surveyed students at two local high schools and said he found that many were routinely sending hundreds of texts every day.
Lauren Kirk had a hamburger in hand, a new friend by her side. On Monday afternoon, she was one of the cool kids.
The 14-year-old from Bloomington, Ind., with the lime-green headband and wild shoelaces wasn’t about to skip the annual Scripps National Spelling Bee barbecue to pore over lists of obscure words for the weeklong spell-off.
While a few did choose to hang out at the hotel to study _ with the hope they’ll be crowned champion Thursday on prime-time network television _ the rest were in their element at a park in the Virginia suburbs, romping around, playing volleyball, trading autographs and singing karaoke. (ABBA seemed to be a favorite this year).
“It’s a lot more social than I thought it would be,” said Lauren said, who had a peace sign painted on her temple and yellow-and-black bee on her leg. “It’s really nice to be among people who actually get your jokes.”
Wisconsin’s statewide test given to hundreds of thousands of students each year deserves a poor grade for its own performance.
The test has some of the weakest standards in the nation.
The test takes far too long to process.
The Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination also fails to compare student proficiency at the beginning of a school year with proficiency at the end of the same academic year.
All of that needs to change, as recommended last week in reports by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, a conservative study group in Hartland.
As tragedies go, not getting what you want is the straightforward kind, and getting it can be the ironic variety. But there is also the existential tragedy of not knowing what you want to begin with. That’s the species of catastrophe recounted in Walter Kirn’s memoir, “Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever,” the witty, self- castigating story of the author’s single-minded quest to succeed at a series of tests and competitions that took him from one of the lowest-ranked high schools in Minnesota to Princeton. As Kirn, a noted critic and novelist, tells it, in childhood he leapt onto a hamster wheel baited with “prizes, plaques, citations, stars,” and kept rattling away at it until his junior year in the Ivy League, when he suffered a breakdown that left him nearly speechless.
After channeling their complaints about school lunch into an effort to make a real difference, students at Onalaska High School are enjoying healthier, better tasting choices–not to mention some national attention for the improvements they’ve made.
In 2007-08, Amy Yin, then a junior at Onalaska and the student representative to the local school board, was hearing grumbling from students about the elimination of favorite food choices. According to the Onalaska Holmen Courier-Life, it was Principal Peter Woerpel who first planted the idea of starting a Student Nutrition Advisory Committee. Yin, a high-achieving Presidential Scholar semifinalist who got a perfect score on the ACT exam, ran with the concept, and it took off. The committee was a devoted group–meeting multiple hours every week, including on weekends.
Although some of the lost favorites didn’t return–the chocolate chip muffins, for example, no longer met nutrition standards–the students were able to make an important impact. As they learned more about nutrition and the school lunch program, they were able to work with the school to provide choices that were both healthier and more appealing to the student body. These days, Onalaska High School serves fresh fruit instead of just canned, and offers a salad bar that became especially popular after the addition of ingredients in three different colors. Lunch participation and consumption in general is up, too.
They are younger than their predecessors, have less experience in the classroom and are, most often, responsible for far fewer students. But their salaries are higher and they have greater freedom over hiring and budgets, handling a host of responsibilities formerly shouldered by their supervisors.
Among the most striking transformations of New York’s public school system since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took charge in 2002 is that of the role of principal, once the province of middle-aged teachers promoted through the ranks, now often filled by young graduates of top colleges.
“I wanted to change the old system,” Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said in an interview. “New leadership is a powerful way to do that.”
One of Mr. Klein’s proudest achievements is luring promising candidates to the toughest schools by providing more autonomy in exchange for accountability through test scores and other data.
But an analysis by The New York Times of the city’s signature report-card system shows that schools run by graduates of the celebrated New York City Leadership Academy — which the mayor created and helped raise more than $80 million for — have not done as well as those led by experienced principals or new principals who came through traditional routes.
MY day job is teaching introductory economics to about 700 Harvard undergraduates a year. Lately, when people hear that, they often ask how the economic crisis is changing what’s offered in a freshman course.
They’re usually disappointed with my first answer: not as much as you might think. Events have been changing so quickly that we teachers are having trouble keeping up. Syllabuses are often planned months in advance, and textbooks are revised only every few years.
But there is another, more fundamental reason: Despite the enormity of recent events, the principles of economics are largely unchanged. Students still need to learn about the gains from trade, supply and demand, the efficiency properties of market outcomes, and so on. These topics will remain the bread-and-butter of introductory courses.
You might think of flash cards and work sheets when you think of grade-school math. But now, thanks to two young brothers from Hinsdale, there’s an app for that.
Eleven-year-old Owen Voorhees’ iPhone application, MathTime, debuted in the iTunes App Store last week. The simple program, which displays random addition, subtraction, multiplication or division problems and their solutions, has been a work in progress for nearly nine months.
“I hope it helps people practice their facts,” Owen said, explaining that the application is intended for students a bit younger than himself, such as brother Finn, 9.
Before D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) took over the city’s public schools two years ago, he paid a visit here to learn about a school system at the center of urban education reform.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) had taken charge of the 1.1 million-student system in 2002, naming a litigator with little professional education experience to turn it around.
In seven years as schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein has emphasized accountability and school choice. He has granted principals more autonomy and money in exchange for results, piloted a performance-based teacher compensation plan and raised millions of dollars in private funds to support his initiatives, including $100 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create smaller, more personalized high schools.
When Maryland’s high school class of 2009 graduates next month, it will become the first in the state to prove it can solve an equation such as 12x + 84 =252. (Answer: 14.)
But state officials still don’t know the value of another variable: the number of students who won’t pass exams in algebra, English, biology and government for a new graduation requirement. As of March, about 4,000 of 58,000 seniors statewide hadn’t passed the High School Assessments or met an alternative academic standard. This is the first year that seniors have been required to meet the testing standard.
State and local officials predict that graduation rates will remain roughly the same and that only a handful of seniors will be denied a diploma based on the HSA requirement.
One of the state’s oldest and largest virtual charter schools is scheduled to make big changes this year affecting hundreds of students.
Yet there have been no noticeable protests and no parental complaints as students from throughout Wisconsin prepare to attend a different school this fall without changing facilities, principal or staff.
Starting July 1, Wisconsin Virtual Academy and Honors High Online, the two online schools for students in grade school and high school now housed at the Northern Ozaukee School District, will move to the McFarland School District with mostly new employees. The schools will be run by the same company that now operates them – K12 Inc. – as one school: Wisconsin Virtual Academy (WIVA).
Here’s the latest privacy rupture: old school newspaper archives are showing up online, getting indexed, and becoming part of the permanent googlable record for the people who wrote for them and the people who appeared in them. This is the latest installment in an ongoing story — for example, when DejaNews (now Google Groups) put Usenet’s archives online, the material we thought we’d written in a no-archive medium became part of our googlable past. Soon, face-recognition will put names on every photo on the web, and then, look out!
When the Elvehjem Elementary School parents who raised $200,000 for a playground outside the school last year started looking for a new fundraising project, they thought of the teacher on the itty-bitty chair.
She’s someone like Julie Fitzpatrick, a first-grade teacher at Elvehjem who uses a nearly decade-old classroom computer to track attendance, fill out report cards and answer parents’ e-mails. The bulky monitor and sluggish hard drive sit on a desk sized for the 6- and 7-year-olds who also use the terminal, one of two PCs in Fitzpatrick’s room.
Even if the teacher wanted to bring more modern equipment from home, like a laptop, she couldn’t access the Internet with it. There’s no wireless connection.
“I go in to take my son to his first day of school, and I see these two ancient-looking computers with floppy disc drives,” said Brian Johnson, vice-president of operations for a Madison high-tech firm and a parent in the group LVM Dreams Big Technology, which hopes to raise $20,000 this summer to buy the school some of the latest classroom tools: document cameras that can project computer and other images on a screen, an interactive “whiteboard” called a Smart Board, and a message board with an LCD screen at the school entrance to announce the day’s activities. They hope to come up with another $5,000 for grants aimed at teachers wanting to try new technologies.
In an era when college students commonly take longer than four years to get a bachelor’s degree, some U.S. schools are looking anew at an old idea: slicing a year off their undergraduate programs to save families time and money.
Advocates of a three-year undergraduate degree say it would work well for ambitious students who know what they want to study. Such a program could provide the course requirements for a major and some general courses that have long been the hallmark of American education.
The four-year bachelor’s degree has been the model in the United States since the first universities began operating before the American Revolution. Four-year degrees were designed in large part to provide a broad-based education that teaches young people to analyze and think critically, considered vital preparation to participate in the civic life of American democracy.
The three-year degree is the common model at the University of Cambridge and Oxford University in England, and some U.S. schools have begun experimenting with the idea. To cram four years of study into three, some will require summer work, others will shave course lengths and some might cut the number of credit hours required.
If the No Child Left Behind law, focused on raising test scores, proves to be a dead end, what do we do next? I rarely read or hear intelligent discussion of this question. The Pentagon has battle plans from A to Z. Why do those of us who care about schools keep bickering over the current system, rather than expand the debate to realistic alternatives?
Thankfully, one of the most thoughtful and imaginative education scholars, Richard Rothstein, has come to the rescue. As usual, I am getting to his new book, “Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right,” a few months later than I should have, making it the latest selection of my Better Late Than Never Book Club. It is a must-read for anyone who wonders, as I often have, how we might replace or augment standardized testing with measures of what is happening in the classroom beyond just the few days in spring when our kids take the state tests.
Rothstein is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and a former national education columnist for the New York Times. He spent much of his career as an analyst of school district spending. No one knows more than he does about the strange ways we use our education dollars. In the past few years he has become an articulate national spokesman for the view that our urban public schools cannot succeed unless health, social and employment issues are addressed in those communities with the same passion and persistence that the teachers I write about put toward classroom learning issues.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan believes we have what amounts to a “once-in-a-couple-of-generations opportunity” to “push a very, very strong reform agenda” for the nation’s schools. His view is based, in part, on the Obama administration’s intention to spend billions of additional dollars on public education, though Duncan acknowledges that money alone is not the answer. He also says the country has arrived at a moment when we have the necessary political will to make tough changes.
Not least of the problems that must be addressed can be found in America’s high schools, where, Duncan said in a speech last week, “Our expectations for our teenagers in this country are far too low.”
In fact, change has never come easily to America’s approximately 23,800 public high schools. Since the alarming report A Nation at Risk was published in 1983, we have had “wave after wave of reform”- and little progress, according to Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution.
As of this week, total US debt is $11.3 trillion and rising rapidly. The Obama
Administration projects that to rise another $1.85 trillion in 2009 (13% of
GDP) and yet another $1.4 trillion in 2010. The Congressional Budget Office
projects almost $10 trillion in additional debt from 2010 through 2019. Just
last January the 2009 deficit was estimated at “only” $1.2 trillion. Things
have gone downhill fast.
But there is reason to be concerned about those estimates, too. The CBO assumes a
rather robust recovery in 2010, with growth springing back to 3.8% and then up
to 4.5% in 2011. Interestingly, they project unemployment of 8.8% for this year
(we are already at 8.9% and rising every month) and that it will rise to 9%
next year. It will be a strange recovery indeed where the economy is roaring along
at 4% and unemployment isn’t falling. (You can see their spreadsheets and all
the details if you take your blood pressure medicine first, at
www.cbo.gov.)
Just a few quick thoughts. This year the proposed administration plan is to borrow 50% of every dollar spent. The CBO projects than nominal GDP will grow by about 50% over the next 10 years (which is historically reasonable), but also that revenues will double, which suggests massive tax increases in relation to GDP. Interestingly, the International Monetary Fund says growth next year will be tepid at best (more below). The deficit in 2010 is almost 10% of GDP. The average proposed deficit is almost a $1 trillion average for the next ten years. Ten years from now, the deficit is projected to be $1.2 trillion. And that is if government costs do not go up and inflation only averages 1.1% for the next six years.
After Irace got his termination papers in June from JPMorgan Chase, he called “Brother K.”
Brother Kenneth Hoagland, the principal at Kellenberg, a private Catholic institution, taught Irace at Chaminade High School in Mineola, New York.
Hoagland called Irace in for an interview in August, when he needed a replacement for a math instructor on leave. A month later, the former trader was teaching quadratic equations and factoring to freshmen in five 40-minute periods of algebra a day. He enrolled in refresher math classes at Nassau Community College, sometimes learning subjects a day or two ahead of the kids. This semester, he’s teaching sixth-graders measurements and percentages.
Conditioning Drills
Seated at wooden desks, 21 to 39 in each class, they get excited when he flashes the animated math adventures of a robot named Moby onto a classroom projector. After school, Irace, now 198 pounds (90 kilograms), puts a whistle on a yellow cord around his neck and runs girls through conditioning drills as an assistant coach for the lacrosse team. The extra coaching stipend runs $1,000 to $2,000 for the season.
Colorado is making it easier for schools to offer teens a chance to earn an associate’s degree while still in high school, a move backers say could help lower the dropout rate and help the state win millions in extra federal stimulus money.
Gov. Bill Ritter signed House Bill 1319 into law along with eight other education bills on Thursday at a high school called the Middle College of Denver.
It’s one of a half dozen high schools around the state where students take career classes and earn college credit at nearby community colleges.
Ritter urged the students, packed into the school cafeteria along with lawmakers and education officials, to tell their siblings and friends about the program, which he said would help keep more students in school.
State education officials believe it’s the first statewide program of its kind in the nation.
“None of this is really about us. This is about you,” Ritter said before sitting down to sign the bills.
Bankers, lawyers and journalists have taken pay cuts and gone without raises to stay employed in a tough economy. Now similar givebacks are spreading to education, an industry once deemed to be recession-proof.
All 95 teachers and five administrators in the Tuckahoe school district in Westchester County agreed to give $1,000 each to next year’s school budget to keep the area’s tax increase below 3 percent. In the Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow district, 80 percent of the 500 school employees — including teachers, clerks, custodians and bus drivers — have pledged more than $150,000 from their own pockets to help close a $300,000 budget gap.
And on Long Island, the 733 teachers in the William Floyd district in Mastic Beach decided to collectively give up $1 million in salary increases next year to help restore 19 teaching positions that were to be eliminated.
Local students can compete for a place on the world’s first expedition testing how to clean up a floating patch of plastic waste more than 1,000 times bigger than Hong Kong.
The estimated 4 million tonnes of plastic waste floating on the Pacific Ocean was discovered in 1997 by boat captain Charles Moore. He caught sight of the trash while on his way home after finishing a Los Angeles-Hawaii sailing race.
Called the Plastic Vortex, the trash inspired Project Kaisei, an America-based environmental organisation that studies marine pollution, to plan an expedition in July and August – and it will look for volunteers in Asian universities.
“This is one of the top 10 man-made disasters ever, but no one knows about it,” said Doug Wood- ring, ocean and conservation expert from the Hong Kong team. “It’s in the ocean and no one sees it.”
Project Kaisei’s pilot mission aims to test technologies and evaluate the problem before a full-scale cleanup in 18 months.
While this legislation is well-intentioned, it will ultimately do more harm than good — and it is the children in the most troubled schools who will pay the price.
Here’s why: SB 175 is intended to attract math and science professionals (engineers and scientists) into teaching, based on the belief that they have the necessary subject-matter knowledge. The bill would allow them to get teaching licenses almost entirely on the basis of written tests (a math test, for example), as long as they receive some loosely specified form of mentoring during their first year on the job.
There’s nothing wrong with using written tests, and mentoring new teachers is a great idea. But neither is sufficient to protect children from dangerously under-prepared teachers.
Although subject-matter knowledge is essential to good teaching, the knowledge required for teaching is significantly different from that used by math and science professionals. A well-constructed certification program gives beginning teachers a crucial knowledge base (of math or science as well as about teaching) and helps them develop the skills and practices that bring this knowledge to life.
There’s a reason that so many certification programs immerse new teachers in classroom tasks gradually: It gives them a chance to make their mistakes and sharpen their skills in more controlled, lower-stakes contexts before handing them primary responsibility for a classroom of students.
I had never been to Madison in my life, and you know what? It was a good decision. Except for one thing: I ignored the data about schools. I didn’t believe that a city known for progressive social programs and university filled with genius faculty could have poorly performing public schools. But it ended up being true, and all economic development research says do not move to a place with crap schools—it’s a sign that lots of things in the city are not right.
Fairfax County students can expect larger classes, new bell schedules and higher parking fees next year, all part of a $2.2 billion budget the School Board unanimously approved last night. The plan also freezes salaries for teachers and staff.
The spending plan for the region’s largest school system accounts for 5,000 more students but is $18 million and 800 positions lighter than this year’s budget.
The Fairfax Board of Supervisors froze funding for the 169,000-student system, but an infusion of $50 million in federal stimulus money helped stave off deeper cuts. More than half of that will be spent on special education or high-poverty schools.
Still, school officials said the spending plan increases burdens on teachers and reduces the quality of education that families expect from a world-class system.
“We are at a tipping point,” said School Board budget chairman Phillip A. Niedzielski-Eichner (Providence). “If we are not careful we will pass it and realize we have done some permanent damage.”
The scourge of teachers surveys the desolation of learning
“SACK the useless teachers!” ran the headline above an interview with Chris Woodhead in 1994. And the newly appointed chief inspector of schools grew no more emollient on the job. Naming and shaming bad schools and teachers would raise standards (“I personally respond to threats”); educational research was “an irrelevance and a distraction”; schools didn’t need more money, but to jettison progressive teaching methods. After becoming prime minister, Tony Blair kept the Conservative appointee on as part of the attempt to persuade middle England that New Labour was not in hock to the unions. When Mr Woodhead finally resigned in 2000, after clashing repeatedly with David Blunkett, the education secretary of the day, many schools threw staffroom parties.
Now the scourge of trendy teachers is back, and as intemperate as ever. In “A Desolation of Learning“, a book published on May 22nd, Mr Woodhead surveys state schools in England and sees a wasteland. The national curriculum intended to ensure that all children learned the basics has become a “solipsistic daydream”. The inspectorate he used to lead is no longer an impartial arbiter but a partisan thought-police, “arguably the most lethal part” of the system. Government oversees “bloated bureaucracies and frenzied initiatives”, and the opposition Tories can be as “sanctimoniously utopian” as New Labour.
Just like the auto companies that fuel this city, struggling Detroit schools are undergoing a painful restructuring to avoid complete failure and bankruptcy.
Next fall, 29 public schools will close, another 40 will be restructured, 900 teachers and staff will be pink-slipped and 33 principals fired. A former FBI agent also has been brought in to ferret out corruption and fraud. And a request has been made to declare the district a “special presidential emergency.”
The changes were ordered by Robert Bobb, who was appointed emergency financial manager of the district in January by the governor. He has one year to correct a $300 million budget deficit, improve test scores and address a graduation rate that’s among the nation’s lowest.
Without his intervention, Bobb said, the district “would have gone into the abyss and the biggest losers would have been students and their parents.”
Handcuffs, tape and isolation are tools used on children with behavioral disorders in some classrooms. Restraint and isolation techniques are sometimes necessary to prevent students from harming themselves and others. But some educators argue for emphasizing prevention.
Poudre School District middle school students will benefit from a new computer curriculum next school year, giving them the most up-to-date technology skills to prepare them for the future.
“We are making a huge paradigm shift in what we are teaching middle school students in technology,” said Kathy Hanson, PSD career education coordinator. “Previously, we were teaching a few commonly-used applications. This expands considerably on that base.”
The new curriculum, developed by PSD and Colorado State University’s Information Science and Technology Center, includes courses for sixth- and seventh-graders that will give them skills for a lifetime.
PSD middle school teachers and school technology coordinators recently completed two of five days of training for the new curriculum.
Timing for the implementation coincides with PSD’s grade-level changes to institute middle schools.
Residents of a rural community near Yosemite National Park have overwhelmingly voted to recall all five members of the local school board after a group of high school students launched a campaign to unseat them, election officials said Wednesday
Unofficial results show the Big Oak Flat-Groveland Unified School District school board was recalled by more than a 2-to-1 margin, and a slate of new candidates was elected to replace them, the Tuolumne County Elections Department said.
The department had not finished counting ballots Wednesday, but it’s unlikely the election results would change, an elections official said.
“It was a lot of work, but it was totally worth it. Our school district can finally get back on track,” said Elise Vallotton, 18, a senior at Tioga High School who helped lead the recall effort. “We knew we needed to get people in there who could make the right decisions.”
The recall of an entire school board is uncommon and possibly unprecedented in California, said Brittany McKannay, a spokeswoman for California School Boards Association.
The proposed Zaytuna College would be a first: a four-year, accredited, Islamic college in the United States.
“Part of the process of indigenizing Islam in America is for the community to begin to develop its own leadership from inside the country, develop its own scholars,” said Hatem Bazian, chair of the management board for Zaytuna College and a senior lecturer of Near Eastern studies at the University of California at Berkeley.
“There is a growing need in the Muslim community to provide a variety of trained specialists to fulfill a growing and diverse community infrastructure and institutional framework,” Bazian said — to work as imams, as chaplains, or within the growing network of Islamic non-profit organizations. Currently, Bazian said, American students who seek a high-level Islamic education must study in the Muslim world.
The proposed college would be built out of an existing institute with significant influence in the Islamic community. The Zaytuna Institute and Academy, an Islamic educational institute founded in 1996, is transitioning into Zaytuna College; the Berkeley-based institute already offers classes, but not for university credit.
Those behind the transition from institute to college plan to seek accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges – a daunting and multi-year process, they realize. “We know what is required. We know how difficult it is in terms of maintaining solvency and making sure that the management structure is strong. Those are things that WASC is looking for – making sure that the caliber of the education is at the level it should be, making sure that the organization is solvent and will continue to be around years from now,” said Farid Senzai, a member of Zaytuna’s management board, director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding and an assistant professor of political science at Santa Clara University.
For the first time in three years, more parents are putting their children’s education ahead of their own retirement, according to a new survey by Country Financial.
The survey of 1,241 Americans found 61 percent of parents are not letting the recession change their plans for their children’s college education. Forty-seven percent said college plans are a higher priority than retirement savings.
Last year, 47 percent of parents favored building their nest eggs over paying.
Men are more likely to put their children’s education (50 percent) ahead of their retirement than women (38 percent) .
Citing “disturbing” reports of schoolchildren harmed when teachers physically restrained them, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan called on state school chiefs yesterday to develop plans this summer to ensure that restraints are used safely and sparingly.
Virginia and Maryland have policies that call on teachers to use other means to calm students and to turn to physical restraint only when a student is in danger of hurting himself or others. D.C. law provides no guidance on the issue for public schools but restricts public money from going to private schools if they restrain students in ways that are physically dangerous.
Duncan’s announcement came a day after federal investigators revealed word of hundreds of allegations that youngsters were improperly held, bound or isolated in schools over the past two decades. Investigators with the Government Accountability Office highlighted a 2002 case in Texas that involved a teacher who now works in Loudoun County. Teacher Dawn Marie Hamilton lay on a 14-year-old boy who refused to stay in his seat, and the boy died, according to the report.
Although sex education is optional statewide, Chicago public schools have been teaching abstinence, contraception and the prevention of sexually-transmitted diseases for at least three years.
Chicago School Board members approved an “age-appropriate” and “comprehensive” sexual health education policy for grades six through 12 in 2006, and last year mandated that such classes start in fifth grade.
At the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, physical education director Ken Bringe said sex education is covered freshmen year.
“Right off the bat, they get this,” Bringe said. Why? “To prevent pregnancy.”
Bringe believes the class, which uses the Family Health and Sexuality curriculum by Health Teachers, is one reason why the school at 3857 W. 111th St. has only had about two teen pregnancies in seven years.
Families can spend thousands of dollars on coaching to help college-bound students boost their SAT scores. But a new report finds that these test-preparation courses aren’t as beneficial as consumers are led to believe.
The report, to be released Wednesday by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, criticizes common test-prep-industry marketing practices, including promises of big score gains with no hard data to back up such claims. The report also finds fault with the frequent use of mock SAT tests because they can be devised to inflate score gains when students take the actual SAT. The association represents 11,000 college admissions officers, high-school guidance counselors and private advisors.
“It breaks my heart to see families who can’t afford it spending money they desperately need on test prep when no evidence would indicate that this is money well-spent,” says William Fitzsimmons, Harvard University’s dean of undergraduate admissions, who led a group at the college admissions association that prompted the report.
Today I will start out with one of my favorite topics, failure, which was treated recently in a brilliant parody by Gently Hew Stone.
With the recent release of ELA test scores in New York City, we hear, yet again, that Bloomberg and Klein regard their reforms as a great success. Beyond questioning the test scores themselves, I wonder just how helpful it is to go around proclaiming success in the first place. Is success an unequivocal good? Is it an end in itself?
With failure you learn your limits. You may or may not be able to stretch them, but you find out what they are. Failure is like the molding of a sculpture. The bronze must pour into something. If it spills all over the place in an endless gush of success, it takes no shape at all.
There are too many kinds of failure to enumerate, but here are a few of the common varieties:
In more than 40 years of studying this city’s street gangs as a social psychologist, Malcolm Klein says his home was burglarized nine times. Now, the retired University of Southern California professor is offering the city what he hopes one day will help stem crime: A test that he says could predict if a child is destined to join a gang.
The multiple-choice screening, some 70 questions long, shows how closely Los Angeles has begun to examine the work of social scientists to tackle complex policy issues like gang violence. Last year, city officials turned to Dr. Klein and his colleagues at USC to design a test that they hope will empirically identify which children are headed toward a life on the street. This year, the test will help decide the direction of the millions of dollars the city spends annually on gang-prevention efforts.
Los Angeles is relying more on data to stop youths from joining gangs.
The screening, intended for children between 10 and 15 years old, asks a range of questions on issues ranging from past relationships to drug use to attitudes toward violence. One question asks test takers if they recently had a breakup with a boyfriend or girlfriend; another asks test takers if they are kind to younger children.
In order to avoid stigmatizing children with the label of potential criminal, Dr. Klein says test takers aren’t told that the questions are intended to screen for future gang involvement.
Modeling the effect of education stimulus funds on state education spending
This brief presents projections of changes in state K-12 education spending, amidst both state revenue gaps and the addition of ARRA funds. The idea is to rank order states according to how much budget gaps and stimulus funds are likely to affect state education spending.
This analysis relies on the most current state projections of budget shortfalls (as reported by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities), ARRA allocations for education by state, and 2009 state education budgets. The analysis does not take into account any of the decisions that state lawmakers are making on their budgets. Rather, it projects spending as if revenue gaps are first applied proportionately to education during 2008-09 and 2009-10, and then as if 70% of all education ARRA funds are applied to K-12 education during the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years.
The numbers don’t reflect ongoing changes made in states, but rather their vulnerability to cuts as a result of these 2 changes (revenue gaps and stimulus funds).
When Miriam Flores was in third grade at Coronado Elementary School, her mother, also named Miriam, was surprised to learn that she was getting in trouble.
“Her teacher said she was talking in class,” said Mrs. Flores, who speaks limited English. “She had always been a quiet child, but she said she had to ask other students what the teacher was saying because she didn’t understand.”
At the time, the state provided only $150 extra for each non-English-speaking student like Miriam. Few teachers were trained to help English language learners, and many students in this small, largely Hispanic border town were floundering. So Mrs. Flores and other parents sued under a federal civil rights law, charging that non-English-speaking children were being denied equal educational opportunity.
Much has changed since then: Miriam is now a 23-year-old college student. Under a new Arizona law, Coronado Elementary provides four hours a day of intensive English, in small classes, for students struggling with the language. These days, the Nogales schools spend 10 times as much on their English language learners.
Next month, after 17 years of litigation, the United States Supreme Court will rule on the Flores case, deciding whether Arizona is complying with federal laws requiring public schools to teach children to speak English.
The neighborhoods of Southeast Washington, D.C., are among the poorest in the city. There, the grocery stores, banks, restaurants, and other institutions that suburbanites take for granted have long been in short supply. In recent years, however, government and nonprofit agencies have begun turning things for the better. A brand new, government-subsidized shopping center recently opened on Alabama Avenue, providing one of the few full-service grocery stores in the area, along with a new sit-down restaurant and mainstream bank branch.
But reformers are finding that such initiatives won’t fix decades of market dysfunction overnight. Not far from the new Super Giant grocery store and Wachovia Bank are older businesses that continue to draw a steady stream of customers–corner stores that sell little fresh food, fast-food outlets that serve meals low in nutritional value, and tax preparation firms and check-cashing outlets that charge high fees. Markets are complicated, and improving them requires more than just creating incentives for new providers to set up shop.
Repetition doesn’t make something true. The latest reminder was a piece by Financial Times columnist Clive Crook, in which he warns that America’s long-term economic prospects are bleak because of a “calamitous” failure of schools to produce a high-quality workforce. This alarmist view is not limited to Crook. It has been echoed by Bill Gates and philanthropist Eli Broad, and by a host of organizations, such as the Business Roundtable.
OPEN FORUM
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It’s easy to understand why people take at face value what reformers with impressive credentials say about education. They can be intimidating. But that’s no excuse. As a wag quipped: In God we trust, all others bring evidence.
So let’s look at the evidence.
In October 2007, B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University and Hal Salzman of the Urban Institute concluded that the United States has a problem on the demand side of the equation – not on the supply side. This crucial distinction is lost in the heated debate, resulting in widespread misunderstanding.
Toni Price was at work that afternoon in 2002 when she got the call from her foster son Cedric’s eighth-grade teacher: Paramedics were at his middle school in Killeen, Texas. Cedric wasn’t breathing.
When Price arrived at school, there he was, lying on the floor. “I’m thinking he’s just laying there because he didn’t want to get in trouble,” she says, fighting back tears.
Actually, Cedric was dead.
A 14-year-old special-education student who’d arrived at the school with a history of abuse and neglect, Cedric had been taken from his home five years earlier with his siblings.
He’d just been smothered by his teacher, police said, after she placed him in a “therapeutic floor hold” to keep him from struggling during a disagreement over lunch.
Good afternoon. We’d like to invite you to Memorial High tomorrow afternoon for a discussion hosted by our Equity Team. Professor Adam Gamoran, Interim Dean of the UW School of Education, will be presenting paper titled Tracking and Inequality: New Directions for Research and Practice. His article is attached. We will begin at 4:15pm and should end around:15pm, and we’ll meet in the Wisconsin Neighborhood Center, which is in the Southwest corner of the building. Please park on the Mineral Point Rd. side of the building, and enter through the doors closest to Gammon Rd. There will signs to direct you from there. Have a good week, and we hope to see you tomorrow afternoon…Jay
Jay Affeldt
James Madison Memorial High School
Professional Development School Coordinator
Project REAL SLC Grant Coordinator
201 South Gammon Road
Madison, WI 53717
jaffeldt@madison.k12.wi.us
608-442-2203 fax
608-663-6182 office
“Upper caucasia” is not the nicest name for one of Washington, D.C.’s “nicest” areas. Situated west of Rock Creek Park and just south of tony Bethesda, Maryland, are a number of neighborhoods — Chevy Chase, Friendship Heights, Tenleytown — that offer suburban- style living with an urban address. In a city that is 55 percent black and 17 percent poor, the residents here are, for the most part, white and wealthy.
Most children in this area attend private school, despite the presence of several well-regarded public options. So it was hardly a surprise last November when self-segregated Upper Caucasia erupted into turf wars as the Obamas toured elite preparatory academies, seeking a school appropriate for the first daughters. They settled, predictably, on Sidwell Friends, Chelsea Clinton’s alma mater.
But a month later, another prominent family’s search for a school went largely unnoticed. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan moved with his family from Chicago, where he had been chief executive officer of the city’s public schools, to Arlington, Virginia. High-quality suburban public schools were “why we chose” to live in Arlington, Duncan told Science magazine in March. “It was the determining factor.”
Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad appeared recently on WIBA 1310 radio’s “Outreach” program. Listen to the conversation via this 20MB mp3 audio file.
Last year, I wrote a defense of high school senioritis as a useful break from academic drudgery. This made me, briefly, a hero to teenagers across the country. Then I returned to my usual theme that classes leading up to that last semester of the senior year should still be tougher, not easier, with less time for play, not more.
I was stuck on the fact that teenagers spend on average two hours a day watching television, compared with less than an hour a day doing homework. When Washington area parents or students complained about school stress, I acknowledged that many of them had a point in this affluent region full of kids who dream of the Ivy League. But elsewhere, the majority of high school students were not studying much at all. As a consequence, reading and math scores for 17-year-olds had seen little improvement in a generation.
Yet it is spring again, a good time to ponder the balance of hard work and fun throughout high school. In last year’s piece, I wrote: “High-octane students play it safe. Textbook pages are still memorized. Old exams are mastered. Anything less than a perfect score is cause for concern. Such students need to discover that that is not the way creative and productive work is done in college, or in life. The important part of the learning process is not pounding in the material but thinking it over, talking about it, coming up with new and intriguing ways of connecting it to the rest of the world.”
President Obama has pledged to spend $10 billion more a year on “zero to five” education, and his 2010 budget makes a $2 billion “down payment” on that commitment. (Billions more are already in the “stimulus” package.) Any number of congressional leaders want more preschool, as do dozens of governors. Not to mention the National Education Association and the megabucks Pew Charitable Trusts, which is underwriting national and state-level advocacy campaigns on behalf of universal pre-kindergarten. At least three states are already on board.
Underlying all this activity and interest is the proposition that government — state and federal — should pay for at least a year of preschool for every American 4-year-old. One rationale is to boost overall educational achievement. Another is to close school-readiness gaps between the haves and have-nots.
Almost nobody is against it. Yet everybody should pause before embracing it.
The growth in antipsychotic-drug prescriptions for children is slowing as state Medicaid agencies heighten their scrutiny of usage and doctors grow more wary of the powerful medications.
The softening in sales for children is the first sign that litigation, reaction to improper marketing tactics, and concern about side effects may be affecting what had been a fast-growing children’s drug segment.
The six so-called atypical antipsychotics that dominate the market have limited approval from the FDA to treat patients under 18 years of age. Only one is cleared for children under age 10 — risperidone, branded by Johnson & Johnson as Risperdal — to treat irritability associated with autism.
In a region where college preparation often begins at birth, some glossy new public school brochures offer a tantalizing formula for parents who crave assurance that their children are on track: a seven-step pathway to higher education that starts as early as kindergarten.
Montgomery County educators are blitzing parents and students with information on what they call “Seven Keys to College Readiness.” The initiative, also promoted on the Web (http://www.mcps7keys.org), spells out in detail the courses and tests that officials say point toward academic prosperity.
Measuring students early and often against lofty goals is part of school culture in the Washington area. School systems in Fairfax, Prince William and Calvert counties, among others, set annual targets in such areas as college entrance testing and accelerated math.
The son of an acquaintance of mine has recently landed a good job on a national newspaper. For the past few months I’ve been reading the articles written by this boy – let’s call him Derek – and thinking how delightfully original they were. Last week I ran into Derek’s mother and told her that her son was brilliant and that she must be proud of him. She rolled her eyes and said he hadn’t always been a star. He had been expelled from his state comprehensive school at 15, failed dismally academically and had spent his teenage years off the rails. So how, I asked, did he land this most sought after of jobs, one that Oxbridge graduates kill for?
She said that Derek had decided in his early 20s that he wanted to be a journalist and simply refused to take no for an answer. He more or less took up residence outside the newspaper of his choice, bombarding it with e-mails, until eventually he was allowed in as an unpaid intern. He financed his journalism by working night shifts as a hospital porter, until eventually he was offered a job.
We all love an underdog story, and this one vastly cheered me up. All the more so because it seems to belie the conviction of every pushy parent that if a child puts one foot wrong academically they have blown it for life. Both in London and New York there is this feverish notion that the journey to success starts at around three years old. It is vital to get a child into the right nursery school that will get them into Harvard or Cambridge or wherever. And if the child does not land up with straight A grades then clearly their chances of success in life are very low indeed.
This tiresome hysteria has got worse in one generation. When I was at school and at university there was a lot of opportunity for screwing up, and most of us availed ourselves of it at one point or another. In fact, if you cruised effortlessly from one academic triumph to another you were regarded as rather dull. As a schoolgirl, not only did I fail to get straight As, I didn’t get any As at all – though I did get an F and even a U (for unclassified).
By law public schools in Wisconsin must administer a rigid, comprehensive set of tests. In the fall of every school year students are tested in reading, math, language, science and social studies. Test results from each district and each school are posted on the Internet, passed along to the federal government to comply with No Child Left Behind requirements and are made available to parents. In an era where measurable student performance is essential, it is expected that Wisconsin’s elaborate system of testing will tell us how Wisconsin students are performing. Unfortunately the testing required by Wisconsin state law is not very good.
The purpose of state standards and state-mandated testing is to increase academic achievement. Does Wisconsin’s elaborate system of testing advance this goal? From every quarter the answer is a clear no. That is the consensus of independent, third-party evaluators. Wisconsin’s massive testing program has come under fire from the U.S. Department of Education which said that Wisconsin testing failed to adequately evaluate the content laid out in the state’s own standards. Further, a joint report issued by the independent Fordham Institute and the Northwest Evaluation Association performed a detailed evaluation of testing in every state and ranked Wisconsin 42nd in the nation. The Fordham Institute gave Wisconsin’s testing a grade of “D-minus.”
Perhaps even more troublesome is that many Wisconsin school districts find the testing system inadequate. Over 68% of Wisconsin school districts that responded to a survey said they purchase additional testing to do what the state testing is supposed to do. These districts are well ahead of the state in understanding the importance of timely, rigorous testing.
This report lays out the thirty-year history of testing in Wisconsin and the criticism of the current testing requirement. It is the first of two reports to be issued regarding Wisconsin’s testing program. The second report will show how a new approach to testing will not only meet the standards that parents, teachers and the public expect, but will also allow teachers and policy makers to use testing to actually increase the achievement of Wisconsin’s children.
But perhaps as early as the 2010-’11 school year, things will be different:
Changes are expected in the state standards for what students are supposed to learn in various grades and subjects. The primary goal of the WKCE is to measure how well students overall are doing in meeting those standards. But Mike Thompson, executive assistant to the state superintendent of public instruction, said new standards for English language arts and math should be ready by the end of this year.
As the policy institute studies note, the existing standards have been criticized in several national studies for being among the weakest in the U.S.
The tests themselves will be altered in keeping with the new standards. Just how is not known, and one key component won’t be clear until perhaps sometime in 2010, the No Child Left Behind Act could be revised. What goes into the new education law will have a big impact on testing in every state.
The way tests are given will change. There is wide agreement that the wave of the future is to do tests online, which would greatly speed up the process of scoring tests and making the results known. The lag of five months or more now before WKCE scores are released aggravates all involved.
The policy institute studies called for online testing, and the DPI’s Thompson agrees it is coming. Delays have largely been due to practical questions of how to give that many tests on computers in Wisconsin schools and the whole matter of dealing with the data involved.
Also changing will be the way performance is judged.
Now, Wisconsin and most states measure which category of proficiency each student falls into, based on their answers. Reaching the level labeled “proficient” is the central goal.
Ernando Minghine would have enjoyed having time to listen to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan talk about the U.S. school system and Detroit Public Schools during a stop last week.
But Minghine, superintendent of Westwood Community Schools, was swamped with a to-do list that included:
Hiring a high school principal.
Finishing months of work in pursuit of a New Tech high school.
Hiring another instructor from China to add to the three he has already teaching Mandarin in grade and middle schools.
Expanding the district’s Cyber High School — which started in February and has been such a hit that the school with 180 students is growing to 500 this fall.
As Duncan made stops at a school in Detroit and Cobo Center, conversing with new Mayor Dave Bing, Gov. Jennifer Granholm and others and sharing his thoughts about the state of Detroit Public Schools, Minghine wished he could have listened in and talked with the education secretary about his district.
Smart, particularly the Mandarin offering in grade and middle schools along with the cyber options.
Here’s the final offering from Elvis, entitled Mister Know-it-All:
I’ve eaten all the fruit from the tree of knowledge
I know what’s what, I know who’s who
I know my onions, I know the ropes
I know a thing or two
I know the way to Amarillo
I know the way to San Jose
I know who let the dogs out
I know the time of day
I know what happened to The Likely Lads
I know what happened to Baby Jane
I know what’s eating Gilbert Grape
In January, Catherine Johnson, a senior at Fairfax High School in Northern Virginia, was trying to decide between her dream school — Hampton University — and a university half as expensive and just down the street — Old Dominion.
Rebecca Roberts catches up with Catherine and her mother, Pearl Johnson, about which path she decided to take, and how the daughter and mother talked through the decision.
Politics often produces strange bedfellows. But yesterday, on the 55th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that integrated the nation’s schools, when former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich shared the stage at a boisterous rally in front of the White House with the Rev. Al Sharpton, even Gingrich called the two the “Original Odd Couple.”
What unites the conservative Gingrich and the liberal Sharpton, Gingrich said, is the urgent mission to close the persistent achievement gap that divides students along racial and socioeconomic lines and to make educational equality the civil rights issue of the 21st century.
“I know it’s possible to educate every child from every background,” Gingrich said to loud applause from the largely African American crowd that had come to Washington in 70 buses from 22 cities. “We’re not telling you what the answer is. But we’re telling you to keep changing until you find a solution.”
eorgia is in a race to the top and, in many respects, we’re leading the way.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced recently that $5 billion in grants are being made available to states that — in his words — adopt “college and career-ready internationally benchmarked standards” and “state of the art data collection systems, assessments and curricula to meet these higher standards.”
To me, it sounds like Secretary Duncan was reading straight from our Strategic Plan. For six years, Georgia has been focused on implementing a world-class curriculum, raising expectations and using quality data to make decisions. We have received high marks for the policies and standards we’ve put in place from groups across the nation.
But the journey to “the top” is not always smooth and raising standards is not easy. The truth is that the material that Georgia students are learning today is more rigorous than it has ever been and, consequently, the assessments they are taking are more difficult.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen the pass rates on our state tests — like the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests and End of Course Tests — drop in the first year we’ve implemented our new curriculum and given the new state exams. This is to be expected: Whenever you raise the bar, there’s going to be a temporary drop in the number of people that can reach that bar. That’s true in any situation.
As the founding president of the Federation of Parent-Teacher Associations of Yuen Long District, I have always paid close attention to the development of the relationship between schools and parents.
The relationship has come a long way since 1999 when both sides viewed each other with hostility and scepticism. There are a lot of troubled or single-parent families in Tin Shui Wai. Many parents are deemed “invisible parents”. Coming from disadvantaged backgrounds, mostly from the mainland, they lack self-confidence and always fear people will ridicule them for their accents and unsophisticated remarks.
Afraid of suffering embarrasment, children also don’t want their parents to attend school functions. So such parents seldom have connections with schools and when they do attend certain functions such as parents’ day, they take umbrage easily at what teachers say.
For example, when teachers find fault with their children’s performance, such “invisible parents” will think that they are making veiled criticisms of their parenting skills.
A team from Madison West High School in Madison, Wi., took first place at the Seventh Annual Team America Rocketry Challenge (TARC) Saturday, taking on the title of national champion.
“Hard work, perseverance, teamwork, and custom electronics are the reasons our rocket performed well today,” said Ben Winokur, team member.
The team, one of three from Madison West High School, logged the winning score of 20.54. The team won an opportunity to fly against the champions of UKayRoC in the Second Annual Transatlantic Rocket Fly-Off.
Before the first lunch period begins at Oconomowoc High School, students sidle up to see what chef Brian Shoemake is cooking.
“Chicken pasta broccoli bowl,” Shoemake says in answer to an inquiry. “I’ll get you to eat your broccoli.”
Well, maybe not that student. But in the 15 minutes that ensue, Shoemake manages to fill the bowls of at least 60 others with steaming rotini, strips of chicken breast, their choice of Alfredo sauce and, yes, freshly cooked broccoli spears.
The addition of Shoemake to the lunch lineup this school year is part of a larger effort at the school.
Like a number of schools throughout the state, Oconomowoc High School is trying to tackle that seemingly intractable barrier in the fight to improve childhood nutrition: the school lunch.
“Student tastes have changed so much in the last 10 years,” said Brenda Klamert, director of child nutrition services for the Oconomowoc Area School District. “They’re looking for healthy foods.”
Schools have been slow to meet the demand.
Sure, many have added salad bars. But most lunches remain high in saturated fat and cholesterol and low in fiber- and nutrient-rich food, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. The Washington-based group advocates a more vegetarian approach.
“The article describes my experience tutoring my daughter and her friend when they were in sixth grade, using Singapore Math in order to make up for the train wreck known as Everyday Math that she was getting in school. I doubt that the article will change the minds of the administrators who believe Everyday Math has merit, but it wasn’t written for that purpose. It was written for and dedicated to parents to let them know they are not alone, that they aren’t the only ones who have shouted at their children, that there are others who have experienced the tears and the confusion and the frustration. Lastly it offers some hope and guidance in how to go about teaching their kids what they are not learning at school.”
They were 11 girls growing up together in Ames, Iowa. Now they are 10 women in their mid-40s, spread all over the country. And they remain the closest of friends.
Whenever “the Ames girls” get together, it’s as if they’ve stepped into a time machine. They feel like they are every age they ever were, because they see each other through thousands of shared memories.
As 12-year-olds, they’d sit in a circle, combing each other’s hair. As 17-year-olds, they’d go to parties together deep in the cornfields outside Ames. As 30-year-olds, they’d commiserate over the challenges of marriage and motherhood.
Like the Ames girls, millions of us have nurtured decades-long friendships, and we don’t always stop to recognize the power of these bonds. As we age, friendships can be crucial to our health and even our sanity. In fact, a host of scientific studies show that having a close group of friends helps people sleep better, improve their immune systems, stave off dementia and live longer.
ae Jemison is an astronaut, a doctor, an art collector, a dancer … Telling stories from her own education and from her time in space, she calls on educators to teach both the arts and sciences, both intuition and logic, as one — to create bold thinker.
Emulating a controversial practice at many colleges, two high-achieving public school districts in California are giving preference to the children of alumni.
The Beverly Hills Unified School District and the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District have adopted legacy admissions policies for children of former students who live outside their enrollment boundaries. The policies appear to be the first in the nation at public schools, education experts said.
The programs vary slightly, but leaders of both districts say they hope to raise money by forging closer ties with alumni who may be priced out of their hometowns as well as with grandparents who still live there. In each district, nonresident legacy students will make up a tiny percentage of the student population, officials said.
“I’m taking a page out of the university or college playbook,” said Steve Fenton, a Beverly Hills Unified trustee. “Alumni are the lifeline for any academic institution.”
Critics argue that such policies are antithetical to American public education.
Inclusive schools are places where children and young adults of all abilities, races, and cultures share learning environments that build upon their strengths while supporting their diverse needs.
Utilizing inclusive practices, school staff create flexible goals, methods, materials, and assessments that accommodate the interests and needs of all of their learners. Inclusive schools also allow for the development of authentic relationships between students with and without identified differences.
The MMSD’s Dept. of Educational Services is committed to building the capacity of school district staff to provide inclusive educational practices. To address this departmental priority, school district staff have been provided with two unique opportunities to further develop their knowledge and skills in this area.
First of all, in honor of Inclusive Schools Week (December, 2008), the Department provided a year-long opportunity for schools to highlight the accomplishments of educators, families and communities in promoting inclusive schools.
In 1943, the United States Armed Forces Institute published a second edition of War Department Education Manual EM 603 Discovering Music: A Course in Music Appreciation by Howard D. McKinney and W.R. Anderson. The material presented in the book was a reprint of educational material taken from existing standard textbook matter used in American schools and colleges at that time and is significant to this discussion because the text included the following when discussing jazz:
Some may start with an enthusiasm for music of the jazz type, but they cannot go far there, for jazz is peculiarly of an inbred, feeble-stock race, incapable of development. In any case, the people for whom it is meant could not understand it if it did develop. Jazz is sterile. It is all right for fun, or as a mild anodyne, like tobacco. But its lack of rhythmical variety (necessitated by its special purpose), its brevity, its repetitiveness and lack of sustained development, together with the fact that commercial reasons prevent its being, as a rule, very well written, all mark it as a side issue, having next to nothing to do with serious music; and consequently it has proved itself entirely useless as a basis for developing the taste of the amateur.
Tina Fey is, as usual, ahead of us all. A recent episode of her sitcom 30 Rock titled “The Bubble” evolved around a ridiculously handsome man who had no idea he was something of an idiot. Everyone around him treated him so well that his self-esteem soared far beyond his actual capabilities.
The character was a comic exaggeration, of course, but a new study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology suggests the episode was grounded in good science. It finds physical attractiveness has a significant positive influence on an individual’s self-confidence, income and financial well-being.
“This study finds that, even accounting for intelligence, one’s income prospects are enhanced by being good-looking,” report authors Timothy Judge, Charlice Hurst and Lauren Simon of the University of Florida Department of Management. One reason for this, they explain, is that “people who are attractive do think more highly of their worth and capabilities,” and this self-confidence “results in higher earnings and less financial stress.”
The commencement speeches will soon be over. The graduation caps and gowns put away, the gift cards used.
The one thing that won’t go away is the tens of thousands of dollars graduates owe in student loans. For most college graduates, the cost of their educations will finally be a reality.
So now what?
With unemployment continuing to climb and good-paying jobs hard to find, many recent graduates will be looking for refuge from their loans.
Excitement, innovation, ingenuity, interaction, fun are ideals that teachers want to bring to their classrooms every day.
West High School teachers who work with high-tech whiteboards experience those ideals in new ways as they create novel learning environments for their students and each other.
Last year, West received a private, anonymous donation to support teaching students to think philanthropically. School staff and students established the Student Support Foundation, a student group created to find ways of using the gift that fit West’s goals for improving the lives of its students.
The donors contacted members of the foundation in the spring to gauge their interest in a new kind of whiteboard technology.
Initially the students seemed puzzled: they could only imagine handheld whiteboards and dry erase makers sometimes used in classes. They soon learned about an entirely different tool – the interactive electronic whiteboard.
Gov. Jim Doyle said Friday that falling tax collections will force him to propose new cuts of up to 5% in state spending for public schools and aid to local governments.
Aid to public schools has been Doyle’s top priority during his 6 1/2 years as governor, and Friday was the first time he said it will have to be reduced.
“There are going to have to be cuts in school aids,” Doyle said when he signed a bill rewriting state unemployment compensation laws so that the state can capture federal stimulus funds.
Aid cuts like those envisioned by Doyle could cost Milwaukee Public Schools – the state’s largest district – more than $20 million. The cut would cost other districts anywhere from several thousand dollars to several million dollars.
At the same time, Doyle said his plan would include levy limits on districts, which would prevent them from recouping all of the cuts through higher property taxes.
This year, state aid for public schools totals $5.17 billion, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau. A 5% cut would cost schools about $258 million, although they are getting federal stimulus money, Doyle noted.
However, the state pledge to provide two-thirds of schools revenues in 1996-97 changed the budget landscape. By 2006-07, state-tax support for the UW System had almost doubled during Ihe 25 years prior. However, inflation (CPI, up 115%). school aids/credits (320%). and overall slate GPR expenditures (222%) rose more.
It’s the last class of the day Friday at Community High School, but instead of a lot of fidgeting and clock-watching, 24 teenagers are engaged in a spirited discussion about sex and “sexting” with a lawyer and a former journalist.
It is a five-year-old course that aims to prepare students to “talk about social issues at a cocktail party with their boss,” according to Jason O’Brien, a co-teacher of the class at Community, a charter school in Milwaukee.
Students have a lot of questions for their professional visitors: Why is sexting, or sending sexually explicit photos of oneself over a mobile phone, a crime? Why shouldn’t adults face charges as well if they take and send similar nude material of themselves to their peers?
It’s a big diversion from your typical lecture environment, but O’Brien and co-teacher Roxane Mayeur believe in the value of exposing kids to multiple viewpoints on various topics through debate, essay writing and discussions with local experts.
New Milwaukee School Board President Michael Bonds said Friday he will continue to push for major structural changes in the central office of Milwaukee Public Schools, despite the board balking at his plans.
A meeting on the budget for next year that ended at 2:45 a.m. Friday showed Bonds is nowhere near prevailing with his ideas – and that no major change in either specific matters or the culture of the organization is likely to come quickly or easily.
Things went so poorly for 20 amendments that Bonds had submitted to the $1.2 billion budget proposal from Superintendent William Andrekopoulos that even Bonds didn’t vote for one of his own proposals. On two others, his was the only vote in favor.
“We have a status quo board at this point,” Bonds said afterward. “I don’t think much was accomplished.”
But other board members clearly believed that a lot of Bonds’ ideas were wrong or counterproductive. Bonds has been calling for major change since he was elected board president April 28.
The mythologizing of Arne Duncan is moving along at a pretty fast past. Bernie Noven alerted me to this adulatory article from the London Economist and urged me to respond using some of the recent data about Arne’s record here in Chicago, saying that people “out there” have no idea about the reaiity here in Chicago. Here’s what I sent.
“Golden Boy” Arne Duncan is a pleasant fellow who held the position of Chicago Executive Officer (CEO) of the Chicago Public Schools for seven years without losing his cool.
He’s so cool, in fact, that butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.
As a long-time Chicago public school parent advocate, I have had a front row seat at the Arne Duncan show. When Mayor Richard Daley appointed Mr. Duncan to replace Paul Vallas in 2001, there was a palpable sense of relief across the city. The new CEO’s Opie-from-Mayberry modesty was a soothing antidote to the previous six years spent with a CEO who could suck the oxygen out of a room.
We soon discovered, however, that Mr. Duncan simply provided a more complaisant and – more importantly – a more compliant cover for City Hall’s machinations.
The contracts of 33 principals will not be renewed, Detroit Public Schools officials announced this afternoon.The district also is reassigning more than two dozen school principals.
Robert Bobb, the district’s emergency financial manager, said additionally, the district will conduct a full scale national search for 10 principal positions, district officials said.
Bobb told The Detroit News Thursday that he plans to change the operation of the district’s school by giving its principals more autonomy and authority over finances and school budgets.
The Monona Grove School District is considering busing some of Cottage Grove’s youngest students to Monona to help ease space problems in the district.
District leaders are quick to say such a change isn’t likely: Parents want to keep their children in their neighborhood schools, and busing students is costly.
But the possibility has been left in the mix to illustrate the breadth of options being considered to resolve crowding in Cottage Grove’s two elementary schools.
“This is something I was hoping to get off the table, but I think there was enough concern of the committee that the community have an understanding that we’re really looking outside the box,” said Monona Grove Superintendent Craig Gerlach. “This (option) is certainly outside the box.”
The Middleton High School Class of 2009 had quite a few ways to spend the $11,000 it raised over four years at the school. It could buy, for example, a souvenir key chain for every senior graduating. Or order a plaque for the school. Or host a big party.
Instead, the students decided to give every penny away.
A few liked the idea so much, they decided to raise even more — so far, $27,509 more.
Now totalling more than $37,509, the seniors’ cash gift is heading to Middleton Outreach Ministries, or MOM, a nonprofit that serves people in need from Madison west of Midvale Boulevard to across the Middleton-Cross Plains school district.
Though students have donated to MOM or run food drives — including helping the U.S. Postal Service’s drive last week — the largesse of the Class of 2009 is unique, executive director David Miller said.
Higher expectations for achievement and greater exposure to more difficult and complex mathematics are among the major difference between Hong Kong, home of the world’s top-performing 4th grade math students, and Massachusetts, which is the highest scoring state on the U.S. National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), according to a report by the American Institutes for Research (AIR).
While Massachusetts 4th grade students achieved a respectable fourth place when compared with countries taking the 2007 Grade 4 Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS-4), Hong Kong students outperformed the Bay State 4th graders in numerous categories.
The Hong Kong performance advantage over Massachusetts was especially large in the percentage of its students achieving at the very highest level. For example, 40 percent of Hong Kong students achieved at the advanced TIMSS level, compared with only 22 percent of Massachusetts students.
To help understand why Hong Kong students outperform Massachusetts students, the AIR study identified differences between the items on Hong Kong’s and Massachusetts’ internal mathematics assessments administered in the spring of grade 3 in 2007 to gather insight into the relative mathematical expectations in Hong Kong and Massachusetts.
The AIR report found that the Hong Kong assessment contained more difficult items, especially in the core areas of numbers and measurement, than the Massachusetts assessment.
“The more rigorous problems on the Hong Kong assessment demonstrate that, even at Grade 3, deep conceptual understanding and the capacity to apply foundational mathematical concepts in multistep, real-world situations can be taught successfully,” said Steven Leinwand, Principal Research Analyst at AIR and co-author of the report.
As those of us in the newspaper business have discovered to our misfortune, productive original thinking is hard, and rare. Even after the Internet began nibble at our toes, we couldn’t come up with a way to do our jobs that would keep us from losing a leg or two, maybe more.
The same is true of original thought in education, but good ideas about schools are more common than people might imagine. My latest example is Sande Caton, a Delaware high school science teacher who has come up with a simple but smart solution to the ongoing battle between Advanced Placement and honors courses for our nation’s teenagers.
Caton revealed her method in an online comment to one of my recent columns on this blog. Her timing is good. In early June, newsweek.com will unveil the new Newsweek Top High Schools list, its annual ranking of the best 1,500 public high schools. Newsweek uses a rating formula I invented in the 1990s. Many readers think this method, called the Challenge Index, has helped AP push honors courses out of our schools. Here comes Caton with a way to make everyone happy.
Many high schools used to offer juniors and seniors a choice of a regular, an honors or an AP course in popular subjects like history or English. In recent years some have removed the honors options, saying they can’t staff three different courses. They feel honors students should be taking the more challenging AP courses anyway. My suggestion, offered with no hope of it ever being accepted, was to remove not the honors option, but the regular option. In my experience, regular students were capable of handling honors or even AP courses if well taught. Why confine them to a regular class taught to the lowest standard?
Trying to make sure social workers are up to their thankless job
THE case of Baby P, a toddler tortured and killed by his supposed carers, shocked Britain after the conviction last year of his mother, her lover and a lodger. The grim tale now turns out to have a horrible coda. On May 1st verdicts were returned in the trial of the mother and her boyfriend for the rape of a two-year-old. The mother was acquitted of cruelty–the victim told police she had seen the rape, and failed to intervene. The boyfriend was convicted and may get a life sentence.
The case made legal history. The child, aged three at the time of the trial and cross-examined via video link, was the youngest ever to give evidence in a British court. Also unusual was the decision to use false names for the defendants, and to ban all reporting until after the verdict. The fear was that the defendants would not be tried fairly if the jury made the connection with Baby P–or Peter, as he can now be called after his father asked for him to be dignified with his name.
A $150,000 grant from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation will help support a corps of 90 teachers recruited for Milwaukee Public Schools through the Teach for America program.
The allocation is part of the $6.2 million in grants the community foundation distributed in the first quarter of 2009. Earlier in the year, the foundation awarded $362,500 from a Basic Needs fund it created to support food pantries and shelters struggling to meet an increasing demand for services.
The foundation’s education grant and support for a job training program are targeted to slow the growth of poverty that has strained the area’s emergency services.
More than 150 community leaders targeted those priorities in a series of recent interviews, said Doug Jansson, president of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation.
Transparency is powerful and President Obama has rightly made it a pillar of his administration’s approach to policymaking. But transparency also offers the seductive promise of an easy way out for policymakers. It can trap proponents of various policy proposals in an intellectual cul de sac because it becomes easy to see information as sufficient to drive reform rather than just as a predicate for change. The risk is especially potent when proponents are convinced of the obviousness of the changes they seek.
We’ve seen this repeatedly with federal education policy. The Bush administration assumed the federal No Child Left Behind law would produce a tidal wave of student and school performance data that would swamp opposition to school improvement efforts. Seven years later the political resistance to education reform is as potent as ever and former Bush aides now acknowledge placing too much faith in the power of information.
In 1997, Congress tried unsuccessfully to increase accountability for colleges of education and teacher training programs by requiring them to report more data about outcomes. “Congress asked colleges of education to take stock of quality issues, but instead the colleges mostly whitewashed the problem,” says Ross Weiner, a senior adviser at The Education Trust. No Child Left Behind also required states and school districts to issue better report cards about educational performance. There, too, evasion rather than aggressive efforts are the norm.
No fireworks, lots of pledges to work together.
That summarizes a meeting Tuesday evening involving Mayor Tom Barrett, state Secretary of Administration Michael Morgan and the Milwaukee School Board on what to do in the aftermath of a consultant’s report that criticized the business culture of Milwaukee Public Schools and said MPS could save up to $103 million a year by changing practices.
All the participants agreed that MPS faces daunting financial problems, getting worse over the next several years, if there are not major changes in the way money comes in and is spent. There also was agreement that everyone – the state, the city, MPS and others – needs to work together to improve the financial picture and to improve academic outcomes overall.
Gov. Jim Doyle and Barrett sought the report after becoming concerned about trends in MPS, including continuing low test scores overall and large property tax increases in recent years.
A week ago, Barrett and Doyle did not come to meet with board members and did not send representatives, causing some members, particularly budget committee chairman Terry Falk, to criticize them. But for this special meeting of the board, Barrett was there, Doyle sent Morgan, and everyone acted diplomatically.
