Helping Students, in and Out of School



Letters to the NY Times Editor:

“Lessons for Failing Schools” (editorial, July 6) says Education Secretary Arne Duncan, with a $100 billion educational stimulus fund at his disposal, is right to focus on transforming 5,000 low-performing schools that account for the majority of minority dropouts. But if it were that easy — just a matter of spending money — the country would have probably done it long ago.
What we are facing is more than a school problem caused by the schools alone. It is a pervasive set of problems in some minority communities, including fatherless households, teenage dropout mothers, drugs and a culture that disparages education, along with some incredibly poor teaching.
The first thing Mr. Duncan should do is to ensure that minority children and their families who really want to do well and are trying hard get the opportunity to escape to charter and other schools so they aren’t dragged down by the mass failures we are witnessing in public urban education.




The 25 Best Foods for Fitness



Chap.com:

When it comes to choosing the foods we eat, we have so many choices that it often becomes confusing. As Americans, we are blessed with almost every kind of food imaginable, available right next door at the supermarket. There are, however, some very specific foods that help improve athletic performance. The foods listed below are particular important to keep in your diet. The following foods, in alphabetical order, provide premium fuel for the active athlete.




Children of the credit revolution



Samantha Pearson:

Andy Slater, a 22-year-old delivery driver in London, appears oblivious to the fact that the UK is suffering its worst recession since the second world war.
“You gotta have new trainers ain’t you? Nike, Adidas, Lacoste – whatever looks good,” he says, eyeing up the latest models in the Westfield shopping mall in west London.
He is not alone in his opinion. In a survey conducted by the US-based Westfield group in May, 70 per cent of its shoppers aged between 18 and 35 said they were spending the same or more on clothes and eating out.
Slaves to fashion and free of most financial commitments, young people have kept spending in economic downturns when others have cut back. But today’s younger generation is particularly flush with cash and, after growing up during the credit boom, spending is deeply ingrained.
As a result, retailers geared towards the youth market – particularly clothing chains – have been basking in their good fortune.




Babysitting has figured in much of society’s angst over teen culture and the changing American family



Laura Vanderkam:

Like many girls, I began my adventures in babysitting when I was 11 years old. It was in the late 1980s, after I had taken a Red Cross course to become “babysitter certified,” acquiring expertise in dislodging an object from a choking baby’s throat and learning to ask parents for emergency phone numbers. During my roughly four-year career, there were highs, like using my babysitting contacts to co-found a lucrative summer day camp in my neighborhood, and lows: bratty children and stingy parents, such as one mom who would have me come over 45 minutes early but wouldn’t start the clock until she left and always wrote out a check when she got back — even though, considering my $2-per-hour rate, she probably could have paid me from change in the bottom of her purse.
My experiences were fairly typical of those encountered by millions of young women, as I might have suspected at the time and as I am thoroughly convinced after having read “Babysitter: An American History,” a scholarly examination of the subject by Miriam Forman-Brunell. Ms. Forman-Brunell is a history professor at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, but she is also a mother who reports that she has hired a bevy of babysitters.
Babysitting, the author says, has always been a source of tension: “Distressed parent-employers have suspected their sitters of doing wrong ever since the beginning of babysitting nearly one hundred years ago.” Before that, extended families or servants ensured that someone was watching the kids, but with the rise of the suburban nuclear family, parents looking to preserve adult intimacy in their marriages were forced to seek help elsewhere. Since most either weren’t willing to or couldn’t pay adult wages, the labor supply was reduced to young teens who wanted money but didn’t have other ways of earning it.




Baby Boomers to Kids: Kiss Your Inheritance Goodbye



Brett Arends:

Thanks to the financial crisis many people will have to reconsider the legacy they’ll leave behind.
Ross Schmidt, a financial advisor in Denver, sat down with a well-to-do client last fall, just after the stock market had collapsed. The client was in her sixties, divorced, with two adult sons. “We were scrambling to stem losses in her portfolio” and re-evaluate retirement plans, Mr Schmidt recalls. He asked his client how much she wanted to leave her sons.
“Well, now, nothing,” she replied.
She will not be the last to reach this decision — especially if the stock market stays down.
Millions of families are struggling with new financial realities, including heavy losses in many retirement accounts, and more prosaic expectations for future investment returns. Those near retirement face the hardest choices. Should they keep working for longer? Revise their retirement plans? Scale back their standard of living now to conserve money for later?
One idea that should be in the mix, much to the dismay of your children: Leave less to your heirs. Or even nothing at all.




The Case for Power-to-Weight Graduated Drivers’ Licenses



Jerry Sutherland:

On October 31 2006, Orange County teen Nikki Catsouras had an argument with her father. When Mr. Catsouras left for work, the his daughter “borrowed” his Porsche 911. Approaching a tollbooth, Catsouras rear-ended a Honda at 70 mph. The California Highway Patrol took photographs of the gruesome results. The photos hit the net and went viral. Catsouras sued the police for invasion of privacy. Lost in the shuffle: why was Miss Catsouras-a young, inexperienced driver– legally entitled to drive the Porsche?
The issue is pretty easy to understand: should young, inexperience motorists be allowed to drive high-powered cars? Australia says no. This despite a 2006 study by the University of Australia (funded by red light camera income) that concluded that only three percent of young driver crashes involved vehicles with a high power to weight ratio. The state of Victoria, for example, has instituted a power-to-weight related graduated license program for young drivers. Since July 2007, a probationary driver can’t drive a car which has:




A Vietnamese American is bringing hope to disabled people in his homeland through IT training



John Boudreau:

Some wounds never heal. In 1968, at the age of 15, Do Van Du lost a leg and part of an arm while serving as a combat interpreter for the US Special Forces near the Cambodian border. He moved to the US in 1971 and became a successful software engineer and systems analyst. Then, seven years ago, Du returned to his homeland to help found a college-level programme run by Catholic Relief Services to train disabled young people to be software engineers and tech workers – a first for Vietnam.
“People with disabilities don’t have a voice in Vietnam,” he says. “You are basically thrown away. You are not ‘normal’. You can’t work. You are a leech on society,” he says, before walking into a classroom full of eager students on crutches and in wheelchairs. “In Asia, because of the belief in reincarnation, people think you have done something in a prior life and now you are paying for it.”
Grim evidence of the harsh treatment of Vietnam’s disabled citizens is easy to find among the students in Du’s programme.
Duong Anh My was pelted with rocks because his leg was deformed.




Charter Schools Aren’t the Solution for Virginia



Kitty Boitnott:

The Obama administration and The Post are fascinated with charter schools [editorial, July 5], but charters do not make sense for Virginia. Maybe charter schools are needed in the District or Chicago, but in Virginia they are a solution looking for a problem.
The first question to consider is whether charter schools actually work. A recent study by the Rand Corp. suggests that they produce about the same results as traditional public schools.
Charter schools haven’t flourished in Virginia because our school boards already have the autonomy to create specialty schools. In the Richmond area alone we have schools that specialize in the arts; engineering; communication; languages; the humanities; technology; international studies; leadership and government; global economics; the military; science and mathematics; and technology. We have governor’s schools, magnet schools and centers for the gifted, and the list goes on and on. Virginia school boards, unlike those in states where charters have proliferated, don’t need charter legislation to allow flexibility and innovation. Our school boards have great autonomy and flexibility. They are free to innovate, and they do.




Columbus High School student dies after playing ‘the choking game’



Devin Rose:


At 17, Macklin “Mack” Jensen was getting ready to compete at a national wrestling tournament in Fargo, N.D.
Jensen also played rugby, like his father, Dan, had played years ago, and one of his teams won a national championship June 18 in Colorado.
“He loved life,” said Dan Jensen. “Anybody that knew him could see that he had lots of life.”
Mack died Friday while participating in “the choking game,” also called “space monkey” or “gasp.”
The game is typically played by adolescents who strangle themselves or have others push on their chests in order to feel light-headed for a few seconds, according to GASP, a campaign organized by parents of victims to educate about the dangers of the game.




Mathematics Learning in Early Childhood: Paths Toward Excellence and Equity



Christopher T. Cross, Taniesha A. Woods, and Heidi Schweingruber, Editors; Committee on Early Childhood Mathematics; National Research Council:

arly childhood mathematics is vitally important for young children’s present and future educational success. Research has demonstrated that virtually all young children have the capability to learn and become competent in mathematics. Furthermore, young children enjoy their early informal experiences with mathematics. Unfortunately, many children’s potential in mathematics is not fully realized, especially those children who are economically disadvantaged. This is due, in part, to a lack of opportunities to learn mathematics in early childhood settings or through everyday experiences in the home and in their communities. Improvements in early childhood mathematics education can provide young children with the foundation for school success.


Relying on a comprehensive review of the research, Mathematics Learning in Early Childhood lays out the critical areas that should be the focus of young children’s early mathematics education, explores the extent to which they are currently being incorporated in early childhood settings, and identifies the changes needed to improve the quality of mathematics experiences for young children. This book serves as a call to action to improve the state of early childhood mathematics. It will be especially useful for policy makers and practitioners-those who work directly with children and their families in shaping the policies that affect the education of young children.




Driver’s education and more for 3 teens



Kirk Dooley:

Ralph and Robin Burns have three teenage boys, each one armed with a driver’s license.
Nick, Zach and Lucas Burns are good drivers, but like most other relatively inexperienced motorists, they have yet to hit a slick patch of ice on the road or to hydroplane on rain-soaked pavement. When any driver faces such road hazards for the first time, the outcome is usually determined more by luck than skill.
If a young driver hits a patch of ice for the first time and loses control of the car, it could be the last mistake he or she ever makes.
Ralph took a special driving class sponsored by Lexus a few years ago at Texas Motor Speedway and remembered being impressed with the program as it simulated emergency conditions in a controlled environment. When a friend recently told him that he had sent his daughter to a similar program geared for teen drivers, Ralph’s ears perked up.




New student loan repayment plan is based on borrower’s income



Kathy Kristof:

The federal program is complex and won’t apply to every borrower, but it could dramatically reduce monthly payments for some.
The 32-year-old father of two just graduated from architecture school with $125,000 in debt. He and his wife, an audiologist, expect to make good money someday — more than enough to pay the loans. But between the rotten economy and a new baby, the Savannah, Ga., couple have only been able to find part-time work. They’re struggling to make ends meet, so the $1,200 a month that Jeff’s lenders want on his loans doesn’t seem feasible.
Fortunately for the Zollingers, a new federal student loan repayment plan goes into effect this month that could dramatically reduce payments for highly indebted borrowers. Called “income-based repayment,” the plan limits the monthly payments to a percentage of the borrower’s monthly income.




Admissions 101: Are Low Grades in AP/IB Classes Better than High Grades in Regular Classes?



Jay Matthews:

A few weeks ago, Jay Mathews asked readers a tough question in his Admissions 101 forum – which is better: an A or B in a regular course or a C in a more challenging course like an AP or IB class? Jay sided with AP, saying that all students interested in tier 1 or tier 2 schools should take at least 2 AP or IB courses. Even if that means a C on a high school transcript, Jay argued, colleges will appreciate a student who is willing to take on a challenge. Reader reactions have been pouring in ever since:

eloquensa: “My strategy suggestion is a little different from yours – I don’t know about the college front in the C-in-AP/IB-or-A-in-regular argument, but if the student is a little more strategic in course and teacher selection it’s a lot easier to avoid that dreaded C.




Middle Class Children in KIPP



Catharine Bellinger, a Princeton sophomore who has plans to start a campus journal on education policy.
I suggested she practice with a topic provocative enough to get her in trouble, a good place for all writers to be. My question to her, inspired by her experiences in the D.C. schools, is: “Should middle class parents send their kids to KIPP?”
I have written a great deal about that successful network of public charter schools, known for raising the achievement of low-income students in our poorest urban and rural neighborhoods. I am hearing from some middle-class parents who would like some of that teaching for their own children. Here is Bellinger’s take on whether that will work. Her email address is cbelling@princeton.edu. Let her, and me, know what you think.
By Catharine Bellinger”>:




New Index Will Score Graduate Students’ Personality Traits



Daniel de Vise:

The Educational Testing Service wanted to help graduate school applicants prove they are more than a set of test scores. So it developed a tool to rate students across a broad sweep of traits — creativity, teamwork, integrity — that admission tests don’t measure.
The Personal Potential Index, unveiled this week, looks suspiciously like another set of scores. An applicant’s personality is distilled into six traits, and the applicant is rated on each of them by various professors and former supervisors on a scale of 1 to 5.
Officials with the nonprofit organization, based in Princeton, N.J., say the index marks the first large-scale attempt to codify the elusive, subjective attributes that make up a successful grad student. The goal is to raise the share of students who finish graduate school. Non-cognitive, or “soft,” skills are considered crucial to success in higher education.




Madison School District: Private/Parochial, Open Enrollment Leave, Open Enrollment Enter, Home Based Parent Surveys



Kurt Kiefer, MMSD Chief Information Officer [1.3MB PDF]:

This memo is a summary of the results from the surveys completed during the past school year with various parent groups whose children reside within the MMSD attendance area but receive certain alternative education options. Also included are results of the survey conducted with non-residents who attend MMSD schools via the Open Enrollment program (Le., Open Enrollment Enter).



Background
Groups were surveys representing households whose students were enrolled in one of four different educational settings: MMSD resident students attending private/parochial schools, MMSD resident students attending other public schools via the Open Enrollment program, non-resident students attending MMSD schools via the Open Enrollment program, and MMSD resident students provided home based instruction.



The surveys were conducted between December 2008 and February 2009. The surveys were mailed to households or they could complete the survey online. Two mailings were conducted – the initial mailing to all households and a second to non-respondents as a reminder request. Total group sizes and responses are provided below.

This document will be discussed at Monday evening’s Madison School Board meeting.
UPDATE:




Indiana providing teaching fellowships in Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM)



The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation:

The Woodrow Wilson Indiana Teaching Fellowship seeks to attract talented, committed individuals with backgrounds in the STEM fields–science, technology, engineering, and mathematics–into teaching in high-need Indiana high schools. Learn more…
Funded through a $10 million grant from the Lilly Endowment, the Fellowship offers rigorous disciplinary and pedagogical preparation, extensive clinical experience, and ongoing mentoring. Eligible applicants include current undergraduates, recent college graduates, midcareer professionals, and retirees who have majored in, or had careers in, STEM fields.

When will the MMSD and the State of WI follow suit?
Related:




University students not shy about asking profs to reconsider grades



Todd Finkelmeyer:

Compiling final grades for students in Sharon Thoma’s Zoology 101 course is fairly simple.
Students take three multiple-choice exams, plus a final, during the semester. The grading scale is spelled out at the start of the year in the syllabus, which also notes there is no way to earn extra credit.
“So it’s solely objective and it’s pretty clear where you fall,” says Thoma, a University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty associate who co-teaches the huge lecture with two professors.
And yet, over the past two years Thoma has observed a surprising uptick in the number of students who e-mail her at the end of the semester, asking if she’d reconsider the grade she awarded them “because they worked so hard.”
Thoma estimates she received 20 such e-mails this spring out of some 850 students. “They’ll typically say, ‘I know you said there won’t be any grade adjustments, but I worked really hard and I don’t feel that the grade reflects the effort I put into the class,'” says Thoma, who stresses most students work hard in class and understand the ground rules. “And so I have a new standard reply: ‘I can’t quantitate your effort.'”




We Are All Writers Now



Anne Trubek:

Blogs, Twitter, Facebook: these outlets are supposedly cheapening language and tarnishing our time. But the fact is we are all reading and writing much more than we used to, writes Anne Trubek …
The chattering classes have become silent, tapping their views on increasingly smaller devices. And tapping they are: the screeds are everywhere, decrying the decline of smart writing, intelligent thought and proper grammar. Critics bemoan blogging as the province of the amateurism. Journalists rue the loose ethics and shoddy fact-checking of citizen journalists. Many save their most profound scorn for the newest forms of social media. Facebook and Twitter are heaped with derision for being insipid, time-sucking, sad testaments to our literary degradation. This view is often summed up with a disdainful question: “Do we really care about what you ate for lunch?”
Forget that most of the pundits lambasting Facebook and Twitter are familiar with these devices because they use them regularly. Forget that no one is being manacled to computers and forced to read stupid prose (instead of, say, reading Proust in bed). What many professional writers are overlooking in these laments is that the rise of amateur writers means more people are writing and reading. We are commenting on blog posts, forwarding links and composing status updates. We are seeking out communities based on written words.




Houston Community College Has Global Appeal



Larry Abramson:

America’s community colleges suffer from an image problem at home, but some are experiencing a boom — especially when it comes to foreign student enrollments.
Take Houston Community College. Thanks in part to an aggressive outreach campaign, the school has the highest percentage of international students of any community college in the U.S.
Betting On An American Education
Even if there were ivy on the walls of Houston Community College, it would wither in the Texas heat. The drab buildings of the school’s Gulfton neighborhood campus are typical community college architecture, but that doesn’t scare anyone away.
Sejal Desai came here after the college’s fame spread — via word of mouth — to the small city she comes from in India.




Schoolboy dream grows up



Joathan Moules:

When asked why he thinks the UK is not as entrepreneurial as the US, Mr Smith puts the blame on education. “Teachers and career advisers have been very risk-averse,” he says.
“If you can change attitudes in schools and teach entrepreneurship to primary and secondary school children, we will have more role models.”




Dear Plagiarist



G. Thomas Couser:

When you got your paper back with a grade of F for plagiarism, you reacted in predictable fashion — with indignant denial of any wrongdoing. You claimed “you cited everything” and denied that you had committed intentional plagiarism, or ever would.
This response is all too familiar to an experienced professor. Only once in my three decades of teaching has a student I caught plagiarizing owned up to it right away. And in that case, I believe (perhaps cynically) that she (a graduate student) thought a forthright confession might lead me to lighten the penalty. It didn’t; I failed her for the course and wrote her up. Indeed, I found out later that she had been caught plagiarizing by a colleague the previous term and let off lightly. I suspect that, because too many professors (many of them adjuncts fearful of student backlash) overlook or are unwilling to pursue plagiarism — the process can be labor intensive, and it is always unpleasant — cheating has become a way of life for many students, and they are genuinely surprised at being held responsible for it. So I don’t doubt that your shock is real.




6 Great Tools for LSAT, SAT and GMAT Test Prep



Dana Oshiro:

Thousands of intelligent students seize up during standardized test season. They’re the ones in the back of the gymnasium, frantically writing to the last minute and choking under the pressure of an egg timer. I am this student.
Perhaps test anxiety doesn’t come from the actual questions sitting in front of us, but rather the fact that these standardized test scores can be life altering. These scores affect our admittance to the right schools, our ability to gain scholarships and our ability to qualify for certain types of aid. The weight of these tests had many of us prematurely self-destructing, and honestly, it doesn’t get any easier as we get older.
Want to do an MBA or law degree? Your qualifying test scores could mean the difference between a great life transition and a mediocre one. Below is a list of test prep resources. If you’re spending your summer prepping, these might just help you gain the confidence you need to come out on top.




Privacy & Social Network Sites: Wife Blows MI6 Chief’s Cover on Facebook



Nadia Gilani:

The wife of the new head of MI6 has caused a major security breach and left his family exposed after publishing photographs and personal details on Facebook.
Sir John Sawers is due to take over as chief of the Secret Intelligence Service in November, putting him in charge of all of Britain’s spying operations abroad.
But entries by his wife Shelley on the social networking site have exposed potentially compromising details about where they live and work, their friends’ identities and where they spend their holidays. On the day her husband was appointed she congratulated him on the site using his codename “C”.




What it’s Like to Teach Black Students



Marty Nemko:

Despite almost 50 years of large and accelerating efforts to improve the school achievement of African-American students, the gap between their achievement and that of whites and Asians remains about as large as ever.
Yet proposals for what to do about it seem basically unchanged: Spend more money and divert existing money to reduce class size and train teachers better, have more students take a rigorous college prep curriculum, work on improving self-esteem, eliminate ability-grouped classes, use cooperative-learning techniques, and reassign top teachers to schools with a high percentage of African-American students.
I have become especially doubtful about whether those approaches will work better in the future than they have in the past when I read this report from the trenches. Usually, we hear only from politicians and education leaders (who also are politicians) spouting lofty rhetoric. Occasionally, we hear of a promising program, but which never turns out to be scalable. Or we see a Hollywood movie about some amazing teacher.
We rarely, however, hear from a more typical teacher who, day to day, teaches low-achieving African-American kids. So it was with interest that I read this truly depressing account from a teacher. I’ve edited out a couple of unnecessarily snarky sentences, which are irrelevant to the issue. Nonetheless the essay is long yet, I believe, worth your time.)




Naval Academy Professor Challenges Rising Diversity



Daniel de Vise:

Of the 1,230 plebes who took the oath of office at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis this week, 435 were members of minority groups. It’s the most racially diverse class in the academy’s 164-year history.
Academy leaders say it is a top priority to build a student body that reflects the racial makeup of the Navy and the nation. The service academy has almost twice as many black, Hispanic and Asian midshipmen as it did a decade ago. Much of the increase has occurred in the past two years, with a blitz of 1,000 outreach and recruitment events across the country.
But during the past two weeks, a faculty member has stirred debate by suggesting that the school’s quest for diversity comes at a price. Bruce Fleming, a tenured English professor, said in a June 14 opinion piece in the Capital newspaper of Annapolis that the academy operates a two-tiered admission system that makes it substantially easier for minority applicants to get in. Academy leaders strenuously deny Fleming’s assertion. Fleming served on the academy’s admissions board several years ago.




A parent’s plea on teaching



Michael Laser, via a kind reader’s email:

IF I could change public education, here’s what I’d do first: reward the best teachers with higher pay and stature, and fire the worst teachers, because they shouldn’t be in the classroom.
My children have gone through a total of 16 years of public schooling in New Jersey. Over the years, I’ve seen outstanding teachers, and outstandingly bad ones. Our kids have had teachers who introduced them to everything under the sun, and made every day different and fascinating. Some of our daughter’s teachers gave up their lunch and stayed late to help her find her way through the maze of math. Two of our son’s teachers comforted him when traumatic events laid him low. My daughter’s sixth-grade teacher made students feel like real scientists; her language arts teacher covered everyone’s papers with useful suggestions. These people put everything they have into teaching. They light sparks that stay lit for years.
But we’ve also seen teachers who put dents in our children’s spirits, day after day, teachers who barely taught anything at all, who, I suspect, chose the profession because they wanted summers off.
My father used to come home from his post office job railing about co-workers who didn’t do their share of the work, but couldn’t be fired. Watching bad teachers fail to do their jobs, I’m even angrier than he was. How can anyone justify protecting the jobs of teachers who:




Korean School Preps Students For Ivy League



Anthony Kuhn:

With admissions getting more competitive every year, spots at top American colleges are becoming a globally coveted commodity. In Seoul, one elite South Korean prep school has become the envy of many upper-crust U.S. prep schools with its success at getting its students into Ivy League colleges.
The Korean school’s formula is simple: Select the country’s brightest and most ambitious students and work them extremely hard.
U.S.-Style Studying 101
Roughly 1,200 students at the private Daewon Foreign Language High School begin their day with a nationally required curriculum of Korean, math and English. Three afternoons a week, about a quarter of them continue their studies in the Global Leadership Program — a special course that emphasizes the research, writing and analytical skills they will need at top U.S. colleges.




A Bank Run Teaches the ‘Plain People’ About the Risks of Modernity



Douglas Belkin:

Dan Bontrager is a 54-year-old Amish man with flecks of gray in his long beard. He’s also treasurer of the Tri-County Land Trust, an Amish lending cooperative created to support the Amish maxim that community enhances faith in God.
This past spring, Mr. Bontrager was startled when a number of men he has known most of his life tied their horses to the hitching post outside his office and came inside to withdraw their money from the Land Trust.
“We had a run,” Mr. Bontrager says. “I don’t know if you know anything about the Amish grapevine, but word travels fast. Somebody assumed it was going to happen, and it started a panic.”




Private Schools & The Recession



The Economist:

In both America and Britain recession has so far done little to dent the demand for private education.


“COMPARED with last year, applications are up 14%,” says Mark Stanek, the principal of Ethical Culture Fieldston, a private school in New York. All through the application season he and his board of governors had been on tenterhooks, waiting to see if financial turmoil would cut the number of parents prepared to pay $32,000-34,000 a year to educate a child. Requests for financial help from families already at Fieldston had been rising fast, and the school had scraped together $3m–on top of the $8m it spends on financial aid in a normal year–in the hope of tiding as many over as possible. Nothing is certain until pupils turn up in the autumn. Some parents could get cold feet and sacrifice their deposits. Yet so far the school is more popular than ever.


Across America the picture is patchier, but there is little sign of a recession-induced meltdown in private schooling. Catholic parochial schools and some in rural areas are finding the going harder–but this is merely the acceleration of existing trends. Private schools in big cities with rich residents, and those with famous names and a history of sending graduates to the Ivy League, seem to be doing rather well. “Some parents weighing up their options may be worried about what recession will do to public-school budgets,” says Myra McGovern of the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), which represents around 1,400 of the country’s 30,000-odd private schools. “And some may think that if other people are struggling, that will mean their children are more likely to get in.”




Massachusetts Teachers Union Votes Down Advanced Placement Grant



Mike Antonucci:

Today’s lesson comes courtesy of Bernadette Marso, president of the Leominster Education Association in Massachusetts. Her members just voted down, by a 305-47 margin, a five-year, $856,000 grant from the Advanced Placement Training and Award Program. The program, among other things, pays teachers of Advanced Placement courses bonus money “if they successfully recruit more students to take AP courses and if the students perform well on the end-of-the-year AP exam.”

Some district officials and parents complained about the union decision because the bonuses were just one part of the program, which includes professional development and a subsidy to offset the AP exam fee for the students. But the union stood firmly opposed.

“We understand that some people will not understand the vote, but we confronted this from a union perspective,” Marso said. “We have a fair and equitable contract with the district, and to have a third party come in and start paying certain teachers more money than other hard-working teachers goes against what a union is all about.”

It will be interesting to see how the Madison School District’s contract negotiations play out with respect to community 4K partners and other curriculuar issues.




Reroute The Pre-K Debate!



Andy Rotherham:

It just can’t be a very good sign that when someone raises serious questions about one of the liveliest and controversial issues in our field those questions are ignored or distorted and caricatured. I’ve heard Checker Finn’s new book on pre-kindergarten education referred to as an anti-pre-k book (it’s not), an intemperate attack on the pre-k movement (it’s critical, sure, but let’s assume they’re not as vulnerable as the kids they serve), or dismissed as simply too conservative to be taken seriously by the field (again it’s not).
That doesn’t mean it’s a flawless book. Sara Mead has engaged with it and points out some problems with the analysis (in particular Finn overstates current participation levels – especially from a quality standpoint – and that’s no small thing given his underlying point) and she also rounds up the other writing on it. But in general there hasn’t been a lot of discussion of Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut’s points about current program coordination, costs and how to think about costs, quality, and universality. These are not small matters; they cut to the heart of what is likely to be a massive public investment in an important strategy to improve outcomes for economically disadvantaged youngsters.




Sports Salaries Show What We Really Value



Allen Barra:

The issue of escalating compensation and rising ticket prices in professional sports has been around for years. But next month it could reach a boiling point when 21-year-old Stephen Strasburg, the No. 1 pick in this year’s Major League Baseball draft, signs for at least $15 million. And that’s just a bonus before salary is even discussed.
The blogosphere and radio call-in shows are already buzzing, with people saying things like “Man, the [Washington] Nationals” — or whatever team ends up signing Mr. Strasburg — “are sure going to have to raise prices to pay for this guy. You’ll be lucky to afford a beer when you go out to the ballpark to see him pitch.”
Well, if you can’t afford to buy a beer at the ballpark then it didn’t do the team much good to sign the player, did it? Sportswriters and radio guys delight in reminding fans that every time a team acquires an expensive player the cost of everything goes up. But that’s just not the way economics works.




US obesity problem ‘intensifies’



BBC:

The Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found adult obesity rates rose in 23 of the 50 states, but fell in none.
In addition, the percentage of obese and overweight children is at or above 30% in 30 states.
The report warns widespread obesity is fuelling rates of chronic disease, and is responsible for a large, and growing chunk of domestic healthcare costs.
Obesity is linked to a range of health problems, including heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes.
Dr Jeff Levi, TFAH executive director, said: “Our health care costs have grown along with our waist lines. “The obesity epidemic is a big contributor to the skyrocketing health care costs in the US.




Toyota Unveils Wheelchair Propelled by Thoughts Alone



Clay Dillow:

We’ll still have to wait a few years to mind-meld with our Camrys, but researchers at Toyota have unveiled an advanced brain sensing system that controls the movement of a wheelchair by reading a user’s thoughts alone. By processing patterns in brain waves, the system can propel a wheelchair forward, as well as make turns, with virtually no discernable delay between thought and movement.
Developed by researchers at BSI-Toyota Collaboration Center, the brain machine interface technology can return a response from a thought stimulus in just 125 milliseconds, whole seconds faster than existing technology, in effect creating real-time responsiveness. Five electroencephalography sensors stationed above the regions of the brain that deal with motor movement interpret patterns in the signals generated by the user. Further, the software interpreting the signals adapts to a particular user’s patterns of thinking, achieving 95% accuracy after just one week of three-hour training sessions.
The potential applications for BMI technology extend far beyond the wheelchair, but Toyota’s immediate focus will be to help those with mobility issues regain their freedom of movement, as well as to improve nursing care for the elderly. In that pursuit, Toyota is far from alone, as an aging population has Japan forecasting a shortage of health-care workers in the future. Rival automaker Honda is experimenting with a similar technology that allows its Asimo robot to be manipulated via brain signals, the idea being that humanoid robots could replace home care nurses in coming years.




Khosla: How To Succeed In Silicon Valley By Bumbling And Failing…



Tom Foremski:

Vinod Khosla is one of Silicon Valley’s most successful VCs. I was at the recent SDForum Visionary Awards where Mr Khosla was one of four winners of the 2009 awards.
His acceptance speech was short and very good. Excellent advice for entrepreneurs.
Also, he talks about failure, which I have long advocated is Silicon Valley’s strength.
A couple of years ago I met with a delegation of Russian diplomats, VCs, and government officials. They were visiting Silicon Valley and wanted to meet with me as part of their tour. They were looking for ways to create several silicon valley-like regions in Russia.
During our meeting, I told them I would tell them the secret of Silicon Valley. I paused. They all leaned in a little closer…




University Of Illinois Tracked Applicants With ‘Clout’



David Schaper:

The state of Illinois is embroiled in yet another political scandal. This one involves the University of Illinois and allegations that students with political clout were admitted to the school over other, more qualified applicants.
A Shoo-In
When William Jones graduated from high school three years ago, he thought he had done what he had to do to get into University of Illinois that fall.
“I was mostly an A student. A’s, with a couple of B’s. I got a 29 on my ACT,” Jones said. “So when I originally applied to U of I, I guess I cockily thought I was a shoo-in, but apparently not.”
Jones scored high enough to get on Illinois’ waiting list before ultimately being denied. His Plan B was to go to the University of Iowa, where he paid out-of-state tuition.




The Library of Congress on iTunes U



• Historical videos from the Library’s moving-image collections such as original Edison films and a series of 1904 films from the Westinghouse Works;

  • Original videos such as author presentations from the National Book Festival, the “Books and Beyond” series, lectures from the Kluge Center, and the “Journeys and Crossings” series of discussions with curators;
  • Audio podcasts, including series such as “Music and the Brain,” slave narratives from the American Folklife Center, and interviews with noted authors from the National Book Festival; and
  • Classroom and educational materials, including 14 courses from the Catalogers’ Learning Workshop

Slick. Download iTunes here. MIT’s open courseware, among many others is also available on iTunes U.




HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?



Lera Boroditsky:

For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity.




The ‘little red schoolhouse’ of legend, whatever its flaws, made more sense than the warehouse-schools of today.



Bill Kauffman:

Tacked to my wall is a lithograph of the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington. For many years, it graced my mother’s one-room schoolhouse in Lime Rock, N.Y. Antiquarian relic or enduringly relevant image? The same question may be asked of the “little red schoolhouse” itself, whose reality and legend are the subject of “Small Wonder.” Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor at New York University, sets out to tell “how — and why — the little red schoolhouse became an American icon.” Mr. Zimmerman proves a thoughtful and entertaining teacher.
First, the chromatic debunking: One-room schools were often white and seldom red. The teachers were usually young unmarried females, pace the most famous one-room schoolteacher in literature, Ichabod Crane. They swept the floor, stoked the stove, rang the hand-bell and taught their mixed-age students by rote and recitation. The schools could be a “cauldron of chaos,” in Mr. Zimmerman’s alliteration, as tyro teachers were tormented by Tom Sawyers dipping pigtails in inkwells and carving doggerel into desks.




The Bard of Berkeley A former poet laureate on haiku and the responsibilities of writers.



The Bard of Berkeley:

One benefit of being a poet — as opposed to, say, a politician or talk-show host — is that you can be the most celebrated person in your field, a virtual rock star among those who study, read and write poetry, and still remain anonymous in just about any public setting.
The thought occurs to me as I stand outside one of this city’s finer Japanese-fusion restaurants (a fancy joint called Yoshi’s) chain smoking and awaiting the arrival of Robert Hass, a poetry rock star if ever there was one.
Last year alone the 68-year-old Berkeley professor won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his collection of poems “Time and Materials.” From 1995-97 he was America’s poet laureate, and he used the post in innovative ways to promote literacy. From 1997-2000 he wrote the popular “Poet’s Choice” column for the Washington Post, introducing readers to his favorite poets each week. His translations of Japanese haiku and the works of Czeslaw Milosz — the late, great Polish poet, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature — are read the world over.




My Son’s Gamble



Lucy Ferriss:

ust past dawn one morning last August, I pulled myself from bed, bleary from ragged sleep. I headed downstairs to make coffee and settle at my computer. There, I booted up Firefox and accessed an online card room, Full Tilt Poker, from which I downloaded a program to play Texas Hold ‘Em and other games. Once the program was open, I tried to log on with the screen name my 18-year-old son, Dan, had shown me on a different site called PokerStars. Full Tilt Poker, unsurprisingly, rejected the name.
Following the plan I outlined as I lay awake in the wee hours, I opened up Dan’s college e-mail account. Weeks before, he read his e-mail via my computer and asked Firefox to save the password. I clicked “Enter.” There before me were all the e-mail messages from university officials, from his tennis coach, from teachers. Most prevalent were e-mail messages from Full Tilt Poker, addressed to a screen name I did not recognize. Grimly satisfied, I read none of these. I simply returned to Full Tilt, entered the screen name from the e-mail and clicked “Forgot my password.” I expected the program to ask me the name of my favorite rock band, at which point my foray into the role of Internet spy would cease. To my surprise, the window on the screen read, “We have sent your new password to the e-mail address on record.” I re-entered Dan’s e-mail account, fetched the new password and entered it into the Full Tilt log-in window.




Critical Likability



Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
28 June 2009
As we approach the end of the first decade of the first century of the third millennium of the Christian Era, the corporate members of the new and influential Partnership for 21st Century Skills have begun to look beyond and behind and beneath their earlier commitment to the education of our students in critical thinking, collaborative problem solving, and global awareness.
It has become obvious to industry leaders that more fundamental than all these new student skills for success in the business world is really Critical Likability. While it may be useful for new employees to know that the world is round, and that solving problems is sometimes easier if others provide help, and that real thinking is superior to not thinking at all, these all pale in importance to whether other people like you or not.
Being a great communicator is important, and reading and writing have received some support from the 21st Century leaders, but those are not of much value if no one likes you and no one wants to hear what you have to say, whether oral or written.
Critical Likability, it must be understood, goes far beyond mere popularity in school, although they share some essential tools and characteristics. Future employees must learn, while they are in school, the basic lessons of smiling, personal hygiene (including the control of bad breath and the release of hydrogen sulfide gas), grooming, table manners, the correct handshake, and at least the basics of dressing for success.
At a more advanced level students should be taught to listen, empathize, seem to agree, laugh, hug (only where clearly appropriate), tell jokes, drink (where and when culturally appropriate), play a social sport (like golf), and generally to be likable in the most efficient and effective senses of that word.

(more…)




Perfect Failure
Commencement Address to Graduating Class of the Buckley School



Paul Tudor Jones, via a kind reader’s email:

When I was asked to give the commencement address to a graduating class of 9th graders, I jumped at the chance. You see, I have four teenagers of my own and I feel like this is the point in my life when I am supposed to tell them something profound. So thank you Buckley community for giving me this opportunity. I tried this speech out on them last night and am happy to report that none of them fell asleep until I was three quarters done.
When composing this message I searched my memory for my same experience back in 1969 when I was sitting right where you are. I realized that I could hardly remember one single speaker from my junior high or high school days. Now that could be my age. I’m old enough now that some days I can’t remember how old I am. But it could also have been a sign of the times. Remember, I was part of the student rebellion, and we did not listen to anything that someone over 30 said because they were just too clueless. Or so we thought.
Anyway, as I sat there considering this speech further, I suddenly had a flashback of the one speaker who I actually did remember from youthful days. He was a Shakespearean actor who came to our school to extol the virtues of William Shakespeare. He started out by telling us that Shakespeare was not about poetry or romance or love, but instead, was all about battle, and fighting and death and war. Then he pulled out a huge sword which he began waving over the top of his head as he described various bloody conflicts that were all part and parcel of Shakespeare’s plays. Now being a 15-year old testosterone laden student at an all boys school, I thought this was pretty cool. I remember thinking, “Yea, this guy gets it. Forget about the deep meaning and messages in the words, let’s talk about who’s getting the blade.”
As you can see, I have a similar sword which I am going to stop waving over my head now, because A) I think you are permanently scarred, and B) the headmaster looks like he is about to tackle me and C) some of you, I can tell, are way too excited about this sword, and you’re scaring me a little.
I’m here with you young men today because your parents wanted me to speak to you about service–that is, serving others and giving back to the broader community for the blessings that you have received in your life. But that is a speech for a later time in your life. Don’t get me wrong, serving others is really, really important. It truly is the secret to happiness in life. I swear to God. Money won’t do it. Fame won’t do it. Nor will sex, drugs, homeruns or high achievement. But now I am getting preachy.

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Off to private Brentwood School, thanks to the kindness of strangers



Carla Rivera:

New friendships bloom as an L.A. judge and his college professor wife decide to foot the bill for a talented boy to attend the private school, which his mom can’t afford.
When David and Jacki Horwitz read an article in The Times about Lorelei Oliver’s struggle to find a good school for her son Kamal Key, their response was immediate: Perhaps, they inquired, there was a fund to which they could contribute to help the 12-year-old, who had been admitted to a prestigious but costly private campus?
Three weeks and several phone calls and e-mails later, Kamal and his family sat in the backyard of the Horwitzes’ spacious Pacific Palisades home, laughing as if they had known each other for years. The couple’s initial offer of a modest donation for a little boy who was a complete stranger has led to the unexpected meeting of two families whose lives may now be intertwined for years.




Grad Guid 2009



Washington Post:

Transitioning from full-time student to working professional is challenging enough, but in this turbulent job market, what’s a student to do? Our experts have help




In Uncertain Times, Valedictorians Look Ahead



Lizette Alvarez:

“We’re that high school class that was there when Obama got elected and that’s going to be there forever,” said Christian Monsalve, who was chosen by his classmates at Regis High School, one of the city’s most prestigious Catholic schools, to give the commencement address. “Who knows what, in the next 5, 10 years, what’s going to happen. We’re going to be that class that’s going to make that history.”
Before tossing their mortarboards into the air, all graduating seniors are spoon-fed equal parts inspiration and responsibility. But for the class of 2009, laying claim to The Future can be a disquieting proposition.
Unemployment is discouragingly high. Wall Street is downsizing. Icecaps are melting. America remains at war. And politicians are still feuding — or in New York State’s case, locking one another out of rooms.
Yet, these best and brightest flip all this negativity into opportunity: to cure, to defend, to counsel, to heal, even to make a buck. “It’s not like we’ll be in recession for the rest of our lives, until we die,” noted Jenae Williams, the valedictorian at the Celia Cruz Bronx High School of Music.




Can Charter-School Execs Help Failing Public Schools?



Gilbert Cruz:

In the late ’90s, software entrepreneur John Zitzner was pretty close to being bankrupt. Yet within six months — in one of those typical “holy crap” dotcom-era stories — Zitzner had sold his company and become “a very modest millionaire.” Fantastic. And in one of those typical “What do I do with all this money?” stories, he decided to help make the world a better place — specifically by co-founding a charter school in Cleveland. (Read TIME’s report: “How to Raise the Standard in America’s Schools.”)
That was three summers ago. Fast-forward to last Monday, when Zitzner was in the audience in Washington as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appealed to a gathering of charter-school operators to “adapt your educational model to turning around our lowest-performing schools.” For months now, Duncan has talked about closing 5,000 — or about 5% — of the nation’s lowest-performing public schools. By throwing down the gauntlet to charter schools, Duncan is challenging an industry that has become very proficient at opening up brand-new schools, but has very little experience in going into a preexisting school and turning those kids from low performers into high-quality students. But Zitzner, whose Entrepreneurship Preparatory has about 200 students in grades 6 to 8, can’t wait to dive in. In the past three years his students have gone from fairly abysmal test results to scoring in the top quartile on the Ohio standardized test, and he doesn’t see why that model can’t be replicated among other underperforming students. “Charter-school people are entrepreneurs — we like challenges, and this industry needs people who can make order out of chaos.”




Charter Schools Win a High-Profile Convert: Boston Mayor



Jon Keller:

Tom Menino, the longtime Democratic mayor of this city, is not known for rocking the boat or for eloquence. But earlier this month he stunned many in the city when he gave a powerful speech about school reform.
The speech took aim at the lack of progress in dozens of low-performing, inner-city Boston public schools, many of which have not met adequate yearly progress for five years running.
“To get the results we seek — at the speed we want — we must make transformative changes that boost achievement for students, improve quality choices for parents, and increase opportunities for teachers,” Mr. Menino said. “We need to empower our educators to quickly innovate and implement what works.” With that, Mr. Menino abandoned nearly two decades of personal opposition to nonunion charter schools, which have been bitterly resisted by Massachusetts teachers unions and their political allies. “I believe that the increased flexibility that charters provide can . . . help us close the achievement gap,” he declared.




A special report on ageing populations: Suffer the little children



The Economist:

IN GERMANY a mother who neglects her children is known as a Rabenmutter (raven’s mother). Many older Germans slap that label on women with small children who go out to work. Young women in Germany, as elsewhere, are torn. They enjoy their jobs but find it hard to combine them with having a family, for a host of practical reasons such as school hours and lack of child care as well as public disapproval. Faced with that dilemma, some give up work. Others give up having children. About a quarter of the current generation of German women in their 40s have remained childless. The country’s fertility rate (the number of children a woman can expect to have in her lifetime) is now a rock-bottom 1.3–the same as in Japan and Italy, where similar attitudes prevail (see chart 3). The chancellor, Angela Merkel, has acknowledged that her country needs to be more child-friendly.




SIS Interview: University of Wisconsin Education Professor Adam Gamoran





Dr. Adam Gamoran (Dr. Gamoran’s website; Clusty search) has been involved with a variety Madison School District issues, including controversial mandatory academic grouping changes (English 10, among others).
I had an opportunity to briefly visit with Dr. Gamoran during the District’s Strategic Planning Process. He kindly agreed to spend some time recently discussing these and other issues (22K PDF discussion topics, one of which – outbound open enrollment growth – he was unfamiliar with).
Click here to download the 298MB .m4v (iTunes, iPhone, iPod) video file, or a 18MB audio file. A transcript is available here.




Germany’s mediocre universities



The Economist:

THE IG FARBEN building in Frankfurt has a history. This is where Zyklon B gas, used at Auschwitz, was invented and Dwight Eisenhower later worked. Now it is part of an €1.8 billion ($2.5 billion) building project at Frankfurt’s Goethe University. Not for Goethe’s 35,000 students the grotty campuses of others: the “House of Finance” has a marble floor inspired by Raphael’s fresco “The School of Athens.”
Thousands of less coddled students recently staged protests across Germany against their conditions. “Back education, not banks”, demanded protesters fed up with overcrowded lecture halls, crumbling campuses, tuition fees and a chaotic conversion from the traditional diploma to a European two-tier degree system.
German universities are underfunded by international standards (see chart). Professors juggle scores of students; at top American universities they nurture a handful. In switching to the bachelors-masters degrees prescribed by Europe’s standardising “Bologna process”, many universities tried to cram bachelors degrees into just six terms. Only six German universities are among the top 100 in the Shanghai rankings (Munich is highest, at 55th). Just 21% of each age cohort gets a degree; the OECD average is 37%.




If students actually write the essay, they’ll get extra credit.



Howard Blume:

To make classes more manageable, administrators have enrolled some especially challenging students in Locke 4, an academy whose Opportunities program consists of three classrooms set aside for students who are doing poorly or displaying serious behavior problems. The program also accepts students returning after being convicted of crimes.
On a recent Monday, 14 students sat in an Opportunities class with one teacher and an aide — Green Dot wanted especially small adult-to-student ratios for these youths. The posted class rules were simple: Stay seated during class; complete all of your work; be polite and respectful.
These expectations failed to achieve traction with several students, including a recently arriving freshman.
“Do you need help?” the teacher asked him.
“You need help,” he retorted, looking around for admiration from his peers. “You know, lady, I don’t like you.”
The group was assigned to organize an essay on juvenile justice after reviewing case studies of four young offenders. If students actually write the essay, they’ll get extra credit.
One table over from the ninth-grader, a wiry boy with slicked-back hair said he had landed in Locke 4 after punching a school security guard. He considers gang membership necessary to survive: “That’s almost part of life.”
Then he paused and offered something close to an endorsement of the new Locke: “Other schools, you have your enemies all the time. In this school everybody gets along. People talk to Bloods and Crips.”

Jerry Pournelle has more.




Who Are We as Americans?



Nat Hentoff:

resident Obama, in his May 21 speech at the National Archives Museum in Washington said that “we can defeat Al Qaeda …if we stay true to who we are…anchored in our timeless ideals.” A much more somber note, however, was in a warning by retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter the day before at Georgetown University Law Center.
Deeply concerned at how little knowledge Americans have of how this republic works, Justice Souter cited as an example that the majorities of the public can’t name — according to surveys — the three branches of government.
Who we are, Souter continued, “can be lost, it is being lost, it is lost, if it is not understood.” What is needed, he said, “is the restoration of the self-identity of the American people. … When I was a kid in the eighth and ninth grades, everybody took civics. That’s no longer true. (Former Justice) Sandra Day O’Connor says 50 percent of schools teach neither history nor civics.” Justice Souter continued that when he was in school, “civics was as dull as dishwater, but we knew the structure of government.”
This alert to the citizenry was almost entirely ignored by the press.
Admirably, O’Connor is trying to engage students in learning who they are as Americans through her Web site: Our Courts – 21st Century Civics (www.ourcourts.org). The site asks students what part of government they would most want to be a part of. And she invites teachers to click and “find lesson plans that fit your classroom needs.”

I complete agree with Hentoff. These words are particularly relevant when elected officials, such as Democrat Charles Schumer advocate biometric ID cards for all workers:

“I’m sure the civil libertarians will object to some kind of biometric card — although . . . there’ll be all kinds of protections — but we’re going to have to do it. It’s the only way,” Schumer said. “The American people will never accept immigration reform unless they truly believe their government is committed to ending future illegal immigration.”

The Obama Administration is advocating easy sharing of IRS data… (not good).




The New Student Excuse?



Scott Jaschik:

Most of us have had the experience of receiving e-mail with an attachment, trying to open the attachment, and finding a corrupted file that won’t open. That concept is at the root of a new Web site advertising itself (perhaps serious only in part) as the new way for students to get extra time to finish their assignments.
Corrupted-Files.com offers a service — recently noted by several academic bloggers who have expressed concern — that sells students (for only $3.95, soon to go up to $5.95) intentionally corrupted files. Why buy a corrupted file? Here’s what the site says: “Step 1: After purchasing a file, rename the file e.g. Mike_Final-Paper. Step 2: E-mail the file to your professor along with your ‘here’s my assignment’ e-mail. Step 3: It will take your professor several hours if not days to notice your file is ‘unfortunately’ corrupted. Use the time this website just bought you wisely and finish that paper!!!”




Recession? Valet Parking Arrives



Ben Eisen:

For some college students, “roughing it” may be a thing of the past.
When the concept of starting a valet parking service came up at a recent Florida Atlantic University Board of Trustees meeting, it seemed less out of place than one would think. With the number of students growing, and the number of convenient parking spaces on campus unchanged, the idea to charge students and faculty for such a convenience did not seem unreasonable.
Florida Atlantic is just talking about valet service. Other colleges have implemented it. Florida International University and Columbia University introduced valet programs this spring. The University of Southern California has had a program in place since 2008, and High Point University brought in valet at the behest of its president, Nido Qubein, to provide a better student experience. California State University at Sacramento has also begun a premium parking program.




A Semantic Hijacking”



Charles J. Sykes, Dumbing Down Our Kids
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995, pp. 245-247

Ironically, “outcomes” were first raised to prominence by leaders of the conservative educational reform movement of the 1980s. Championed by Chester E. Finn, Jr. among others, reformers argued that the obsession with inputs (dollars spent, books bought, staff hired) focused on the wrong end of the educational pipeline. Reformers insisted that schools could be made more effective and accountable by shifting emphasis to outcomes (what children actually learned). Finn’s emphasis on outcomes was designed explicitly to make schools more accountable by creating specific and verifiable educational objectives in subjects like math, science, history, geography, and English. In retrospect, the intellectual debate over accountability was won by the conservatives. Indeed, conservatives were so successful in advancing their case that the term “outcomes” has become a virtually irresistible tool for academic reform.
The irony is that, in practice, the educational philosophies known as Outcome Based Education have little if anything in common with those original goals. To the contrary, OBE–with its hostility to competition, traditional measures of progress, and to academic disciplines in general–can more accurately be described as part of a counterreformation, a reaction against those attempts to make schools more accountable and effective. The OBE being sold to schools represents, in effect, a semantic hijacking.
“The conservative education reform of the 1980s wanted to focus on outcomes (i.e. knowledge gained) instead of inputs (i.e. dollars spent),” notes former Education Secretary William Bennett. “The aim was to ensure greater accountability. What the education establishment has done is to appropriate the term but change the intent.” [emphasis added] Central to this semantic hijacking is OBE’s shift of outcomes from cognitive knowledge to goals centering on values, beliefs, attitudes, and feelings. As an example of a rigorous cognitive outcome (the sort the original reformers had in mind), Bennett cites the Advanced Placement Examinations, which give students credit for courses based on their knowledge and proficiency in a subject area, rather than on their accumulated “seat-time” in a classroom.
In contrast, OBE programs are less interested in whether students know the origins of the Civil War or the author of The Tempest than whether students have met such outcomes as “establishing priorities to balance multiple life roles” (a goal in Pennsylvania) or “positive self-concept” (a goal in Kentucky). Where the original reformers aimed at accountability, OBE makes it difficult if not impossible to objectively measure and compare educational progress. In large part, this is because instead of clearly stated, verifiable outcomes, OBE goals are often diffuse, fuzzy, and ill-defined–loaded with educationist jargon like “holistic learning,” “whole-child development,” and “interpersonal competencies.”
Where original reformers emphasized schools that work, OBE is experimental. Despite the enthusiasm of educationists and policymakers for OBE, researchers from the University of Minnesota concluded that “research documenting its effects is fairly rare.” At the state level, it was difficult to find any documentation of whether OBE worked or not and the information that was available was largely subjective. Professor Jean King of the University of Minnesota’s College of Education describes support for the implementation of OBE as being “almost like a religion–that you believe in this and if you believe in it hard enough, it will be true.” And finally, where the original reformers saw an emphasis on outcomes as a way to return to educational basics, OBE has become, in Bennett’s words, “a Trojan Horse for social engineering, an elementary and secondary school version of the kind of ‘politically correct’ thinking that has infected our colleges and universities.”
=============
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
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Varsity Academics®




Rigor Reduction in Sports? An NBA Player Speaks Out!



Kevin Clark:

or some time, coaches have grumbled that the AAU’s emphasis on building stars and playing games over practicing produces a lot of talented prospects who have great physical skills but limited knowledge of the fundamentals. Now some players are speaking out.


By the middle of the last NBA season, as concerns build about his dwindling playing time and rough transition to the NBA, last year’s No. 2 overall pick, Michael Beasley of the Miami Heat, finally conceded a fundamental flaw: No one, at any level in his basketball career, had asked him to play defense. And especially not in AAU. “If you’re playing defense in AAU, you don’t need to be playing,” he says. “I’ve honestly never seen anyone play defense in AAU.”



An AAU official declined to comment for this article.



The chorus of critics ranges from AAU player Alex Oriakhi, a McDonald’s All-American center who plans to play for the University of Connecticut, who says shooting guards he’s seen in AAU are in for a “rude awakening” to USA Basketball officials and NBA coaches.



Founded in 1888, the AAU’s first goal was to represent American sports internationally. AAU teams blossomed in many sports, and the organization became a driving force in preparing Olympic athletes. In 1978, the Amateur Sports Act established a governing body for American Olympic sports, usurping the AAU’s role as an Olympic launching pad. Its most notable sport today is basketball, where it counts Magic Johnson, Shaquille O’Neal and LeBron James among its alumni.

I am no NBA fan, having attended my last game, in I think, 1972 – a Milwaukee Bucks playoff game. A one dimensional game is not all that interesting, particularly via sky high ticket prices.




American IT grads unprepared and unemployable: Indian CEO Vineet Nayar



Richi Jennings:

Vineet Nayar is reported to have called Americans graduates “unemployable”; the CEO of IT services vendor HCL Technologies was speaking recently in New York. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers debate racism, stereotyping, sweatshops, and H1B visas.
By Richi Jennings, your humble blogwatcher, who has selected these bloggy tidbits for your enjoyment. Not to mention the best gaming toilets…
Rob Preston reports inflammatory comments with dignity:

via Lou Minatti.




ABC’s and PhD’s: Towards a New Normal



Liz Stockwell:

For the past nearly two months I’ve been working towards some sort of new normal as I recover from and work with my doctors to figure out how to live with the illness I never dreamed would turn our family life so utterly on its head. Since then we’ve been taking one day at a time, each day assessing whether I need to spend extra time in bed on pain killers to get over a bad migraine and whether my husband has to once again skip his work obligations to take the children to one of their activities or take me to a doctor’s appointment. Our parents have all spent time with us, each taking a one to two week shift caring for our household. It’s been an unexpected silver lining for us to have so much time with them, and they give my husband a break to get some of his own work done and get back to academic life. He’s taken over as principle provider of domestic services and chauffer, as well as breadwinner, and he said recently that he’s looking forward to going back to work full-time so he can have a vacation — he’s exhausted! With our families here, I get many greatly appreciated offers to “just go lie down, I’ll take care of this” though it makes it a little more difficult to find ‘normal!’
Since my last post, my illness has been diagnosed at different times as brain stem migraine and viral encephalitis, for which I spent 12 days in hospital on a course of intra-venous anti-viral drugs. I should add that despite my tongue-and-cheek tone about the diagnoses, I’ve been very happy with the excellent medical care I’ve received and the thoughtful consideration my doctors have made for the fact that I’m the mother of two young children. When they saw how difficult it was for our family to be separated with me in hospital, they arranged for day passes and made accommodations for me to be temporarily unplugged from the IV to visit home. Yesterday was a long awaited appointment with a second neurologist who weighed in on my crazy collection of symptoms with yet a new diagnosis: syndrome of headache, neurological deficits, and cerebrospinal fluid lymphocytosis (or HaNDL, which almost sounds like it was invented as a catch-all for me and my symptoms). Along with the white blood cells in my spinal fluid, migraines, and dizziness, I also have entertaining colorful hallucinations (fairies, dragons, iridescent butterflies, and hammering cartoon characters) which have become an unlikely family source of creativity as I describe the latest over breakfast and my son later reproduces them, based on my descriptions, in his drawing journal at school. Fortunately his teacher is aware of my neurological problems, since I’ve not yet received any worried phone calls or visits from social workers to investigate my seven-year-old son’s involvement with mind-altering drugs as the inspiration for his art.




Students Without Borders



Maria Glod:

A team of very smart teenagers has set out to discover ways that maggots might make the world a better place. Two are from Loudoun County. Two live more than 9,000 miles away in Singapore.
To many U.S. politicians, educators and business leaders, Singapore’s students have become a symbol of the fierce competition the nation faces from high achievers in Asia. But these four students call themselves “international collaborators” and friends.
Even as globalization has fed worries about whether U.S. students can keep up with the rest of the world, it also has spawned classroom connections across oceans. Teachers, driven by a desire to help students navigate a world made smaller by e-mail, wikis and teleconferences, say lessons once pulled mainly from textbooks can come to life through real-world interactions.
“When we talk on Facebook,” Joanne Guidry, 17, one of the researchers at Loudoun’s Academy of Science, said of her Singaporean peers, “you can’t tell they are halfway around the world.”

Related: Credit for non-Madison School District Courses.




The economic cost of the US education gap



Byron G. Auguste, Bryan Hancock, and Martha Laboissière:

A persistent gap in academic achievement between children in the United States and their counterparts in other countries deprived the US economy of as much as $2.3 trillion in economic output in 2008, McKinsey research finds.1 Moreover, each of the long-standing achievement gaps among US students of differing ethnic origins, income levels, and school systems represents hundreds of billions of dollars in unrealized economic gains. Together, these disturbing gaps underscore the staggering economic and social cost of underutilized human potential. Yet they also create room for hope by suggesting that the widespread application of best practices could secure a better, more equitable education for the country’s children–along with substantial economic gains.
How has educational achievement changed in the United States since 1983, when the publication of the seminal US government report A Nation at Risk2 sounded the alarm about the “rising tide of mediocrity” in American schools? To learn the answer, we interviewed leading educational researchers around the world, assessed the landscape of academic research and educational-achievement data, and built an economic model that allowed us to examine the relationships among educational achievement (represented by standardized test scores), the earnings potential of workers, and GDP.
We made three noteworthy assumptions: test scores are the best available measure of educational achievement; educational achievement and attainment (including milestones such as graduation rates) are key drivers in hiring and are positively correlated with earnings; and labor markets will hire available workers with higher skills and education. While these assumptions admittedly simplify the socioeconomic complexities and uncertainties, they allowed us to draw meaningful conclusions about the economic impact of educational gaps in the United States.




The Cyber Way to Knowledge



James Glassman:

Every three years, the Program for International Student Assessment ranks the education levels of 15-year-olds around the world. The most recent test, in 2006, brought back results from 30 industrialized nations that were hardly inspiring for U.S. teachers and parents. American students’ science scores lagged behind those of their counterparts in 20 countries, including Finland, Japan, Germany and Belgium. The numbers from the math test were even worse: The U.S. came in 25th. The “rising tide of mediocrity” in American schools — famously so described in 1983 by a government report called “A Nation at Risk” — would now appear to be about chin-high.
In response to “A Nation at Risk,” Terry Moe and John Chubb in 1990 published “Politics, Markets and America’s Schools,” which identified special-interest groups — mainly teachers unions — as the culprits in preventing the reforms urged in the report. Now Messrs. Moe and Chubb have returned to the subject with “Liberating Learning,” a more optimistic sequel. The authors believe there exists a magic bullet that is capable of shattering the unions’ political power and, at last, bringing the sort of reform and excellence to U.S. K-12 education that might make U.S. students competitive with Finnish teenagers. The ammunition? Technology.




Two students, two schools — 20 miles and a world apart



Mitchell Landsberg:

Meet Kyle Gosselin and Henry Ramirez. Kyle attends La Cañada High; Henry was at South L.A.’s Jefferson High before moving to Texas. Their backgrounds may be worlds apart, but their dreams are similar.
Henry Ramirez, meet Kyle Gosselin.
We thought you should be introduced, at least virtually, because you have some things in common. You’re a couple of low-key, low-drama, low-maintenance 17-year-olds who have just navigated 11th grade at large public high schools. Both of you are planning to go to college. Both thinking about careers in medicine. Both willing to work hard (but not insanely hard). Both smart (but not gunning to be No. 1).
Yet how different two young lives can be.




In Setbacks, Finding Motivation



Ralph Blumenthal:

A cane-cutter’s son from Aguada, Puerto Rico, Antonio Pérez barely made it out of high school in Washington Heights in 1964. But he went on to earn a doctorate by age 27 and become a college dean by 29. Since 1995, Dr. Pérez, now 62, has been president of Borough of Manhattan Community College on Chambers Street, now the largest unit of the City University of New York, with 22,500 matriculated students plus 10,000 in continuing education.




British schools told to scrap ‘i before e’



UPI:

British elementary schools have been advised to scrap one of the most venerable rules in English spelling: “I before e except after c.”
The word was given this week in a National Strategies document, “Support for Spelling.” The 124-page document includes a lot of words of wisdom for teachers working with young children, like using puns to teach the distinction between pair and pear.
The document has harsh words for the “i before e” rule.
“The i before e rule is not worth teaching,” it said. “It applies only to words in which the ie or ei stands for a clear ee sound. Unless this is known, words such as sufficient and veil look like exceptions. There are so few words where the ei spelling for the ee sounds follows the letter c that it is easier to learn the specific words.”




Do Schools Need More PE Time?



Nancy Armour:

The gym at Eberhart Elementary School is bright and spacious — with high ceilings, several basketball hoops, even a large, colorful climbing wall.
But for much of the day, the gym doubles as a cafeteria where the school’s 1,800-plus students are offered breakfast and lunch.
There’s another gym on the fourth floor, but it’s so old it has basketball hoops attached to ladders. Time and space limitations mean each class gets physical education just once a week for 40 minutes.
In the fight against childhood obesity, getting kids moving is one of the most effective ways to combat the problem. But only Illinois and Massachusetts require P.E. classes for all kids in kindergarten through 12th grade. And, as Eberhart’s example shows, even those requirements sometimes are not enough.
“I understand the funding issue. I understand the space issue,” said Betty Hale, one of two P.E. teachers at Eberhart. But “our children are getting shortchanged.”




She finally has a home: Harvard



Esmeralda Bermudez:

Khadijah Williams stepped into chemistry class and instantly tuned out the commotion.
She walked past students laughing, gossiping, napping and combing one another’s hair. Past a cellphone blaring rap songs. And past a substitute teacher sitting in a near-daze.
Quietly, the 18-year-old settled into an empty table, flipped open her physics book and focused. Nothing mattered now except homework.
“No wonder you’re going to Harvard,” a girl teased her.
Around here, Khadijah is known as “Harvard girl,” the “smart girl” and the girl with the contagious smile who landed at Jefferson High School only 18 months ago.
What students don’t know is that she is also a homeless girl.




Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey



MIT Open Courseware:

What do one mathematician, one artist, and one musician all have in common? Are you interested in zen Buddhism, math, fractals, logic, paradoxes, infinities, art, language, computer science, physics, music, intelligence, consciousness and unified theories? Get ready to chase me down a rabbit hole into Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach. Lectures will be a place for crazy ideas to bounce around as we try to pace our way through this enlightening tome. You will be responsible for most of the reading as lectures will consist primarily of motivating the material and encouraging discussion. I advise everyone seriously interested to buy the book, grab on and get ready for a mind-expanding voyage into higher dimensions of recursive thinking.




So Many Dreams, So Many Diplomas



Michael Alison Chandler:

Fifteen-year-old Simon Lhuillier wants to become a pediatrician when he grows up and buy a big house near a lake. Nila Fasihi, 17, thinks she might one day open a hair salon in Afghanistan when the war is over.
To prepare for the future, Lhuillier is signing up for honors physics and Advanced Placement English classes at Fairfax High School next year and stockpiling credits for an advanced diploma. Fasihi will take anatomy and English 12 at Fairfax High and continue refining her haircutting and skin care skills in a career academy at Chantilly High. When she graduates next spring from Fairfax High, she will earn a standard diploma and a state license in cosmetology.
The District and many states, including Maryland, offer one main high school diploma. Additional diplomas are often available for special education students.




Educators Seek Ways to Prevent Learning Losses During Vacation



Valerie Strauss:

It’s called “the summer brain drain” because during those long, hot months away from school, kids supposedly forget a lot of what they had learned in class.
Research, however, tells a more nuanced story: Some learning is lost among some groups, and others gain.
Here’s what experts from Johns Hopkins University, the University of Tennessee, the University of Virginia and elsewhere say happens over the summer:
— Most students — regardless of family income or background — lose 2 to 2 1/2 months of the math computational skills that they learned during the school year.




Their Parents’ Keepers



Paula Span:

My father and I were waiting in the director’s office for our tour to begin. With a recent haircut, he looked almost dapper despite the two hearing aids.
I admired the way he’d put together a life since my mother died. He had good friends, played cards several nights a week, faithfully attended services at his synagogue, shopped and cooked for himself. With prescriptions to keep his cholesterol and blood sugar in line, he was relatively healthy.
Yet how long could we be this fortunate? He was 83 then. Sooner or later, my sister and I knew, he’d need more help.
Nobody wants to have to face such questions. Yet we want to do the best we can for the people who did the best they could for us. Maybe this assisted-living place was where Dad would want to be, when the time came.




2009 British Graduation Climate



BBC:

It is hard to imagine a more difficult time to be a school leaver entering the world of work.
The class of ’09 will be the first students in a generation to finish their studies in a recession.
With youth unemployment already at 16% and rising, what will their future be?
Greg James, 18, is revising hard. He is in the middle of his exams at the City of Stoke-on-Trent Sixth Form College. He is also working hard to find a job, with prospects. Greg has applied for up to ten positions so far, without any luck. His dream job is working with computers.
“That’s what I really want at the end of the day, to get a job so that all the hours of hard work pay off, rather than sitting around doing nothing,” he says.




“Revolutionize Curriculum”? – Madison School’s Proposed Strategic Plan



I supported use of the term “revolutionize curriculum” as part of the proposed Madison School District Strategic Plan. The words contained in the document can likely be used to support any number of initiatives.
The term “revolutionize” appealed to me because I believe the School District should get out of the curriculum creation business (generally, the “Teaching & Learning Department“).
I believe, in this day and age, we should strive to hire the best teachers (with content knowledge) available and let them do their jobs. One school district employee could certainly support an online knowledge network. Madison has no shortage of curricular assets, including the UW Math Department, History, Physics, Chemistry, Engineering, Sports and Languages. MATC, Edgewood College, UW-Milwaukee, UW-Whitewater and Northern Illinois are additional nearby resources.
Finally, there are many resources available online, such as MIT’s open courseware.
I support “revolutionizing” the curriculum by pursuing best practices from those who know the content.
Dictonary.com: “revolutionize“.
Britannica on revolution.




Student Debt, Fool’s Gold?



NYTimes:

In our discussion about the rising burden of student loans, we received numerous comments from readers who took on a lot of debt to pay for their education. Some found they simply couldn’t afford to repay the loans with the jobs they found after college. Others said their debts determined their life choices. Still others wondered if the college experience was worth the financial burden they’ll carry for decades afterward. Here are excerpts from their comments.




Tell the Truth About Colleges



Thomas Toch:

AMERICA’S PARENTS AND politicians obsess over getting kids to go to college. But the delivery of a decent education, once the kids are on campus, is at least as large a challenge. Only about half of all college entrants earn degrees within six years. And many who do aren’t learning much: one study indicates, for instance, that only 38 percent of graduating college students can successfully compare the viewpoints of two newspaper editorials.
The conventional wisdom is that you get what you pay for–that the larger the price tag, the better the product. But that’s not true in higher education. Tuition has been skyrocketing for years, with little evidence that education has improved. Universities typically favor research and publishing over teaching. And influential college rankings like the one published by U.S. News & World Report measure mostly wealth and status (alumni giving rates, school reputation, incoming students’ SAT scores); they reveal next to nothing about what students learn.
We need to shed more light on how well colleges are educating their students–to help prospective students make better decisions, and to exert pressure on the whole system to provide better value for money.
Reliable measures of the quality of undergraduate teaching already exist. The National Survey of Student Engagement gathers data on factors proven to correlate with learning–things like the number of books and lengthy papers assigned in courses. (The organization reports little relationship between having a prominent brand name and teaching students well.) The Collegiate Learning Assessment tests students’ critical thinking and measures progress over a college career.




FDA Says Kids Shouldn’t Stop Taking ADHD Medications



Jared Favole:

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday said children shouldn’t stop taking drugs that treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, despite a study showing the stimulants may be associated with sudden death.
A study released in the American Journal of Psychiatry found an association between the stimulants, which include drugs such as Ritalin, and sudden death in children who take the medicines.
The FDA, which partly funded the study, said there isn’t enough evidence to conclude the drugs are dangerous and recommends people continue taking their medications. The study compared 564 healthy children who died suddenly to 564 who died in a motor vehicle accident. The study found that two patients in the motor vehicle group were taking stimulants, while 10 in the group of those who died suddenly were taking the medicines. The children died between 1985 and 1996, before certain stimulants, such as Adderall, became more commonly used.
“Given the limitations of this study’s methodology, the FDA is unable to conclude that these data affect the overall risk and benefit profile of stimulant medications used to treat ADHD in children,” FDA said.




Study links breastfeeding to high grades, college entry



Reuters:

Breastfed babies seem more likely to do well at high school and to go on to attend college than infants raised on a bottle, according to a new U.S. study.
Professors Joseph Sabia from the American University and Daniel Rees from the University of Colorado Denver based their research on 126 children from 59 families, comparing siblings who were breastfed as infants to others who were not.
By comparing siblings, the study was able to account for the influence of a variety of difficult-to-measure factors such as maternal intelligence and the quality of the home environment.
The study, published in the Journal of Human Capital, found that an additional month of breastfeeding was associated with an increase in high school grade point averages of 0.019 points and an increase in the probability of college attendance of 0.014.
“The results of our study suggest that the cognitive and health benefits of breastfeeding may lead to important long-run educational benefits for children,” Sabia, a professor of public policy who focuses on health economics, said in a statement.




The Madison School District’s Strategic Plan, By the Numbers



Via a kind reader’s email:

Culturally Relevant/Cultural Relevance 40
Standards 24
Content 21
Measure (including measurement) 28
DPI 2
TAG 17
Special Education 8
ELL 2 (it comes up 45 times, but the other 43 were things like ZELLmer)
inclusion 0
differentiation 0
science 2
mathematics 0
literacy 4
reading 7 (of these, three were in the appendix with the existing ‘plan’)
African American 7
Hmong 1 (and not in any of the action plans)
Latino or Latina 0
Hispanic 0
Spanish speaking or Spanish speakers 0
Anyone see a problem here?????

The free Adobe Reader includes a text search field. Simply open the proposed document (773K PDF) and start searching.
The Proposed Strategic Plan, along with some comments, can be viewed here.
Interested readers might have a look at this Fall, 2005 Forum on Poverty organized by Rafael Gomez (audio/video). Former Madison School Board member Ray Allen participated. Ray mentioned that his daughter was repeatedly offered free breakfasts, even though she was fed at home prior to being dropped off at school. The event is worth checking out.
I had an opportunity to have lunch with Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad last summer. Prior to that meeting, I asked a number of teachers and principals what I should pass along. One of the comments I received is particularly relevant to Madison’s proposed Strategic Plan:

  1. Curriculum: greater rigor
  2. Discipline: a higher bar, much higher bar, consistent expectations district wide, a willingness to wrestle with the negative impact of poverty on the habits of mind of our students and favor pragmatic over ideological solutions
  3. Teacher inservice: at present these are insultingly infantile
  4. Leadership: attract smart principals that are more entrepreneurial and less bureaucratic, mindful of the superintendent’s “inner circle” and their closeness to or distance from the front lines (the classrooms)

I know these are general, but they are each so glaringly needy of our attention and problem solving efforts.

Notes and links on Madison’s Strategic Planning Process.




Rigid Athletic Tracking



The New York Times reports that the Stamford, Connecticut public schools may finally achieve the goal of eliminating academic tracking, putting students of mixed academic ability in the same classes at last. The Times reports that “this 15,000-student district just outside New York City…is among the last bastions of rigid educational tracking more than a decade after most school districts abandoned the practice.”
If that newspaper thinks Stamford has taken too long to get rid of academic tracks for K-12 students, how would they report on the complete dominance of athletic tracking in schools all over the country? Not only does such athletic tracking take place in all our schools, but there is, at present, no real movement to eliminate it, unbelievable as that may seem.
Athletes in our school sports programs are routinely tracked into groups of students with similar ability, presumably to make their success in various sports matches, games, and contests more likely. But so far no attention is paid to the damage to the self-esteem of those student athletes whose lack of ability and coordination doom them to the lower athletic tracks, and even, in many cases, may deprive them of membership on school teams altogether.
It is also an open secret that many of our school athletic teams ignore diversity entirely, and make no effort to be sure that, for example, Asians and Caucasians are included, in proportion to their numbers in the general population, in football, basketball, and track teams. Athletic ability and success are allowed to overwhelm other important measures, and this must be taken into account in any serious Athletic Untracking effort.
In Stamford, some parents are opposed to the elimination of academic tracking, and have threatened to enroll their children in private schools. This problem would no doubt also arise in any serious Athletic Untracking program which could be introduced. Parents who spend money on private coaches for their children would not stand by and see the playing time of their young athletes cut back or even lost by any program to make all school sports teams composed of mixed-ability athletes.
The New York Times reports that “Deborah Kasak, executive director of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform, said research is showing that all students benefit from mixed-ability classes.”
Perhaps it will be argued that all athletes benefit from mixed-ability teams as well, but many would predict not only plenty of losing seasons for any schools which eliminate Athletic Tracking programs, but also very poor scholarship prospects for the best athletes who are involved in them. Just as students who are capable of excellent academic work are often sacrificed to the dream of an academic (Woebegone) world in which all are equal, so student athletes will find their skills and performance severely degraded by any Athletic Untracking program.
Nevertheless, when educators are more committed to diversity and equality of outcomes in classrooms than they are in academic achievement, they have eliminated academic tracking and set up mixed-ability classrooms.
Surely athletic directors and coaches can be made to see the supreme importance of some new diversity and equity initiatives as well, and persuaded, at the risk of losing their jobs, to develop and provide non-tracked athletic programs for our mixed-ability student athletes. After all, winning games may be fun, but, in the long run, people can be led to realize that being politically correct is much more worthwhile than real achievement in any endeavor in our public schools. As the Dean of a major School of Education recently informed me: “The myth of individual greatness is a myth.” [sic] The time for the elimination of Athletic Tracking has now arrived!
15 June 2009
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review




For Rio Vista grads, the future looks grim



Carolyn Jones:

For the Rio Vista High School class of 2009, there’s not much pomp but plenty of circumstance.
Like most seniors, the 82 graduating in Rio Vista last week face the most desolate economic landscape in generations, with few jobs and rapidly evaporating college aid. Many of their parents are out of work, and no one’s quite sure which way the out-of-control economy will flip next.
“I’m scared. Very, very scared,” said Chantell Bodle, 18, whose father’s job as a natural gas rig swabber has slowed to a crawl, forcing Chantell to opt for the cheapest possible route to her goal of becoming a nurse: live at home, work part time and commute 60 miles round trip to Delta College in Stockton.
“My parents said they’re having a hard time with the bills right now,” Chantell said last week as she spray-painted on a Rio Vista street as part of a senior art project. “It’s going to be hard out there. There’s not a lot of jobs.”




China’s College Entry Test Is an Obsession



Sharon LaFraniere:

For the past year, Liu Qichao has focused on one thing, and only one thing: the gao kao, or the high test.
Some prepare for the test at a strict Tianjin boarding school.
Fourteen to 16 hours a day, he studied for the college entrance examination, which this year will determine the fate of more than 10 million Chinese students. He took one day off every three weeks.
He was still carrying his textbook from room to room last Sunday morning before leaving for the exam site, still reviewing materials during the lunch break, still hard at work Sunday night, preparing for Part 2 of the exam that Monday.
“I want to study until the last minute,” he said. “I really hope to be successful.”
China may be changing at head-twirling speed, but the ritual of the gao kao (pronounced gow kow) remains as immutable as chopsticks. One Chinese saying compares the exam to a stampede of “a thousand soldiers and 10 horses across a single log bridge.”




Community members learn safer ways to get to school



Kathy Chang:

bright lime-green T-shirts, groups of parents, students and teachers of the 16 elementary schools in Woodbridge Township and residents in the surrounding areas volunteered their time over the weekend to be part of making the routes to their individual schools safer.
Top and above: Teacher Beth Heagen, from Woodbine Avenue Elementary School No. 23 in Avenel, leads Bhavika Shah and her children Hetri, 8, a third-grader, and Ishika, 6, a firstgrader, as they travel through the streets that they and other students walk each day to get to school, looking for unsafe conditions as well as positive ones.
Dr. Wansoo Im, president of Vertices LLC, a GIS consulting firm, and a professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, led the group of a dozen or so people at Woodbine Avenue Elementary School No. 23 in Avenel to kick off the Discovering Safe Routes to School event, which was a walkability assessment, on May 30.
Each person was given a pedometer and took a map of the route, a survey and a digital camera to take photographs of what each one felt needed improvement, such as implementation of sidewalks, dangerous street crossings and overgrown shrubbery, and also what the participants felt worked well in the area.
“This event is an outgrowth of the walk we took with former Olympic racewalker [Mark Fenton] last year,” said Mayor John E. McCormac. “Our job as public officials is to keep the kids safe. What is safe to us might not be what is safe to an 8-year-old kid. The kids walk these routes every day.”




Teen sacrifices fun for hard work, education



Carolyn Jones:

While her classmates were signing yearbooks and preening for the prom, Vicheka Chres was experiencing a different kind of senioritis as she approached Friday’s graduation.
As she had since she started high school, Vicheka, 17, was studying six hours a night. After school and on weekends, she was making apple turnovers in her uncle’s bakery – for no pay. At home, she was translating for her mother, whose English is poor and who has a sixth-grade education.
“Fun? I don’t really have fun,” Vicheka said recently while taking a break from swabbing tables at Rio Vista Bakery, where her mother also works. “I know American kids go see movies, concerts. Go shopping. But that’s not what I do.”
Vicheka has reason to be motivated. She knows that if her family had stayed in their native Cambodia, which they left in 2003, she wouldn’t have had the luxury of studying trigonometry and literature six hours a night. She’d be working in a factory, sewing clothes 12 hours a day for $50 a month.
Instead, she’s bound for UC Davis. She plans to study biochemistry so she can eventually be a pharmacist and support her family, those in Rio Vista as well as in Phnom Penh.




Global Academy Presentation to the Dane County Public Affairs Council Audio / Video




Watch the May 27, 2009 video here, or listen via this mp3 audio file.
Bill Reis: Coordinator, Global Academy [Former Superintendent, Middleton-Cross Plains School District]
Dean Gorrell: Superintendent, Verona Area Schools
To a significant degree talented and gifted students in our schools are under-served. These students are often left to do it on their own, particularly if that talent is in only one or two areas.  Finally, there is something being done about that.  Not only is the Global Academy going to be a reality, but surprise beyond belief, eight area school districts, including Madison, are actually cooperating and going to be part of the Global Academy.  The presentation and discussion will focus on

What is the rationale and data to support this educational experience?
What school districts are involved and how will it be financed?
What students will be served by the Academy? How will students be selected?
What will be the curriculum and methodology for instruction?
Will these students be prepared for post high school education and work?
Will there be partnerships with MATC, other colleges and universities, community persons and organizations?
How will the students relate with their home schools?

Thanks to Jeff Henriques for recording this event.




Teenage readers are gravitating toward even grimmer fiction; suicide notes and death matches



Katie Roiphe:

Until recently, the young-adult fiction section at your local bookstore was a sea of nubile midriffs set against pink and turquoise backgrounds. Today’s landscape features haunted girls staring out from dark or washed-out covers. Current young-adult best sellers include one suicide, one deadly car wreck, one life-threatening case of anorexia and one dystopian universe in which children fight to the death. Somewhere along the line our teenagers have become connoisseurs of disaster.
Jay Asher’s “Thirteen Reasons Why,” which is narrated by a dead girl, came out in March 2007 and remains on the bestseller list in hardcover. The book is the account of a fragile freshman named Hannah Baker who kills herself by overdosing on pills and sends audiotapes to the 13 people she holds responsible for making her miserable in the last year of her life. There may be parents who are alarmed that their 12-year-olds are reading about suicide, or librarians who want to keep the book off the shelves, but the story is clearly connecting with its audience–the book has sold over 200,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan.
For those young readers who find death by pill overdose inadequately gruesome, there’s Gayle Forman’s “If I Stay,” which takes as its subject a disfiguring car wreck. The book has sold a robust 17,000 copies in its first two months on sale, and was optioned by Catherine Hardwicke, the director of the film “Twilight.” The story follows an appealing cellist named Mia who goes on a drive to a bookstore with her unusually sympathetic ex-punk-rocker parents. When a truck barrels into their Buick, Mia hovers ghost-like over the scene. She sees her family’s bodies crushed, then watches on as her own mangled body is bagged and rushed to the hospital. Lingering somewhere between this world and the next, Mia must decide whether to join her parents in the afterlife or go it alone in the real world. The brilliance of the book is the simplicity with which it captures the fundamental dilemma of adolescence: How does one separate from one’s parents and forge an independent identity?




Marketplace’ will help rein in college costs: Duncan



Lynn Sweet:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the former Chicago Public Schools chief and basketball buddy of President Obama, says the “marketplace” will work to keep university costs down.
And he seems intrigued with the notion of developing “no-frills” campus options for financially strapped students.
Duncan has moved his family from Hyde Park in Chicago to the northern Virginia suburbs, where his kids go to a public school. I caught up with Duncan at a breakfast with reporters last week.
He has been on his own “listening tour” of the nation to figure out what needs to be changed in the No Child Left Behind law. He said he has no timetable for asking Congress to rewrite the controversial Bush-era program.
The economic stimulus measure has given Duncan $10 billion in discretionary spending. By comparison, President George W. Bush’s first education secretary, Rod Paige, had only $17 million in the cash drawer to pass around.
Duncan said he wants to use some of the federal money as an incentive to “change behavior” when it comes to college expenses.




College in Need Closes a Door to Needy Students



Jonathan Glater:

The admissions team at Reed College, known for its free-spirited students, learned in March that the prospective freshman class it had so carefully composed after weeks of reviewing essays, scores and recommendations was unworkable.
Money was the problem. Too many of the students needed financial aid, and the college did not have enough. So the director of financial aid gave the team another task: drop more than 100 needy students before sending out acceptances, and substitute those who could pay full freight.
The whole idea of excluding a student simply because of money clashed with the college’s ideals, Leslie Limper, the aid director, acknowledged. “None of us are very happy,” she said, adding that Reed did not strike anyone from its list last year and that never before had it needed to weed out so many worthy students. “Sometimes I wonder why I’m still doing this.”




The Genius Index: One Scientist’s Crusade to Rewrite Reputation Rules



Guy Gugliotta:

Jorge Hirsch had been getting screwed. For years. At a scientific conference in 1989, he presented a paper arguing that the generally accepted theory of low-temperature superconductors–the BCS theory–was wrong. Most researchers at the time held that under certain low-temperature conditions, vibrations in a metal’s crystal lattice can allow electrons to become attracted to one another, which drops electrical resistance to zero–a superconducting state. Hirsch said this “electron-phonon interaction” in fact had nothing to do with superconductivity. He was a youngish up-and-comer then, but physics rarely forgives apostasy. After his fateful presentation, similar conferences stopped inviting him to speak. Colleagues no longer sought him out for collaboration. Grants dried up. High-visibility journals shunned his papers.
It’s not that Hirsch wasn’t getting his work published. He was. And other physicists were still citing his research, implying some acceptance of his views. Hirsch just wasn’t able to get his papers into the really high-visibility journals–places like Science, Nature, and, for a solid-state physicist, Physical Review Letters. There’s a clear pecking order, established and reinforced by several independent rating systems. Chief among them: the Journal Impact Factor.




So much hinges on that high school education



Bill Foy:

Volunteering as a GED program tutor continues to be one of my most gratifying experiences, but it also has been sobering to realize how many in our community lack basic – high school – education. (GED is the acronym for general equivalency degree, a recognized substitute for a high school diploma.)
Students in GED programs range in age from the mid-20s to the late 40s; many are minorities. They say they’ve recommitted themselves to furthering their education in order to enhance job skills, to help their children succeed with their education or simply, but profoundly, to regain some self-esteem. GED programs are a lifeline to those who have the courage to “go back” later in life to achieve these goals, but the programs currently serve just a fraction of those who lack a high school education.
You get a sense of the magnitude of the problem by reading a 2008 publication of the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center called “Cities in Crisis.” The study, which was funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, looks at the 50 largest cities in the United States (Milwaukee is No. 25) and the number of kids enrolled in high school in the “focal” district of each city (in our case Milwaukee Public Schools). In the year studied – 2006 – MPS’s high school population (grades nine through 12) was estimated to be 25,000.




Physical Stress and Academic Performance



Sara Goldrick-Rab:

I’ve been preoccupied by sleep lately. Not sleeping — though as I approach the end of my first trimester I sure could use some — but sleep itself. What it means to sleep a little or a lot, how it affects your daily interactions with others, etc. This is something I know a tiny bit about, having spent a solid year sleep-deprived after the birth of my first child, but not something I’ve devoted my academic time to.
Until now. I just spent two full days at the Cells to Society (C2S) Summer Biomarker Institute. C2S is also known as the Center on Social Disparities and Health at Northwestern University. It’s directed by developmental psychologist Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, and has additional star power in folks like Thom McDade, Emma Adam, and Chris Kuzawa. These are social science researchers who have mastered the hard sciences as well, and are using medical tools to get at how social practices and environments “get under the skin.”
What does that mean? Well, to explain I’ll tell you why I’m thinking about sleep. It all begins with an attempt to understand the reasons why so many low-income kids drop out of college. A big problem, to be sure — and one that we still don’t know enough about. I’m thinking that has to do with the limited number of ways in which we’ve approached the problem. It’s primarily treated as an educational issue, one we tackle with a combination of college practices and individual-level incentives like money.




Report From China: “Novels are not taught in class, and teachers encourage outside reading of histories rather than fiction.”



Annie Osborn in the Boston Globe:

Teen’s lessons from China. I am a product of an American private elementary school and public high school, and I am accustomed to classrooms so boisterous that it can be considered an accomplishment for a teacher to make it through a 45-minute class period without handing out a misdemeanor mark. It’s no wonder that the atmosphere at Yanqing No. 1 Middle School (“middle school” is the translation of the Chinese term for high school), for students in grades 10-12, seems stifling to me. Discipline problems are virtually nonexistent, and punishments like lowered test scores are better deterrents for rule breaking than detentions you can sleep through.
But what does surprise me is that, despite the barely controlled chaos that simmers just below the surface during my classes at Boston Latin School, I feel as though I have learned much, much more under the tutelage of Latin’s teachers than I ever could at a place like Yanqing Middle School, which is located in a suburb of Beijing called Yanqing.
Students spend their days memorizing and doing individual, silent written drills or oral drills in total unison. Their entire education is geared toward memorizing every single bit of information that could possibly materialize on, first, their high school entrance exams, and next, their college entrance exams. This makes sense, because admission to public high schools and universities in China is based entirely on test scores (although very occasionally a rich family can buy an admission spot for their child), and competition in the world’s most populous country to go to the top schools makes the American East Coast’s Harvard-or-die mentality look puny.
Chinese students, especially those in large cities or prosperous suburbs and counties and even some in impoverished rural areas, have a more rigorous curriculum than any American student, whether at Charlestown High, Boston Latin, or Exeter. These students work under pressure greater than the vast majority of US students could imagine.

(more…)




Learn from three success stories



Rising above IQ
Nicholas Kristoff
In the mosaic of America, three groups that have been unusually successful are Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks — and in that there may be some lessons for the rest of us. Asian-Americans are renowned — or notorious — for ruining grade curves in schools across the land, and as a result they constitute about 20 percent of students at Harvard College. As for Jews, they have received about one-third of all Nobel Prizes in science received by Americans. One survey found that a quarter of Jewish adults in the United States have earned a graduate degree, compared with 6 percent of the population as a whole. West Indian blacks, those like Colin Powell whose roots are in the Caribbean, are one-third more likely to graduate from college than African-Americans as a whole, and their median household income is almost one-third higher.
These three groups may help debunk the myth of success as a simple product of intrinsic intellect, for they represent three different races and histories. In the debate over nature and nurture, they suggest the importance of improved nurture — which, from a public policy perspective, means a focus on education. Their success may also offer some lessons for you, me, our children — and for the broader effort to chip away at poverty in this country.




On California’s Hard Copy Textbook Purchase Ban



Rupert Neate:

“Textbooks are outdated, in my opinion,” said the film-star-turned-politician. “For so many years, we’ve been trying to teach exactly the same way. Our children get their information from the internet, downloaded on to their iPods, and in Twitter feeds to their phones. Basically, kids feel as comfortable with their electronic devices as I was with my pencils and crayons
“So why are California’s school students still forced to lug around antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks?”
State officials said textbooks typically cost between $75 (£46) and $100, far more than their digital equivalents.
A spokesman for Pearson said it has been planning for the switch from printed text to digital for a decade, but conceded that the company will collect less money per unit from digital sales. The company added the move would allow it to save money on printing and distribution costs.

I have been a slow, but generally pleased user of electronic books (stanza, kindle and open source) on my iphone. It is time to transition and save money….
Matthew Garrahan & Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson have more:

“But our students still learn from instructional materials in formats made possible by Gutenberg’s printing press. It’s nonsensical – and expensive – to look to traditional hard-bound books when information is so readily available in electronic form.”
However, with California facing a record $24bn budget deficit the state could struggle with high start-up costs – particularly as Mr Schwarzenegger has pledged to make digital text books available to each of the state’s 2m students.
“The main practicality is that until students have full and equal access to computers, this would be very difficult to phase in,” wrote Citigroup analysts in a research note.
The state is one of the biggest purchasers of school textbooks in the world so the transition to digital learning could have big implications for publishers, such as Pearson, owner of the Financial Times.




The Examined Working Life



Lauren Mechling:

The Swiss essayist Alain de Botton has cultivated a following by unpacking the psychological and philosophical underpinnings of our everyday lives.
His 1997 breakout book “How Proust Can Change Your Life” imparted practical lessons to be found in Marcel Proust’s classic “In Search of Lost Time.”
He has also written books and hosted television programs on travel, love, and architecture. In his latest book, “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work,” he examines of the activity we spend most of our waking hours doing: our jobs.
To research this project, Mr. de Botton, who lives in London, shadowed members of various professions including an accountant, a rocket scientist, a cookie manufacturer, and an inventor. He answered our questions by email.




Falling flat-screen TVs a growing threat for kids



Alex Johnson:

Samara Brinkley dozed off just for a moment as she was watching cartoons on TV with her 4-year-old daughter.
Then “I heard the boom, and I woke up and I [saw] my child laying on the floor, and I [saw] a pool of blood coming out in the back of her head,” said Brinkley, 26, of Jacksonville, Fla.
Dymounique Wilson, one of Brinkley’s two daughters, died last Wednesday when the family’s 27-inch television fell over on her.
Nearly 17,000 children were rushed to emergency rooms in 2007, the last year for which complete figures were available, after heavy or unstable furniture fell over on them, a new study reported this month. The study, published in the journal Clinical Pediatrics by researchers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, found that the such injuries had risen 41 percent since 1990.