Intel has pledged to help accelerate Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training’s e-learning initiative which aims to modernise Vietnam’s education system by 2011 and provide opportunities for the country’s teachers and students, especially those in remote and rural areas.
An agreement to this effect was signed in Hanoi on April 9 by representatives from Intel Semiconductor Ltd. Vietnam and the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) under the witness by Prof. Dr. Nguyen Thien Nhan, Deputy Prime Minister and MOET Minister and Dr. Craig Barrett, Intel Corporation Chairman.
Under the terms of the agreement, Intel and local technology companies will make available one million affordable PCs during the next two years. The “Education PC” program’s objective is to provide all Vietnamese teachers with a PC with educational software and broadband Internet connectivity.
Nobel laureate John Nash shares with students his love of a puzzle
More than 800 students gathered yesterday to hear Nobel prize-winning mathematician, John F. Nash, Jr. (American mathematician), share stories about his early life.
Professor Nash, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in economic sciences in 1994 and whose life was dramatised in an Oscar-winning film, A Beautiful Mind, told a hall packed with students at the Polytechnic University yesterday how problem-solving fascinated him from an early age.
“From a very young age, when we would start working with addition and subtraction calculations … when the standard kids were working with two digits, I was working with three or four digits …
“I got some pleasure from that,” the professor said.
Professor Nash is in Hong Kong for a week-long speaking tour. Yesterday’s talk, organised by the university and the Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups, was designed to give students an opportunity to pose questions.
Fascinating.
Math Performance Anxiety
n the 1990s, the Math Wars pitted two philosophies against each other. One side argued for content-based standards – that elementary school students must memorize multiplication tables by third grade. The other side argued for students to discover math, unfettered by “drill and kill” exercises.
When the new 1994 California Learning Assessment Test trained test graders to award a higher score to a child with a wrong answer (but good essay) than to a student who successfully solved a math problem, but without a cute explanation, the battle was on. New-new math was quickly dubbed “fuzzy crap.” By the end of the decade, repentant educators passed solid math standards.
Yet the Math Wars continue in California, as well as in New Jersey, Oregon and elsewhere. In Palo Alto, parent and former Bush education official Ze’ev Wurman is one of a group of parents who oppose the Palo Alto Unified School District Board’s April 14 vote to use “Everyday Mathematics” in grades K-5. Wurman recognizes that the “fuzzies” aren’t as fuzzy as they used to be, but also believes that state educators who approve math texts “fell asleep at the switch” when they approved the “Everyday” series in 2007.
The “Everyday” approach supports “spiraling” what students learn over as long as two or more years. As an Everyday teacher guide explained, “If we can, as a matter of principle and practice, avoid anxiety about children ‘getting’ something the first time around, then children will be more relaxed and pick up part or all of what they need. They may not initially remember it, but with appropriate reminders, they will very likely recall, recognize, and get a better grip on the skill or concept when it comes around again in a new format or application-as it will!” Those are my italics – to highlight the “fuzzies’ ” performance anxiety.
Related: Math Forum.
US schools chief says kids need more class time
American schoolchildren need to be in class more — six days a week, at least 11 months a year — if they are to compete with students abroad, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Tuesday.
“Go ahead and boo me,” Duncan told about 400 middle and high school students at a public school in northeast Denver. “I fundamentally think that our school day is too short, our school week is too short and our school year is too short.”
“You’re competing for jobs with kids from India and China. I think schools should be open six, seven days a week; eleven, twelve months a year,” he said.
Instead of boos, Duncan’s remark drew an unsurprising response from the teenage assembly: bored stares.
The former Chicago schools superintendent praised Denver schools for allowing schools to apply for almost complete autonomy, which allows them to waive union contracts so teachers can stay for after-school tutoring or Saturday school.
It is indeed, time to move away from the current, 19th century agrarian model.
Do Study Sites Make the Grade?
At 10 p.m. on a recent night, high-school senior Scott Landers was having trouble figuring out differential calculus in order to compare rates of change.
With his professor unreachable and the exam set for the next day, he sent a shot in the dark to Cramster, an “online study community” recommended by classmates.
Within two hours, Mr. Landers was surprised to find his answer pop up in his email, followed by a few more responses the next morning, all pointing in the same direction. “I thought it was cool that there were people out there actually willing to help me,” he says.
Web sites such as Cramster aim to revolutionize the way students study, much the way that networking sites like Facebook have changed the way people socialize.
Course Hero, launched last year primarily for college students, already holds a library of more than two million course documents, including homework, class notes and graded essays, uploaded by students enrolled at 3,000 different colleges. Koofers (a nickname at Virginia Tech for old tests passed around at fraternities) allows students from about 25 state universities to submit posts about the difficulty of courses taught by different instructors at their schools. It also offers average semester grades from instructors. Enotes, geared mainly to high-school students, allows peers to form discussion groups and pose questions to experts — usually teachers — who are paid by the Web site.
Newark schools, Rutgers unveil research collaboration
s one of the state’s poorest school districts, Newark has long known it has some severe problems. Quantifying them has been another matter.
Now, the district may be one step closer to getting some answers as Superintendent Clifford Janey joined officials at Rutgers University in Newark today to announce an ambitious research collaboration.
Modeled after a 20-year relationship between the University of Chicago and that city’s public schools, the project seeks to join a growing trend of universities helping public schools use technology to better track student performance. The relationships are particularly prevalent in cities where impoverished students have long struggled and are the focus of growing national concern.
Triumphing Over Long Odds to Succeed at School
Before the economy collapsed and thrift became a national watchword, a high school senior named Wei Huang was already scouring New York City for bargains, determined to support herself on the $10 a month she had left after she paid her rent.
Ms. Huang, 20, one of 12 high school seniors named New York Times Scholars this year, immigrated to New York from China with her parents in 2007. But when her parents found the transition to American life too hard and returned to China last year, she decided to stay here alone, entranced by the city’s streetscapes and the thought of attending college here one day.
She found a job at a florist paying $560 a month, and a house to share in Ridgewood, Queens, for $550. That leaves $10 a month, which she spends carefully on large bags of rice, chicken leg quarters at 49 cents a pound, and whatever vegetables are cheapest. Throw in the two free meals a day at school, a student MetroCard and the unexpected kind act — her English teacher, for instance, gave her $100 — and she manages to get by.
Denver Public Schools’ eager to prove its renewal
By taking the nation’s education secretary to visit two Denver schools undertaking significant reforms, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet aims to demonstrate why Colorado’s innovation should be rewarded with government cash.
But while Denver schools showed some encouraging improvement when Bennet was superintendent, there remains a question whether there is substance behind the buzz at Denver Public Schools.
The two schools Secretary Arne Duncan will visit today — Montclair Elementary and Bruce Randolph schools — have made intentional moves to free themselves from district and union rules. Duncan will be watching that kind of innovation as his department decides how to divide $5 billion in stimulus funds nationwide through a program called “Race to the Top.”
“This allows the secretary to point to something tangible that should be rewarded in this new world order,” said Joe Williams, director of Democrats for Education Reform. “People watched (President Barack) Obama run on a campaign of change. This is kind of an attempt to show people what that looks like on the ground.”
But at both schools, the reforms are in their infancy. One has had some modest success, but scores are still low.
What is Discovery Learning?
Barry Garelick, via email:
By way of introduction, I am neither mathematician nor mathematics teacher, but I majored in math and have used it throughout my career, especially in the last 17 years as an analyst for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. My love of and facility with math is due to good teaching and good textbooks. The teachers I had in primary and secondary school provided explicit instruction and answered students’ questions; they also posed challenging problems that required us to apply what we had learned. The textbooks I used also contained explanations of the material with examples that showed every step of the problem solving process.
I fully expected the same for my daughter, but after seeing what passed for mathematics in her elementary school, I became increasingly distressed over how math is currently taught in many schools.
Optimistically believing that I could make a difference in at least a few students’ lives, I decided to teach math when I retire. I enrolled in education school about two years ago, and have one class and a 15-week student teaching requirement to go. Although I had a fairly good idea of what I was in for with respect to educational theories, I was still dismayed at what I found in my mathematics education courses.
In class after class, I have heard that when students discover material for themselves, they supposedly learn it more deeply than when it is taught directly. Similarly, I have heard that although direct instruction is effective in helping students learn and use algorithms, it is allegedly ineffective in helping students develop mathematical thinking. Throughout these courses, a general belief has prevailed that answering students’ questions and providing explicit instruction are “handing it to the student” and preventing them from “constructing their own knowledge”–to use the appropriate terminology. Overall, however, I have found that there is general confusion about what “discovery learning” actually means. I hope to make clear in this article what it means, and to identify effective and ineffective methods to foster learning through discovery.
Waitlisted? Here’s What You Do
Are you stuck on a college waiting list? Frustrating, isn’t it? You feel disrespected, unlucky. But you are not alone. Some selective schools send more wait-list letters than acceptance letters. This year’s economic uncertainties might produce the largest number of wait-listed applicants ever.
What can you do about it? I have some ideas. There is only one job other than newspapering that I would be even remotely qualified for: college admissions consultant. I have written a lot on the subject, including a guidebook. My clients would be careerist, overinvolved parents just like me. In truth, I couldn’t take the pressure, but for fun, let’s pretend that you are paying me $300 an hour to get you off that waiting list. Here’s the plan:
Winning the wait-list game, like getting to the Final Four, is all about commitment. You must decide if a college that wait-listed you is still your first choice. If so, then go after it. (Pick just one school. No others allowed. Otherwise, someone will tell on you, and you will be dead.)
The Orwellian language of Wall Street finds its way to the Treasury Department.
In his timeless 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell condemned political rhetoric as a tool used “to make lies sound truthful” and “to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Were he alive today, Orwell might well be moved to pen a companion piece on the use of financial lingo. Remember those toxic assets? The poorly performing mortgages and collateralized debt obligations festering on the books of banks that made truly execrable lending decisions? In the latest federal bank rescue plan, they’ve been transformed into “legacy loans” and “legacy securities”–safe for professional investors to purchase, provided, of course, they get lots of cheap government credit.
It’s as if some thoughtful person had amassed, through decades of careful husbandry, a valuable collection that’s now being left as a blessing for posterity. Using the word legacy to describe phenomena that are causing financial carnage is “crazy,” according to George Lakoff, a Berkeley professor of cognitive science and linguistics, because “legacy typically suggests something positive.” More insidiously, the word is frequently deployed to deflect blame. Legacy financial issues are, by definition, holdovers from prior regimes. Word sleuths advise me that legacy derives from an ancient Indo-Aryan root meaning, “It wasn’t my fault, and I should still get a bonus this year even though we lost billions of dollars.”
On Music Education
First we met Seth Godin at Maison du Chocolat. It was fascinating to hear him riff on music education, Felice’s world. He lamented teachers married to excellence, performance of material that most people were not enamored of. He boiled it down to a sense of mastery. That by learning how to play an instrument, a child experienced a sense of accomplishment. That’s the message of music education, not exposing people to the classics or some extrapolation about IQ improvement. That’s Seth’s gift, the ability to execute an insightful surgical strike, right to the heart of the matter.
Are people ready for it?
Social Media Course Defended on Twitter
Jessica Shepherd, via a kind reader’s email:
Lecturers criticised for setting up £4,000 social media degree are fighting back on Twitter
Academics criticised for offering a masters degree covering Twitter and other social networking websites are defending themselves against the media onslaught – where else, but on Twitter.
Students on the £4,000 one-year Social Media degree, offered by Birmingham City University, will explore how we communicate on the websites and how they can be used for marketing.
Other modules on the course will teach students how to start a blog and podcasting techniques. The course is being advertised through a video on the university’s website.
The course convenor, Jon Hickman, who is posting regularly today on his Twitter feed, responded to media coverage of the course, saying it was not for “IT geeks”.
Adolescent Literacy Flim-Flam
The Concord Review
3 April 2009
There is no question that lots of people around the nation are concerned about the literacy of American adolescents. They must be worried about the ability of our students to read and write, one would assume. It might also seem reasonable to take for granted that professionals interested in teen skills in reading books and writing papers would give close attention to those students who are now reading a fair amount of nonfiction and writing really exemplary research papers at the high school level.
At this point, expectations need to be altered a bit. Surely coaches of Adolescent Sports have a tremendous fascination with the best teen athletes in the country. There are lots of prizes and even scholarships for high school students who perform very well in football, soccer, basketball, baseball, etc., and there are even college scholarships for good teen cheerleaders. We might think it odd if all high school coaches cared about was physical education classes and even in those, only those student/athletes who were most un-coordinated and incompetent. Not that it is unimportant to worry about teens who are overweight and cannot take part in sports, but nevertheless, coaches tend to focus on the best athletes, and colleges and the society at large seem to think that is fine for them to do, and is even their job, some would say.
But when it comes to students who read well and write good term papers, the Literacy Community has no interest in them. It is only able to focus on the illiterate and incompetent among Adolescents, and their professional peers seem to think that is fine for them to do, and is even their real job. And it surely is important for them to help those who need help. They should do research and develop curricula and programs to help teens become more literate. They have been doing this for many decades, and yet more than a million of our high school graduates each and every year are in remedial (non-credit) courses when they are “admitted” (conditionally) to colleges around the country.
Perhaps the current approach to literacy training for young people might deserve a second look. The Chronicle of Higher Education surveyed college professors, 90% of whom reported that they thought the freshmen in their classes were not well prepared in reading, doing research, or writing term papers. Their high school teachers had thought they were well prepared, but college professors didn’t see it that way.
No doubt many of those students had the benefit of the Adolescent Literacy Initiatives of AdLit.org, National Council of Teachers of English, National Writing Project, Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), Alliance for Excellent Education, Partnership for Reading, National Adolescent Literacy Coalition, Learning Point Associates, Education Development Center, Council of Chief State School Officers, Scholastic, Adolescent Literacy Coaching Project (ALCP), National Governors’ Association, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Adolescent Literacy Research Network, Adolescent Literacy Support Project, WGBH Adolescent Literacy website, and the International Reading Association, not to mention the many state and local literacy programs, and yet our students’ literacy still leaves a lot to be desired, even if they can graduate from high school.
To me it seems that, unlike coaches, the literacy pros are almost allergic to good academic work in reading and writing by our teens. I am not really sure why that would be the case, but in the last 20 years of working with exemplary secondary students of history from 44 states and 35 other countries, I have not found one single Literacy Organization or Literacy Program which had the slightest interest in their first-rate work, which I have been privileged to publish in 77 issues of The Concord Review so far. They have heard about it, but they don’t want to know about it, as far as I can tell.
It does seem foolish to me, that if they truly want to improve the reading and writing of adolescents, they don’t take a tiny bit of interest in exemplary reading and writing at the high school level, not only in the students’ work, but even perhaps in the work of the teachers who guided them to that level of excellence, just as high school coaches are interested in the best athletes and perhaps their coaches as well.
They could still spend the bulk of their time on grants given them to do “meta-analyses” of Literacy Strategies and the like, but it seems really stupid not to glance once or twice at very good written work by our most diligent teens (the Literate Adolescents).
Of course, I am biased. I believe that showing teachers and students the best term papers I can find will inspire them to try to reach for more success in literacy, and some of my authors agree with me: e.g. “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.” Emma Curran Donnelly Hulse, Columbia Class of 2009; 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.” Pamela Ban, Harvard Class of 2012; Thomas Worthington High School (OH) Class of 2008…
But what do they know? They are just some of those literate adolescents in whom the professional adolescent literacy community seems to have no interest.
“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®
THE AGE OF COMMODIFIED INTELLIGENCE
The commute is just long enough to be useful. Over the speakers comes the reflective voice of Harold Bloom, telling the businessman as he sits in traffic about the “The Art of Reading a Poem”. Across town on the subway, a student spends the first day of spring break on a visit to the Guggenheim. And overhead, as a plane clears the skyline, a woman unpacks her Oprah edition of “Light in August”.
As a still life, the “Age of Mass Intelligence” is compelling. No one doubts that reality TV and gossip journalism increasingly share mental space with Joyce and Ravel. But intelligence is not a matter of pressing more pieces of culture into the great jigsaw puzzle of the mind. Unless operas and concerts are prophylactics against a churlish existence, we are not wising up. We are merely trying to buy wisdom.
This is an Age of Commodified Intelligence, a time of conspicuously consumed high culture in which intellectual life is meticulously measured and branded.
Equal measures success and hubris are to blame. By the end of the last century, exponential gains in science and in living standards made advancement seem inevitable, progress a matter of putting one scientific foot in front of the other. The intellectual horizon felt flatter, more intelligible, more accessible. A rise in intellectual exuberance is therefore unsurprising. Enrichment has certainly been on the march.
Nothing to Think About
There is a priceless exchange in the 20th episode of “The Sopranos”–the soap-opera about a New Jersey mobster whose stressful career brings him to the couch of a psychotherapist, Jennifer Melfi. Tony Soprano is annoyed with his teenage son, who has been moaning about the ultimate absurdity of life:
Melfii: Sounds to me like Anthony junior may have stumbled onto existentialism.
Tony: F____’ internet!
Melfi: No, no, no. It’s a European philosophy.
Quite so; one cannot blame the internet for everything. Existentialism has roots in the 19th-century thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, but it is most famously linked with restless French students in the 1960s and the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Sure enough, Anthony junior has been assigned Camus’s novel “L’Etranger” in class. It also doesn’t help his precarious state of mind when his grandmother bitterly tells him “in the end, you die in your own arms… It’s all a big Nothing.”
Well, plus ça change. It is not only on television that nihilist strains of existentialism continue to tempt young minds, and no doubt the minds of some grandmothers. Last autumn I taught a seminar about ideas of nothingness at the New School, a university in New York. Most of the students were already keen on Sartre and Camus, and among the many facets of nothingness that we looked at in science, literature, art and philosophy, it was death and the pointlessness of life that most gripped them. They showed a polite interest in the role of vacuum in 17th-century physics and in the development of the concept of zero. But existentialist angst was the real draw.
An Interview with Eli Broad
Steve Pearlstein interviews Eli Broad on Education:
Broad discusses school choice, differential pay for math, science and Michelle Rhee.
The Peter Principle Lives On
Leigh Buchanan & Robert Sutton:
Forty years ago, Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull invented business satire with the publication of The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong. The principle posits that employees are rewarded for competence by being shoved up hierarchies until they reach a position that overwhelms their skills. At that point, they stick. Consequently, “In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties,” the authors wrote. Inc. editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan discussed the idea’s enduring relevance with Stanford management professor Robert Sutton, who wrote an introduction to the 40th-anniversary edition. (Peter and Hull died in 1990 and 1985, respectively.)
Eleminate the Education Major at UDC?
The University of the District of Columbia plans to shut down its struggling undergraduate education department, which, officials say, is out of touch with current thinking on how to train teachers and fails to graduate the vast majority of its students.
Usually, 7 or 8 percent of the students who enroll in the department have graduated from it within six years, according to UDC data. Professors said that is primarily because many cannot pass a national standardized test of basic high school-level reading, writing and math skills.
Academic March Madness
There haven’t been many upsets in this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament, as big name basketball powerhouses have dominated the hardwood. But evaluate the Sweet Sixteen based on the most important academic competition of studying for and obtaining a meaningful degree and you’ll find that most of the top teams wouldn’t even come close to cutting down the nets in Detroit early next month.
Higher Ed Watch’s third annual Academic Sweet Sixteen examines the remaining teams in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament to see which squads are matching their on-court success with academic achievement in the classroom. And for the third consecutive year, academic indicators produce a championship game match-up that isn’t on anyone’s radar: Purdue versus Villanova, with Purdue’s 80 percent graduation rate trumping Villanova’s 67 percent. The University of North Carolina and Michigan State, meanwhile, round out the Final Four with graduation rates of 60 percent.
High School Debate Lacking in Madison
ast week’s Isthmus reminded me that school board elections are happening this April. The lack of discussion this time around stands in stark contrast to the amount of discussion that occurred in 2007. Some of the 2007 issues stick out in my memory, because many of the candidates chose to highlight the value of speech and debate. Two year’s later, I wonder if the rhetoric of praising the value of speech and debate has translated into supporting the activity.
In the Spring of 2007, as an assistant forensics coach preparing for the state championship, it was nice to hear that members of the community had taken notice of James Madison Memorial’s success. (Memorial won state forensics championships in 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2006. JMM also won last year and they’ve taken individual championships each year). Back then, we were just about the only game in town. Since then, Madison West, Sun Prairie, and Middleton have developed quality forensic teams. At last year’s state forensics tournament, Memorial went home with the championship, West placed eighth, and Sun Praire placed fourth.
Debate, however, is a different story. Madison West has lost most of their debate team; while Middleton has developed one. Madison East and LaFollette, are no where to be found for either debate or forensics. Sure, they have teams. But their teams do not compete in the same way that Memorial/West/Sun Prairie/Middleton do.
Education Secretary Says Aid Hinges on New Data
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the nation’s governors on Wednesday that in exchange for billions of dollars in federal education aid provided under the economic stimulus law, he wants new information about the performance of their public schools, much of which could be embarrassing.
In a “Dear Governor” letter to the 50 states, Mr. Duncan said $44 billion in stimulus money was being made available to states immediately. To qualify for a second phase of financing later this year, however, governors will need to provide reams of detailed educational information.
The data is likely to reveal that in many states, tests have been dumbed down so that students score far higher than on tests administered by the federal Department of Education.
It will also probably show that many local teacher-evaluation systems are so perfunctory that they rate 99 of every 100 teachers as excellent and that diplomas often mean so little that millions of high school graduates each year must enroll in remediation classes upon entering college.
Wisconsin’s academic standards have been criticized by the Fordham foundation, among others.
aSam Dillon:
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the nation’s governors on Wednesday that in exchange for billions of dollars in federal education aid provided under the economic stimulus law, he wants new information about the performance of their public schools, much of which could be embarrassing.
In a “Dear Governor” letter to the 50 states, Mr. Duncan said $44 billion in stimulus money was being made available to states immediately. To qualify for a second phase of financing later this year, however, governors will need to provide reams of detailed educational information.
The data is likely to reveal that in many states, tests have been dumbed down so that students score far higher than on tests administered by the federal Department of Education.
It will also probably show that many local teacher-evaluation systems are so perfunctory that they rate 99 of every 100 teachers as excellent and that diplomas often mean so little that millions of high school graduates each year must enroll in remediation classes upon entering college.
Wisconsin’s academic standards have been criticized by the Fordham foundation, among others.
Robert Tomsho has more.
Robert Tomsho has more.
Wisconsin Lags in Closing the Education Gap – Education Trust
Wisconsin is not making as much progress raising student achievement and closing the gaps between have and have-not students as the nation as a whole, according to a report released Tuesday by the Education Trust, an influential, Washington-based nonprofit group.
As with other reports in recent years, the analysis showed the achievement of African-American students remains a major issue overall and that the gaps between black students and white students in Wisconsin are among the largest in the United States.
But it also analyzed the progress made in recent years and found Wisconsin lagging when it came to all racial and ethnic groups – and the news was generally not good across a wide range of measures.
Daria Hall, director of kindergarten through 12th-grade policy for the Education Trust, said, “What you see is when you look at any of the critical milestones in education – fourth-grade reading, eighth-grade math, high school graduation, collegiate graduation – Wisconsin and African-American students in particular are far below their peers in other states. This shows that while there has been some improvement, it is not nearly fast enough for the state’s young people, communities or the economy as a whole.”
For example, consider reading scores for fourth-graders in 1998 and in 2007 in the testing program known as the National Assessment of Education Progress. White students nationwide improved their scores seven points over the nine-year period (on a scale where average scores were in the low 200s), while in Wisconsin, the improvement was one point. For black fourth-graders, the nationwide gain was 11 points, while in Wisconsin it was four. And for low-income students in general, the national gain was 10 points, while in Wisconsin it was two points.
Wisconsin lagged the nation when it came to similar comparisons involving the graduation rate for black students, the percentages of black and Hispanic students graduating college within six years of finishing high school and the degree to which there had been improvements in recent years in the size of black/white achievement gaps.
This pdf chart compares the 50 States and the District of Columbia.
Related: Tony Evers and Rose Fernandez are running for Wisconsin DPI Superintendent in the April 7, 2009 spring election. Capital Newspapers’ Capital Times Editorial Board endorsed Tony Evers today.
Watch or listen to a recent debate here. SIS links on the race.
Some schools are cutting back on homework
Rachel Bennett, 12, loves playing soccer, spending time with her grandparents and making jewelry with beads. But since she entered a magnet middle school in the fall — and began receiving two to four hours of homework a night — those activities have fallen by the wayside.
“She’s only a kid for so long,” said her father, Alex Bennett, of Silverado Canyon. “There’s been tears and frustration and family arguments. Everyone gets burned out and tired.”
Bennett is part of a vocal movement of parents and educators who contend that homework overload is robbing children of needed sleep and playtime, chipping into family dinners and vacations and overly stressing young minds. The objections have been raised for years but increasingly, school districts are listening. They are banning busywork, setting time limits on homework and barring it on weekends and over vacations.
Reforming Education in America
According to a 2005 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study, the United States is tied for first place with Switzerland when it comes to annual spending per student in public schooling. Each of the two countries spends more than $11,000 per student per year, while the average spending in developed countries at $7343. The United States spends 7% of it’s GDP on education, second in the world.
Sadly, that doesn’t mean U.S. students are roughly 50% better educated than the students in these other countries. In fact, (given the topic it seems appropriate to award it with a grade) American education would most likely earn a sold “C”.
The 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) showed U.S. student’s science and mathematics scores in the middle of the pack:
Jay Cross Wants No More Learners
Take a look and see what you think of this three-and-a-half minute rant about leveling the preacher-and-congregation model of learning from Jay Cross. I of course love it as you will recognize that is what my knowledge cafes are about. You can hear the story here of how I started the knowledge cafes in response to death-by-powerpoint presentations.
But also read the comments on Jays post. Some people do not agree with him. But note Jay is not saying that we need to get totally away from the teacher-student model of learning more that we need to shift the balance. Jay himself is in preach mode in delivering the rant and I am sure he was well aware of it. My Knowledge cafes also have a chalk-and-talk component.
Advanced Placement Annual Conference
The College Board, via a kind reader’s email:
The AP Annual Conference is a forum for all members of the AP and Pre-AP communities, worldwide, to exchange experiences, strengthen professional ties, and gain a better sense of how they can help their students to prepare for college success.
Clever boys dumb down to avoid bullying in school
Clever children are saving themselves from being branded swots at school by dumbing down and deliberately falling behind, a study has shown.
Schoolchildren regarded as boffins may be attacked and shunned by their peers, according to Becky Francis, professor of education at Roehampton University, who carried out a study of academically gifted 12- and 13-year-olds in nine state secondary schools.
The study, to be published in the Sociological Review next year, shows how difficult it is for children, particularly boys, to be clever and popular. Boys risk being assaulted in some schools for being high-achievers. To conform and escape alienation, clever boys told researchers they may “try to fall behind” or “dumb down”.
One boy told researchers: “It is harder to be popular and intelligent. If the subject comes naturally … then I think it makes it easier. But if the subject doesn’t come naturally, they work hard and other people see that and then you get the name-calling.” This may in part explain boys’ perceived underachievement, Francis said.
The New Hard Times
Ernest Kurnow, a 96-year-old business school professor at New York University, finished his own schooling in the middle of the Great Depression. Now his current students are faced with finding a job in the floundering world of finance after graduation.
The Impact of Dropping the SAT
A new research study — based on simulations using actual student applications at competitive colleges that require the SAT or ACT for admission — has found that ending the requirement would lead to demonstrable gains in the percentages of black and Latino students, and working class or economically disadvantaged students, who are admitted.
The finding is consistent with what admissions officers have reported at many colleges that have gone SAT-optional. But the basis of this new research goes well beyond the anecdotal information reported by colleges pleased with their shifts. Scholars at Princeton University’s Office of Population Research obtained actual admissions data from seven selective colleges that require the SAT or ACT. Using the actual admissions patterns for these colleges, the scholars then ran statistical models showing the impact of either going SAT-optional or adopting what they called the “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach in which a college says that it won’t look at standardized test scores.
These models suggest that any move away from the SAT or ACT in competitive colleges results in significant gains in ethnic and economic diversity. But the gains are greater for colleges that drop testing entirely, as opposed to just making it optional. (To date, only one institution — Sarah Lawrence College — has taken that step.)
In terms of other measures of academic competitiveness, the study found that going SAT optional would result in classes of students with higher grade point averages. Dropping testing entirely, on the other hand, would result in higher levels of academic achievement in the entering classes at the public institutions studied, but not the privates. The research will be formally presented next month at a conference at Wake Forest University about college admissions, but the Princeton researchers released the findings Wednesday.
Bioscience, genetics, ecology revolutionizing ‘Ag Ed’ class
In Craig Kohn’s classroom at Waterford Union High School, students use traditional Punnett square diagrams to study animal genetics.
But they also use 80-pound Foster, the living, breathing class Holstein calf, and talk about his genetics and which of those traits they can predict his offspring may have generations from now.
Using Foster requires more post-lesson cleanup in the school’s agriculture education classroom, but students say Kohn’s lessons bring science alive. It is fun, real and far more engaging than memorizing facts and formulas.
The approach represents part of a revolution in agriculture education that is under way across Wisconsin and the United States.
The so-called “cows and plows” high school curriculum – animal science, plant science and mechanics – once dominated by farm kids in Carhartt jackets and Wranglers has morphed into courses that cover turf management, wildlife ecology, landscape design, biotechnology, organic farming, genetic engineering, sustainable water, biodiesel production and meat science.
The developments have exciting implications, from a wave of new student interest in agri-science to ample post-secondary career prospects.
Many school leaders are harnessing the potential of the programs. The Hartland-Lakeside School District is designing an organic farming charter school; state agriculture officials hope a similar urban agriculture school could take root in Milwaukee.
Europe and the Financial Crisis: US High School Students Take on The Euro Challenge
Is the global economy heading from recession to depression? Why did a crisis in US mortgage markets wreak havoc in economies across Europe? The Euro Challenge, an academic contest now in its fourth year, pits teams of high school students against each other as they answer economic and financial questions to showcase their knowledge of everything from ballooning government deficits to rising unemployment.
This year, 72 high school teams from nine states (Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Illinois and Pennsylvania) will compete in the Euro Challenge, which fosters a better understanding of the European and transatlantic economy and supports local learning objectives in the field of economics and finance. Regional rounds kick off on March 30 and culminate in the finals at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on April 29.
Students Speak Out on AP and the Challenge Index
Advanced Placement English teacher Allison Beers asked her 11th-grade students at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Prince George’s County to critique my annual rankings, in The Washington Post and Newsweek, of public high schools. I use the Challenge Index, a measure of participation in AP and other college-level tests. Here are excerpts of comments from several students, with some comments from me:
‘Great Texts’ exposes high-schoolers to literature
High school students in Wisconsin are digging into great world literature that would bewilder older and more experienced readers: “Don Quixote,” by Miguel de Cervantes, “Dante’s Inferno,” by Dante Alighieri, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and “The Brothers Karamazov,” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. All the students need is a chance to try and the right guidance from their teachers. Both of these necessities are provided by the Center for the Humanities.
During the past five years, the center’s program Great World Texts in Wisconsin has enabled some 1,000 students to read heady and challenging tomes not found on the young adult reading list. The program is a perfect example of the Wisconsin Idea in action. It creates partnerships between UW-Madison faculty and Wisconsin high school teachers for the benefit of state students.
Design Under Constraint: How Limits Boost Creativity
..A 16-by 10.875-inch rectangle containing precisely 174 square inches of possibility, made from two sheets of paper glued and bound together. Legendary magazine art director and Pentagram partner D. J. Stout calls the science of filling this box with artful compositions of type and images “variations on a rectangle.” That is, in any given issue of a magazine–this one, for example–subjects and stories will change, but as a designer, you’re still dealing with the same ol’ blank white box.
At Wired, our design team sees this constraint as our daily bread. On every editorial page, we use words and pictures to overcome the particular restrictions of paper and ink: We can’t animate the infographics (yet). We can’t embed video or voice-over (yet). We can’t add sound effects or music (yet). But for all that we can’t do in this static medium, we find enlightenment and wonder in its possibilities. This is a belief most designers share. In fact, the worst thing a designer can hear is an offhand “Just do whatever you want.” That’s because designers understand the power of limits. Constraint offers an unparalleled opportunity for growth and innovation.
Think of a young tree, a sapling. With water and sunshine, it can grow tall and strong. But include some careful pruning early in its development–removing low-hanging branches–and the tree will grow taller, stronger, faster. It won’t waste precious resources on growth that doesn’t serve its ultimate purpose. The same principle applies to design. Given fewer resources, you have to make better decisions.
Academic Earth Aggregates Lectures from MIT, Harvard, Yale, and Others
Web site Academic Earth is like Hulu for academic lectures, pulling free lectures from Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale into one attractive, easy to navigate site. It’s incredible.
The site clearly takes its cues from Hulu and iTunes on its design, but it’s ten times better than either, because it’s open. The videos can be embedded anywhere or downloaded and enjoyed wherever you want to take them. It’s easy to use, has tons of great content, and it doesn’t cost a dime.
Why College Towns are Looking Smart
ooking for a job? Try a college town.
Morgantown, W.Va., home to West Virginia University, has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the U.S. — just 3.9% — and the university itself has about 260 job openings, from nurses to professors to programmers.
“We’re hurting for people, especially to fill our computer and technical positions,” says Margaret Phillips, vice president for human relations at WVU.
Of the six metropolitan areas with unemployment below 4% as of January, three of them are considered college towns. One is Morgantown. The other two are Logan, Utah, home of Utah State University, and Ames, Iowa, home of Iowa State University. Both have just 3.8% unemployment, based on Labor Department figures that are not seasonally adjusted.
The pattern holds true for many other big college towns, such as Gainesville, Fla., Ann Arbor, Mich., Manhattan, Kan., and Boulder, Colo. In stark contrast, the unadjusted national unemployment rate is 8.5%.
While college towns have long been considered recession-resistant, their ability to avoid the depths of the financial crisis shaking the rest of the nation is noteworthy. The ones faring the best right now are not only major education centers; they also are regional health-care hubs that draw people into the city and benefit from a stable, educated, highly skilled work force.
The Education Wars
Like any successful negotiator, Randi Weingarten can sense when the time for compromise is nigh. On Nov. 17, after the Election Day dust had cleared, Weingarten, the president of both the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and its New York City affiliate, the United Federation of Teachers, gave a major speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. In attendance were a host of education-policy luminaries, including Weingarten’s sometimes-foe Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City, Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern, National Education Association (NEA) President Dennis van Roekel, and Rep. George Miller of California.
“No issue should be off the table, provided it is good for children and fair for teachers,” Weingarten vowed, referencing debates within the Democratic coalition over charter schools and performance pay for teachers — innovations that teachers’ unions traditionally held at arm’s length.
The first openly gay president of a major American labor union, Weingarten is small — both short and slight. But she speaks in the commanding, practiced tones of a unionist. In speeches, newspaper op-eds, and public appearances, Weingarten, once known as a guns-blazing New York power broker, has been trying to carve out a conciliatory role for herself in the national debate over education policy. It is a public-relations strategy clearly crafted for the Obama era: an effort to focus on common ground instead of long-simmering differences.
Notably absent from the audience for Weingarten’s post-election speech was D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. In the summer of 2007, Rhee, a Teach For America alumna and founder of the anti-union New Teacher Project, took office and quickly implemented an agenda of school closings, teacher and principal firings, and a push toward merit pay. These actions met with their fair share of outrage from both parents and teachers and especially from the local teachers’ union. At the time of Weingarten’s speech, Rhee and the AFT-affiliated Washington Teachers’ Union (WTU) were stalemated over a proposed new contract for teachers.
Wider testing to ID kids
Rhonda Bodfield
Arizona Daily Star
Even as schools across the state brace for sky-is-falling budget cuts, the Tucson Unified School District program for gifted and talented students is prepping for dramatic growth in the next school year.
The district plans to double the number of students it tests — up to 10,000 — and will send postcards to every family about testing opportunities.
As a result of state and federal requirements, it also will begin offering gifted classes for kindergartners and for juniors and seniors in high school.
Currently, parents request testing to see if their children qualify. That’s a system that can be full of pitfalls in lower-income areas where parents miss the newsletter because they may be working two jobs, for example, or where language barriers might lead to missed deadlines, let alone confusion over how to access the program.
The Ethics of DNA Databasing: The House Believes That People’s DNA Sequences are Their Business and Nobody Else’s
An online debate at The Economist:: Professor Arthur Caplan:
Emmanuel and Robert Hart Professor of Bioethics and Director, Centre for Bioethics, Penn University
There are, it is increasingly said, plenty of reasons why people you know and many you don’t ought to have access to your DNA or data that are derived from it. Have you ever had sexual relations outside a single, monogamous relationship? Well then, any children who resulted from your hanky-panky might legitimately want access to your DNA to establish paternity or maternity.
Craig Venter, Against:
As we progress from the first human genome to sequence hundreds, then thousands and then millions of individual genomes, the value for medicine and humanity will only come from the availability and analysis of comprehensive, public databases containing all these genome sequences along with as complete as possible phenotype descriptions of the individuals.
College Prestige Lies
Over the next two weeks my eldest son will be rejected by some colleges, accepted by others. And then we’ll likely have to make a hard choice, between cheap state schools and expensive prestigious ones. A colleague told me the best econ paper on this found it doesn’t matter. From its 1999 abstract:
We matched students who applied to, and were accepted by, similar colleges to try to eliminate this bias. Using the … High School Class of 1972, we find that students who attended more selective colleges earned about the same [20 years later] as students of seemingly comparable ability who attended less selective schools. Children from low-income families, however, earned more if they attended selective colleges.
A 2006 NYT article confirms this:
Higher education experts have this message … Pay less attention to prestige and more to “fit” — the marriage of interests and comfort level with factors like campus size, access to professors, instruction philosophy. … A 1999 study by Alan B. Krueger … and Stacy Dale … found that students who were admitted to both selective and moderately selective colleges earned the same no matter which they attended.
Ease the Tuition Squeeze
You’ve been waiting for this moment for nearly 18 years: Your baby is almost ready for college. Your finances, not so much. The market’s protracted free fall means that your college fund is now worth just a fraction of what you need. Your home’s value has no doubt dropped sharply too – no help there. The only thing that keeps going up, you guessed it, is college tuition. So it’s goodbye, Dream School U., hello, Central State, right?
Wrong. While there’s no denying times are tough, you have more options to help pay for that BA than you think. From targeting the right schools to taking advantage of new financial aid rules and tax breaks, you can get the price to a manageable level. These steps will ensure your kid ends up at a great school you can really afford.
1. Use your savings strategically
The typical 529 college savings plan of a high school junior or senior has dropped 12.5% in value over the past year. And if you didn’t invest in an age-based portfolio that automatically shifted into safer investments as your child got older, your losses may be far worse. The big question before you: Should you try to hold off withdrawing money from the account to give your savings time to bounce back?
CNA program a boon to Oregon High School students
Kayla Crowley, 18, is healthy, but she’s lying in a financial institution with a thermometer in her mouth.
Two mornings a week, this basement room in the Oregon Community Bank and Trust has served as a bustling training area — not for lending money, but for lending a hand.
Crowley and 10 other students from Oregon High School are earning both high school and college credit while they prepare for a booming job category: nursing assistant. While courses such as this take place across the region, the Oregon class “has been a real community effort,” said Bill Urban, coordinator for Oregon’s School 2 Career program, which matches students with on-the-job training.
The bank donated space. Meriter loaned two hospital beds. Oregon Manor contributed two wheelchairs and a Hoyer patient lift.
Behind the Boom in AP Coursess
It’s about 9 a.m. on a Friday morning and history teacher Howard Wilen is lecturing on President Theodore Roosevelt’s relationship with labor unions.
Roosevelt, Wilen told the class, helped secure better work hours for coal miners but coal prices increased as a result.
Wilen’s Advanced Placement U.S. history students have brokered a deal of sorts too, taking a tough class in high school that could earn college credit. For those who do well on the placement exam, many colleges will give credit for the AP history class, saving students money and time down the road.
Participation in AP courses has skyrocketed in recent years as many school districts have adopted open-enrollment policies, allowing any student willing to take on the work a chance to try the college-level courses.
But at Alamo Heights High School, where Wilen chairs the social studies department, admission remains restricted to top students. The district is rethinking that policy now.
Core Knowledge Foundation Blog, Take That, AIG!
Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 20, 2009 in Education News and Students:
An upstate New York high school student could teach a course in character to the bonus babies of AIG. Nicole Heise of Ithaca High School was one of The Concord Review’s six winners of The Concord Review’s Emerson Prize awards for excellence this year. But as EdWeek’s Kathleen Kennedy Manzo tells the story, she sent back her prize, a check for $800, with this note:
“As you well know, for high school-aged scholars, a forum of this caliber and the incentives it creates for academic excellence are rare. I also know that keeping The Concord Review active requires resources. So, please allow me to put my Emerson award money to the best possible use I can imagine by donating it to The Concord Review so that another young scholar can experience the thrill of seeing his or her work published.”
The Concord Review publishes research papers by high school scholars. It’s a one-of-a-kind venue for its impressive young authors. Manzo notes TCR “has won praise from renowned historians, lawmakers, and educators, yet has failed to ever draw sufficient funding…It operates on a shoestring, as Founder and Publisher Will Fitzhugh reminds me often. Fitzhugh, who has struggled for years to keep the operation afloat, challenges students to do rigorous scholarly work and to delve deeply into history. His success at inspiring great academic work is juxtaposed against his failure to get anyone with money to take notice.”
Young Ms. Heise noticed. Anyone else?
“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®
Why Don’t Students Like School?
Daniel Willingham, via a kind reader’s email:
trange as it may sound, the mind is not designed for thinking–it’s designed to save us from having to think. Because thinking is slow, effortful, and uncertain, we rely on memory, not thought, to guide us whenever possible. Nonetheless, we are curious and we do like to think, so long as the issue or problem at hand is neither too easy nor too hard.
Price Drop: Stocks, Homes, Now Triple-Word Scores
A trio of words — one that’s slang for pizza, another defined as a body’s vital life force and a third referring to a snoring sound — have conspired to change the game of Scrabble.
“Za,” “qi” and “zzz” were added recently to the game’s official word list for its original English-language edition. Because Z’s and Q’s each have the game’s highest point value of 10, those monosyllabic words can rack up big scores for relatively little effort. So now that those high-scoring letters are more versatile, some Scrabble aficionados would like to see the rules changed — which would be the only change since Alfred Butts popularized the game in 1948.
For non Scrabble-rousers, there are analogs for the proposed re-evaluations in other leisure pursuits. Some notable mispriced assets: Vermont Avenue in Monopoly, three-point field goals in basketball and football and overtime losses in hockey. Yet traditionalists say rules should endure; it’s up to players to exploit them.
In Scrabble, players form words on a 15-by-15-space board using 100 tiles — two of them blanks that can stand in for any letter, and 98 tiles with letters and corresponding point values. Players draw seven tiles to start the game and refresh their set after each turn.
Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Candidate Tony Evers Advocates Charter Schools
Tony Evers campaign, via email:
Tony Evers today pledged to continue his long commitment to Wisconsin’s charter schools, which provide innovative educational strategies. Dr. Evers has played a major educational leadership role in making Wisconsin 6th in the nation, out of all 50 states, in both the number of charter schools and the number of students enrolled in charter schools.
“We are a national leader in charter schools and I will continue my work for strong charter schools in Wisconsin,” Evers said. “As State Superintendent, I will continue to promote our charter schools and the innovative, successful learning strategies they pursue as we work to increase achievement for all students no matter where they live.”
Evers, as Deputy State Superintendent, has been directly responsible for overseeing two successful competitive federal charter school grants that brought over $90 million to Wisconsin. From these successful applications, Evers has recommended the approval of over 700 separate planning, implementation, implementation renewal, and dissemination grants to charter schools around the state since 2001.
During the past eight years, the number of charter schools in Wisconsin has risen from 92 to 221 – an increase of almost 150%. The number of students enrolled in charter schools has increased from 12,000 students in 2001 to nearly 36,000 today.
Evers has also represented the Department of Public Instruction on State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster’s Charter School Advisory Council. The council was created to provide charter school representatives, parents, and others with the opportunity to discuss issues of mutual interest and provide recommendations to the State Superintendent.
To improve education, improve teacher training
Last week, President Barack Obama challenged parents, school leaders and teacher unions to raise their expectations for our children’s educational achievement, warning that we cannot maintain our global economic competitiveness otherwise. So Obama has increased the federal government’s financial commitment to education and strongly recommended both an increase in the number of charter schools and merit pay for teachers whose students show progress.
But these two initiatives are stopgaps. The real need is to improve the quality of all our teachers. And that goal starts with the colleges of education that prepare new teachers to enter the classroom.
What we need most is a total revamping of teacher-preparation programs. Until this occurs, we’ll continue to have second-rate schools no matter how much money we spend.
And now is the time to act. In addition to a president who’s identified education as a top priority, we have Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who led one of our country’s largest school districts and has a reputation for getting things done; teacher unions that support higher standards for new teachers; and, perhaps most importantly, a $5 billion pot of stimulus funds at Duncan’s disposal for educational improvement initiatives.
American Adults Flunk Basic Science
Are Americans flunking science? A new national survey commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences and conducted by Harris Interactive® reveals that the U.S. public is unable to pass even a basic scientific literacy test.
Over the past few months, the American government has allocated hundreds of billions of dollars for economic bailout plans. While this spending may provide a short-term solution to the country’s economic woes, most analysts agree that the long-term solution must include a transition to a more knowledge-based economy, including a focus on science, which is now widely recognized as a major driver of innovation and industry.
Despite its importance to economic growth, environmental protection, and global health and energy issues, scientific literacy is currently low among American adults. According to the national survey commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences:
Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
Madison School Superintendent Dan Nerad on Poverty and Enrollment: “For every one student that comes into the MMSD, three leave it”
Kristin Czubkowski, via Jackie Woodruff:
All of the speakers were good, but I will admit I really enjoyed listening to Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Dan Nerad talk on the issue of poverty in our schools.
“Oftentimes, the statement is used as follows: Our children are our future. In reality, we are theirs.”
Nerad made one more point I found interesting, which was his explanation for why for every one student that comes into the MMSD, two to three students leave it. While MMSD has been well-recognized for having great schools and students, many of the schools have high concentrations of poverty (17 of 32 elementary schools have more than 50 percent of students on free or reduced lunch programs), which Nerad said can lead to perception issues about how MMSD uses its resources.
“From my perspective, it’s a huge issue that we must face as a community — for every one child coming in, two to three come out right now. I worry that a lot of it is based on this increasing poverty density that we have in our school district … Oftentimes that’s based on a perception of quality, and it’s based on a perception based on that oftentimes that we have more kids in need, that we have more kids with more resource needs, and oftentimes people feel that their own children’s needs may not be met in that equation.”
Recent open enrollment data.
Pennsylvania’s Cyber Charter Schools
When thousands of students ditch home computers and gather in makeshift classrooms across the state today, the future of their cyber charter schools is uncertain.
Testing begins on reading and math portions of the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, the measure by which the state determines whether public schools are making “adequate yearly progress” under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Last year, only three of the state’s 11 cyber schools — which educate more than 19,000 students — achieved AYP.
Traditional schools that fail to do so face corrective action from the state that increases in severity each succeeding year, up to a state takeover. Cyber schools face the threat of the state not renewing their five-year charters, effectively shutting them. Six charters are up in the next two years, and test scores will be a big factor in renewals, said Leah Harris, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Education.
Bill Tucker has more.
We Should Not Be Surprised at These Outcomes, When We Teach our Children PowerPoint
A recently released “slideument” from General Motors. This document [PDF or [PPT] “explains” their March, 2009 buyer and dealer incentives. Via the Truth About Cars.
Related: “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint“, “slideuments“, PowerPoint and Military Intelligence, PowerPoint does Rocket Science and Two Decades of PowerPoint, is the World a Better Place?
I am frequently amazed at the information sent around in such slideuments.
Transforming Workers and Work: Learning how to read the new knowledge economy.
THOUSANDS OF PROFESSIONAL JOBS IN THIS COUNTRY have been downsized or offshored, and the Americans who held them have been laid off. Where are those people now? Few have starved to death or the tabloids would have told us. Few have jumped from bridges or the security camera footage would be all over YouTube. All those poor souls somehow have continued to earn enough for bare subsistence, or better.
Like it or not, the underemployed eventually realize that they have become small-business people. They did not register with the SBA for loans; they just began creating wealth for themselves by selling stuff or services to others.
We live in the most adaptable organism on earth. With a computer and a link to a network, we can use our knowledge to adapt and create wealth.
FARMERS AND FACTORY WORKERS could tell us that economic activity has always had a knowledge component. It’s hard to create much wealth without skills. Now, for the first time in human history, knowledge is becoming the dominating determinant of wealth creation.
There are giant companies, such as Microsoft, that manufacture almost nothing. They don’t ship anything except computer disks loaded with data, and sometimes not even that. Even an old-line “heavy-iron” company like IBM has transformed its manufacturing business into a different kind of wealth-creating enterprise, in which 60% of sales come from service contracts.
Paying It Forward as a Full-Time Job
When Trevor Patzer was growing up in Ketchum, Idaho, he received an unusual offer from family friend Ric Ohrstrom: get admitted to New Hampshire’s prestigious St. Paul’s School, and Mr. Ohrstrom would foot the entire bill for his schooling there.
Mr. Patzer was accepted and graduated three years later. He says the experience of someone offering to pay for his high-school education had a profound effect on him, and the gift was always in the back of his mind, even as he moved to college and into the work world.
After graduating from Brown University, Mr. Patzer, now 35, headed off to Andersen Consulting to be a systems integration consultant. “It was that or investment banking,” he says. But it didn’t take him long to realize that there was more to life than “coding someone else’s computers,” he says. “I knew it wasn’t the best fit for me. I’m a people person.” Still, he kept plugging away in consulting for two more years.
During one of his vacations in 1998, he decided to visit Nepal and see “the biggest mountain in the world.” While there, Mr. Patzer had another life-changing experience and it had little to do with the majestic awe of Mount Everest. His tour guide for the trip was Usha Acharya, an author and the wife of Nepal’s former ambassador to the United Nations. While they took in various historic sites together, she talked to Mr. Patzer about the plight of poor children in Nepal. He decided on the spot that he wanted to fund the education of a Nepalese child, in the same spirit Mr. Ohrstrom had funded his education. When Mr. Patzer asked Ms. Acharya if she knew of such a child, she spoke of a young girl who could benefit from his philanthropy.
Obama’s Education Chief Knows Stars Are Aligned for Real Change
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner may be the Obama cabinet member facing the biggest crisis — the economic one — but Education Secretary Arne Duncan may be the one holding the biggest opportunity in his hands.
It is this: He inherits the best chance in a generation to really shake up an American education system that is uneven and underperforming. And he knows it.
“I see this as an extraordinary opportunity,” Mr. Duncan says in an interview. “We have a couple of things going in our direction that create what I call the perfect storm for reform.”
If the economy ever heals, and if Afghanistan doesn’t blow up, this quest to change the way Americans educate their kids may emerge as one of the biggest dramas of the Obama term. Here are the components of that perfect storm for change that Mr. Duncan describes:
There’s virtually a national consensus — one that certainly includes business leaders panting for a better-prepared work force — that America’s ossified education system needs a big shake-up. Moreover, a bipartisan trail toward real change was blazed by the Bush administration (which gets too little credit for doing so).
Sweden’s School Choice: Vouchers for All
“Education is so important that you cannot leave it to just one producer” – Sweden’s former Education Minister, Per Unckel; Video by Lance Izumi. Izumi is co-author of “Not as Good as You Think: Why the Middle Class Needs School Choice“.
Milwaukee Schools Chief Seeks to Disrupt the Status Quo
Superintendent William Andrekopoulos on Sunday called for using tens of millions of dollars in federal economic stimulus money “to disrupt the status quo” in Milwaukee Public Schools in a bid to increase student achievement.
Making school days for kindergarten through eighth grader longer by something less than an hour a day and pushing the entire MPS system to switch to a “year-round” schedule, in which summer vacation is shortened, were two of the ideas suggested by Andrekopoulos.
He also called for improving teaching quality by giving staff members more time to prepare for class and collaborate with other teachers and by providing teachers more training.
Andrekopoulos said the short time frame being set for spending economic stimulus money and the urgency of improving student achievement mean that MPS should aim to implement the changes by the start of the coming school year. Decisions must be made by about May 1, he said.
A set of public meetings will be held, beginning Wednesday, to get public reaction and allow people to make their own suggestions on what MPS should do.
Grade Inflation at American Colleges and Universities
gradeinflation.com, via a kind reader:
This web site is an outgrowth of an op-ed piece that I wrote on grade inflation for the Washington Post, “Where All Grades Are Above Average” In the process of writing that article, I collected data on trends in grading from about 30 colleges and universities. I found that grade inflation, while waning beginning in the mid-1970s, resurfaced in the mid-1980s. The rise continued unabated at virtually every school for which data were available. By March 2003, I had collected data on grades from over 80 schools. Then I stopped collecting data until December 2008, when I thought it was a good time for a new assessment.
I now have data on average grades from over 180 schools (with a combined enrollment of over two million undergraduate students). I want to thank those that have helped me by either sending information or telling me where I can find it. I especially want to thank Chris Healy and Lee Coursey who, combined, uncovered over 50 web sites with detailed data. Chris Healy has written a research paper with me on the topic of grading at American colleges and universities that we finished March 2, 2009; preprints are available upon request. I also want to thank those that have sent me emails on how to improve my graphics. Additional suggestions are always welcome.
View University of Wisconsin-Madison grades by College and Department from 1998 onward here.
“Dumbing Down” UK University Standards
wo senior academics at a Manchester university have accused it of “dumbing down” higher education.
Sue Evans and Walter Cairns, both lecturers at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), said the marks of failing students had been “bumped up”.
They also claim the university will not take action against students who fail to turn up for lectures.
Deputy vice chancellor Kevin Bonnett said the comments were an “insult” to the university and its students.
A group of university lecturers have painted a bleak picture of the falling standards of British higher education in a 500-page dossier presented to an MPs’ inquiry.
The academics warn of an across-the-board dumbing down with degrees becoming increasingly easy, widespread plagiarism and institutional pressure from university bosses to award students higher grades than they deserve.
The lecturers come from a wide range of universities including Oxford, Birmingham, Cardiff, Sussex and Manchester Metropolitan, reported The Sunday Times.
Graduates throwing mortarboards in the air
The aim of the dossier, which blames the problems on university expansion without adequate funding, is to force Universities Secretary John Denham to take action to safeguard standards of higher education.
One academic to give evidence is Stuart Derbyshire, a senior lecturer in psychology at Birmingham University.
More from Greame Paton and Yojana Sharma.
Push for financial literacy spreads to schools
Create a budget and stick to it. Shop around for the best price. Pay off credit-card balances each month.
Roy Kobert set aside his work as a bankruptcy attorney one Friday morning to teach these and other personal-finance lessons at Boone High School. He starts by showing the 11 students of this senior-level business class a Saturday Night Live sketch in which Chris Parnell touts a book called, “Don’t Buy Stuff You Can’t Afford.” He garners laughs then delves into the basics.
The students listen up. Three say they already have credit cards. One says his dad makes him read books by personal finance expert Suze Orman. All say most of their friends have no idea how to manage money.
“They spend stuff on little stuff,” says Hillary Haskins, a 17-year-old senior. “It adds up.”
Mr. Kobert knows many adults never will master what he’s teaching. But with the economy spiraling, interest in financial literacy is growing. Nationwide, a movement is spreading, with the emphasis on children and young adults who advocates want to reach before credit-card companies do.
Milwaukee’s St. Anthony to add high school
Govanne Martinez said it will be an honor to be in the first ninth-grade class at St. Anthony School.
Sebastian Pichardo said, “I want to test how smart I am, how much I can achieve.” The best way to do that, he thinks, is to stay at the school where he has been since he was 4 years old.
The two St. Anthony eighth-graders are among more than 90 students who have enrolled in what will be the first new Catholic high school in the Milwaukee archdiocese in more than 25 years. It also will be the first Catholic high school to operate on the south side and within the boundaries of the city of Milwaukee since St. Mary’s Academy closed in 1991.
St. Anthony is already the largest kindergarten through eighth-grade school in Milwaukee, with 1,045 students, all but a handful participants in the publicly funded private-school voucher program. That makes the school one of the largest Catholic grade schools in the United States
And now: St. Anthony, the high school.
School leaders plan to add a grade a year and reach 400 students or more by the fifth year.
A building just north of W. Mitchell St. on S. 9th St. is expected to house the high school for the first couple years, said Terry Brown, president of the school. That’s in the block north of St. Anthony church and the several buildings used now by the school’s upper grades.
Information Technology Academy
University of Wisconsin-Madison:
Sponsored by the UW-Madison Division of Information Technology (DoIT), ITA is an innovative, 4-year pre-college technology access and training program for talented students of color and economically disadvantaged students attending Madison Public Schools. Our mission is to prepare students for technical, academic, and personal excellence in today’s Information Age.
Each year, ITA competitively recruits 30 students in their final semester of 8th grade to participate in the program. Selected students receive four years of intensive training in preparation for high tech, IT related careers; in addition to intensive academic support in preparation for competitive University admissions and study. The Academy’s dual focus on academic excellence and technological literacy prepares promising students for learning and leadership in the 21st century digital age, and continues the University of Wisconsin’s long tradition of excellence and service.
Through hands-on training, mentoring, leadership development, community service, and internship opportunities, ITA students develop the knowledge and skills to increase their own, as well as their community’s access to technology; while gaining valuable skills and experiences as future leaders and professionals.
ITA is one of only five information technology outreach programs for high school students in the State of Wisconsin, and the only program of its kind and scope in the Madison area.
SAT Question: Do You Think It is Sometimes Necessary to Be Impolite to Get Your Wa
My daughter took the SAT this morning. The essay question she was asked to answer was more or less what you see in the headline. How is that for a coincidence? She thought it was pretty funny to see the question, and in talking to her about her answer she wrote, I got the first hint ever that she had actually read The No Asshole Rule, or at least parts of it. I hope it helped…..
Obama on Math
President Obama outlined his reform agenda yesterday for the nation’s public schools in a speech before the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. He promoted extending the school day, adopting performance pay for teachers, and encouraging the proliferation of charter schools, to name a few.
But what did he say about math, you are wondering.
Here it is – the math report. Obama’s speech mentioned math education explicitly four times:
1. He reminded the nation that economic development and academic achievement go hand in hand and that the federal government can play a significant role.
“Investments in math and science under President Eisenhower gave new opportunities to young scientists and engineers all across the country. It made possible somebody like a Sergei Brin to attend graduate school and found an upstart company called Google that would forever change our world,” he said.
Five Ways to Survive the April College Crunch
I was born in April. I used to have positive feelings about the month, notwithstanding T. S. Eliot’s observation about its cruelty, although lately my birthday has become just another reminder of my rapid decline into irrelevancy and ruin. The other problem with April is that it is, by far, the worst month for college-bound high school seniors. Twelfth-graders are among my best sources, so I sense their pain and want to help ease it.
Everything piles up in April. The month starts with often frightful news about which colleges accepted you and your friends, and which didn’t. By the end of the month you have to decide which school should get your unrefundable deposit to reserve a place in its freshman class. Your favorite school may have wait-listed you, and you have to figure out what to do about that. Your Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate final exams are just a month away, and you don’t want to embarrass yourself. It’s spring, so your social life may be heating up, maybe for the first time in your adolescence if you were a bookworm like me. You have to worry about your parents interfering in all these important personal decisions. They will be concerned about how college is going to fit into the family finances, which don’t look so good this year.
Here is my helpful guide to surviving April. Since it is still March, you have time to think and prepare. Let me know how it works for you.
HERE COMES THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION. ARE WE READY?
It’s not enough to just worry about how your revenues are going to look at the end of this quarter, and it’s also not enough to be thinking about how your business is going to adapt to new realities in the coming years. We need to take a serious step back and also analyse the state of education, and what it’s going to mean (and look like) in the future.
None of us are going to have any modicum of success if we can’t hire, develop and nurture the right talent out of school. It’s also going to be increasingly challenging if those young people are not prepared for the new realities of the new workplace.
While in New York City recently for a series of meetings, I was introduced to a senior publishing executive who was intrigued by the topic of my forthcoming book (Six Pixels of Separation, expected in September). It turns out said executive has a son who is about to complete his MBA at an Ivy League school. The problem (according to this industry executive) is: “Where is he going to work? All of those jobs are either gone, or people with tons more experience are willing to do them for a fraction of what they were paying only six months ago.” It’s not an uncommon concern, and the obvious fear in this father’s tone of voice is becoming much more apparent in conversations with other business professionals who have young adult children about to enter the workforce.
Ending the “Race to the Bottom”
There was an impressive breadth of knowledge and a welcome dose of candor in President Obama’s first big speech on education, in which he served up an informed analysis of the educational system from top to bottom. What really mattered was that Mr. Obama did not wring his hands or speak in abstract about states that have failed to raise their educational standards. Instead, he made it clear that he was not afraid to embarrass the laggards — by naming them — and that he would use a $100 billion education stimulus fund to create the changes the country so desperately needs.
Mr. Obama signaled that he would take the case for reform directly to the voters, instead of limiting the discussion to mandarins, lobbyists and specialists huddled in Washington. Unlike his predecessor, who promised to leave no child behind but did not deliver, this president is clearly ready to use his political clout on education.
The Insider vs. the Upstart: Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Race
It’s a classic political face-off: a seasoned professional with a mile-long résumé and a host of influential backers versus a relative neophyte with a fervent grassroots base.
It happened in last year’s presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and it’s happening in Wisconsin now, in the race to run the state Department of Public Instruction.
Standing in for Clinton is Tony Evers (tonyevers.com), currently deputy superintendent to retiring DPI head Elizabeth Burmaster. Evers, 57, is the choice of the state’s education establishment, including unions and professional groups representing teachers and administrators.
This kind of backing has been critical to Burmaster and her predecessors, who’ve had little trouble dispatching challengers over the last two decades. The easy analysis is that heavy union spending should ensure Evers’ victory April 7.
That is, unless Rose Fernandez (changedpi.com) pulls an Obama.
Fernandez, 51, who finished a close second in the five-way Feb. 17 primary, is a pediatric nurse who became a parent activist on behalf of families of children enrolled in “virtual” schools. She led the charge for the online academies after their existence was threatened by a court ruling sought by DPI.
The race is officially nonpartisan, and both candidates eschew identifying with political parties. But as in past races, the candidates and their supporters seem to fall into two camps: center/left (Evers) or right (Fernandez). And the campaigns reflect the ideological fissures dominating discourse regarding education reform.
Madison Says No to a Nuestro Mundo Charter Middle School, Opting for Dual Immersion Across the District
TJ Mertz comments on Monday’s Madison School Board meeting:
At Monday’s Board of Education Meeting an administrative recommendation to move forward with planning for a dual language district middle school program at Sennett was approved by a vote of 7-0 and the request for a memo of understanding with Nuestro Mundo Inc in order to qualify a charter dual language immersion middle school program for planning grants was not acted on. The lack of action was an expression of non support for the charter, as the comments by the Board members made clear.
I applaud the Board for their action and inaction.
Intel Science Winners Announced: Two from Wisconsin
Intel has announced the winners of the pre-college Intel Science Talent Search 2009.
The winner, Eric Larson, 17, of Eugene, Ore., was awarded a $100,000 Intel Scholarship. Larson won for his research project “classifying mathematical objects called fusion categories. Eric’s work describes these in certain dimensions for the first time,” Intel said in a statement.
Larson’s background is described on this Siemens Foundation site, which discussed his project and his background last year. The Siemens post states that Larson, in addition to his mathematics prowess, is a piano player and a four-time winner of the Oregon Junior Bach Festival.
He is the son of Steven Larson and Winifred Kerner of Eugene, both members of the music faculty at the University of Oregon, according to the The Oregonian newspaper.
Philip Streich, 18, of Platteville, Wis placed third (home school) and Gabriela Farfan of Madison placed tenth (Madison West High School). Congratulations all around!
Washington State High School Math Text Review
W. Stephen Wilson: 285K PDF via a kind reader’s email:
A few basic goals of high school mathematics will be looked at closely in the top programs chosen for high school by the state of Washington. Our concern will be with the mathematical development and coherence of the programs and not with issues of pedagogy.
Algebra: linear functions, equations, and inequalities
We examine the algebraic concepts and skills associated with linear functions because they are a critical foundation for the further study of algebra. We focus our evaluation of the programs on the following Washington standard: A1.4.B Write and graph an equation for a line given the slope and the y intercept, the slope and a point on the line, or two points on the line, and translate between forms of linear equations.
We also consider how well the programs meet the following important standard: A1.1.B Solve problems that can be represented by linear functions, equations, and inequalities.
Linear functions, equations, and inequalities in Holt
We review Chapter 5 of Holt Algebra 1 on linear functions.
The study of linear equations and their graphs in Chapter 5 begins with a flawed foundation. Because this is so common, it will not be emphasized, but teachers need to compensate for these problems.
Three foundational issues are not dealt with at all. First, it is not shown that the definition of slope works for a line in the plane. The definition, as given, produces a ratio for every pair of points on the line. It is true that for a line these are all the same ratios, but no attempt is made to show that. Second, no attempt is made to show that a line in the plane is the graph of a linear equation; it is just asserted.
Third, it not shown that the graph of a linear equation is a line; again, it is just asserted.
Related: Math Forum and Madison’s Math Task Force.
Milwaukee’s Educational Options
Our urban and suburban school districts are under tremendous pressure to be all things for all students. Special learning needs and unique learning styles complicate the process of providing each student with a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE).
I have served in conventional schools and public charter schools in the Milwaukee area. I’ve found that every school has its strengths as well as its needs to improve.
I am currently a speech therapist in two Milwaukee public charter schools, the Downtown Montessori Academy and Inland Seas High School. Yes, charter schools are actually public schools. Yes, many public charter schools provide special education services for frequently occurring disabilities.
Teaching at a charter school allows me to think outside the box as I serve my students. Public charter schools can offer teachers greater autonomy to be innovative in the classroom. For example, if a school’s reading program is not serving the needs of a classroom, charter schools have the autonomy to make changes as needs are identified. I think the ability to initiate necessary changes is where the “can-do” attitude of fellow teachers in charter schools comes from.
Many of Milwaukee’s charter schools are based on cutting-edge curriculums that serve a variety of learning styles. One option is referred to as “project based,” where students design and carry out a learning project of their particular interest. Another option is the student-led, teacher-guided Montessori environment. Direct instruction is a teacher-led style of learning that uses the repetition of very small, specifically targeted learning goals.
Colleges share applicants’ anxiety
Economic uncertainties prompt private institutions to admit more students in order to meet enrollment targets. But public schools, including UC and Cal State, are taking fewer students.
It’s not much solace for nervous college applicants awaiting acceptance or rejection letters, but there is plenty of anxiety this month inside college admissions offices as well.
Many colleges and universities in California and around the country report unprecedented uncertainty about how the depressed economy and state budget cuts could affect fall enrollments. As a result, they say they cannot rely this year on the admission formulas that typically help them hit enrollment targets without overcrowding dorms.
The ABCs of federal tax breaks for college education expenses
If you’re paying for a college education, you may need an advanced degree to figure out how to claim federal tax breaks for those expenses.
Congress in recent years has approved myriad special credits, deductions and other tax breaks for people paying tuition bills and related costs, and new breaks and twists were added in the recent stimulus bill.
The tax breaks can be generous, saving you as much as $2,500 per student. But how much you can claim depends on your income, the student’s educational status and how and when you paid the bill.
“We call it complexification,” said Jackie Perlman, an analyst at H&R Block’s Tax Institute in Kansas City, Mo. “We hear people saying that they would like the tax law simplified, but simplifying means eliminating tax breaks. It’s really simple when there’s nothing to claim.”
The Black Box of Peer Review
Countless decisions in academe are based on the quest for excellence. Which professors to hire and promote. Which grants to fund. Which projects to pursue. Everyone wants to promote excellence. But what if academe actually doesn’t know what excellence is?
Michèle Lamont decided to explore excellence by studying one of the primary mechanisms used by higher education to — in theory — reward excellence: scholarly peer review. Applying sociological and other disciplinary approaches to her study, Lamont won the right to observe peer review panels that are normally closed to all outsiders. And she was able to interview peer review panelists before and after their meetings, examine notes of reviewers before and after decision-making meetings, and gain access to information on the outcomes of these decisions.
The result is How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (Harvard University Press), which aims to expose what goes on behind the closed doors where funds are allocated and careers can be made. For those who have always wondered why they missed out on that grant or fellowship, the book may or may not provide comfort. Lamont describes processes in which most peer reviewers take their responsibilities seriously, and devote considerable time and attention to getting it right.
She also finds plenty of flaws — professors whose judgment on proposals is clouded by their own personal interests, deal making among panelists to make sure decisions are made in time for panelists to catch their planes, and an uneven and somewhat unpredictable efforts by panelists to reward personal drive and determination over qualities that a grant program says are the actual criteria.
On diversity, Lamont’s research finds that peer reviewers do factor it in (although the extent to which they do so varies by discipline). But peer reviewers are much more likely to care about diversity of research topic or institution than gender or race, she finds.
“Top” Wisconsin High Schools
Five high schools in each state that represent the qualities of a great school
via Prashant Gopal:
Kimberly Lynch, a redhead with freckles, had a keen interest in sunblock. So much so that she spent the past year developing a new method to test the effectiveness of sunscreens and recently submitted the results to a medical journal.
The 17-year-old senior at Bergen Academies in Hackensack, N.J., is quite a bit younger than most scientists submitting papers to accredited medical journals. Then again, Lynch doesn’t go to a typical public high school.
Bergen Academies, a four-year high school, offers students seven concentrations including science, medicine, culinary arts, business and finance, and engineering. It even has its own stem-cell laboratory, where Lynch completed her experiments under the guidance of biology teacher Robert Pergolizzi, a former assistant professor of genetic medicine at Cornell University.
The stem-cell lab, where students work with adult stem cells and mouse stem cells, and the nanotechnology lab down the hall, which has a high-powered scanning electron microscope, have hundreds of thousands of dollars of cutting-edge equipment.
“I’ve done internships at different labs in the area, and none of them had the equipment we have here,” Lynch said.
Degree of Difficulty
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
7 March 2009
In gymnastics, performances are judged not just on execution but also on the degree of difficulty. The same system is used in diving and in ice skating. An athlete is of course judged on how well they do something, but their score also includes how hard it was to do that particular exercise.
One of the reasons, in my view, that more than a million of our high school graduates each year are in remedial courses after they have been accepted at colleges is that the degree of difficulty set for them in their high school courses has been too low, by college standards.
Surveys comparing the standards of high school teachers and college professors routinely discover that students who their teachers judge to be very well prepared, for instance in reading, research and writing, are seen as not very well prepared by college professors.
According to the Diploma to Nowhere report issued last summer by the Strong American Schools project, tens of thousands of students are surprised, embarrassed and depressed to find that, after getting As and Bs in their high school courses, even in the “hard” ones, they are judged to be not ready for college work and must take non-credit remedial courses to make up for the academic deficiencies that they naturally assumed they did not have.
If we could imagine a ten point degree-of-difficulty scale for high school courses, surely arithmetic would rank near the bottom, say at a one, and calculus would rank at the top, near a ten. Courses in Chinese and Physics, and perhaps AP European History, would be near the top of the scale as well.
When it comes to academic writing, however, and the English departments only ask their students for personal and creative writing, and the five-paragraph essay, they are setting the degree of difficulty at or near the bottom of the academic writing scale. The standard kind of writing might be the equivalent of having math students being blocked from moving beyond fractions and decimals.
Vouchers vs. the District with ‘More Money than God’
Andrew Coulson, via a kind reader’s email:
This week, education secretary Arne Duncan referred to DC public schools as a district with ” more money than God.” Perhaps he was thinking of the $24,600 total per-pupil spending figure I reported last year in the Washington Post and on this blog. If so, he’s low-balling the number. With the invaluable help of my research assistant Elizabeth Li, I’ve just calculated the figure for the current school year. It is $28,813 per pupil.
In his address to Congress and his just-released budget, the president repeatedly called for efficiency in government education spending. At the same time, the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate have been trying to sunset funding for the DC voucher program that serves 1,700 poor kids in the nation’s capital. So it seems relevant to compare the efficiencies of these programs.
According to the official study of the DC voucher program, the average voucher amount is less than $6,000. That is less than ONE QUARTER what DC is spending per pupil on education. And yet, academic achievement in the voucher program is at least as good as in the District schools, and voucher parents are much happier with the program than are public school parents.
In fact, since the average income of participating voucher families is about $23,000, DC is currently spending about as much per pupil on education as the vouchers plus the family income of the voucher recipients COMBINED.
Proof of Anaheim math teacher’s skill is in students’ test scores
The former engineer has won a national honor for his energetic commitment in the classroom. Last year his young charges, who think he may be the best math teacher anywhere, aced the AP calculus test.
Sam Calavitta presides over what may be the noisiest, most spirited math class in the nation.
He greets each student personally, usually with a nickname (“Butterfly,” “Batgirl” and “Champ” are a few) and a fist bump. Then he launches a raucous, quiz-show-style contest.
Boys and girls line up on opposite sides of the room, Calavitta shouts out complex equations from index cards, and the opposing sides clap and cheer with each correct answer.
“State the anti-derivative of the secant function,” Calavitta yells.
“The natural log of the absolute value secant x plus tangent x plus c,” answers a student correctly.
PISA & Hong Kong Schools
Pisa tests 15-year-old students in reading, maths and science. More than 400,000 students from 57 countries and regions took part in 2006 when Hong Kong students came second in science and third in maths and reading. This year, 72 countries and regions will participate. The test takes place from next month until May.
On Monday, the HKCISA appealed to schools to take part after not enough signed up for the test, saying they were too busy dealing with education reforms. The bureau brushed aside the centre’s concern the next day, calling it a “false alarm” and saying there was “no question of Hong Kong not participating”.
But Professor Ho said the message was wrong. The government failed to “understand the actual situation” and sent out “a wrong message” to the public by misjudging the sampling requirement.
“It was very irresponsible to make such a comment,” she said.
Professor Ho also expressed a concern that schools might be pressured by the administration to take part in the test.
“If Hong Kong is lacking students and falls out of Pisa’s international rankings, the government will have to take up the responsibility,” Professor Ho warned.
She said she had been working on Pisa for 10 years and did not want to see the hard work jeopardised. This year’s test was particularly significant because it was the first time Macau, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore would be compared internationally at the same time.
Parents Sue Trustees Over Prep School’s Shutdown
When the students of the Conserve School in Wisconsin poured into the auditorium on a blustery morning early this year, they had no inkling of what would follow.
Stefan Anderson, the headmaster, told them that the trustees were essentially shutting down the prep school because of the dismal economic climate. Its four-year program would be converted to a single semester of study focused on nature and the environment.
“We thought we would hear they were cutting financial aid,” recalled Erty Seidel, a senior on the wooded campus, which is filled with wildlife and sprawls across 1,200 acres in Land O’ Lakes.
Greta Dohl, a student from Iron River, Mich., in her third year at the school, broke down and cried. “I was absolutely heartbroken,” she said of the closing.
Now students and parents are banding together and challenging the action, contending the school’s underlying financial condition does not look so dire. In fact, the school’s endowment would be the envy of many a prep school. With $181 million and 143 students, it has the equivalent of more than $1 million a student.
In a lawsuit filed in State Circuit Court in Wisconsin, the parents argue that the trustees are acting in their own interests — as officials of a separate, profit-making steel company — and want them removed from oversight of the school.
20 Ways AP is Bad — Not!
Bruce G. Hammond, a well-regarded educator and former Advanced Placement teacher, is at it again. His organization, Excellence Without AP, has changed its name to the Independent Curriculum Group (ICG). Hammond, based in Charlottesville, is the executive director. The group’s new Web site is www.independentcurriculum.org.
I have written before about what I consider his short-sighted opposition to AP, the nation’s largest program of college-level courses and tests for high school students. I thought the group’s name change was a good sign. I hoped that Hammond had revised a point of view that alienated many AP teachers. I thought he was going to emphasize henceforth his best and most positive point, that good teachers should be able to challenge their students in any way that works best for them, AP or not.
But the announcement of the name change did not go in that direction. Instead, Hammond unveiled a document titled “Twenty of the most fundamental reasons to rethink AP.”
I have shared the document with AP teachers I know. They had the same reaction I did: The list betrays an insufferably elitist view of American education. This is not entirely surprising since almost all of the 70-or-so institutions listed on the ICG Web site are small, private schools that cater to affluent families, such as Beaver Country Day in Massachusetts, Putney in Vermont, Fieldston in New York and Crossroads in California. The public schools that I write about most frequently, those that use AP and International Baccalaureate courses and tests to challenge average and below-average students, many of them from low-income minority families, appear to be unfamiliar to the Independent Curriculum Group.
Dane County High School AP Course Offering Comparison.
Killers of Writing
“Even before students learn to write personal essays.” !!!
[student writers will now become “Citizen Composers,” Yancey says.]
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Eschool News
NCTE defines writing for the 21st century
New report offers guidance on how to update writing curriculum to include blogs, wikis, and other forms of communication
By Meris Stansbury, Associate Editor:
Digital technologies have made writers of everyone.
The prevalence of blogs, wikis, and social-networking web sites has changed the way students learn to write, according to the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)–and schools must adapt in turn by developing new modes of writing, designing new curricula to support these models, and creating plans for teaching these curricula.
“It’s time for us to join the future and support all forms of 21st-century literacies, [both] inside…and outside school,” said Kathleen Blake Yancey, a professor of English at Florida State University, past NCTE president, and author of a new report titled “Writing in the 21st Century.”
Just as the invention of the personal computer transformed writing, Yancey said, digital technologies–and especially Web 2.0 tools–have created writers of everyone, meaning that even before students learn to write personal essays, they’re often writing online in many different forms.
“This is self-sponsored writing,” Yancey explained. “It’s on bulletin boards and in chat rooms, in eMails and in text messages, and on blogs responding to news reports and, indeed, reporting the news themselves…This is a writing that belongs to the writer, not to an institution.”
Reid Hoffman Tells Charlie Rose: “Every Individual Is Now An Entrepreneur.”
Reid Hoffman is an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. He worked at Paypal, founded LinkedIn, and invested in dozens more. Last night, he appeared on Charlie Rose (full interview embedded above, full transcript below), where he talks about the rise of social networking in general, and LinkedIn’s success in particular (it is adding one million professionals every 17 days and is emerging as a “low cost provider of really good hiring services”).
Yesterday, Hoffman wrote a post for us with some concrete suggestions for a Stimulus 2.0 plan led by startups. He hit some of the same themes on Charlie Rose. The best part of the hour-long interview, however is towards the end where Hoffman discusses the role that entrepreneurship can play in getting America out of its rut. Some excerpts:
Californian and Texan universities struggle with admissions policies
CALIFORNIA and Texas are both large states that are home to a growing population of minorities. They also share another trait. In a blow to the policy of affirmative action, public universities in the two states were forbidden, a decade ago, from using race as a factor in college admission decisions–by a federal court, in Texas’s case, and by state law in California’s.
Texas stalled, guaranteeing admission at the state university of his or her choice to any student graduating in the top 10% of their high-school class. This helped students from predominantly minority high schools who excelled relative to their peers. The University of California (UC), on the other hand, altered its admissions standards in 2002 to require a “comprehensive” review of applications. Under that system, students win points not just for academic criteria such as grades and test scores, but also for overcoming “life challenges”. Affirmative action by the back door, some critics say.
Both policies have had modest success in maintaining diversity. But now policymakers in both states are about to shake the kaleidoscope again. William Powers, the president of the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, has sounded an alarm. The number of students in the top tenth of fast-growing Texas’s high-school classes will have climbed from some 20,000 in 1998 to over 30,000 by 2015. Last year more than 80% of Texas freshmen at UT Austin came from this group. By 2013 it will be 100%.
The 2008 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning?
The watchword of this year’s Brown Center Report is caution–caution in linking state tests to international assessments–“benchmarking” is the term–caution in proceeding with a policy of “algebra for all eighth graders,” caution in gleaning policy lessons from the recent progress made by urban schools. State and local budget woes will restrain policymakers from adopting costly education reforms, but even so, the three studies contained herein are a reminder that restraint must be exercised in matters other than budgets in governing education well. All too often, policy decisions are based on wishful thinking rather than cautious analysis. As education evolves as a discipline, the careful analysis of high-quality data will provide the foundation for meaningful education reform.
The report consists of three sections, each discussing a separate study. The first section looks at international testing. Powerful groups, led by the National Governors Association, are urging the states to benchmark their state achievement tests to an international assessment, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). After comparing PISA to the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the other major international assessment in which the United States participates, the Brown Center analysis examines findings from a chapter of the 2006 PISA report that addresses student engagement. The chapter presents data on students’ attitudes, values, and beliefs toward science.
Teenagers With Souls of Poets Face Off
It was a rainy Friday evening in Chelsea, and nobody wanted to go home, preferring instead to spit poems from the depths of their tortured teenage souls.
The finals of the New York Knicks Poetry Slam Program were in four days, and a handful of high school poets from around New York City had gathered at the headquarters of Urban Word, a literary arts organization for young people, to cheer Tia-Moné Llopiz as she cried out again in eloquent anguish over her mother’s death.
They needed to hear Cynthia Keteku, known as Ceez, come to grips with her girlfriend’s dumping her for a boy.
And they could not help but hear Elton Ferdinand III — even through the walls of the director’s office — crescendo to a state of raging guilt over his mute uncle in Guyana, a man misunderstood.
In their search for identity and their quest to be understood, the teenagers mold metaphors from their jagged-edge experiences and bend rhymes to their own rhythm.
“Ladies and gents, this is more than a silly teen’s heartbreak,” intoned Lauren Anderson, 16, who attends the Beacon School.
Charters Offer More Choices in Harlem, but Stir Concern for Public Schools
The high-achieving sixth graders huddled near the gym bleachers to mull their options: African drumming at the Future Leaders Institute, debate team at Democracy Prep or piano at New Heights Academy.
The sixth graders, seven of them, said they were bored with the intellectual pace at Middle School 322 in Washington Heights, so their teachers brought them to the Harlem Education Fair on Saturday to hunt for a new school for the fall.
“I need to be challenged more,” said Shirley Reyes, 11, who was checking out the mix of public charter schools and private schools making their pitches. “These schools give you a better opportunity, they give you better test grades.”
The bustle inside the gym at City College of New York at 138th Street in Harlem — organizers said the fair drew about 5,000 people — reflected just how significantly Harlem’s educational landscape has changed over the past decade.
Charter schools, which are publicly financed but have latitude in how they operate, are now a major force in the community, with 24 of them serving 6,000 children (across the city, there are about 24,000 students enrolled in 78 charter schools). The neighborhood includes about 70 traditional public schools, 14 Catholic schools and 16 other private schools.
Public Colleges Get a Surge of Applicants
Admissions officers at the State University of New York college campus here are suddenly afraid of getting what they have always wished for: legions of top high-school seniors saying “yes” to their fat envelopes.
Lisa Jones, right, and Kimberly Strano assess applications at SUNY New Paltz.
Students are already tripled up in many dorm rooms after an unexpectedly large freshman class entered last fall. And despite looming budget cuts from the state, which more tuition-paying students could help offset, officials say they are determined not to diminish the quality of student life by expanding enrollment at their liberal-arts college beyond the current 6,000 undergraduates.
At SUNY New Paltz, as at many other well-regarded public institutions this spring, admissions calculations carefully measured over many years are being set aside as an unraveling economy is making less expensive state colleges more appealing.
The application deadline is not until April 1, but officials here conservatively predict 15,500 students competing for 1,100 spots, a 12 percent jump over last year.
Similar surges are occurring at public colleges and universities across the country, education experts say.
Community College Transfer and Articulation Policies: Looking Beneath the Surface
Betheny Gross & Dan Goldhaber:
As the demand for higher education has grown, so has the role of community colleges in providing post-secondary education to students. The development of curriculum articulation and school transfer policies is one policy movement that demonstrates the extent to which state policymakers view community colleges as creating greater and broader access for students. Recent research suggests that the presence of a state articulation and transfer policy does not increase the transfer rate of community college students to four-year institutions. However, all such policies are not the same – so we must account for more than just the presence of these policies when assessing their impact, and account for the mechanisms through which they encourage or facilitate student transfers.
We attempt to address this gap in this paper by exploring the relative importance of specific policy components (such as common course numbering or common general education requirements) on post-secondary outcomes, and how such policies differently impact students with different aspirations or economic and ethnic backgrounds. In addition, we explore how the potential impacts of these policies compare with some institution-level policies such as support for tenured faculty, expenditures for student services, or expenditures for instruction. In the end, we find only small effects – concentrated amongst Hispanic students – that state transfer and articulation policies are related to the transfer of students between sectors. In terms of general effects across students, institutional factors regarding faculty tenure at community colleges seem to be more correlated to the propensity of students to transfer between community colleges and four-year institutions.
Low Income Student Advance Placement (AP) Wisconsin Incentive Grant
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction:
Wisconsin has won a $2.2 million grant to expand Advanced Placement to low-income students.
Wisconsin’s $2.2 million federal Advanced Placement Incentive Program grant will target 46 eligible middle and high schools, benefitting about 26,600 students.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s “Blended Learning Innovations: Building a Pipeline for Equity and Access” grant from the U.S. Department of Education will support a multipronged approach for students from eligible middle and high schools throughout the state. Poverty rates in participating districts range from 40 percent to 83 percent. Statewide, 35 percent of students are economically disadvantaged based on family income levels that qualify them for free or reduced-price school meals.
In the recent Advanced Placement Report to the Nation, Wisconsin had the Midwest’s highest participation rate (24.2 percent) for 2008 graduates taking one or more Advanced Placement exams while in high school. Of the 15,677 graduates who took Advanced Placement exams, 973 students, or just 6.3 percent, received a fee waiver because they were from economically disadvantaged families.
State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster noted that the grant employs strategies that engage students at various times in their educational planning and preparation. “We want to increase our support for students so they are ready for the academic challenges of Advanced Placement coursework,” she said. “Staff development and business, community, and family partnerships are major components of our effort.”
The three-year grant targets 19 high schools and 27 middle schools located in three cooperative educational service agencies (CESAs) and the Madison Metropolitan School District. CESA 7 is headquartered in Green Bay, CESA 9 is headquartered in Tomahawk, and CESA 11 is headquartered in Turtle Lake. The CESAs will coordinate activities associated with the grant.
Related: Dane County AP Course Offering Comparison.
Winterhouse Writing Awards
The Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing & Criticism seek to increase the understanding and appreciation of design, both within the profession and throughout American life. A program of AIGA, these annual awards have been founded by Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel of the Winterhouse Institute to recognize excellence in writing about design and encourage the development of young voices in design writing, commentary and criticism.
The 2009 awards will be open for entries beginning March 2.
Read about the members of the 2009 jury.
THE TWO TYPES OF AWARDS ARE:
Writing Award of $10,000
Open to writers, critics, scholars, historians, journalists and designers and given for a body of work.
Education Award of $1,000
Open to students (high school, undergraduate or graduate) whose use of writing, in the interest of making visual work or scholarship or cultural observation, demonstrates extraordinary originality and promise.
This awards program is part of a larger AIGA initiative to stimulate new levels of design awareness and critical thinking about design.
Jane Pettit might see good – and bad – at Bradley Tech High School
Dear Mrs. Pettit,
Ald. Bob Donovan wrote recently that Bradley Tech High School, the school you made happen with a $20 million gift, is “a disgrace that is likely causing Jane Pettit to turn over in her grave.”
Fran Croak, who, unlike Donovan, knew you well as your lawyer and close adviser, is confident you’re resting comfortably, because there are a lot of good things going on at the school, which is named after your father and your uncle. Unlike Donovan, he spends time in the building and is a member of the commission of community leaders that oversees what’s going on.
I thought I’d fill you in on things I saw and heard when I spent a few hours at Tech the other day, as well as in other visits over the years, in case that’s helpful in making up your own mind whether to be pleased or horrified.
The community at large appears to be on the horrified side – at least if you listen to the radio talk shows and some similar chatter. But the folks at the school, both adults and kids, are convinced Bradley Tech is pretty much your typical school, except better than some others. They feel like the kid who incurs the teacher’s wrath even though everyone else did worse things – except in this case, it’s the wrath of the TV helicopters circling overhead after a fight in the school.
Of course, high schools these days – even in the suburbs (did you hear about the New Berlin Eisenhower mess?) – aren’t like they were when you were a student.
There are good aspects to that. A lot of kids, at Bradley Tech and elsewhere, are doing more sophisticated work than you did in high school, not only because of the changes in technology, but because expectations are so different. College wasn’t a must in your day the way it is in the eyes of many kids now, including some at Bradley Tech.
There is a conspiracy to deny children the vital lesson of failure
Chris Woodhead, via a kind reader:
Parents, teachers and ministers are all engaged in a deception over our exam system says the former chief inspector of schools
Sitting at the back of the classroom, I cringed. A pupil had given an answer that betrayed his complete misunderstanding of the question. His teacher beamed. “Well done, Johnny,” she said, “that is fantastic.”
Why, I asked her afterwards, had she not corrected his mistake? She looked at me as if I were mad. “If I’d told him that he’d got it wrong he would have been humiliated in front of the rest of the class. It would have been a dreadful blow to his self-esteem.” With a frosty glare she left the room.
Have you looked at your children’s exercise books recently? The odds are that the teacher’s comments will all be in green ink. Red ink these days is thought to be threatening and confrontational. Green is calm and reassuring and encouraging. If you read the comments, you will probably find that they are pretty reassuring and encouraging, too. The work may not be very good, but the teacher appears to have found it inspirational.
One of my Sunday Times readers wrote in recently to ask why her son’s headmaster was so reluctant to tell parents whether children had passed or failed internal school examinations. His line was that school tests were meant to diagnose weaknesses rather than to give a clear view of a pupil’s grasp of the subject. He wanted to help his pupils do better and he was worried that honesty might demotivate pupils who were not achieving very much. Did I, she asked, think this was a very sensible idea? I replied that I did not.
To Keep Students, Colleges Cut Anything but Aid
With the economy forcing budget cuts and layoffs in higher education, colleges and universities might be expected to be cutting financial aid. But no.
Students considering a wide range of private schools, as well as those who are already enrolled, can expect to get more aid this year, not less.
The increases highlight the hand-to-mouth existence of many of the nation’s smaller and less well-known institutions. With only tiny endowments, they need full enrollment to survive, and they are anxious to prevent top students from going elsewhere.
Falling even a few students short of expectations can mean laying off faculty members, eliminating courses or shelving planned expansions.
“The last thing colleges and universities are going to cut this year is financial aid,” said Kathy Kurz, an enrollment consultant to colleges. “Most of them recognize that their discount rates are going to go up, but they’d rather have a discounted person in the seat than no one in the seat.”
Congress in the Classroom 7/27/2009 to 7/30/2009: Pelkin, IL
The Dirksen Center, via a Cindy Koepel email:
What is Congress in the Classroom®?
Congress in the Classroom® is a national, award-winning education program now in its 17th year. Developed and sponsored by The Dirksen Congressional Center, the workshop is dedicated to the exchange of ideas and information on teaching about Congress. The Center will join with the new Institute for Principled Leadership in Public Service in conducting the workshop.
Who Should Attend?
Congress in the Classroom® is designed for high school or middle school teachers who teach U.S. history, government, civics, political science, or social studies. Forty teachers will be selected to take part in the program.
What Will I Learn?
Although the workshop will feature a variety of sessions, the 2009 program will focus on two themes: (1) developments in the 111th Congress, and (2) new resources for teaching about Congress.
Throughout the program, you will work with subject matter experts as well as colleagues from across the nation. This combination of firsthand knowledge and peer-to-peer interaction will give you new ideas, materials, and a professionally enriching experience.
“Until now so much of what I did in my class on Congress was straight theory–this is what the Constitution says,” noted one of our teachers. “Now I can use these activities and illustrations to help get my students involved in the class and at the very least their community but hopefully in the federal government. This workshop has given me a way to help them see how relevant my class is and what they can do to help make changes in society.”
In sum, the workshop consists of two types of sessions: those that focus on recent research and scholarship about Congress (and don’t always have an immediate application in the classroom) and those geared to specific ways to teach students about the federal legislature.
Achievement Effects of Four Early Elementary School Math Curricula Findings from First Graders in 39 Schools
Roberto Agodini, Barbara Harris, Sally Atkins-Burnett, Sheila Heaviside, Timothy Novak, Robert Murphy and Audrey Pendleton [693K PDF]:
Many U.S. children start school with weak math skills and there are differences between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds–those from poor families lag behind those from affluent ones (Rathburn and West 2004). These differences also grow over time, resulting in substantial differences in math achievement by the time students reach the fourth grade (Lee, Gregg, and Dion 2007).
The federal Title I program provides financial assistance to schools with a high number or percentage of poor children to help all students meet state academic standards. Under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), Title I schools must make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in bringing their students to state-specific targets for proficiency in math and reading. The goal of this provision is to ensure that all students are proficient in math and reading by 2014.
The purpose of this large-scale, national study is to determine whether some early elementary school math curricula are more effective than others at improving student math achievement, thereby providing educators with information that may be useful for making AYP. A small number of curricula dominate elementary math instruction (seven math curricula make up 91 percent of the curricula used by K-2 educators), and the curricula are based on different theories for developing student math skills (Education Market Research 2008). NCLB emphasizes the importance of adopting scientifically-based educational practices; however, there is little rigorous research evidence to support one theory or curriculum over another. This study will help to fill that knowledge gap. The study is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) in the U.S. Department of Education and is being conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. (MPR) and its subcontractor SRI International (SRI).
BASIS FOR THE CURRENT FINDINGS
This report presents results from the first cohort of 39 schools participating in the evaluation, with the goal of answering the following research question: What are the relative effects of different early elementary math curricula on student math achievement in disadvantaged schools? The report also examines whether curriculum effects differ for student subgroups in different instructional settings.
Curricula Included in the Study. A competitive process was used to select four curricula for the evaluation that represent many of the diverse approaches used to teach elementary school math in the United States:
- Investigations in Number, Data, and Space (Investigations) published by Pearson Scott Foresman (Russell, Economopoulos, Mokros, Kliman, Wright, Clements, Goodrow, Murray, and Sarama 2006)
- Math Expressions published by Houghton Mifflin Company (Fuson 2006a)
- Saxon Math (Saxon) published by Harcourt Achieve (Larson 2004)
- Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley Mathematics (SFAW) published by Pearson Scott Foresman (Charles, Crown, Fennel, Caldwell, Cavanagh, Chancellor, Ramirez, Ramos, Sammons, Schielack, Tate, Thompson, and Van de Walle 2005)
The process for selecting the curricula began with the study team inviting developers and publishers of early elementary school math curricula to submit a proposal to include their curricula in the evaluation. A panel of outside experts in math and math instruction then reviewed the submissions and recommended to IES curricula suitable for the study. The goal of the review process was to identify widely used curricula that draw on different instructional approaches and that hold promise for improving student math achievement.
Rendering Knowledge
I may have finally broken a writing block. Aside from two book chapters in the last couple of months I more or less completed a paper length opinion piece for a report ARK are producing on KM in the Legal Profession. The title includes one of those words which has multiple and different meanings namely render which is allowing me to play games between the poetic meaning and that of rendering something down to fat. As a part of that paper I updated my original three rules of knowledge management to seven principles which I share below.
Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted. You can’t make someone share their knowledge, because you can never measure if they have. You can measure information transfer or process compliance, but you can’t determine if a senior partner has truly passed on all their experience or knowledge of a case.
We only know what we know when we need to know it. Human knowledge is deeply contextual and requires stimulus for recall. Unlike computers we do not have a list-all function. Small verbal or nonverbal clues can provide those ah-ha moments when a memory or series of memories are suddenly recalled, in context to enable us to act. When we sleep on things we are engaged in a complex organic form of knowledge recall and creation; in contrast a computer would need to be rebooted.
There’s financial help for college students — if you can decipher the application forms
There could soon be more money than ever to help students go to college, but figuring out how to get it is the trick.
Both the proposed state and federal budgets included significant investments in financial aid, beefing up grant and loan programs and creating new ones.
The concern among some officials is that the federal application form for aid — a labyrinthine 109 questions — intimidates prospective college students and their families from applying to college.
“I think it’s overwhelming,” said Cari Schuepbach, a parent from McFarland who attended a recent session at Edgewood College designed to help families fill out the application. “It’s my first time and you think, ‘Oh god, I don’t know what I’m doing.’ ”
