Parenting – Page 30 – School Information System

Adding Personality to the College Admissions Mix

For years, colleges have asked applicants for their grade-point averages and standardized test scores.
Now, schools like Boston College, DePaul University and Tufts University also want to measure prospective students’ personalities.
Using recently developed evaluation systems, these schools and others are aiming to quantify so-called noncognitive traits such as leadership, resilience and creativity. Colleges say such assessments are boosting the admissions chances for some students who might not have qualified based solely on grades and traditional test scores. The noncognitive assessments also are being used to screen out students believed to be at a higher risk of dropping out, and to identify newly admitted students who might need extra tutoring.
Big nonprofits that administer standardized admissions tests, including the College Board, the Educational Testing Service and ACT Inc., are also getting in on the trend. ETS, for instance, which administers the Graduate Record Examination, or GRE, recently unveiled a “personal potential index” designed for schools that want to replace traditional letters of recommendation for prospective grad students with a standardized rating.
“There is quite a bit of demand for these [noncognitive] instruments,” says David Hawkins, director of public policy for the National Association of College Admissions Counseling. Educators say the use of such assessments is likely to grow as some schools search for new tools to recruit more minority and low-income students. At the same time, budget pressures are forcing public institutions in states like California and Florida to find new tools for selecting incoming students.

A Partial Look (School Climate) at the Outbound Madison School District Parent Survey

Samara Kalk Derby:

Madison school district parents dissatisfied with local schools got a boost after a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision which trumped state law and made it easier for students living in the district to attend schools in other districts, a practice known as open enrollment.
The case was brought by Seattle parents who challenged the use of race in assigning students to schools, arguing it violated the Constitution’s right of equal protection. The ruling was celebrated by those who favor color-blind policies, but criticized by civil rights groups as a further erosion of Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 case that outlawed school segregation.
Last year it became easier in Madison, and in school districts across the country, for white students to transfer even if it meant increasing the district’s racial imbalance.
After a flood of local students left the district last year, Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad decided to investigate why.
“We had an interest in knowing ideas from people that had made the decision for open enrollment,” Nerad says. “We are attempting to learn from those experiences to see if there are some things as a school district that we can constructively do to address those concerns.”
To that end, the district surveyed households of district residents who left Madison schools and transferred to another district for the 2008-09 school year to find out why the families left. The majority of parents who took their kids out of the Madison school district last year under open enrollment said they did so for what the district classifies as “environmental reasons”: violence, gangs, drugs and negative peer pressure. Other reasons were all over the map. Many cited crowded classrooms and curriculum that wasn’t challenging enough.
Only a few responses pointed directly to white flight.

The Private/Parochial, Open Enrollment Leave, Open Enrollment Enter, Home Based Parent Survey, including School Board discussion, can be found here. David Blask comments.

Harvard, Ivy Leagues Bust Tuition Cost Bubble:

John Wasik:

A high-priced college may not be worth the price of admission.
As the economy forces more students out of the classroom and graduates into under- or unemployment, a college enrollment bubble may be starting to deflate.
The recession, combined with rising college costs, has accelerated a college affordability crunch that is exacerbated by shrinking family incomes, diminished home equity and reduced household wealth.
As many as one-third of all private colleges surveyed by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (Complete Report) said they expected enrollment to drop in the next academic year.
Almost 40 percent of those colleges said some of their students dropped out due to personal economic reasons and a quarter said full-time attendees switched to part time. Half said families had to cut back their expected contributions as the value of college savings plans dropped 21 percent last year.
The job market is so awful that I have encountered several graduates this summer who weren’t able to line up full-time employment, even though they had sound academic records. Some are even “taking the year off” or doing internships.

Education Secretary Criticizes Steep Rise in College Costs

Jack Kadden:

In an interview to be broadcast on the Tavis Smiley program on PBS, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan predicts that as tuition continues to rise, students will increasingly turn to schools that are “smarter and more creative” about lowering the cost of a college education.

But let me tell you Tavis, what I think is going to happen is parents of students are really smart, and those schools where tuition is going up exponentially high, folks have a lot of options out there. You’ve seen some other universities be smarter and more creative and go to three-year programs, and go to no-frills programs, I think you are going to see them capture a larger share of the marketplace. Again, parents of students are going to vote with their feet and when costs are skyrocketing, we think those colleges are going to pay a price for it.

Mr. Duncan also describes the Obama administration’s efforts to make a college education more accessible, including more money for Pell grants, Perkins loans and tuition tax credits.

Stars Aligning on School Lunches

Kim Severson:

ANN COOPER has made a career out of hammering on the poor quality of public school food. The School Nutrition Association, with 55,000 members, represents the people who prepare it.
A meal from the cafeteria at P.S. 89 in Manhattan does not contain processed food.
Imagine Ms. Cooper’s surprise when she was invited to the association’s upcoming conference to discuss the Lunch Box, a system she developed to help school districts wean themselves from packaged, heavily processed food and begin cooking mostly local food from scratch.
“All of a sudden I am not the fringe idiot trying to get everyone to serve peas and carrots that don’t come out of a can, like that’s the most radical idea they have ever heard of,” she said.
The invitation is a small sign of larger changes happening in public school cafeterias. For the first time since a new wave of school food reform efforts began a decade ago, once-warring camps are sharing strategies to improve what kids eat. The Department of Agriculture is welcoming ideas from community groups and more money than ever is about to flow into school cafeterias, from Washington and from private providers.
“The window’s open,” said Kathleen Merrigan, the deputy secretary of agriculture. “We are in the zone when a whole lot of exciting ideas are being put on the table. I have been working in the field of sustainable agriculture and nutrition all my professional life, and I really have never seen such opportunity before.”

A Last-Minute Dash for Tuition

Melissa Korn:

Weeks or even days before classes start, hundreds of thousands of college students nationwide still don’t know whether they’ll be able to cover their tuition bills this year.
In Michigan, the state legislature continues to battle over the Michigan Promise Grant, a merit award of up to $4,000 given to 96,700 students. The State Senate recently passed a bill to cut it entirely and eliminate another $56 million in need-based aid for this school year.
In Illinois, the need-based Monetary Award Program was halved last month, leaving about 145,000 students without a spring-semester payout. The full award used to total nearly $5,000.
In Utah, the state cut the tuition subsidy to 40% from 75% in its New Century Scholarship, a merit program in which students earn their associates degrees while in high school.
And in Pennsylvania, a state budget impasse is leaving 172,000 students unsure what funding they will get from the state Higher Education Assistance Agency. The maximum award is slated to be $4,700 for students who attend in-state schools.

Connecting Anxious Parents and Educators, at $450 an Hour

Susan Dominus:

If you’re going to do something, do it right.
Such has been the longstanding philosophy of Suzanne Rheault, a 39-year-old mother of two who now lives with her family downtown. A Type-A — make that A-plus — overachiever, even by New York standards, she skated competitively as a kid, finished M.I.T. in three and a half years, and tested out of a chunk of her courseload at Columbia Business School. She conquered the marathon.
She logged long hours and worked on holidays for Morgan Stanley, once flying, with pneumonia and against doctor’s orders, across the country for a technology conference (she paid with a burst eardrum). After marrying and having children, she kept up a grueling schedule, typically traveling two weeks a month.
The key to her success in picking stocks, she always felt, was extensive research. Then came the personal challenge that defied all research, her own Moby Dick: getting her daughter into private school. No Excel spreadsheet would unlock the formula that would guarantee results; all her expertise in statistics and economics failed her.

Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom

Steve Lohr:

A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education, has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”
The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.
Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.

The Adolescent Politics of Virtual Education

Tom Vander Ark:

In 1995, I was sure that the explosion of the web would result in a good deal of online learning competition — and fast. I may have been right about the first but not the second. It took a dozen years for online learning to get big and competitive, but it is finally a force to be reckoned with. Next month there will be close to two million students learning online at home and at school.
Back then I was superintendent in Federal Way Washington, between Seattle and Tacoma. We were a founding district in Microsoft’s Anytime Anywhere Learning initiative and began rolling out laptop programs to all of our secondary schools. The brave new world of education blending the best of online and onsite learning seemed right around the corner.
In September 1996, we opened the Internet Academy, the nation’s first K-12 virtual school. It was a bootstrapped operation; a group of intrepid teachers staying a day ahead of the kids and testing the application of the state’s seat time requirements.
Enrollment quickly grew to over 1,000 students with about half new to public education (i.e., home and private school students) with an even split between students seeking acceleration and those seeking credit recovery. For most of a decade, Internet Academy had Washington’s virtual space to itself.

Special-Education Stigmatization
School vouchers may be the best way to curb abuse of public funds.

Marcus Winters & Jay Greene:

Federal law first insisted in 1975 that public schools educate disabled students. Since then, the portion of students receiving special education services has increased 64%. Today, 13.5% of all public school students have been diagnosed with a disability. Special education, it turns out, is no longer particularly special at all.
Taxpayers pay a substantial price for the growth in special education. In New York state, for instance, in 2007, the average special education student cost $14,413 more to educate than a regular-enrollment student.
What has produced such rapid growth in the percentage of American students identified as disabled? Don’t worry–it’s not “something in the water.”
Better means of identification explain part of special education’s expansion. However, a growing body of research points to a less benign cause: Schools see a financial incentive to designate low-achieving students as disabled, while they may not actually be disabled at all.

Age-Old Problem, Perpetually Absent Solution: Fitting Special Education to Students’ Needs

Jay Matthews:

Miguel Landeros is a lanky, well-spoken 12-year-old about to begin seventh grade in Stafford County. He is severely learning disabled, with reading, writing and math skill levels at least two years below his peers, and needs special teaching, according to a licensed clinical psychologist at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore and other specialists.
Last February, Stafford officials refused to accept that evaluation and left him in regular classes. He performed poorly, failing all core subjects. Recently, they promised to give him more specialized services, but not the ones the experts who examined him say he needs.
I admit that education writers in general, and I in particular, write very little about learning disabilities and the many failures of federally mandated public school programs to help students who have them. I often say the cases are so complicated I have difficulty translating them into everyday language, and even then readers struggle to understand.

A Hand Up for Students Facing a Mountain of Debt

Ron Lieber:

The biggest problem for consumers of American higher education is that many of them must take on a mountain of debt to get the degree they want. That intimidating quandary has inspired some unique, though often unsuccessful, attempts to make student loans more affordable over the years.
One of the most innovative sprang from a handful of trailblazers, including an economist who later won a Nobel and some entrepreneurs barely out of school themselves, who tried to persuade undergraduates to sell a portion of their future income to investors in exchange for money for college. Critics fretted about “indentured servitude,” and the idea never amounted to much.
Others have tried to let strangers finance students’ fixed-rate loans via Web sites. The idea of “peer to peer” lending hasn’t gained much traction either so far.

More on the Madison School District’s Proposed Talented & Gifted Plan

Gayle Worland:

The new program would help meet the needs of students through better identification and enrichment.
Lorie Raihala had planned for her kids to attend public school — but over the years, the lack of programming for talented and gifted students proved too frustrating.
“We tried very hard for six years to make it work for them, and we’re very supportive of the public school system, so we really wanted it to work,” Raihala said. But it affected their emotional well-being, that their needs weren’t being met in the classroom.”
So Raihala’s children moved to a private school. And Raihala joined a group of parents pushing for a commitment by the Madison School District to improve programming for its talented and gifted, or TAG, students.
That group will score a victory Monday night when a plan drafted by the district that would overhaul how TAG students are identified and supported through their school careers comes before the Madison School Board. The three-year plan would replace current TAG policy, which has been out of compliance with state statutes since 1990.

Madison School District Talented & Gifted Plan notes & links.
MP3 audio: School Board discussion of the plan.
Madison United for Academic Excellence links and notes (well worth reading).

Bullies: They can be stopped, but it takes a village.

Alan Kazdin & Carlo Rotella:

Let’s say you find out that your child is being bullied by a schoolmate. Naturally, you want to do something right now to make it stop. Depending on your temperament and experience, one or more of four widely attempted common-sense solutions will occur to you: telling your child to stand up to the bully, telling your child to try to ignore and avoid the bully, taking matters into your own hands by calling the bully’s parents or confronting the bully yourself, or asking your child’s teacher to put a stop to it.
These responses share three features:
1) They all express genuine caring, concern, and good intentions.
2) You will feel better for taking action.
3) They are likely to be ineffective.

Hong Kong School drug tests will go ahead, Henry Tang says

Martin Wong:

The voluntary school drug test would go ahead in Tai Po as scheduled at the end of the year despite reservations about it in various sectors, the chief secretary said yesterday.
Speaking after attending an anti-drug seminar for secondary teachers in Kowloon, Henry Tang Ying-yen said he had heard the community’s different opinions about the plan.
“Our current goal is still to have [the pilot project] launched at the end of the year,” he said. “We still have plenty of time … when we can discuss details of the programme and how to improve it.”
His comment came a day after the Professional Teachers’ Union said schools should have more flexibility over when and how to conduct the drug-testing programme.
Three youth groups – the Youth Union, the Hong Kong Christian Institute and Ytalk! – have accused the government of not planning the scheme properly and urged students in Tai Po to boycott it. Social workers and the Catholic Church have also raised concerns about the programme, saying more resources should be deployed for it.
Mr Tang said: “We are serious about the scheme and will allocate an appropriate level of resources so it can be carried out successfully.”
Deputy Education Secretary Betty Ip Tsang Chui-hing told yesterday’s seminar she believed many students and parents supported the test.

American High Education is Sliding Lower & Lower

Steve Salerno:

You may have heard about Trina Thompson. Unable to find work, she’s suing her alma mater, Monroe College, to recover $70,000 in tuition. The Thompson case may not turn out to be the precedent-setter that some theorize, because Monroe makes unusually bold promises to students about post-college success.
But the sad truth is this: Practically all colleges are failing their students nowadays, and in most cases at far greater expense than Monroe failed Thompson.
Historically, criticism of education in America has targeted grade-school and secondary education. Indeed, perhaps the best thing about the K-12 is that in these polarized times, it is the great uniter: Maligned by liberals and conservatives, Christians and Jews, Red Sox fans and Yankee fans, and just about everyone else in the grand American cultural stew.

Expanding the Charter Option

Anne Marie Chaker:

Andrea Byrd, mother of two boys, had enough with her son’s school. After she and her older son, Andrae, moved from Mississippi to Memphis a year ago, the formerly straight-A student “started dumbing himself down,” she says, to fit in with the other boys at his new school.
“I needed to get my child into a school where there were high expectations,” Ms. Byrd says. A charter school had recently opened nearby, but the 34-year-old single mom hesitated over getting an application since Tennessee law required her son to either be considered low-performing–which he wasn’t–or attend a low-performing school–which he didn’t–in order to get in. But all that changed a few weeks ago, when the state enacted a law for charter schools to also include students from low-income families. Two weeks ago, Ms. Byrd went into the Power Center Academy for an application. Later that same day, she got a call to say Andrae had been accepted.
The U.S. Education Department is engaged in a high-pressure campaign to get states to lift limits on charter schools through a $4 billion education fund, Race to the Top, that encourages more charters as one of the criteria for states to qualify for a piece of the pie. A total of 40 states and the District of Columbia permit charter schools.

Little Hearts, Big Problems
Few Drugs or Devices to Treat Cardiovascular Disease Are Designed With Children in Mind

Ron Winslow:

Matthew Emmerling was just three days old and barely home from the hospital when his mother noticed his feet were unusually cold to the touch. Hours later, doctors determined that he was born with a critically narrowed aortic valve that prevented his heart from getting an adequate supply of blood to the rest of his body. He was in shock, and without quick intervention, his life was in danger.
To avoid risky open-heart surgery on the infant, doctors figured they could thread a tiny balloon into his heart and inflate it to stretch open the obstructed valve. The problem was that a balloon designed and approved to treat heart defects in patients as tiny as Matthew didn’t exist. Instead, Robert Beekman, a pediatric cardiologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, chose an angioplasty balloon that normally serves a different function: opening up clogged kidney arteries in adults.
The adult kidney balloon “is the right size for a newborn’s aortic valve, so we use it,” Dr. Beekman says. But, he adds, using a device in small children that wasn’t designed for that purpose puts them at heightened risk for procedural complications and medical errors.
Matthew’s situation highlights an enduring reality for children born with life-threatening heart defects: Hardly any of the myriad drugs and devices developed for the multibillion-dollar market for cardiovascular disease are designed with kids in mind. Children with heart disease represent too small a segment of that market to justify companies’ investing the time and resources needed to develop specialized products. Litigation worries over products intended for children–and the challenge of conducting clinical trials for treatments often administered to newborns–are other impediments.

The Best Colleges

David Ewalt & Hana Alberts:

Forbes’ list of public and private colleges and universities ranks the best schools–from the students’ point of view.
The best college in America has an 11:30 p.m. curfew. It doesn’t allow alcohol in the dorms, which must be kept meticulously clean. Students have to keep their hair neat, their shoes shined, their clothes crisply pressed. They also receive a world-class education, at no cost, and incur no debt–except for a duty to their country.

Out of College at 17, and en Route to Law School at 19: A Father’s Perspective

Jacques Steinberg:

We’ve published more than 100 comments on our post yesterday about Kate McLaughlin, the California teenager who has already graduated from college and is en route to law school.
Some of you applauded her accomplishments, and her family’s willingness to allow her to fast-track her education. Others saw it as too much too soon. And still others weighed in on whether the law was an appropriate career choice. Many of you wrote that you could identify with Ms. McLaughlin.
Missing from the conversation — other than in the original article in the Orange County Register — were the voices of Ms. McLaughlin and her parents. Earlier today, though, we received a comment sent by Kate’s father, John McLaughlin. We then had a brief phone conversation in which he told me that some of the criticisms posted by readers echoed those that have been lobbed at the family for much of his daughter’s life.

Picking junior’s teacher: Should parents weigh in?

Diana Marszalek:

After doing some research, including sitting in on classrooms, Valerie Gilbert thought she knew which third-grade teacher would be perfect for her son, Stanley.
Impressed by that teacher’s creative, visually stimulating style, the Berkeley, Calif., mother lobbied on Stanley’s behalf. “I did my best to make my opinion known,” Gilbert said.
The school, however, placed Stanley in a different class. And to his mother’s surprise and delight, the year wound up being so successful for him that Gilbert said she is approaching his pending entry into fourth grade in a new way: by vowing to stay out of the process.
“I’m learning to be more open-minded,” she said.
With parents becoming increasingly involved in their children’s lives and educations, Gilbert’s foray into her son’s classroom placement process is not unique, particularly around this time of year when anxieties about the coming school year run high.

Ms. Cornelius has more.

“School Answering Machine Message”

Via a kind reader’s email. mp3 audio.

Madison Public Schools’ Arts education gets needed support

Anne Katz & Barbara Schrank, co-chairwomen, MMSD Arts Task Force, via a kind reader’s email:

Kudos and thanks to the Madison School District Board of Education and Superintendent Dan Nerad for their support of arts education opportunities for all students, with additional thanks to members of the Arts Education Task Force.
The task force of art teachers and citizens has worked since 2007 with Board members and administrative and teaching staff on a plan that supports, enhances and sustains arts education in Madison’s public schools. The Board approved the plan on July 20.
In adopting the plan, the Board showed support of the arts as a priority for a quality public education.
The process took hard work by committee members, administrative and teaching staff and input from over 1,000 community members who have been thoughtful, inquisitive and dedicated to nurturing students’ talent and creativity through the arts. These plans will move forward with leadership, support and a strong partnership between the district and the community.
We are proud to live in a community with educational leaders who understand that arts and creativity are essential components of a 21st century education.

Proposed Madison School District Talented & Gifted Plan

Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad’s memo [100K PDF] on the Proposed Talented & Gifted Plan [1.2MB PDF]:

Background
Wisconsin Administrative Rule 8.01 (2)(t)2 states that each school district shall establish a plan and designate a person to coordinate the gifted and talented program. The previous Talented and Gifted (TAG) Plan approved by the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Board was in 1991. 2008-09 highlighted several independent yet related events which served to underscore both the urgency of and District-wide benefit for an updated Plan. Among the events that converged to result in the need to update the Talented and Gifted Plan were:

Superintendent Dr. Daniel Nerad was hired in July 2008. Dr. Nerad recognized the need for addressing the issues related to Talented and Gifted programming;

The last TAG Plan (1991) approved by the District was found by the DPI to be out of compliance;

An increase in open enrollment leaving the District spurred conversation regarding strategies to attract and retain students;

Families leaving the District were surveyed to gather information regarding their reasons for leaving MMSD. A desire for improved Talented and Gifted programming was one of several emerging themes; and

A new Strategic Plan was developed through extensive community involvement. The Strategic Plan clearly demands a rigorous and challenging education for all students.

Process In response to the events described above, the Superintendent charged the Teaching & Learning TAG Division to develop a process to create an updated Plan. The TAG Division met on a regular basis to define major areas for improvement in alignment with the National Association for Gifted Children standards. A Talented and Gifted Advisory Committee comprised of 30 members was convened in early spring. This group met five times between February and June to provide input and critique the evolving draft. The Superintendent and TAG Coordinator hosted a community input session on March 26. Senior Management, Instructional Council and Principals reviewed drafts and provided input. In order to ensure a timely and high quality Plan, a subcommittee of the Talented and Gifted Advisory Committee was invited to continue to work with TAG staff to complete the Plan during June and July.
There have been significant challenges in the process leading to the development of the enclosed plan. These challenges include communication, changes in leadership and an evolving level of District and community trust in MMSD’s commitment to providing high quality education for all stUdents. Overcoming these challenges is an on-going process, one captured in the language of the plan with respect to continual improvement. Although there are aspects of current MMSD talented and gifted programming that are sound and valued, the need for overall structural improvements and re-vitalization is recognized byal!.
In addition to the TAG Division staff, we sincerely appreciate the members of the TAG Advisory Committee for their extraordinary gift of time and dedication toward creating this plan. Special recognition goes to TAG Advisory Subcommittee members Kerry Berns, Bettine Lipman, Laurie Frost, Chris Gomez Schmidt and Carole Trone for their continuing support and input through the final draft of this plan.
MMSD Strategic Planning The enclosed TAG Plan aligns, supports and strengthens important aspects of the Strategic Plan. In particular, the TAG Plan undergirds District-wide efforts to: enhance assessments to guide appropriate levels of instruction; accelerate learning for all students; embed differentiation as core practice in all classrooms; and map and develop a comprehensive and articulated curriculum K-12 in order to increase curricular rigor for all students.
Executive Plan Summary Based upon the framework set forth by the National Association for Gifted and Children standards and areas identified by MMSD for improvement, eight key goal areas addressed in this Plan are:

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Toddler to Teen, Decor That’s Not a Chore

Terri Sapienza:

Very soon, parents everywhere will start gearing up for a new school year: plotting schedules, reorganizing desks and going though drawers and closets to remove items their children no longer use. In some cases, parents may find that it’s not only clothes their children have outgrown, it’s their bedroom, too.
Pastels, primary colors, firetrucks and fairy princesses: all sensible choices for a baby or toddler’s room but not so cool for a tween or teen. Unfortunately, a makeover every few years isn’t budget-friendly. Nor is it practical, says D.C. designer Annie Elliott. “If you’re running around with kids, you’re not going to have the energy to update their rooms,” she says. “You’re just going to be too exhausted to want to deal with it.”

F in Exams

Richard Benson:

Q: What happens to a boy when he reaches puberty?
A: He says goodbye to childhood and enters adultery.
Q: How can you prevent milk turning sour?
A: Keep it in the cow.
We’ve all been there. You’ve been studying hard, the day of the BIG test arrives, you turn over the paper, and ‘what the *&%@ does that mean?!’ Not a clue.
Some students, rather than admit defeat, choose to adopt a more creative approach to answering those particularly awkward exam questions.
Packed full of hilarious examples, this book will bring a smile to the face of teachers, parents and students alike – and anyone who’s ever had to sit a test.

‘Obama Effect’ at school: Black parents volunteer, expect more

Greg Toppo:

A new survey suggests that President Obama’s victory last November had a positive effect not just on the academic expectations of black Americans — it may have raised parents’ interests in volunteerism.
The “Obama Effect,” documented last winter, showed that Obama’s rise during the 2008 presidential election helped improve African Americans’ performance on skills tests, which helped narrow a black-white achievement gap.
In the new findings, African-American parents of children in K-12 schools say they’re much more likely to volunteer in a classroom this fall, in effect narrowing a volunteering gap.
The survey, being released today by GreatSchools, a San Francisco non-profit that promotes parental involvement, finds a jump of 37 percentage points in the portion of African-American parents who say they’ll volunteer in their child’s school — 60% vs. 23% a year ago.

Quick! Tell Us What KUTGW Means

Stephanie Raposo:

Kate Washburn didn’t know what to make of the email a friend sent to her office with the abbreviation “NSFW” written at the bottom. Then she clicked through the attached sideshow, titled “Awkward Family Photos.” It included shots of a family in furry “nude” suits and of another family alongside a male walrus in a revealing pose.
After looking up NSFW on NetLingo.com–a Web site that provides definitions of Internet and texting terms–she discovered what it stood for: “Not safe for work.”
“If I would have known it wasn’t safe for work, I wouldn’t have taken the chance of being inappropriate,” says Ms. Washburn, 37 years old, a media consultant in Grand Rapids, Mich.
As text-messaging shorthand becomes increasingly widespread in emails, text messages and Tweets, people like Ms. Washburn are scrambling to decode it. In many offices, a working knowledge of text-speak is becoming de rigueur. And at home, parents need to know the lingo in order to keep up with–and sometimes police–their children.

Brain Emotion Circuit Sparks As Teen Girls Size Up Peers

Science Daily:

What is going on in teenagers’ brains as their drive for peer approval begins to eclipse their family affiliations? Brain scans of teens sizing each other up reveal an emotion circuit activating more in girls as they grow older, but not in boys. The study by Daniel Pine, M.D., of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of National Institutes of Health, and colleagues, shows how emotion circuitry diverges in the male and female brain during a developmental stage in which girls are at increased risk for developing mood and anxiety disorders.
“During this time of heightened sensitivity to interpersonal stress and peers’ perceptions, girls are becoming increasingly preoccupied with how individual peers view them, while boys tend to become more focused on their status within group pecking orders,” explained Pine. “However, in the study, the prospect of interacting with peers activated brain circuitry involved in approaching others, rather than circuitry responsible for withdrawal and fear, which is associated with anxiety and depression.”
Pine, Amanda Guyer, Ph.D., Eric Nelson, Ph.D., and colleagues at NIMH and Georgia State University, report on one of the first studies to reveal the workings of the teen brain in a simulated real-world social interaction, in the July, 2009 issue of the Journal Child Development.

Michelle Rhee: Partnering With City Year DC to Tackle Dropout “Catastrophe”

Alice Korngold:

Washington, D.C.’s public school system has 45,000 students and an abysmal dropout rate of about 50%, typical of large cities. With a goal to remedy this dropout “catastrophe” (Gen. Colin Powell’s term), while being constrained by a tight economy, D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee is looking to–in her words–“leverage opportunities for the greatest change.”
To this end, Rhee believes that one of the best investments that D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) has made in the past year is its partnership with City Year DC. In 2008/09, City Year corps members proved themselves in a pilot program in 4 of Washington’s most challenging elementary schools.
Jeff Franco, Executive Director of City Year DC explained that “we offered to help the Chancellor to solve her worst headaches.” After rigorous training, corps members coached, tutored, and mentored children in grades K to 2, and successfully demonstrated that they could help improve children’s reading ability. This achievement will be instrumental in changing the life trajectory of these kids–ultimately increasing the likelihood that they will graduate from high school, go to college, and later, earn greater incomes.
“I’ve been thrilled with the results of this first year,” Rhee told me. So thrilled that she and Franco plan a “feeder pattern” strategy to have corps members continue working with these same children all through elementary school, middle school, and high school, while also expanding City Year’s involvement with additional schools. The end game: reduce the dropout rate.

For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics

Steve Lohr:

At Harvard, Carrie Grimes majored in anthropology and archaeology and ventured to places like Honduras, where she studied Mayan settlement patterns by mapping where artifacts were found. But she was drawn to what she calls “all the computer and math stuff” that was part of the job.
“People think of field archaeology as Indiana Jones, but much of what you really do is data analysis,” she said.
Now Ms. Grimes does a different kind of digging. She works at Google, where she uses statistical analysis of mounds of data to come up with ways to improve its search engine.
Ms. Grimes is an Internet-age statistician, one of many who are changing the image of the profession as a place for dronish number nerds. They are finding themselves increasingly in demand — and even cool.
“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”

Scholarships 101: How to fund an education after high school

Marnie Ayers:

Getting an education is vital to financial stability and future success but the cost of education beyond high school continues to rise. Luckily Federal Student Aid offers financial aid programs that help millions of students attend college, universities and trade schools each year.
The billions of dollars of help from Federal Student Aid is administered by the U.S. Department of Education and comes in the forms of grants such as the Pell and National SMART Grant and work-study and low interest loans such as the Federal Perkins Loan and the Stafford Loan. Some grants require a cumulative GPA of 3.0 while loans have interest rates around 5%.
Each year, millions of students benefit from federal financial aid programs. For information on programs you might qualify for visit FederalStudentAid.ed.gov or call 800-4Fed-Aid. Applying for federal aid is free and the application is called FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid). Free help is available throughout the application process. The College Scholarship Fraud Protection Act protects people from financial aid fraud.

What have private schools done for (some of) us?

Royal Statistical Society: Significance:

Many parents in Britain make huge financial sacrifices to send their children to private schools. Are those sacrifices worthwhile? What return, if any, do they get? Do their children end up in better careers, earning more, than if they have been educated at the expense of the state?Francis Green, Stephen Machin, Richard Murphy and Yu Zhu examine who exactly benefits from the privileges of the Old School Tie.

Via Mrs. Moneypenny.

Federal Tax Receipts Decline 18%, Dane County (WI) Tax Delinquencies Grow

Stephen Ohlemacher:

The recession is starving the government of tax revenue, just as the president and Congress are piling a major expansion of health care and other programs on the nation’s plate and struggling to find money to pay the tab.
The numbers could hardly be more stark: Tax receipts are on pace to drop 18 percent this year, the biggest single-year decline since the Great Depression, while the federal deficit balloons to a record $1.8 trillion.
Other figures in an Associated Press analysis underscore the recession’s impact: Individual income tax receipts are down 22 percent from a year ago. Corporate income taxes are down 57 percent. Social Security tax receipts could drop for only the second time since 1940, and Medicare taxes are on pace to drop for only the third time ever.
The last time the government’s revenues were this bleak, the year was 1932 in the midst of the Depression.
“Our tax system is already inadequate to support the promises our government has made,” said Eugene Steuerle, a former Treasury Department official in the Reagan administration who is now vice president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

Channel3000.com recently spoke with Dane County Treasurer Dave Worzala on the growing property tax delinquencies:

While there aren’t any figures for this year, property tax delinquencies have been on a steep climb the last few years, WISC-TV reported.
Delinquencies increased 11 percent in 2006, 34 percent in 2007 and 45 percent in 2008, where there is now more than $16 million in unpaid taxes in the county.
“It affects us in that we have to be sure that we have enough resources to cover county operations throughout the year even though those funds aren’t here. And we do that, we are able to do that, but 40 percent increases over time become unsustainable,” said Dane County Treasurer David Worzala.
“I can see that there are probably some people that either lost their jobs or were laid off, they’re going to have a harder time paying their taxes,” said Ken Baldinus, who was paying his taxes Thursday. “But I’m retired, so we budget as we go.”
Big portions of those bills must go to school districts and the state. Worzala said the county is concerned about the rise in delinquencies because if the jumps continue the county could run into a cash flow issue in paying bills.

Resolution of the Madison School District – Madison Teachers, Inc. contract and the District’s $12M budget deficit will be a challenge in light of the declining tax base. Having said that, local schools have seen annual revenue increases for decades, largely through redistributed state and to a degree federal tax dollars (not as much as some would like) despite flat enrollment. That growth has stopped with the decline in State tax receipts and expenditures. Madison School District revenues are also affected by the growth in outbound open enrollment (ie, every student that leaves costs the organization money, conversely, programs that might attract students would, potentially, generate more revenues).

Dumb Money Too many nations are wasting their school spending. Here’s how to get it right.

Stefan Theil:

“If we want to become a strong economy again, the best thing we can do is have an educated workforce.” Few would object to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s explanation of why Washington is funneling $100 billion to schools and universities as part of February’s giant stimulus package. Indeed, other countries are following suit, with Britain, Germany, Canada, China, and others making new education funding part of their anticrisis strategies.
What’s far less clear is that this money is going where it’s most needed–or likely to have the greatest social and economic payoff. In Germany, the bulk of nearly €10 billion in new school spending is being used to renovate buildings–a bonanza for construction companies and popular with parents and teachers, but unlikely to have much effect on the quality of German graduates. In Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown is pushing for more PCs and Web access in schools–another policy that’s popular but considered irrelevant by educators. In the United States, a July audit by the Government Accountability Office found that schools were not using the stimulus money to boost student achievement, as promised by Duncan, but to fund their general budgets. And in still other countries, governments are using money to help build new world-class universities–projects that a World Bank study in July warned risk bleeding resources away from more desperately needed areas. “I’m not sure that the people making these decisions even realize the trade-offs involved,” says Jamil Salmi, author of the study.
That’s particularly unfortunate today, given the economic stakes. According to an April report by McKinsey, the United States’ GDP would have been 9 to 16 percent–or $1.3 trillion to $2.3 trillion–higher in 2008 had U.S. high-school graduates attained the average skills of their peers in Canada, Finland, or South Korea. This fall, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) will unveil a similar study in Paris detailing the losses suffered by other laggards. Andreas Schleicher, author of the OECD study, says that “in a whole row of countries, the economic losses of educational underperformance are significantly higher than the costs of the financial crisis.” What’s worse, he says, countries pay the price for their mistakes year after year.

Community colleges gaining respect, admissions

Glen Martin:

Because of their emphasis on job skill development and professional certification programs, community colleges have been the traditional province of working people. But as the recession bites deeper, many middle- and upper-class youths are finding their entree to exclusive private colleges or prestigious public universities limited by depleted family funds. The community colleges have become a practical option for the first two years of study for a bachelor’s degree.
Jack Scott, the California Community Colleges chancellor and past president of Cypress College and Pasadena City College, cites the tuition cost differential between the first two undergraduate years at the University of Southern California and two years at nearby Pasadena City College.
“Assuming that you’re taking transferable courses at Pasadena, you can go to USC your junior year after spending no more than $1,200 total tuition for your freshman and sophomore years,” Scott said. “That’s compared with roughly $50,000 for the initial two years of tuition at USC. If you lived at home while attending Pasadena, your savings were even greater.”

The First Big Test: Watching Expenses Some Students Clamp Down as They Gear Up

Jonathan Starkey:

Getting that college tuition and housing bill under control is only the first step. Then comes the comforter and refrigerator and textbooks and — well, the College Board has a list of 118 to-buy items on its off-to-college checklist.
And don’t forget the pizza money.
The bill to outfit a freshman can run to thousands of dollars if you’re not careful, financial advisers say. As recession losses have whittled down college funds and as part-time jobs have become more elusive, families are finding creative ways to stretch each dollar.
In recent weeks, Sharon Okolicsanyi of Manassas has scoured the Web for deals on a laptop for her daughter, Helena, who will be a freshman at George Mason University. They finally found a bargain: It cost $499, marked down from $700. A security and software upgrade cost $100, and a printer cost $30, marked down from $70.

Woodside Priory keeps boarding school tradition

Sam Whiting:

At the end of the school day, as their classmates pile into cars for the commute home, 50 students at the Woodside Priory, near Stanford University, turn and lug their backpacks uphill. These 30 high school boys and 20 girls are already home. They call themselves the “dormers,” and they are the last of their kind between San Francisco and Monterey.
“I have roommates instead of a mom. It’s better, I think,” says sophomore Allegra Thomas, 14, as she sits in a vinyl booth in the mock ’50s-style diner in her residence hall. It is 5 p.m., which is right about when she would be getting home to the Santa Cruz Mountains, with her mother shuttling.
“Before being in the dorms, I never really had an opportunity to hang out with people after school because it was such a long drive home,” says Thomas, who started the Priory as a freshman day student, then became a boarder midyear. “Because I’m on foot, I can do more things around the school, be part of the community. I like the structure. My grades have been better.”

Bay Area is Biggest Little Italy for Preschools

Patricia Yollin:

Abigail Call corrects her mother’s grammar when they speak Italian and has started to teach her father the language, sometimes making up nonexistent words just to toy with him a bit. She is not quite 4 years old.
“When she’s by herself with her dolls, she sings all these songs in Italian,” said Abigail’s mother, Jessica Hall. “I’m a parent, so of course it makes me want to cry – to think that her little brain, in those unprompted moments of alone time, chooses to do that.”
Abigail doesn’t know it yet, but she is part of a trend.
Italian playgroups, preschools and language centers for children are proliferating in the Bay Area these days in a manner unequaled anywhere in the country, according to Marco Salardi of the Italian Consulate in San Francisco.
“It’s just exploding,” said Salardi, director of the consulate’s office of education. “It’s very new. And it’s becoming bigger and bigger. It’s a very nice surprise.”
La Piccola Scuola Italiana on Potrero Hill in San Francisco. Spazio Italiano Language Center in North Beach. The tiny Vittoria Italian Preschool in the Mission District. Girotondo Italian School and Parliamo Italiano, both in Marin County. Mondo Bambini in Berkeley, purchased a few months ago by Girotondo so it can expand to meet a swelling demand in the East Bay.

Online education comes into its own

Carol Lloyd:

As the job market grows softer and less nourishing than a jelly doughnut, reports show more people are returning to school to immunize their careers and feed their souls. But “school” is not necessarily the idyll of leafy campuses and long afternoons arguing philosophy in oak-paneled rooms.
Online education, long an ugly duckling of the ivory towers of the world, is coming into its swan years.
In its annual report on the state of online education, the Sloan Consortium reported in 2008 that online education continues to grow at a much faster rate than its brick-and-mortar competitors. Anecdotal evidence suggests that 2009’s economic woes will only accelerate the pattern.
“We have seen our small university double in size this year,” says Scott Stallings, director of marketing and admissions for California InterContinental University, a for-profit “distance education” university in Diamond Bar (Los Angeles County). “I believe this can be attributed to our low cost of tuition and the large influx of students who need their degrees to remain competitive.”

Is Google Killing General Knowledge?

Brian Cathcart:

General knowledge, from capital cities to key dates, has long been a marker of an educated mind. But what happens when facts can be Googled? Brian Cathcart confers with educationalists, quiz-show winners and Bamber Gascoigne …
One day last year a daughter of Earl Spencer (who is therefore a niece of Princess Diana) called a taxi to take her and a friend from her family home at Althorp in Northamptonshire to see Chelsea play Arsenal at football. She told the driver “Stamford Bridge”, the name of Chelsea’s stadium, but he delivered them instead to the village of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire, nearly 150 miles in the opposite direction. They missed the game.
Such stories are becoming commonplace. A coachload of English schoolchildren bound for the historic royal palace at Hampton Court wasted an entire day battling through congested central London as their sat-nav led them stubbornly to a narrow back street of the same name in Islington. A Syrian lorry driver aiming for Gibraltar, at the southern tip of Spain, turned up 1,600 miles away in the English east-coast town of Skegness, which has a Gibraltar Point nearby.
Two complementary things are happening in these stories. One is that these people are displaying a woeful ignorance of geography. In the case of Stamford Bridge, one driver and two passengers spent well over two hours in a car without noticing that instead of passing Northampton and swiftly entering the built-up sprawl of London, their view continued to be largely of fields and forests, and they were seeing signs for Nottingham, Doncaster and the North. They should have known.

At School, Lower Expectations Of Dominican Kids

Claudio Sanchez:

Parents and teachers often expect less of students who are the children of Dominican immigrants. This causes their grades and ambitions to suffer.
Now, why some immigrants’ children do better in school than others. Yesterday, we heard about the kids of Chinese immigrants and the tensions between what their parents want for them academically and what they want. Today, the achievement gap between Chinese-American students and students of Dominican background. In Boston, researchers have zeroed-in on that gap. They’ve looked at whether one culture values education more than the other and what role do schools play. NPR’s Claudio Sanchez has the second of two reports.
CLAUDIO SANCHEZ: Carmen Merced has had two sons in the Boston Public Schools. Fernando, an eighth grader, and Wildo, her oldest, just finished high school. They were born in Boston and grew up speaking English. In school, though, both were tagged learning disabled. Merced is convinced that it’s because they’re Latino.
Ms. CARMEN MERCED: (Foreign language spoken)
SANCHEZ: Latinos, even if they know English, are always discriminated, says Merced. It’s not something schools even try to hide. Like the time one of Wildo’s teachers told him he was never going to amount to anything in life.

Rent, Read and Return

Stephanie Lee:

Students frequently rent DVDs to watch in their dorm rooms, but soon they may start checking out something much heavier and pricier: textbooks.
Saying they offer an alternative to the textbook industry’s bloated prices, a growing number of companies are renting new and used titles at reduced prices. Among them are Chegg, BookRenter and the Follett Higher Education Group, which will test drive a rental service at campus bookstores this fall. They join a number of colleges that have already started their own on-campus programs.
With all of them, the concept is essentially to pay to check out textbooks as if they’re out of a library — only there are more copies and titles, and they can be used for longer periods of time. Through Chegg, for instance, a student searches for a book and rents it for up to a certain number of days, such as up to a quarter or a semester. Users are promised discounts of 65 to 85 percent off the list price, but if they don’t return a book on time, they are charged full price. The same punishment applies to doodling in the margins, since the books are meant for reuse. As a disclaimer on Chegg warns: “Highlighting in the textbook is OK — to a certain extent. Writing in the book is not accepted.”

Learn how to draw Garfield on iTunes U

iTunes U:

Thanks to the Virginia Department of Education and the Professor Garfield Foundation, you — and your kids, of course — can get an Introduction to Comics on iTunes U. The 15 video episodes encourage children to draw, sculpt, and carve. In fact, Jim Davis — who created Garfield — gets the course off to a great start, showing us all how he draws his famous lasagna-loving feline.

What the SAT-optional Colleges Don’t Tell You

Jay Matthews:

I don’t much like the SAT. When the SAT-optional movement began to gain momentum a few years ago, I cheered. Dozens of colleges told their applicants that if they didn’t want to submit their SAT or ACT scores, they didn’t have to. Some restricted this choice to students with high grade point averages, but it seemed to me a step in the right direction.
In my view the SAT does not reflect very well what students learn in high school. It seems more influenced by how much money their parents make. Indeed, SAT prep classes (such as those offered by Kaplan Inc., the Washington Post Company’s leading revenue source) give kids from affluent families an advantage.
So I was impressed and pleased when the SAT-Optional movement grew so strong that FairTest (the National Center for Fair & Open Testing), a non-profit group that supports the change, noted that 32 of the top 100 colleges on the U.S. News & World Report liberal arts college list no longer require every applicant to submit an SAT or ACT score.
When I started reading Jonathan P. Epstein’s article on SAT-Optional schools in the summer edition of the Journal of College Admissions, I expected a careful history of these developments, with no surprises. Epstein is a senior consultant with Maguire Associates in Boston, who specialize in advising college admissions offices. He is not a journalist, and sees no need to deliver the big news at the top of the story.

Harvard Schmarvard: A Small College Shines

Jay Matthews:

This will be the first in an occasional series of blog postings on little-known colleges that prove their worth. My 2003 book Harvard Schmarvard argued that the big name schools don’t provide a better education than the little name schools. Research indicates that qualities that bring success—persistence, humor, kindness, patience—are acquired before we ever take an SAT test. The brand name schools look good because they lure lots of students with those qualities, but students with similar character strengths who go to unknown schools often do just as well, particularly if they pick colleges with great strengths in areas that interest them.
I tend to ramble about this topic a lot. Parents who write and seek my advice on college selection get an email-full of such Jayisms. In many cases they go away realizing I am a bore. But occasionally I say the right thing, and years later they let me know that. Here is a message I received today from Michael Bledsoe, pastor of the Riverside Baptist Church in southwest D.C. and an adjunct at the Howard University Divinity School. Four years ago, when he and his wife were agonizing over where to send their first child, Kelley, off to college, they read some of my columns and wrote for more advice. Kelley was attracted to Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga., I told them that in many ways that school would be better for her than an Ivy League university. In his new message, Bledsoe said this:

COCKSURE Banks, battles, and the psychology of overconfidence.

Malcolm Gladwell:

In 1996, an investor named Henry de Kwiatkowski sued Bear Stearns for negligence and breach of fiduciary duty. De Kwiatkowski had made–and then lost–hundreds of millions of dollars by betting on the direction of the dollar, and he blamed his bankers for his reversals. The district court ruled in de Kwiatkowski’s favor, ultimately awarding him $164.5 million in damages. But Bear Stearns appealed–successfully–and in William D. Cohan’s engrossing account of the fall of Bear Stearns, “House of Cards,” the firm’s former chairman and C.E.O. Jimmy Cayne tells the story of what happened on the day of the hearing:
Their lead lawyer turned out to be about a 300-pound fag from Long Island . . . a really irritating guy who had cross-examined me and tried to kick the shit out of me in the lower court trial. Now when we walk into the courtroom for the appeal, they’re arguing another case and we have to wait until they’re finished. And I stopped this guy. I had to take a piss. I went into the bathroom to take a piss and came back and sat down. Then I see my blood enemy stand up and he’s going to the bathroom. So I wait till he passes and then I follow him in and it’s just he and I in the bathroom. And I said to him, “Today you’re going to get your ass kicked, big.” He ran out of the room. He thought I might have wanted to start it right there and then.
At the time Cayne said this, Bear Stearns had spectacularly collapsed. The eighty-five-year-old investment bank, with its shiny new billion-dollar headquarters and its storied history, was swallowed whole by J. P. Morgan Chase. Cayne himself had lost close to a billion dollars. His reputation–forty years in the making–was in ruins, especially when it came out that, during Bear’s final, critical months, he’d spent an inordinate amount of time on the golf course.

In Defense of the Play Date

Emily Bazelon:

One of the most biting scenes in The Group, Mary McCarthy’s acerbic sendup of female friendship and aspiration, takes place on a play date. Priss Crockett, the grind of the Vassar class of 1933 and now a doctor’s wife, is walking through Central Park with her toddler Stephen. She runs into a fellow alum, Norine Schmittlapp, and her 3-month-old baby, Ichabod. “Aren’t you afraid he’ll be called ‘Icky’ in school?” Priss asks before barely resisting the urge to tell Norine to raise the hood of the baby’s carriage, to shield his head from the sun.
The two women are off and running for an afternoon of sniping and clashing. Norine mentions letting Ichabod sleep in the bed with her at night. Priss can’t believe she doesn’t know that “under no circumstances, not even in a crowded slum home, should a baby be permitted to sleep with an adult.” Stephen sees Ichabod sucking on a pacifier and reaches up to touch the unknown object. Priss snatches his hand away. Norine brings up toilet training, the source of Priss’ most bitter shame, since Stephen is not performing properly. Norine’s theory is that children should train themselves. “Where in the world did you get such ideas?” Priss asks. The women repair to Norine’s apartment, where a butler whisks Stephen away. The butler later returns to whisper in Norine’s ear. “Stephen shat,” she casually reports, to Priss’ humiliation, even as she lets Stephen’s nursemaid clean up the mess.
In the last minutes in this strange apartment, Stephen plunges his hand into the neck of the nursemaid’s dress, and Priss, desperate to distract him, gives him a piece of chocolate cake. Stephen, a chocolate virgin, doesn’t now what to do with it. “Look! It’s good,” Priss tells him, chewing. McCarthy makes Stephen’s corruption complete with this last line of the chapter: “Soon he was greedily eating chocolate cake, from a Jewish bakery, with fudge frosting.”

Free Program Allows Single Parents to Develop Confidence as They Train for a Career

Emma Brown:

Two years ago, Taishia Jenerette was holding down two jobs, caring for her 6-year-old daughter and struggling as a single mother with too little time and too many bills. Then a friend told her about an unusual Fairfax County program that provides low-income single parents with career counseling and professional certificate courses — free.
“I would have never been able to go to school if not for the Education for Independence program,” said Jenerette, 32, who quit her part-time job at Macy’s to make time for night classes. “I had looked into it so many times, but I didn’t have the money.”
In a ceremony last week at the Fairfax County Government Center, Jenerette graduated with a medical assistant certificate that will help her qualify for a promotion, and a raise, at the Virginia Department of Rehabilitative Services, where she prepares disability cases for review. But more important than the certificate, Jenerette said, the program has given her confidence.
“I was so scared to go back to school because I didn’t want to fail,” said Jenerette, of Centreville. “I said if I can get through this two years, I can do anything.”
That attitude is what Education for Independence is meant to engender, said Lorraine Obuchon, one of two career counselors who work with the program’s approximately 120 participants.

Special Education Vouchers

Jay Greene:

In 1975, Congress passed legislation giving students with disabilities the right to an appropriate education at public expense. But having a right is only as good as your ability to enforce it. In New York City and elsewhere, public schools regularly delay and frustrate disabled students seeking appropriate services–everything from tutoring to speech therapy to treatment of severe disabilities–making their federally protected right all but meaningless. Rather than compelling families with disabled children to contend with obstinate public school systems, we should give them the option of purchasing the services they need for their children from a private provider. That is, we should give them special-ed vouchers–good for the same amount of money that we already spend on them in the public school system–that they could then use to pay for private school. Not only would this bring better services to disabled New York students; it could also save the public money.
Many parents of disabled students have a lot of trouble ensuring that public schools give their kids an appropriate education. The parents have to know what they’re entitled to, and most do not. They must negotiate services from the local schools–but the schools are experienced in these negotiations, while the parents generally aren’t, so the schools often get away with minimizing their responsibilities. And even if parents win at the negotiating table, getting the schools actually to deliver on their promises is enormously difficult.

“What if it has all been a huge mistake?”

The Chronicle Review
July 27, 2009
A Rescue Plan for College Composition and High-School English
By Michael B. Prince:

The new administration in Washington promises fresh resources for our failing school systems. The need is great. Yet at a time when every penny counts, we had better be sure that new investments in education don’t chase after bad pedagogical ideas.
I propose a rescue plan for high-school English and college composition that costs little, apart from a shift in dominant ideas. For the sake of convenience and discussion, the rescue plan reduces complex matters to three concrete steps.
First, don’t trust the SAT Reasoning Test, especially the writing section of that test, as a college diagnostic, and don’t allow the writing test to influence the goals of high-school English.
The news last year that Baylor University paid its already admitted students to retake the SAT in order to raise the school’s ranking in U.S. News and World Report would be funny if it weren’t so sad. The test is a failure.
Even the manufacturer of the SAT admits that the new test, which includes writing, is no better than the old test, which didn’t. As The Boston Globe reported on June 18, 2008: “The New York-based College Board, which owns the test, released the study yesterday showing that the current SAT rated 0.53 on a measure of predictive ability, compared with 0.52 for the previous version. A result of 1 would mean the test perfectly predicts college performance. Revising the SAT ‘did not substantially change’ its capacity to foretell first-year college grades, the research found.”
How could this happen? College professors frequently ask their students to write. Shouldn’t a test that includes actual writing tell us more about scholastic aptitude than a test that doesn’t? Yes, unless the test asks students to do something categorically different from what college professors generally ask their students to do. Is that the problem with the SAT? You be the judge.
The following essay question appeared on the December 2007 SAT. It was reprinted on the College Board’s Web site as a model for high-school students to practice; it was subsequently disseminated by high schools and SAT-prep Web sites. The question runs as follows:
“Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below.
“‘Our determination to pursue truth by setting up a fight between two sides leads us to believe that every issue has two sides–no more, no less. If we know both sides of an issue, all of the relevant information will emerge, and the best case will be made for each side. But this process does not always lead to the truth. Often the truth is somewhere in the complex middle, not the oversimplified extremes.’
“[Adapted from Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture]

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Join me at the REACH Awards Day next Wed 8/5; Education Reform’s Moon Shot; A $4B Push for Better Schools; Taken to school: Obama funding plan must force Legislature to accept education reforms; President Obama Discusses New ‘Race to the Top’ Program

1) I hope you can join me a week from Wednesday at the REACH Awards Day from 10-12:30 on Aug. 5th at the Chase branch on 39th and Broadway (see full invite at the end of this email).
REACH (Rewarding Achievement; www.reachnyc.org) is a pay-for-performance initiative that aims to improve the college readiness of low-income students at 31 inner-city high schools in New York by rewarding them with up to $1,000 for each Advanced Placement exam they pass. I founded it, with funding from the Pershing Square Foundation and support from the Council of Urban Professionals.
This past year was the first full year of the program and I’m delighted to report very substantial gains in the overall number of students passing AP exams at the 31 schools, and an even bigger gain among African-American and Latino students (exact numbers will be released at the event). As a result, more than 1,000 student have earned nearly $1 MILLION in REACH Scholar Awards! Next Wednesday, the students will come to pick up their checks, Joel Klein will be the highlight of the press conference at 11am, and there will be a ton of media. I hope to see you there! You can RSVP to REACH@nycup.org.
2) STOP THE PRESSES!!! Last Friday will go down in history, I believe, as a key tipping point moment in the decades-long effort to improve our K-12 educational system. President Obama and Sec. Duncan both appeared at a press conference to announce the formal launch of the Race to the Top fund (KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg also spoke and rocked the house!). Other than not being there on vouchers, Obama and Duncan are hitting ALL of the right notes, which, backed with HUGE dollars, will no doubt result in seismic shifts in educational policy across the country.
Here’s an excerpt from Arne Duncan’s Op Ed in the Washington Post from Friday (full text below — well worth reading):

Under Race to the Top guidelines, states seeking funds will be pressed to implement four core interconnected reforms.
— To reverse the pervasive dumbing-down of academic standards and assessments by states, Race to the Top winners need to work toward adopting common, internationally benchmarked K-12 standards that prepare students for success in college and careers.
— To close the data gap — which now handcuffs districts from tracking growth in student learning and improving classroom instruction — states will need to monitor advances in student achievement and identify effective instructional practices.
— To boost the quality of teachers and principals, especially in high-poverty schools and hard-to-staff subjects, states and districts should be able to identify effective teachers and principals — and have strategies for rewarding and retaining more top-notch teachers and improving or replacing ones who aren’t up to the job.
— Finally, to turn around the lowest-performing schools, states and districts must be ready to institute far-reaching reforms, from replacing staff and leadership to changing the school culture.
The Race to the Top program marks a new federal partnership in education reform with states, districts and unions to accelerate change and boost achievement. Yet the program is also a competition through which states can increase or decrease their odds of winning federal support. For example, states that limit alternative routes to certification for teachers and principals, or cap the number of charter schools, will be at a competitive disadvantage. And states that explicitly prohibit linking data on achievement or student growth to principal and teacher evaluations will be ineligible for reform dollars until they change their laws.

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Humans prefer cockiness to expertise

Peter Aldhous:

EVER wondered why the pundits who failed to predict the current economic crisis are still being paid for their opinions? It’s a consequence of the way human psychology works in a free market, according to a study of how people’s self-confidence affects the way others respond to their advice.
The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record. Moore argues that in competitive situations, this can drive those offering advice to increasingly exaggerate how sure they are. And it spells bad news for scientists who try to be honest about gaps in their knowledge.
In Moore’s experiment, volunteers were given cash for correctly guessing the weight of people from their photographs. In each of the eight rounds of the study, the guessers bought advice from one of four other volunteers. The guessers could see in advance how confident each of these advisers was (see table), but not which weights they had opted for.

Diminishing Returns in Humanities Research

Mark Bauerlein:

It was sometime in the 1980s, I think, that a basic transformation of the aims of literary criticism was complete. Not the spread of political themes and identity preoccupations, which struck outsiders and off-campus critics like William Bennett, a former secretary of education turned radio host, as the obvious change, but a deeper adjustment in the basic conception of what criticism does. It was, namely, the shift from criticism-as-explanation to criticism-as-performance. Instead of thinking of scholarship as the explication of the object–what a poem means or a painting represents–humanists cast criticism as an interpretative act, an analytical eye in process.
The old model of the critic as secondary, derivative, even parasitical gave way to the critic as creative and adventuresome. Wlad Godzich’s introduction to the second edition of Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight (1983) nicely caught the mood in its title: “Caution! Reader at Work!” People spoke of “doing a reading,” applying a theory, taking an approach, and they regarded the principle of fidelity to the object as tyranny. In a 1973 essay in New Literary History titled “The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis,” Geoffrey H. Hartman chastised the traditional critic for being “methodologically humble” by “subduing himself to commentary on work or writer”; then he declared, “We have entered an era that can challenge even the priority of literary to literary-critical texts.” A writer has a persona, he stated. “Should the interpreter not have personae?”
Older modes of criticism were a species of performance as well. But they claimed validity to the extent to which the object they regarded gave up to them its mystery. The result, the clarified meaning of the work, counted more than the execution that yielded it. By the late 1980s, though, the question “What does it mean?” lost out to “How can we read it?” The interpretation didn’t have to be right. It had to be nimble.

A story from the trenches — send me more!; DAVID STEINER ELECTED COMMISSIONER OF EDUC FOR NY; As Charter Schools Unionize; Must unions always block innovation in public schools?; NEA Discovers It Is a Labor Union; So You Want to Be a Teacher for America?

1) If you read anything I send out this year, let this be it. One of my friends responded to the survey I sent around a couple of weeks ago by emailing me this story of his experience as a TFA teacher in the South Bronx a decade ago (though he’s no longer there, he is still (thankfully) very much involved with educating disadvantaged kids). It is one of the most powerful, heart-breaking, enraging things I have ever read — and perfectly captures what this education reform struggle is all about. Stories like this about what REALLY goes on in our failing public schools need to be told and publicized, so please share yours with me:

Whitney,
Thanks so much for putting this survey together. It brought back some memories well beyond the few questions about what it was like to teach in the South Bronx with TFA back in the late nineties. I want to emphasize here that I no longer teach in the Bronx, so I have little idea how things have changed and have seen the current Administration take a number of important steps that may be making a great impact. I’m not close enough to the ground to know, but my guess is that there are still plenty of schools in the Bronx and in every other low-income community in the country that reflect some of the miserable stuff I saw in my school. You should really start collecting a book of stories like these. Among all the people I know who’ve done TFA, these stories are just a few among many sad ones.
As I filled out the survey, I was first reminded of the art teacher in our school. She was truly a caricature of bad teaching. Like something out of the movies. She spent almost every minute of every day screaming at the top of her lungs in the faces of 5-8 year olds who had done horrible things like coloring outside the lines. The ART teacher! Screaming so loud you could hear her 2-3 floors away in a decades old, solid brick building. When she heard I was looking for an apt, she sent me to an apt broker friend of hers. I told the friend I wanted to live in Washington Heights. “Your mother would be very upset with me if I let you go live with THOSE PEOPLE. We fought with bricks and bats and bottles to keep them out of our neighborhoods. Do you see what they have done to this place?” This same attitude could be heard in the art teacher’s screams, the administration’s ambivalence towards the kids we were supposed to be educating and the sometimes overt racism of the people in charge. The assistant principal (who could not, as far as I could tell, do 4th grade math, but offered me stop-in math professional development for a few minutes every few months with gems like “these numbers you see here to the left of the zero are negative numbers. Like when it is very cold outside.”) once told me “I call them God’s stupidest people” referring to a Puerto Rican woman who was blocking our way as we drove to another school. She also once told me I needed to put together a bulletin board in the hallway about Veteran’s Day. I told her we were in the middle of assembling an Encyclopedia on great Dominican, Puerto Rican and Black leaders (all of my students were Dominican, Black or Puerto Rican). “Mr. ____, we had Cin-co de May-o, and Black History Month, and all that other stuff. It is time for the AMERICAN Americans.”
Not everyone in the school was a racist. There were many hard working teachers of all ethnicities who did not reflect this attitude at all. But the fact that the leadership of the school and a number of the most senior teachers was either utterly disdainful of the students they taught, or has completely given up on the educability of the kids, had a terrible effect on overall staff motivation. And many of the well-meaning teachers were extremely poorly prepared to make a dent in the needs of the students even if they had been well led. The Principal told more than one teacher there that “as long as they are quiet and in their seats, I don’t care what else you do.” This was on the day this person was HIRED. This was their first and probably last instruction. He never gave me a single instruction. Ever. And I was a new teacher with nothing but TFA’s Summer Institute under my belt. The Principal proceeded to get a law degree while sitting in his office ignoring the school. When we went to the Assistant Superintendent to report that the school was systematically cheating on the 3rd grade test (i.e., the third grade team met with the principal and APs, planned the cheating carefully, locked their doors and covered their windows and gave answers) she told the principal to watch his back. A few months later, inspectors came from the state. After observing our mostly horrible classes for a full day, they told us how wonderful we were doing and that they had just come down to see what they could replicate in other schools to produce scores like ours. And the list goes on and on.
Like when I asked the principal to bring in one of the district’s special education specialists to assess two of my lowest readers, both of whom had fewer than 25 sight-words (words they could recognize on paper) in the 3rd grade, he did. She proceeded to hand one of the students a list of words that the child couldn’t read and tell her to write them over again. Then she went to gossip with the Principal. After explaining to him in gory detail, IN FRONT OF THE STUDENT, that she had just been “dealing with a case where a father had jumped off a roof nearby and committed double-suicide with his 8 year old daughter in his arms”, she collected the sheet with no words on it, patted the child on the head and left. No IEP was filed nor was I allowed to pursue further action through official channels (I lobbied the mother extensively on my own). I never asked for her to come back to assess the other student.
Our Union Rep was said to have tried to push another teacher down a flight of stairs. The same Union Rep, while I was tutoring a child, cursed out a fellow teacher in the room next door at the top of her lungs so the child I was tutoring could hear every word. When I went to address her about it, the other teacher had to restrain the Rep as she threatened to physically attack me. And when the cheating allegations were finally take up by city investigators, the same Union Rep was sent to a cushy desk job in the district offices. I hear that most of the people I’m referencing here are long gone now, and some of them actually got pushed out of the system, but how rare can this story really be given the pitiful results we see from so many of our nation’s poorest schools and how far the system goes to protect horrible teachers and administrators like the ones I worked with?
At the same time as all of this was happening, by the way, the few good teachers in the building often became beaten down and disillusioned. One of the best in my building was consistenly punished for trying to make her corner of the school a better place for learning. They put her in a basement corner with no ventilation, no windows and nothing but a 6-foot-high cubicle-style partition separating her from the other 5 classrooms in the basement. After fighting the good fight she went to teach in the suburbs. When I got a financial firm to donate 20 computers, the principal said he didn’t have the resources to get them setup for use and refused to allow them into the school. When I had my students stage a writing campaign to get the vacant lot behind the building turned into a playground, the principal wanted me silenced.
The saddest thing about the whole damn mess was that our K-3 kids still REALLY WANTED TO LEARN. Every day they came eager for knowledge. And every day this cabal of cynicism, racism and laziness did everything within their powers to drain it out of them. It was unreal. Don’t get me wrong. There were some good teachers there. And some well meaning, but poor teachers. But in many classrooms, the main lesson learned was that school became something to dread, many adults thought you were capable of very little, and some adults couldn’t be bothered to lift a finger.
I hope if any of the good, hard-working teachers who fought so hard to rid the school of this mess read this, they’ll know I’m not lumping them in with the rest. But the problem was, when I addressed the worst practices in the school at a staff meeting, the bad teachers laughed and the good teachers took it the hardest and thought I was criticizing them.
Thanks again for the survey. Let’s make these stories known.

(more…)

College Courses for High School Students: Bellevue, Washington

Bellevue College:

Running Start provides academically motivated students an opportunity to take college courses as part of their high school education.
Students may take just one class per quarter, or take all of their courses on the BC campus. If you are eligible for the program, you will earn both high school and college credit for the classes you take.
Classes taken on the college campus as part of the Running Start program are limited to “college level” courses (most classes numbered 100 or above qualify).
Tuition is paid for by the school district. Books, class related fees and transportation are the responsibility of the student.
Running Start was created by the Washington State Legislature in 1990 and is available at all community and technical colleges in the State of Washington.

Smart.
Related: The ongoing battle: Credit for Non-MMSD Courses.

The Dad Who Holds Schools to the Rules

Emily Alpert:

David Page says the problem is that parents are on their own. Teachers have a union. So do principals. School board members get to vote plans up or down and top administrators make decisions in the salmon-pink offices of San Diego Unified.
But parents are often too intimidated to speak up or too star-struck with school staffers to question them, Page said. Education is a world loaded with its own numbing lingo — categorical funding, supplement not supplant, program improvement — and it seems overwhelming to understand it, let alone to fight it.
“They think, ‘They make six figures and they’re educated. Who am I to second guess them?'” Page said.
Yet Page has done just that. If parents at the poorer schools in San Diego Unified did have a union, he might be their leader, with all the fans and foes that entails. Seventeen years after the father of six first walked into a parents’ meeting at Ross Elementary in Kearny Mesa, unsure of his rights and unfamiliar with the jargon, Page has become a human encyclopedia on the rules that govern funds for disadvantaged kids and a dogged fighter for parents in communities sometimes left out of decisions.
He is one of the few parents across the state that jets to Sacramento for meetings of the state Board of Education, pores over complex regulations on education spending, and explains it all to befuddled parents at the school district committee that oversees funds for children in poverty, which he has led for six years. Page also leads the nonprofit California Association of Compensatory Education and sits on the board of the Family Area Network, which advises the state on parent involvement.

‘Fast Forwarding to Designer Baby Era’

David Washburn:

Beyond the celebration of the 40-year-old lunar landing, the big science news this week came Thursday from a group of Chinese researchers who figured out how to grow healthy mice from mouse stem cells.
The breakthrough is a huge step for research into induced pluripotent, or iPS, stem cells, which is taking adult stem cells and converting them into embryonic stem cells. But the Chinese discovery is causing some to worry that we’re a lot closer to human cloning than we should be.
This story in Friday’s Los Angeles Times frames the debate well.

Pursuing an Academic Edge at Home

Joseph de Avila:

Kimberly Kauer was worried about her 6-year-old daughter’s math skills. Her school doesn’t assign homework, and Ms. Kauer wasn’t sure which math concepts her daughter fully understood.
To quell her fears, Ms. Kauer started her daughter on an online educational program for young children called DreamBox Learning. DreamBox uses interactive games to teach math and analyzes users’ progress as they complete lessons.
“It was really well-geared to her age,” says Ms. Kauer, a 38-year-old stay-at-home mom in Emerald Hills, Calif. “They really tailored their questions to meet her needs.” After monitoring her daughter’s progress, Ms. Kauer concluded that her daughter was up to par for her age.
DreamBox is one of a number of companies, with names like SmartyCard, Brightstorm and Grockit, that are pitching a new generation of online educational products aimed at supplementing students’ education at home. The programs, which parents pay for by subscription, target learners from kindergartners to high-school seniors. The companies hope their interactive programs will draw students wanting to get ahead at a lower cost than hiring a professional tutor.

Charter schools need a shout-out in Madison action plans

Scott Milfred:

Yet try to find any mention of charter schools in the Madison School District’s new strategic plan and you’ll feel like you’re reading a “Where’s Waldo?” book. You almost need a magnifying lens to find the one fleeting reference in the entire 85-page document. And the words “charter school” are completely absent from the strategic plan’s lengthy and important calls for action.
It’s more evidence that much of liberal Madison clings to an outdated phobia of charter schools. And that attitude needs to change.
Nearly 10 percent of Wisconsin’s public schools are charters. That ranks Wisconsin among the top five states. Yet Madison is below the national average of 5 percent.
Charter schools are public schools free from many regulations to try new things. Parents also tend to have more say.
Yet charters are held accountable for achievement and can easily be shut down by sponsoring districts if they don’t produce results within a handful of years.
One well-known Madison charter school is Nuestro Mundo, meaning “Our World” in Spanish. It immerses kindergartners, no matter their native language, in Spanish. English is slowly added until, by fifth grade, all students are bilingual. My daughter attends Nuestro Mundo.
It was a battle to get this charter school approved. But Nuestro Mundo’s popularity and success have led the district to replicate its dual-language curriculum at a second school without a charter.
The School Board has shot down at least two charter school proposals in recent years, including one for a “Studio School” emphasizing arts and technology.
Madison School Board President Arlene Silveira told me Friday she supports adding charter schools to the district’s action plans in at least two places: under a call for more “innovative school structures,” and as part of a similar goal seeking heightened attention to “diverse learning styles.”

I agree. I believe that diffused governance, in other words a substantive move away from the current top down, largely “one size fits all” governance model within the Madison public schools is essential.

Chicago Report: STILL LEFT BEHIND

Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago
June 2009
KEY FINDINGS 150K PDF
Most of Chicago’s students drop out or fail. The vast majority of Chicago’s elementary
and high schools do not prepare their students for success in college and beyond.
There is a general perception that Chicago’s public schools have been gradually
improving over time. However, recent dramatic gains in the reported number of CPS
elementary students who meet standards on State assessments appear to be due to
changes in the tests made by the Illinois State Board of Education, rather than real
improvements in student learning.
At the elementary level, State assessment standards have been so weakened that most
of the 8th graders who “meet” these standards have little chance to succeed in high
school or to be ready for college. While there has been modest improvement in real
student learning in Chicago’s elementary schools, these gains dissipate in high school.
The performance of Chicago’s high schools is abysmal—with about half the students
dropping out of the non-selective-enrollment schools, and more than 70% of 11th
grade students failing to meet State standards. The trend has remained essentially flat
over the past several years. The relatively high-performing students are concentrated
in a few magnet/selective enrollment high schools. In the regular neighborhood high
schools, which serve the vast preponderance of students, almost no students are
prepared to succeed in college.
In order to drive real improvement in CPS and fairly report performance to the public,
a credible source of information on student achievement is essential. Within CPS
today, no such source exists. CPS and the State should use rigorous national
standardized tests. Also, the Board of Education should designate an independent
auditor with responsibility for ensuring that published reports regarding student
achievement in CPS are accurate, timely and distributed to families and stakeholders
in an easily understood format.
Efforts to provide meaningful school choices to Chicago’s families must be aggressively
pursued–including expanding the number of charter and contract schools in
Chicago. Most of these schools outperform the traditional schools that their students
would otherwise have attended; and the choices that they offer parents will help spur
all schools in CPS to improve.

Politically Correct Speech at the Stanford Graduate School of Education

Jay Matthews:

Michele Kerr (she tells me it is pronounced “cur”) is a hard-working educator and Web surfer who is often mean to me. This is probably a good thing. When I post something stupid, Kerr–using her nom de Internet, “Cal Lanier“–is on me like my cat chasing a vole in the backyard.
Her acidic humor is so entertaining, however, and her command of the facts so complete, that I have come to look forward to her critiques. She tends to eviscerate me whenever I embrace anti-tracking or other progressive gospel preached in education schools these days, but I learn something each time.
I wish the supervisors of the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP) at that university’s School of Education had checked with me before they decided Kerr’s views and her blogging were inappropriate for a student in their program. They appeared to have decided her anti-progressive views were disrupting their classes, alienating other students and proving that she and Stanford were a bad fit. Kerr says they tried to stifle both her opinions and her blog, and threatened to withhold the Masters in Education she was working toward, based on their expressed fear that she was “unsuited for the practice of teaching.”
Kerr’s eventual triumph over such embarrassingly wrong-headed political correctness is a complicated story, but worth telling. In her struggle with STEP, she exposed serious problems in the way Stanford and, I suspect, other education schools, treat independent thinkers, particularly those who blog.
STEP retains the right to decide if a student is suited to teaching, and can deny even someone as smart and dedicated as Kerr, who has a splendid record as a tutor, a chance to work in the public schools.

A Research Article On “flexible grouping”

Via a kind reader’s email:

“States and Provinces and curricula around the world track students by age. This practice is so common that we do not think of it as tracking. With few exceptions, a six year old must go into first grade even if that six year old is not ready or was ready for the grade one year earlier” (Usiskin 98)
Introduction
One of the many challenges facing schools is the decision on how to allocate students to classrooms. Research confirms the empirical observations of many parents and educators that students learn at greatly varying rates (Walberg 1988). These different learning rates are explained by (among other things) differing learning styles, aptitudes and levels of motivation (NECTL 1994). Unfortunately for visions of “equal outcomes,” due to differences in understanding, among other things, these differences in learning rates tend to increase as the child moves through the educational system (Arlin, 1984, P. 67). Given the wide variations in knowledge, motivation, and aptitude, schools must choose methods of allocating students to classes, and curriculum to classes and students.
Unfortunately, school administrators face not only conflicting messages in regard to the educational implications of various decisions, but significant pressure to base decisions either partly or mainly on nonacademic factors(1) (Oakes 1994 a, b and Hastings, 1992 for example). Hastings declares ability grouping to be wrong as a “philosophic absolute” and declares its use to be “totally unacceptable.” The National Education Commission on Time and Learning, on the other hand, labels the act of providing the same amount of learning time to students who need varying amounts “inherently unequal” (94). They state “If we provide all students with the same amount of instructional time, we virtually guarantee inequality of achievement” (emphasis in original). The Draft for “Standards 2000′ from the NCTM (NCTM 98) calls for increased equity by exposing all students, not just the elite, to challenging mathematics. There is no apparent awareness that many students do not find existing materials, whether consistent with the 1989 standards or not, challenging.

Weighing School Backpacks

Tara Parker-Pope:

Last year, my daughter’s school backpack got so heavy, she would sometimes just drag it behind her rather than hoist it onto her shoulders. Backpacks with wheels are too bulky for her locker, so next year I’m thinking about buying an extra set of textbooks to keep at home.
In its latest rating of the most durable school backpacks, Consumer Reports has conducted its own survey to determine how much weight kids are carrying as a result of overloaded packs. The researchers visited three New York City schools and weighed more than 50 children’s backpacks. They found that kids in the 2nd and 4th grades are carrying about 5 pounds worth of homework and books. But once kids reach the 6th grade, the homework load gets heavier. On average, 6th graders in the study were carrying backpacks weighting 18.4 pounds, although some backpacks weighed as much as 30 pounds.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that a child’s backpack weigh no more than 10 to 20 percent of a child’s weight. Consumer Reports recommends keeping the weight closer to 10 percent of a child’s weight. But one Texas study found that most parents don’t check the weight of their child’s backpack. According to Consumer Reports:

Are teenagers more business savvy than 40-year-olds?

Financial Times:

THE EXECUTIVE
Don Williams
It is a rare joy to see such a stir caused by a document written by someone who resides in the real world and that isn’t based on ubiquitous, spurious statistics. It is terrifying that the glimpse of the bleeding obvious that is Matthew Robson’s report has senior executives going into meltdown. “Teenagers see adverts on websites as extremely annoying and pointless.” I’m gobsmacked! I thought we all went into rapture when screen infestations do their best to disrupt what you’re trying to do. Low price (or no price) seems to be critical to all aspects of teenage consumption . . . really? “Teenagers don’t use Twitter . . . tweets are pointless” – well actually, not just pointless, a smidgeon tragic unless you don’t have anything resembling a life. The near panic caused by Mr Robson beautifully demonstrates that industry is awash with people who try to impose old-world thinking, methods and tools on new-world technology and lifestyles. To make even basic decisions they surround themselves with reports, advisers, consultants and, scariest of all, research. The 15-year-old’s work proves there is a canyonesque gap in the market for a “common sense” consultancy.

For Difficult Kids, Choice Of Care Can Bring Rewards

Sue Shellenbarger:

Dorothy Flint knew soon after her son William was born that she had a difficult child. He cried often and nursed nonstop. He slept so poorly that Ms. Flint took him on midnight drives in the car to calm him. He had separation anxiety so severe that she rarely left him. “He was really a tough baby,” says the Crofton, Md., mother.
Later she found a silver lining. Ms. Flint took pains to choose an excellent child-care center for William, now 4, and he quickly surpassed other kids, sharing his toys and learning classroom rules. He wins praise from his teacher for his social skills. As high-maintenance as William was, Ms. Flint says, he has also been high-reward.
Working parents struggling with difficult children–marked by excessive crying, fussiness, emotional volatility, fear of strangers and clinginess–often worry about how they will fare in child care. Research has shown that sensitive, vulnerable kids can be at higher risk of problems later if they’re mistreated or face other adversity early.
But new studies are discovering an upside: these difficult babies also have a significantly higher chance of surpassing other kids later if placed in the right kind of child care. The findings offer new guidance for parents in predicting how child care is likely to affect a child.

Education 101: Taking charge of your child’s middle school education

Andrea Hermitt:

Middle School is where parents begin to lose touch with what is going in in their child’s education. The child is old enough to manage his or her own assignments, and also mature enough to suffer the consequences should they not follow through. There really is no need for the parent to continue to manage the students education, right? Wrong.
Middle school is also where students become more interested in having a social life and less interested in getting an education. Without the watchful eye of the parents, the student can begin a downhill spiral that the parents won’t be able to control.
Here are some things parents must do to take charge of a middle school child’s education:
Make your presence known in the school. Speak to teachers and administrators to find where they can use your talents within the school. Whether you have a job or not, make it a point to spend at least one day a month at the school, or perhaps a couple of long lunch breaks a month.

My Totally Unscientific Teacher Quality Survey

My survey:

Based on your experience working in a traditional public school serving primarily low-income and/or minority students, what percentage of the teachers you worked with were (the numbers in the three boxes must add up to 100):

Good/great (you would be happy to have your child in the class)
Fair, but improvement is possible (you would have reservations having your child in the class)
Horrible and unlikely to ever improve (you would NEVER permit your child to be in the class)

46 people responded and here were the results:
Good/great: 20%
Fair: 35%
Horrible: 45%
This is obviously a very skewed group of mostly TFA teachers in the worst schools, but nevertheless I’m shocked that the horrible number is so high. If this figure is even close to being right, then the problem is even bigger than I thought. I’ll have to think about the implications of this, but one obvious one is the enormous importance of changing union contracts (and other factors) that make it impossible to remove horrible teachers — and let’s be clear, everyone knows who they are. There may be some tough calls regarding whether to keep certain teachers in the “fair” category, but horrible ones who are unlikely to ever improve need to find another line of work — but, esp in this economy, they will fight to the death to keep their very nice jobs…
2) Here’s a comment from one person who responded to the survey:
Good/great: 50%
Fair: 30%
Horrible: 20%

I taught in NYC for 5 years, from 2002-2007; I taught 5th grade, all subjects, and I was not TFA, but was NYCTF. One quibble with your survey and its framing: I would not want my daughter in any classroom in my school, regardless of the teacher quality. The curriculum (Teacher’s College reading and writing; Everyday Math, virtually zero science, social studies, art and music) was either bad or nonexistent, and the social environment (harsh, chaotic) was not fit for any child. I agree that teacher quality is huge, but it’s not enough to overcome all other problems. Great schools are great schools when all or most of the moving parts (teachers, administrators, curriculum, accountability, environment, seriousness of purpose, parental involvement, et al) are working. Planes can fly if they lose an engine, even two. They can’t fly on one. At least not for very long.

Parent-Paid Aides Ordered Out of New York City Schools

Winnie Hu:

For years, top Manhattan public schools have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from parents to independently hire assistants to help teachers with reading, writing, tying shoelaces or supervising recess. But after a complaint by the city’s powerful teachers union, the Bloomberg administration has ordered an end to the makeshift practice.
Principals have been told that any such aides hired for the coming school year must be employees of the Department of Education, their positions included in official school budgets.
But such employees can command nearly double the pay of the independently hired assistants, and several schools on the Upper East Side either have told current employees they will probably not have jobs in the fall or have put off hiring new employees. That has incensed many parents, who see the aides less as a perk than as a necessity to cope with growing class sizes in well-regarded schools like the Lower Lab School for gifted children, where the average class size is now 28, and Public School 290, where broom closets are used as offices and the cafeteria doubles as a gym.
“The reason the teaching assistants are here is because they’ve been stuffing so many kids in these classes,” said Patrick J. Sullivan, co-president of the Parent-Teacher Association at the Lower Lab School (P.S. 77), where parents spend $250,000 a year on the teaching assistants. “Nobody wants to break any rules, but 28 is just too many kids for one teacher.”

An unsentimental education

Christopher Caldwell:

Long before the US began shedding millions of jobs last year, American politicians were obsessed with retraining people cast off by the global economy. “The average worker will change jobs six or seven times in a lifetime,” Bill Clinton said in an address to the Cleveland City Club in 1994. That was not much help: how do you train people for tomorrow’s jobs if you do not know what tomorrow’s jobs will be?
President Barack Obama’s call for $12bn (£7.4bn, €8.5bn) of investment in “community colleges” is evidence that the flux Mr Clinton alluded to is ending. Community colleges offer a range of short-term credentialing courses along with two-year and four-year degrees. They are where you go to become a dental hygienist, a cyber-security expert, a nurse or a solar-energy technician. If job-specific training is making more sense, then the job market is probably growing more predictable. The economy may be in a terrible rut, but we are, to a degree, re-entering the world of stable, credentialed work.
Community colleges now accommodate half the nation’s undergraduates. Enrolment has leapt by a million students in the past decade, to more than 6m. Most are funded by individual states, which have had to cut their budgets even as demand for spaces has risen, and no one has picked up the slack. The Chronicle of Higher Education notes that “community colleges receive less than one-third the level of federal support per full-time-equivalent student ($790) that public four-year colleges do ($2,600).”

Before College, Costly Advice Just on Getting In

Jacques Steinberg:

The free fashion show at a Greenwich, Conn., boutique in June was billed as a crash course in dressing for a college admissions interview.
Katherine Cohen has a Web site called ApplyWise that puts prospective college applicants through a 12-step presentation.
Yet the proposed “looks” — a young man in seersucker shorts, a young woman in a blue blazer over a low-cut blouse and short madras skirt — appeared better suited for a nearby yacht club. After Jennifer Delahunty, dean of admissions at Kenyon College, was shown photos of those outfits, she rendered her review.
“I burst out laughing,” she said.
Shannon Duff, the independent college counselor who organized the event, says she ordinarily charges families “in the range of” $15,000 for guidance about the application process, including matters far more weighty than just what to wear.
Ms. Duff is a practitioner in a rapidly growing, largely unregulated field seeking to serve families bewildered by the admissions gantlet at selective colleges.
No test or licensing is required to offer such services, and there is no way to evaluate the counselors’ often extravagant claims of success or experience. And Ms. Duff’s asking price, though higher than many, is eclipsed by those of competitors who may charge upwards of $40,000 — more than a year’s tuition at many colleges.

Online Education and its Enemies

Liam Julian:

Holly Bates, an eight-year-old Florida girl, has such bad allergies that being near nuts or nut-based products–or even being near someone who has recently eaten nuts–can trigger anaphylactic shock. With peanut peril ubiquitous, young Holly is not enrolled in a traditional public school; instead, she attends Florida Connections Academy, a full-time “virtual” school that she accesses from her home computer. Her mother, a former public school teacher, loves the program. “The curriculum is unbelievable,” she told the Tampa Tribune in 2007. “It would astound you, the progress these children make.”
The Sunshine State is something of a virtual education pioneer. Since the 2003-04 school year, Florida has partnered with two for-profit companies–Connections Academy and K12 Inc.–to provide pupils with the option of attending school online, full-time, for free. But years before that, Florida was promoting other types of virtual education. Florida Virtual School is a statewide program that allows students to take individual courses online, often in subjects not offered at their local school, like Latin or Macroeconomics. It began in 1997 as a small grant-based project with just 77 course enrollments. Today, Florida Virtual School is its own school district and has an annual budget near $100 million. In the 2008-09 school year, according to Education Next, some “84,000 students will complete 168,000 half-credit courses, a ten-fold increase since 2002-03.” A newly-minted Florida Virtual School Connections Academy, announced in August 2008, will further expand online learning options and access.

Joanne has more.

Virginia Home-Schoolers Can Seek State Aid

Washington Post:

Home-schoolers in Virginia are now eligible for state financial aid that they were previously not allowed to receive.
The Virginia Guaranteed Assistance Program, which provides need-based scholarships for tuition, fees and books at the state’s two- and four-year public institutions, required recipients to have graduated from high school with at least a 2.5 grade-point average.
The state’s approximately 30,000 home-schoolers were ineligible for the aid, which offered an average grant of $3,671 in the 2007-08 school year.
Under rules the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia approved this week, home-schoolers may qualify by submitting SAT scores of at least 900 and ACT scores of at least 19.

Stop Cyberbullying with Education

Larry Magid:

The first things you need to know about cyberbullying are that it’s not an epidemic and it’s not killing our children. Yes, it’s probably one of the more widespread youth risks on the Internet and yes there are some well publicized cases of cyberbullying victims who have committed suicide, but let’s look at this in context.
Bullying has always been a problem among adolescents and, sadly, so has suicide. In the few known cases of suicide after cyberbullying, there are other contributing factors. That’s not to diminish the tragedy or suggest that the cyberbullying didn’t play a role but–as with all online youth risk, we need to look at what else was going on in the child’s life. Even when a suicide or other tragic event doesn’t occur, cyberbullying is often accompanied by a pattern of offline bullying and sometimes there are other issues including long-term depression, problems at home, and self-esteem issues. And the most famous case of “cyberbullying”–the tragic suicide of 13-year-old Megan Meier–was far from typical. Cyberbullying is almost always peer to peer, but this was a case of an adult (the mom of one of Megan’s peers) being accused of seeking revenge on a child who had allegedly bullied her own child.

Teaching Kids About Money the Hard Way

Karen Blumenthal:

It’s getting harder for parents to raise financially independent young adults.
Many banks refuse to open individual checking accounts for 16- and 17-year-olds, requiring parents to jointly own the account, even if the youngsters have a job. Colleges urge parents to link their bank accounts or credit cards to the prepaid cash cards that double as their students’ ID cards, to ensure a regular flow of funds from the Bank of Mom and Dad.
And under the new credit-card law that goes into effect early next year–part of a broader move toward aggressive consumer protection–parents of those under 21 will have to agree to take responsibility for their kids’ credit cards unless the young applicants can show they have the income to qualify.
All of this seems to encourage parents to interfere with–and maybe even bail out–these young adults. And it comes at an age when the youngsters themselves should be taking on personal responsibility and making their own financial decisions.

A Privacy Law That Protects Students, and Colleges, Too

Chriss Herring:

A law designed to keep college students’ grades private often is used for a much different purpose — to shield universities from potentially embarrassing situations.
Some critics say a number of schools are deliberately misreading the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act in order to keep scandals and other unflattering news from hitting the media. “Some schools have good-faith misunderstandings of the law, but there are others that simply see this as a handy excuse to hide behind,” says Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, which provides student journalists with legal help.
Legal experts say part of the problem is that the law is loosely defined. In addition, the potential consequences of violating the law — namely, that schools would lose their federal funding — prompt university officials to be conservative in their decisions about releasing information.
Those complaints rankle advocates of student privacy, who say that, if anything, the three-decade-old law should be expanded. “Most of these kids are adults, and they should be able to make their own decisions,” says Daren Bakst, president of the Council on Law in Higher Education.

Connecticut Schools, Charters, Politics, Parents and the Achievement Gap

Sam Dillon:

Connecticut is another Northern state where achievement gaps are larger than in states across the South, the federal study shows. That is partly because white students in Connecticut score above the national average, but also because blacks there score lower, on average, than blacks elsewhere”.

This validates my personal belief, and something that I have been saying for several years now, that Connecticut does not have great public schools, rather, it has one of if not the highest percentages of households with 4-year and advanced college degrees (CT, NJ and MA are always at the top of this list). This high percentage of well educated households makes Connecticut’s public schools look good — it is the household that is the difference maker, not the public schools. To prove my point, why is it that not one DRG B school does not outperform just one DRG A school?…or just one DRG C school out perform just one DRG B school?…makes no sense if the school were in fact the difference maker. DRG = Demographic Reference Group which is how the Dept. of Ed. here in CT groups all of its school districts to rate performance and other statistical data. It is generally rated by median household income but size of the community and other socioeconomic factors are part of the equation too. A = the most wealthy communities (also the “best” schools) and it goes down form there.
…it is all about socio-economics not how great Connecticut’s public schools are, which they are not.
Connecticut’s high-performing, public charter schools are making a difference, and that is an objective statement based on proven data.
We should do everything in our powers to embrace the proven Achievement First (Amistad Academy) model and replicate it far and wide. Why it is being stiff-armed by our legislators and the teachers union is simply bewildering. But then again both have proven to put their interests (political careers and pay checks) first and Connecticut’s children second — the teachers union is particularly good at that.

Teaching Kids About Money the Hard Way

Karen Blumenthal:

It’s getting harder for parents to raise financially independent young adults.
Many banks refuse to open individual checking accounts for 16- and 17-year-olds, requiring parents to jointly own the account, even if the youngsters have a job. Colleges urge parents to link their bank accounts or credit cards to the prepaid cash cards that double as their students’ ID cards, to ensure a regular flow of funds from the Bank of Mom and Dad.
And under the new credit-card law that goes into effect early next year–part of a broader move toward aggressive consumer protection–parents of those under 21 will have to agree to take responsibility for their kids’ credit cards unless the young applicants can show they have the income to qualify.
All of this seems to encourage parents to interfere with–and maybe even bail out–these young adults. And it comes at an age when the youngsters themselves should be taking on personal responsibility and making their own financial decisions.

Weighing Price and Value When Picking a College

Sue Shellenbarger:

Facing shrunken savings and borrowing options, parents and students are making some tough trade-offs in choosing and paying for college, suggesting some shifting attitudes toward higher education may endure beyond the recession.
Old dreams of adult children earning degrees from elite, door-opening colleges or “legacy” schools attended by relatives are falling away in some families, in favor of a new pragmatism. Other parents and students are doing a tougher cost-benefit analysis of the true value of a pricey undergraduate degree. As parents wrestle privately with such emotional issues, many say they wish they’d begun years earlier to assess their values and priorities, long before their children’s college-decision deadline was upon them.
Mustafah Abdulaziz for The Wall Street Journal
Throughout her childhood, Sarah Goldstein imagined attending New York University, says her mother, Rose Perrizo of Sharon, Mass. Sarah’s grandmother is an NYU alum; Sarah lived near campus with her parents when she was small. “In her mind, Sarah was always headed there,” Ms. Perrizo says.

The statistics that colleges hate to share

Penelope Wang:

When you start searching for that perfect college for your child, you might think there’s plenty of information to help you with your decision. Just for starters, every college has a website that will give you all the essentials.
Take Stephens College, a private, four-year women’s school in Columbia, Missouri. A quick tour of its website will tell you that the college offers more than 50 major and minors, everything from English to event planning to equestrian science. Class sizes average just 13 students. Annual costs total $32,250, but nearly all students get some kind of financial aid. And the campus looks nice.
But what you won’t see without diligent searching is that half of Stephens students fail to graduate, even after six years. Not to pick on Stephens, which does mention that statistic deep in its website. Point is, little of the data that colleges provide really tell you much about the value of your investment: the quality of the education, the experience of the students, or how the graduates fare later in life. Instead parents have long accepted the value of the diploma on faith. And many assume that a college that charges $50,000 a year will give their child a better education than one that charges $25,000.

If granny would disapprove, don’t put it on the net

Rhymer Rigby:

No matter how many people come unstuck after posting inappropriate details of themselves on the internet, people just keep on doing it.
We had the case of Sir John Sawers, the UK’s incoming head of MI6 and his wife’s Facebook account. Some of the details we learnt about the new head spook were innocuous enough (he wears Speedos), others less so (the location of his flat and details of friends and family). He is not the only one. From Republicans making racist remarks to bankers slagging off their bosses, it is a long and sorry list.
“Everyone knows that a lot of companies make a beeline for Facebook when they’re looking at potential recruits,” says Charlotte Butterfield, managing director of Law Absolut, the legal recruitment firm. “It’s a form of due diligence and your profile on Facebook should be broadly the same as the person you present at interview.”

High Schools Seek to Curb Heat-Linked Sports Injuries

Laura Yao:

On a hot day last August, Max Gilpin, a high-school sophomore from Louisville, Ky., collapsed during a preseason football practice. Three days later, he died from complications of heatstroke. His coach, Jason Stinson, was later indicted for reckless homicide in the first known criminal case of its kind.
With high-school football season set to get under way in many parts of the country next month, Max’s story, which received widespread media attention, has spurred a nationwide debate about how far high schools should go to prevent heat-related injuries among their athletes.
Last month, the National Athletic Trainers’ Association, which represents accredited trainers with a background in sports medicine, issued new heatstroke-prevention guidelines for high schools. These included recommendations to limit the duration and intensity of practice sessions early in the season and in hot weather.

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.

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

22MB mp3 audio file. A summary of the survey can be seen here. The Board and Administration are to be commended for this effort. It will be interesting to see how this initiative plays out.

Fine Arts Task Force Report Discussion – Audio

The Madison School Board’s discussion last evening via a 42MB mp3 audio file. An interesting discussion, particularly with respect to the School District’s interaction with the community and the Teaching & Learning Department. Much more on the Fine Arts Task Force here.

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.

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.

Task force on Minn. high schools taking shape

AP:

A task force asked to suggest ways to design an accountability system for Minnesota high schools is seeking suggestions itself.
The panel created this spring by the Legislature is soliciting advice through July 15 on the key issues it should tackle.
From there, the task force plans to produce a report on high school assessments and accountability. Preliminary recommendations could be out this fall, and the goal is to deliver a final report to the state education commissioner and lawmakers by year’s end.

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.

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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”>:

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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.

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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:

Complete survey results can be found here [250K PDF]
Madison School Board discussion of this survey (mp3 audio)

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Drivers of Choice: Parents, Transportation, and School Choice

Paul Teske, Jody Fitzpatrick, Tracey O’Brien, via a kind reader’s email:

Transportation is clearly a consideration to be factored into any discussion of school choice. Yet we know very little about how much it matters in family’s decisions about their children’s school, and almost nothing about how much of a barrier it is to school choice, especially for low-income families. How far does the average family want their child to travel to school? Would they be as comfortable letting their younger children travel as far as they might a middle or high school student? What transportation options are available to low-income families? These are the kinds of questions we tried to address in this study, in order to obtain meaningful data to help shape school transportation policy.

This project first surveyed the landscape of transportation and school choices. It examined the density of large districts in the U.S. The project team contacted large school districts to find out their policies on transportation and choice, then examined district budgets to see how much they actually spend on transportation. Most importantly, the project surveyed families in two cities—Denver and Washington, D.C.—to find out their travel patterns and school choice options. The study breaks down that data, collected from households earning less than $75,000 in annual income, to determine how much transportation is a barrier to choice.

This report addresses the following questions:

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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.

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