Dr. Ari Brown – pediatrician in Austin, Tex., spokeswoman for the American Academy of Pediatrics and author of “Baby 411: Clear Answers and Smart Advice for Your Baby’s First Year” – cautions that in haste to get children the clothes and supplies they need for school, health issues are sometimes overlooked.
She and other experts offer the following advice:
BACKPACKS Many children have no lockers in school and are forced to carry all their books back and forth to school and between classes. An overweight pack can cause muscle strains and overuse injuries and distort the child’s posture.
A loaded backpack should not weigh more than one-fifth of a child’s weight. The pack’s shoulder straps should be wide and padded on the back as well. The pack should always be carried using both straps. “Now and then, a parent should check what’s in the pack and determine if everything has to be carried daily,” Dr. Brown suggested.
Category Archives: Student Support
Why Does College Cost so Much
As college students begin a new academic year, many parents are reeling from tuition fees. This fall’s probable average 8% increase at public universities, added onto double-digit hikes in the two previous years, means tuition at a typical state university is up 36% over 2002 — at a time when consumer prices in general rose less than 9%. In inflation-adjusted terms, tuition today is roughly triple what it was when parents of today’s college students attended school in the ’70s. Tuition charges are rising faster than family incomes, an unsustainable trend in the long run. This holds true even when scholarships and financial aid are considered. One consequence of rising costs is that college enrollments are no longer increasing as much as before. Price-sensitive groups like low-income students and minorities are missing out. A smaller proportion of Hispanics between 18 and 24 attend college today than in 1976. The U.S. is beginning to fall below some other industrial nations in population-adjusted college attendance.
More on the Evils of PowerPoint in Schools
Teachers say creating a PowerPoint presentation captivates students and gives them background using a technological tool common in business.
Critics say PowerPoint requires students to do little more than assemble outlines and is a poor replacement for age-old standards such as essays.
Edward Tufte, professor emeritus at Yale University, has been one of the most vocal opponents, such as in an opinion piece called “PowerPoint is Evil” carried in the September 2003 edition of Wired.
“Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials,” Tufte wrote.
With 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art for each PowerPoint slide, with only three to six slides per presentation, that amounts to only 80 words for a week’s work. “Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something,” he wrote.
More on Powerpoint and schools here.
Survey Finds Students Want Tougher Schools
From the Associated Press and the Wisconsin State Journal:
A Survey Finds High School Students Want More Demanding Coursework To Prepare For Work And College.
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
BEN FELLER Associated Press
WASHINGTON
The campaign to make high school more demanding seems to be picking up support from the people who have the biggest stake in the matter: the students.
Almost nine in 10 students say they would work harder if their high school expected more of them, a new survey finds. Less than one-third of students say their school sets high academic expectations, and most students favor ideas that might add some hassle to their life, such as more rigorous graduation standards and additional high-stakes testing.
“The good old times in high schools are being replaced by good old hard work,” said Peter Hart, whose Peter D. Hart Research Associates conducted the survey for the “State of Our Nation’s Youth Report,” released Tuesday. “There’s a recognition among students that they have to be more ready to compete.”
The nonprofit Horatio Alger Association, which provides college scholarships and mentoring to needy students, issued the annual report on youth attitudes. The findings are based on a phone survey of 1,005 students in high school last May.
The Internet at School
Lee Rainie and Paul Hitlin (PDF version):
The internet is an important element in the overall educational experience of many teenagers. Schools are a common location where online teens access the web, although very few online teenagers rely exclusively on their school for that web access. Further, there is widespread agreement among teens and their parents that the internet can be a useful tool for school. However, 37% of teens say they believe that “too many” of their peers are using the internet to cheat. And there is some disagreement among teens and their parents about whether children must be web-literate by the time they begin school. Additionally, large numbers of teens and adults have used the web to search for information about colleges and universities.
The most recent Pew Internet Project survey finds that 87% of all youth between the ages of 12 and 17 use the internet. That translates into about 21 million people. Of those 21 million online teens, 78% (or about 16 million students) say they use the internet at school. Put another way, this means that 68% of all teenagers have used the internet at school.
This represents growth of roughly 45% over the past four years from about 11 million teens who used the internet in schools in late 2000. In the Pew Internet Project survey in late 2000, we found that 73% of those ages 12 to 17 used the internet and that 47% of those in that age cohort used the internet at school.
Struggling to stay on topic, the debate continues…
Lucy,
Your anger at your experience with MMSD is palpable. I’d like, however, to stick to the main point of my original post which is whether UW should be lowering admission standards for students who participate in the PEOPLE program. Whatever you think of the validity of those requirements, it doesn’t change the fact that it is what nearly every other student has to contend with. And nothing you have said persuades me that a student with a 2.75 GPA has a very good shot at succeeding at UW. (And I didn’t say every PEOPLE grad got in to UW, but it’s clear that they will not necessarily be held to the same admission standards as everyone else.) I also don’t see why you have such trouble accepting my query whether this program will actually turn out successful college graduates, and at what cost. (Perhaps you don’t remember the airbrushing incident, where a minority student was photoshopped into a glossy UW brochure to create the impression of greater diversity) I’d hope this program isn’t a bandaid but genuinely prepares students to deal with the rigors of college.
I come from a hard science background. Your belief that a motivated student, albeit with a significantly lower GPA, will ask good questions begs the question. The rigors of science and math education are not much about sharing cultural or experiental differences. You can either do it or not–motivation AND preparation. And I’d argue that while GPA certainly isn’t the ideal measure, it does indicate some commitment and participation in the process of education.
Continue reading Struggling to stay on topic, the debate continues…
Response to Lucy’s Post on PEOPLE program
Lucy,
I feared this would become personal. Tempting though it is to rebut your arguments tit for tat I am not sure it will necessarily be productive. If necessary I will, though I prefer to look past your anger which now seems aimed directly at me.
Let’s back up and look at the assumptions underlying this program. The first is that minority students are not getting adequate preparation in their home schools. You assert that this is true in the well-staffed, well-funded Madison school district because of institutional racism. You believe your visual review of a school proves your point. That’s not particularily strong evidence. This isn’t about ability but preparation and motivation. West is tough on all kids, just for the record. (And for the commenter below who mentioned that a kid with a 3.6 from West might not be in the top 10%, you’re exactly right–one B in four years and you’re out of the top 5%, two B’s and you’re out of the top 10%, historically anyway. But then what does that say for the student with a 2.75 at West who can get into UW through the PEOPLE program?)
Here is why I commented. What troubles me is whether this will be a fruitful program or just a bandaid, which is why I expressed the hope that this was designed in a way to measure genuine success as defined by actually graduating from college.This is assumption number one, that this program is not just about getting minority students on campus but actually successfully graduating. And I don’t think it out of line to then ask whether it is a cost-effective program.
But more important, at least what could be gleaned from the story, it sounds to me like UW alters its admission requirements for those who attend faithfully the PEOPLE program. I have a big problem with a different set of rules for those participating in a program not open to all students.
As I said in my first post, I had first-hand experience tutoring minority students from Milwaukee. They clearly needed the kind of advance preparation this program offers. Thus, I am not opposed to a summer program, but I have serious questions about bending the admission rules. Moreover, it is beyond me how someone could successfully attend and graduate from UW with such low admission scores. I say that as someone from a blue-collar family who was a Wisconsin honor scholar, Phi Beta Kappa/honors undergrad, UW MS (teaching assistant) and UW law degree, (to succumb for a moment to a tit for tat.)
I am also here to tell you that my children did not for the most part feel supported in MMSD. Welcome to the club, in other words. However, they did have the advantage of an intact, financially secure family, college-educated parents and alot of opportunities low-income kids miss out on. So let me repeat that I’m not opposed to offering college prep classes to kids who need it. But I still think they need to meet the same standards at the end of the day. Otherwise, we may as well gift them with a college diploma, skip the four/five year investment of time and energy, and just strip away the facade that this is supposed to be about advanced education.
Why Not Fail?: Children, Grades and Self Esteem
Neal Conan, Talk of The Nation:
Some British schools want to erase “Failure” off report cards — in favor of “deferred success. The idea is to spare the self-esteem of struggling or indifferen students. But is a good self-image the product of praise or real achievement? Neal Conan and guests discuss what really builds self-esteem in children.
Audio
UW’s Long-term College Prep Program Puts Prospects In The Pipeline
The Wisconsin State Journal discusses the college prep program UW sponsors for middle (Madison students only) and high school minority students.
Glaringly absent from the reporting is what are the criteria for getting accepted into this program. It sounds like a program open only to minority students, or is it for low-income students of color?
While it has barely been in existence long enough to produce college graduates, I would hope someone is studying PEOPLE’s effectiveness. For instance, I’d like to see a control group who can’t attend these summer sessions but who are given the same break on admission, (2.75 GPA is all that’s required), and if accepted at UW, the students also get a full five-year tuition scholarship. Then I’d like to see the numbers on those who graduate and in what time period and at what cost.
Many years ago while I was a UW zoology grad student, I was a paid tutor through a university program aimed at assisting minority students. All my students were from Milwaukee. None was prepared, either for the intro zoo course or for college in general. Thus, I am sympathetic to the idea of helping these students before they enroll at the university. However, I have to question the lowered admission requirements. If you can’t cut a 2.75 in high school, you’re not likely to successfully complete a degree at UW-Madison.
In addition, I noticed that two of the students interviewed in the article were from Madison West. Is MMSD so deficient in preparing its (low income) minority students that they can only hope to succeed with this special program? I can understand how students coming from poorly funded and troubled disticts like Milwaukee might need extra attention, but Madison West?
Moreover, I know students at West who did not get in to UW despite GPAs of 3.6 and higher. This is the best education many can afford for their children. To learn that their students cannot get admitted while some are allowed in with significantly lower requirments and paid summer college prep courses might be a bitter pill to swallow. (For the record, both our children were accepted at UW.)
So I have two questions: are there checks in place to determine whether this is an effective program, and cost-effective at that, given the 5+ million dollars expended on about 1200 individuals; and how does the UW legitimately justify employing markedly different admission criteria, especially if PEOPLE isn’t open to all students who wish to participate.
Continue reading UW’s Long-term College Prep Program Puts Prospects In The Pipeline
UW Madison Math Tutors
I periodically here of requests for math tutors. The University of Wisconsin Math Department maintains a helpful list of tutors here.
K-12 Schools & Technology
“The greatest asset of the American, so often ridiculed by Europeans, is his belief in progress,” Victor Vinde, in 1945
Mary Kay Battaglia recently wrote about the virtual non-existence of electronic communication with parents in the Madison School District. I agree with Mary Kay’s comments.
Having said that, I believe that any District technology investment should be made in the context of these three priorities:
- Curriculum: we should strive to teach our children to be creators rather than consumers (writing and thinking rather than powerpoint).
- High Expectations: Our children must have the skills (arts, languages, math, science, history) to compete in tomorrow’s world. Retiring Milwaukee High School Principal Will Jude refers to the Tyranny of Low Expectations:
Graduation comes, “but it’s at the expense of content.” The student goes to college and finds other kids are way ahead. Jude’s response: “You were doing the A section of the book while they were doing the B and C sections. You covered a lot of material but it was very shallow. They covered a lot of material but it was in depth.” . Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron (1961) provides further useful reading.
- Inquisitiveness: Our students interest in and ability to ask questions, in other words, their willingness to question things that they read, observe and hear (Jay Rosen shows how important this is to our democracy).
Today’s communication tools provide our students and community with an unprecedented ability to converse, debate and learn. Our K-12 students, like their parents and those who teach them should be comfortable conversing in written form, email, cellphones, voicemail, weblogs and html.
The Madison School District, as Troy Dasler pointed out, will soon start to implement a new internet based Student Information System.
The Evils of Excellence
Susan Black on the “Trouble with Classroom Competition”:
How much competition is too much?
I asked myself that question some years ago when I was appointed director of curriculum and instruction for a Midwestern city school district. Making the rounds of the district’s 12 schools I found competition everywhere.
In a 10th-grade English class, I found kids writing essays on citizenship for a local bar association’s contest. Moving on to a middle school, I saw seventh-grade science students drawing posters for a county humane society contest in hopes of winning stuffed animals. That afternoon, I watched third-graders hop around a gym as part of a national charity’s pledge drive. The kids who hopped the longest won crayons and coloring books.
When I counted up the number of competitive activities in classrooms — more than 200 in one school year — I knew it was time to put on the brakes. It wasn’t easy, but with the school board’s support and principals’ cooperation, we reclaimed the instructional program. Competitive activities were still allowed, but they were held after school for students who wanted to sign up.
Via Joanne Jacobs and Gadfly. I wonder if students in India, China, Japan, Finland and elsewhere have curriculum planners with this point of view? This thinking seems rather Soviet, where everyone is the same except for those who are not.
Ask the Cognitive Scientist
Modality theory—the idea that students differ in their visual, auditory, and kinesthetic abilities and learn more when instruction is geared to their strengths—has been a popular idea for decades. But research has found that learning is enhanced by designing instruction around the content’s best modality, not the student’s.
Bringing Better Nutrition to School Cafeterias
The school cafeteria line is hardly the place to develop healthy eating habits. Forget fruits and veggies — the typical lunch usually contains fast food staples like pizza and french fries. What can — or can’t — school districts do to make lunches healthier?
audio. Chez Panisse’s Alice Water’s participated in this program (Waters has been active in Berkeley nutrition programs).
Talking To Strangers
“Many children are taught never to talk to strangers, an extreme precaution with minimal security benefit.”
In talks, I’m even more direct. I think “don’t talk to strangers” is just about the worst possible advice you can give a child. Most people are friendly and helpful, and if a child is in distress, asking the help of a stranger is probably the best possible thing he can do.
This advice would have helped Brennan Hawkins, the 11-year-old boy who was lost in the Utah wilderness for four days.
The parents said Brennan had seen people searching for him on horse and ATV, but avoided them because of what he had been taught.
“He stayed on the trail, he avoided strangers,” Jody Hawkins said. “His biggest fear, he told me, was that someone would steal him.”
They said they hadn’t talked to Brennan and his four siblings about what they should do about strangers if they were lost. “This may have come to a faster conclusion had we discussed that,” Toby Hawkins said.
In a world where good guys are common and bad guys are rare, assuming a random person is a good guy is a smart security strategy. We need to help children develop their natural intuition about risk, and not give them overbroad rules.
Social Mobility & The Educated Class
The Economist [6.9.2005]:
The obvious way to deal with this is to use the education system to guarantee a level playing field. Improve educational opportunities for the poorest Americans, make sure that nobody is turned away from university on grounds of financial need, and you will progressively weaken the link between background and educational success. Alas, there are at least three big problems with this.
The first is that the schools the poorest Americans attend have been getting worse rather than better. This is partly a problem of resources, to be sure. But it is even more a problem of bad ideas. The American educational establishment’s weakness for airy-fairy notions about the evils of standards and competition is particularly damaging to poor children who have few educational resources of their own to fall back on. One poll of 900 professors of education, for example, found that 64% of them thought that schools should avoid competition.
Behind every grad
The NYTimes’ Tom Friedman has a nice piece on the importance of good teachers in our children’s education. As the mother of a graduating senior, I wish there was space here to list the terrific teachers (as well as TAG and guidance staff) both our children had while attending Franklin/Randall, Wingra, Hamilton and West. Our deepest gratitude to those who helped our kids love to learn.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/10/opinion/10friedman.html
Morin: The Price of Acting White
” Children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.”— Barack Obama, keynote speech, 2004 Democratic National Convention
It may be even worse than Obama imagined: It’s not just black children who face ridicule and ostracism by their peers if they do well in school. The stigmatizing effects of “acting white” appear to be felt even more by Hispanics who get top grades.
De-Gifting
An honors program beset by ethnic tensions and strained relations between parents and administrators at Lincoln Middle School is being eliminated.
After three months of public debate, trustees for Vista Unified voted 4-1 late Monday to eliminate the Gifted and Talented Education program, which supporters said promoted Lincoln’s brightest students. School administrators, however, said the GATE program was closed to most students.
The board’s decision will open honors classes that have GATE students to everyone.
School and district officials said putting GATE students in classes with those of mixed abilities would help improve test scores.
Joanne Jacobs has more.
Fed Up With Lunch Waste
“They never eat them all,” Aubrey said, referring to chicken nuggets left on the trays of first-, second- and third-graders.
The pair saw only a small portion of a nationwide pile of school lunch waste.
Each year, about $600 million in food served by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National School Lunch Program is thrown away by students, the department’s Economic Research Service estimates in a report. That amounts to 12% of the food they are served.
Low Cost Handhelds show results as Teaching Tools
Foxview Intermediate School fifth-grader Meg Summerside becomes animated as she explains all the cool functions her personal digital assistant can perform.
Summerside excitedly rattles off a flurry of features that help her organize her life, write research papers and create simple animation in Becky Lee’s classroom.
Stressed Out: Parental Pressure to Excel
As the boy played behind the bushes at his Redwood City school, his obviously agitated mother grabbed him, abruptly escorting him to her car.
“She asked him what he thought he was doing and proceeded to tell him all in one breath that he would never get into a good university or have a good job if he spent all his time playing and goofing around,” said Jim Dassise, a parent who watched the episode unfold. “He should be more like one of his friends, who spent his time studying and having good grades.”
The boy was about 9 years old.
UC System Struggles to Attract Minorities
Ramine Cromartie-Thornton is just the kind of student that UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau wants to attract to his campus to increase ethnic diversity: She is African American, has a grade point average of about 4.2, a 1310 SAT score and plans to major in engineering.
But eight other universities want her, too, including Harvard, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Duke and the University of Pennsylvania. In the end, UC Berkeley wasn’t even in her top three.
Madison Mother Wants in to Virtual Charter School
A Madison mother is threatening to go to court if necessary to get Madison schools to transfer two of her children to a virtual charter school.
The transfers were denied based on race, and the family says that’s discriminatory, reported News 3’s Linda Eggert.
Two years ago the Madison Metropolitan School District allowed the family’s oldest boy to transfer to the virtual school open enrollment. Earlier this month, two of his younger brothers were denied the same kind of access.
interesting issue
Bar Coding Your Child? – No thanks!
Suppose you are a fifth-year mechanical-engineering student at Cleveland State University, paying your tuition by taking off an occasional semester to work.
Is that any business of the federal government?
An idea circulating in the U.S. Department of Education and on Capitol Hill says that maybe it should be, and that maybe the government should follow students’ progress through college by assigning them bar codes.
Not surprisingly, that already is raising alarms. “What right does the government have to know that?” asks Katherine Haley Will, president of Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pa., an outspoken critic of student tracking.
Simply Absurd…
The Insanity of Youth Sports
(Warning: Parent bragging ahead.) My daughter and son, now college students, had terrific school sports experiences by just about any standard. Both played for Central Coast Section and league championship teams at Archbishop Mitty High School. Sarah’s soccer team was ranked No. 1 in the nation for a while. Our son’s basketball team was ranked No. 1 by the Mercury News and reached the NorCal championship game at Arco Arena in Sacramento.
And yet for all of that, I still look back on our family’s trip through the youth and club sports gantlet with emotions that cause me to shake my head, shudder, grimace, get indigestion or . . . yes, scream.
This is what the gantlet does: It takes away the sweetness of simply enjoying a game. As your children progress in sports and the pressure builds from coaches and parents to make sure your kid plays on the “right team” with the “right exposure” so the kid can “move up to the next level,” you can almost feel the whole thing starting to smother you like a blanket.
GPS Enabled Children’s Uniforms…
But the notion of electronic IDs in schools has proven more than a little controversial, with some calling them a cutting-edge way to monitor attendance and keep kids safe and others assailing them as an assault on the youngsters’ right to privacy.
What about an e-mail link from teachers to parents?
In Madison, parents have begun asking why MMSD does not link parents to teachers through regular e-mail reports and messages. The April 6, 2005 issue of Education Week offers pros and cons of this suggestion. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2005/04/06/30email.h24.html?querystring=e-mail%20opens%20line
Does Pre-Kindergarden Improve School Preparation & Performance?
Using a new rich source of data, researchers Katherine Magnuson, Christopher Ruhm, and Jane Waldfogel conclude in Does Prekindergarten Improve School Preparation and Performance? (NBER Working Paper No. 10452) that early education does increase reading and mathematics skills at school entry, but it also boosts children’s classroom behavioral problems and reduces their self-control. Further, for most children the positive effects of pre-kindergarten on skills largely dissipate by the spring of first grade, although the negative behavioral effects continue. In the study, the authors take account of many factors affecting a child, including family background and neighborhood characteristics. These factors include race/ethnicity, age, health status at birth, height, weight, and gender, family income related to need, language spoken in the home, and so on.
Parents Question Math Strategies in Boston
Surely, the quote of the day:
”What’s going to happen when they go into a store? Are they going to say, ‘Do you happen to have 25 Cheerios so I can break it down?’ ” said Jacqueline Azulay of Roslindale, who sees her two daughters going to great lengths to break large numbers into manageable pieces. ”I think they need to teach basic math.”
Vanessa Parks dives into the math wars with many interesting quotes.
WORT’s In Our Backyard – March 15, 2005
Proposed Elementary Strings Program Elimination
Listen now: 3.5MB mp3 audio file. WORT
Madison School Board President Bill Keys, Strings Teacher Jack Young, Parent Michael McGuire and Activist Barb Schrank.
Biotech: Teachers Key in Setting Student on Biotech Path
“I don’t think you’re smart enough to be a doctor.”
Bernadette Tansey:
People sometimes look at Teresa Ramirez with wide eyes when they find out she comes from Compton.
The city south of Los Angeles is not the hometown that many expect to turn out a biotechnology fellowship winner who’s doing research at the National Cancer Institute before applying to medical school.
In Compton, Ramirez was grazed with a bullet when a junior high school classmate dropped a gun he had brought on campus. Some of her classmates joined gangs, and some have already died. She faced skepticism when she said she wanted to be a doctor.
“I came across people, even the priest at my church, who said, ‘I don’t think you’re smart enough to be a doctor.’ ”
Many are counting on biotech to drive Wisconsin’s economy (and provide the tax base for growing education demands…).
Emerson Won’t Be Closed
The proposal, which drew strong, immediate opposition from parents on the northeast side of the isthmus, was part of sweeping enrollment boundary changes that the district plans to decide this spring.
I wonder if this will popup again later, perhaps after the planned referendums? [speculation]
Madison Citizens Speak on the School Board’s Proposed Equity Policy Change
Several Madison Citizens spoke to the Board of Education Monday night regarding the Administration’s proposed change to the Equity Policy.
California: Mandatory Student ID Cards with RFID’s
The EFF (well worth your support):
Several civil liberties groups, including the ACLU of Northern California (ACLU-NC), Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) sent a letter today expressing alarm at the Brittan School District’s use of mandatory ID badges that include a RFID device that tracks the students’ movements. The device transmits private information to a computer on campus whenever a student passes under one of the scanners. The ID badges also include the student’s name, photo, grade, school name, class year and the four-digit school ID number. Students are required to prominently display the badges by wearing them around the neck at all times.
School Privacy Notices
Treena Shapiro discusses concerns raised over school privacy notices:
Sybil Arum’s eighth-grade granddaughter came home this week worried that she was on the verge of being drafted by the military and sent off to war.
The reason for her fear was the Department of Education’s annual privacy notice, which says contact information for secondary students as young as sixth-graders may be released to military recruiters unless the student, parent or legal guardian requests otherwise.
Arum, who is the child’s guardian, quickly determined that her granddaughter was not being shipped off to Iraq, but became alarmed anyway.
“I’m very upset with the age level that this policy encompasses,” she said.
DOE and U.S. Department of Defense officials, however, stress that the military is only interested in students who are 17 and older and will not be following up with students as young as sixth-graders.
“We don’t just automatically release (the information to recruiters); it would have to be on request,” said DOE spokesman Greg Knudsen. “Recruiters have told us that their interest is in juniors and seniors.”
There’s more to this than just information for recruiters. DPI has information on this issue here (parents can opt out. This page describes that process). MMSD’s policy 4157 apparently describes the district’s data privacy processes. Send me comments/questions on this: zellmer at mailbag dot com.
Ruth Robarts Letter to the Isthmus editor on MMSD Reading Progress
Ruth Robarts wrote:
Thanks to Jason Shepard for highlighting comments of UW Psychology Professor Mark Seidenberg at the Dec. 13 Madison School Board meeting in his article, Not all good news on reading. Dr. Seidenberg asked important questions following the administrations presentation on the reading program. One question was whether the district should measure the effectiveness of its reading program by the percentages of third-graders scoring at proficient or advanced on the Wisconsin Reading Comprehension Test (WRCT). He suggested that the scores may be improving because the tests arent that rigorous.
I have reflected on his comment and decided that he is correct.
Using success on the WRCT as our measurement of student achievement likely overstates the reading skills of our students. The WRCT—like the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE) given in major subject areas in fourth, eighth and tenth grades— measures student performance against standards developed in Wisconsin. The more teaching in Wisconsin schools aims at success on the WRCT or WKCE, the more likely it is that student scores will improve. If the tests provide an accurate, objective assessment of reading skills, then rising percentages of students who score at the proficient and advanced levels would mean that more children are reaching desirable reading competence.
However, there are reasons to doubt that high percentages of students scoring at these levels on the WRCT mean that high percentages of students are very proficient readers. High scores on Wisconsin tests do not correlate with high scores on the more rigorous National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests.
In 2003, 80% of Wisconsin fourth graders scored proficient or advanced on the WCKE in reading. However, in the same year only 33% of Wisconsin fourth graders reached the proficient or advanced level in reading on the NAEP. Because the performance of Madison students on the WCKE reading tests mirrors the performance of students statewide, it is reasonable to conclude that many of Madisons proficient and advanced readers would also score much lower on the NAEP. For more information about the gap between scores on the WKCE and the NAEP in reading and math, see EdWatch Online 2004 State Summary Reports at www.edtrust.org.
Next year the federal No Child Left Behind Act replaces the Wisconsin subject area tests with national tests. In view of this change and questions about the value of WRCT scores, its time for the Board of Education to review its benchmarks for progress on its goal of all third-graders reading at grade level by the end of third grade.
Ruth Robarts
Member, Madison Board of Education
Continue reading Ruth Robarts Letter to the Isthmus editor on MMSD Reading Progress
Parental Involvement Critical in the Drug War
Don’t be afraid to be involved – even intrusive – if you want to keep your kids off drugs, a Middleton High School student advised parents at a forum Tuesday night.
More than 250 people packed the school’s cafeteria to ask questions and get information from a panel that included school officials, social workers, students and police officers. Catherine Zdeblick also sat on the panel. Her daughter Julie, a junior at Middleton High School, died from an Oxycontin overdose in March. That death has had a big impact on the community.
Beth Wild, 18, who was a friend of Julie’s, talked about her own recovery from addiction to marijuana and Oxycontin. She told the crowd that her parents were instrumental in getting her sober because they were always there for her.
Wild, a senior at the Middleton Alternative High School, said she has been sober for 99 days, although she has been in treatment for two years.
She said that after several unhealthy relationships she finally decided to take her treatment seriously. Wearing a T-shirt that said “high on life,” Wild told the crowd, “I love life and I’m very proud of myself.”
I sent an email to Tom Vandervest, Middleton High’s principal urging him to post an html/pdf, audio and video transcript on their web site. He responded with “Our school personnel will be recording it for our use. Thanks, Tom”.
I hope that includes posting it online.
India Launches First Education Satellite
Millions of illiterate people in remote, rural India could soon have access to an education, as a satellite devoted exclusively to long distance learning was launched on Monday. It is the world’s first dedicated educational satellite, according to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
India launched the $20 million, 2-tonne EDUSAT from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota, a tiny island in the Bay of Bengal. The satellite is the heaviest ever launched by an Indian-made rocket – the new Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV), which cost $33 million.
About 35% of the country�s billion-plus population are illiterate, a 2001 government census showed. �India will require 10,000 new schools each year and meeting the teaching needs on such a scale [by conventional methods] will be impossible,� Madhavan Nair, chairman of ISRO, told New Scientist.
To date, India has used both of its multi-purpose INSAT satellites to provide long-distance education information alongside their telecommunications, broadcasting and weather-forecasting functions.
Interesting way to leverage technology. It it works, it will turn out to be cheap….. (and creative!) We need more of this kind of thinking.
Good Homes, Good Students
My hope is that by the time the children of our Baby Steps parents emerge from the preschool pipeline into regular classes, the difference will be plain to see.
I don’t exempt either the school system or the larger community from its responsibility to help the town’s children grow up smart and successful — and, indeed, both the system and the community have come together in support of Baby Steps in its first year.
But I am convinced that all the other things we do will have limited impact unless we also undertake to enhance the competence of our children’s first and most effective teachers: their parents.
Small Scale School Enthuses Students
“We believe the arts and technology are a great tool for engaging students”, Bob Lenz, Principal of the Marin School of Art & Technology. Maggie Shiels writes about this Novato, CA school for the BBC.
Ideas to Close the Education Gap
Alan J. Borsuk writes about efforts to close the education gap between black & white students:
In Wisconsin the gap is so wide that black eighth-graders and white fourth-graders had almost identical scores in math on a national standardized test given in 2003. The gap between white and black eighth-graders was larger in Wisconsin than in any other state in both reading and math on that set of tests.
There’s been quite a bit of discussion on Bill Cosby’s recent speech at Howard University. The Washington Post’s Colbert I. King says simply: “Fix it, Brother“. Debra Dickerson also comments on her blog.
“Debacle” at East High School
Highly respected East High School biology teacher Paul de Vair, who chairs the school’s National Honor Society Selection Committee, wrote a two-and-a-half page memo to Principal Catherine Tillman on May 7.
It starts, “I am writing this letter to formally protest the debacle involving six honor students who were elected to the National Honor Society by the Selection Committee and who were denied membership on the day of the induction ceremony.”
He goes through the details of “the mess you (Tillman) created,” resigns as chair of the Selection Committee, and concludes in italics, ” Never in my 40 years in education (which includes MTI and WEAC presidencies and terms on the NEA Board of Directors) have I seen a faculty’s spirit and enthusiasm plunge so rapidly as it has in the last 2 years at East High School.”
Mr. du Vair’s memo seems to be a public document, so I assume that I’m not violating any confidences by quoting it. He copied it to President, Board of Education; Superintendent of Schools; NHS Selection Committee; East High School Administration; EHS Faculty and Staff.
Ed Blume
Circulation of West High School Calculus Exams in 2001
As a sophomore at Madison West High School, Danny Cullenward tookCalculus 1, a yearlong advanced math class that put the only B on theotherwise straight-A student’s transcript.
The same happened with Sam Friedman, the former captain of West’s mathteam. Friedman, who is now at the University of Chicago, got two B’s incalculus at West but went on, as a high school student, to get an A inadvanced calculus at the University of Wisconsin.Chris Moore, who is a junior at West and is already ranked among the top 30high school math students in the United States, also had trouble in his highschool course. He got a B when he took calculus as a freshman.
UW Professor Janet Mertz knows of all these cases, and cited them in aletter to administrators. She argued, as other parents have for more than ayear, that something is not right with the way calculus students at West aretested.
It’s unfair, she wrote, and it’s hurting students’ chances to get intoelite colleges such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for whichMertz interviews student applicants.
Fuzzy Math at West High: A Capital Times Editorial:
For more than a year, a group of West High parents have beencomplaining about the way calculus students at West are tested. This week theywent public — voicing their concerns before the Madison School Board.The first complaint came from Joan Knoebel and Michael Cullenward, M.D., onbehalf of their son, now a senior at West. They decried the fact that KeithKnowles, West’s calculus teacher, reuses old tests or parts of old tests thatare available to some — but not all — students.
According to the formal complaint, “students have obtained copies fromolder siblings, prior students, through study groups, private tutors, or by awell-defined grapevine.” The school itself does not keep the tests on file.
School district administrators contend that Knowles did nothing wrong andthat there’s no evidence to conclude that having access to old tests washelpful to students.
George Kelly, English chairman at East High School, said teachers share thesame interests as committee members — to ensure that students have access tothe tests they’ve taken and to make the playing field level for all students.But he said a districtwide policy would be cumbersome.
“There’s a larger issue here,” Kelly said. “How much micromanaging does theboard want to do in instruction and evaluation?”
West parent Joan Knoebel said Tuesday that the district continues to avoidthe real issue that her family raised, which is that a particular teacher atWest is not following the test return policy already in place at that school.Although she would like to see districtwide guidelines, she has neversuggested that the problem is widespread.
“(The district) is attacking this globally, when what you really have isone teacher who, in my opinion, is acting unethically,” she said. “They’reusing an elephant gun to shoot a starling.”
Common sense tells us that students with an advance copy of a test have asignificant advantage over their classmates. Assessment is meaningless underthese circumstances.This is the basis of our complaint. And this isn’t just about one teacherat West. The decisions in this case emanate throughout the Madison SchoolDistrict.
What’s the teacher’s job? To teach the principles of calculus and to fairlyevaluate whether his students learned the math. He undoubtedly knows the math,as some former students enthusiastically attest. However, because old examswere not available to all, the only thing his tests reliably measured is whoma student knows, not what a student knows.
And — this point is critical — he also couldn’t tell whether the tests heconstructed, or copied, were “good” tests. A good test is one a well-preparedstudent can complete successfully during class time. Think of it this way.Assume there were no old tests to study — all students were on a levelplaying field. The teacher gives a test. No one finishes or gets a high score.Did no one understand the material? Possibly, but many of these hardworkingstudents come to class prepared. The better explanation is that there was aproblem with the test itself; for example, it was too long or too complex tofinish within the time limit.
This mirrors the experience of students who didn’t study the old tests.Unfortunately, they were sitting alongside classmates who’d seen an advancecopy and could thus easily finish within the class period.
Ten years ago, West High enacted a test return policy. Why? Because thiscalculus teacher, among others, wouldn’t give the tests back. The policy was acompromise to give families a chance to review tests, but only underconditions that gave teachers control against copies being handed down.
This calculus teacher had a choice: offer in-school review, as is done atMemorial High, or let the tests go home under tight restrictions, including awritten promise not to copy or use them for cheating. After this policy washammered out, he elected to return his tests unconditionally yet continued tore-use his tests. The district says that was his prerogative.
What was the administration’s job here? To conduct a fair formal complaintprocess and to ensure that assessment is non-discriminatory. The “outsideinvestigator” the district appointed is a lawyer who together with her firmroutinely does other legal work for the district. Had we known of thisconflict, we wouldn’t have wasted our time. In reality, the administration andits investigator endeavored mostly to find support for the foregone conclusionthat a teacher can run his class as he wishes.
We greatly appreciate our children’s teachers, but with all due respect,autonomy does not trump the duty of this teacher, the administration and theboard to provide all students with a fair and reliable testing scheme.
The only remedy the district offers is to let students repeat the course,either at West or at UW-Madison at their own expense — $1,000 — andsubstitute the new grade. This isn’t a genuine remedy. It punishes studentsfor a problem they didn’t create. Furthermore, it is only truly available tothose who can afford UW-Madison tuition and the time.
What was the School Board’s job? To tackle public policy — in this case,non-discriminatory assessment. With one brave exception, the board ducked, andchose to protect the teacher, the administration and the union — everyoneexcept the students.
The solution is easy. If teachers are going to re-use tests or questions,safeguard them using the test return policy or make an exam file available toall. Otherwise, write genuinely fresh tests each time.
After 14 months of investigation and a 100-plus page record, it’s worsethan when we started. Now the district says that this teacher, any teacher,can re-use tests and give them back without restriction, and that it isperfectly acceptable for some but not all students to have copies to preparefrom.
For six months, we sought to resolve this matter privately and informally,without public fanfare. Confronting the dirty little secret of the calculusclass didn’t sully West’s remarkable national reputation, but openly paperingit over surely does. Simply put, this teacher didn’t do his job. Theadministration and six board members didn’t do theirs, either. “Putting kidsfirst” needs to be more than just a campaign slogan. –>
In the Madison West High calculus class, tests are the only way astudent is evaluated — not by quizzes, homework or classroom participation,just tests. The teacher admits he duplicates or tweaks old tests. He knew somebut not all students had copies, yet he wouldn’t provide samples or an examfile.
Common sense tells us that students with an advance copy of a test have asignificant advantage over their classmates. Assessment is meaningless underthese circumstances.This is the basis of our complaint. And this isn’t just about one teacherat West. The decisions in this case emanate throughout the Madison SchoolDistrict.
What’s the teacher’s job? To teach the principles of calculus and to fairlyevaluate whether his students learned the math. He undoubtedly knows the math,as some former students enthusiastically attest. However, because old examswere not available to all, the only thing his tests reliably measured is whoma student knows, not what a student knows.
And — this point is critical — he also couldn’t tell whether the tests heconstructed, or copied, were “good” tests. A good test is one a well-preparedstudent can complete successfully during class time. Think of it this way.Assume there were no old tests to study — all students were on a levelplaying field. The teacher gives a test. No one finishes or gets a high score.Did no one understand the material? Possibly, but many of these hardworkingstudents come to class prepared. The better explanation is that there was aproblem with the test itself; for example, it was too long or too complex tofinish within the time limit.
This mirrors the experience of students who didn’t study the old tests.Unfortunately, they were sitting alongside classmates who’d seen an advancecopy and could thus easily finish within the class period.
Ten years ago, West High enacted a test return policy. Why? Because thiscalculus teacher, among others, wouldn’t give the tests back. The policy was acompromise to give families a chance to review tests, but only underconditions that gave teachers control against copies being handed down.
This calculus teacher had a choice: offer in-school review, as is done atMemorial High, or let the tests go home under tight restrictions, including awritten promise not to copy or use them for cheating. After this policy washammered out, he elected to return his tests unconditionally yet continued tore-use his tests. The district says that was his prerogative.
What was the administration’s job here? To conduct a fair formal complaintprocess and to ensure that assessment is non-discriminatory. The “outsideinvestigator” the district appointed is a lawyer who together with her firmroutinely does other legal work for the district. Had we known of thisconflict, we wouldn’t have wasted our time. In reality, the administration andits investigator endeavored mostly to find support for the foregone conclusionthat a teacher can run his class as he wishes.
We greatly appreciate our children’s teachers, but with all due respect,autonomy does not trump the duty of this teacher, the administration and theboard to provide all students with a fair and reliable testing scheme.
The only remedy the district offers is to let students repeat the course,either at West or at UW-Madison at their own expense — $1,000 — andsubstitute the new grade. This isn’t a genuine remedy. It punishes studentsfor a problem they didn’t create. Furthermore, it is only truly available tothose who can afford UW-Madison tuition and the time.
What was the School Board’s job? To tackle public policy — in this case,non-discriminatory assessment. With one brave exception, the board ducked, andchose to protect the teacher, the administration and the union — everyoneexcept the students.
The solution is easy. If teachers are going to re-use tests or questions,safeguard them using the test return policy or make an exam file available toall. Otherwise, write genuinely fresh tests each time.
After 14 months of investigation and a 100-plus page record, it’s worsethan when we started. Now the district says that this teacher, any teacher,can re-use tests and give them back without restriction, and that it isperfectly acceptable for some but not all students to have copies to preparefrom.
For six months, we sought to resolve this matter privately and informally,without public fanfare. Confronting the dirty little secret of the calculusclass didn’t sully West’s remarkable national reputation, but openly paperingit over surely does. Simply put, this teacher didn’t do his job. Theadministration and six board members didn’t do theirs, either. “Putting kidsfirst” needs to be more than just a campaign slogan.
Lee Sensenbrenner: Former Students Defend Teacher:
After hearing West High graduates who had returned home for winterbreak defend their former calculus teacher, the Madison School Board decidedit would seek the advice of department heads before potentially changing anypolicies on math tests.
Noah Kaufman, a freshman at Dartmouth College, told the board Monday nightthat complaints against calculus teacher Keith Knowles — who parents sayrepeated exam material without providing universal access to the old tests –were “entirely unreasonable.””Had I memorized numbers and calculations from old exams, and passed themoff as my answers, I would have failed my class, without question,” Kaufmansaid.
“Mr. Knowles did not use the same questions on different tests. What he diddo was ask questions that involved similar applications of the concepts. Allof these concepts were explained thoroughly in the textbook, as well as by Mr.Knowles himself.
“A student could have access to the concepts and examples of applicationsby simply doing the homework and paying attention in class.”
arents of a Madison West High School senior urged the School BoardMonday to make sure that teachers who recycle exams from year to year also tryto keep copies of the old tests from circulating among students.
Either that, or a sample test should be made available to all studentsequally, said Joan Knoebel.She said her son, Danny Cullenward, and other students were at adisadvantage during several semesters of advanced math, because the teacherrecycled tests even though he knew that some but not all students had accessto old copies. Danny said that when he privately asked for help, the teachertold him to find old tests but refused to supply them.
Said his mother: “Exams should be about what you know, not who you know.”
She said her son, a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist, becamesuspicious when some students breezed through the exams while he struggled tofinish on time.
college pressure
This is an article from several years ago. It describes the pressures and attitudes of those seriously college bound students. (I’m not a fan of Brooks as a political commentator, but I think he did his homework on this. It certainly compares to our college sophomore’s experience.)
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/04/brooks-p1.htm