There’ve been lots of complaints that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has neither much interest in education policy, nor the capacity to deal with it. But his precipitous plunge into the algebra wars last week and the state Board of Education’s sudden decision to bow to his demand makes you wish that that he had less interest or a lot more capacity.
The leap, in the form of a letter urging the board to require that every eighth-grader take beginning algebra and the board’s overnight agreement to mandate it within three years is like trying to make a scrawny horse pull a heavier load with a bigger whip. At best, it won’t work; at worst, it will kill the horse.
The state has for some years had an admirable “goal” that every eighth-grader take algebra, combined with a set of incentives for districts to get all students there. The incentives – essentially penalizing schools by reducing a school’s Academic Proficiency Index for each student who takes only general math – have worked. More than half of California’s eighth-graders now take either algebra or geometry.
Even background TV can impact kids’ attention
Pediatricians have long said children younger than 2 shouldn’t watch any television. But in new findings from a small-scale study, researchers say that even having a TV on in the background could be “an environmental hazard” for children.
For the study, released today, researchers observed 50 children, ages 1 to 3, for an hour at a time as they played alone in a small room with a variety of toys. Parents sat nearby, and for half of each session (starting either at the beginning or 30 minutes in), a small TV broadcast a taped episode of Jeopardy.
After videotaping and carefully analyzing the children’s reactions, researchers found that kids watched the TV only in snippets but that it modestly shortened their playtime. TV decreased play’s intensity and cut by half the amount of time children focused on a given toy.
The researchers chose Jeopardy on the theory that it would be “nearly incomprehensible” to toddlers.
Leaders explain schools’ gains
Middle school students at the Crossroads School near Fells Point were evaluated by teachers every single day last school year, with the results driving the next day’s instruction.
At East Baltimore’s Fort Worthington Elementary, about a quarter of the school’s parents turned out for MSA Family Fun Night and sampled questions from the Maryland School Assessments.
Alexander Hamilton Elementary, situated in a West Baltimore neighborhood that the principal calls “gang-infested,” started a gifted education program last year to challenge students to learn beyond their grade levels.
The principals of the three schools credit those and myriad other initiatives with making their schools among of the most improved in Baltimore, during a year in which the school system overall posted historic gains on the standardized tests administered under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
Cheating on ACT, SAT college entrance exams has few consequences
If the testing firms suspect fraud, they simply cancel the student’s score — but they never tell schools why.
A group of students at a Los Angeles high school is suspected of cheating on the ACT college entrance exam by paying a former student, who used fraudulent identification, to take the tests. The testing agency recently began investigating the claims, which could result in cancellation of scores provided to colleges.
But those colleges will not be told why the scores are invalid, nor will the students’ high school be clued in.
On Being More Like Ted Widerski
I’ve been convinced that a comment I made on another thread about Ted Widerski deserves to be shared as a post. –LAF
“I’ll miss him” only begins to capture it for me. Ted was HUGELY important to the student advocacy work I do in the District. I think I/we won’t know — fully — what we’ve lost until the school year begins to unfold.
People have said that Ted was a tireless and “courageous” advocate for TAG students, and that he was. I couldn’t agree more. At the same time, I can’t help but think “why should it require boundless courage and limitless persistence simply to get smart kids’ educational needs met?” Sigh.
On a more positive note, it has occurred to me that there are two things each of us could do to honor Ted’s memory. The first is to donate to the “Ted Widerski Mathfest Fund.” There is no better way to honor Ted than to insure that the mathfests he worked so hard to create, implement and protect KEEP HAPPENING. Send your check — appropriately marked “Ted Widerski Mathfests” — to the Foundation for Madison’s Public Schools, 455 Science Drive, Madison, WI, 53711.
The second thing each of us could do to honor Ted’s memory is to approach the coming school year with the happy intention of becoming more like him. So much of what we are up against in our advocacy work is a matter of misunderstanding, misinformation and misguided attitude. With a change in all of that – and few, if any, more dollars – the situation for our students could be profoundly different.
Practically speaking, what might it mean to “become more like Ted?” Well, here are a few beginning thoughts about that. I’m sure some of you will have many more.
Math Meltdown
Summertime means school for an increasing number of high school students who have struggled in their math courses. But the system could be contributing to the kids’ poor performances.
Sam Cooke once cooed: “It’s summertime, and the living is easy.”
Tell that to the increasing number of middle and high school students who will be sweating out summer school this year because of their meltdown in math.
Related: Math Forum.
Former Math Teacher’s Lesson of the Day
It isn’t absurd enough that we test high school students with a High School Exit Exam that is pretty much on a par with the California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST) required of teachers, but now we are all congratulating ourselves with a decision to test eighth graders for algebra. At least state schools chief Jack O’Connell has learned from his own past mistakes and opposed this decision. If only he had the guts to say he blew it on advocating for the exit exam, which is not only a complete waste of tens of millions of dollars, but sends more and more kids into the streets and trouble with the law when they fail to graduate because they do not test as well as others. (About 10 percent of high school students must “fail,” otherwise it isn’t a “test.”)
I tutored algebra to younger students when I myself was in high school. Later I taught it in public high schools for nearly 20 years, concurrently with other math courses, including geometry, pre-algebra and seventh and eighth grade math. I taught in some of the highest achieving, and some of the lowest achieving middle and high schools in the state. So, maybe my perspective is broader than the average citizen’s. Still, anyone who thinks it is a good idea to begin testing all eighth graders in algebra is simply delusional. It would be more PC to say uninformed, but I am at wit’s end.
California’s algebra fracas symbolizes bigger mess
This week’s dust-up over whether all of California’s eighth-graders should be taking algebra encapsulates one of the state’s overarching educational dilemmas: Is it wise to set educational standards that apply to all students, even though they have an astonishing and ever-widening array of innate abilities and cultural, economic, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds?
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and advocates of educational rigor are hailing the state Board of Education’s vote to impose the algebra requirement in response to pressure from federal officials about creating more uniformity in standards and testing.
However, state schools Superintendent Jack O’Connell, who wanted to modify the decade-old state policy of introducing eighth-graders to algebra to comply with the federal demands, claims that the decree will leave many kids behind because the state is unprepared, educationally and financially, to implement it.
The conflict echoes, ironically, the controversy over the decree that high-schoolers must pass an exit exam before being awarded graduation diplomas – a standard that O’Connell vigorously championed as legislator and state schools chief.
Forget About the Achievement Gap: High Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind
“The narrowing of test score gaps, although an important accomplishment,” Loveless writes, should not “overshadow the languid performance trends of high-achieving students.” He adds: “Their test scores are not being harmed during the NCLB era, but they are not flourishing either. Gaps are narrowing because the gains of low-achieving students are outstripping those of high achievers by a factor of two or three to one. The nation has a strong interest in developing the talents of its best students to their fullest to foster the kind of growth at the top end of the achievement distribution that has been occurring at the bottom end.”
Ann Duffett, Steve Farkas & Tom Loveless on the “Robin Hood Effect”:
This publication reports the results of the first two (of five) studies of a multifaceted research investigation of the state of high-achieving students in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era.
Part I: An Analysis of NAEP Data, authored by Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, examines achievement trends for high-achieving students (defined, like low-achieving students, by their performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP) since the early 1990s and, in more detail, since 2000.
Part II: Results from a National Teacher Survey, authored by Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett of Farkas Duffett Research Group, reports on teachers’ own views of how schools are serving high-achieving pupils in the NCLB era.
Students likely to fail high school exit exam can be identified as early as 4th grade, study says
Seema Mehta, via a kind reader’s email:
As early as fourth grade, students who will be at risk of failing the high school exit exam – a state requirement to earn a diploma – can be identified based on grades, classroom behavior and test scores, according to a new study released Tuesday.
The findings, based on an extensive study of student achievement in San Diego schools, call into question the effectiveness of aiming significant efforts and tens of millions of dollars at struggling high school seniors and older students to help them pass the exam.
“From a political standpoint, such spending seems necessary. However, our results strongly suggest that these 11th-hour interventions by themselves are unlikely to yield the intended results,” according to the report by the Public Policy Institute of California.
Instead, the authors suggested, “moving a portion of these tutoring dollars to struggling students in earlier grades – when the students are still in school – could be a wise choice. An ounce of prevention could indeed be worth a pound of cure.”
Catch ‘Em Young
James J. Heckman, via a reader’s email:
It is a rare public policy initiative that promotes fairness and social justice and, at the same time, promotes productivity in the economy and in society at large. Investing in disadvantaged young children is such a policy. The traditional argument for providing enriched environments for disadvantaged young children is based on considerations of fairness and social justice. But another argument can be made that complements and strengthens the first one. It is based on economic efficiency, and it is more compelling than the equity argument, in part because the gains from such investment can be quantified—and they are large.
There are many reasons why investing in disadvantaged young children has a high economic return. Early interventions for disadvantaged children promote schooling, raise the quality of the work force, enhance the productivity of schools, and reduce crime, teenage pregnancy and welfare dependency. They raise earnings and promote social attachment. Focusing solely on earnings gains, returns to dollars invested are as high as 15 percent to 17 percent.
The equity-efficiency trade-off that plagues so many public policies can be avoided because of the importance of skills in the modern economy and the dynamic nature of the skill-acquisition process. A large body of research in social science, psychology and neuroscience shows that skill begets skill; that learning begets learning. There is also substantial evidence of critical or sensitive periods in the lives of young children. Environments that do not cultivate both cognitive and noncognitive abilities (such as motivation, perseverance and self-restraint) place children at an early disadvantage. Once a child falls behind in these fundamental skills, he is likely to remain behind. Remediation for impoverished early environments becomes progressively more costly the later it is attempted.
India plans massive technical education push
The government is launching a three-year initiative to boost technical education.
The Ministry of Human Resource Development will head the effort designed to overhaul India’s education system, which lags other developing countries. Officials said the effort aims to improve the quality of Indian education by expanding the capacity of institutions and creating new ones.
Regional, social and gender disparities in higher and technical education are also being addressed in the new strategy, which is being bolstered by a nine-fold budget increase for technical education. At the same time, the ministry said, regional governments need to do more to support technical education.
The federal government plans to establish eight new Indian Institutes of Technology, known for producing top researchers for global technology firms. Also planned are two more Indian Institutes of Science, Education and Research. Twenty new Indian Institutes of Information Technology are also planned.
Teachers learn principles to pass on to in-demand students
How many teachers does it take to make a pingpong ball launcher?
More than one, 84 high school and middle school teachers participating in a two-week training class at the Milwaukee School of Engineering found out.
On Friday, they finished learning how to work cooperatively to make pingpong ball launchers and marble sorters, and to rip apart everything from flashlights to strap hinges so they could remake them to work better.
As a result, each is now certified to teach one Project Lead the Way class in digital electronics, civil engineering and architecture, or another engineering topic.
The Project Lead the Way-trained teachers are part of a push that powerful forces in the state have gotten behind.
Commuter College Goes Residential
The neighborhood around Georgia State University was for years a maze of boarded up storefronts, aging buildings and parking lots that emptied at the close of each day.
But the downtown Atlanta campus is shedding its sleepy commuter school image thanks to plush new dorms, gleaming classroom buildings, Greek life and, yes, even football.
Georgia State and other former night schools across the country are transforming into more traditional college campuses to boost enrollment and gain prestige. And each is creating a thriving community that spills over into surrounding neighborhoods, drawing restaurants and retail into once empty streets.
Young Workers Flee Midwestern States
Upper Midwestern states are in danger of losing a precious economic commodity: young people. Many are leaving for other parts of the country after finishing school. Without young, educated workers, there’s little incentive for businesses to locate in economically hard-hit states.
audio
The Two Worlds of Advanced Placement
Arguing about Advanced Placement, the college-level program found in most U.S. high schools, can be confusing. Some critics say AP courses and tests, like the similar but smaller International Baccalaureate and Cambridge programs, are too deep for most high school students. Other critics say they are too shallow. Some say AP teachers follow a boring, trivia-filled script. Others say AP teachers are the most creative and engaging instructors they know.
Two well-crafted op-ed pieces, by Chicago high school student Tom Stanley-Becker in the Los Angeles Times and by Stanford University graduate fellow Jack Schneider in the Christian Science Monitor, have recently illuminated this split. They point toward a more intelligent way of seeing AP and other college-level high school courses as a useful whole, rather than as large and clumsy devices with contrary parts.
Holding Back Young Students: Is Program a Gift or a Stigma?
With the increasing emphasis on standardized testing over the past decade, large urban school systems have famously declared an end to so-called social promotion among youngsters lacking basic skills. Last year, New York flunked 6 percent of its first graders, and Chicago 7.7 percent.
Now the 8,400-student East Ramapo school district in this verdant stretch west of the Palisades is going further, having revived a controversial retention practice widely denounced in the 1980s to not only hold back nearly 12 percent of its first graders this spring but to segregate them in a separate classroom come fall.
The special classes, which are limited to 15 students and follow a pared-down curriculum of reading, writing and arithmetic, are called the Gift of Time and come with extras like tutoring and field trips to a local farm.
The idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth. An instructor at a “college of last resort” explains why.
I work part-time in the evenings as an adjunct instructor of English. I teach two courses, Introduction to College Writing (English 101) and Introduction to College Literature (English 102), at a small private college and at a community college. The campuses are physically lovely—quiet havens of ornate stonework and columns, Gothic Revival archways, sweeping quads, and tidy Victorian scalloping. Students chat or examine their cell phones or study languidly under spreading trees. Balls click faintly against »
bats on the athletic fields. Inside the arts and humanities building, my students and I discuss Shakespeare, Dubliners, poetic rhythms, and Edward Said. We might seem, at first glance, to be enacting some sort of college idyll. We could be at Harvard. But this is not Harvard, and our classes are no idyll. Beneath the surface of this serene and scholarly mise-en-scène roil waters of frustration and bad feeling, for these colleges teem with students who are in over their heads.
I work at colleges of last resort. For many of my students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in. Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest; in their ideal academic geometry, college is located at a convenient spot between work and home. I can relate, for it was exactly this line of thinking that dictated where I sent my teaching résumé.
The Third World Challenge
Bob Compton, via a kind reader’s email:
ersonally, I know that China and India are not “Third World” countries, but that is because I’ve traveled to those countries and I deeply admire their cultures and their people.
The inspiration for the name “Third World Challenge” came a statement made to me by a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education when I showed my film Two Million Minutes for the HGSE faulty. “We have nothing to learn from education systems in Third World countries,” he intoned with much gravitas, “Much less a Third World country that lacks freedom of speech.” To my surprise, no other faculty member rose to challenge that statement.
While I certainly expected a more open-minded and globally aware audience at Harvard, I have now screened my film around the country and a surprisingly large segment of the American population believes India and China’s K-12 education systems are inferior to that of the United States. While no American makes the statement with the boundless hubris of a Harvard professor, the conclusion often is the same – America is number one in education and always will be.
This of course is not true. American students’ academic achievement has been declining vis-à-vis other developed countries for more than 20 years. What is now surprising and worrisome is US students are even lagging the developing world.
Bringing Potential Dropouts Back From the Brink
ON the morning of her Regents Exam in English language arts earlier this month, Sheile Echie-Davis, an 11th grader at Roosevelt High School, pointed to a blemish just below the swirls of pink and purple polish that covered her long fingernails and explained its meaning. “I’ve been writing so much, I’m getting bruises from holding my pencils,” she said, her tone conveying pride rather than concern that the results of weeks of intense studying were so visible.
Sheile, 16, expected to do well on the exam, judging by her past results: She scored 88 percent on her Regents Exam in United States history last year, even though the subject is her least favorite.
Three years ago, Sheile was an unlikely candidate for academic success given her chronic truancy from school. Skipping class regularly led to her having to repeat eighth grade in her Brooklyn middle school. Parental pressure and visits from truancy officers did little to budge her belief that the classroom was not where she belonged. Dropping out, she said, was a foregone conclusion.
Related: a look at Madison dropout data, including those with advanced abilities.
Marquette’s new engineering school will focus on creating a collaborative culture and produce grads and marketable ideas.
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:
The spark plug igniting this creative combustion is engineering school Dean Stan Jaskolski, who returned to his alma mater five years ago after retiring as chief technology officer at Eaton Corp. and a stint on the board of the National Science Foundation.
Jaskolski is re-engineering the engineering program with money, innovation and collaboration. The new engineering complex will link up faculty and students from all levels and disciplines, along with sales and marketing students and labs. Out of this intellectual stew, Jaskolski believes, will come a better prepared, more innovative engineering graduate. The school has raised $60 million out of the $100 million needed to build the complex.
Wisconsin’s improved performance on a noted ranking of science and technology is a plus. But the state still must work harder to turn good ideas into jobs.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Editorial:
Wisconsin is far better positioned in the knowledge economy than it was four years ago, with larger pools of risk capital and better coordination of the state’s best research.
That’s one way to read a new report from the well-respected Milken Institute. The state finished five spots higher at No. 22 in Milken’s State Technology and Science Index (www.jsonline.com/765102).
But the state’s policy-makers and business leaders must figure out how to turn more of the state’s best ideas into jobs across the state, not just in Madison. And perhaps how better to tap the wealth of intellectual property in southeastern Wisconsin.
While Wisconsin moved up five notches, it still ranks only middling overall and still lags far behind on some of the measures. Furthermore, it’s arguable how much such state-by-state rankings tell us in a world where the competitor as easily could be in Bangalore as in Buffalo.
Schools Promote Students Despite Widespread Failure
Thousands of Tucson-area middle and high school students who fail key subjects continue to progress through Pima County’s largest school districts every year toward graduation, a 10-month investigation by the Arizona Daily Star has found.
In the 2006-07 school year alone, nine in 10 students were moved to the next grade level, but data show that nearly a third of them failed basic courses in English, math, science or social studies. At least 94,000 students failed essential classes during the past six years.
The analysis confirms what has essentially been an open secret in education for years, what critics call social promotion, and shows it is pervasive throughout Tucson’s schools.
The practice is not only causing major academic problems now, but is setting up what could be a major blow to the region’s economy.
The underlying problem, experts say, is low student achievement compounded by the lack of concrete promotion policies and systemic pressure not to flunk children.
The Star’s analysis found, that because grade inflation is likely occurring in Tucson-area schools, not only are thousands of children being socially promoted every year, but many other students are receiving passing grades they may not deserve.
American High Schools “Not Properly Preparing Kids For Life”
A poll conducted by the Associated Press has found that more than half of people polled claim that U.S. high schools are falling short when it comes to readying students for adulthood. In addition, the same number of American’s polled believe that schools are focusing too much on some subjects and neglecting others, leading to an unbalanced education and a lack of “survival skills” needed for life after high school.
“When you get out of high school, what are you educated to do?” Mused California firefighter Jamie Norton. “A lot of kids, when they get out of school, are kind of lost.”
The AP poll revealed that parents from a minority group tend to believe that their children are receiving an education than they actually are. Three-fourths of adults polled also claimed that their children’s schools were emphasizing the wrong subjects – music, art, English – and not spending enough time on “important” subjects, such as math or biology. Parents are also frustrated by the seeming lack of assistance available during school hours for children who may be struggling with math, and are often unwilling to dedicate time at home to work on their children’s math homework.
Most individuals polled claimed that the U.S. is far behind other world countries when it comes to education. In reality, U.S. students fall somewhere in the middle when compared to students from other countries.
Education Reform: How to learn the right lessons from other countries’ schools
THE children at Kulosaari primary school, in a suburb of Helsinki, seem unfazed by the stream of foreign visitors wandering through their classrooms. The head teacher and her staff find it commonplace too—and no wonder. The world is beating a path to Finland to find out what made this unostentatious Nordic country top of international education league tables. Finland’s education ministry has three full-time staff handling school visits by foreign politicians, officials and journalists. The schools in the shop window rotate each year; currently, Kulosaari is on call, along with around 15 others. Pirkko Kotilainen, one of the three officials, says her busiest period was during Finland’s European Union presidency, when she had to arrange school visits for 300 foreign journalists in just six months of 2006.
Finland’s status as an education-tourism hot spot is a result of the hot fashion in education policy: to look abroad for lessons in schooling. Some destinations appeal to niche markets: Sweden’s “voucher” system draws school choice aficionados; New Zealand’s skinny education bureaucracy appeals to decentralisers. Policymakers who regard the stick as mightier than the carrot admire the hard-hitting schools inspectorate and high-stakes mandatory tests in England (other bits of Britain have different systems).
$2.6 million drives unique Boys & Girls Club, MMSD partnership
New joint program aims to double minority/low-income student college enrollment
Via the Madison School District [Press Release | AVID – TOPS Fact Sheet]:
The Boys & Girls Club (BGC) and Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) announced today a new joint initiative that intends to double the number of minority and low-income students who plan to pursue four-year college and technical college degrees upon high school graduation. The launch of the initiative is made possible through private commitments of $2.6 million to the Boys & Girls Club covering 50% of the first five years of the programs cost.
“We are so excited to partner with the Madison Metropolitan School District on this groundbreaking initiative, said Mary Burke, President of the Board of Directors for the Boys & Girls Club. “combining the school district’s AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) program with the Boys & Girls Club Teens Of Promise program (TOPs) we will make a difference, not only in the lives of the students involved in the program but also in the community at large. The health of our community is closely tied to having an educated, skilled workforce. This initiative is designed to do just that.”
The AVID program is a rigorous in-school elective that students take throughout high school to their improve study skills, grades, time management, reading and writing skills to better prepare them for college. The TOPs program offers summer job internships, mentors, scholarships, field trips, career exploration and financial support for tutoring. Students commit to staying on the college track, maintaining a 2.5 GPA, taking courses that will prepare them for college and having a good attendance record.
Impressed with the success of the 28 East High students enrolled in the program last year, the Boys and Girls Club of Madison has committed to raising $2.6 million, half the funding needed to increase enrollment to 100 students districtwide this fall and to add 100 each year until an 800-student cap is reached.
“This will fund college preparation for students not currently getting that opportunity,” said Boys and Girls Club board President Mary Burke.
Developed in California and based partly on a similar Milwaukee program, AVID is aimed at students from low-income households who want to develop the motivation to succeed in school. It is a daily elective students take throughout high school to improve their study skills, grades and time management.
Madison School District leaders on Monday announced a partnership with Boys and Girls Club of Dane County aimed at doubling the number of minority and low-income students who will be ready to enter college after high school.
District officials stressed that the new offering was not a remedial program or a free ride but instead was geared to help motivated students with average grades who have the desire to attend college but lack the practical skills and knowledge to get there and be successful.
And to do that really well, it was vital to involve the community, Pam Nash, assistant superintendent for the district ‘s four high schools, said at a news conference at East High School.
New Schools for Poor?
Some prominent Denver foundations are working on a plan that could create new schools for thousands of poor children in Colorado in the next few years.
The loose-knit group, called the New Schools Collaborative, includes the Piton Foundation, the Donnell-Kay Foundation and the Daniels Fund, names known for their work in urban education.
The idea is to pool money and knowledge to help jump-start the creation or replication of schools that have proved successful with students from low-income families.
That includes expanding homegrown models such as West Denver Preparatory Charter School on South Federal Boulevard, which Head of School Chris Gibbons wants to grow from a single school to three by 2015.
Are Video Games the New Textbooks?
“Immune Attack” is still in its final stage of development and is not on shelves yet, but can be downloaded for free at their website. The game has already been evaluated in 14 high schools across the country with nearly a thousand more educators registered to evaluate it in the next phase of development. The reaction among teachers who have used the game has been positive.
Woodbridge, Va., high school AP biology teacher Netia Elam says the video game brought the concepts of immunology to life for her students.
“[With text books] they might read something, drag vocabulary words onto paper, or use their math, but they’re not really integrated into it,” Elam said. “Because they are playing video games, they were really engrossed in what they were doing. They took on more of an interest and more of an initiative to pay attention.”
“Best” Graduate Schools
U.S. News has collected data from more than 12,000 graduate programs to bring you this year’s rankings. Start by selecting a discipline for access to our top program rankings.
More “Algebra” for Chicago Public Schools Eighth Graders
What do you think about the CPS effort to bring more algebra into middle schools?
From Catalyst: “The June board meeting included a brief presentation on student achievement from the Office of Instructional Design and Assessment. A recap of statistics showed that while 40 percent of 8th-graders across the country take algebra, only 8 percent of CPS 8th-graders do.
“With this in mind, Chief Officer Xavier Botana noted how the district is revamping algebra instruction: 8th-grade algebra will now be called “High School Algebra in the Middle Grades,” a name change that Botana said will help parents and others understand that students are tackling high-school-level material.
A commenter nails the issue:
The exit exams have to be real. They can’t be given credit for high school algebra, then show up in high school unprepared to take second year algebra.
Of course, they would only be prepared to take algebra in 8th grade if they have had rigorous math instruction before that. I believe these suburban schools with 40% of 8th graders taking algebra also have pre-algebra programs for kids in the 7th grade.
I’m all for offering rigorous classes; but there has to be some support to help kids get there.
Related:
- Madison West High School Math Teachers letter to Isthmus:
Moreover, parents of future West High students should take notice: As you read this, our department is under pressure from the administration and the math coordinator’s office to phase out our “accelerated” course offerings beginning next year. Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority math talent earlier, and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.
- Math Forum audio / video and links
It will be interesting to see the results of the Madison Math Task Force’s work.
Q&A with the US Education Secretary: Challenge Assumptions about Time and Teachers
Education has long been a passion of U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, stretching back to the 1980s, when she worked in the Texas Legislature. While serving as chief domestic policy adviser to President George W. Bush, she was an architect of the 2001 federal No Child Left Behind Act. Its goal is for all children to become proficient in math and reading by 2014.
In 2005, the same year she became education secretary, Spellings convened the Commission on the Future of Higher Education to look at how to improve post-secondary institutions. Spellings is the first mother of school-age children to serve as education secretary, and only the second woman to be appointed to the post. In her final few months on the job, much of her time has been devoted to shoring up support for the No Child Left Behind law.
Q. Does the United States need to create world-class schools in every community, and, if so, why?
A. Absolutely, emphatically, yes. And why? Because we pride ourselves on being the center of innovation and creativity, and that has brought us the Internet and other technologies, but we are at risk of losing that. Our country has gotten more diverse [in terms of poverty and children learning to speak English as a second language], so some of the work is more challenging. More education is necessary for everybody. We have to pick up the pace. No Child Left Behind is about that.
Multi-million dollar gifts to help college prospects for MMSD students
via a Joe Quick email:
The announcement of a unique public/private partnership will be made at this event. The multi-million dollar gifts will provide college opportunities for high school students from low-income families, and from families who have never had a college graduate.
The local partnership will provide opportunities for students at all of the district’s high schools and includes the prospects for college scholarship assistance. The funding will support two successful student achievement programs to provide high school students with a more comprehensive set of skills necessary for post secondary education success.
When: Monday, June 30 at 1:30 p.m.
Where: In the East High School Career Center, Room 224 (enter door closest to E. Washington Ave., on the 4th Street side of the school and follow signs).
Who: Gift providers, teacher and students who will potentially benefit with post secondary opportunities. All of the above will be available for interviews following the announcement.
For More Information Contact:
Joe Quick, 608 663-1902
COMMENTS OR QUESTIONS? PLEASE CONTACT:
Madison Metropolitan School District
Public Information Office
545 W. Dayton St.
Madison, WI 53703
608-663-1879
Monday also happens to be retiring Superintendent Art Rainwater’s last day.
Errors found in Michigan school progress reports
A new audit says Michigan’s annual school progress reports from 2004-05 and 2005-06 contained some errors that might have artificially improved some schools’ results.
The Office of the Auditor General report [1.6MB PDF] released Wednesday dealt with the Michigan Department of Education’s school report cards and adequate yearly progress reports based on federal No Child Left Behind rules.
The problem stemmed in part from inaccuracies and inconsistencies in computer programming logic used to calculate the scores. But there were other problems cited in the audit, including insufficient monitoring of data supplied by school districts — some of which may contain inflated favorable self-reporting and missing information.
Oregon Students May Choose Their Graduation Exam
The plan makes Oregon one of several states moving past the “one-size-fits-all” high-stakes testing that became commonplace in many U.S. high schools in the 1990s. In Pennsylvania, the Board of Education is considering a three-pronged approach similar to Oregon’s plan, while in Maryland, students who can’t pass the state tests could be allowed to do a senior project instead.
But some say such choices allow some students _ and states _ to take the easy way out.
Daria Hall, assistant director for K-12 policy at Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for poor and minority children, points to New Jersey, where up to 80 percent of students at high schools in poor cities like Newark and Camden receive alternative diplomas after not passing the state tests. The number falls to about 3 percent in wealthy areas like Princeton, N.J., she said.
California: Education Data Tells a Sorry Story
“Most incoming (community college) students are not ready for college-level work,” the report says. “In addition, relatively few of these students reach proficiency during their time (in community college).”
That’s interesting, but it also raises this question: Since virtually all of those community college students graduated from high school, what is that telling us about the level of K-12 instruction?
One presumes, perhaps naively, that if someone possesses a California high school diploma, thus signifying 12 years of education costing taxpayers around $130,000, that someone must possess basic reading, writing and computational skills.
Remember, we’re not talking about the roughly one-third of California’s teenagers who don’t graduate from high school; with few exceptions we’re talking about graduates who have enough gumption to attend community college, and yet, this report says most don’t have the appropriate basic skills for college-level studies. By the way, that also doesn’t count the large numbers of high school graduates – well over a third – who require remedial instruction after being accepted into the California State University system.
156 Wisconsin Schools Fail to Meet No Child Left Behind Standards
The number of Wisconsin schools that didn’t meet standards set by the federal No Child Left Behind Act and could face sanctions increased from 95 to 156 this year, including the entire Madison Metropolitan School District.
Of the 156 schools on the list released Tuesday by the state Department of Public Instruction, 82 were in the Milwaukee Public School district. Seven of the schools on the list were charter schools.
Besides individual schools on the list, four entire districts made the list for not meeting the standards. That lists includes the school districts of Beloit, Madison, Milwaukee and Racine.
Bill Novak (Interestingly, this Capital Times article originally had many comments, which are now gone):
Superintendent Art Rainwater told The Capital Times the list is “ludicrous,” the district doesn’t pay attention to it, and the district will do what’s best for the students and not gear curriculum to meet the criteria set by the federal government.
“As we’ve said from the day this law was passed, it is only a matter of time before every school in America is on the list,” Rainwater said. “It’s a law that impossible to meet, because eventually if every single student in a school isn’t successful, you are on the list.”
No Child Left Behind allows states to set their own standards. The Fordham Institute has given Wisconsin’s academic standards a “D” in recent years. Neal McCluskey has more on states setting their own standards:
NCLB’s biggest problem is that it’s designed to help Washington politicians appear all things to all people. To look tough on bad schools, it requires states to establish standards and tests in reading, math and science, and it requires all schools to make annual progress toward 100% reading and math proficiency by 2014. To preserve local control, however, it allows states to set their own standards, “adequate yearly progress” goals, and definitions of proficiency. As a result, states have set low standards, enabling politicians to declare victory amid rising test scores without taking any truly substantive action.
NCLB’s perverse effects are illustrated by Michigan, which dropped its relatively demanding standards when it had over 1,500 schools on NCLB’s first “needs improvement” list. The July 2002 transformation of then-state superintendent Tom Watkins captures NCLB’s power. Early that month, when discussing the effects of state budget cuts on Michigan schools, Mr. Watkins declared that cuts or no cuts, “We don’t lower standards in this state!” A few weeks later, thanks to NCLB, Michigan cut drastically the percentage of students who needed to hit proficiency on state tests for a school to make adequate yearly progress. “Michigan stretches to do what’s right with our children,” Mr. Watkins said, “but we’re not going to shoot ourselves in the foot.”
Madison’s Leopold and Lincoln elementary schools were among the list of schools failing to attain the standards, marking the first time that a Madison elementary school made the list.
Three Madison middle schools — Sherman, Cherokee and Toki — also joined the list, which continued to include the district’s four major high schools: East, West, La Follette and Memorial. Madison’s Black Hawk Middle School, which was on the list last year, made enough academic progress to be removed from it.
The Nation’s Most Elite Public High Schools
I am ranking them by one of the most common, and to me most annoying, measures of high school worth–average total reading and math SAT scores. Those test results are most closely tied to the income of the families that raise these fine students. There is something of that relationship at these schools too. But once you get this many bright students together, SAT becomes largely irrelevant, since they have all gone far beyond the 10th-grade reading comprehension and math puzzles that make up those exams. Notice, for instance, the surprises. Some very well-known elite schools have much lower average SATs than some others. Some selective high schools with terrific reputations, like Lowell in San Francisco, do not have high enough SAT averages to make the Public Elites list and so remain on the main list. It shows how little significance SAT numbers have.
I am still amazed that there are high schools whose average scores would be high enough to get any student who got that score, with a little luck, into the Ivy League. Our rule is if a non-traditional school’s average is 1300, or 29 or above on the ACT, it goes on the Public Elites list. We picked 1300 and 29 because those scores are just above the highest average scores of any regular enrollment public school in the country.
The list:
- Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (SAT 1495)
- University Laboratory High School, Urbana, Ill. (SAT 1409)
- Stuyvesant High School, New York (SAT 1405)
- High Technology High, Lincroft, NJ (SAT 1395)
- Hunter College High School, New York (SAT 1395)
- Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics, Oklahoma City (SAT 1383)
- Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, Aurora, Ill. (SAT 1373)
- South Carolina Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics, Hartsville, S.C. (SAT 1362)
- North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, Durham, N.C. (SAT 1356)
- Bergen County Academies, Hackensack, N.J. (SAT 1355)
- Whitney High School, Cerritos, Calif. (SAT 1343)
- Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School for Government and International Studies, Richmond, Va. (SAT:1340)
- Jefferson County International Baccalaureate, Irondale, Ala. (SAT 1315)
- Union County Magnet High School, Scotch Plains, N.J. (SAT 1314)
- International Community School, Kirkland, Wash. (SAT 1309)
- University High School, Tucson, Ariz. (SAT 1304)
- Bronx High School of Science, New York (SAT 1301)
SAT will let students pick which scores to show colleges
High school students seeking to put the best shine on their college applications will soon be able to choose which of their SAT scores to share with admissions officers and which to hide, the College Board said Friday.
The new policy, starting with the class of 2010, will allow students to take the widely used college entrance exam multiple times without admissions officers seeing their less-than-stellar efforts. Now, colleges receive scores of all the times a student attempted the dreaded test, whether the results were spectacular, mediocre or worse.
“Students were telling us the ability to have more control over their scores would make the test experience more comfortable and less stressful,” said Laurence Bunin, senior vice president of the SAT. “. . . We can do that without in any way diminishing the value and integrity of the SAT.”
And the Band Honked On: A Professional Musician Teaches 6th Graders
It was early in the school year. A young professional French horn player named Alana Vegter, a thoroughbred musician trained by elite teachers, took a handful of trumpet and trombone players into an equipment supply room. Speaking in the flat tones of the Chicago suburb where she grew up, Ms. Vegter tried to coax notes out of each player. A tall sixth-grade trumpeter named Kenny Ocean, his pants sagging around his hips, played too high, then too low. A smile spread across his face when he hit it right.
“You see, every time you do it, it gets easier,” Ms. Vegter said. On her cue they all bleated together. “I’m starting to hear everybody making nice, healthy sounds,” she said, half in praise, half in hope.
So began Ms. Vegter’s year in Ditmas Junior High School, Intermediate School 62, in the Kensington section of Brooklyn. It was a year that would teach her the satisfaction of tiny victories in a place where homelessness means that some kids cannot take their instruments home to practice, where chronic asthma forces some to switch from wind instruments to percussion, where the roar of a lunchroom leaves a newcomer stunned.
Ms. Vegter, 25, was there as part of a well-financed experiment by some of the nation’s most powerful musical institutions. The experiment is called, clumsily, the Academy — a Program of Carnegie Hall, the Juilliard School and the Weill Music Institute (the institute being an arm of Carnegie).
In its second season, which ended this month, the academy extended fellowships to 34 graduates of leading music schools to receive high-level coaching and lessons in a two-year program. They play concerts on Carnegie’s stages and participate in master classes. Part of the deal is a commitment to teach one and a half days a week at a New York public school, which pays the academy $13,200 for the service.
Clusty Search: Lemont High School Band.
Return of the Math Wars
1997 saw the height of the Math Wars in California.
On the one side stood educrats, who advocated mushy math – or new-new math. They sought to de-emphasize math skills, such as multiplication and solving numeric equations, in favor of pushing students to write about math and how they might solve a problem. Their unofficial motto was: There is no right answer. (Even to 2 +2.)
They were clever. They knew how to make it seem as if they were pushing for more rigor, as they dumbed down curricula. For example, they said they wanted to teach children algebra starting in kindergarten, which seemed rigorous, but they had expanded the definition of algebra to the point that it was meaningless.
On the other side were reformers, who wanted the board to push through rigorous and specific standards that raised the bar for all California kids. Miraculously, they succeeded, and they took pride in the state Board of Education’s vote for academic standards that called for all eighth-graders to learn Algebra I.
Math Forum Audio, Video and links.
IB or Not IB
Over the last several years, the references to “IB” schools seem to be just about everywhere. IB, or International Baccalaureate, Schools are schools certified by the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO). President George W. Bush cited IB programs as a model for boosting student achievement in science and math. The U.S. Department of Education started a pilot program to bring IB programs to low-income students. The Michigan Department of Education, in its 2006 recommendations to the State Board of Education for College Credit Earning Opportunities, recommends that Advanced Placement (AP) or IB courses be made available to every student in every high school in Michigan. University admissions offices are working to determine their scoring or ranking for students matriculating with an IB diploma. Oakland University is spearheading an IBO teacher certification program. This article will look at the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, explain its roots, mission, programming, and try to assess whether an IB program is a good fit for gifted students.
Does 8th-Grade Pomp Fit the Circumstance?
Andre Cowling, who just finished his first year as principal of Harvard Elementary, one of the poorest-performing schools in Chicago, said the South Side’s eighth-grade celebrations are like “Easter Sunday on steroids.”
In a speech last Sunday at a Chicago church, Barack Obama took on the pomp and purpose of these ceremonies. “Now hold on a second — this is just eighth grade,” he said. “So, let’s not go over the top. Let’s not have a huge party. Let’s just give them a handshake.” He continued: “You’re supposed to graduate from eighth grade.”
Mr. Obama was wading into a simmering debate about eighth-grade ceremonies and their attendant hoopla. Do they inspire at-risk students to remain in high school and beyond? Or do they imply finality?
While some educators are grateful that notice is still being paid to academic achievement, others deride the festivities as overpraising what should be routine accomplishment. Some principals, school superintendents and legislators are trying to scale back the grandeur. But stepping between parents and ever-escalating celebrations of their children’s achievements can be dicey, at best.
Massachusett’s School Overhaul Plan: Let 16 Year Olds Graduate
AP:
The school overhaul plan being unveiled next week by Gov. Deval Patrick includes a proposal to allow high school students as young as 16 to take an international evaluation test that would allow them to graduate, The Associated Press learned today.
A report from the year-old Readiness Project will also include recommendations to make credits universally transferrable through the state college, community college and university system. It also features a so-called dual-enrollment program that would allow high school students to receive credit for classes taken on college campuses, a senior administration official familiar with the report said.
Overall, the goal is to personalize education rather than continuing to rely on the more formulaic approach in which all students march in annual progression from elementary school through high school and undergraduate education — all between the ages of 6 and 22.
Related: Fearing for Massachusetts School Reform.
No Child Left Behind may be a drag on the gifted
By Anya Sostek, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
The school accountability movement is leaving the nation’s most gifted students behind, according to a report released yesterday by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
The report, “High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB,” uses scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress to compare changes in the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent of students since the introduction of No Child Left Behind.
The good news is that NCLB seems to be making progress toward its goal of closing the “achievement gap,” states the report: In fourth-grade reading, for example, NAEP scores for the bottom tenth increased 16 points from 2000 to 2007, compared to 3 points for the top tenth.
But what does the narrowing of that gap mean for students scoring at the top of the spectrum?
“The progress of our top students has been modest at best,” said the report, noting that the focus of NCLB on bringing students to the “proficient” level might result in the neglect of gifted students who are already proficient.
“People can look at this data and say, ‘This is great news,’ and maybe that’s what our national education policy should be,” said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president at the Fordham Institute. “But you see that the performance of the high-achieving students is languid, and the question is whether languid is going to cut it in a global economy.”
A Robin Hood Effect: Does the focus on students who are furthest behind come at the expense of top students?
Ann Duffett, Steve Farkas, Tom Loveless: High Achieving Students in the era of NCLB.
This publication reports the results of the first two (of five) studies of a multifaceted research investigation of the state of high-achieving students in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era.
Part I: An Analysis of NAEP Data, authored by Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, examines achievement trends for high-achieving students (defined, like low-achieving students, by their performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP) since the early 1990s and, in more detail, since 2000.
Part II: Results from a National Teacher Survey, authored by Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett of Farkas Duffett Research Group, reports on teachers’ own views of how schools are serving high-achieving pupils in the NCLB era.
Locally, these issues have manifested themselves with a controversial move toward one size fits all curriculum: English 10 and mandatory academic grouping, High School Redesign and a letter from the West High School Math teachers to Isthmus. Dane County AP Class offering comparison.
Report Sees Cost in Some Academic Gains by Sam Dillon:
And about three-quarters of the teachers surveyed said they agreed with this statement: “Too often, the brightest students are bored and under-challenged in school — we’re not giving them a sufficient chance to thrive”.
Download the complete 7.3MB report here.
Thanks to a reader for emailing the report.
Raising Minority Graduation Rates in College
The Catholic University and Trinity Washington University are well-regarded institutions located next to each other in a verdant section of northeast Washington. Yet there is a huge gap between them in the relative graduation rates of their black and white students.
Trinity, with an enrollment of about 1,600 mostly female undergraduates, graduated 51 percent of its black students entering in 2000 within six years, higher than the national black graduation rate of about 40 percent and almost identical to Trinity’s white graduation rate, 53 percent. Catholic, with an enrollment of about 6,200, has a six-year graduation rate of 25 percent for black students and 72 percent for white students who entered in 2000, one of the largest discrepancies in the country in this vital statistic.
Kevin Carey, a noted graduation rate researcher, merely reveals this interesting divergence in the data about the two schools. He does not explain it. But his startling new report, “Graduation Rate Watch: Making Minority Student Success a Priority,” which can be found online at http://www.educationsector.org/research/research_show.htm?doc_id=678433, identifies the most likely sources of such differences and provides more hopeful data about raising the graduation rates of low-income and minority students than I have seen gathered in one place.
Education: As the twig is bent …
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a single solution to our most vexing problems?
We could add productive workers, cut crime, reduce teen pregnancies and save money, too. Well, just click your heels, because we already have that power; we just have to recognize it and act on it.
The magic lies in early education: all the emotional, physical, social and cognitive learning kids do between birth and 5.
But when people talk about the power of education, it’s usually only K-12 education they’re thinking about, which may be why we just keep talking.
Last week a group of educators and social activists declared education a civil-rights issue.
The head of the school systems in New York City and Washington, D.C., were among the people who formed a new group to advocate for shaking up public education to eliminate achievement gaps based on race and income.
Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels wrote in The Seattle Times last week about urban areas as the foundation of U.S. prosperity and said the quality of education kids get affects our ability to address other problems cities face.
School Choice is Change you Can Believe In
Barack and Michelle Obama send their children to an upscale private school. When asked about it during last year’s YouTube debate, Sen. Obama responded that it was “the best option” for his children.
Several hundred low-income parents in our nation’s capital have also sent their children to private and parochial schools, with the help of a federal program that provides Opportunity Scholarships. Like Mr. and Mrs. Obama, most of these parents are African-American. And like Mr. and Mrs. Obama, they too believe the schools they’ve chosen represent the “best option” for their children.
Now these parents have a question for Mr. Obama. Is Mr. Change-You-Can-Believe-In going to let his fellow Democrats take away the one change that is working for them?
Chris Christoff on Obama’s Flint Education speech:
Barack Obama’s plans to invest more taxpayer dollars on early education, college tuition tax credits and incentives for prospective teachers resonated with those attending his speech Monday at Kettering University in Flint.
Germans eye kindergarten for next engineers
Germany’s shortage of engineers has become so acute that some of its leading companies are turning to nursery schools to guarantee future supplies.
Industrial giants such as Siemens and Bosch are among hundreds of companies giving materials and money to kindergartens to try to interest children as young as three in technology and science.
Many European countries from Switzerland to Spain suffer shortages of graduates. But the problem is especially acute in Germany, renowned as a land of engineering. German companies have 95,000 vacancies for engineers and only about 40,000 are trained, according to the engineers’ association.
“It is a new development in that we have seen we need to start very early with children. Starting at school is not good enough – we need to help them to understand as early as possible how things work,” said Maria Schumm-Tschauder, head of Siemens’ Generation21 education programme.
Madison Math Task Force Minutes
March 7, 2008 Meeting [rtf / pdf]. Well worth reading for those interested in the use of Connected Math and Core Plus, among others, in our schools.
A few interesting items:
- Mitchell Nathan proposed a change to the name of the Work Group to more authentically describe its intent. There was consensus to accept the change in designation for the Work Group from “Curriculum Review and Research Findings” to “Learning from Curricula.”
- “Addresses the misconception that there is one curriculum. There are a number of curricula at play, with the exception of the narrowing down at the middle school level, but teachers are also drawing from supplementary materials. There are a range of pathways for math experiences. The work plan would give an overview by level of program of what exists. “
- “Could say that variety is good for children to have places to plug into. Could expand on the normative idea of purchasing commercial curricula vs. richer, in-house materials. Standards tell the teachers what needs to be taught. Published materials often are missing some aspect of the standards. District tries to define core resources; guides that help people with classroom organization.” Fascinating, given the move toward one size fits all in high school, such as English 9 and 10.
- “Want to include a summary of the NRC report that came out in favor of Connected Math but was not conclusive—cannot control for teacher effects, positive effects of all curricula, etc. “
- “Would like to give some portrayal of the opportunities for accelerated performance — want to document informal ways things are made available for differentiation. “
- “Include elementary math targeted at middle school, e.g., Math Masters. There is information out there to address the Math Masters program and its effect on student achievement.”
- “Data are available to conclude that there is equity in terms of resources”
- “District will have trend data, including the period when Connected Math was implemented, and control for changes in demographics and see if there was a change. No way to link students who took the WKCE with a particular curriculum experience (ed: some years ago, I recall a teacher asked Administration at a PTO meeting whether they would track students who took Singapore Math at the Elementary level: “No”). That kind of data table has to be built, including controls and something to match teacher quality. May recommend that not worth looking at WKCE scores of CM (Connected Math) student or a case study is worth doing. “
- The Parent Survey will be mailed to the homes of 1500 parents of students across all grades currently enrolled in MMSD math classes. The Teacher Survey will be conducted via the district’s web site using the Infinite Campus System.
- MMSD Math Task Force website
Math Forum audio / video and links.
The Fate of The Sentence: Is the Writing On the Wall?
The demise of orderly writing: signs everywhere.
One recent report, young Americans don’t write well.
In a survey, Internet language — abbreviated wds, 🙂 and txt msging — seeping into academic writing.
But above all, what really scares a lot of scholars: the impending death of the English sentence.
Librarian of Congress James Billington, for one. “I see creeping inarticulateness,” he says, and the demise of the basic component of human communication: the sentence.
This assault on the lowly — and mighty — sentence, he says, is symptomatic of a disease potentially fatal to civilization. If the sentence croaks, so will critical thought. The chronicling of history. Storytelling itself.
He has a point. The sentence itself is a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Something happens in a sentence. Without subjects, there are no heroes or villains. Without verbs, there is no action. Without objects, nothing is moved, changed, destroyed or created.
Plus, simple sentences clarify complex situations. (“Jesus wept.”)
Related:
Wealthy Colleges: Ante Up
James D. Miller & Louis Lavelle:
Colleges and universities should be required to spend 5% of their endowments every year or risk losing their tax-exempt status. Pro or con?
100 Black Men of America:
African American History Bowl Challenge Finals
Teams from 100 Black Men of Charlotte and 100 Black Men of Madison faced each other in Friday evening’s Junior Division finals [Photo (Charlotte Left, Madison Right)]. Madison (Cherokee Heights Middle School) prevailed.
100 Black Men of Jackson (MS) faced 100 Black Men of Chicago in the Senior Division Finals [Photo (Jackson Left, Chicago Right)]. Chicago won.
Madison’s team: Marshaun Hall, Maria Lee and Carrie Zellmer. The team was coached by Cherokee Middle School’s Learning Coordinator Jeff Horney. Enis Ragland, founding President of the Madison chapter and Ken Black, current President of the 100 Black Men of Madison accompanied the team (a team from Madison Memorial High School competed in the Senior Division).
Finally, this photo of the Madison team notifying friends and loved ones that they advanced to the finals provides a useful look at the zeitgeist of a 14 year old, circa 2008.
March, 2008 Madison African American History Challenge Bowl.
100 Black Men of America.
“Why is the education lobby so afraid of giving parents more choice?”
I agree with virtually everything Web Hutchins wrote questioning the value of the test-based WASL, Advanced Placement and the very real value of small class sizes [“Test-based education is shortchanging students,” Times, guest commentary, June 11]. He does leave out a few things, however.
I’ve always thought that the education lobby has resisted teacher-competency evaluation to the point that testing students with the WASL has become the alternative to testing and evaluating teachers. What does education certification really mean? It certainly doesn’t mean competence in the classroom. Why is the education lobby so afraid of giving parents more choice in the selection of schools and teachers? I don’t think it’s about classroom size.
Studying Abroad – Two American Students Discuss Their Experiences
From 1991-92 through 2004-05, the number of students studying abroad has more than doubled according to Open Doors 2004. Representing an increase of roughly 145%, the raw numbers translate to about 71,000 students in 1991-92 to almost 175,000 in 2004-05.
Many in recent years have steered away from studying in Europe due to the falling dollar. Though most still list places like Rome, Paris, London, Barcelona and Amsterdam as their number one choices, sticker shock has many students turning towards other areas of the world.
However, at least two young ladies have followed their dreams of studying abroad in Europe. Emily and Rachel are both graduate students at the University of Amsterdam where they are in the ‘Brain and Cognitive Sciences’ master’s program run by the Cognitive Science Center, Amsterdam (CSCA).
Each has also made the most rare of commitments – neither is doing a simple semester or year abroad. Each has made the commitment to complete an entire degree program in a foreign land.
Madison’s Cherokee Middle School Wins the 100 Black Men of America Championship
A team from Madison’s Cherokee Middle School (100 Black men of Madison) defeated students from Charlotte, NC (100 Black Men – Charlotte) in this evening’s middle school African American History Challenge Bowl at the 100 Black Men of America Annual Conference in Orlando.
A team from Madison Memorial High School participated in the event’s initial round Thursday evening.
Photos and links from the March, 2008 Madison competition.
The above photo was taken at the March, 2008 Madison competition.
To solve racial disparities, parents, schools call truce
Minneapolis schools are hoping a new cooperative agreement with African-American parents will smooth some of the hard feelings over school closings last year and help close the district’s student achievement gap.
The idea is for black parents to help get their children ready to learn while the school district works with parents to help the kids succeed.
On average, black kids in Minneapolis schools do about half as well as their white classmates. They get disciplined more often. They get fewer diplomas.
That education gap has been the source of an increasingly bitter struggle in the city, but a group of parents and the school board have decided to call a truce.
The district voted Tuesday, to work with parents on what they’re calling a memorandum of agreement. It’s modeled on other agreements, like a pact with the NAACP and St. Paul Police and American Indian families and Minneapolis schools.
College Track
The educational nonprofit was founded in East Palo Alto in 1997 to help low-income students boost their grades, apply to college and obtain scholarships.
Students must apply to the after-school supplement to their high school studies and maintain a 3.0 grade point average. Those who falter are steered into a counseling group called Inspire, which tries, through group chat sessions, to motivate them to try harder.
There’s fun, too – summer field trips to Yosemite and Tahoe, because many students have never experienced the outdoors. And tucked into all this is counseling. College Track officials find there are times when they have to cajole parents into allowing their children to attend college out of the Bay Area or out of state. Parents who don’t speak English often look to their children as leaders, relying on them for help with translating and enlisting them in child care duties. They want their children close to home.
The Swedish Model
A Swedish firm has worked out how to make money running free schools
BIG-STATE, social-democratic Sweden seems an odd place to look for a free-market revolution. Yet that is what is under way in the country’s schools. Reforms that came into force in 1994 allow pretty much anyone who satisfies basic standards to open a new school and take in children at the state’s expense. The local municipality must pay the school what it would have spent educating each child itself—a sum of SKr48,000-70,000 ($8,000-12,000) a year, depending on the child’s age and the school’s location. Children must be admitted on a first-come, first-served basis—there must be no religious requirements or entrance exams. Nothing extra can be charged for, but making a profit is fine.
The reforms were controversial, especially within the Social Democratic Party, then in one of its rare spells in opposition. They would have been even more controversial had it been realised just how popular they would prove. In just 14 years the share of Swedish children educated privately has risen from a fraction of a percent to more than 10%.
At the time, it was assumed that most “free” schools would be foreign-language (English, Finnish or Estonian) or religious, or perhaps run by groups of parents in rural areas clubbing together to keep a local school alive. What no one predicted was the emergence of chains of schools. Yet that is where much of the growth in independent education has come from. Sweden’s Independent Schools Association has ten members that run more than six schools, and five that run ten or more.
Interesting.
Study of Small High Schools (Small Learning Communities or SLC) Yields Little on Achievement
High schools receiving $80 million in annual federal funding to support “smaller learning communities” can document that they are taking steps to establish learning environments more intimate than found in the typical comprehensive high school.
But, according to a federal study, such smaller schools can’t answer the most significant question: Is student achievement improving in the smaller settings?
The evaluation of the 8-year-old program found that schools participating in it show signs of success. In the schools, the proportion of students being promoted from 9th to 10th grade increases, participation in extracurricular activities rises, and the rate of violent incidents declines.
But the evaluation found “no significant trends” in achievement on state tests or college-entrance exams, says the report, which was prepared by a private contractor and released by the U.S. Department of Education last week.
Related:
- High School Redesign
- US Department of Education response to Madison’s Small Learning Community Grant Request.
- Examining the Madison West SLC Grant Results
Education fundamental building block
Because economists tend to point out things like this, it is not surprising that I was not invited to give a commencement address. But if I had been, my message would have been a simple one.
Don’t worry. You made the right decision.
Recent earnings data indicates the essentiality of education. According to the Current Population Survey (CPS) annual earnings for Colorado’s full-time workers without a high school diploma averaged $25,916 in 2006. For Centennial State residents holding a high school degree only, annual earnings averaged $34,698. Over just 15 years, a (crude) calculation shows the high school diploma is worth about $132,000.
High school graduates are also less likely to live in poverty. CPS data from 2005 indicate 22.1 percent of Colorado’s adult population without a high school diploma lived in poverty. By comparison, the state’s high school only graduates had poverty rates of 11.6 percent.
Columbia, Missouri ACT Results Compared with Math Curriculum
Columbia Parents for Real Math:
CPS Secondary Math Curriculum Coordinator Chip Sharp provided average ACT scores reported by course enrollment which are used in the figures below. Plotting the data in several ways gives food for thought regarding the differences between algebra and integrated math pathways offered at CPS.
The data don’t distinguish between which students are sophomores, juniors or seniors when they take the ACT, which students may have repeated courses or what year they started the pathway (7th, 8th or 9th grade). But it does give some idea of how much math “preparation” each course pathway provides at least for the years for which data is available.
I’ve heard that Madison’s Math Task Force will render a report prior to Superintendent Art Rainwater’s June 30, 2008 retirement. Related: Math Forum.
Education: Failing schools? Failing government, more like
Many children can’t read or write when they reach secondary school
pare a thought this morning for teachers whose schools have the lowest results in the country, waking up to a warning from the Government that they have 50 days – 50 days! – to produce an “action plan” or face closure or merger.
Some of these schools may deserve the opprobrium that ministers are inviting us to heap upon them. Many more will not. Most “failing” schools take the toughest kids from the most socially disadvantaged areas. They are not dealing with the problems you and I might be worrying about: whether the curriculum is broad enough for Sophie’s myriad interests, or when Jamie will fit in the third language you want him to learn.
These schools are dealing with children with deprived and disruptive family backgrounds many of whom cannot read or write English, lack any positive parental support and have already given up on their chances in life before they walk through the school gates at 11.
Imperial College ditches A levels and sets its own entrance exam
One of Britain’s leading universities is to introduce an entrance exam for all students applying to study there from 2010 because it believes that A levels no longer provide it with a viable way to select the best students.
Sir Richard Sykes, Rector of Imperial College, London, suggested that grade inflation at A level meant that so many students now got straight As that it had become almost “worthless” as a way of discriminating between the talented and the well drilled.
Last year one in four A-level marks was a grade A and 10 per cent of A-level students achieved at least three As.
“We can’t rely on A levels any more. Everybody who applies has got three or four As. They [A levels] are not very useful. The International Baccalaureate is useful but again this is just a benchmark,” Sir Richard said.
The Enemy Within British Education
Melanie Phillips via a kind reader:
In my book All Must Have Prizes, first published in 1996, in which I charted the disintegration of education and deconstruction of knowledge in Britain, I noted that this onslaught had resulted from the hijack of education by left-wing ideologues hell-bent on destroying British society. These people were entrenched in university departments of education. So when the government tried to address education decline by imposing a national curriculum and turned to the ‘experts’ to help them do so, the people who wrote that curriculum and sat on the curriculum boards and other education quangos were the very people who were doing the damage in the first place.
Twelve years on, Britain’s education system has disintegrated yet further and exactly the same kind of people are doing the same damage. Today’s Daily Mail reports that Professor John White, who specialises in ‘the philosophy of education’ and a government adviser on curriculum reform, says that children should no longer be taught traditional subjects at school because they are ‘middle-class’ creations and ‘mere stepping stones to wealth’ and that lessons should teach ‘personal skills’ instead.The professor believes the origins of our subject-based education system can be traced back to 19th century middle-class values. While public schools focused largely on the classics, and elementary schools for the working class concentrated on the three Rs, middle-class schools taught a range of academic subjects.
These included English, maths, history, geography, science and Latin or a modern language. They ‘fed into the idea of academic learning as the mark of a well-heeled middle- class’, he said last night. The Tories then attempted to impose these middle-class values by introducing a traditional subject-based curriculum in 1988. But this ‘alienated many youngsters, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds’, he claimed.
Transforming Inner-City Schools To Train Tomorrow’s Work Force
One day in August 2005, Dan Swinney went to the Chicago public schools for help in his crusade to revive manufacturing here. Instead, Mr. Swinney left his meeting with some homework: design a new high school to train the workers needed to make that revival happen.
This past fall, the school, Austin Polytechnical Academy, opened inside a building that had once housed a mammoth, violence-prone high school on the city’s struggling West Side. Now, Mr. Swinney, chairman of the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council, has plans to open two more high schools and an elementary school in other areas of the city.
Mr. Swinney says American manufacturing is adapting to globalization by shifting to higher-value products. But with the baby boomers’ looming retirement, the education system isn’t producing the workers and managers needed to take over the highly skilled jobs that are most in demand.
“There’s a window that’s open that will allow us to sustain and expand our competitive advantage, but it’s only open for a few years,” Mr. Swinney says. Training poor students to fill these positions can “address deep social problems,” while giving industry the work force it needs.
Shameful effort to undermine charter school
San Jose Mercury News Editorial:
Leadership Public Schools’ longstanding battle with the Campbell Union High School District is over.
The district has won. Families of low-income Hispanics, whom the school was designed to serve, have lost.
The board of the non-profit San Francisco-based charter organization voted last week to shut down its Campbell high school after only two years of operation. Leadership is calling the closing a consolidation.
Students will be bused to Overfelt High in East San Jose, where Leadership has a 10-year lease from charter-welcoming East Side Union High School District.
But let’s be straight: This was sabotage by Campbell Union. And it points to weaknesses in the state law that says school districts must provide space to charter schools.
Proposition 39 requires that districts provide equivalent facilities, but only on a yearly basis. So many anti-charter districts, like Campbell, use the provision to give charters a literal run-around and force them to move every year.
Leadership opened two years ago with 120 ninth-graders in rented space at a church not far from Del Mar High, the target area where there was a concentration of long-under-served Hispanic children. (Perhaps showing the value of competition, Del Mar itself has made considerable strides in the past few years under Principal Jim Russell.)
Local Politics: Zig & Zag with the Madison Studio School.
Slowly but surely, universities in France—and across all of Europe—are reforming
BENEATH the medieval cloisters and bleak 1960s campuses of Europe’s universities, the ground is trembling. For years, Europeans have talked of doing something about higher education, so as to prepare better for the “knowledge economy”. But lingering taboos—over tuition fees, private finance, or competition—have inhibited the timid and frustrated the bold. Now, however, there are the first stirrings of genuine change.
The shortcomings of Europe’s universities are well-known. Only two European universities (Cambridge and Oxford) are in Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s global top 20. Europeans spend an average of $10,191 per student, measured at purchasing-power parity, next to $22,476 in America. They devote only 1.3% of GDP to higher education, compared with 2.9% in America, and—unlike in America—almost all of it is public money. Only 24% of working-age Europeans have a degree, compared with 39% of Americans. And Europe bags an ever-declining share of Nobel prizes.
IS AP Good for Everyone?
I am no match for Chester E. Finn Jr. in a debate. The president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and author of “Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik” (Princeton University Press) is feared by many ideological adversaries for his sharp wit and inexhaustible erudition. But I am taking him on anyway in this column because he suggested recently in his own weekly Gadfly column that I was promoting Advanced Placement courses for all students, even those unable or unwilling to handle their difficulties. I thought this would also be a good way to explore the limits of the movement to make high schools more challenging, a very lively issue in our highest-performing schools. Here we go:
Mathews: I want to get to the broader issues pretty quickly, but let’s deal first with your wicked poke in my ribs. I don’t believe I have ever said AP is for everyone. My view has always been that AP is for far more people than are allowed to, or encouraged to, enroll in AP (and International Baccalaureate) courses. There is lots of data to support this, including College Board analysis of PSAT scores showing two or three times as many people could handle and benefit from AP than actually take the course. Have you got a citation showing I said any such silly thing? If not, please debase yourself with an apology to my readers so we can get to the fascinating topic of how much AP and IB should kids have.
Related:
- Dane County, Wisconsin AP Course Offering Comparison.
- November, 2005 Grant to Increase Madison AP Course Offerings.
Leftist thinking left off the syllabus
Leftist ideology may be gaining ground in Latin America. But it will never set foot on the manicured lawns of Francisco Marroquin University.
For nearly 40 years, this private college has been a citadel of laissez-faire economics. Here, banners quoting “The Wealth of Nations” author Adam Smith“>Adam Smith — he of the powdered wig and invisible hand — flutter over the campus food court.
Every undergraduate, regardless of major, must study market economics and the philosophy of individual rights embraced by the U.S. founding fathers, including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
A sculpture commemorating Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” is affixed to the school of business. Students celebrated the novel’s 50th anniversary last year with an essay contest. The $200 cash prize reinforced the book’s message that society should reward capitalist go-getters who create wealth and jobs, not punish them with taxes and regulations.
A Goal of 100%
Next time it rewrites its statewide standardized math test, the state Department of Education might consider this challenging question:
With a statewide high school graduation rate of 58.1 percent in 2005 and an improvement rate of 2.6 percentage points over the previous five years, when can Georgia expect to achieve a 100 percent graduation rate?
Answer: 2110.
One hundred and two years is a long, long time —- too long, in fact. But with the sluggish response of state leaders to holistic and meaningful education reform, accelerating that time frame will be very difficult.
While Gov. Sonny Perdue has introduced graduation coaches to identify and deflect potential dropouts in high school, there’s far more to be done to reclaim children in the early grades, where most kids wander off track. And rather than whittling away at instructional funding, as Georgia has done in recent years, the state ought to be investing in programs to prepare low-income 3-year-olds for school and to help struggling third-graders learn to read.
To truly transform its low-performing schools, Georgia has to take an honest look at its financial commitment to education. That starts with the governor, who continues to maintain that his administration has not shortchanged education and is, in fact, spending more than ever on a per-pupil basis.
Finland’s schools may lead the world, but its universities are nothing special
This bothers the Finnish government. “As a country that thinks its future is purely dependent on its know-how, we cannot afford average results in universities,” says Jyrki Katainen (pictured), the finance minister.
This is my last appointment before I fly back to London, and Mr Katainen is telling me that his government thinks greater independence and a bit of capital may help the country’s universities to specialise and innovate. So it has offered any universities willing to set up charitable foundations a deal too good to refuse: any money they raise by 2010, the government will top up by 2.5 times as much.
Finland is hardly the only country worried about the global reputation of its universities. As with schools, the advent of international rankings has made list-watchers of everyone. The Shanghai Jiao Tong and THE rankings are enormously important both for universities, which are increasingly reliant on international students, and for countries, who take their positions on the charts quite seriously.
Mary Olsky, EAGLE School co-founder, decides to retire
Twenty-six years ago, Mary Olsky was looking for a more challenging educational environment for her children. What ultimately happened has helped thousands of students over the years.
“I didn’t see this happening,” she said recently of Eagle School, which she co-founded with Betty Connor in 1982. Olsky is stepping down as co-director of the school, which now has 182 students, 20 teachers and six to 10 parent aides, and an expansive building at 5454 Gunflint Trail in Fitchburg.
In the 1980s, Olksy had recently moved to the Madison area with her husband and four children, ages 4 to 10, from Chicago. She thought Madison would provide a better educational environment for her children, but was disappointed.
Shortly after meeting Connor, they visited several schools around the country and rented a room in Hoyt School, which the district had closed and was renting rooms to a variety of organizations. They collected materials from a variety of sources and started with 12 students, including two of her children.
By 1985, they had outgrown their space and moved to another former school in Madison. One of the parents was a developer and helped them purchase land and build a school in Middleton. After adding two additions, they purchased land in Fitchburg and constructed the current building.
“We had sworn that we’d never have more than 100 kids or build our own building. What happened has become part of our general philosophy, which is to see problems and try to solve them instead of being rigid,” Olsky.
On Madison’s High School Curriculum
Mitch Henck discussion: MP3 audio file. Recorded 6/2/2008. Henck discussed incoming Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad on January 29, 2008 – MP3 file.
More on Finland’s Schools
THE OECD’s PISA studies are exhibit A for the excellence of Finland’s schools. Finland routinely comes top, or occasionally second, in tests every three years of 15-year-olds’ abilities in reading, mathematics and science. It is impressive, but the suspicious-minded (or perhaps just the begrudgers?) wonder if it is really all down to brilliant schools.
I have a suspicion of my own. When I lived in Finland in the 1990s I learnt rather little Finnish (they speak great English, and I’m lazy), but I learnt to read words and say them correctly in about half an hour. Each letter corresponds to one sound, and only one; there are no exceptions and no combinations of letters that make different sounds, like “sh” or “th”. If a letter is repeated, it is simply said for twice as long. Is it, perhaps, just easier to learn to read and write in Finland than practically anywhere else?
A School Milwaukee’s District Could Learn From
There is a school on Milwaukee’s near south side that should be a beacon of light to the many schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools that are having trouble keeping about 50% of their students in attendance and graduating.
It is Notre Dame Middle School, a Catholic school for girls in fifth through eighth grade. I tutored there for almost two years, and it was a great experience.
The school accepts Hispanic girls from that area who have spent the first few years of elementary school at MPS. Few come from what could be called “advantaged” homes. Most struggle with their studies. Many of them speak only Spanish at home because that is the only language their parents know. Then they must adjust to English the next morning when they return to school.
In spite of these challenges, the school shows an impressive record, with 96% of the girls graduating from high school after they leave Notre Dame and 76% of those continuing with a post-secondary education. How do they do it when more advantaged students drop out of school rather than apply themselves
Seattle School Board’s New Goals
The Seattle School Board approved a five-year plan Wednesday that sets specific targets for raising test scores, graduation rates and even the number of credits earned by ninth-graders.
By 2012, for example, the district wants 88 percent of third-graders to pass reading on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, and 95 percent of the 10th-graders to do the same. Some of the most ambitious goals are in math and science, especially a passage rate of 80 percent on the science section of the 10th-grade WASL. In spring 2007, 33 percent passed.
To reach those and other goals, the plan calls for everything from better math and science instruction, to more consistency in what’s taught from school to school, more tests to track student progress, and hiring teachers earlier so classes don’t start the year with substitutes.
District officials have described the goals as ambitious, but achievable. And some of the most ambitious ones simply match what’s required under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, or reflect increasingly tough graduation requirements for high-school students.
Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson at Wednesday’s School Board meeting said her plan doesn’t cover everything, but that a strategic plan is meant to focus on “deficits.”
“Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum”
Peter Sobol on the 2007 Wisconsin DPI State test results (WKCE):
The results for the WKCE test administered in November 2007 were finally released on May 30th. That is more than six months after the test was given. Worse, the data files containing the detailed results that can be used for proper statistical analysis of the results are STILL not available for download. Assessments are information that degrades over time. The fact that it takes six months to get the data out (whatever its other shortcomings) cheats the taxpayers of the full value of their investment.
At the very least the WI DPI should be embarrassed by the fact it takes this long to release the test results. Personally I find it outrageous. I had an email exchange with DPI officials concerning this long delay and the loss of value, this is an excerpt from part of that response (italics mine):… The WKCE is a large-scale assessment designed to provide a snapshot of how well a district or school is doing at helping all students reach proficiency on state standards, with a focus on school and district-level accountability. A large-scale, summative assessment such as the WKCE is not designed to provide diagnostic information about individual students. Those assessments are best done at the local level, where immediate results can be obtained. Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum.
Does anyone else find the fact that the state issues WKCE results to individual students surprising given the above statement?
The Madison School District, together with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research is using local WKCE results for “Value Added Assessment“.
Much more on the WKCE here.
Minnesota recently administered their first online science test.
Community College Transfer Mess
Like many community college students, Josie Showers saw her classes at Jefferson Community and Technical College in Louisville as the first step toward a four-year degree. She was among the nearly half of American students who start college in two-year community schools. They are told if they work hard, their state’s four-year colleges will be happy to accept them as transfers and cheer them on to graduation. But Showers, like many others, discovered those four-year schools are not as helpful as she had been led to believe.
After she transferred to the University of Louisville as a 27-year-old political science major, she was told she could not get her bachelor’s degree until she had taken the university’s pre-algebra class. That made no sense to her. She had already taken an algebra course, learning concepts more advanced than pre-algebra, at her community college. Sorry, she was told. Rules are rules. That kind of red tape cost her an extra semester and $4,000 before she could graduate.
Education for Peace
When it was becoming clear that the tide of World War II was turning, after Battle of Midway, after Battle of Stalingrad, when Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps was on the run, an unknown, first-term congressman introduced a resolution that would help shape the post-war world.
The freshman congressman was J. William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas. His resolution was only one sentence, as “plain as an old hat,” said Life magazine at the time: “Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring) that the Congress hereby expresses itself as favoring the creation of appropriate international machinery with power adequate to establish and to maintain a just and lasting peace among the nations of the world, and as favoring participation by the United States therein.”
In June of 1943, an isolationist Republican from Ohio, John Vorys, rose to voice his approval, and the resolution was passed. Vorys’s conversion marked the beginning of the United States’s bipartisan, multilateralist foreign policy that would lead to the forming of the United Nations, reversing America’s decision after World War I not to join the League of Nations.
Fulbright, a former Rhodes Scholar and University of Arkansas president, was elected to the Senate the following year. He would go on to become the only senator to vote against the appropriation for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Un-American Activities Committee, and, afterward, as the longest serving chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which so ably illuminated the absurdities of the Vietnam War.
Flowing from his early internationalist resolution came the creation of the Fulbright Scholar Program, signed into law by Harry Truman in 1946. It promoted educational exchanges between foreign students and Americans to facilitate “mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries of the world.” It is a program I have been involved with over the years.
Education in Sweden and Finland
Competition—and ignoring the 1970s—breeds success
THE best schools in the world, it is generally agreed, are in Finland. In the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) studies, which compare 15-year-olds’ reading, mathematics and science abilities in more than 50 countries, it routinely comes top. So politicians, academics, think-tankers and teachers from all over the world visit Finnish schools in the hope of discovering the magic ingredient. Journalists come too, and now it’s my turn.
And since I’m coming this far north, I want to take in Sweden too. That social-democratic paradise has carried out school reforms that make free-market ideologues the world over weak at the knees. In the 1990s it opened its state-education system to private competition, allowing new schools to receive the same amount for each pupil as the state would have spent on that child.
Sweden is my first stop. My week starts with post-breakfast coffee with Widar Andersson, an ex-chairman of Sweden’s Independent Schools Association. When the independent schools reforms were first mooted in 1991, he was a member of parliament for the Social Democrats, in one of their rare spells in opposition. “I think I was the only Social Democrat in favour of the reforms,” he tells me.
In 1994, when they came into force, he and two state-school teachers opened one of the very first independent schools. It was not the first time he took on the state: years earlier he and a few other social workers had set up a private company trying innovative ways to treat drug addicts. “I learned there must be other ways to do things than those the state has decided are right, especially in a country like Sweden where the state is so large,” he says.
Put a Little Science in Your Life
A COUPLE of years ago I received a letter from an American soldier in Iraq. The letter began by saying that, as we’ve all become painfully aware, serving on the front lines is physically exhausting and emotionally debilitating. But the reason for his writing was to tell me that in that hostile and lonely environment, a book I’d written had become a kind of lifeline. As the book is about science — one that traces physicists’ search for nature’s deepest laws — the soldier’s letter might strike you as, well, odd.
Brian Greene:A COUPLE of years ago I received a letter from an American soldier in Iraq. The letter began by saying that, as we’ve all become painfully aware, serving on the front lines is physically exhausting and emotionally debilitating. But the reason for his writing was to tell me that in that hostile and lonely environment, a book I’d written had become a kind of lifeline. As the book is about science — one that traces physicists’ search for nature’s deepest laws — the soldier’s letter might strike you as, well, odd.
But it’s not. Rather, it speaks to the powerful role science can play in giving life context and meaning. At the same time, the soldier’s letter emphasized something I’ve increasingly come to believe: our educational system fails to teach science in a way that allows students to integrate it into their lives.
Allow me a moment to explain.
Find Answer to Achievement Gap
Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
Test scores released last week clearly show one of the primary tasks confronting Madison School District ‘s incoming superintendent, Daniel Nerad:
The district should find more effective ways to educate its rapidly growing populations of foreign-speaking students and lower-income students.
Students from immigrant families and students from lower-income families continue to score low on the annual tests required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
That ‘s the chief reason the Madison district fell below the state average in 22 of 23 scores.
Many notes and links on the latest Wisconsin scores here.
Special Japanese school established for Harvard wannabes
Benesse Corp., the nation’s largest correspondence study company, launched Friday a preparatory school in Tokyo for high school students aiming to get into Harvard University in the United States.
The move came in response to an increasing demand from high school students keen to attend prestigious overseas colleges.
The preparatory school, named Route H, offers a course on the SAT Reasoning Test–a standardized college admission test in the United States–and includes lessons on how to write a statement of purpose and an essay in English, as well as how to make a good impression during an interview. All the lessons are especially tailored for people striving to enter Harvard.
Harvard University, established in 1936, is known for its excellent research programs. It topped The Times-QS World University Ranking 2007 list, published by The Times Higher Education.
Due to the small number of applicants from Japan, information on admission procedures for prestigious overseas colleges is scarce, according to a Benesse official. But in recent years, the company has received an increasing number of inquiries regarding admission to top-notch colleges abroad, with 30 schools across the nation making inquiries in the last academic year.
Private vs. Public Schools
The lawn is meticulously manicured, as if the groundskeeper’s tools include a cuticle scissors. Classic brick buildings, a bell tolling the hour and concrete lion statues almost convince me that I’m at an East Coast college. But this is Lakeside School in Northeast Seattle.
This is where super-achievers went to school – Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Craig McCaw to name a few. Many of Seattle’s affluent families send their kids here for a challenging private education. With an acceptance rate of 24 percent, Lakeside is the most elite private high school in the Northwest. So what am I doing here?
Just wandering, and wondering if my children would have a better start in life if they went to private schools.
“As someone who has experienced both public schooling and private schooling, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind: sending your child to a private school is one of the best decisions you can make for him or her,” says Peter Rasmussen, a recent Lakeside alumnus. “In retrospect, if my parents made me pay my tuition all by myself, I would have. That’s how valuable a Lakeside education is.”
Words from an e-mail conversation with Rasmussen scroll across my brain as I glance around Lakeside: “Absolutely no doubt … one of the best decisions … that’s how valuable.”
A lot of families are like the Rasmussens. In Seattle, almost one out of four students attends private schools, according to an estimate from Seattle Public Schools. The national average is one in 10.
I’ve talked with the president of Seattle Preparatory School, the mom of a Holy Names Academy student, researchers at the Center on Education Policy and a local education author. They’ve given me a better understanding of why private education is extraordinary and also what public schools do well. Which is better for my kids? For your kids?
Related Links:
- Lakeside School
- Seattle Preparatory School
- Holy Names Academy
- Islander Middle School
- Seattle Public Schools
- Whitman Middle School – Seattle
- Ballard High School
- Center on Education Policy: Are Private High Schools Better than Public High Schools?
Continue reading here.
School Shopping, Part IV
I think we’ve decided where Belle is going to kindergarten. Barring some unforeseen circumstance, she’ll be attending our neighborhood school in the fall.
When I last wrote on this subject, we were really torn between the two options, the neighborhood school and the public “Open” school. Since that writing, I did a classroom observation at the Open school, which was required as part of the application process, and liked what I saw overall. I did wish that they hadn’t put me in a student teacher classroom, but I suppose that’s a reality that is good to observe, too.
We went ahead with being entered in the lottery, and we drew number 45. The lottery was in the end of March, and as of now they are at number 38 on the list. Historically, people who draw numbers in the 40s usually get in, but it can be as late as July or August. So all through April and May, Kevin and I put off discussing the issue because we figured we’d hash it out if/when we got in and there was a decision to make. (Of course, that didn’t stop me from getting opinions on both schools from anyone and everyone I could.) We told Belle that there were two schools we were considering for her, and she was OK with it being up in the air.
Eyer recently wrote about the Ann Arbor School District’s use of “Everyday Math”.
More colleges move toward optional SATs
- Smith College and Wake Forest University no longer require the SAT for admissions
- Nearly 760 institutions have made a step in this direction, advocacy group says
- Schools say SAT is biased against students who can’t afford preparation
- The College Board, which owns the SAT, says test is a good predictor of success
Fifteen years into education reform, we are still failing to fix the most troubled schools. Now there’s no excuse.
SCHOOL LEADERS IN Holyoke are no strangers to finger-wagging state reports on student achievement at the Lynch Middle School. It was eight years ago this month that the state education department first declared the Holyoke school, which has a student-poverty rate of 84 percent, “underperforming.” In the years since then, state officials have paid visit after visit to Holyoke, documenting shortcomings in written reports and recording the steps the school was taking to try to address them.
The Lynch was one of the first schools in Massachusetts to earn that unenviable distinction, which is part of the accountability system established by the landmark education reform bill passed in 1993. And today it is still among the 114 schools in the state – nearly all of them serving high-poverty populations – that are officially “underperforming.” Of all the schools that have made this list, only nine have been able to climb off of it. Lynch, and many other schools, land on the list and tend to stay there.
Fifteen years into education reform, a growing number of critics charge that the effort has hit a wall. With MCAS, the sometimes controversial achievement test, the state has become quite good at identifying schools where performance is lagging. But it has failed at the crucial next step: fixing the schools.
Another Look at High School Performance Assessments
Just returned from Providence where I spent two days learning about Rhode Island’s diploma system, which includes a number of performance-based assessment requirements. Today at Portsmouth High School I saw students present their senior projects to groups of teachers, classmates, and outside community judges. Beginning this year, to graduate, all 200+ seniors at Portsmouth are required to complete a year-long senior project, consisting of the “4Ps” — a research paper, a tangible product, a process portfolio, and today’s oral presentation. Students select their projects, submit a letter of intent, and work closely with a school or community mentor. And, the projects really are diverse. The first student I saw today presented the stage set she’d designed for the school production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Another student’s project consisted of running a marathon and fundraising to support leukemia research.
The students were, of course, outstanding. But, what surprised me most were my conversations with the principal, teachers, and state officials about the cultural changes that were emerging from the senior project requirement. Roy Seitsinger, Director of RI High School Redesign, was emphatic that this work was “about transformative cultural change.”
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Releases Latest State Test Results, Madison Trails State Averages
380K PDF Press Release [AP’s posting of DPI’s press release]:
Results for statewide testing show an overall upward trend for mathematics, stable scores in reading, and a slight narrowing of several achievement gaps. This three-year trend comes at a time when poverty is continuing to increase among Wisconsin students.
The 434,507 students who took the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations (WKCE) and the Wisconsin Alternate Assessment for Students with Disabilities (WAA-SwD) this school year showed gains over the past three years in mathematics in six out of seven grades tested. Reading achievement at the elementary, middle, and high school levels was stable over three years. An analysis of all combined grades indicates a narrowing of some achievement gaps by racial/ethnic group.
“These three years of assessment data show some positive trends. While some results point to achievement gains, we must continue our focus on closing achievement gaps and raising achievement for all students,” said State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster.
Andy Hall notes that Madison Trails State Averages [Dane County Test Result Comparison prepared by Andy Hall & Phil Brinkman – pdf]:
But in the Madison School District, just two of the 23 proficiency scores improved, while five were unchanged and 16 declined, according to a Wisconsin State Journal review of the 2006-07 and 2007-08 school year data from the state Department of Public Instruction.
Madison’s scores trail the state average in 22 of the 23 scores. Typically the percentage of Madison students attaining proficient or advanced ratings trails the state average by several percentage points.
“The fact that we’re able to stay close to the state average as our demographics have made dramatic changes, I think is a positive,” said Madison schools Superintendent Art Rainwater, who added that the district’s “strong instructional program” is meeting many of the challenges of immigrant and low-income students while ensuring that “high fliers are still flying high.”
A district analysis shows that when the district’s students are compared with their peers across the state, a higher percentage of Madison students continue to attain “advanced” proficiency scores — the highest category.
Madison students who aren’t from low-income families “continue to outperform their state counterparts,” with higher percentages with advanced scores in reading and math at all seven tested grade levels, the district reported.
Rainwater said he’s long feared that the district’s increasingly needy student population, coupled with the state’s revenue limits that regularly force the district to cut programs and services, someday will cause test scores to drop sharply. But so far, he said, the district’s scores are higher than would be expected, based on research examining the effects of poverty and limited English abilities on achievement.
This school year, 43 percent of Madison students are from low-income families eligible for free and reduced-price lunches, while 16 percent of students are classified as English language learners — numbers that are far above those of any other Dane County school district.
Rainwater noted that students with limited English abilities receive little help while taking the reading and language arts tests in English.
Reading test scores for Madison students changed little compared to 2006-07, but math results decreased in six of the seven grades tested. Of 23 scores in five topics tested statewide, Madison lagged behind state peers in 22 of 23 of those scores.
Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater attributes the district’s performance and trends to the growing population of English language learners in the district.Officials now are able to draw upon three years of results since Wisconsin began administering testing to students in grades three through eight and grade 10 in reading and mathematics. Based on state regulations, students in fourth, eighth and 10th grade were also tested in language arts, science and social studies.
Alan Borsuk on Milwaukee’s results:
But there is little room for debate about what the scores say about the need for improvement in the outcomes for Milwaukee Public Schools students: The gaps between Milwaukee students and the rest of the state remain large, and school improvement efforts of many kinds over the years have not made much of a dent.
The problem is especially vivid when it comes to 10th-graders, the highest grade that is part of Wisconsin’s testing system. The gap between sophomores in Milwaukee and those statewide has grown larger over the last two years, and, once again, no more than 40% of 10th-graders in MPS were rated as proficient or better in any of the five areas tested by the state. For math and science, the figure is under 30%.
Amy Hetzner notes that Waukesha County’s test scores also slipped.
Notes and links regarding the rigor of Wisconsin DPI standards. DPI academic standards home page. Search individual school and district results here. The 2006 Math Forum discussed changes to the DPI math test and local results.
TJ Mertz reviews Wright Middle School’s results.
Chan Stroman’s June, 2007 summary of Madison WKCE PR, data and an interesting discussion. Notes on spin from Jason Spencer.
Jeff Henriques dove into the 2007 WKCE results and found that Madison tested fewer 10th graders than Green Bay, Appleton, Milwaukee and Kenosha. There’s also a useful discussion on Jeff’s post.
Advocating a Standard Grad Rate & Madison’s “2004 Elimination of the Racial Achievement Gap in 3rd Grade Reading Scores”.
Madison School District’s Press Release and analysis: Slight decline on WKCE; non-low income students shine
Advocating a Standard Graduation Rate & Madison’s “2004 Elimination of the Racial Achievement Gap in 3rd Grade Reading Scores”
Back in 1995, when the Wisconsin State Journal and WISC-TV began a civic journalism project to study the racial achievement gaps in our schools, the statistical measures of student achievement and reading in third grade put the issue in sharp focus.
United Way and our community partners’ efforts, through a variety of strategies including the Schools of Hope tutoring program, relied on those strong, focused statistics to measure the success of our 1-on-1 and 1-on-2 tutoring.
By 2004, Superintendent Art Rainwater was able to announce the elimination of the racial achievement gap in third grade reading scores, because our community had focused on stable statistical measure for over 10 years.
A standard graduation rate formula would create the same public focus for our nation’s efforts to increase high school graduation rates.
Related:
- Ruth Robarts Letter to Isthmus on 3rd Grade Reading Scores
- Jason Shephards: The Fate of the Schools discusses those 2004 3rd grade reading scores.
- Ruth Robarts: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before:
On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.
According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.
Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close. - A teacher’s letter to Isthmus on 3rd grade reading scores.
- Channel3000 on the Schools of Hope project and 3rd grade reading scores.
- Value Added Assessment in the Madison School District. Ed Hughes: Madison schools need to get real on equity, New value-added approach is needed for improving schools
- Leslie Ann Howard’s biography.
- Ed Hughes wrote a fascinating piece in 2005 on the local budget, collective bargaining and school climate. The piece includes this gem:
This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker — and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member — believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.
- Madison & Math Data, 8th Grade.
U.S. Schools Tap Growing Ranks of Chinese Students
As more and more Chinese go to college, U.S. universities are trying to grab a piece of this growing market. Even smaller schools feel they must have some sort of exchange program with Chinese schools. Exchange students were once motivated by a desire to spread international understanding, but now many feel that global education is important to their success in the job market.
audio.
National Spelling Bee Brings Out Protesters Who R Thru With Through
A fyoo duhzen ambishuhss intelectchooals, a handful ov British skool teechers and wuhn rokit siuhntist ar triing to chang the way we spel.
They are the leaders of the spelling-reform movement, a passionate but sporadic 800-year-old campaign to simplify English orthography. In its long and failure-ridden history, the movement has tried to convince an indifferent public of the need for a spelling system based on pronunciation.
Reformers, including Mark Twain, Charles Darwin and Theodore Roosevelt, argued that phonetic spellings would make it easier for children, foreigners and adults with learning disabilities to read and write. For centuries, few listened, and the movement, exhausted by its own rhetoric and disputes within its ranks, sputtered out. It’s back.
Spelling reform is currently enjoying a renaissance in the U.S. and Britain. At a time when young people are inventing their own shorthand for email and text messages, the reformers see a fresh opportunity 2 convert people 2 the cause.
In recent years, the ranks of Britain’s Spelling Society and the American Literacy Council have swelled from a few stalwart members to more than 500, which in this effort is a lot. Reformers are energized: Some are writing to dictionary editors urging them to include simplified spellings in new editions. Others are organizing academic conferences, including one on June 7 in Coventry, England, on “The Cost of Spelling.” The American Literacy Council just allocated $45,000 of its $250,000 private endowment to develop a series of DVDs using simplified spelling to teach English to international students. The Spelling Society has hired its first publicist.
US Schools: Not that Bad
America’s educational system is easier than those in China and India — but it’s still teaching valuable life lessons
Students have 2 million minutes—the time from the beginning of eighth grade to high school graduation—to build the intellectual foundation they’ll need for professional success. That’s the premise of a new documentary, Two Million Minutes, that’s making waves in education and political circles.
The film tracks six students—two each in the U.S., India, and China—during their senior year of high school. The Indian and Chinese students work diligently on math and science, while the American students work hard but appear less focused and leave plenty of time for video games and social lives. The message is that because of our education system, we’re getting left behind.
Two Million Minutes provides a provocative glimpse of the global competition now facing U.S. students. And the conclusion many are drawing is that to keep our edge, our children need to study more math and science and work harder. It is true that the U.S. education system should be improved; that’s essential for economic success.
But the solution isn’t for us to become just like our new competitors. We need to do what we do better.
Girls are becoming as good as boys at mathematics, and are still better at reading
Luigi Guiso of the European University Institute in Florence and his colleagues have just published the results of a study which suggests that culture explains most of the difference in maths, at least. In this week’s Science, they show that the gap in mathematics scores between boys and girls virtually disappears in countries with high levels of sexual equality, though the reading gap remains.
Dr Guiso took data from the 2003 OECD Programme for International Student Assessment. Some 276,000 15-year-olds from 40 countries sat the same maths and reading tests. The researchers compared the results, by country, with each other and with a number of different measures of social sexual equality. One measure was the World Economic Forum’s gender-gap index, which reflects economic and political opportunities, education and well-being for women. Another was based on an index of cultural attitudes towards women. A third was the rate of female economic activity in a country, and the fourth measure looked at women’s political participation.
Toughest Summer Job This Year Is Finding One
School is out, and Aaron Stallings, his junior year of high school behind him, wanders the air-conditioned cocoon of the Woodland Hills Mall in search of a job.
Mr. Stallings, 18, says he has been looking for three months, burning gasoline to get to the mall, then filling out applications at stores selling skateboard T-shirts, beach sandals and baseball caps. He likes the idea of working amid the goods he covets. But so far, no offers.
“I’m going to go to Iraq and get a job,” he says acidly. “I hear they’ve got cheap gas.” He grins. “I’m just playing. But I’ve been all over, and nobody’s hiring. They just say, ‘We’ll call you tomorrow.’ And no one ever calls back.”
As the forces of economic downturn ripple widely across the United States, the job market of 2008 is shaping up as the weakest in more than half a century for teenagers looking for summer work, according to labor economists, government data and companies that hire young people.
This deterioration is jeopardizing what many experts consider a crucial beginning stage of working life, one that gives young people experience and confidence along with pocket money.
Related: Milwaukee Sisters Sell Root Beer To Raise Money For College.
Colorado’s Innovation Schools Act of 2008
Colorado State Senate President Peter Groff (D-Denver) submitted a bill that:
- Allows hiring decisions outside Union Labor Contracts
- Gives schools control over:budgets, hiring decisions, and length of school days
- Allows schools to dictate teacher qualifications and how much time to spend in class
- Allows public schools to sidestep restrictions for the purpose of creating wide-ranging innovation in Colorado schools.
More from Jeremy Meyer and Democrats for Education Reform. Download Colorado SB08-130 here. Governor Bill Ritter signed the “Innovation Zones” bill into law on May 28, 2008.
Todd Engdahl summarizes the changes during the bill’s “sausage making” process:
First big change
The original bill required only “a statement of the level of support” for the plan by school employees, students and parents, and the community. The amended bill requires a four-part test of support among various constituencies: “a majority of administrators,” “a majority of teachers” and a “majority of the school advisory council,” plus “a statement of the level of support” among other school employees, students and parents, and the surrounding community.
The amendments add a requirement to the application process – a description of the elements of any collective bargaining agreement that would need to be waived for an innovation plan to work.
Second (really) big change
The original bill gave innovation schools blanket exemption from laws and rules on: performance evaluations, authority of principals, employment of teachers, transfer of teachers, dismissal of teachers, salary schedules, teacher licensing and teacher salary payment.
All of that was struck by the amendments and replaced with language allowing a school board to waive any requirements deemed necessary to an innovation plan, except provisions of the school finance law, the exceptional children’s educational act, data requirements necessary for School Accountability Reports, laws requiring criminal background checks of employees and the children’s Internet protection act. (The original language barred any waivers of CSAP and No Child Left Behind requirements, and those remain in the bill.)
Third (really) big change
The original bill allowed innovation schools to be removed from a district’s entire collective bargaining agreement by a vote of a majority of the personnel at the affected school or schools.
The amendments require “waiver of one or more of the provisions of the collective bargaining agreement” (italics added) to be approved by vote of “at least sixty percent of the members of the collective bargain unit who are employed at the innovation school.”
Working Relationship: Patrick Spottiswoode, director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, and his PA, Adrienne Gillam
“We get 100,000 students a year, aged from 3 to postgraduates,” says Patrick Spottiswoode, the Globe’s education director, “and at our busiest, we have 800 in a day. Children often arrive bored and cynical, but once they’ve been introduced to Shakespeare, they become animated and positive.” His PA, Adrienne Gillam, sees it for herself: “It’s wonderful to watch an audience of kids come alive,” she says.
The education programme is run by 23 members of staff with the help of 60 freelancers, usually actors who have been specially trained in each year group’s syllabus and can help students of all ages to create a production in less than a day.
The events have come a long way since 1984 when Patrick arrived — by coincidence, on Shakespeare’s birthday. He recalls: “I was working on a PhD and decided to take a year off, but 24 years later, I’m still here. There were only two members of staff, and the job advertisement was for someone to run an arts centre, museum and cafe. In reality, I started the arts centre with L200 of my own books, the museum was in a leaking warehouse and the cafe consisted of a kettle.”
Shakespeare’s Globe Education.
Science Students Need To Get Out Of The Classroom
It’s a late Wednesday morning and these three high school students from Meriden should be hunkered down in the classroom. But here they are, jammed around a digital monitor at the Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven, fingers hovering over the touchscreen display that morphs scorpions and other critters through evolutionary time.
“Oh, wow,” says Alexis Rivera, 16, neck craning and eyes fixed to the screen. “This is crazy.”
Rivera was among 40 biology students from Orville H. Platt High School who fanned across the museum last week for a field trip on biodiversity, peering at ecological dioramas and touching interactive displays. To education experts, this is “informal” or “free-choice” science learning, which means it’s happening outside of school.
“When we’re in class, we can say, ‘Do you know that bird, the so-and-so?'” says Walt Zientek, the school’s special-education teacher for science. He is standing in the dimmed exhibit hall on Connecticut birds as his students weave their way through the museum’s three floors.
Parents question proposed changes to Pennsylvania’s gifted-student regulations
Pennsylvania is taking steps to make gifted education available to more students, but that has done little to quell long-standing tension between parents and school districts over how the state’s brightest are educated.
The proposed changes on course to become final this summer make clear that districts must use more than an IQ score to identify gifted students – as most other states do.
The state sets a 130 IQ as the trigger for gifted education and allows districts to choose the other criteria, such as teacher recommendations and classroom work.
Just how much impact the clarification will have is uncertain. State officials had no estimate of how many more students would be identified or the potential cost to districts.
While most area school administrators interviewed said they already use more than an IQ score to evaluate students, education advocates disagree.
