Professional development. What thoughts and feelings do those words conjure up for you? Excitement? Boredom? A chance to improve your skills and learn new, interesting teaching strategies? Or a painful time of listening to someone talk about a topic you already know?
We’ve all been there–sitting in a required in-service class listening to someone go over Bloom’s Taxonomy or some other concept or strategy that we’ve been using effortlessly for years. We grumble our way through the session, irritated that we have to sit on our butts “re-learning” a topic we could have taught just as well ourselves, if not better. Partly we’re irritated because we have so much else to do! Many teachers would categorize a situation like this as wasted time.
Of course, not all professional development is like that. But I use the example because it is a great way to help teachers relate to what a gifted kid experiences when the material being taught in class is not at the right readiness-level for him or her. We don’t like it when someone else puts us into that kind of a situation, yet we routinely do the same to the gifted students.
SAT: If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them
For decades, critics of standardized testing — and especially of the SAT – have said that these examinations fail to capture important qualities, resulting in admissions systems that favor certain groups over others, while failing to represent test takers’ full identities. And generally, these critics have said, the qualities that the SAT is best at identifying are those that wealthy white students are more likely than others to possess.
On Saturday at the annual meeting of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, the College Board — the creator and defender of the SAT — said pretty much what critics have been saying all along. The board presented the most detailed results yet of new approaches to standardized tests that would measure non-cognitive qualities and could become what some have called the “SAT III.”
Thus far, the board has found that there are specific non-cognitive qualities that relate to college success, and that these qualities can be measured. Further, board research suggests that if the admissions process included these qualities in addition to traditional measures, black and Latino enrollments would increase significantly while white and Asian enrollments would drop — the latter significantly at the most competitive colleges.
Education: One size does not fit all
During deliberations on House Bill 119 – the state budget bill for fiscal years 2009-10 – the Strickland administration worked with the Legislature to invest an unprecedented amount of money in higher education, recognizing its importance to Ohio’s future success.
A major player in these discussions was former state senator and current Ohio Board of Regents Chancellor Eric Fingerhut, who was appointed by Strickland in 2007 to help expand access to Ohio’s higher education institutions, increase the number of Ohioans with college degrees and help attract and retain talented students that will strengthen the state’s workforce and grow our economy.
I believe the governor made the right decision in choosing Fingerhut. In more than a year on the job, he has done many good things and has broadened support for higher education. In fact, in March, the chancellor unveiled a 10-year strategic plan for higher education, which includes the goal of enrolling 230,000 more students in Ohio’s colleges and universities by 2017.
The New Paternalism in Urban Schools
By the time youngsters reach high school in the United States, the achievement gap is immense. The average black 12th grader has the reading and writing skills of a typical white 8th grader and the math skills of a typical white 7th grader. The gap between white and Hispanic students is similar. But some remarkable inner-city schools are showing that the achievement gap can be closed, even at the middle and high school level, if poor minority kids are given the right kind of instruction.
Over the past two years, I have visited six outstanding schools. (For a list of schools, see sidebar.) All of these educational gems enroll minority youngsters from rough urban neighborhoods with initially poor to mediocre academic skills; all but one are open-admission schools that admit students mostly by lottery. Their middle school students perform as well as their white peers, and in some middle schools, minority students learn at a rate comparable to that of affluent white students in their state’s top schools. (For one impressive example, see Figure 1.) At the high school level, low-income minority students are more likely to matriculate to college than their more advantaged peers, with more than 95 percent of graduates gaining admission to college. Not surprisingly, they all have gifted, deeply committed teachers and dedicated, forceful principals. They also have rigorous academic standards, test students frequently, and carefully monitor students’ academic performance to assess where students need help. “Accountability,” for both teachers and students, is not a loaded code word but a lodestar. Students take a college-prep curriculum and are not tracked into vocational or noncollege-bound classes. Most of the schools have uniforms or a dress code, an extended school day, and three weeks of summer school.
Sun Prairie teacher with creative approach to reading honored
Sandra Kowalczyk’s creative approach to helping students read is evident when you walk into her classroom at Patrick Marsh Middle School in Sun Prairie.
Kowalczyk, who has traveled to 55 countries in five continents, decorated her room with a variety of artifacts such as wood carvings and masks from Ghana, batik sarongs from Malaysia and Indonesia, mud paintings from the Ivory Coast, mola cloth from Panama, puppets from India and books from around the world.
“My philosophy is build interest, give them background,” said Kowalczyk, who was named the Wisconsin Middle/Junior High School Teacher of the Year.
As Teacher of the Year, she received $3,000 from Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., through the Herb Kohl Educational Foundation. She was recognized by state Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster along with the other three 2008-09 Teachers of the Year during the recent State of Education speech and awards ceremony at the Capitol.
Buffett’s Chinese Investment: Seeking Engineers
MidAmerican also sees promise in BYD’s battery technologies for storing wind energy and solar energy, Mr. Sokol said. Difficulties in storing energy for when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining have limited the deployment of these renewable energy technologies.
More broadly, Berkshire Hathaway wants to tap into China’s engineering talent and is doing so through BYD, which has 11,000 engineers and technicians among its 130,000 employees.
Mr. Buffett did not attend the news conference, but said in a statement that he was impressed with Mr. Wang’s record as a manager.
Evaluating Charter School Impact on Educational Attainment in Chicago and Florida
Kevin Booker, Tim R. Sass, Brian Gill, Ron Zimmer:
Unlike past charter school studies, which focus on student achievement, the authors analyze the relationship between charter high school attendance and educational attainment. They find that charter high schools in Florida and in Chicago have substantial positive effects on both high school completion and college attendance. Controlling for observed student characteristics and test scores, univariate probit estimates indicate that among students who attended a charter middle school, those who went on to attend a charter high school were 7 to 15 percentage points more likely to earn a standard diploma than students who transitioned to a traditional public high school. Similarly, those attending a charter high school were 8 to 10 percentage points more likely to attend college. Using the proximity of charters and other types of high schools as exogenous instruments for charter high school attendance, they find even stronger effects in bivariate probit models of charter attendance and educational attainment. While large, their estimates are in line with previous studies of the impact of Catholic high schools on educational attainment.
Carol Ann Tomlinson explains how differentiated instruction works and why we need it now.
Differentiated instruction–the theory that teachers should work to accomodate and build on students’ diverse learning needs–is not new. But it’s unlikely that anyone has done more to systematize it and explicate its classroom applications than University of Virginia education professor Carol Ann Tomlinson.
A former elementary school teacher of 21 years (and Virginia Teacher of the Year in 1974), Carol Ann Tomlinson has written more than 200 articles, chapters, and books, including The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners and Fulfilling the Promise of the Differentiated Classroom: Strategies and Tools for Responsive Teaching. Characterized by a rigorous professionalism and a strong underlying belief in both teachers’ and students’ potential, her work has given many educators both practical and philosophical frameworks for modifying instruction to meet the individual needs of all students.
Working Without a Safety Net: How Charter School Leaders Can Best Survive on the High Wire
Christine Campbell & Betheny Gross, via a kind reader’s email:
When charter school directors step into the job, they step onto a high wire with no safety net below them. Though they take on a broader set of responsibilities than traditional public school leaders, charter directors rarely have the “back office” administrative support of a district central office. Instead, it is up to them to secure and manage facilities, recruit students and teachers, raise and manage funds, and coordinate curriculum and instruction.
How are charter school leaders facing this challenge? In Working Without a Safety Net: How Charter School Leaders Can Best Survive on the High Wire, authors Christine Campbell and Betheny Gross explain that today’s charter school directors, though deeply motivated by their school’s mission and the students they serve, can have their confidence shaken by many of the extras they face.
Drawing from a six-state survey, the authors find that, like traditional public school principals, today’s charter school directors often come to their positions from other jobs in education and with training from schools of education. However, charter school leaders tend to be younger and newer to leadership positions; many have only a couple years of experience in school administration.
Bilingual Debate: English Immersion
In this installment of Education Watch, Bruce Fuller and Lance T. Izumi discuss the candidates’ positions on bilingual education. Go to Mr. Fuller’s post.
Lance T. Izumi, a senior fellow in California studies and the senior director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, is the co-author of the book “Not as Good as You Think: Why the Middle Class Needs School Choice.” (Full biography.)
Making effective appeals to Hispanic voters is a tricky business. Barack Obama’s education proposals are a case in point.
Mr. Obama’s campaign notes that, “African-American and Latino students are significantly less likely to graduate than white students,” which is true. To combat such achievement gaps, Mr. Obama’s education plan specifically advocates, among other things, “transitional bilingual education” for English-learners. Yet, the question for Mr. Obama is whether his commitment to bilingual education, which emphasizes classroom instruction in languages other than English, overrides his interest in closing achievement gaps.
Disrupting Class: Student-Centric Education Is the Future
Clayton M. Christensen & Michael B. Horn:
The answer isn’t simply investing more in computer equipment and technology for schools, either. The United States has spent more than $60 billion equipping schools with computers during the last two decades, but as countless studies and any routine observation reveal, the computers have not transformed the classroom, nor has their use boosted learning as measured by test scores. Instead, technology and computers have tended merely to sustain and add cost to the existing system.
That schools have gotten so little back from their investment comes as no surprise. Schools have done what virtually every organization does when implementing an innovation. An organization’s natural instinct is to cram the innovation into its existing operating model to sustain what it already does. This is perfectly predictable, perfectly logical — and perfectly wrong.
Student as Consumer
The key to transforming the classroom with technology is in how it is implemented. We need to introduce the innovation disruptively — not by using it to compete against the existing paradigm and serve existing customers, but to target those who are not being served — people we call nonconsumers. That way, all the new approach has to do is be better than the alternative — which is nothing at all.
To convey what we mean, we need to briefly explain the disruptive-innovation theory. In every market, there are two trajectories: the pace at which technology improves and the pace at which customers can utilize the improvements. Customers’ needs tend to be relatively stable over time, whereas technology improves at a much faster rate. As a result, products and services are initially not good enough for the typical customer, but, over time, they improve and pack in more features and functions than customers can use.
Much more on Clayton Christensen.
DCPAC Dan Nerad Meeting Summary
A video tape of the entire presentation and discussion with Dr. Nerad may be viewed by visiting this internet link: https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2008/09/ madison_superin_10.php
Dan Nerad opened his remarks by stating his commitment to efforts for always continuing change and improvement with the engagement of the community. He outlined four areas of focus on where we are going from here.
- Funding: must balance district needs and taxpayer needs. He mentioned the referendum to help keep current programs in place and it will not include “new” things.
- Strategic Plan: this initiative will formally begin in January 2009 and will involve a large community group process to develop as an ongoing activity.
- Meet people: going throughout the community to meet people on their own terms. He will carefully listen. He also has ideas.
- Teaching and learning mission: there are notable achievement gaps we need to face head-on. The “achievement gap” is serious. The broader mission not only includes workforce development but also helping students learn to be better people. We have a “tale of two school districts” – numbers of high achievers (including National Merit Scholars), but not doing well with a lot of other students. Low income and minority students are furtherest away from standards that must be met. Need to be more transparent with the journey to fix this problem and where we are not good. Must have the help of the community. The focus must be to improve learning for ALL kids, it is a “both/and” proposition with a need to reframe the issue to help all kids move forward from where they are. Must use best practices in contemporary assessment, curriculum, pedagogy and instructional methods.
Dr. Nerad discussed five areas about which he sees a need for community-wide conversations for how to meet needs in the district.
- Early learning opportunities: for pre-kindergarten children. A total community commitment is needed to prevent the ‘achievement gap’ from widening.
- High schools: How do we want high schools to be? Need to be more responsive. The curriculum needs to be more career oriented. Need to break down the ‘silos’ between high school, tech schools and colleges. Need to help students move through the opportunities differently. The Small Learning Communities Grant recently awarded to the district for high schools and with the help of the community will aid the processes for changes in the high schools.
- School safety: there must be an on-going commitment for changes. Nerad cited three areas for change:
a. A stronger curriculum helping people relate with other people, their differences and conflicts.
b. A response system to safety. Schools must be the safest of sanctuaries for living, learning and development.
c.Must make better use of research-based technology that makes sense.
- Math curriculum and instruction: Cited the recent Math Task Force Report
a. Good news: several recommendations for curriculum, instruction and policies for change.
b. Bad news: our students take less math than other urban schools in the state; there are notable differences in the achievement gap.
- Fine Arts: Cited recent Fine Arts Task Force Report. Fine arts curriculum and activities in the schools, once a strength, has been whittled away due to budget constraints. We must deal with the ‘hands of the clock’ going forward and develop a closer integration of the schools and community in this area.
The Early Education of Our Next President
One of them, Barack Obama, was awakened at four in the morning in Jakarta to study from a correspondence course; the other, John McCain, attended grade school in old airplane hangars. Both went on to elite private high schools.
Whether it is the image of Abraham Lincoln studying by log cabin candlelight or George Washington dutifully copying the Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation into his schoolboy notebooks, presidential schooling has long been a national fascination (see Figure 1).
Today we have a graduate of Columbia College and Harvard Law (Obama) taking on a graduate of the Naval Academy and National War College (McCain). Harvard boasts seven presidents as alumni (including George W. Bush’s business degree); the Naval Academy, just one (Jimmy Carter). But it is the early schooling–how did they get there?–that is most fascinating. George Washington’s early education is remarkable for what is not known about it, but there is general agreement that if he had much formal education, it ended at about age 15. Teddy Roosevelt, said to have had an “uneven” education at home (strong in biology, French, and German but deficient in math, Latin, and Greek), graduated from Harvard magna cum laude. Harry Truman, the only president since 1897 who did not graduate from college, got up early too, at five in the morning, to practice piano.
Effective education, kindergarten to retirement
Last week I wrote that building the best possible business environment in America was the key to attracting jobs and investment to Indiana. Our state has recently achieved top-tier rankings as a place to do business, with low taxes and utility costs, reduced regulation, new infrastructure investments, and the highest credit rating in history. But we will not maximize these advantages if we do not also have enough well-educated workers. Jobs and investment that would otherwise come to Indiana will wind up somewhere else if we can’t provide a large enough pool of skilled labor.
As our economy diversifies, jobs in all sectors, including manufacturing, increasingly require skills and knowledge beyond high school. Right now, too many of our workers lack the education and training they need to perform — or even qualify for — the kinds of skilled jobs that we want to bring to or grow here in Indiana. Thousands of jobs are open and waiting in fields such as information technology, health and logistics, but are not being filled because of this skills mismatch.
Some districts drop class ranks to improve students’ college chances
At Brookfield East High School, Laura Turner is the kind of student who shouldn’t have to worry about getting into the college of her choice.
She’s articulate, mature and enthusiastic, a hard worker with high marks — a 3.88 grade-point average — who organized hundreds of students last year in Waukesha County to sleep in a parking lot and raise thousands of dollars for displaced Ugandan citizens.
But ranked against her peers in terms of GPA, Turner isn’t in the top 25% of her senior class.
The stratification caused by class rank, which arguably makes a student such as Turner appear less accomplished, compelled the Elmbrook School District last week to start looking at whether its two high schools should quit tracking the data. It’s a move that’s been implemented within the past five years at Whitefish Bay and Shorewood high schools, where administrators say they’ve seen more seniors being accepted into the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
At Amherst college, 1% of first-year students have landlines, 99% have Facebook accounts
Peter Schilling — the director of information technology at Amherst College — crunched the numbers on the technological habits of this year’s incoming class, and discovered some fascinating stuff. He’s published it online as the “IT Index“, crafted in the style of a Harper’s Index, and it’s an intriguing snapshot of some of the technologically-driven behavioral changes that will mark the next generation.
Below are a few of my favorite stats, culled from the list. As you read, keep in mind that this incoming class has 438 students in it:
“Open Detroit School District to Choices”
When I covered the Detroit Public Schools for the Free Press in the mid 1990s, writing umpteen stories about failed programs, stolen money and incompetent management, I reached a point where it seemed to me better just to shut the system down and start fresh, to build something that worked, rather than continuing with what clearly didn’t.
People laughed when I would say that out loud. What would you do with the kids? You can’t just give up on the whole thing.
But who’d be laughing now? If I said it’s time to embrace the rapid decommissioning of the very idea of a Detroit Public Schools system, would I even get a chuckle?
The truth is that the system is imploding, and every family with the ability to roll with something other than DPS appears to be grabbing that choice. The student population plummeted by an estimated 17,000 over the past year, equal to the total number of people living in Auburn Hills.
District Improvement Plan
East Hartford Public Schools [300K PDF]:
The East Hartford Public Schools District Improvement Plan represents the evolution of work begun five years ago. Although it has undergone several transformations as a result of extensive professional development, it continues to serve as the blueprint for action and a path to excellence.
The generally upward trajectories in student achievement confirm the application of researched-based strategies can make a difference in student achievement. This result has provided encouragement and motivation to staff.
Although pleased with the district’s accomplishments and the progress we have made, sustained focus, reinforcement, and fidelity of implementation must continue to be priority. Accomplishments, along with current work in progress, encompass many important areas of focus:
The board of education has unanimously endorsed a state-mandated district improvement plan that aims to raise standardized test scores, reduce school suspensions and narrow significant achievement gaps between black and white students and poor students and their wealthier peers.
Superintendent of Schools Marion H. Martinez will present the plan, approved Monday night, to the State Board of Education on Oct. 2. It will then be detailed for the public at a local board meeting on Oct. 6. The state requires such plans when districts or schools have been deemed “in need of improvement” under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
The plan calls for raising the percentage of students reaching proficiency in reading, writing and math scores on the Connecticut Mastery Test and Connecticut Academic Performance Test by at least 15 points over the next three years. It also calls for reducing the test score gap between racial and ethnic groups and socioeconomic groups by 30 percent in the same three years. Currently, for example, there is a 30 percent average gap in reading scores between those groups in grades 3 to 9, and the plan calls for the gap to be narrowed by 9 percentage points — a 30 percent drop — by 2010-11.
Beware of the Easy School Fix
When fixing schools, beware of miracle cures. Every week people send me ideas they say will change the future of education and lead all humanity to enlightenment. So, when management expert William G. Ouchi let me look at his new work on the surprising power of total student loads per teacher, or TSL, I was skeptical.
He says when middle or high school principals are given control of their schools’ budgets — a rare occurrence in big districts — they tend to make changes in staffing, curriculum and scheduling that sharply reduce TSL, the number of students each of their teachers is responsible for. Some urban districts have TSLs approaching 200 kids per teacher. But after principals get budgeting power, the load drops sharply, sometimes to as low as 80 kids per instructor. When that happens, the portion of students scoring “proficient” on state tests climbs. A group of New York schools had a surge of 11 percentage points after they reduced average TSL by 25 students per teacher.
I hear the mumbles out there. Yes, correlation is not causation. Test scores are not a perfect measure. Many other factors could explain the rise in achievement. For instance, the principals might be using their new powers to hire good teachers and fire bad ones.
K-12 Outreach & Distance Education
Texas Tech University, via a kind reader’s email:
TTUISD has a comprehensive curriculum – coursework is offered in all required subject areas from kindergarten through high school. Our Credit by Examinations (CBEs) allow students to test out of subjects.
TTUISD offers all courses required for a high school diploma in the state of Texas. Our elementary level lesson plans require no prior teaching experience to use, and all TTUISD courses are written by Texas-certified teachers.
TTUISD high school students may choose between a Minimum Graduation Plan and a Recommended Graduation Plan (College Preparatory Program). Students who successfully complete high school requirements and pass the exit-level TAKS will earn an accredited Texas high school diploma.
Students must take a minimum of four full courses to be considered a full-time TTUISD student. CBEs do not count when determining full-time student status.
Perhaps nearby UW-Madison will give K-12 another try?
McCain, Obama Advisers to Debate Education
On Oct. 21, the education advisors to the two candidates — Lisa Graham Keegan for McCain; Linda Darling-Hammond for Obama — will face off in a debate at Teachers College, the venerable education school at Columbia University in New York. The debate, which begins at 4 p.m. PDT, will be webcast by Education Week. The moderator will be Susan Fuhrman, the president of Teachers College.
In the meantime, you can read the education platforms for McCain here and Obama here. And here is Edweek’s blog on the campaign. For those who don’t want to go to that much trouble, we’ll helpfully reduce the platforms to fit on the head of a pin: McCain believes in school choice and local control; Obama believes in an expansion of early childhood education and increased federal funding for education.
[For] Crying Out Loud
September 24, 2008 By Glenn Ricketts:
Yes, yes, we know that you’ve been an outstanding high school history student and that you’d like to major in that subject in college, but we’re not sure why you’re inquiring about scholarships here. Wait, not so fast: it’s certainly impressive that you’ve had some original research published, and your grades are indeed outstanding. But if, as you say, you’re looking for a scholarship, we’d like to hear about your curve ball. Oh, you didn’t play baseball in high school? Well, then how about football or basketball? No? Lacrosse, soccer, swimming, maybe? Golf, bowling, tennis? In that case, do you sing or dance? You don’t appear to have any disabilities, not that we’d ask.
No, sorry, speaking fluent French is not really what we had in mind by “diversity.” Do you by chance play the xylophone? What’s that? History scholarships? You mean something geared specifically towards outstanding high school history students? Ho! Ho! Good one.
No, not here. Haven’t heard of ’em anywhere else, either. Where’d you come up with that idea anyway? Look, we’re not sure we can do anything for you at this point unless…wait a minute, did you say you were a cheerleader? Sit down. I think we’re finally on to something. Yes, that’s right, we have several scholarships for cheerleaders. Can you send us all of the relevant information about your high school cheerleading experience? We may also be able to direct you to other sources of support for promising college cheerleading prospects. Why didn’t you tell us this at the outset, instead of getting sidetracked with all of that stuff about history? We’re very busy in this office, you know. No doubt you’re an outstanding history student, and by all means major in it if you like, but that’s not going to get you anywhere if you’re looking for a scholarship. Good thing you mentioned the cheerleading angle, especially since we have to be careful to choose only the most outstanding applicants.
I made up this little drama, but it is based on the “true facts.” History scholarships are rare. Cheerleading scholarships are pretty common–even at colleges and universities that one might think value intellectual achievement over human pyramids.
Will Fitzhugh is a former high school history teacher who, frustrated with the lack of opportunities to showcase academic achievement among young students, in 1987 founded The Concord Review, (www.tcr.org) a quarterly journal devoted entirely to outstanding research essays by high school students. Anyone who doubts the possibility of impressive research skills and consummate writing ability among some of today’s secondary school students should read at least one issue of the Review, where future historians and teachers might well be making their first appearances. These students don’t need remedial English, and could probably be bumped up beyond the usual introductory survey courses in history to begin work as history majors on the fast track.
Trouble is, as Will has pointed out to us, the students who write in The Concord Review don’t get much recognition beyond that, to say nothing of scholarship assistance. A few colleges–most notably Reed College–have recently started supporting The Concord Review financially–which is bound to encourage some bright, highly capable students to consider attending college out in Portland, Oregon. But by and large, the prospect for students winning scholarships on the basis of outstanding ability to engage in historical scholarship isn’t very bright.
Kiselev’s Geometry: Book II, Stereometry
Alexander Givental, via email:
The Stereometry book adapted from Russian by A. Givental is the second part of the legendary Kiselev’s Geometry. It first appeared in 1892 as a second half of a single textbook and, for a long time, the two co-existed between the same covers. Indeed, the idea of a plane was introduced on page 1 while the last chapter of the book (that followed the stereometry part) was devoted to the geometric constructions in two dimensions. Kiselev’s Geometry has demonstrated an unusual staying power, being in an uninterrupted circulation for a good part of a century. (For the historic outline, see the review of the first part.) As a matter of fact, the first part of the book met with stiffer competition so that, while its rule was weakened in the 1960s, the second part reigned in the textbook market well into the 1970s.
The combined 1980 edition came out under the title Elementary Geometry for teacher colleges with a Foreward by A. N. Tikhonov who observed, albeit with some reservations, that the pedagogical mastery with which the book was written, the simplicity and consistency of the exposition, kept the book from becoming obsolete.
“Data Driven” Education Research
Roland G. Fryer Jr., a Harvard economist, has often complained that while pharmaceutical companies have poured billions of dollars each year into studying new drugs and Boeing devoted $3 billion to develop the 777 jet, there has been little spent on efforts to scientifically test educational theories.
Now Dr. Fryer has quit his part-time post as chief equality officer of the New York City public schools to lead a $44 million effort, called the Educational Innovation Laboratory, to bring the rigor of research and development to education. The initiative will team economists, marketers and others interested in turning around struggling schools with educators in New York, Washington and Chicago.
Backed by the Broad Foundation, founded by the billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, and other private groups, the research is intended to infuse education with the data-driven approach that is common in science and business, Dr. Fryer said. He compared the current methods of educational research to the prescriptions of an ineffective doctor.
National Punctuation Day
http://www.nationalpunctuationday.com/:
A celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotes, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever mysterious ellipsis.
I’ll Take My Lecture to Go, Please
It looks like students can be open-minded after all: When provided with the option to view lectures online, rather than just in person, a full 82 percent of undergraduates kindly offered that they’d be willing to entertain an alternative to showing up to class and paying attention in real time.
A new study released today suggests not only a willingness but a “clear preference” among undergraduates for “lecture capture,” the technology that records, streams and stores what happens in the classroom for concurrent or later viewing.
The study, sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s E-Business Institute, tackles the much-discussed question of students’ preferences for traditional versus online learning with unusual rigor. Based on a survey of more than 29,000 undergraduate and graduate students at the university, the study had a response rate of over 25 percent. Almost half of the undergraduates — 47 percent — had taken a class with lectures available for online viewing.
Is a university degree still worth the time and money it takes?
“MORE will mean worse,” wrote an angry Kingsley Amis in 1961, contemplating plans to expand university education. His prediction has been tested past anything he could have imagined, as that era’s new universities were joined by the ex-polytechnics in the 1990s, and the proportion of youngsters who go on to university rose from less than 10% to almost 40% now. The 430,000 new undergraduates heading off to freshers’ weeks later this month will find themselves part of Britain’s largest university cohort ever.
Similar rumblings have continued since Amis’s jeremiad. With less government money (in real terms) per student than in his day, universities have to pack them in and keep them in to balance the books. Paul Buckland, an archaeology professor at Bournemouth University, resigned when administrators overruled his failing grades for ten students (last month he won a case for “constructive dismissal”). In June a barnstorming lecture by Geoffrey Alderman, of Buckingham University, gained wide attention with its claims of impotent external examiners, widespread unpunished plagiarism and a “grotesque bidding game” in which universities dished out good grades in order to claw their way up league tables.
Local Students Considered for National Achievement Honors
Four area high school students were named semifinalists for the National Achievement Scholarship Program competition and are eligible for scholarships for Black American students through the National Merit Scholarship Program.
Middleton students Zowie L. Miles and Kristina M. Teuschler, Matthew Bowie-Wilson from Madison West and Taylor M. Behnke from Madison Edgewood, along with 13 other Wisconsin students, made the list.
More than 150,000 juniors requested consideration for the 2009 National Achievement Scholarship Program competition by taking the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, a test which served as an initially screening of the applicants.
The Special Needs Kindergarten Crunch
It’s the third week of pre-school. Kids are still settling in, and many are still crying when their parents drop them off in the morning. During these first weeks of school, pre-school teachers do a lot of waiting and wondering — waiting patiently for the separation tears to end and wondering what fascinating young characters will begin to emerge in this year’s class. My students’ parents, however, are already thinking about next year — they’re worried about getting their kids into kindergarten.
As a pre-school special needs teacher in New York, I’ve learned that the city’s culture of cut-throat competition extends to kindergarten admissions. And from that, an unexpected part of my job has evolved — providing psychological and emotional support to parents as they undertake the daunting task of finding an appropriate placement for their child. Securing a good spot in an oversubscribed New York City kindergarten, whether public or private, is difficult enough for most parents. But for the parents of children with special needs, it is especially challenging.
Locke High: The Real Charter Challenge
The new union-friendly charter school in the Bronx I wrote about last week is not the only big project that Green Dot Public Schools has taken on this fall. The other is the attempted transformation of Locke High School in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. The school, which currently has about 2,500 students, has long been notorious as one of the worst in the city, with what the L.A. Times recently described as a “reputation for student fisticuffs and an appallingly high dropout rate.”
Green Dot was founded by Steve Barr, a garrulous, outspoken Irish American in his late 40s who helped start Rock the Vote in 1990 and nine years later decided his role in life was to run high schools. His organization now manages 10 of them, mostly in L.A., and his new mission is to transform the way public education works in the city (and then in the rest of the country).
Perceiving the World in Alternative Terms
Because really good teaching is about not seeing the world the way that everyone else does. Teaching is about being what people are now prone to call “counterintuitive” but to the teacher means simply being honest. The historian sees the election not through the latest news blast but in the context of presidential politics from George Washington to the present. The biologist sees a natural world that’s not calmly picturesque but a jostling, striving, evolving contest of creatures in quest of reproduction and survival. The literature professor won’t accept the current run of standard clichés but demands bursting metaphors and ironies of an insinuatingly serpentine sort. The philosopher demands an argument as escapeproof as an iron box: what currently passes for logic makes him want to grasp himself by the hair and yank himself out of his seat.
Good teachers perceive the world in alternative terms, and they push their students to test out these new, potentially enriching perspectives. Sometimes they do so in ways that are, to say the least, peculiar. The philosophy professor steps in the window the first day of class and asks her students to write down the definition of the word “door.” Another sees that it’s hard to figure out how the solar system works by looking at the astronomy book. So he takes his friends outside and designates one the sun, the other the earth and gets them rotating and revolving in the grassy field. (For reasons of his own, he plays the part of the moon.) The high-school teacher, struck by his kids’ conformity, performs an experiment. He sends the hippest guy in the class off on an errand and while he’s gone draws pairs of lines on the board, some equal, some unequal. When the hip kid comes back, the teacher asks the class, who are in on the game, which lines are the same length and which are different and, as they’ve been instructed, they answer the wrong way. They’re surprised at how often the cool kid disobeys the evidence of his own eyes and goes along with the pack. A few hours later, at home, they’re surprised at how good they were at fooling their friend and how much pleasure they took in making him the butt of the experiment.
Questions for Charles Murray: Head of the Class
Although attending college has long been a staple of the American dream, you argue in your new book, “Real Education,” that too many kids are now heading to four-year colleges and wasting their time in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree. Yes. Let’s stop this business of the B.A., this meaningless credential. And let’s talk about having something kids can take to an employer that says what they know, not where they learned it.
Much more on Charles Murray, here.
California’s new 8th-grade algebra rule gets some poor marks
The new state policy of requiring algebra in the eighth grade will set up unprepared students for failure while holding back others with solid math skills, a new report has concluded.
These predictions, based on national data, come in the wake of an algebra mandate that the state Board of Education, under pressure from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, adopted in July. That decision won widespread praise from some reform advocates and the Bush administration, putting California out front in a national debate over improving mathematics instruction.
The policy also led to a lawsuit filed this month by groups representing school districts and school administrators. They contend that the state board adopted the new rules illegally. Their underlying concern is that the algebra policy is unworkable and unfunded.
The new study, released today by the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., looked at who is taking eighth-grade algebra and how they are doing.
And there was some ostensibly good news. Nationwide, more students are taking algebra than before. Over five years, the percentage of eighth-graders in advanced math — algebra or higher — went up by more than one-third. In total, about 37% of all U.S. students took advanced math in 2005, the most recent year in the analysis.
History Lesson
Bob McGum:
Want to read another story about the dumbing down of American students? How far SAT scores have dropped or standards fallen?
If so, look elsewhere.
We wish instead to draw your attention to one of those little starbursts of intelligence sparkling over our dreary educational landscape: The Concord Review. The first and only academic journal dedicated to the work of high school students, The Concord Review has published essays on everything from the sinking of the Lusitania to the Pullman Strike of 1894 and the Harlem Renaissance. Appropriately enough, it is published out of the same town where, more than two centuries back, embattled farmers fired the shot heard ’round the world.
The Review is the child of Will Fitzhugh, a Harvard alumnus who started publishing it out of his own home in 1987 while a high school teacher himself. The next year he quit his job and dedicated himself to the journal full-time. Not least of the spurs behind his decision was having witnessed two of his fellow Concord teachers propose an after-school program to help a select group of students prepare a serious history essay-only to be shot down by the administration on the grounds of “elitism.”
Like most such academic adventures, the Review isn’t going to challenge People magazine any time soon; it still has only about 850 subscribers, and among the high schools that don’t subscribe are a number whose students have been published in the Review itself. But it is attracting attention. The Concord Review has received endorsements from a cross-section of prominent historians such as David McCullough, Eugene Genovese, Diane Ravitch, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who says “there should be a copy in every high school.” Another fan is James Basker, a Barnard and Columbia professor who also serves as president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
“Students rise to the expectations you have of them,” states Mr. Basker. “All you have to do is show them they are capable of writing serious historical essays, and off they go.” To emphasize the point, his institute will on June 10 inaugurate three annual Gilder Lehrman Essay Prizes in American History drawn from Concord Review essayists. This year’s first prize, for $5,000, goes to Hannah S. Field for her contribution about library efforts to suppress Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz.
All this acclaim notwithstanding, Mr. Fitzhugh believes today’s culture retains a pronounced bias against academic achievement and excellence. He cites the example of a Concord Review essayist from Connecticut who subsequently went on to Dartmouth and will be studying medicine this fall at Harvard. When Mr. Fitzhugh paid a visit to her high school, he found that though everyone knew she was all-state in soccer, no one knew that an essay of hers had appeared in the Review, beating out hundreds of the finest student essays from not only the U.S. but other parts of the English-speaking world. It’s one of the things that tells him that the need for such a journal remains strong.
“Varsity athletics and athletes are celebrated everywhere,” Mr. Fitzhugh says. “We’ve decided to celebrate varsity academics.”
The Misplaced Math Student: Lost in Eighth-Grade Algebra
Algebra in eighth grade was once reserved for the mathematically gifted student. In 1990, very few eighth graders, about one out of six, were enrolled in an algebra course. As the decade unfolded, leaders began urging schools to increase that number. President Clinton lamented, “Around the world, middle students are learning algebra and geometry. Here at home, just a quarter of all students take algebra before high school.”1 The administration made enrolling all children in an algebra course by eighth grade a national goal. In a handbook offering advice to middle school students on how to plan for college, U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley urged, “Take algebra beginning in the eighth grade and build from there.”2 Robert Moses ratcheted up the significance of the issue by labeling algebra “The New Civil Right,” thereby highlighting the social consequences of so many poor and minority students taking remedial and general math courses instead of algebra.3
The campaign was incredibly successful. Several urban school districts declared a goal of algebra for all eighth graders. In 1996, the District of Columbia led the nation with 53 percent of eighth graders enrolled in algebra. From 1990 to 2000, national enrollment in algebra courses soared from 16 percent to 24 percent of all eighth graders.
The surge continued into the next decade. Eighth-grade enrollment in algebra hit 31 percent nationally in 2007, a near doubling of the 1990 proportion. Today more U.S. eighth graders take algebra than any other math course.4 In July 2008, the State of California decided to adopt an algebra test as its eighth-grade assessment of student proficiency. The policy in effect mandates that all eighth graders will be enrolled in algebra by 2011.
Related from Jay Matthews.
Recalculating The 8th-Grade Algebra Rush
Nobody writing about schools has been a bigger supporter of getting more students into eighth-grade algebra than I have been. I wrote a two-part series for the front page six years ago that pointed out how important it is to be able to handle algebra’s abstractions and unknown quantities before starting high school. I have argued that we should rate middle schools by the percentage of students who complete Algebra I by eighth grade.
Now, because of a startling study being released today, I am having second thoughts.
Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, has looked at the worst math students, those scoring in the bottom 10th on the National Assessment of Educational Progress eighth-grade test. He discovered that 28.6 percent of them — let me make that clear: nearly three out of every 10 — were enrolled in first-year algebra, geometry or second-year algebra. Almost all were grossly misplaced, probably because of the push to get kids into algebra sooner.
The report (to be available at http://www.brookings.edu/brown.aspx ) reprints this simple NAEP problem:
There were 90 employees in a company last year. This year the number of employees increased by 10 percent. How many employees are in the company this year?
A) 9
B) 81
C) 91
D) 99
E) 100
The correct answer is D. Ten percent of 90 is 9. Add that to 90 and you get 99. How many of the misplaced students got it right? Just 9.8 percent. Not good.
College Panel Calls for Less Focus on SATs
A commission convened by some of the country’s most influential college admissions officials is recommending that colleges and universities move away from their reliance on SAT and ACT scores and shift toward admissions exams more closely tied to the high school curriculum and achievement.
The commission’s report, the culmination of a yearlong study led by William R. Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, comes amid growing concerns that the frenzy over standardized college admissions tests is misshaping secondary education and feeding a billion-dollar test-prep industry that encourages students to try to game the tests.
A growing number of colleges and universities, like Bates College in Maine, Lawrence University in Wisconsin, Wake Forest University in North Carolina and Smith College in Massachusetts, have made the SAT and ACT optional. And the report concludes that more institutions could make admissions decisions without requiring the SAT and ACT.
“It would be much better for the country,” Mr. Fitzsimmons said in an interview, “to have students focusing on high school courses that, based on evidence, will prepare them well for college and also prepare them well for the real world beyond college, instead of their spending enormous amounts of time trying to game the SAT.”
The report calls for an end to the practice of using minimum-admissions-test scores to determine students’ eligibility for merit aid. And it specifically urges the National Merit Scholarship Corporation to stop using PSAT scores as the initial screen for eligibility for recognition or scholarships. The National Merit Scholarship competition “contributes to the misperception of test scores as sole measures of ‘merit’ in a pervasive and highly visible manner,” the report says.
The Harmful Mistakes of Sex Education in School
Those who can, do, according to the old saying, and those who can’t, teach. That has always seemed to me unfair. However, I have come to think that those who can’t teach, teach sex education.
Judged by its results – not a bad way of judging – sex education has been an utter failure. The increase in sex education here in recent years has coincided with an explosion of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease (STD) far worse than anywhere else in Europe. Since the government’s teenage pregnancy strategy was introduced in 1999, the number of girls having abortions has soared. You might well be tempted to argue that sex education causes sexual delinquency.
Only two months ago the Health Protection Agency reported that a culture of promiscuity among the young had driven the rate of STDs to a record. Almost 400,000 people – half of them under 25 – were newly diagnosed, 6% more than in 2006.
When something fails, the usual procedure is to drop it and try something else. With sex education, the worse it gets, the more people cry out for more of it and earlier. Ministers are considering whether to make schools offer more sex education, offer it earlier and deny parents the right to withdraw their children from it.
Monona Grove Enrollment Numbers
Preliminary 2008-9 enrollment numbers show a total of 3076 students “in seats” as of 9/10. This includes 85 4k students and community daycare sites, 107 4k students at Maywood and TP, and 133 open enrollment in (vs. 39 oe out).
It will be interesting to see County and Statewide open enrollment numbers.
Engaging students in discussion on the achievement gap
Two hundred students from 23 school districts across the country will convene in Madison for the annual Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN) Student Conference Sept. 24-27. This year’s theme will be “Futura De La Juventud: Laying Foundation, Affirming Our Identity, Building Relationships.”
“One of the things that the conference is really focused on is engaging the kids in discussion about the achievement gap and what barriers that students of color face in their school environment,” says Lisa Black, special assistant to the Superintendent for Race & Equity and the planning chair for the MSAN Conference. “Our goals really are to increase access to post-secondary options.”
African American and Latino students from around the country will gather at Monona Terrace to share experiences and develop strategies for improving student academic achievement and school climate in their home districts.
Black stresses that the students have really taken ownership of the planning for the conference.
“The students really set the agenda. We shared with them what MSAN is all about and they studied the gap and all the data in the district, and they are taking it from there,” she says. “It’s important that their voices and views are heard, and [that] it’s not always adults setting the agenda.”
Each year, MSAN holds a student conference in a different city across the United States where teams of students of member district schools engage in discussion and plan for follow up activities related to improving the effectiveness of their schools in educating African American and Latino youth.
How Well Do You Know Your State Board of Education?
Ever wonder who decides what your kids are taught in school? It’s not their principals and teachers. Nor is it their school’s superintendent. The Legislature, maybe? Not quite; the Legislature’s responsibility is to write the education code, fund the schools, and keep the state’s commitment to an accountability system. Every once in a while a lawmaker might pass a bill that authorizes Bible classes or requires daily recitation of the pledge of allegiance to the Texas flag, but the Legislature isn’t responsible for curriculum. Okay, then, how about the Texas Education Agency and the commissioner of education? Sounds right, but you’re wrong again. The TEA’s role is simply (or not so simply) to administer the education code.
Ready for the answer? The folks who decide what Texas schoolchildren will learn are the fifteen members of the State Board of Education. Don’t worry if you can’t name a single one. Almost nobody can! Members of this obscure panel are elected in down-ballot races that generate about as much media attention as an appointment to the Funeral Service Commission, but they are the ones who determine the classroom content for every public- or charter-school student in Texas. The board, currently composed of ten Republicans and five Democrats, oversees the process that establishes curriculum standards–known as Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills–and adopts or rejects textbooks. Members serve four-year terms and receive no financial compensation. (You heard right: They do this for free.) So how well do you know the powerful volunteers who control your children’s education? Take this quiz and see.
What Happens When a School District Fails?
Students, families, and educators in Georgia still are struggling to make sense of how a school district recently lost its accreditation and what impact the ruling will have on the students’ chances of getting into competitive colleges. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, one of the nation’s major accrediting agencies, revoked the Clayton County school system’s accreditation in late August after the district’s leaders failed to achieve eight of nine mandates for improvement set by SACS in February. Some of the unmet mandates include establishment of a responsible school board, removal of outside influences that disrupt the district’s ability to function, and adherence to a code of ethics.
SACS Chief Executive Officer Mark Elgart said the board’s problems permeated the system, but that dysfunction did not directly affect the quality of learning offered by the 50,000-student district located just south of Atlanta. Revocation of accreditation, he said, was the only way to prevent further damage to that system. The last school system to lose its accreditation in the United States was Florida’s Duval County in 1969.
A Look at Madison’s Multi-age Classrooms
A third of the elementary classrooms in the Madison School District are multi-age. That figure, which has held steady for more than five years, makes Madison one of the biggest users of multi-age classrooms — some educators say the largest user — in Dane County.
Also, Madison’s Sennett Middle School is in its 33rd year of offering a unique multi-age classroom setting that blends sixth, seventh and eighth graders.
“I think it really does foster that sense of family,” said Sennett Principal Colleen Lodholz, who said the arrangement is so popular that several former students have returned to teach at the East Side school.
There’s nothing new about putting children of more than one grade level into a single classroom.
“Look at the one-room schoolhouse. That was all multi-age. That’s where we started in the United States,” said Sue Abplanalp, the assistant superintendent overseeing Madison’s elementary schools.
Cultivating Algebra Enthusiasm
“Nothing like a little math to wake you up in the morning,” teacher Tricia Colclaser said this month after a taxing round of word problems.
Abstract math is not known for its stirring effect on U.S. teenagers. But algebra is viewed as increasingly essential for students preparing for college or careers in a fast-changing, technology-based economy. Some advocates call it the new literacy.
Strengthening the math abilities of all students is a steep challenge. Educators must reinforce basic concepts early on, attract teachers talented enough to go beyond dictating formulas, and, not least, overcome an anti-math bias many students harbor long into adulthood, that all the hours spent mixing letters and numbers yield more punishment than possibility.
How hard can it be?
The question led this education reporter back to high school to try again, as a student in Colclaser’s class. To prepare, I reviewed a recent version of Virginia’s Algebra II Standards of Learning exam. The 50 questions conjured a familiar wave of anxiety but little actual math. I then fumbled through a state Algebra I test, getting at most 10 answers right.
Inside Bay Area KIPP Schools
One of the benefits of finding public schools that work is the chance to study them and discover exactly what they are doing that other schools are not doing. Sadly, this rarely seems a blessing to the educators at those schools, who have to fill out surveys, sit for long interviews and have strangers recording their every move. Often they feel like Michael Phelps might have felt, told to take a drug test every time he won an Olympic gold medal.
I sense these often intrusive assessments have been particularly galling for many teachers at KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program). It has become the most studied school network in the country, one more indication that it is probably also the best. KIPP serves children from mostly low-income minority families at 66 schools in 19 states and the District, a network way too big for most researchers to handle. But since KIPP began to expand in 2001 from the two successful charter middle schools created by co-founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg, scholars have been examining pieces of the growing enterprise.
KIPP has cooperated with the research; one of its “Five Pillars” — its philosophy of success — is “Focus on Results.” Five independent studies of KIPP have been done so far. A sixth has just been released, available at http://policyweb.sri.com/cep/publications/SRI_ReportBayAreaKIPPSchools_Final.pdf.
Teens, Video Games & Civics
Amanda Lenhart Joseph Kahne Ellen Middaugh Alexandra Rankin Macgill Chris Evans Jessica Vitak:
The first national survey of its kind finds that virtually all American teens play computer, console, or cell phone games and that the gaming experience is rich and varied, with a significant amount of social interaction and potential for civic engagement. The survey was conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, an initiative of the Pew Research Center and was supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The primary findings in the survey of 1,102 youth ages 12-17 include —
Game playing is universal, with almost all teens playing games and at least half playing games on a given day. Game playing experiences are diverse, with the most popular games falling into the racing, puzzle, sports, action and adventure categories.
Game playing is also social, with most teens playing games with others at least some of the time and can incorporate many aspects of civic and political life.
Maryland Charter “School learns its lesson”
Since opening inside a Hanover office park three years ago, the county’s only public charter school has delivered strikingly high standardized test scores and, this year, produced a semifinalist – the only one in Anne Arundel County – in a national science competition.
But Chesapeake Science Point Public Charter School has also struggled. It faced the threat of closure after it failed to adhere to the county school system’s standards in special education, and in administrative and staffing matters. Fulfilling its plan to expand to include high-schoolers, the charter school expanded to ninth-graders last year but was ultimately forced to downsize back to sixth through eighth grades amid space concerns.
Though it remains on probation through June, administrators at the school said the outlook for this year is bright, pointing to improved communication with school system officials that has led to a greater understanding of expectations.
History Scholar
Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review
9/18/2008
College scholarships for specific abilities and achievements are not news. There are football scholarships and volleyball scholarships and music scholarships and cheerleading scholarships, and so on – there is a long list of sources of money to attract and reward high school students who have talent and accomplishments if those are not academic.
Consider an example: there is a high school student in Georgia, in an IB program, who spent a year and a half working on an independent study of the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s. This paper, a bit more than 15,000 words, with endnotes and bibliography was published in the Fall 2008 issue of The Concord Review, the only journal in the world for the academic research papers of secondary students, and it is a strong candidate for the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize. If he were an outstanding baseball player, a number of college baseball coaches would have heard about him, and would be doing what they could to persuade him to accept an athletic (baseball) scholarship to their colleges.
But suppose he were not a HS athlete, but only a HS history students of extraordinary academic promise at the high school level. Would college professors of history know about and take an interest in his work? No. Would there be college history scholarships competing for him? No. Would his teacher, who worked with him on his independent study, attract attention from his peers at the college and university level? No.
I hope I am wrong, but based on what I have found out so far, there are no college scholarships available specifically for outstanding secondary students of history. There is abundant moaning and gnashing of teeth by edupundits and professors about the widespread ignorance of history among our young people, but when someone shows unusually strong knowledge of history at the Lower Education Level, no one pays any attention at the Higher Education Level.
In 21 years of working to publish 824 history research papers by secondary students of history from 44 states and 34 other countries in The Concord Review, I have not learned of a single instance of an author being offered a college scholarship based on their academic work in history.
When we lament that our adolescents seem more interested in sports than in academics, we might consider how differently we celebrate and reward those activities. High school coaches who are well known to and almost treated as peers by their college counterparts, receive no attention at all for their work as teachers, no matter how unusually productive that work may happen to be. Higher Education simply does not care about the academic work being done by teachers and students at the Lower Education level.
Behavioral psychology argues that by ignoring some behavior you will tend to get less of if, and by paying attention to and rewarding other behavior you are likely to find that there is more of it.
I know that students are being recruited for college scholarships in cheerleading, and I would dearly love to hear from anyone who can tell me of students being recruited for their specific academic work in a high school subject, like history, literature, physics, Chinese, chemistry and so on.
I realize there are scholarships for disadvantaged students, for students of high general intellectual ability, and the like, but where are the scholarships for specific HS academic achievement? After all, athletic and dance scholarships are not awarded on the basis of general tests of physical fitness, but because of achievement in the actual performance of particular athletic or artistic activities.
It is said that you get what you pay for, and it seems likely that you get more of what you value and reward in academics as well. If we continue to overlook and ignore the academic achievement of our secondary-level scholars of history and other subjects, that does not mean that some students will no longer work hard in their areas of academic interest. There may be fewer of them, and fewer teachers who see the point of putting in the extra coaching time with exceptionally diligent students, but if we continue down this road, at least folks in Higher Education ought to be aware that they are working just as hard to discourage good academic work at the secondary level as anyone, and they should stop complaining about the attitudes toward scholarship of the students in their classrooms, which, after all, are in part a result of their own contempt for and neglect of academic work at the secondary (aka “pre-college”) level.
Will Fitzhugh [founder], Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987], Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998], TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24, Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007, www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org, Varsity Academics®
Unprepared high school grads focus of state education hearing
David Morales never thought much about going to college. But in 12th grade he watched his aunt graduate from The Richard Stockton College in Galloway Town-ship.
“After seeing her succeed in everything she wanted to do and watching her face light up with her own accomplishment, this inspired me to change my mind,” Morales told the state Board of Education on Wednesday.
It was too late to switch to college preparatory classes, but Morales thought that since he had received all A’s and B’s in his courses, he could still handle college. But when he took the Accuplacer placement test at Cumberland County College, he found he would have to take remedial courses first.
“Now I will be in school a year longer to get my degree (in radiology),” he said.
Morales was one of three current and former Cumberland County College students who spoke to the board about their high school experiences. CCC President Ken Ender brought them to the meeting to demonstrate the consequences for students who meet the current high school graduation requirements but are still not ready for college.
Educating Migrant Children
How migrants fare in school, and what schools can learn from them.
MOST teachers admit that occasionally, when a lesson is going badly, they suspect the problem lies not with the subject or pedagogy, but with the pupils. Some children just seem harder to teach than others. But why? Is it because of, say, cultural factors: parents from some backgrounds place a low value on education and do not push their children? Or is it to do with schools themselves, and their capacity to teach children of different abilities?
It might seem impossible to answer such a question. To do so would require exposing similar sorts of children to many different education systems and see which does best. As it happens, however, an experiment along those lines already exists–as a result of mass migration. Children of migrants from a single country of origin come as near to being a test of the question as you are likely to find.
Colleges spend billions to prep freshmen
It’s a tough lesson for millions of students just now arriving on campus: even if you have a high school diploma, you may not be ready for college.
In fact, a new study calculates, one-third of American college students have to enroll in remedial classes. The bill to colleges and taxpayers for trying to bring them up to speed on material they were supposed to learn in high school comes to between $2.3 billion and $2.9 billion annually.
“That is a very large cost, but there is an additional cost and that’s the cost to the students,” said former Colorado governor Roy Romer, chair of the group Strong American Schools, which is issuing the report “Diploma to Nowhere” on Monday. “These students come out of high school really misled. They think they’re prepared. They got a 3.0 and got through the curriculum they needed to get admitted, but they find what they learned wasn’t adequate.”
Christina Jeronimo was an “A” student in high school English, but was placed in a remedial course when she arrived at Long Beach Community College in California. The course was valuable in some ways but frustrating and time-consuming. Now in her third year of community college, she’d hoped to transfer to UCLA by now.
Like many college students, she wishes she’d been worked a little harder in high school.
“There’s a gap,” said Jeronimo, who hopes to study psychology. “The demands of the high school teachers aren’t as great as the demands for college. Sometimes they just baby us.”
New school year, new programs in Minneapolis, St. Paul
As a host of new charter schools opened this year in the metro area, trying to lure disaffected parents away from public school systems, both Minneapolis and St Paul public schools are rolling out new programs and programming changes to keep these families – and the state funding dollars that come with them – in the school systems. In particular, Minneapolis public schools have fired the opening salvo in a multi-year offensive against their poor reputation, with a thorough-going re-design of district high schools.
St Paul
Fortunately for St. Paul Public Schools (SPPS), the district does not have as serious a credibility problem as Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS). St Paul school board members Tom Goldstein and Keith Hardy told this reporter in July that district leadership believes not all parents want a “one-size-fits-all” public school. Some parents, Hardy said, are looking for specific types of programming, such as gender-segregated education or career-specific training in high school, and the district has to provide these or risk losing these families to charter schools.
An Email to Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad on Credit for non MMSD Courses
Dear Superintendent Nerad:
I was rather surprised to learn today from the Wisconsin State Journal that:
“The district and the union also have quarreled over the role of MTI members in online learning for seven years. Under the new agreement, ANY (my emphasis) instruction of district students will be supervised by Madison teachers. The deal doesn’t change existing practice but confirms that that practice will continue.”
You are quite new to the MMSD. I am EXTREMELY disappointed that you would “cave in” to MTI regarding a long-standing quarrel it has had with the MMSD without first taking the time to get input from ALL affected parties, i.e., students and their parents as well as teachers who might not agree with Matthews on this issue. Does this agreement deal only with online learning or ALL non-MMSD courses (e.g., correspondence ones done by mail; UW and MATC courses not taken via the YOP)? Given we have been waiting 7 years to resolve this issue, there was clearly no urgent need for you to do so this rapidly and so soon after coming on board. The reality is that it is an outright LIE that the deal you just struck with MTI is not a change from the practice that existed 7 years ago when MTI first demanded a change in unofficial policy. I have copies of student transcripts that can unequivocally PROVE that some MMSD students used to be able to receive high school credit for courses they took elsewhere even when the MMSD offered a comparable course. These courses include high school biology and history courses taken via UW-Extension, high school chemistry taken via Northwestern University’s Center for Talent Development, and mathematics, computer science, and history courses taken at UW-Madison outside of the YOP. One of these transcripts shows credit for a course taken as recently as fall, 2005; without this particular 1/2 course credit, this student would have been lacking a course in modern US history, a requirement for a high school diploma from the State of Wisconsin.
The MMSD BOE was well aware that they had never written and approved a clear policy regarding this matter, leaving each school in the district deciding for themselves whether or not to approve for credit non-MMSD courses. They were well aware that Madison West HAD been giving many students credit in the past for non-MMSD courses. The fact is that the BOE voted in January, 2007 to “freeze” policy at whatever each school had been doing until such time as they approved an official policy. Rainwater then chose to ignore this official vote of the BOE, telling the guidance departments to stop giving students credit for such courses regardless of whether they had in the past. The fact is that the BOE was in the process of working to create a uniform policy regarding non-MMSD courses last spring. As an employee of the BOE, you should not have signed an agreement with MTI until AFTER the BOE had determined official MMSD policy on this topic. By doing so, you pre-empted the process.
There exist dozens of students per year in the MMSD whose academic needs are not adequately met to the courses currently offered by MTI teachers, including through the District’s online offerings. These include students with a wide variety of disabilities, medical problems, and other types of special needs as well as academically gifted ones. By taking appropriate online and correspondence courses and non-MMSD courses they can physically access within Madison, these students can work at their own pace or in their own way or at an accessible location that enables them to succeed. “Success for all” must include these students as well. Your deal with MTI will result in dozens of students per year dropping out of school, failing to graduate, or transferring to other schools or school districts that are more willing to better meet their “special” individual needs.
Your rush to resolve this issue sends a VERY bad message to many families in the MMSD. We were hoping you might be different from Rainwater. Unfortunately, it says to them that you don’t really care what they think. It says to them that the demands of Matthews take primarily over the needs of their children. Does the MMSD exist for Matthews or for the children of this District? As you yourself said, the MMSD is at a “tipping point”, with there currently being almost 50% “free and reduced lunch” students. Families were waiting and hoping that you might be different. As they learn that you are not based upon your actions, the exodus of middle class families from the MMSD’s public schools will only accelerate. It will be on your watch as superintendent that the MMSD irreversibly turns into yet another troubled inner city school district. I urge you to take the time to learn more about the MMSD, including getting input from all interested parties, before you act in the future.
VERY disappointingly yours,
Janet Mertz
parent of 2 Madison West graduates
Tamira Madsen has more:
“Tuesday’s agreement also will implement a measure that requires a licensed teacher from the bargaining unit supervise virtual/online classes within the district. The district and union have bickered on-and-off for nearly seven years over the virtual/online education issue. Matthews said the district was violating the collective bargaining contract with development of its virtual school learning program that offered online courses taught by teachers who are not members of MTI.
In the agreement announced Tuesday, there were no program changes made to the current virtual/online curriculum, but requirements outlined in the agreement assure that classes are supervised by district teachers.
During the 2007-08 school year, there were 10 district students and 40 students from across the state who took MMSD online courses.
Though Nerad has been on the job for less than three months, Matthews said he is pleased with his initial dealings and working relationship with the new superintendent.
“This is that foundation we need,” Matthews said. “There was a lot of trust level that was built up here and a lot of learning of each other’s personalities, style and philosophy. All those things are important.
“It’s going to be good for the entire school district if we’re able to do this kind of thing, and we’re already talking about what’s next.”
The Death of WKCE? Task Force to Develop “Comprehensive Assessment System for Wisconsin”
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction [150K PDF], via a kind reader’s email:
Wisconsin needs a comprehensive assessment system that provides educators and parents with timely and relevant information that helps them make instructional decisions to improve student achievement,” said State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster in announcing members of a statewide Next Generation Assessment Task Force.
Representatives from business, commerce, and education will make recommendations to the state superintendent on the components of an assessment system that are essential to increase student achievement. Task force members will review the history of assessment in Wisconsin and learn about the value, limitations, and costs of a range of assessment approaches. They will hear presentations on a number of other states’ assessment systems. Those systems may include ACT as part of a comprehensive assessment system, diagnostic or benchmark assessments given throughout the year, or other assessment instruments and test administration methods. The group’s first meeting will be held October 8 in Madison.
A few notes:
- “Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum”
- The Madison School District’s “Value Added Assessment System” uses WKCE results.
- The Fordham Foundation has criticized the lack of rigor in the WKCE
.
Future of ‘No Child’ Left Behind
For the next president, one of the first domestic challenges will be to reshape the No Child Left Behind law, hailed six years ago as a bipartisan solution to America’s education troubles.
But in their race for the White House, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) are distancing themselves from what has become a tainted brand.
Education experts say the candidates have offered, at best, a fuzzy vision for the future of the No Child Left Behind law. Obama pledges to “fix the failures” of the law, while McCain seeks to avoid mention of it.
Madison Schools & Madison Teachers Union Settle Online Class Administration & Athletic Director Conflict
At a joint news conference at MTI headquarters, Madison schools Superintendent Daniel Nerad and MTI Executive Director John Matthews said the settlement resolves issues that have festered for up to eight years.
Among other things, the agreement reinstates Boyce Hodge, the longtime West High School athletic director, to that position and as coach of the boys basketball team for the current school year. The district’s other three major high schools also will have full-time athletic directors.
The district and the union also have quarreled over the role of MTI members in online learning for seven years. Under the new agreement, any instruction of district students will be supervised by Madison teachers. The deal doesn’t change existing practice but confirms that that practice will continue.
Matthews said he was pleased with the negotiations and agreements, and added that he’s enjoyed working with Nerad.
“I think probably the over-reaching issue that this resolution provides is an improved problem-solving relationship between the union and the school district that’s possible now with the coming of Dan Nerad as the superintendent in Madison,” Matthews said.
Fascinating and an interesting look at new Superintendent Dan Nerad’s approach.
Related: Madison Teachers June, 2008 Athletic Director Issue Press Release 12K PDF and Arbitrators award 222KB PDF.
Educators focus attention on ninth-graders’ transition to high school
Because the first year of high school is considered crucial to a student’s success, more campuses are sheltering freshmen in small learning communities or sometimes on separate campuses.
As Jessica McClain, 14, stood in line to get her student ID picture taken on her first official day as a Muir High School student, she was a churning mix of anticipation and anxiety.
“The campus is huge,” a wide-eyed McClain said as she looked at hundreds of freshmen lined up in the school’s cavernous gymnasium. “I am excited, but I’m nervous. New school. Bigger school. Bigger people.”
But for McClain, freshman year will be a more intimate experience than for earlier generations. Ninth grade is crucial to a student’s eventual academic success, so secondary schools across the nation, including Pasadena’s Muir High, are increasingly sheltering their freshmen in small learning communities or sometimes on separate campuses.
“We really wanted to make sure our freshmen have a strong, solid foundation and are able to bond with the school,” said Edwin Diaz, superintendent of the Pasadena Unified School District. “If they don’t connect well in ninth grade, they tend to disappear in 10th. A high percentage drop out.”
Beyond “No Child”
Anthony Brooks, Jeremy Miller, Seppy Basili, Sara Mead and Jordan Meranus:
How to improve under-achieving schools in America’s poorest communities has vexed policy makers for generations. President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law insists on accountability. But critics charge it encourages teaching to the test at the expense of real learning.
The law still sparks a loud argument — but as one of our guests today writes in the current issue of Harper’s magazine, there’s debate that test-prep companies such as Kaplan are profiting handsomely from the federal mandate to test, and test, and test again.
Re-examine testing of special ed students
Almost half of children with special needs failed their high school exit exam this year. Legislation calls for identifying new ways to assess performance and devising new methods.
The predictable result came in last week from forcing students with disabilities to pass a high school exit exam in order to earn a diploma. Nearly half failed.
Failed. Demoralizing words for some kids who struggle daily to perform tasks most teens carry out with ease.
The psychological damage “is horrific,” says Sid Wolinsky, director of litigation for Disability Rights Advocates, which fought unsuccessfully for alternative ways to measure the knowledge of special education students.
“We had dozens of sworn declarations from parents about the deep depression that their disabled children went into when they didn’t pass the exit exam,” Wolinsky says. “When you’re a child with a disability, you start with problems of stigma, societal stereotyping and self confidence.
“Then you’re shattered when you can’t pass the exit exam. You blame yourself and have terrible problems with self worth.”
States hire foreign teachers to ease shortages
AP:
The school system in coastal Baldwin County — 60 miles by 25 miles of Alabama farmland framed on two sides by waterfront towns — was short on teachers, especially in courses such as math and science.
So short, in fact, that district officials went around the world last year, with expenses paid by a teacher recruiting firm, and brought back Michel Olalo of Manila and 11 other Filipinos to teach along the shores of the Gulf Coast and Mobile Bay and in the communities in between.
That raised some eyebrows in Baldwin County, where nine out of 10 people are white, just one in 50 is foreign-born and, as the county’s teacher recruiter Tom Sisk noted recently, “Many of our children will never travel outside the United States.”
Yet school administrators throughout the U.S. are plucking from an abundance of skilled international teachers, a burgeoning import that critics call shortsighted but educators here and abroad say meets the needs of students and qualified candidates.
Talking with Jeremy Miller, Author of “Tyranny of the Test”
Jeremy Miller is the author of “Tyranny of the Test,” the September cover story. The article, which explains how No Child Left Behind has changed the structure of our schools-and how “teaching the test” takes more away from students than it gives-was based on his years of experience working as a test-prep “coach” for Kaplan, Inc. Associate Editor Ben Austen follows up with Jeremy Miller now that the issue is on newsstands.
1. At some point last year, you decided you wanted to write about working for Kaplan in New York City’s public schools. This kind of reporting, in which the participant’s journalistic intentions are not made explicit, is always complicated. But the issues here seemed to be compounded by your background as a full-time classroom teacher and by your desire to succeed at a job that you increasingly saw as problematic. What were some of the difficulties you faced in reporting this story?
Colleges spend billions to prep freshmen
Justin Pope
It’s a tough lesson for millions of students just now arriving on campus: even if you have a high school diploma, you may not be ready for college.
In fact, a new study calculates, one-third of American college students have to enroll in remedial classes. The bill to colleges and taxpayers for trying to bring them up to speed on material they were supposed to learn in high school comes to between $2.3 billion and $2.9 billion annually.
“That is a very large cost, but there is an additional cost and that’s the cost to the students,” said former Colorado governor Roy Romer, chair of the group Strong American Schools, which is issuing the report “Diploma to Nowhere” on Monday. “These students come out of high school really misled. They think they’re prepared. They got a 3.0 and got through the curriculum they needed to get admitted, but they find what they learned wasn’t adequate.”
Christina Jeronimo was an “A” student in high school English, but was placed in a remedial course when she arrived at Long Beach Community College in California. The course was valuable in some ways but frustrating and time-consuming. Now in her third year of community college, she’d hoped to transfer to UCLA by now.
Like many college students, she wishes she’d been worked a little harder in high school.
“There’s a gap,” said Jeronimo, who hopes to study psychology. “The demands of the high school teachers aren’t as great as the demands for college. Sometimes they just baby us.”
Want Schools to Work? Meet the Parents
Sandra Tsing Loh, making sense, continues her whirlwind media tour, this time at the Washington Post (thanks to a kind reader’s email for this link):
Yea, public school parents’ priorities are routinely placed below those of building inspectors, plant managers, even, given an errant bell schedule, cafeteria workers. Although, teachers are down in the bunkers with us, too. You’d be amazed how many extraordinary schoolteachers, who’ve served faithfully, conscientiously, daily for 40 years, just keep their heads down at this point.
Since most politicians have never dealt with U.S. public schools as customers themselves (in the same way that precious few of them put their own children in the Army), it might shock you, Mr. Future President, how poorly parents are treated out here in Public-School-Landia. You know how when you walk into a Wal-Mart or a McDonald’s, someone greets you with, “Hello! May I help you?” It’s startling how seldom you can expect this basic courtesy in public schools, how often we parents approaching the counter are treated as felons, or more often simply ignored by the frantically typing office-administrator-type-person. It’s a peculiar thing, in this 21st century. Forget best-practice research and technology-driven classrooms. I really believe if anyone in the multibillion-dollar industry called U.S. public education were ever listening to us, improved schools would start, simply, with this: “Hello! May I help you?”
Where does this culture of committee-oriented time wastage — even for parents who work — spring from? Here’s a clue. L.A. Unified recently faced such a budget shortfall that the district was actively recruiting potential save-our-schools spokesparents to submit their resumes and come to the central offices for “media training” if selected. Cut to the bone as it is, though, next year’s budget still slates a hefty $78.8 million for consultants (last year a consultant was paid $35,000 to teach our superintendent how to use a computer). And yes, I realize that I’m getting off-message by noting that our school district wastes money.. . . That’s like waving red meat in front of America’s seniors, who’ll probably vote to cut taxes again! Even though it’s not the bureaucracy, but the children who get squeezed. That’s all budget cuts mean, in the end. My kids have their assemblies on cracked asphalt. Now the cracked asphalt will have weeds.
But here’s the good news, Mr. Future President. In a testament to the incredible can-do American spirit (and I mean that in the most drop-dead-serious way), activist public school parents are fighting back against U.S. public education’s wasteful and unresponsive corporate “professionalism.” (Remember George Bernard Shaw’s quip about the professions being “conspiracies against the laity”?) City by city, homegrown “parents for public schools”-style Web sites are springing up daily, little rebel force fires on the horizon. From New York to Chicago, Seattle to San Francisco and beyond, activist parents are starting to blog their outrage over millions of education dollars wasted on non-working computer technology, non-child-centered programs and, of course, those entities whose education dollars are never, ever cut — the standardized-testing companies.
Some years ago, I sketched a chart illustrating the influence of various factions on our nearly $400M local school system. Topping the list were Administrators of both the school system and local teachers union. Far down were teachers (think of the “downtown math police”) and parents. Further still were students themselves. Taxpayers were not represented.
Observing public education rather closely for a number of years, it seems to me that all players, especially teachers, parents and students, would be better off with a far more diffused governance model (charters, smaller districts/schools, choice?).
School Choice Better Choice for Poor
Barack Obama, whose campaign is heavily funded by teachers unions, plans to funnel more money into the existing public education system. In this system, poor kids remain the only ones who don’t get to choose which school they attend. Mr. McCain is a strong supporter of school choice and has a record of this in Arizona.
As a teacher of 30 years, I am outraged that the liberal leaders in this country pretend to champion the poor, while, through their opposition to school choice, they act to keep the poor uneducated and poor.
Get education priorities straight or fall behind
Hoosiers need to re-evaluate level of emphasis they place on education.
High school life for millions of teenagers in the United States is filled with football games, part-time jobs, text messages and prom. And, oh yes, a dash of biology and geometry.
While their peers in other nations dig deep into academics, many American teens seem content to skim the surface.
Or at least that’s the premise of a documentary called “Two Million Minutes,” which revolves around the lives of six high school seniors — two each from China and India, and two from Carmel High School.
The documentary isn’t without its critics, who contend that executive producer Robert Compton set out to make the film with a predetermined point of view. Many educators also say the film fails to note the United States’ universal approach to education, in contrast to other nations’ more selective practices.
Fossil hunts, music classes, museum trips and more. Our picks for some of the best bets in educational travel
As a kid, going back to school was never quite like this.
As part of a shipboard education program, Marty Zafman, a retired human-resources consultant, worked with Mother Teresa in Calcutta and dined in Havana — while Fidel Castro spoke to him and his classmates for four hours.
On a hunt for fossils in Mexico, Warren Stortroen, a former insurance-claims manager, led a paleontologist and fellow diggers to the remains of a giant glyptodont, a three-million-year-old ancestor of the armadillo that’s the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.
And as part of a cultural tour of Morocco this spring, Paul Tausche, a retired international marketer, rode a camel to the top of a desert dune at sunset, then enjoyed dinner and a musical performance around a campfire before retiring to a nomadic tent.
Are Too Many People Going to College?
America’s university system is creating a class-riven nation. There has to be a better way.
To ask whether too many people are going to college requires us to think about the importance and nature of a liberal education. “Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining their livelihood,” John Stuart Mill told students at the University of St. Andrews in 1867. “Their object is not to make skillful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings.” If this is true (and I agree that it is), why say that too many people are going to college? Surely a mass democracy should encourage as many people as possible to become “capable and cultivated human beings” in Mill’s sense. We should not restrict the availability of a liberal education to a rarefied intellectual elite. More people should be going to college, not fewer.
Yes and no. More people should be getting the basics of a liberal education. But for most students, the places to provide those basics are elementary and middle school. E. D. Hirsch Jr. is the indispensable thinker on this topic, beginning with his 1987 book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Part of his argument involves the importance of a body of core knowledge in fostering reading speed and comprehension. With regard to a liberal education, Hirsch makes three points that are germane here:
An Innovative Program That Could Serve as a Model for At Risk Children
The reason I think the Harlem Children’s Zone is so important–the reason I wrote a whole book about the program–is that I think it’s the closest thing we have to a model for the kind of collaboration I was referring to yesterday.
What Geoffrey Canada has constructed in Harlem is a comprehensive set of integrated programs that currently serve 8,000 kids in a 97-block neighborhood, starting at birth and going all the way through college. It is based on two innovative ideas. The first is what Canada calls the Conveyor Belt–a system that reaches kids early and then moves them through a seamless series of programs that try to re-create the invisible cocoon of support that surrounds middle-class and upper-middle-class kids throughout their childhoods. The Conveyor Belt starts with Baby College, a nine-week program that provides expecting parents and parents of young children with new information about effective parenting strategies. The next stop is an all-day language-focused pre-kindergarten for 200 4-year-olds, who then graduate into a K-12 charter school that has an extended day and an extended year and employs some of the intensive academic practices developed in the KIPP schools. Throughout their academic careers, students at the school have access to social supports: after-school tutoring, a teen arts center, family counseling, and a health clinic.
To Raise Smart and Successful Children, Focus on Developing a Work Ethic
In one of Kurt Vonnegut’s most enduring short stories, Harrison Bergeron, everyone is finally equal thanks to the efforts of the Handicapper General. However, one of the many lasting messages of the story is a derisive one. In the futuristic world of Harrison Bergeron, accomplishment is no longer the measure of stature. Instead, it is all about trying, of recognizing effort, regardless of result.
However, a recent summary of three decades of research reveals that when it comes to raising smart children, developing their work ethic is in fact the most critical component. Whether it is success in school or in life, research indicates that innate intelligence and ability are simply not as important as a person’s level of effort.
When Achievement Push Comes to Shove
We have some of the top schools in the country in Arlington County. Is there some point with our children at which we could back off and not continue to push for rising achievement, an official goal of the county schools? Is there a way we can say, good enough is good enough?
My oldest son is in middle school. He is a talented but not gifted math student. Midway through this past school year, it was clear that he was not ready for algebraic thinking, and his seventh-grade math teacher compassionately helped us help him decide to move back to a more appropriate math level. Because I teach human development, I was able to help him understand that this wasn’t about being dumb, but a developmental marker he had not yet hit. He moved back to repeat the math class he took last year.
Now I have a boy who is not enthusiastic about math. He doesn’t believe he is good at it and doesn’t think math is fun, all because we want rising achievement for all students.
Young, inexperienced teachers recruited to New Orleans
Amid the tag-team commotion of three new teachers prepping a science class for summer school finals one recent morning, one teacher sits alongside a student for what seems an eternity.
The exchange is perfectly ordinary, except that in post-Katrina New Orleans, little is ordinary.
The student, a young mother forced to move four times in the 15 months after the storm, is 20 years old.
Her teacher is 22.
2008 Presidential Candidates & School Choices
As usual, Bruce Fuller and Lance Izumi , my fellow Education Watch contributors, make some fascinating points, none more startling to me than Lance’s casual throw-away that Barack Obama sends his children to private school. As a rabid public school Democrat, I crumpled in despair at the news.
Look, I am not in politics, I get no money from foundations, I do not get invited to lecture on third world eco-sustainability on luxury cruises. I have no highly placed blue-state friends and I will soon be a divorced woman because my die-hard Democratic husband will not brook any dissent, public or private, about our party.
Candidate websites: Bob Barr, McCain/Palin, McKinney/Clemente, Obama/Biden
Megan Mcardle @ the Atlantic has more.
WHERE WE STAND: America’s Schools in the 21st Century
Via a kind reader’s email:
Monday, September 15th
9:00 p.m. on Milwaukee Public Television (Channel 10)
11:00 p.m. on Wisconsin Public Television stations
In 1995, America’s college graduation rate was second in the world. Ten years later, it ranked 15th. As so many nations around the world continue to improve their systems of education, America can no longer afford to maintain the status quo. In an ever-changing, increasingly competitive global economy, is the U.S. doing all it can to prepare its students to enter the workforce of the 21st century and ensure our country’s place as a world leader?
WHERE WE STAND: America’s Schools in the 21st Century examines the major challenges for U.S. schools in the face of a changing world. Divided into five segments, topics include globalization; measuring student progress; ensuring that all students achieve; the current school funding system, and teacher quality.
WHERE WE STAND is airing at a critical time in our country’s history. Along with its companion website and a variety of dynamic outreach activities across the country, the program will inspire a national dialogue in the weeks prior to the November elections. Nationally recognized education experts and leading proponents of educational reform will put these examples in context. They include Geoffrey Canada, CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone; Diane Ravitch, education historian; Wendy Puriefoy, President of Public Education Network; Chester Finn, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute; Rick Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies, AEI; Michael Rebell, Executive Director of the Campaign for Educational Equity; and Sharon Lynn Kagan, Associate Dean for Policy, Teacher’s College at Columbia University.
How One’s ‘Number Sense’ Helps With Mathematics
Scientists have for the first time established a link between a primitive, intuitive sense of numbers and performance in math classes, a finding that could lead to new ways to help children struggling in school.
A study involving 64 14-year-olds found that the teenagers who did well on a test that measured their “number sense” were much more likely to have gotten good grades in math classes.
“We discovered that a child’s ability to quickly estimate how many things are in a group significantly predicts their performance in school mathematics all the way back to kindergarten,” said Justin Halberda, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University who led the research, published online yesterday by the journal Nature. “It was very surprising.”
Plugging In, Tuning Out
The digital culture has changed the way kids learn, but at the expense of literacy and cultural awareness.
I ask students on the first day of my journalism classes to fill out a questionnaire. Most questions inquire about their interest in journalism and any experience they have that is journalism-related. One question is: “What do you read, at least fairly regularly?”
Used to be, they would say The New York Times or Newsweek or Sports Illustrated. A few would list the local newspaper, or The New Yorker or The Economist to impress me. In recent years, the answers more often have been CNN.com, ESPN.com, blogs and other Internet offerings.
And then, at the beginning of the last semester, a student who claimed to be interested in journalism wrote this about what she reads: “Nothing.”
Her answer astonished me but shouldn’t have, because it epitomized the lack of intellectual curiosity in students that I have noticed in recent years, along with a decline in such basic skills as grammar, spelling and simple math. A sense of history? History is what happened since they left middle school.
As both a teacher and a father of two multi-tasking teenage daughters, I had long suspected that something was going on. While some students seem just as smart or smarter than they did 15 years ago, I’m also confronted with college sophomores who can’t identify Henry Kissinger or perform simple percentage exercises; who argue, as one did, that misspelling someone’s name was no big deal because I knew who she meant; students who begin sentences with lower-case letters and embellish news stories by adding their own facts.
Thanks to a kind fellow traveller for pointing this out.
School District Steps Back from Controversial Math Curriculum
Janese Heavin via a kind reader’s email:
Columbia Public Schools’ chief academic officer said the district is ready to compromise with the community when it comes to elementary math. But Sally Beth Lyon, who oversees district curricula, stopped short of saying concepts-based math would be replaced by a more traditional program.
“We’re going to figure out how to get something done so we can all move forward,” she told the Tribune. “We’re still at the table and will discuss the best way to move forward and include and acknowledge the community concerns we’re hearing.”
Lyon’s comments followed last night’s Board of Education meeting, where board member Ines Segert accused the district of appointing people to district math committees who are biased toward investigative math programs and not appointing mathematicians who favor more traditional math instruction.
Segert cited three University of Missouri math education professors who serve on district committees and have received grant funds to train Columbia teachers how to use concepts-based math materials. “They instruct teachers in a certain ideology that happens to be used in these textbooks we have in class,” said Segert, a vocal advocate of returning traditional math to classrooms.
Lyon’s comments followed what was almost a scolding from board member Ines Segert during last night’s board meeting. Segert criticized the district for appointing math education professors on math committees who seem to benefit from investigative math curriculum. She also accused the district of giving people incomplete data and summaries that skew results to justify current practices.
Lyon denied that anyone making curricula decisions receive district dollars. Any grant money they get comes from federal and state sources, she said.
Related: Madison School District Math Task Force Discussion.
Goal by Goal
I WAS born and raised in Milwaukee, the youngest of five children. My mother worked as a postal clerk, and my father was a welder and line supervisor.
My parents set a goal that all of their kids would go to college. All five of us have college degrees. My mother had started college at 16, but had finished only a year and half when her mother became ill and she had to quit. My father never had the means to go to college.
Recently, my mother told me, “Our best friends were the people at our credit union.” My parents borrowed money at the beginning of each school year and hurried to try to pay back that loan before the next school year started.
Their unspoken message was that the sky is the limit. They never said that because you are an African-American, you can go only this far or do only this or that. They just said, “Go for it.”
Madison Schools’ Math Task Force Discussion
We scrutinize MPS because we care about the community
Q. It seems sometimes that the Journal Sentinel does nothing but bash the Milwaukee Public Schools. There are a lot of people working for MPS who work hard to make a difference in kids’ lives. They are writing grant proposals to make it possible for kids to attend camps they couldn’t otherwise attend, and creating programs to keep kids involved in school and off the streets. As a former camp counselor and volunteer in the classroom, I know how important these things are.
A. I share your concern that our coverage can seem, at times, negative – not just about MPS, but about any number of community institutions we cover. It is an issue we talk about a great deal because we don’t just report on this area – we live here ourselves. What I would ask you to think about is that what drives us to report what may seem like a negative story is actually our concern, our passion, for our community.
When we write about a school board member going to a convention but never attending its sessions, it is because that money could have been used to improve the educational experience of students and teachers. When we write about the failure of the $102 million Neighborhood Schools Initiative building plan, it is because that money could have been used for other projects to transform the lives of students, teachers and staff alike. When we write about the district receiving a low level of funding to educate disabled children, it is because other districts seem to be taking better advantage of available money to improve the lives of children who already face so many challenges.
Grand Prairie (Texas) parents drop schools not making grade
Rae Ann Forester was losing confidence in Grand Prairie High School’s academic program. Even though she was president of the Parent Teacher Student Association, she took a decisive step away from the school.
Parents whose children attend struggling public schools may feel like there’s no way out. But Ms. Forester and other persistent parents are taking control of their children’s education and finding options.
“What do you do in a school that’s low-performing?” Ms. Forester asked. “If we can’t get what we need from that specific campus, we do what we need to as a family. I do want people to have options, and that’s what I’m advocating.”
After the Texas Education Agency rated Grand Prairie High School “academically unacceptable” the previous two years, the school’s poor reputation prompted some families to act.
You’re invited to attend the first national GREEN CHARTER SCHOOLS CONFERENCE November 7-9, 2008 in Madison, Wisconsin
The conference is presented by the Green Charter Schools Network, UW-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and many partnering educational and environmental organizations.
SEE CONFERENCE PROGRAM & ONLINE REGISTRATION HERE
Conference Keynoters:
William Cronon is UW-Madison Professor of History, Geography & Environmental Studies. His research seeks to understand the history of human interactions with the natural world and how we depend on the ecosystems around us to sustain our material lives, He is the author of several books, including Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature and Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.
Morgan Brown — Assistant Commissioner Morgan Brown oversees charter school programs, special education policy, food and nutrition services, adult basic education, and American Indian education programs at the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE). Previously, he served as the Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Innovation & Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education.
Prince William County, Maryland Pupils Still Grapple With Math Test
New state test results show that Prince William County’s third-graders are struggling to score at the highest level since the implementation of a controversial math program that was intended to boost performance.
The scores, which are the first state Standards of Learning (SOL) results to gauge the new program’s effectiveness, reveal that fewer than half of Prince William’s third-graders scored in the advanced category this year, the first that the Pearson math program “Investigations in Number, Data, and Space” was taught in that grade. Last year, third-graders who had not begun “Investigations” posted the same results.
The flat scores are a sizable decline since 2006, when 56 percent of third-graders reached the advanced level in math.
” ‘Investigations’ didn’t cure the problem,” said Vern Williams, a Fairfax County teacher and former member of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel who was invited by the Prince William School Board to speak at its work session later this month.
It will be interesting to see what, if any effect the soon to be released Madison Math Task Force report has on the local curriculum.
Math Forum
ACT Growth Outpacing the SAT
Thomas Chun took the SAT college entrance exam twice, scoring well within qualifying range for prestigious research universities, if hundreds of points short of the top mark.
Still, Chun believed his score, 2090 out of a possible 2400, might not stand up against those of other whiz kids at Whitney High, his selective magnet school in Cerritos. So he took the other admissions test, the ACT, and scored a perfect 36.
“I was never a big fan of the SAT,” said Chun, 17, of Cerritos, who since sixth grade has dreamed of going to Yale. “The ACT tests you on what you learned in high school rather than what you learned in test prep academy.”
The ACT was once the overlooked stepsister to the SAT. It was popular in the Midwest and the South but less established on the East and West coasts. Now, however, the ACT is growing faster than its rival, not only nationally but also in SAT strongholds such as California, where 50% more students in the class of 2008 took the ACT than their 2004 counterparts. Nationwide, the ACT was taken by 1.4 million students in the 2008 class, compared with 1.5 million who took the SAT, according to the test companies.
Teaching Fractions Effectively Webcast
The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement at Learning Point Associates:
This interactive video webcast is hosted by The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement at Learning Point Associates. The Center is funded by the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education of the U.S. Department of Education. The webcast will highlight the following:
Recommendations from the National Mathematics Advisory Panel
Instructional strategies to foster deep “conceptual and procedural knowledge of fractions”
Video clips from teacher training sessions and elementary classrooms
There is no charge for this event. It is open to the public, so please invite your colleagues to join in. Registrationis required, and minimal information is requested.
To register, visit the webcast registration page.
For more information, please contact Abner Oakes. We look forward to your participation!
The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement
Cry for change resounds in St. Paul schools
The St. Paul School District this fall is planning on engaging community members, parents and school district staff in an indepth discussion about the district’s future with one major premise: Things need to change.
The district, which serves about 38,800 students, faces considerable challenges. It has made more than $93 million in budget cuts over the last nine years. Only half its students are proficient in reading, the achievement gap between white students and students of color is among the widest in the nation, and federal and state expectations for student achievement are accelerating.
The district “is at a crossroads,” according to a presentation that district staff made to school board members on Thursday night. “Business as usual is not a sustainable option for achieving our mission.”
The St. Paul district’s efforts to comply with federal and state desegregation laws over the past 30 years and retain students have resulted in a complex network of magnet and neighborhood schools.
A Look Back at a 2001 Dayton School Board’s Results
Let’s remember back for a moment to the excitement of 2001. Gail Littlejohn, a retired corporate attorney, and three allies won four seats on the school board, taking control with a majority and promising big changes that would help lead the district back to respectability.
And for the first few years, the Kids First team had a remarkable run of successes. They replaced a well meaning but floundering superintendent with an efficient manager in Percy Mack, a move that was well received in the community. They put a reform in place that emphasized teacher training and focused on math and reading instruction. They got the NAACP and the state to agree to settle the 20-year-old desegregation case, bringing millions in cash and releasing the district from court supervision. They got a huge bond issue passed to rebuild all the schools in the city. Eventually, Dayton even had enough test score gain to jump from “academic emergency to “continuous improvement” in the state ratings. And for at least those first few years, Kids First got support from the rest of the school board, business leaders and much of the community.
Finland’s Lesson: Education
Like many other foreign journalists, I made the obligatory pilgrimage to Helsinki, Finland, to learn how this country has climbed to the top spots in key international rankings measuring economic, political and social success. The answer, I was told, is amazingly simple.
First, the facts. Finland ranks first among 179 countries in Transparency International’s index of the least corrupt nations in the world (the United States is No.20); No.1 in Freedom House’s ranking of the world’s most democratic countries (the U.S. ranks No.15); No.1 in the world in 15-year-old students’ standardized test scores in science (the U.S. ranks No.29), and is among the 10 most competitive economies in the World Economic Forum’s annual competitiveness index (the U.S. topped the list this year).
A small country of 5.3 million, which only two decades ago was by most measures the poorest country in northern Europe, Finland also boasts the headquarters of the world’s biggest cellphone maker — Nokia — and cutting-edge paper and pulp-technology firms.
Indiana Governor Candidates Discuss Education
ill Long Thompson unveiled a handful of education initiatives Wednesday while Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels introduced five campaign commercials, three of which focus on his own education proposals.
The two face off in November’s gubernatorial election.
“I don’t have all the answers, but we are not meeting our objectives,” Long Thompson said at a Statehouse news conference Wednesday.
One of her proposals is to provide a free book every month to all Hoosier children from birth to age 5. This is modeled after Tennessee’s partnership with Dolly Parton’s “Imagination Library,” but Long Thompson’s program would be paid for with private donations.
She also wants to allow kids who need the extra time and help to attend a fifth year of high school in an effort to improve Indiana’s graduation rate of about 76 percent.
US Senator Herb Kohl Supports Merit Pay for Teachers
Kohl spoke at length about education, especially the failure of the public school system in Milwaukee, “where many neighborhoods are not inhabitable … a problem spread across the country. When we have a large number of people unproductive, who do you think pays for it? We all do.”
In answer to a question about school choice, and what the questioner called the “horrible” academic gap here in Racine, Kohl responded: “Anybody who had the answer would be lauded and sainted.”
He mentioned meeting with New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and NY School Chancellor Joel Klein, and hearing from them “how important high standards and accountability are. We all know it’s not only the schools that fail; it’s the homes and neighborhoods the kids come out of. I would have very high, very high accountability, and reward good teachers, measure teachers. We need to find a way to pay teachers more, and the better ones more than that, and schools that fail should be closed.”
Kohl related his approach toward education to his firing of the Bucks GM and coach last year. “We were not getting the job done.” Ditto in education. “For too long we’ve not been willing to do enough to get the job done.”
World Class Writing
Over the past few weeks, much has been said by Senator Clinton, Michelle Obama and Senator Obama about “world class education”. Those three words have resounded in all of their speeches of late. I would like to acknowledge some “world class writing” which has recently appeared in The Concord Review, edited by Will Fitzhugh.
Below are the papers, the authors, and the high school with which the student is affiliated or enrolled. We should acknowledge the teachers, and principals of these schools, as well as the parents of these fine “world class writers”.
Congratulations to these fine young scholars on their exemplary research and writing.
Bessemer Process…Pearson W. Miller……Hunter College High School, Manhattan Island, New York.
Soviet- Afghan War…Colin Rhys Hill…….Atlanta International School, Atlanta, Georgia
Silencio!…Ines Melicias Geraldes Cardoso …Frank C. Carlucci American International School of Lisbon
Jews in England…Milo Brendan Barisof…Homescholar, Santa Cruz, California
United States Frigates…Caleb Greinke….Park Hill South High School, Riverside, Missouri
Roxy Stinson….Elizabeth W. Doe….Deerfield Academy, Deerfield, Massachusetts
Mary, Queen of Scots….Elizabeth Pitts….Charlotte Country Day School, Charlotte, North Carolina
Viking Gifts….Elisabeth Rosen….St. Ann’s School, Brooklyn, New York
Hugh Dowding….Connor Rowntree…William Hall High School, West Hartford, Connecticut
Confederate Gold….Steffi Delcourt….Frederica Academy, St. Simons Island, Georgia
Max Weber…Diane (Elly) Brinkley….Dalton School, Manhattan Island, New York
I daresay that social studies, history teachers and even history professors would learn a great deal about a variety of topics by reading these essays.Further, I would hope that these essays would serve as models of excellent scholarship and writing for high school students across America.
“Hole in the Wall” Education Researcher on Kids Teaching Themselves
TED:
In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.
In the following years they replicated the experiment in other parts of India, urban and rural, with similar results, challenging some of the key assumptions of formal education. The “Hole in the Wall” project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Mitra, who’s now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), calls it “minimally invasive education.”
College prep blends with job training
Sometimes it’s unclear which of Manuel Santos’ classes are college prep and which are vocational. Last year, he took medical terminology, classified as vocational but heavy on the advanced vocabulary he’ll need if he majors in pre-med in college.
And though the Sweetwater High School senior has taken all the advanced science courses he needs to be admitted to his top college choice, the University of California Berkeley, it may be another vocational course, medical assistant training, that is best preparing him for pre-med.
National City’s Sweetwater High and schools across San Diego County are developing a new brand of education that is a hybrid of college-prep and job training, a series of classes that will equip high school graduates to simultaneously impress employers and university admissions counselors.
New and more sophisticated job-training classes have emerged as a response to calls from industry for a skilled, homegrown work force and the rising awareness of a dropout epidemic among students who don’t find school relevant.
Sharing Classroom Created Media
t looks like part of a documentary from a cable TV nature channel, with dramatic music, video of frogs and a narrator solemnly warning that a fungus is killing the animals around the world.
It’s posted on iTunes, available for downloading. And it was produced by elementary school students in Montclair.
Students there and in four other New Jersey school districts will take a leap in classroom technology this year, using Apple’s iTunes store to post and share educational material.
Lectures, student projects, orientation videos and other media can be posted on iTunes, available free to students and parents in the five districts, or anyone else. Other New Jersey districts taking part are East Orange, Hunterdon Central Regional High School, Perth Amboy and Union City.
“The idea is that there are educators and others producing digital content that really can have value for others,” said Mary Ann Wolf, executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association, which helped Apple roll out the program, called “K-12 on iTunes U.” It is modeled after iTunes U, started about two years ago for colleges and universities.
Improving School Leadership
OECD – Directorate for Education:
School leaders in OECD countries are facing challenges with the rising expectations for schools and schooling in a century characterized by technological innovation, migration and globalization. As countries aim to transform their educational systems to prepare all young people with the knowledge and skills needed in this changing world, the roles and expectations for school leaders have changed radically. They are no longer expected to be merely good managers. Effective school leadership is increasingly viewed as key to large-scale education reform and to improved educational outcomes.
With 22 participating countries, this activity aims to support policy development by providing in-depth analyses of different approaches to school leadership. In broad terms, the following key questions are being explored:
Head of the Class: Finding the Right School for Your Child
For 20 years Sandra Tsing Loh has taken satirical shots at Los Angeles and her own growing pains without making the tiresome error, committed by nonnative observers from Joan Didion to Caitlin Flanagan, of conflating the two. Her aim is generally dead-on; her gun emplacement is even better. We not only can read the Malibu-raised Loh in The Atlantic Monthly, where she’s a contributing editor, on her Los Angeles Times blog, and in comic memoirs like A Year in Van Nuys. We can also hear her on KPCC and see her turn her elegant Chinese German face to Silly Putty in performance pieces.
Whatever the target–eye bags, ethnicity, envy, Christmas–Loh’s a linguistic Muhammad Ali, floating and stinging at a pace that would drive a hummingbird to wing splints. At times her approach has left some of her frailer subjects exhausted along with her audience. With Mother on Fire (Crown, 320 pages, $23), her new memoir expanding on the one-woman show of the same name that debuted in 2005, she’s taken on an issue scary enough to warrant her biggest guns: getting your child an education.
How harrowing, you tax-gouged nonparents may wonder, can this be? In my experience the trauma of a difficult birth is nothing compared with the scars of being polite to a teacher who has forbidden a second grader to look at a book that intrigues her “because it’s too hard.” These don’t fade even after said child has obtained a graduate degree. Schooling, in short, pushes buttons. In Los Angeles, it’s also tied to a full range of inflammatory issues, from immigration to celebrity.
Clusty Search: Sandra Tsing Lo.
MythBuster Adam Savage: 3 Ways to Fix U.S. Science Education
When Jamie Hyneman and I speak at teacher conventions, we always draw a grateful crowd. They tell us Thursday mornings are productive because students see us doing hands-on science Wednesday nights on our show MythBusters, and they want to talk about it. These teachers are so dedicated, but they have difficulty teaching for the standardized tests they’re given with the budgets they’re not given. It’s one reason the U.S. is falling behind other countries in science: By 2010, Asia will have 90 percent of the world’s Ph.D. scientists and engineers. We’re not teachers, but our show has taught us a lot about how to get people interested in science. Here are three humble suggestions that might help reinvigorate American science education.
“Middle School Madness Blog”
by Unnamed MMSD Educators [RSS]. The blog touches on the “Standards Based Report Card” initiative among a number of other topics.
What about . . . THE 6th GRADE STUDENT READING AT A 2nd GRADE LEVEL?
From the district Curricular Standards:
“These Grade Level Performance Standards describe behaviors typical at the specified grade level. They represent behaviors students generally exhibit as they move from novice to expert in their ability to take control of language processes. It is important to remember, however, that literacy learning may not be sequential and each child has a unique developmental pattern.”
The 6th grade student reading at a 2nd grade level earns a ONE (remember, no zeroes) for the Power Standard of Reading Comprehension. Why? For not meeting the “behaviors typical at the specified grade level ” (6th).
Now, if said student raises her/his reading level to that of a 4th-grade student, guess what. That student still does not meet the 6th grade standard and will still earn a ONE for the Power Standard of Reading Comprehension. Effort and improvement are not taken into consideration in this constricted construct for grading.
via a kind reader email.
Much more on standards based report cards here.
Founder of The Secret Society of Mathmaticians
Henri Cartan, one of the leaders of a revolution in mathematics, dies at 104
In the 1930s, a group of young French mathematicians led an uprising that revolutionized mathematics. France had lost most of a generation in the First World War, so the emerging hotshots in mathematics had few elders to look up to. And when these radicals did look up, they didn’t like what they saw. The practice of mathematics at the time was dry, scattered and muddled, they believed, in need of reinvention and invigoration.
So they took up arms: pens and typewriters. Using the nom de plume “Nicolas Bourbaki” (after a dead Napoleonic general), they wrote a series of textbooks laying out mathematics the right way. Though the young mathematicians started out only intending to write a good textbook for analysis (essentially an advanced form of calculus), they ended up creating dozens of volumes which formed a manifesto for a new philosophy of mathematics.
The last of the founders of Bourbaki, Henri Cartan, died August 13 at age 104. In addition to his work in Bourbaki, Cartan made groundbreaking contributions to a wide array of mathematical fields, including complex analysis, algebraic topology and homological algebra. He received the Wolf Prize in 1980, one of the highest honors in mathematics, for his work on the theory of analytic functions. Two of his students won the Fields medal, sometimes considered equivalent to the Nobel Prize in mathematics, one won the Nobel Prize in physics and another won the economics Nobel.
Open Source Textbooks Challenge a Paradigm
A small, digital book startup thinks it has a solution to the age-old student lament: overpriced textbooks that have little value when the course is over. The answer? Make them open source — and give them away.
Flat World Knowledge is the brainchild of two former textbook industry executives who learned from the inside about the wacky economy of textbooks.
In a nutshell, there is a huge, inelastic demand for college texts, even though textbook prices are high. Because of this there is a lot of piracy and a robust secondary market for textbooks — but not for long, because they are updated every couple of years, rendering old editions virtually worthless.
Perhaps a way to save some money?
Madison Edgewood senior gets a perfect ACT, almost on SAT
6 Dane County Students Score a Perfect 36 on the 2007 ACT
Edgewood High School senior Matthew Everts recently learned he’s just about perfect — when it comes to the two major college-entrance exams, anyway.
Matthew, who hopes to attend a university on the West Coast, received a 36, the highest possible composite score, on the ACT.
He remembers feeling focused when he took the ACT in June, a week before tackling the SAT.
“I knew that if I did well I wouldn’t have to take the test again,” Matthew said Tuesday. “Not having to take a four-hour test is always a good thing.”
On the SAT, Matthew received a perfect 800 on critical reading and math, two of the three SAT Critical Reasoning Tests, along with a 740 out of a possible 800 on the writing test.
Matthew also took the SAT in three subject areas — chemistry, math level two and U.S. history — and received a perfect score on all three tests.
(Adam) Schneider, who plays trumpet in the Middleton school band and is a member of the ecology club, expects to attend college and study biology at UW-Eau Claire or St. Olaf College, a liberal arts college in Minnesota. He also plans on working toward a graduate degree in botany, doing field research and teaching once he finishes school.
Schneider is one of six Dane County students to post perfect marks on the ACT test during the 2007-08 school. Others who earned perfect marks were Mary Kate Wall and Matthew Everts from Edgewood High School, Axel Glaubitz and Dianna Amasino from Madison West High School and Alex Van Abel from Monona Grove High School. All the students were juniors when they took the test.
At the state level, 22 students received perfect scores on the ACT test last school year. On the national level, less than one-tenth of 1 percent of students that take the ACT test earn a perfect mark.
Meanwhile, six Madison Metropolitan School District students earned perfect test scores in 2006.
