Eduwonk posts a variety of responses to Susan Goodkin’s OP-ED on gifted children and No Child Left Behind:

Not surprisingly, with the entire curriculum geared to ensuring that every last child reaches grade-level proficiency, there is precious little attention paid to the many children who master the standards early in the year and are ready to move on to more challenging work. What are these children supposed to do while their teachers struggle to help the lowest-performing students? Rather than acknowledging the need to provide a more advanced curriculum for high-ability children, some schools mask the problem by dishonestly grading students as below proficiency until the final report card, regardless of their actual performance.

More:

As a matter of pure politics, how can you expect to retain public support for a school reform regime that short-changes high-achieving students, whose parents, whether rich or poor, are likely to be more politically engaged and influential than the parents of low-performing students?

Georgina Gustin:

Starting in the 2007-08 school year, any high school that offers an AP class will have to prove it meets certain College Board requirements. Teachers and administrators will have to perform annual self-audits and submit materials, including syllabi, to the College Board.

Via Education Gadfly:

Prestigious universities value the letters AP (i.e., Advanced Placement) on an applicant’s transcript, maintaining that success in AP courses is the best indicator of success in college. But students looking to score points with admissions officers have begun gaming the system. Many enroll in AP courses but never sit for the accompanying AP exam. And high schools—bowing to student pressure for more AP courses—are lowering expectations so that more students can have the coveted letters on their transcripts (see here for more on AP’s expansion).

Jay Matthews:

Bracey has been exposing statistics abuse for years. But I have never seen him put together all that he knows as well as he has in this book. It has some of the best explanations of educational numbers manipulation I have ever read, particularly issues like SAT scores, year-to-year school comparisons and argument by graph that are most likely to deceive us innocents. The book has Bracey’s deft prose and sure touch with clarifying examples. I also appreciate the fact he trimmed much of his sharp ideological edge, loved by many of his fans, but not by me. He acknowledges several times that no combatant in the bitter education policy wars has an unquestionable grasp on the truth.

Amanda Kraemer:

The Highland School District, which has about 300 kindergarten through high school students, learned early this month they are one of 79 nationwide recipients of a $300,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture rural development grant.
School Board president Brad Laufenberg said one of the disadvantages of being a smaller school district is the inability to provide a large and varied number of courses to their students.
“The distance learning lab will enable us to provide many more of those courses to both our students and the rest of the community,” he said.

Nick Anderson:

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings outlined new testing rules for disabled students yesterday, formalizing an initiative that has already helped more than 100 public schools in Maryland and Virginia meet the standards of the No Child Left Behind law.

Micael Winerip:

Here in this integrated, upper-middle-class Cleveland suburb, you would think they would be boasting. African-Americans’ combined math and verbal SAT scores average 976, 110 points above the national average for black students. The number of black sixth graders scoring proficient on the state math test has nearly doubled in three years and is more than 20 percentage points above the Ohio average for blacks.
A black parent group here has sponsored many projects aimed at narrowing the gap, including a summer enrichment program started in 1997. In October, Alisa Smith opened a parent room at the high school to encourage more adult involvement. Ms. Smith, a Columbia graduate and a stay-at-home mother, and her husband, a doctor, have three children in the schools, including Andre, the MAC scholar. While she says her children have been underestimated at times because they are black, over all she is delighted with the schools.

The Education Trust:

The Education Trust’s two newest reports highlight the practices of high schools that are getting the job done and improving student achievement, especially for the poor and minority children traditionally underserved by the American high school.

(Press Release) (Gaining Traction; Gaining Ground) (The Power to Change)

BBC:

Improvements in standards in primary and secondary schools in England are being marred by poor levels of literacy and numeracy, Ofsted inspectors say.
Pupils with below average abilities in reading, writing and maths are not getting enough help, Ofsted reports.

Dan Carneville:

The Michigan State Board of Education is set to approve a new graduation requirement today that would make every high-school student in the state take at least one online course before receiving a diploma.
The new requirement would appear to be the first of its kind in the nation. Mike Flanagan, the Michigan state superintendent of public instruction, said he proposed the online-course requirement, along with other general requirements, to make sure students were prepared for college and for jobs, which are becoming more technology-focused.
“We don’t want our kids left in the global dust,” Mr. Flanagan said. “It’s an experience we need to have.”

Robin J. Lake and Paul T. Hill, Editors:

The report is in two parts. In the first, the National Charter School Research Project (NCSRP) provides new data that inform questions such as: Is the charter school movement growing or slowing down? Do charter schools serve more or fewer disadvantaged children than regular public schools? Are charter schools innovative? It also identifies several important questions on which state and local record keeping needs to be improved.
The second part of this report takes up issues and controversies that have characterized the discussion of charter schools in the past year. NCSRP’s goal is to provide essays that examine these controversies in a broad context and assemble evidence in as balanced and informative way as possible. The essays are unlikely to settle any of these issues definitively, but they may establish a more constructive basis for continued discussion.

L. Johnson:

SIP Goal #2: Literacy-All students at John Muir will be proficient readers by the end of third grade.
Rationale: 50% of African Americans beginning fourth graders have minimal or basic reading skills as measured by the WKCE test. As a school, all students need to demonstrate proficient or advanced reading and writing skills. All classroom teachers will implement components of a Balance Literacy program. Students will have increased opportunities to read and practice their skills using a variety of ficion and non-fiction texts.

Anthony Gottschlich:

Catholic and private schools in Dayton have seen a 20 percent decline in enrollment over the past five years in the face of changing demographics and intense competition from charter schools, which are tuition-free public schools run by private operators.

Norman R. Augustine:

But the U.S. educational system is failing in precisely those areas that underpin our competitiveness: science, engineering and mathematics. In a recent international test involving mathematical understanding, U.S. students finished 27th among the participating nations. In China and Japan, 59 percent and 66 percent, respectively, of undergraduates receive their degrees in science and engineering, compared with 32 percent in the United States.
I’ve recently had an opportunity to review these trends as chairman of a 20-member committee created by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine. Congress asked the committee to examine the threats to America’s future prosperity. The panel was a diverse group that included university presidents, Nobel laureates, heads of companies and former government officials. We agreed unanimously that the United States faces a serious and intensifying economic challenge from abroad — and that we appear to be on a losing path.

Letters to the NY Times Magazine regarding “The Prodigy Puzzle“:

It is easier to be a genius when you don’t have to pay the rent. We live in a world that values dependability over brilliance and where jobs that reward curiosity may not support a family. The time to explore and take bold risks is a luxury few of us, genius or not, can afford once we leave school. Measuring programs for gifted children by the success of their adult graduates overlooks the significant hurdles that lie just after graduation.
Kate Wing
San Francisco
I have found that there is often an inverse relationship between what I perceive to be a genuinely innovative thinker in my third-grade classroom and the attitude of the parents. The most intellectually curious and imaginative problem solvers have parents who are supportive of rather than ambitious for their child. And each year I am struck by how some of the most perceptive children come from families whose parents have no time to advocate for them and no “gifted” agenda to pursue.
Barbara Yost Williams
Madison, Wis.

Much more.

Lita Johnson quotes Leonard Pitts:

Consider the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal study released last month. It found that, despite some improvement, American kids remain academically underwhelming. Only 31 percent of fourth-graders, for instance, were rated ”proficient” or better in reading. Just 30 percent of eighth-graders managed to hit that mark in math.
In recent years, I’ve taught writing at an elite public high school and three universities. I’ve been appalled at how often I’ve encountered students who could not put a sentence together and had no conception of grammar and punctuation. They tell me I’m a tough grader, and the funny thing is, I think of myself as a soft touch. ”I’ve always gotten A’s before,” sniffed one girl to whom I thought I was being generous in awarding a C-plus.
It occurs to me that this is the fruit of our dumbing down education in the name of ”self-esteem.” This is what we get for making the work easier instead of demanding the students work harder — and the parents be more involved.
So this new white flight is less a surprise than a fresh disappointment. And I’ve got news for those white parents:
They should be running in the opposite direction.

Robert Tomsho:

A reform effort launched by Charlotte-Mecklenburg in the late 1990s focused on shifting more district funds to low-performing schools from schools that were doing better — a move that has lately created some backlash. The district also reduced class sizes in those schools and offered to pay graduate-school tuition for teachers who agreed to work in those schools for at least two years. The district also required all of its elementary schools to adhere to a strict, phonics-based reading program.
And it brought more learning-disabled students back into mainstream classrooms and paired up teachers who had been teaching them separately. Now, “you have a great combination of teachers who are very, very versed in reading and teachers who are very, very versed in additional learning strategies,” says Frances Haithcock, the district’s interim superintendent.

Reason Magazine:

Fifty years after Milton Friedman first proposed the idea of education vouchers, school choice proposals come in all shapes and sizes. We asked a dozen experts what reforms they think are most necessary and promising to improve American education. We also asked them to identify the biggest obstacles to positive change. Here are their answers. Comments should be sent to letters@reason.com.

Via Joanne Jacobs who has more on Math Curriculum in China.

Reader Helen Hartman emailed this article: Michael Winerip:

SARAH JACOBS’ son Jed, 9, has a learning disability. He’s easily distracted and, if asked to do too many things at once, panics. At his former school, a private academy that cost $20,000 a year, his mother says Jed got into trouble daily (“kicking and even some biting”) and stopped learning. “He was reading ‘Captain Underpants’ in kindergarten and he was in third grade and still reading ‘Captain Underpants,'” she says.
So in September she switched him to a nearby public school, P.S. 75 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Jed was a new boy. His fourth grade had two full-time teachers and the class was so well-organized, Jed moved smoothly from one task to the next. When Ms. Jacobs asked how he liked it, Jed said he thought his teachers must have a disability too, because they made it so easy to understand the work.

New York Times Editorial:

A federal judge in Michigan took exactly the right action last week when he dismissed a transparent attempt by the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, to sabotage the No Child Left Behind education act. The ruling validates Congress’s right to require the states to administer tests and improve students’ performance in exchange for federal education aid. Unfortunately, it will not put an end to the ongoing campaign to undermine the law, which seeks to hold teachers and administrators more closely accountable for how their schools perform.

Toni Randolph:

Newgate is a nonprofit organization that is completely self-supporting. It costs about $900,000 a year to run the program. Newgate gets all of its revenue from the sale of cars on which the students train. They buy some of the vehicles, and the rest are donated.
Instead of a traditional classroom, the students learn in the shop doing actual repair work. The students here don’t take English and math classes, but they start with the basics of engine repair, then cleaning a car. Eventually, they start knocking out dents and dings, working their way up to more complex auto body work.
Newgate’s been around for more than 25 years. More than 400 students have been through the 15-month program. About 20 students are enrolled at any given time.

Jay Matthews:

So after more than two decades of underwhelming scholarly interest in this topic, I am delighted to report a surge of serious AP research, with four new studies in the past year and a fine piece by Andrew Mollison in the latest issue of the quarterly Education Next summing them up [see http://www.educationnext.org ]. One study in particular merits attention: “The Relationship Between Advanced Placement and College Graduation,” by Chrys Dougherty, Lynn Mellor and Shuling Jian of the National Center for Educational Accountability.
Almost all the new studies show that students who get a good score on an AP test in high school do better in college than those who get a bad score or don’t take AP. But I am also interested in how those students with bad scores did in college compared with students who did not take AP. Many AP teachers have shown me examples of students who did poorly on the exam but did well in college — in part, they think, because struggling with AP gave them a useful dose of thick-reading-list-and-long-final-exam trauma.

Audie Cornish:

From the MCAS test to the SAT, test scores have become the de-facto definition for achievement. There is evidence of girls scoring better than boys, or vice versa, or richer students outscoring poorer ones.
One longtime puzzle of the so-called achievement gap has taken center stage — that gap between different races of students. In the past, the issue has rested in the laps of parents, but recent education reforms have pushed it firmly into the arms of teachers.
In the first of a WBUR four-part series examining the achievement gap, Audie Cornish visits one school that is trying to understand the problem and make changes.

audio

Brent Staples:

The United States will become a second-rate economic power unless it can match the educational performance of its rivals abroad and get more of its students to achieve at the highest levels in math, science and literacy. Virtually every politician, business leader and educator understands this, yet the country has no national plan for reaching the goal. To make matters worse, Americans have remained openly hostile to the idea of importing strategies from the countries that are beating the pants off us in the educational arena.
The No Child Left Behind Act, passed four years ago, was supposed to put this problem on the national agenda. Instead, the country has gotten bogged down in a squabble about a part of the law that requires annual testing in the early grades to ensure that the states are closing the achievement gap. The testing debate heated up last month when national math and reading scores showed dismal performance across the board.
Lurking behind these test scores, however, are two profoundly important and closely intertwined topics that the United States has yet to even approach: how teachers are trained and how they teach what they teach. These issues get a great deal of attention in high-performing systems abroad – especially in Japan, which stands light years ahead of us in international comparisons.

(more…)

Suein Hwang:

By most measures, Monta Vista High here and Lynbrook High, in nearby San Jose, are among the nation’s top public high schools. Both boast stellar test scores, an array of advanced-placement classes and a track record of sending graduates from the affluent suburbs of Silicon Valley to prestigious colleges.
But locally, they’re also known for something else: white flight. Over the past 10 years, the proportion of white students at Lynbrook has fallen by nearly half, to 25% of the student body. At Monta Vista, white students make up less than one-third of the population, down from 45% — this in a town that’s half white. Some white Cupertino parents are instead sending their children to private schools or moving them to other, whiter public schools. More commonly, young white families in Silicon Valley say they are avoiding Cupertino altogether.
Whites aren’t quitting the schools because the schools are failing academically. Quite the contrary: Many white parents say they’re leaving because the schools are too academically driven and too narrowly invested in subjects such as math and science at the expense of liberal arts and extracurriculars like sports and other personal interests.
The two schools, put another way that parents rarely articulate so bluntly, are too Asian.