School Information System
RSS Newsletter·2024 Referendum·Gell-Man Amnesia Effect

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.

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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.

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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.

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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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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:

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Everybody Hates The Teachers’ Unions Now

Mickey Kaus:

When Father Hesburgh throws down … How can we know when the tide of respectable opinion has decisively turned against the teachers’ unions? When a panel that includes Father Hesburgh, Birch Bayh. Bill Bradley, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Roger Wilkins goes medieval on them, saying their resistance to reforms designed to hold schools accountable has hurt “disadvantaged students” and led to “calcified systems in which talented people are deterred from applying or staying as teachers …”
Here are two undiplomatic grafs from the report’s final page:

The unions have battled against the principle that schools and education agencies should be held accountable for the academic progress of their students. They have sought to water down the standards adopted by states to reflect what students should know and be able to do. They have attacked assessments designed to measure the progress of schools, seeking to localize decisions about test content so that the performance of students in one school or community cannot be compared with others. They have resisted innovative ways-such as growth models-to assess student performance.
In their attack on education reform, the national unions have often been unconstrained by considerations of propriety and fairness. They have sought to inject weakening amendments in appropriations bills, hoping that they would prevail if no hearings were held and the public was unaware of their efforts. They have used the courts to launch an attack on education reform, employing arguments that could imperil many federal assistance programs going back to the New Deal. They have failed to inform their own members of the content of federal reform laws.

Locally, it will be interesting to see what substantive changes, if any, come out of the current Madison School District / Madison Teachers, Inc. bargaining.

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

The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation:

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

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

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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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More Rigorous Requirements for Teacher Education Will Encourage Programs To Emphasize Clinical Training, Focus on Critical Needs of P-12 Schools

The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, via a kind reader’s email:

As part of the first major revision of teacher education requirements in 10 years, i nstitutions seeking the NCATE seal of approval must either demonstrate that they are on track to reach an “excellent” level of performance, rather than remain at an “acceptable level,” or make transformative changes in key areas, such as:

  • strengthening the clinical focus of their programs to better prepare educators to meet the needs of today’s P-12 students and foster increases in student learning
  • demonstrating the impact of their programs and graduates on P-12 student learning
  • increasing knowledge about what works in teacher education to improve P-12 student learning, using a research and development strategy to build better knowledge and help institutions use that knowledge to improve programs, and
  • addressing critical needs of schools, such as recruiting talented teachers and bolstering teacher retention.

The new accreditation strategy, approved by the NCATE Executive Board last month, creates two alternative pathways to accreditation. The Continuous Improvement track raises the target level of performance beyond the “acceptable” level. The second pathway, the Transformation Initiative track, encourages institutions to build the base of evidence in the field about what works in teacher preparation and help the P-12 schools they serve address major challenges, from raising student achievement to retaining teachers.

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Learning the ropes: Program helps teens transition to high school

Gayle Worland:

On Monday, it was all about maneuvering through a seemingly endless maze of high school hallways. By Tuesday, it was about soaring through the air on a zip line.
It was day two of LIFE, or Learning is for Everyone, a pilot program launched this summer for graduates of Whitehorse and Sennett middle schools. In the fall, the teens will enter La Follette High School as ninth-graders — both statistically and anecdotally one of the toughest periods of a student’s school career.
“Ninth grade can be a really rocky, challenging transition for many students,” said Julie Koenke, a grant communications coordinator for the Madison School District who helped write the curriculum for LIFE. “They’re not always sure of the change in expectations for them around academics. There’s a different school culture, and just the largeness of what a high school can be.”
LIFE — which offers students everything from scavenger hunts at La Follette to learn their way around the school to an athletic ropes course, classes on time management and visits to MATC and UW-Madison — is part of a trend: High schools are reaching out to freshmen to keep them in school even before the school year begins.

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Newark Starts a Summer School Aimed at Advanced Placement

Winnie Hu:

Advanced Placement classes do not begin at Science Park High School until September, but Cristiana De Oliveira will spend many a summer day sitting behind a desk in A.P. calculus for five hours rather than lounging by a swimming pool.
Cristiana is one of 335 students signed up for Newark’s new A.P. Summer Institute, in which A.P. courses in calculus, biology, United States history and English language and literature each get an intensive two-week introduction, paid for with $300,000 in federal grants.
Intended to help increase enrollment in the special courses as well as student performance, the new program, which starts on Monday, is expected to reach more than half the students taking Advanced Placement classes this fall in the 40,000-student Newark school district.
“We’re in a stressful environment in school, and if we can start now, it will be a lot easier,” said Cristiana, 17, a senior who will be getting up at 6:30 a.m. and riding two public buses to reach the high school for the summer program.

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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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Schoolboy dream grows up

Joathan Moules:

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

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Dear Plagiarist

G. Thomas Couser:

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

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How I Spent My Summer: Hacking Into iPhones With Friends

Yukari Iwatani Kane:

Like many teenagers, Ari Weinstein spends his summers riding his bike and swimming. This year, the 15-year-old had another item on his to-do list: Foil Apple Inc.’s brightest engineers and annoy chief executive Steve Jobs.
Ari is part of a loose-knit group of hackers that has made it a mission to “jailbreak” Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. The term refers to installing unapproved software that lets people download a range of programs, including those not sanctioned by Apple.
Since Apple began selling its latest iPhone 3GS on June 19, Ari and six online cohorts spent hours a day probing the new product for security holes. This weekend, one of the member of the group, dubbed the Chronic Dev Team, released the jailbreaking software they’ve been working on. Ari says the program is a test version with some bugs, but that users have successfully downloaded it. A quarter-million people have visited the site, he says.
“Coding and testing things that may or may not work, and figuring things out, is a really rewarding experience,” says Ari, a Philadelphia resident who began hacking when he was 11.

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6 Great Tools for LSAT, SAT and GMAT Test Prep

Dana Oshiro:

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

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Q & A With US Education Secretary Arne Duncan

Chicago Tribune:

ucation Secretary Arne Duncan recently answered questions about his goals and relationship with the business community. An edited transcript:
QWhy include business in the policy debate about public education?
AWe all need to work together on this stuff, business leaders and educators. Everyone’s mutual interests are absolutely aligned.
QBusiness leaders want reform but don’t want to pay for it, right?
ANo; there’s been unbelievable generosity, not just in resources but in ideas. We’ve had a great relationship with the Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable. I’ve met with a number of CEOs.

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

Nadia Gilani:

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

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Peer Pressure

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
6 July 2009
We make frequent use of the influence of their high school peers on many of our students. We have peer counseling programs and even peer discipline systems, in some cases. We show students the artistic abilities of their peers in exhibitions, concerts, plays, recitals, and the like.
Most obviously, we put before our high school students the athletic skills and performances of their peers in a very wide range of meets, matches, and games, some of which, of course, are better attended than others.
While some high schools still have just one valedictorian, fellow students have little or no idea what sort of academic work the student who is first in her class has done. Academic scholarships may be announced, but it is quite impossible for peers to see the academic work for which the scholarship has been awarded. Here again, the contrast with athletics is clear.
We show high school students the artistic, athletic, and other examples of the outstanding efforts and accomplishments of their peers without seeming to worry that such examples will send their peers into unmanageable depressions or cause them to give up their own efforts to do their best.
When it comes to academic achievements, on the other hand, we do seem to worry that they will have a harmful effect if they are shown to other students. I am not quite sure how that attitude got its hold on us, but I do have some comments from authors whose papers I have published, on their reaction to seeing the exemplary academic work of their peers:
“When a former history teacher first lent me a copy of The Concord Review, I was inspired by the careful scholarship crafted by other young people. Although I have always loved history passionately, I was used to writing history papers that were essentially glorified book reports…As I began to research the Ladies’ Land League, I looked to The Concord Review for guidance on how to approach my task…In short, I would like to thank you not only for publishing my essay, but for motivating me to develop a deeper understanding of history. I hope that The Concord Review will continue to fascinate, challenge and inspire young historians for years to come.”
North Central High School (IN) Class of 2005
“The opportunity that The Concord Review presented drove me to rewrite and revise my paper to emulate its high standards. Your journal truly provides an extraordinary opportunity and positive motivation for high school students to undertake extensive research and academic writing, experiences that ease the transition from high school to college.”
Thomas Worthington High School (OH) Class of 2008
“Thank you for selecting my essay regarding Augustus Caesar and his rule of the Roman Republic for publication in the Spring 2009 issue of The Concord Review. I am both delighted and honored to know that this essay will be of some use to readers around the world. The process of researching and writing this paper for my IB Diploma was truly enjoyable and it is my hope that it will inspire other students to undertake their own research projects on historical topics.”
Old Scona Academic High School, Edmonton, Alberta, (Canada) Class of 2008
“In the end, working on that history paper, inspired by the high standard set by The Concord Review, reinvigorated my interest not only in history, but also in writing, reading and the rest of the humanities. I am now more confident in my writing ability, and I do not shy from difficult academic challenges. My academic and intellectual life was truly altered by my experience with that paper, and the Review played no small role! Without the Review, I would not have put so much work into the paper. I would not have had the heart to revise so thoroughly.”
Isidore Newman School (LA) Class of 2003
“At CRLHS, a much-beloved history teacher suggested to me that I consider writing for The Concord Review, a publication that I had previously heard of, but knew little about. He proposed, and I agreed, that it would be an opportunity for me to pursue more independent work, something that I longed for, and hone my writing and research skills in a project of considerably broader scope than anything I had undertaken up to that point.”
Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School (MA) Class of 2003
Now, whenever a counterintuitive result–like this enthusiasm for a challenge–is found, there is always an attempt to limit the damage to our preconceptions. “This is only a tiny fringe group (of trouble-makers, nerds, etc.)” or “most of our high school students would not respond with interest to the exemplary academic work of their peers.” The problem with those arguments is that we really don’t know enough. We haven’t actually tried to see what would happen if we presented our high school students with good academic work done by their more diligent peers. Perhaps we should consider giving that experiment a serious try. I have, as it happens, some good high school academic work to use as examples in such a trial…

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What it’s Like to Teach Black Students

Marty Nemko:

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

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Like Her Subject, Math Teacher’s Dedication and Conviction Were Absolute

Lauren Wiseman:

Doris Broome DeBoe, who became one of the District’s leading math teachers, said she was drawn to the subject because it was absolute. Where other subjects were subjective, she said, math was exact.
“Once you understand what you are doing, there is no deviation,” she said.
As a teacher, she believed in endless math drills, nightly homework and practice. She described herself not as a harsh instructor but as one who thought algebra is “a skill like ball playing and piano playing. Once you learn the basics, practice is necessary to ensure mastery.”
She said every child had the potential to do well in class. “My best dog is the underdog,” she told her students.
Her conviction motivated many students. Michael Bell, a student at Bertie Backus Middle School in the mid-1970s, said Mrs. DeBoe was the inspiration for creating his math preparation company, Acaletics, which helps develop curriculums and training programs within the Florida public school system. His company follows the same basic formula as Mrs. DeBoe’s teaching: Practice makes perfect.

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Learning-community dorm: Cool or not cool?

Deborah Ziff:


There are dorms that are popular on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus: Elizabeth Waters, the scenic hall in the center of campus, or the new Ogg, which has air conditioning and walk-in closets.
And then, for whatever reason, there are the ones that aren’t. Whether it be Witte, Cole, Kronshage, or another, officials say they’re never sure which dorms will drop to the bottom of the list on any given year, falling victim to the whims of 17- and 18-year-olds.
In particular, the university has had some trouble enticing students to live in dorms they label as learning communities, or those that bring faculty, staff, and unique seminars into dorm life.
There are two full dorms on campus with this mission — Chadbourne and Bradley — plus floors with special interest themes like women in science and engineering, entrepreneurship, international interests and more.
Last year, UW-Madison started a program that rewards students for picking these halls by allowing them to choose their room online, a la seat selection with the airlines. The fate of other students are left to a computer program’s random picks.

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Number of Black Male Teachers Belies Their Influence

Avis Thomas-Lester:

Tynita Johnson had attended predominantly black schools in Prince George’s County for 10 years when she walked into Will Thomas’s AP government class last August and found something she had never seen.
“I was kind of shocked,” said Tynita, 15, of Upper Marlboro. “I have never had a black male teacher before, except for P.E.”
Tynita’s experience is remarkably common. Only 2 percent of the nation’s 4.8 million teachers are black men, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In fact, Thomas, a social studies teacher at Dr. Henry A. Wise Jr. High School, never had a black teacher himself.
“I love teaching, and I feel like I am needed,” said Thomas, 33, of Bowie. “We need black male teachers in our classrooms because that is the closest connection we are able to make to children. It is critical for all students to see black men in the classrooms involved in trying to make sure they learn and enjoy being in school.”

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A parent’s plea on teaching

Michael Laser, via a kind reader’s email:

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

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Seniority vs. Effectiveness

Seattle: Support Great Teachers:

As a Seattle community, we can and must speak up to improve the effectiveness of every school, in every neighborhood.
We, the undersigned, ask our leaders to do the following:
1. Delay the immediate assignment of replacement teachers until the effects of attrition and retirement are understood. Keep successful teams intact.
2. In the new contract between the teachers’ association and the school district, change the layoff policy to prioritize effectiveness. Put in place a system that promotes, rewards and protects teamwork, expertise, best teaching practices and each site’s unique programmatic needs.
3. Ensure that all kids have consistent access to highly effective teachers.
4. Give our principals the tools they need to support and retain effective teachers within their individual schools.

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US Education Secretary Duncan Advocates Merit Pay at NEA

Stephen Sawchuck:

To answer the question I’m sure you all have: Yes. Teachers booed and hissed during some of the performance-pay portions of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s speech. And they weren’t overwhelmingly happy with the talk of reform to seniority and tenure systems, either.
But some of the stories I’ve seen around the Web on the speech are billing this as “tough love” for the teachers’ unions. There was some of that, sure, but President Barack Obama and Duncan clearly telegraphed their intentions to push hard on these issues in the stimulus legislation, and that passed months ago.
So there was an element to this whole proceeding that came off as a little bit rehearsed to me. I wonder if Duncan had prepared his seemingly ad-libbed line for when the booing started: “You can boo; just don’t throw any shoes, please.” And I’m pretty sure most of the delegates had gotten their vocal chords ready, too.
To me, the biggest news out of the speech is that the administration is increasingly emphasizing student achievement as one measure of teacher pay or evaluation, although not the only measure. That is a big issue, and it’s one that helped sink congressional attempts to renew the No Child Left Behind Act in 2007.

Joanne has more along with Thomas.
Libby Quaid:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan challenged members of the National Education Association Thursday to stop resisting the idea of linking teacher pay to student achievement.
It was Duncan’s first speech at the union’s annual meeting, a gathering at which President Barack Obama was booed when he mentioned the idea of performance pay last year. By contrast, Duncan drew raucous applause and only a smattering of boos.
“I came here today to challenge you to think differently about the role of unions in public education,” Duncan told the 3.2 million-member union in San Diego.
“It’s not enough to focus only on issues like job security, tenure, compensation, and evaluation,” he said. “You must become full partners and leaders in education reform. You must be willing to change.”

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

Douglas Belkin:

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

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Education in America and Britain: Learning Lessons from Private Schools

The Economist:

The right and wrong ways to get more poor youngsters into the world’s great universities
LOTS of rich people and crummy state schools, especially in the big cities where well-off folk tend to live: these common features of America and Britain help explain the prominence in both countries of an elite tier of private schools. Mostly old, some with fat endowments, places like Eton, Harrow and Phillips Exeter have done extraordinarily well. Fees at independent schools have doubled in real terms over the past 25 years and waiting lists have lengthened. Even in the recession, they are proving surprisingly resilient (see article). A few parents are pulling out, but most are soldiering on and plenty more are clamouring to get their children in.
Row, row together
All sorts of class-based conspiracy theories exist to explain the success of such institutions, but the main reason why they thrive in a more meritocratic world is something much more pragmatic: their ability to get people into elite universities. For Britain and America also have the world’s best universities. Look at any of the global rankings and not only do the Ivy League and Oxbridge monopolise the top of the tree, British and (especially) American colleges dominate most of the leading 100 places. This summer graduates will struggle to find jobs, so a degree from a world-famous name like Berkeley or the London School of Economics will be even more valuable than usual. The main asset of the private schools is their reputation for getting children into those good universities.

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Massachusetts Teachers Union Votes Down Advanced Placement Grant

Mike Antonucci:

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

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

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

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

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Reroute The Pre-K Debate!

Andy Rotherham:

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

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

Tom Foremski:

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

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38,000 Hong Kong Students Receive A-level results

Simpson Cheung:

Over 38,000 Hong Kong students received their A-level results on Tuesday morning – in one of the most eagerly anticipated but stressful days for young people in the territory.
The Examination Authority said this year there were 38,647 students sitting the A-level exams.
Of these, 8,859 were private candidates and 9,711 were repeating the exams. While most are secondary school pupils, some are also mature students. The exams allow people to enter university.
A total of 17,744 students obtained minimum qualifications for university – a rise of 174 over last year, the authority said.
But it said there were only 14,500 government-funded undergraduate places available at universities. This means 3,244 students will have to attend other tertiary institutions.

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The Library of Congress on iTunes U

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

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

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

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HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?

Lera Boroditsky:

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

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

Bill Kauffman:

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

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Animal House at 30: College students find new ways to channel their inner Bluto.

EE Smith:

When Animal House first came out just over 30 years ago, it dominated the cultural landscape. College students were nostalgic for the “raunchy, pre-1960s undergraduate ideal,” says Peter Rollins, who has been studying pop-culture academically for over 30 years. Mr. Rollins, who attended Dartmouth in the 1960s, says that students back then tried to live “the fantasy” on their own campuses. Some still do, taking Bluto’s counsel to heart: “My advice to you is to start drinking heavily.”
Take Alpha Delta, the Dartmouth College fraternity that the infamous Delta house of the movie is based on. The movie, co-written by Dartmouth graduate and Alpha Delta brother Chris Miller, still inspires some of the fraternity’s traditions today.
In spring 2008, a band covering Otis Day and the Knights played on Alpha Delta’s front lawn to an audience of boozers, brawlers and, probably, future U.S. senators. This past spring, Alpha Delta organized an Animal House-themed party with the preppy brothers Sigma Alpha Epsilon, the inspiration for the sadomasochistic Omega house in the film. And on any given Friday night, it’s not just beer making the basement floor of Alpha Delta sticky. Paying tribute to the movie that made their fraternity famous, the brothers of Alpha Delta relieve themselves in plain sight along their basement wall.

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

The Bard of Berkeley:

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

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My Son’s Gamble

Lucy Ferriss:

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

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Is Wisconsin state-of-the-art for K-12 science and math education?

Anneliese Dickman:

The Public Policy Forum’s latest report, released today, finds that of the 10 career clusters predicted to grow the most over the next five years, seven include occupations requiring strong backgrounds in science, math, technology, or engineering (STEM). Of the 10 specific jobs predicted to be the fastest growing in the state, eight require STEM skills or knowledge and six require a post-secondary degree.
Do Wisconsin’s state educational policies reflect this growing need for STEM-savvy and skilled workers? Are Wisconsin education officials focusing on STEM in a coherent and coordinated way? Our new report probes those issues by examining state workforce development data and reviewing state-level policies and standards that impact STEM education.
We present several policy options that could be considered to build on localized STEM initiatives and establish a greater statewide imperative to prioritize STEM activities in coordination with workforce needs. Those include:

Amy Hetzner has more.

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Critical Likability

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

(more…)

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Perfect Failure
Commencement Address to Graduating Class of the Buckley School

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

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

(more…)

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Note to Union: Don’t Mess With Success at This High-Achieving Charter Middle School

Jay Matthews:

Sometime last year, while negotiating a teacher contract for the KIPP Ujima Village charter middle school in Baltimore, founder Jason Botel pointed out that his students, mostly from low- income families, had earned the city’s highest public school test scores three years in a row. If the union insisted on increasing overtime pay, he said, the school could not afford the extra instruction time that was a key to its success, and student achievement would suffer.
Botel says a union official replied: “That’s not our problem.”
Such stories heat the blood of union critics. It is, they contend, a sign of how unions dumb down public education by focusing on salaries, not learning.
Baltimore Teachers Union President Marietta English, who was at the meeting, denied Botel’s account. But, she added, teacher salaries and working conditions are her priority as a negotiator. I think the union leader is right.

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

Carla Rivera:

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

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Grad Guid 2009

Washington Post:

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

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In Uncertain Times, Valedictorians Look Ahead

Lizette Alvarez:

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

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Can Charter-School Execs Help Failing Public Schools?

Gilbert Cruz:

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

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Charter Schools Win a High-Profile Convert: Boston Mayor

Jon Keller:

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

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A special report on ageing populations: Suffer the little children

The Economist:

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

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SIS Interview: University of Wisconsin Education Professor Adam Gamoran



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

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

Howard Blume:

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

Jerry Pournelle has more.

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Evanston Township High School Board Stresses Rigor in School Improvement Plan

This is an interesting read (688K PDF).

RACE AND ACHIEVEMENT
Rigor Recommendation: Develop a clear, consistent operational/working definition of rigor to be used at ETHS.
Supporting Detail:

  • Communicate the definition of rigor to all ETHS stakeholders. (Means of communication to include, e.g., ETHS website/newsletters and displaying definition of rigor in every classroom and in other locations.)
  • Ensure a common understanding of rigor by other means, including providing opportunities for all ETHS stakeholders to discuss and better understand the meaning of rigor and what it entails in different ETHS departments, the different expectations associated with rigor by different ETHS stakeholders, and the varying responsibilities of ETHS stakeholders to ensure that rigor is experience by students.
  • Identify the components of a rigorous classroom and provide illustrations thereof for each ETHS department, including curriculum/assignments, instructional techniques, behavioral expectations, and classroom dynamics/interaction.
  • Ensure that rigor is provided and experienced in ETHS classrooms by means of classroom observations conducted by outside experts andlor by other appropriate means.
  • Create and utilize diagnostics to monitor/assess the extent to which rigor actually is being provided at ETHS, to enable teachers to improve the rigor of their classes, and to identify areas where other improvement(s) may be needed. Such diagnostics should include, e. g., assessments that teachers can use in their classrooms to evaluate students’ experience of rigor and other questionnaires to be completed by students.

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Who Are We as Americans?

Nat Hentoff:

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

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

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

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

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The New Student Excuse?

Scott Jaschik:

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

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School of the Future: Lessons in failure

Meris Stansbury:

When it opened its doors in 2006, Philadelphia’s School of the Future (SOF) was touted as a high school that would revolutionize education: It would teach at-risk students critical 21st-century skills needed for college and the work force by emphasizing project-based learning, technology, and community involvement. But three years, three superintendents, four principals, and countless problems later, experts at a May 28 panel discussion hosted by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) agreed: The Microsoft-inspired project has been a failure so far.
Microsoft points to the school’s rapid turnover in leadership as the key reason for this failure, but other observers question why the company did not take a more active role in translating its vision for the school into reality. Regardless of where the responsibility lies, the project’s failure to date offers several cautionary lessons in school reform–and panelists wondered if the school could use these lessons to succeed in the future.

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Tax Credits, Not Vouchers, Are Keeping School Choice a Viable Option

Adam Schaeffer:

Many school choice supporters are discouraged after having suffered a series of setbacks on the voucher front, ranging from the loss of Utah’s nascent voucher program last year to the recent death sentence handed to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. A rambling and inaccurate article in the normally supportive City Journal got the chorus of naysayers rolling more than a year ago with the cry “school choice isn’t enough.”
The bright spot for vouchers in recent years has been the success of special-needs programs. Yet the Arizona Supreme Court ruled recently that school vouchers for disabled and foster children violate the state constitution, which forbids public money from aiding private schools.
Naturally, the pessimists and opponents of choice are forecasting the death of the voucher movement. They’re wrong, because there never was a voucher movement to begin with. It has always been movement for educational freedom, and it is still going strong.
Over the past several years, there has been a gradual shift in focus from vouchers to an alternative mechanism: education tax credits. Illinois, Minnesota and Iowa already provide families with tax credits to offset the cost of independent schooling for their own kids. Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona and three other states provide tax credits for donations to nonprofit scholarship organizations that subsidize tuition for lower-income families.

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A Semantic Hijacking”

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

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

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Rigor Reduction in Sports? An NBA Player Speaks Out!

Kevin Clark:

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


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



An AAU official declined to comment for this article.



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



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

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

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American IT grads unprepared and unemployable: Indian CEO Vineet Nayar

Richi Jennings:

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

via Lou Minatti.

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ABC’s and PhD’s: Towards a New Normal

Liz Stockwell:

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

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Pearson Gets Stakes In Indian Education, Including a Tutoring Service for US Students

Ketaki Gokhale:

Separately, Pearson said it will also buy a 17% stake in TutorVista, a Bangalore-based online tutoring company that links Indian tutors with U.S. students.
TutorVista will issue new shares to Pearson as part of its third round of fundraising. It has already received funding from Manipal Educational and Medical Group and private equity fund LightSpeed Venture Partners.
Pearson says its stake in TutorVista will strengthen its position as a supplier of education tools in the U.S., TutorVista’s core market.

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Do charter schools work?

The Economist:

AMERICA’S universities are the best in the world, but the kindest verdict on its schools is “could do better”. It spends enough on them–around the rich-world average of 3.8% of GDP–but its pupils do poorly in tests of reading, writing and mathematics, and too many drop out before completing school. Teaching attracts few ambitious and able graduates; school leaders have little autonomy. The solution, to free-marketeers, seems obvious. Give taxpayers’ money not to a state-run monopoly, but to independent schools.
Since Minnesota started the experiment in 1991, most states have introduced independent, or charter, schools in some form. Evaluations have been broadly positive, but their enemies, including the politically powerful teachers’ unions, can fairly claim that more research is needed. Do charter schools’ pupils do better at tests because they have been coached intensively at the expense of a broad education? Do charters mean the most motivated students cluster in a few schools, to the detriment of the majority? Do they kick out–or coax out–the toughest to teach?

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Students Without Borders

Maria Glod:

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

Related: Credit for non-Madison School District Courses.

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The economic cost of the US education gap

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

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

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Court Favors Parents in Battle Over Special-Education Private School Tuition

Robert Barnes & Nelson Hernandez:

By a 6 to 3 vote, the court settled an emotional and contentious issue that has divided frustrated parents and financially strapped school officials, often ending in legal battles. In writing the opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens said Congress intended for the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act to provide an appropriate educational experience for all children, no matter whether they had ever received special-education services from a school system.
The issue has emerged as one of the fastest-growing components of local education budgets, threatening to “seriously deplete public education funds,” according to a brief filed by the nation’s urban school districts.
Local school systems in the Washington area spend millions of dollars each year on private school reimbursement. And the D.C. public schools allocated $7.5 million of this year’s $783 million budget just for the legal costs of hearing officers or judges to decide whether the system can provide appropriate services for children with disabilities.

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Gender gap in maths driven by social factors, not biological differences

Ed Yong:

History has had no shortage of outstanding female mathematicians, from Hypatia of Alexandria to Ada Lovelace, and yet no woman has ever won the Fields medal – the Nobel prize of the maths world. The fact that men outnumber women in the highest echelons of mathematics (as in science, technology and engineering) has always been controversial, particularly for the persistent notion that this disparity is down to an innate biological advantage.
AdaLovelace.jpgNow, two professors from the University of Wisconsin – Janet Hyde and Janet Mertz – have reviewed the strong evidence that at least in maths, the gender gap is down to social and cultural factors that can help or hinder women from pursuing the skills needed to master mathematics.
The duo of Janets have published a review that tackles the issue from three different angles. They considered the presence of outstanding female mathematicians. Looking beyond individuals, they found that gender differences in maths performance don’t really exist in the general population, with girls now performing as well as boys in standardised tests. Among the mathematically talented, a gender gap is more apparent but it is closing fast in many countries and non-existent in others. And tellingly, the size of the gap strongly depends on how equally the two sexes are treated.

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Girls vs. Boys at Math

Joyce Gramza:

Are men naturally better at math than women or is that just an out-dated stereotype? When former Harvard president Larry Summers said publicly in 2005 that men are innately better at math, many women were outraged. So a couple of women scientists decided to research it. This ScienCentral News video explains their report published this week.

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NONRESIDENT TUITION EXEMPTIONS FOR CERTAIN UNDOCUMENTED WISCONSIN PERSONS

via email a kind reader’s email:

[LFB Paper 812]
Governor/Joint Finance: Provide that a person who is a citizen of another country is exempt from nonresident tuition if that person meets all of the following requirements: (a) the person graduated from a Wisconsin high school or received a high school graduation equivalency declaration from this state; (b) the person was continuously present in this state for at least three years following the first day of attending a Wisconsin high school or immediately preceding the receipt of a declaration of equivalency of high school graduation; and (c) the person enrolls in a UW System institution and provides the institution with an affidavit that the person has filed or will file an application for a permanent resident visa with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services as soon as the person is eligible to do so. Specify that this provision would first apply to persons who enroll for the semester or session following the bill’s effective date.
Please make the call!
Please call your legislators today.
To locate your legislators online, visit:
http://www.legis.wisconsin.gov/w3asp/waml/waml.aspx
You can also call the legislative hotline at 1-800-362-9472
Thank you for your participation to pass the tuition bill
Sincerely
Rafael Gomez

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

Mitchell Landsberg:

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

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In Setbacks, Finding Motivation

Ralph Blumenthal:

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

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Judge orders search for Milwaukee students in need of special education

Alan Borsuk:

A federal judge has ordered Milwaukee Public Schools to launch a wide search for students who didn’t get special education services they should have gotten between 2000 and 2005 and to figure out what needs to be done to make that up to them.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Aaron Goodstein ordered that someone from outside the system be hired to monitor work on providing education services to compensate the students or former students involved because MPS has not shown it will adequately remedy its problems in special education on its own.
Goodstein’s decision earlier this month was another step in a lawsuit that dates to 2001. In earlier decisions, he ruled that MPS had denied students their rights in the past and ordered major changes in how MPS deals with deciding whether children are entitled to special education help. The process of making those changes is under way.

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British schools told to scrap ‘i before e’

UPI:

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

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Do Schools Need More PE Time?

Nancy Armour:

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

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Where Kids Learn All About The Bulls and the Bears

Candice Lee Jones:

Long division or long stock position? Both are part of the curriculum at Chicago’s Ariel Community Academy, a public school sponsored by Ariel Investments, where the kids are managing real-life portfolios.
Each first-grade class is given $20,000 to seed a portfolio. At first, the money is invested on their behalf as they study the savings-and-investment curriculum, a joint project of Ariel Investments and Nuveen Investments.
Finance classes start with counting coins. By sixth grade, students take more control of their portfolio.
Teacher Connie Moran says students usually choose to invest in names they recognize — Nike, Target, McDonald’s. And yes, their investments are down just like yours. Between March 31, 2008, and March 31, 2009, class portfolios fell an average of about 40 percent.

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New Era at Hawaiian School of Hard Knocks

Brandon O’Malley:

Hawaii conjures up images of palm-fringed beaches and tropical tranquility, but when Gail Awakuni joined James Campbell High School as principal in 2000, it was a place of gang fights, hoodlums and educational failure. The 2,000-pupil comprehensive school was bottom in the state.
“We had violence, the highest non-graduation rate of the state, the highest pregnancy rate, the highest number of dropouts,” she says. “In our freshman class, 350 were being detained: they weren’t being promoted from ninth to 10th grade. It was out of control.”
Yet by 2007, Ms Awakuni and her staff had pushed graduation rates up from 86.4 per cent in 1999 to 98.9 per cent and the numbers going on to post-high school education from 57 per cent to 74 per cent. The amount earned by students in scholarships at colleges and universities soared from US$600,000 to US$7.3 million in the same period.
“This year has been record-breaking,” says Ms Awakuni. “One pupil gained a perfect 800 out of 800 in the United States-wide colleges admissions test in maths, another got 760 and a third pupil got 750 in the verbal test.”
Campbell High, which has pupils aged 15 to 18, earned Breakthrough School status in 2004 and Ms Awakuni, who reorganised the school into smaller learning communities, was awarded National Principal of the Year in 2004-5.

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“I don’t believe in colleges and universities,” Ray Bradbury, 88, said. “I believe in libraries.”

Jennifer Steinhauer:

This is a lucky thing for the Ventura County Public Libraries — because among Mr. Bradbury’s passions, none burn quite as hot as his lifelong enthusiasm for halls of books. His most famous novel, “Fahrenheit 451,” which concerns book burning, was written on a pay typewriter in the basement of the University of California, Los Angeles, library; his novel “Something Wicked This Way Comes” contains a seminal library scene.
Mr. Bradbury frequently speaks at libraries across the state, and on Saturday he will make his way here for a benefit for the H. P. Wright Library, which like many others in the state’s public system is in danger of shutting its doors because of budget cuts.
“Libraries raised me,” Mr. Bradbury said. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”
Property tax dollars, which provide most of the financing for libraries in Ventura County, have fallen precipitously, putting the library system roughly $650,000 in the hole. Almost half of that amount is attributed to the H. P. Wright Library, which serves roughly two-thirds of this coastal city about 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

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She finally has a home: Harvard

Esmeralda Bermudez:

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

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Larry Summers Vindicated? Global Study Shows Greater Male Variability in Math, Reading Scores

Mark Perry:

The tables above show selected statistics from the paper Global Sex Differences in Test Score Variability (see summary here), published by two economists, one from the London School of Economics and the other from the Helsinki School of Economics. Analyzing standardized test scores in reading and mathematics from the OECD’s “Program for International Student Assessment” (PISA), a survey of 15-year olds in 41 industrialized countries, the authors found that:
Our analysis of international test score data shows a higher variance in boys’ than girls’ results on mathematics and reading tests in most OECD countries. Higher variability among boys is a salient feature of reading and mathematics test performance across the world. In almost all comparisons, the age 15 boy-girl variance difference in test scores is present. This difference in variance is higher in countries that have higher levels of test score performance.

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The Community College Placement Mess

Jay Matthews:

Newspaper reporters, a group to which I belonged until recently, usually don’t write about old reports, unless of course the documents have been suppressed for years by nefarious government minions. If a reporter tells her editor she has found a neat piece of research from 2007 in the bottom of her drawer, the editor will tell her it isn’t news and advise that she put a calendar in her cubicle.
We columnists, on the other hand, are free to roam the past, particularly when we stumble across something as remarkable as “Investigating the Alignment of High School and Community College Assessments in California,” a 41-page report by Richard S. Brown & David N. Niemi, published by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education in June 2007.
I know. The title is sleep-inducing. But for the millions of people who care about community colleges — including the nearly half of all U.S. college students who attend them — it is a must-read.

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Should Advanced Elementary Students Be Bussed to a Middle School?

Jay Mattews:

Dear Extra Credit:
I am a former Montgomery County public schools employee, a parent of two in the system and a lifelong educator. An accelerated math program is presenting a unique challenge for the whole system.
As a parent, I addressed the issue first with the principal, then at a PTA meeting and then to the director of school performance when I thought that no satisfactory resolution was being looked into. There is still no resolution, and I do not believe the problem is unique to my small school.
Approximately 25 children in my son’s fourth grade have been accelerated two grade levels in math instruction. They took what’s called Math A (usually for sixth-graders) this year. They are slated to take Math B (usually for seventh-graders) next year, when they are in fifth grade.
In the past couple of years, the few students who qualified for this level of acceleration were bused to a middle school, then returned to the elementary school for the remainder of their day. This year, so many students have been found eligible that parents have requested that instead of sending them to the middle school, a Math B teacher be brought to the elementary school to teach them. This would reduce disruption and be better for their development.

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So Many Dreams, So Many Diplomas

Michael Alison Chandler:

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

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Study Shows Possible Link Between Deaths and ADHD Drugs

Shankar Vedantam:

Children taking stimulant drugs such as Ritalin to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder are several times as likely to suffer sudden, unexplained death as children who are not taking such drugs, according to a study published yesterday that was funded by the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute of Mental Health.
While the numbers involved in the study were very small and researchers stopped short of suggesting a cause and effect, the study is the first to rigorously demonstrate a rare but worrisome connection between ADHD drugs and sudden death among children. In doing so, the research adds to the evolving puzzle parents and doctors face in deciding whether to treat children with medication.
Doctors have speculated about such a connection in the past because stimulants increase heart rate and have other cardiovascular effects. Physicians are currently advised to evaluate patients for cardiac risks before prescribing the drugs, and FDA officials said yesterday that those guidelines do not need strengthening in light of the new study. About 2.5 million children in the United States take ADHD medications such as Ritalin and Adderall.

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

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

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Student Debt, Fool’s Gold?

NYTimes:

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

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Tell the Truth About Colleges

Thomas Toch:

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

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FDA Says Kids Shouldn’t Stop Taking ADHD Medications

Jared Favole:

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

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Study links breastfeeding to high grades, college entry

Reuters:

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

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A College for History Only

Scott Jaschik:

A non-traditional and sometimes iconoclastic law school has announced plans to create a new kind of undergraduate college — one focused on history.
The new college will offer only the junior and senior years of instruction, will operate in a no-frills manner to keep costs down, and will offer the single major of history. The American College of History and Legal Studies will start offering classes in August 2010 and has been licensed to operate in Salem, N.H. — just seven miles from the Andover, Mass., campus of the Massachusetts School of Law. While the law school and the history college will be independent of one another in a legal sense, with their own boards, many trustees are expected to serve on both boards, and the two institutions will start with overlapping administrations.
Lawrence R. Velvel, the dean of the law school, said in an interview Friday that he saw a need to promote the study of history in a way that was affordable and might reach new groups of students. “I have been aware that this country is not only ahistorical, but because it doesn’t know history and ignores history, it makes the same mistakes over and over again,” he said.
Tuition is planned to start at $10,000 a year — low in comparison to most private colleges.

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

Via a kind reader’s email:

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

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

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

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

Notes and links on Madison’s Strategic Planning Process.

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In Urban Classrooms, the Least Experienced Teach the Neediest Kids

MaryEllen McGuire:

Imagine for a moment that you are driving your child to the hospital. She has a high fever and is suffering from severe abdominal pain. It’s unclear what’s wrong but she is in definite need of medical attention.
Now imagine that the only doctor on call is a recently graduated medical student. It’s her first day on the job and there is no experienced physician or surgeon available for consultation. Are you satisfied with this level of care for your child? I wouldn’t be. I’d want to benefit from the knowledge of a more experienced physician. Wouldn’t you?
Unfortunately, a similar scenario is playing out in America’s urban classrooms with shocking regularity. Teachers with the least experience are educating the most disadvantaged students in the highest poverty, most challenging schools. Low-income kids are being “triaged” not by experienced teachers, but by those with fewer than three years of teaching to go on.
Does it matter? Absolutely. According to the research, teacher experience is at least a partial predictor of success in the classroom and, at present, one of the only approximations for teacher quality widely available. Experienced teachers tend to have better classroom management skills and a stronger command of curricular materials. Novice teachers on the other hand struggle during their initial years in any classroom.

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What Happens to School Choice if People Aren’t Rational and Choose Bad Schools?

Daniel Willingham:

The logic of school choice seems obvious. If parents selected their children’s schools, they would not choose bad ones, so bad schools would not be able to survive. Schools would have to improve or close, just as a store that offers poor service will lose business to a store that offers better service.
Here’s my problem with that logic: I think it’s highly likely that many parents will choose bad schools.
People often make irrational decisions. The decisions most often studied by psychologists over the last 40 years are financial, but in the last 20 years research has explored decisions made about sex, medicine, and a great many other subjects (see Dan Ariely’s wonderful book, Predictably Irrational, for an account.)
Financial decisions offer a useful analogy because the success or failure of the decision seems straightforward: you make money or you don’t; similarly, it would seem, schools teach kids or they don’t.

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Eastern Michigan University Newest Safety Tool is Crime Mapping

USNewswire:

One of the most important tools in crime prevention and safety is getting an accurate and timely picture of what is going on.
Eastern Michigan University and the City of Ypsilanti are taking that picture one step further.
By partnering with EMU’s Institute for Geospatial Research, EMU’s Department of Public Safety and the Ypsilanti Police Department have created a mapping/tracking system for area crime.
“We saw an opportunity to use EMU resources to help the campus and the community by providing timely, accurate information that enhances the safety of our campus,” said Sue Martin, president of EMU.
“This is part of our commitment to having a transparent police agency,” said Greg O’Dell, executive director of public safety at EMU. “With this addition to our Web site, people have total access to a lot of information.”
“We want to increase the awareness of what’s going on out there. If we increase awareness, people will have a better understanding of what is going on and take appropriate action,” said O’Dell.
The crime mapping application is located on the DPS Web site (http://geodata.acad.emich.edu/Crime/Main.htm) and provides users with a visual representation of where crime is occurring by adding markers to a map of the campus and the city. The application uses the Google mapping Web interface to plot the points where crimes occur.
“DPS posts the data daily to its Web site and the application looks at that data and maps it,” said Mike Dueweke, manager of EMU’s Institute for Geospatial Research.

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Report: Missouri charter school students outperform peers

Mara Rose Williams:

Missouri charter school students, on average, do better in reading and math than students in their peer traditional public schools, according to a national study released today.
The report done by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University does not mention specific schools in Kansas City or St. Louis — the only two places in the state allowed by law to operate charters.
The report’s authors say they found great variation in academic achievement among each state’s charters.
“An important part of the story is the variations,” said Margaret Raymond, director of the Center and lead author of the report.

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Picture is unclear on arts instruction in schools

Greg Toppo:

Gather up a group of eighth-graders, pop in a CD of George Gershwin’s seminal Rhapsody in Blue and turn up the volume. Then ask: In those first few seconds, what keening, soaring, note-bending instrument do you hear?
When the federal government put this question to thousands of eighth-graders in 1997, only about half knew it was a clarinet. When they tried again last year, the results were the same.
New data out today from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, may make America’s arts instructors kind of blue: In the past decade or so, middle-schoolers have made little progress in how much they know about music and visual arts.

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Rigid Athletic Tracking

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

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No Longer Letting Scores Separate Pupils (No More Tracking)

Winnie Hu via a kind reader’s email:

Sixth graders at Cloonan Middle School here are assigned numbers based on their previous year’s standardized test scores — zeros indicate the highest performers, ones the middle, twos the lowest — that determine their academic classes for the next three years.


But this longstanding system for tracking children by academic ability for more effective teaching evolved into an uncomfortable caste system in which students were largely segregated by race and socioeconomic background, both inside and outside classrooms. Black and Hispanic students, for example, make up 46 percent of this year’s sixth grade, but are 78 percent of the twos and 7 percent of the zeros.



So in an unusual experiment, Cloonan mixed up its sixth-grade science and social studies classes last month, combining zeros and ones with twos. These mixed-ability classes have reported fewer behavior problems and better grades for struggling students, but have also drawn complaints of boredom from some high-performing students who say they are not learning as much.



The results illustrate the challenge facing this 15,000-student district just outside New York City, which is among the last bastions of rigid educational tracking more than a decade after most school districts abandoned the practice. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Stamford sorted students into as many as 15 different levels; the current system of three to five levels at each of four middle schools will be replaced this fall by a two-tiered model, in which the top quarter of sixth graders will be enrolled in honors classes, the rest in college-prep classes. (A fifth middle school is a magnet school and has no tracking.)

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Textbook Rant

Seth Godin:

‘ve spent the last few months looking at marketing textbooks. I’m assuming that they are fairly representative of textbooks in general, and since this is a topic I’m interested in, it seemed like a good area to focus on.
As far as I can tell, assigning a textbook to your college class is academic malpractice.
They are expensive. $50 is the low end, $200 is more typical. A textbook author in Toronto made enough money from his calculus textbook to afford a $20 million house. This is absurd on its face. There’s no serious insight or leap in pedagogy involved in writing a standard textbook. That’s what makes it standard. It’s hard, but it shouldn’t make you a millionaire.
They don’t make change. Textbooks have very little narrative. They don’t take you from a place of ignorance to a place of insight. Instead, even the best marketing textbooks surround you with a fairly non-connected series of vocabulary words, oversimplified problems and random examples.
They’re out of date and don’t match the course. The 2009-2010 edition of the MKTG textbook, which is the hippest I could find, has no entries in the index for Google, Twitter, or even Permission Marketing.
They don’t sell the topic. Textbooks today are a lot more colorful and breezy than they used to be, but they are far from engaging or inspirational. No one puts down a textbook and says, “yes, this is what I want to do!”

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For Rio Vista grads, the future looks grim

Carolyn Jones:

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

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China’s College Entry Test Is an Obsession

Sharon LaFraniere:

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

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