President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have made charter schools a big part of their reform agenda, but the pushback from unions has been fierce. Perhaps that explains why the new $10 billion federal teacher bailout will be dispensed in a way that discriminates against charters.
The Administration’s initial guidance excluded many charter school teachers, even though charters are public schools. The Department of Education said money from the Education Jobs Fund could go only to teachers and others employed by a local education agency or school district.
“A charter school,” says the department, “may not use Ed Jobs funds to pay for the compensation and benefits of employees of a charter management organization or an educational management organization who provide school-level educational and related services in the charter school.” Many charter school teachers are employees of management firms rather than the school district, so the guidelines would have excluded more than 1,000 charters nationwide (serving around 400,000 students) from the cash.
Managing Expectations of Costly Kids
At 10, Grace Morgan is a young fashionista and takes pains to dress in the latest styles. But her mom, Amy, works part-time and her husband was recently laid off, leaving little room in the family budget for designer-brand clothes.
So Grace didn’t ask her mom to open her wallet this fall to buy clothes. Instead, she sold a stack of her own old jeans and shirts at a rummage sale and paired the proceeds with discount coupons to get the stylish jeggings and tops she wanted for school, says her mother, of Lake in the Hills, Ill. Grace is learning “we have to make choices with our money,” she says.
The cost of raising kids is continuing to rise. A middle-income family can expect to shell out nearly a quarter of a million dollars, or $222,360, to raise a baby born in 2009 to age 18, according to the Department of Agriculture. That is up about 1.4% from 2007, before the recession began–and it doesn’t include college costs.
Mitch Henck Discusses Madison’s Attempts to Restrict Open Enrollment
15.8MB mp3 audio file, via a kind reader.
Related:
- Madison School District’s Attempt to Limit Outbound Open Enrollment, via a WASB Policy Recommendation.
- Madison School Board Discussion: Private/Parochial, Open Enrollment Leave, Open Enrollment Enter, Home Based Parent Surveys
- Madison School Board member Ed Hughes on restricting open enrollment.
Model preschool program emphasizes inclusion for children with disabilities
It is 8:30 on a crisp September morning, the start of a busy day for preschoolers at the Waisman Center’s Early Childhood Program, a nationally renowned laboratory school.
At a piano in the gym, a teacher holds a 4-year-old named Michael in her lap and helps him tap out “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” She speaks to him using both sign language and a singsong voice. Several other boys driving toy cars swerve around another teacher doing duty as traffic cop. A student teacher is coloring at a table with students. In a corner of the gym, two girls are playing house. “This is your bed, Baby Kitty. Go to sleep right NOW!” one of them says. A tiny child with big brown eyes, named Caroline, curls up on a mat and pretends to sleep.
Michael, distracted by the noisy traffic behind him, wriggles out of Kerri Lynch’s lap and runs up to the boys in cars, making guttural sounds. The boys ignore him and continue to whiz past. Lynch waves down an especially energetic driver in a red T-shirt who has snagged the school’s popular police car. “Michael is talking to you,” she says, holding Michael, who is clearly becoming frustrated. She puts Michael’s face between her hands gently so that he makes eye contact with the other child and encourages him to try to speak again. The other boy listens carefully as the teacher translates: “Michael is wondering when he can have a turn?”
Handwriting program worth writing home about
The handwriting workshop at Meriter Hospital is much more than penmanship drills.
The 8-week program for elementary students focuses on areas such as upper body strength and stability and eye-hand coordination. Some students took the hour-long class, which was held once a week, in the summer to be more prepared for school this fall. Two more evening workshops for students grades second through fifth will start Sept. 28.
“Handwriting is really important,” said Noah Walker, 7, a second grader at Cottage Grove Elementary School. “It won’t be all scribbly.”
At a recent session, Noah practiced throwing animal-shaped bean bags against the wall. Later he practiced writing with a vibrating pen to work on grip strength and to make the task more enjoyable.
Lucky breaks as juvenile kept Latin Kings leader free Barragan, a homicide suspect on the lam, was convicted in Children’s Court but sentence was stayed
When it came to violent crime, Armando Barragan started young, shooting up a van of rival gang members at age 14 and, eight months later, attacking a Milwaukee police officer, trying to grab his gun.
The crimes landed Barragan in the juvenile justice system, but he got breaks that kept him on the street, where he committed new crimes, according to Children’s Court records and police reports reviewed by the Journal Sentinel.
Barragan quickly rose to become a leader of the Latin Kings and was charged with ordering the execution of a man who tried to stop a fight outside a Cudahy gas station in 2003 – one of six homicides or attempted homicides he was investigated for by the time he was 18.
The Journal Sentinel reported in July that miscommunication between federal and state authorities resulted in missing a chance to arrest Barragan in a courtroom before he fled to Mexico and became one of the U.S. Marshals Service’s most wanted fugitives.
Court documents show Barragan could have – and probably should have – been behind bars in April 2003, when Kevin Hirschfield was shot to death outside the gas station. He was free because of breaks he received, first from a judge and later from police, according to court records and interviews.
Misguided use of microchip technology
Officials with Contra Costa County’s Head Start program were frustrated. In order to meet federal requirements, they had to take attendance every hour.
These and other administrative tasks were taking up a lot of teachers’ time – between one and three hours a day per teacher – and using up a lot of the program’s limited funds.
We sympathize with their pain. An hourly attendance requirement is indeed burdensome, and it’s a useless distraction from the very important work that Head Start does – preparing low-income preschoolers for school. But we can’t support what those officials did next, which was to implement a microchip tracking program for those very young children.
ACLU sues California for allowing school districts to charge fees
The suit alleges that more than 30 districts require students and their families to pay for books and other basic supplies that are supposed to be provided at no cost.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the state of California on Friday for allowing school districts to charge students for books, uniforms, classes and other basic supplies.
The suit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, alleges that more than 30 districts require students and their families to pay for basic supplies that are supposed to be provided at no cost. Districts cited in the lawsuit include Beverly Hills, Burbank and Long Beach.
The Los Angeles Unified School District was not named in the suit, although “we have heard anecdotal reports about Los Angeles,” Mark Rosenbaum, chief counsel for the ACLU of Southern California, said at a morning news conference.
Dear alma mater: I can’t pay
At New York’s colleges and universities, the arrival of a new school year brings anticipation tinged with anxiety. For many students, the second emotion is prompted by one nagging question: How am I going to pay for this?
Many of them won’t be able to find an answer. The Higher Education Services Corp., which services and collects federally backed college loans in New York, has almost $2 billion worth of defaulted debt on its hands.
As of July 1, HESC listed 145,437 accounts with $1,983,922,931 in college loans that had gone into default. That’s up from last year, when there were 144,216 borrowers for a total of $1,895,211,727 by the end of July.
In 1991, the defaulted sum was just $230 million.
Visualizing the U.S. Higher Education Bubble
Is there really a bubble in US higher education?
Today, one way or another, we’re going to find out! First, let’s define just what a bubble is:An economic bubble exists whenever the price of an asset that may be freely exchanged in a well-established market first soars then plummets over a sustained period of time at rates that are decoupled from the rate of growth of the income that might be realized from either owning or holding the asset.
Here, we’ll consider the asset to be one year of college education at a four-year institution, whose price is given by the cost of tuition and any required fees for attendance.
Desk Arrest Stirs Protest
In February, 12-year-old Alexa Gonzalez doodled on her desk in social studies class at her junior high school in Forest Hills: “Lexi was here 2/1/10” and “I Love my babis, Abby & Faith.”
Ms. Gonzalez was escorted to the dean’s office where school safety officers had her empty her backpack, take off her shoes and sweater and then searched her pockets. The New York Police Department was then called and four officers arrived, arrested her then walked her out of the school with her wrists handcuffed behind her back as classmates looked on. Her mother was told she would have to report to family court on vandalism charges.
The severity of authorities’ reaction has turned Ms. Gonzalez, who was using an erasable marker, into the poster child for a student rights movement that wants more transparency on the suspensions, expulsions and arrests in each school. A protest rally, sponsored by the New York Civil Liberties Union and student rights groups, was held at the Board of Education building behind City Hall on Tuesday calling on law makers to pass the so-called Student Safety Act. It would provide detailed data of disciplinary action taken by the School Safety Division, which is part of the NYPD, by race, sex, age, disability and socioeconomic status.
Both the city’s Department of Education and NYPD have conceded their officers overreacted in Ms. Gonzalez’s case and didn’t act within their guidelines.
Plenty of university graduates are working in low-skilled jobs
Young people often worry whether the qualification for which they are studying will stand them in good stead in the workplace. According to the OECD, college and university leavers are better placed in the labour market than their less educated peers, but this advantage is not even in all countries. Young graduates living in Spain are particularly likely to end up taking low-skilled work, while those in Luxembourg rarely take anything other than a graduate job. American and British students appear to have the biggest incentive to study: British graduates aged 25-34 earn $57,000 on average. Their Swedish peers earn $37,400.
Who’s That Texting Your Kids in Class 66% of the Time? Parents
The days of getting caught talking in class are over–and so aren’t the days of even getting caught.
According to a new survey by app developer textPlus, which surveyed more than 600 of its users aged 13 to 17, texting is more rampant than ever in the classroom. A whopping 42.5% of teens admit to texting during class, and more than half of those say they text sometimes or constantly. What’s more, nearly 80% of students say they’ve never gotten in trouble for texting during class, suggesting the eyes-down, cell-under-the-desk method is slipping past even your most yard-stick taunting school teachers.
With more than 42% of teens admitting to bringing a cell phone or iPod Touch to class, isn’t it time schools start cracking down? And if technology is to become more a part of education, how will teachers ever track students who are already able to pull off using these devices when they’re not supposed to? As more and more gadgets enter the classroom, won’t it just make it easier to find distractions?
Madison West High gang incident raises specter of retaliation
An armed altercation Friday outside West High School involving known and suspected members of two street gangs involved in an April homicide heightened concerns of possible retaliation, police and school officials said Tuesday.
Sgt. Amy Schwartz, who leads the Madison Police Department’s Crime Prevention Gang Unit, said it is not known if members of the South Side Carnales gang went to the high school looking for members of the rival Clanton 14, or C-14 gang.
But staff at West and the city’s three other main high schools and two middle schools were told Tuesday to determine if safety plans are needed for any students who might be at risk, said Luis Yudice, security coordinator for the Madison School District.
Police have not notified the School District of a specific threat against any student, Yudice said.
But authorities have been concerned about possible retaliation since the April 28 shooting death of Antonio Perez, 19, who police say founded Madison’s C-14 gang several years ago while he was a high school student. Five people, who police say are associated with the South Side Carnales and MS-13 gangs, are charged in Perez’s slaying. Two of them remain at large.
Related: Gangs & School Violence Forum audio / video.
A kind reader noted this quote from the article:
“But authorities have been concerned about possible retaliation since the April 28 shooting death of Antonio Perez, 19, who police say founded Madison’s C-14 gang several years ago while he was a high school student.”
Much more here.
Keeping Track of the Kids
This is an era in which many devices are watching us. We carry about wireless phones that tell our service providers exactly where we are. Surveillance cameras blink down from corners and storefronts. Advertisers follow us effortlessly around the Internet. Still, plans in Contra Costa County, Calif., to tag preschoolers with radio frequency identification chips to keep track of their whereabouts at school seem to go too far.
The concern that school officials would use the ID chips to keep tabs on children’s behavior — and tag them perhaps as hyperactive or excessively passive — seems overwrought. County officials point out that the tags will save money and allow teachers to devote less time to attendance paperwork and more time to their students. And the chips, which will be randomly assigned to different children every day, according to a county representative, will not carry personal information that could be intercepted by others.
Has college sendoff always been so tough?
The hour when Ariana Kramer will begin her college career is fast approaching — and her parents are in an office supply store, disagreeing about hanging files, of all things.
“She’ll need them,” her mother says.
“I don’t think so,” her dad counters.
Ariana, meanwhile, walks dreamily through the store, offering no opinion on this particular decision. She is, in fact, confident that she will have what she needs when she starts her freshman year at the University of Iowa.
She has mom, the family organizer, with her, and dad, the calm encourager. And they have “the list,” which mom printed from one of those “what-you’ll-need-at-college” websites.
New laptop. Check.
Private vs Public Education
The lawn is meticulously manicured, as if the groundskeeper’s tools include a cuticle scissors. Classic brick buildings, a bell tolling the hour and concrete lion statues almost convince me that I’m at an East Coast college. But this is Lakeside School in Northeast Seattle.
This is where super-achievers went to school – Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Craig McCaw to name a few. Many of Seattle’s affluent families send their kids here for a challenging private education. With an acceptance rate of 24 percent, Lakeside is the most elite private high school in the Northwest. This photo of Bliss Hall was taken before the current renovation project started.
So what was I doing there? Just wandering, and wondering if my children would have a better start in life if they went to private schools.
“As someone who has experienced both public schooling and private schooling, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind: sending your child to a private school is one of the best decisions you can make for him or her,” says Peter Rasmussen, a recent Lakeside alumnus. “In retrospect, if my parents made me pay my tuition all by myself, I would have. That’s how valuable a Lakeside education is.”
The New Black Migration: The Suburbs or Bust
Steven Snead, via a kind reader
Recall now the biblical phrase, “from whence comes my help?” It mentions looking up to the hills and Detroiters are doing just that.
They are looking to the Hills of Bloomfield, Auburn Hills, and Rochester Hills. They are looking to the rich green lawns of Troy, Sterling Heights, Farmington, and Gross Pointe. And yes, they are looking to their excellent schools too.
I have no doubt that this mother’s prayers have been duplicated by thousands of Detroit parents. The results of the 2010 census will no doubt show that minority populations have increased in suburban cities and overall population in Detroit will yet again hit an all time low. So while they desperately scramble to enroll their children in charter schools and suburban schools of choice, parents still have their compass set due north. Way north.
This is the New Black Migration. And if school leaders cannot devise a way to make the city schools a viable option for parents who want the best for their children, it will be a migration whose tide will know no end.
Clusty Search: Steven Snead.
Related: Madison Preparatory Academy.
Teaching for a Shared Future: American Educators Need to Think Globally
Esther Wojcicki & Michael Levine, via a Kris Olds email:
American students’ lack of knowledge about the world is unsettling.
According to surveys by National Geographic and Asia Society, young Americans are next to last in their knowledge of geography and current affairs compared to peers in eight other countries, and the overwhelming majority of college-bound seniors cannot find Afghanistan, Iraq or Israel on a world map.
Less than one half of today’s high school students study a foreign language, and while a million study French, a language spoken by some 80 million worldwide, less than 75,000 study Chinese, a language spoken by some 1.3 billion. Minority students especially have little access to global topics taught in “higher performing” schools, ranging from languages and economics to exchanges, arts and cultural activities.
The typical teacher or supervisor is not prepared to address this gap: most educators have not taken any international courses and comparatively few participate in study abroad programs.
Schools: The Disaster Movie A debate has been raging over why our education system is failing. A new documentary by the director of An Inconvenient Truth throws fuel on the fire.
The Harlem-based educator and activist Geoffrey Canada first met the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim in 2008, when Canada was in Los Angeles raising money for the Children’s Defense Fund, which he chairs. Guggenheim told Canada that he was making a documentary about the crisis in America’s schools and implored him to be in it. Canada had heard this pitch before, more times than he could count, from a stream of camera-toting do-gooders whose movies were destined to be seen by audiences smaller than the crowd on a rainy night at a Brooklyn Cyclones game. Canada replied to Guggenheim as he had to all the others: with a smile, a nod, and a distracted “Call my office,” which translated to “Buzz off.”
Then Guggenheim mentioned another film he’d made–An Inconvenient Truth–and Canada snapped to attention. “I had absolutely seen it,” Canada recalls, “and I was stunned because it was so powerful that my wife told me we couldn’t burn incandescent bulbs anymore. She didn’t become a zealot; she just realized that [climate change] was serious and we have to do something.” Canada agreed to be interviewed by Guggenheim, but still had his doubts. “I honestly didn’t think you could make a movie to get people to care about the kids who are most at risk.”
Two years later, Guggenheim’s new film, Waiting for “Superman,” is set to open in New York and Los Angeles on September 24, with a national release soon to follow. It arrives after a triumphal debut at Sundance and months of buzz-building screenings around the country, all designed to foster the impression that Guggenheim has uncorked a kind of sequel: the Inconvenient Truth of education, an eye-opening, debate-defining, socially catalytic cultural artifact.
Related: An increased emphasis on adult employment – Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s recent speech to the Madison Rotary Club and growing expenditures on adult to adult “professional development“.
Everyone should see this film; Waiting for Superman. Madison’s new Urban League President, Kaleem Caire hosted a screening of The Lottery last spring. (Thanks to Chan Stroman for correcting me on the movie name!)
Caire is driving the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy International Baccalaureate charter school initiative.
Study finds capable children are their own best defense against abduction
The children most at risk of attempted abduction by strangers are girls ages 10 to 14, many on their way to or from school, and they escape harm mostly through their own fast thinking or fierce resistance, according to a new national analysis.
Probing a crime that is infrequent but strikes fear in the hearts of parents as little else does, analysts from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children found that children who encountered would-be abductors were usually alone, often in the late afternoon or early evening.
It’s a chilling thought for working parents and all those who have asked children to hold hands tightly in crowds or to phone as soon as they get home from school. It calls to mind last year’s killing of Somer Thompson, 7, snatched en route from school in Florida as she ran ahead of her siblings, and the highly publicized case of Elizabeth Smart, taken from her Utah bedroom at age 14.
7 strategies to avoid the college debt trap
Is it worth it to pay $200,000 for a liberal arts education, especially if it means taking out loans? One of my 20-something Kiplinger colleagues answers bluntly: “If I had realized how much debt I was getting into, I would have gone to my state school instead of an expensive private college.”
As important as education is in today’s world, families need to find more affordable ways to pay for it. Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org and FastWeb.com, has calculated that total student-loan debt exceeds revolving credit (mostly credit-card debt).
Here’s my guide for parents about avoiding the student-debt trap:
Too often, students’ parents get lost in the equation
Vernita Otukoya said her son, Babatunde, was struggling in third grade last year. So she met with his teacher at Milwaukee’s 53rd St. School.
“We made a plan, we stuck with it, we checked with each other on a regular basis,” Otukoya said. The literacy coach at the school gave her books that her son could read. The teamwork and the focus on how to help Babatunde paid off.
“He actually made the honor roll” by the end of the school year, Otukoya said proudly as her son began his first day of fourth grade Wednesday.
Would that all stories of parent-teacher interaction were that positive. For that matter, would that there were a lot more stories of parent-teacher interaction at all.
There is no getting around the fact that the low level of parent involvement in helping children succeed in school is a huge impediment to educational success, especially in low-income communities.
That’s true nationwide. It’s true in Milwaukee. The teacher who has 30 kids and maybe five parents show up for conferences is a common and discouraging story.
Lack of funding, high-speed Internet, counseling hampers Alaska students, group says Read more: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner – Lack of funding high speed Internet counseling hampers Alaska students group says
A special advisory task force is meeting in Fairbanks to address poor retention and graduation rates in higher education.
The state Legislature created the group largely to address poor skills exhibited by many high school graduates entering college and vocational programs.
The task force, which includes education leaders, lawmakers and students, is meeting at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and hearing from education agencies.
Senate President Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak and one of the group’s two chairmen, said the task force hopes to pinpoint enough potential solutions to buttress recommendations, due by April, for better preparing high school students for postsecondary education.
“No surprises here, we know the problems,” Stevens said. Local funding shortfalls, heavy demand for remedial coursework after high school and a shortfall of student counseling services challenge school districts and the university, he said. Alaska would benefit from a standing education task force to keep studying those issues, he said.
Read more: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner – Lack of funding high speed Internet counseling hampers Alaska students group says
Advice for kids on the first day of school
I wrote a column in June that offered advice to the new superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools. With the new school year beginning, I thought I would offer some advice to MPS students on their first day of class.
Good morning, students. On your first day of school, there are a million things going through your minds. I hate to do this to you, but I am going to add a few more things for you to think about.
First and foremost, take a look around. Do you see where you are? Make it a habit. Attend all of your classes each and every day. That is the only way you are going to get an education.
Second, do your homework. Don’t just bring it home and back to school – actually do it. The only way you can get anything out of it is by actually doing your best to complete each and every assignment.
Good teachers, good students
The role of test scores in evaluating teachers is a prickly and complicated issue, which is why California has been avoiding the conversation for so long. Fortunately, that procrastination is no longer possible after The Times took the bold step of analyzing standardized test scores in the Los Angeles Unified School District to see whether individual teachers appeared to be successful at raising their students’ scores.
Given the current nationwide push to include test data in teacher evaluations, it was time to strip away the mystery about test scores and take a close look at what they are, what they show and don’t show, and what teachers, administrators and the rest of us might learn from them. The Times’ articles and online database rating nearly 6,000 elementary school teachers allow the examination to begin.
Ouch! Madison schools are ‘weak’? and College Station’s School District
Wisconsin State Journal Editorial
Another national magazine says Madison is one of the nation’s best cities in which to raise a family.
That’s something to celebrate.
But Kiplinger’s, a monthly business and personal finance periodical, also raps ours city schools as “weak” in its latest edition.
That’s troubling.
“Madison city schools are weak relative to the suburban schools,” the magazine wrote in its analysis of the pros and cons of living here with children.
Really?
The magazine apparently used average test scores to reach its conclusion. By that single measure, yes, Dane County’s suburban schools tend to do better.
But the city schools have more challenges – higher concentrations of students in poverty, more students who speak little or no English when they enroll, more students with special needs.
None of those factors should be excuses. Yet they are reality.
And Madison, in some ways, is ahead of the ‘burbs. It consistently graduates some of the highest-achieving students in the state. It offers far more kinds of classes and clubs. Its diverse student population can help prepare children for an increasingly diverse world.
Madison School Board member Ed Hughes compares WKCE scores, comments on the Kiplinger and Wisconsin State Journal article and wonders if anyone would move from Madison to College Station, TX [map], which Kiplinger’s ranked above our local $15,241 2009/2010 per student public schools.
I compared Madison, WI to College Station, TX using a handy Census Bureau report.
93.8% of College Station residents over 25 are high school graduates, a bit higher than Madison’s 92.4%.
58.1% of College Station residents over 25 have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to Madison’s 48.2%
Madison does have a higher median household and per capita income along with a population about three times that of College Station.
Turning to the public school districts, readers might be interested in having a look at both websites: the College Station Independent School District and the Madison Metropolitan School District. 75% of College Station students took the ACT (average score: 22.6) while 67% of Madison students took the exam and achieved a composite score of 24.2.
College Station publishes a useful set of individual school report cards, which include state and national test results along with attendance and dropout data.
College Station’s 2009-2010 budget was $93,718.470, supporting 9,712 students = $9,649.76 per student. . They also publish an annual check register, allowing interested citizens to review expenditures.
Madison’s 2009-2010 budget was $370,287,471 for 24,295 students = $15,241 per student, 57.9% higher than College Station.
College Station’s A and M Consolidated High School offers 22 AP classes while Madison East offers 12, Memorial 25 (8 of which are provided by Florida Virtual…), LaFollette 13 and West 8.
College Station’s “student profile” notes that the District is 59.3% white, 31.4% are economically disadvantaged while 10.3% are in talented and gifted.
Texas’s 2010 National Merit Semifinalist cut score was 216 while Wisconsin’s was 207. College Station’s high school had 16 National Merit Semi-Finalists (the number might be 40 were College Station the same size as Madison and perhaps still higher with Wisconsin’s lower cut score) during the most recent year while Madison’s high schools had 57.
Raising Minimalist Children in a Society of Excess
There is a growing trend toward minimalism and voluntary simplicity. I have written about it many times here. We made a huge leap towards minimalism and a more simple life last year. We moved from a large house in the suburbs to a small 1000 square foot house in the city. We downgraded to one car and we got rid of 50% of our belongings. You kind of have to when you move into a smaller place. It was a wonderful experience and has helped us see more clearly what kind of life we want to shape.
We are moving again to a better area of town and a slightly nicer home but it is only 300 square feet bigger and lucky for us that wiggle room translates into better closet space (so we can ditch our dressers), a dishwasher, and an extra bathroom. Once again we chose a place that is right next to one of the major Metro Parks because being close to nature is what we value. It was only after living so simply that we can move into this equally modest home and feel like we are living luxuriously. And because we don’t want to move tons of stuff.. even if it is way less than what we had a year ago… we have given away or sold another 50% of our stuff.
Robotic Nation
I went to McDonald’s this weekend with the kids. We go to McDonald’s to eat about once a week because it is a mile from the house and has an indoor play area. Our normal routine is to walk in to McDonald’s, stand in line, order, stand around waiting for the order, sit down, eat and play.
On Sunday, this decades-old routine changed forever. When we walked in to McDonald’s, an attractive woman in a suit greeted us and said, “Are you planning to visit the play area tonight?” The kids screamed, “Yeah!” “McDonald’s has a new system that you can use to order your food right in the play area. Would you like to try it?” The kids screamed, “Yeah!”
The woman walks us over to a pair of kiosks in the play area. She starts to show me how the kiosks work and the kids scream, “We want to do it!” So I pull up a chair and the kids stand on it while the (extremely patient) woman in a suit walks the kids through the screens. David ordered his food, Irena ordered her food, I ordered my food. It’s a simple system. Then it was time to pay. Interestingly, the kiosk only took cash in the form of bills. So I fed my bills into the machine. Then you take a little plastic number to set on your table and type the number in. The transaction is complete.
Bill Dickens versus the Signaling Model of Education
I take it that you think that nearly all of the value of schooling is signaling? I used to take that view too, but the accumulation of evidence that I’ve seen leads me to believe that isn’t the case.
For one thing I find it very hard to believe that we would waste so many resources on a nearly unproductive enterprise. There are plenty of entrepreneurs out there trying to make money by selling cheaper, in time and money, versions of education and they aren’t very successful. Mainstream schools have experimented with programmed learning, lectures on video, self-paced learning, etc. and none of the methods have caught on. Why wouldn’t they if they worked?
Of course its hard to believe that reading novels and poems contributes much to ones productivity on the job. So how do I square curriculum content with my view that education is productive? Here goes:
1. Education isn’t mainly about learning specific subject matter. Rather education is mainly about practicing the sort of self-discipline that is necessary to be productive in a modern work environment. High school allows you to practice showing up on time and doing what you are told. College allows you to practice and work out techniques that work for you that allow you to take on and complete on time complicated multi-part tasks in an environment where you have considerable freedom about how you spend your time. Some people may be more talented than others at this sort of thing (you come to mind as someone who is particularly talented at self-discipline), but this is also an acquired skill that one can develop with practice, and everyone needs to develop certain work habits that make one more productive at both types of tasks.
We all must take part in education
I had the pleasure of teaching a group of Milwaukee Public Schools students this summer. And, yes, it was a pleasure. Classes were small – 15 students maximum – there was team-teaching and students and faculty had access to technology.
Many of the students were those who had not met math and literacy requirements during the 2009-’10 academic year. Some had let their behavior get in the way of their learning, so we were eager to provide some structure that would help them move forward.
By the end of the summer session, our data revealed that our students made gains in math and vocabulary acquisition. According to MPS standards, a 7% to 9% gain in math or literacy is acceptable. Many of our students had 10% to 60% gains.
I don’t believe this progress would be possible with 40 students in a classroom, without access to technology or without extra adults in the classroom. We were able to give our students the individualized attention that they would not get in an overcrowded and understaffed classroom.
It is crucial that our educational leaders go back to the basics during the 2010-’11 school year. Education is a contact activity, and more contact is better.
A Look at the Small Learning Community Experiment
Did Bill Gates waste a billion dollars because he failed to understand the formula for the standard deviation of the mean? Howard Wainer makes the case in the entertaining Picturing the Uncertain World (first chapter with the Gates story free here). The Gates Foundation certainly spent a lot of money, along with many others, pushing for smaller schools and a lot of the push came because people jumped to the wrong conclusion when they discovered that the smallest schools were consistently among the best performing schools.
…….
States like North Carolina which reward schools for big performance gains without correcting for size end up rewarding small schools for random reasons. Worst yet, the focus on small schools may actually be counter-productive because large schools do have important advantages such as being able to offer more advanced classes and better facilities.
Schools2 All of this was laid out in 2002 in a wonderful paper I teach my students every year, Thomas Kane and Douglas Staiger’s The Promise and Pitfalls of Using Imprecise School Accountability Measures.
In recent years Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation have acknowledged that their earlier emphasis on small schools was misplaced. Perhaps not coincidentally the Foundation recently hired Thomas Kane to be deputy director of its education programs.
Related: Small Learning Communities and English 10.
At East High School, ‘Freshman Academy’ is fun but has a serious purpose
It felt more like a day of summer camp than the first day of school, with team-building fun and games and youthful leaders in T-shirts and shorts.
But the goal of ninth-grade orientation Wednesday at Madison’s East High School — the school year’s first day that’s been labeled “Freshman Academy” — was serious: to lower truancy rates, curb behavior problems and raise academic success of the incoming class of 2014.
As it’s been in Madison for years, the first day of school in the city’s public high schools was dedicated to welcoming only ninth-graders, an effort to help them find their way before the buildings become flooded with additional sophomores, juniors and seniors Thursday.
East’s new take on that is based on Link Crew, a national program designed to bond newcomers with juniors and seniors, who throughout the year will serve as mentors and personal cheerleaders to a freshman group of about six students each.
The L.A. Times Flunks L.A. Schoolteachers The newspaper takes on the two L.A. sacred cows–teachers and unions–and lives to print again!
Nobody but a schoolteacher or a union acolyte could criticize the Los Angeles Times’ terrific package of stories–complete with searchable database–about teacher performance in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Union leader A.J. Duffy of the United Teachers Los Angeles stupidly called for a boycott of the Times. Boycotts can be sensible things, but threatening to boycott a newspaper is like threatening to throw it into a briar patch. Hell, Duffy might as well have volunteered to sell Times subscriptions, door-to-door, as to threaten a boycott. Doesn’t he understand that the UTLA has no constituency outside its own members and lip service from members of other Los Angeles unions? Even they know the UTLA stands between them and a good education for their children.
Duffy further grouched that the Times was “leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by … a test.” [Ellipsis in the original.] Gee, Mr. Duffy, aren’t students judged by test results?
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten also knocked the Times for publishing the database that measures the performance of 6,000 elementary-school teachers. Weingarten went on to denounce the database as “incomplete data masked as comprehensive evaluations.” Of course, had the Times analysis flattered teachers, Weingarten would be praising the results of the analysis.
Wisconsin’s Mind is on Education
Kenneth M. Goldstein and William G. Howell
Over half of Wisconsinites (51 percent) told us that they were paying either “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of attention to issues involving education. In national surveys, 38 percent of the American public as a whole. When asked about specific education reforms, moreover, Wisconsinites are as much as five times more likely to stake out a clear position either in support or opposition than is the American public. Assuming such differences aren’t strictly an artifact of survey methodology, a possibility we will discuss, Wisconsinites seem to pay more attention to educational issues and revealed a greater willingness to offer their opinions on education and potential reforms. In other words, when it comes to education, the people of Wisconsin have strong views and that makes them different from the rest of the country.
Wisconsin residents reported higher levels of support for a variety of reforms–in particular vouchers, charter schools, online education, and merit pay–than does the nation as a whole. That said, opposition levels to these reforms were also as high or higher than the nation as a whole. Though they give their local schools slightly lower grades than does the American public, Wisconsin residents also claimed (correctly) that their students perform as well as or better than students in other states on standardized tests. And Wisconsin residents are just as enthusiastic about student accountability requirements as is the American public. And Wisconsinites have another thing in common with their fellow Americans: they vastly underestimate the actual amount of money that is spent each year on students in public schools.
There is another important element that can be taken from this poll. The divide between residents of Milwaukee and the rest of the state is deep. When asked about the quality of education in the state, Milwaukee residents offered significantly lower assessments than do residents statewide. In addition, city of Milwaukee residents distinguish themselves from other Wisconsinites for their higher levels of support for various education policy reforms.
How to Reform the Failing Schools
In “Steal This Movie, Too” (column, Aug. 25), Thomas L. Friedman is right to rejoice in those educators working from the bottom up.
I have been lucky enough to have enjoyed a career as a teaching artist in the Catskills and in New York City for many years. I see the really great teachers and administrators every day, and they have two important characteristics in common: they love and respect the children, and they love and are open to thought.
Everything else follows — the expectations that the children really want to learn and will do well, the enthusiasm with which the educators seek out and bring new ideas to the classroom and are willing to listen to the students’ theories, and the eagerness to bring others into the classroom to contribute other concepts. These educators should indeed be championed.
Look Ma, No Pedals! Ditch the Training Wheels? New Bikes Promise a Faster Way to Learn
Learning to ride a bike usually involves bumps, bruises, lots of practice–and back-breaking pain, too, if you’re the parent running hunched over behind your child’s wobbling cycle.
A new breed of bicycles that claims to help improve balance and allay jitters is changing how kids reach this childhood milestone. The bikes promote a simple strategy: ride without the pedals first.
Balance bikes–also called like-a-bikes and run bikes–are already widespread in Europe and are gaining popularity in the U.S. Bike makers say that children develop balance most effectively by sitting on the bike and walking with their feet flat on the ground and learning to pedal later. The bikes are generally meant for children ages two to five although some parents choose to buy them earlier.
Models cost from $50 to upwards of $200, or more than a regular kid’s bike with pedals. And 4- and 5-year-olds may outgrow them pretty quickly, moving on to a real two-wheeler in less than a year.
First virtual school in Mass. opens Thursday
As students in the state’s first online-only public school, they will log onto a computer and find out what books they need to read and what new skills they should master.
The Massachusetts Virtual Academy opens in Greenfield on Thursday, not only as the first in the state, but also as the first virtual school in New England to serve students from kindergarten through high school.
At virtual school, the students will take all of their classes online and have a learning coach make sure they complete their assignments. A parent could be certified, for instance, to be the learning coach.
The student can work anytime of day and some may never see their teachers in person.
Big incentive for school attendance: Cash
Stacey Wright had more than a dozen choices when it came to enrolling three of her children in an elementary school, from charters to magnets to traditional public schools in every corner of the city.
She chose Jefferson Elementary School, the brick St. Louis public school across the street. And for that, she may get $900.
For the first time, a local organization is offering parents a cash incentive to enroll their children at Jefferson. The money is limited to students who didn’t attend the school last year. To get it, the kids must finish this semester with near-perfect attendance and receive no out-of-school suspensions; the parent must attend three PTO meetings. The program is being offered to families in three mixed-income housing complexes surrounding the school, where most of the students live.
Wright, an in-home caregiver, recently moved with her children to north St. Louis from Oxford, Miss. She’s eager to get involved at Jefferson, located at Hogan and O’Fallon streets.
The Mystery Among Us Autism diagnoses are on the rise. The reasons are elusive, but understanding the disorder doesn’t have to be
Autism has hit L.A. harder than almost any other region of California, with diagnosed cases double or quadruple the state average in many instances, and at a time when our local schools and public health agencies have ever less funds to intervene. In the September issue of Los Angeles we tackle the subject of autism in L.A. While the causes of this public health crisis are elusive, understanding the disorder doesn’t have to be. We offer practical advice for parents on what do after their son’s or daughter’s diagnosis and an etiquette handbook for friends and relatives (example: Do not say, “She’s autistic? She looks normal.”). We explore how the film industry has shaped–and misshaped–autism awareness, whether it’s Elvis Presley as a singing physician who smothers autism with hugs in 1969’s Change of Habit or Claire Danes’s majestic work in HBO’s Temple Grandin. Dustin Hoffman discusses the many realities that coalesced into his Oscar-winning role as Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man. We hear from warrior moms–or “AutMoms”–struggling for their children in Silver Lake and Compton, and from dads as diverse as Altadena poet Tony Peyser and former NFL quarterback Rodney Peete. Then there are firsthand accounts from adults with autism, among them Pulitzer-winning music critic Tim Page, who tells how he chooses not to wear prescription eyeglasses in order to dull the sensory assault that is Los Angeles.
Alone Together: My Autistic Son
My six-year-old son is affectionate (a Southern granny couldn’t give bigger hugs), funny (he looked at me one morning and declared, “Mama’s hair is broke”), and bright (his memory is scary-sharp, and he can assemble a 250-piece puzzle five times faster than I can). He is also autistic.
We learned that Isaac had mild autism when he was three. A close friend asked my husband and me, “Do you notice how he flaps his hands? He has a lot of anxiety, too. I’m just wondering…” It had never crossed our minds. We just thought Isaac was eccentric, a late talker but a charmer. I Googled “autism symptoms” and sat at the computer in disbelief. Assessments followed. Out went his Montessori, where he was most often found safe in the lap of a teacher, far from the mayhem of Duck, Duck, Goose; in came a special-needs program with our school district. The teacher was kind but the classroom too large, the demands of the children too disparate. Isaac sat on his assigned carpet square, lined up for snacks, and absorbed nothing. He was slipping further into his obsessions–fountains, photographs, Dr. Seuss–and became so fettered by his fears of crying babies and barking dogs that it was hard to leave our house. During trips to the Getty or dinners at our local pizza joint, I bristled at the reproachful stares of strangers.
German Study Discovers Schadenfreude
What you’ve always suspected is true: your elders kind of like it when you have to suck on the lemons of life experience. According to a study conducted by Drs. Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick of Ohio State and Matthias Hastall, from the Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, Germany, older folks are often shown in a negative light, derided as stodgy and absent-minded. So, says Dr. Knobloch-Westerwick, older folks in “a youth-centered culture” are grateful for what they see as “a boost in self-esteem.” She continues: “That’s why they prefer the negative stories about younger people, who are seen as having a higher status in our society.” Knobloch-Westerwick and Hastall studied nearly 300 German adults, ages ranging from 18-30 and 55 to 60. They showed the adults a fake online news site and gave them a few moments to browse either negative or positive versions of several articles. Older test subjects tended to pick negative articles about younger people. In general, they had no interest in articles about people in their age group or older.
First day preparations: Getting students to school and back home safely
As many students in the Madison School District head back to the classroom Wednesday, Sennett Middle School principal Colleen Lodholz hopes that upgrades outside her school will turn a “scary” traffic situation into a safer one.
A new pedestrian safety island, designed to give walkers a place to pause on Pflaum Road, plus rejuvenated bike lanes, crosswalks and a permanent speed board clocking motorists’ miles-per-hour (still on order) are part of changes made there after an 11-year-old boy was hit by a car in a Sennett school crosswalk last year on the second day of the school year — and is part of two big-ticket upgrades meant to help children get to school more safely.
Across the city, parents and principals are also taking measures to encourage safer drop-offs and pick-ups in front of schools as well as to urge parents and students to leave the car at home and walk to school.
Middle Schools Fail Kids, Study Says
New York City’s standalone middle schools do a worse job educating students than schools that offer kindergarten through eighth grade under one roof, according to a new study to be released Wednesday by researchers at Columbia University.
On average, children who move up to middle school from a traditional city elementary school, which typically goes up to fifth grade, score about seven percentiles lower on standardized math tests in eighth grade than those who attend a K-8 school, says Jonah Rockoff, an associate professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Business who co-authored the study.
The disparity stems from the toll that changing to a new school takes on adolescents and differences in the sizes of grades, the study says. Typically, K-8 schools can fit fewer children in each grade than standalone middle schools.
“What we found bolsters the case for middle-school reform.” says Mr. Rockoff, noting that there aren’t significant differences in financial resources or single class sizes between the two types of schools. Standalone “middle schools, where kids are educated in larger groups, are not the best way to educate students in New York City.”
The research culls data for city school children who started in grades three through eight during the 1998-99 school year and tracks them through the 2007-2008 school year, comparing test scores, attendance rates and parent evaluations. Of the student sample, 15,000 students attended a K-8 school versus 177,000 who attended a standalone middle school.
The complete paper is available here:
We examine the implications of separating students of different grade levels across schools for the purposes of educational production. Specifically, we find that moving students from elementary to middle school in 6th or 7th grade causes significant drops in academic achievement. These effects are large (about 0.15 standard deviations), present for both math and English, and persist through grade 8, the last year for which we have achievement data. The effects are similar for boys and girls, but stronger for students with low levels of initial achievement. We instrument for middle school attendance using the grade range of the school students attended in grade 3, and employ specifications that control for student fixed effects. This leaves only one potential source of bias–correlation between grade range of a student’s grade 3 school and unobservable characteristics that cause decreases in achievement precisely when students are due to switch schools–which we view as highly unlikely. We find little evidence that placing public school students into middle schools during adolescence is cost-effective.
One of the most basic issues in the organization of public education is how to group students efficiently. Public schools in the U.S. have placed students of similar ages into grade levels since the mid-1800s, but grade configurations have varied considerably over time. At the start of the 20th century, most primary schools in the U.S. included students from kindergarten through grade 8, while the early 1900s saw the rise of the “junior high school,” typically spanning grades 7-8 or 7-9 (Juvonen et al., 2004). More recently, school districts have shifted toward the use of “middle schools,” which typically span grades 6-8 or 5-8.1 Interestingly, middle schools and junior high schools have never been popular among private schools.2
The impact of grade configuration has received little attention by economists relative to issues such as class size or teacher quality. There are a few studies which provide evidence that the transition to middle school is associated with a loss of academic achievement, elevated suspension rates, and reduced self esteem (Alspaugh (1998a, 1998b), Weiss and Kipnes, (2006), Byrnes and Ruby (2007), Cook et al. (2008)). There is also a large body of work by educational researchers and developmental psychologists documenting changes in attitudes and motivation as children enter adolescence (Eccles et al. (1984)), and some have hypothesized that instructional differences in middle schools contribute to these changes. However, these studies examine differences between middle school and elementary school students using cross-sectional data, and therefore are unable to reject the hypothesis that differences across students, rather than differences in grade configuration, are responsible for divergent educational outcomes.3
In this study, we use panel data in New York City to measure the effects of alternative grade configurations. Specifically, we focus on variation in achievement within students over time, and examine how student achievement is affected by movement into middle schools. Elementary schools in New York City typically serve students until grade 5 or grade 6, while a smaller portion extend through grade 8; thus most students move to a middle school in either grade 6 or grade 7, while some never move to a middle school. We find that achievement falls substantially (about 0.15 standard deviations in math and English) when students move to middle school, relative to their peers who do not move. Importantly, these negative effects persist through grade 8, the highest grade level on which test data are available.
More on the Proposed IB Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men Charter School
522K PDF via a Kaleem Caire email:
Based on current education and social conditions, the fate of boys of color is uncertain.
Black boys are grossly over-represented among youth failing to achieve academic success, are at grave risk of dropping out of school before they reach 10th grade, are disproportionately represented among adjudicated and incarcerated youth, and are far less likely than their peers in other subgroups to achieve to their dreams and aspirations.
Research indicates that although black boys have high aspirations for academic and career success, their underperformance in school and lack of educational attainment undermine their career pursuits and the success they desire. This misalignment of aspirations and achievement is fueled by and perpetuates a set of social conditions wherein black males find themselves disproportionately represented among the unemployed and incarcerated. Without meaningful, targeted, and sustainable interventions and support systems, hundreds of thousands of young Black men will never realize their true potential and the cycle of high unemployment, fatherless homes, overcrowded jails, incarcerated talent, deferred dreams, and high rates of school failure will continue.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (aka Madison Prep) will be established to serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity among young men of color. Its founders understand that poverty, isolation, structural discrimination, lack of access to positive male role models and achievement-oriented peer groups, limited exposure to opportunity and culture outside their neighborhood or city, and a general lack of understanding – and in some cases fear – of black boys among adults are major contributing factors to why so many young men are failing to achieve to their full potential. However, the Urban League of Greater Madison – the “founders” of Madison Prep – also understand that these issues can be addressed by directly countering each issue with a positive, exciting, engaging, enriching, challenging, affirming and structured learning community designed to exclusively benefit boys.
School Spotlight: K-Ready program preps children for kindergarten
More than a fifth of the incoming kindergarteners registered in the Madison School District will be more ready for school this fall after attending a six-week summer program.
The full-day K-Ready program helps children prepare for kindergarten by working on academic readiness skills such as letter recognition, name writing and counting. They also have the opportunity to learn what school is like, how to get along with others, and how to listen to a teacher.
This summer, the program grew to a new high of 460 students – about 22 percent of projected kindergarteners.
Fakeith Hopson enrolled his daughter, Aniyah, who will attend Leopold Elementary School, in the K-Ready program at Huegel Elementary School and was impressed by the strides she made in counting and saying her ABCs. She also learned how to tie her shoes.
Bill Gates Enrolls His Child in Khan Academy
“At some schools, a teaching load of five courses every academic year is considered excessive. But Sal Khan, as an earlier Slashdot post noted, manages to deliver his mini-lectures an average of 70,000 times a day. BusinessWeek reports that Khan Academy has a new fan in Bill Gates, who’s been singing and tweeting the praises of the free-as-in-beer website. ‘This guy is amazing,’ Gates wrote. ‘It is awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources.’ Gates and his 11-year-old son have been soaking up videos, from algebra to biology. And at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of 2,000 people, Gates gave Khan a shout-out, touting the ‘unbelievable’ Khan Academy tutorials that ‘I’ve been using with my kids.'”
Ideological War Spells Doom for America’s Schoolkids
Students are returning to school this week. But they’re not heading back to class — they’re walking straight into a war zone. Our kids have become cannon fodder for two rival ideologies battling to control America’s future.
In one camp are conservative Christians and their champion, the Texas State Board of Education; in the other are politically radical multiculturalists and their de facto champion, President Barack Obama. The two competing visions couldn’t be more different. And the stakes couldn’t be higher. Unfortunately, whichever side wins — your kid ends up losing.
That’s because this war is for the power to dictate what our children are taught — and, by extension, how future generations of Americans will view the world. Long gone are the days when classrooms were for learning: now each side sees the public school system as a vast indoctrination camp in which future culture-warriors are trained. The problem is, two diametrically opposed philosophies are struggling for supremacy, and neither is willing to give an inch, so the end result is extremism, no matter which side temporarily comes out on top.
Both visions are grotesque and unacceptable — and yet they are currently the only two choices on the national menu. Which shall it be, sir: Brainwashing Fricassee, or a Fried Ignorance Sandwich?
Keeping parents’ ‘helicopters’ grounded during college
The UCLA meeting hall was standing room only as campus psychologist Susan Bakota delivered a message to about 150 parents gathered at an orientation session designed just for them.
“Take a moment to inhale and release your concerns and anxieties and release your student to this wonderful adventure,” she told the audience, whose children are about to enroll as UCLA freshman. “And I suggest you too enjoy the ride.”
That may be easier said than done for many parents who are dropping their children off for the first time at a big university in a huge city. But at this time of year, more and more colleges across the country are attempting to teach anxious mothers and fathers a lesson not contained in any traditional curriculum: Let go.
How to keep your kids safe for the school year
Well, we survived the first week of school, so for this week, let’s review as we do every year how parents can help keep kids safe.
- Never place your child’s name on any piece of clothing that is visible to anyone. You do not want to make them a target for a stranger to call out to by name.
- Make sure your child knows his or her full name, phone number, parents’ full names, address and a work phone number. It is not helpful when officers find children who do not know their full names or addresses.
- Throughout the school year, talk to your child about drugs, strangers and any weapon they might see or hear about, a bully or any related concerns. Let the child know that such information should be reported to the teacher and to you immediately.
- If your child is going into a new school or going to school for the first time, ask her whether there is anything that frightens or makes him/her uncomfortable. Share that information with the teacher or school police; officers are well-trained in safety issues.
Students clock fewer study hours
Economists have discovered that the earning gap for college is even bigger because students are studying far less than previous generations. Midmorning asks if students are coming to college better prepared, or if the schools are complicit in lowering standards?
San Francisco public schools a good choice
C.W. Nevius’ columns about parents’ distress over San Francisco schools rang a bell with me, and I was prompted to weigh in about my delight with the public schools my daughter has attended in San Francisco.
When my daughter was starting kindergarten, friends said: “You can’t stay in San Francisco; you have to move!” I heard this often enough that I worried. Did my husband and I have to leave the city we loved?
Well, we did decide to stay, and we entered our daughter in our neighborhood school, Fairmount Elementary. “You can’t send her there – she won’t learn anything at a Spanish immersion school,” friends protested. I worried anew.
Ann Cooper’s latest tool in the Food Revolution
Food Revolution hero Ann Cooper recently re-launched her new and improved website for The Lunch Box — a collection of scalable recipes, resources and general information to turn any school lunch system into a healthy, balanced diet for kids. One of the most exciting initiatives of this revamp is the Great American Salad Project (GASP) which, in partnership with Whole Foods, will create salad bars in over 300 schools across America. The new salad bars will give young students daily access to the fresh fruits and vegetables they need, and will be funded by donations from Whole Foods shoppers and visitors to the website. To donate, click here.
Schools can begin grant applications on September 1. If you’d like to see a fresh salad bar in your cafeteria, click here to review the process and get your app ready.
Bribing parents to do their jobs is an outrage, right?
I’ll confess my initial gut reaction to the news that HISD plans to offer parents cash to show up to parent-teacher conferences and help their children study was righteous indignation. What a shame, I thought, that we’ve been reduced to paying parents to be engaged in their children’s learning. I’d be insulted if someone were to greet my wife and me with a fistful of dollars when we show up at her pre-kindergarten open house tonight.
Obviously, many of our readers had the same reaction when we posted reporter Ericka Mellon’s story to chron.com just after 1 p.m.
It took a reader going by the name of R_Dub just five minutes to fire the first shot:
“What a (expletive) discrace (sic)! HISD giving away money for grades. This is not teaching students anything other than how to manipulate the system or take advantage of others. Good job you idiots.”
Similar comments have been streaming in at a clip of about one per minute.
Should You Teach Your Kids Chinese?
When I get into cocktail-party conversation about language and politics, someone inevitably says “and of course there’s the rise of China.” It seems like any conversation these days has to work in the rise-of-China angle. Technology is changing society? Well, it’s the flood of cheap tech from China. Worried about your job? It’s the rise of China. Terrified of nuclear Iran? If only that rising China would stop resisting sanctions. What’s for lunch? Well, we’d all better develop a taste for Chinese food.
I was reminded of this walking down New York’s Park Avenue last night, when I saw a pre-school offering immersion courses in French, Italian, Spanish and Chinese. For years now, we’ve been seeing stories like this: Manhattan parents, always eager to steal some advantage for their children, are hiring Mandarin-speaking nannies, so their children can learn what some see as the language of the future.
But while China’s rise is real, Chinese is in no way rising at the same rate. Yes, Mandarin Chinese is the world’s most commonly spoken language, if you simply count the number of speakers. But the rub is that they’re almost all in China. Yes, we’ve also read that Mandarin is advancing in Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas Chinese communities (which have traditionally spoken one of China’s other languages, such as Cantonese). And China is trying to expand the use of the language through the expansion of its overseas Confucius Institutes. But English remains the world’s most important language. America’s superpower status has made it everyone’s favourite second language. This is where its power lies. A Japanese businessman does deals in Sweden in English. A German airline pilot landing in Milan speaks English to the tower. English is also the language of writing intended for an international audience, whether scientific, commercial or literary.
Watch kids’ backs, parents told
Children who carry schoolbags and adopt improper postures while sleeping, walking and doing homework are susceptible to spinal problems, chiropractors warned.
A Children Chiropractic Foundation survey of 1,298 Primary One to Six students from September last year to May this year found 18 percent of them suffered from spinal problems.
Foundation member Tony Cheung Kai-shui said girls are more susceptible to spinal problems as their growth development is faster compared with boys of the same age.
Cheung noted that common symptoms of spinal problems are headaches, chest pains, asthma, back pains and overall weakness.
Typical College Student No Longer So Typical
Kathryn McCormick, Kevin Carey & Brandon Krapf:
College classrooms were once filled primarily by eager students straight out of high school. But the vast majority of today’s college students work, have a family, are enrolled only part time, or a combination of all three. This new breed of college student is reshaping the face of higher education in America.
Which cities are most willing to tackle education reform?
A report released Tuesday ranks cities not in terms of best-performing schools but on their openness to outside ideas and education reform.
Education entrepreneurs – the sort of people who want to open a new charter school, or have an innovative way to get talented new teachers into schools – would do well to head to New Orleans. Or Washington or New York.
At least that’s the judgment of “America’s Best (and Worst) Cities for School Reform: Attracting Entrepreneurs and Change Agents,” a study released Tuesday that’s attempting to rank cities in a new way. It doesn’t look at how well their students perform, or even on the programs their districts have put in place, but on how welcoming they are to reforms and new ideas. The education version of the World Bank’s annual ranking of the best countries for business, if you will.
Enter the education entrepreneur, a problem-solver who has developed a different and–it is to be hoped–better approach to teaching and learning, either inside or outside the traditional school system. He or she may provide, among other things, a novel form of brick and mortar teaching, an alternative version of teacher recruitment or training, or time-saving software and tools that make for more efficient instruction and surer learning. Which cities would welcome and support such problem-solvers by helping to bring their ideas to scale, improve their odds of success, and nurture their growth? Put another way, which cities have the most reform-friendly ecosystems?
To answer this question, analysts examined six domains that shape a jurisdiction’s receptivity to education reform:
Human Capital: Entrepreneurs need access to a ready flow of talented individuals, whether to staff their own operations or fill the district’s classrooms.
Financial Capital: A pipeline of flexible funding from private and/or public sources is vital for nonprofit organizations trying to break into a new market or scale up their operations.
Charter Environment: Charter schools are one of the primary entrees through which entrepreneurs can penetrate new markets, both as direct education providers and as consumers of other nontraditional goods and services.
Quality Control: Lest we unduly credit innovation per se, the study takes into account the quality- control metrics that appraise and guide entrepreneurial ventures.
District Environment: Because many nontraditional providers must contract with the district in order to work in the city, finding a district that is both open to nontraditional reforms and has the organiza- tional capacity to deal with them in a speedy and professional manner can make or break an entrepreneur’s foray into a new market.
Municipal Environment: Beyond the school district, is the broader community open to, even eager for, nontraditional providers? Consider, for example, the stance of business leaders, the mayor, and the media.
Drawing on publicly available data, national and local survey data, and interviews with on-the-ground insiders, analysts devised a grading metric that rated each city on its individual and collective accom- plishments in each of these areas.
America: Land of Loners?
Americans, plugged in and on the move, are confiding in their pets, their computers, and their spouses. What they need is to rediscover the value of friendship.
Science-fiction writers make the best seers. In the late 1950s far-sighted Isaac Asimov imagined a sunny planet called Solaria, on which a scant 20,000 humans dwelt on far-flung estates and visited one another only virtually, by materializing as “trimensional images”–avatars, in other words. “They live completely apart,” a helpful robot explained to a visiting earthling, “and never see one another except under the most extraordinary circumstances.”
We have not, of course, turned into Solarians here on earth, strictly limiting our numbers and shunning our fellow humans in revulsion. Yet it’s hard not to see some Solarian parallels in modern life. Since Asimov wrote The Naked Sun, Americans have been engaged in wholesale flight from one another, decamping for suburbs and Sunbelt, splintering into ever smaller households, and conducting more and more of their relationships online, where avatars flourish. The churn rate of domestic relations is especially remarkable, and has rendered family life in the United States uniquely unstable. “No other comparable nation,” the sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin observes, “has such a high level of multiple marital and cohabiting unions.”
L.A. Times testing series raises more questions
Few education stories have excited me as much as the series on teacher assessment being done by reporters Jason Song, Jason Felch and Doug Smith of the Los Angeles Times. They have dug up a goldmine of data on the student test score gains of 6,000 individual elementary school teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, information that the district has refused to show to parents despite pleas from its staff to do so.
The latest story in the series, “L.A.’s leaders in learning,” does many things that I think are crucial to improving American education, and fit what I have been trying to do calculating the level of challenge in high schools, nationally and in the Washington area, the last 12 years.
The latest Times story focuses on how schools as a whole, not individual teachers, are doing in raising achievement. That emphasis encourages schools to create team-like cultures in which everyone works to make everyone else better. The story buttresses the central point of the series–that schools that seem similar to parents trying to choose where to send their children look very different when unreported data like relative test score gains are revealed. It also shows in a dramatic way the uselessness of our usual means of rating schools. Those that have the highest test scores are considered the best, even though achievement measured that way reflects the average incomes of the parents far more than it does the quality of the teaching.
No hables con mi hija en inglés!
IT’S AUGUST, and time to reheat an old story, as most sensible journalists are on holiday (as I will be next week). Today the New York Times reports a trend in families seeking bilingual nannies. They reported on this same trend in 2006, with specific reference to Chinese nannies.
Parents think kids get a benefit from bilingualism, and they’re probably right. But this article does mention some of the costs I hadn’t seen mentioned before: word retrieval is said by Ellen Bialystock, a psychologist at York University in Toronto, to be milliseconds slower in bilingual kids than in monolingual ones. Overall vocabulary in the first language tends to be somewhat smaller (though overall vocabulary in both languages combined is of course greater). “It doesn’t make kids smarter,” says Ms Bialystock, though there are clear cognitive “developments”, some good, some less so.
Germ warfare: the end of antibiotics
A world without antibiotics could be a mere 10 years away as science and nature compete in a battle that may render some routine operations too risky to consider.
Just 65 years ago, David Livermore’s paternal grandmother died following an operation to remove her appendix. It didn’t go well but it was not the surgery that killed her. She succumbed to a series of infections that the pre-penicillin world had no drugs to treat. Welcome to the future.
The era of antibiotics is coming to a close. In just a couple of generations, what once appeared to be miracle medicines have been beaten into ineffectiveness by the bacteria they were designed to knock out. Once, scientists hailed the end of infectious diseases. Now, the post-antibiotic apocalypse is within sight.
Hyperbole? Unfortunately not. This month, the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases posed the question over a paper revealing the rapid spread of drug-resistant bacteria. “Is this the end of antibiotics?” it asked.
Time With Mom and Dad: Making It Fair
“It isn’t fair.”
I’d be willing to bet that somewhere, some kid is uttering those words at this very moment. And most likely the outburst was triggered by sibling rivalry.
Amy and I got a taste of it (hardly our first) a while back when we took our 13-year-old son to see the latest installment of the “Twilight” movie saga. He has read all the books and seen the first two movies, so we’ve been promising we would take him as soon as we could.
Our 7-year-old daughter stayed with her grandmother, Amy’s mom. We knew various scenes in the movie — as well as the dark, overarching theme of vampires and werewolves — would simply be too scary for her.
So we arranged for her and her grandmother to have dinner at a restaurant our daughter likes. That way everyone would be happy.
Or so we thought.
Free education?
I remember hearing it somewhere.
What’s that term again, oh yes, “free education.”
Anyone can get a public education because it’s free.
Really, because I just spent close to $90 at one of our fine local retailers picking up a few of those last minute mandated items for that free education.
Obviously when you’re talking about parochial or private schools, there is a degree of tuition associated with that choice. But the public school system is supposed to be something that we pay taxes to cover.
And yet each year, I see a rack of flyers for each school within a one-hour radius with lots of small lettering detailing every item the students must have to attend the public schools to acquire their free public education.
A Look at the Madison School District’s Use of Infinite Campus
Since Andie was in 6th grade – she’ll be entering 8th grade Sept. 1 – the Smith family has used Infinite Campus, an electronic data system that gives parents access to information about how students are doing in school. It often provides more information than the typical middle school student brings home and it helps parents know from week-to-week what’s going on in the classroom. Madison, like most other Dane County school districts, has been using some form of electronic communication system for the last several years.
“I don’t have to ask to look at her planner anymore,” says Smith. “And, her group of teachers at Toki wrote a weekly newsletter last year that I could read online. When your kids get into middle school, they’ve got more classes, and parents generally have fewer connections with the teachers so I really appreciate the way it works.”
For the first time this year, Smith, like the rest of the parents and guardians of the approximately 24,000 students in the Madison Metropolitan School District, is using the online system to enroll her children in class. She also has a son, Sam, who will be a 5th grader at Chavez Elementary this fall. District officials hope that giving parents a password and user ID at the enrollment stage will expand the number of parents using Infinite Campus. A primary goal is to help increase communication ties between home and school, which is a proven way to engage kids and boost academic achievement.
But whether all parents will take to the system remains to be seen. Despite the boom in electronic communication, there are plenty of homes without computers, especially in urban school districts like Madison where poverty levels are rising. The extent to which teachers will buy in is also unclear. Teachers are required to post report cards and attendance online, but things like test scores, assignments and quizzes will be discretionary.
Much more on Infinite Campus and “Standards Based Report Cards”, here.
Why so many colleges are education-free zones
If you have a child in college, or are planning to send one there soon, Craig Brandon has a message for you: Be afraid. Be very afraid.
“The Five-Year Party” provides the most vivid portrait of college life since Tom Wolfe’s 2004 novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons.” The difference is that it isn’t fiction. The alcohol-soaked, sex-saturated, drug-infested campuses that Mr. Brandon writes about are real. His book is a roadmap for parents on how to steer clear of the worst of them.
Many of the schools Mr. Brandon describes are education-free zones, where students’ eternal obligations–do the assigned reading, participate in class, hand in assignments–no longer apply. The book’s title refers to the fact that only 30% of students enrolled in liberal-arts colleges graduate in four years. Roughly 60% take at least six years to get their degrees. That may be fine with many schools, whose administrators see dollar signs in those extra semesters.
Critical Thinking in Schools
Letters to the New York Times Editor
“Schools Given Grade on How Graduates Do” (front page, Aug. 10) was revealing of system failure on several levels.
Especially telling for me were the comments by a remedial writing teacher at a community college who noted: “They don’t know how to develop an argument. They have very little ability to get past rhetoric and critically analyze what is motivating the writer.”
This teacher’s observation highlights what may well be the school system’s worst deficiency in terms of skills development: a failure to promote critical thinking. That skill is fundamental if our youth are to become thoughtful workers and thoughtful citizens of a democratic society rather than robots. Developing it can’t be left to writing classes alone but must happen throughout the curriculum.
An educational odyssey across three generations
Striving to be a dad, I read “The Odyssey” this summer.
You probably know the story. Odysseus is trying to make his way back home from the battlefield at Troy. He’s been away at war for two decades.
But the gods punish him again and again on the sea journey home. With each new disaster that befalls him, Odysseus longs more for his wife and son. Finally he reaches the soil of his beloved Ithaca and speaks this line lamenting all he had lost by seeking glory in battle:
…I had no love for working the land, the chores of household either, the labor that raises crops of shining children.
That line caught my attention because I was reading “The Odyssey” precisely to help raise my family “crop.” My 14-year-old son enters high school in a few weeks and “The Odyssey” was his assigned summer reading.
Education: From Chattel to Freshman
he descendant of a slave is about to enter Mars Hill College, bringing to an end 105 years of segregation at the Baptist school in western North Carolina.* Her admittance means something more: the payoff of a novel moral debt.
The founders of little Mars Hill were in trouble as soon as they laid the last handmade brick on the first building in 1856. They owed the contractors $1,100; the treasury was empty. While they frantically passed the hat, the builders slapped a judgment on the Rev. J. W. Anderson, future secretary of the college. The Rev. Mr. Anderson owned a Negro named Joe –a strapping young man easily worth $1,100 on the slave market in nearby Asheville. Some say that Joe himself volunteered to be a human surety. The builders took him to jail for safekeeping. Four days later, when the founders raised the cash. Mars Hill was saved.
Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World
Katharine Beals, Trumpeter Books, 2009 Reviewed by Barry Garelick, via email
Many school parents question the value of today’s homework assignments. They rightly wonder whether their children are getting the education they need in order to succeed in college. For the most part, they are well-meaning parents who were educated from the 1950’s through the 1970’s in a different style–a style derided by the current power elite in graduate schools of education and school administration. They describe the schoolroom remembered by today’s parents as: sitting in rows, facing front, listening passively to a teacher who talked to the blackboard, “memorizing by rote”, and thinking uncritically. In today’s classrooms, students are given a minimal amount of instruction, and instead are presented with a question–say a math problem–told to form groups and work out an approach to solving the problem. Or if not a math problem, they are told to discuss an aspect of a book they are reading. Homework assignments are often art projects, in which students must construct dioramas of the climactic event of a story they read, or decorate a tissue box with German phrases to help them learn the language, or put together a family tree with photographs and label each with the Spanish term for their place in the family.
In Raising a Left-brain Child in a Right-brain World, Katharine Beals explores today’s classrooms and describes in detail why this approach is particularly destructive and ineffective for students who are shy, awkward, introspective, linear and analytic thinkers. She is careful to explain that her use of the term “left brained” is her way of categorizing students who are linear thinkers–who process information by learning one thing at a time thoroughly before moving on to the next. (I use the term in the same fashion in this review.)
A particularly powerful passage at the beginning of the book describes the difficulties that left-brained children face and provides a stark and disturbing contrast with the traditional classrooms that the parents of these children remember:Making matters worse is how today’s informal discussions favor multiple solutions, personal opinions, and personal connections over single correct answers. In previous generations the best answer, exerting an absolute veto power, favored the studious over the merely charismatic; how that there is no best answer, extroversion is king. … To fully appreciate the degree to which today’s classrooms challenge our children, we should consider how they might have fared in more traditional schools. Imagine how much more at ease they might be in general, and how their attitudes toward school might improve, if they enjoyed the privacy of quietly listening to teachers lecture instead of having to talk to classmates. …Imagine if they could read to themselves instead of to a group, do math problems on their own, and find, in the classroom, a safe haven from school yard dynamics. (p. 23)
Best (and most unsettling) college admissions book ever
My relationship with journalist Zac Bissonnette began on the wrong foot. He told me a high school from his part of Massachusetts was misrepresenting itself on my annual high schools list for Newsweek. I checked and decided he was wrong, which he found hard to accept. I assumed someone so certain of his conclusions had to be an experienced reporter. In fact, he was only 18.
That was just the first of the surprises he had in store for me. He turned out to be an entrepreneurial prodigy who had grown up in a family that did not have much money. He started his first business in the second grade, built his brokerage account to five figures by the ninth grade, and moved on to help run a personal finance site, WalletPop.com, for AOL.
Having developed a sharp sense of the real world unusual for his age, Bissonnette commenced the college admissions process. If the National Association for College Admissions Counseling had anticipated the dire consequences of one of the smartest teenagers in America encountering the ill-examined assumptions of their profession, they might have found some way to buy him off, maybe a full ride scholarship to Harvard.
Integrating Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design
The premise of this book is enticingly simple . It presents two solutions to two prevalent problems in education . The first is the vast amount of content required to be taught because of various state standards, and how one can thread that maze and “teach for understanding .” That is, how can educators get students to apply what they’ve learned to new and unfamiliar problems? The second is the diverse nature of today’s classrooms, the result of heterogeneous grouping of students of different abilities . How does an educator differentiate instruction to accommodate such diversity in a single classroom?
I read this book in a math teaching methods class a few years ago . One event in that class stands out regarding this textbook . In a chapter on assessing understanding, a chart presents examples of “Inauthentic versus Authentic Work” (p . 68) . For example, “Solve contrived problems” is listed as inauthentic; “Solve ‘real world’ prob- lems” is listed as authentic . The black-and-white nature of the dis- tinctions on the chart bothered me, so when the teacher asked if we had any comments, I said that calling certain practices “inauthentic” is not only pejorative but misleading . Since the chart listed “Practice decontextualized skills” as inauthentic and “Interpret literature” as authentic, I asked the teacher, “Do you really think that learning to read is an inauthentic skill?”
She replied that she didn’t really know about issues related to reading . Keeping it on the math level, I then asked why the authors automatically assumed that a word problem that might be contrived didn’t involve “authentic” mathematical concepts . She answered with a blank stare and the words “Let’s move on .”
That incident remains in my mind because it is emblematic of the educational doctrine that pervades schools of education as well as this book . The doctrine holds that mastery of facts and attaining procedural fluency in subjects like mathematics amounts to mind- numbing “drill and kill” exercises that ultimately stifle creativity and critical thinking . It also embodies the belief that critical thinking skills can be taught .
In a discussion of what constitutes “understanding,” the authors state that a student’s ability to apply what he or she has learned does not necessarily represent understanding . “When we call for an appli- cation we do not mean a mechanical response or mindless ‘plug-in’ of a memorized formula . Rather, we ask students to transfer–to use what they know in a new situation” (p . 67) . In terms of math and other subjects that involve attaining procedural fluency, employing worked examples as scaffolding for tackling more-complex prob- lems is not something that these authors see as leading to any kind of understanding . That a mastery of fundamentals provides the foun- dation for the creativity they seek is lost in their quest to get stu- dents performing authentic work from the start
Suffer the little children Time and again, studies have determined that parents hate parenting. So why do so many of us do it?
Recently, I found my 2-1/2-year-old son sitting on our building doorstep, waiting for me to come home. He spotted me as I was rounding the corner and the scene that followed was one of inexpressible loveliness, right out of the film I’d played to myself before having a child, with him popping out of his babysitter’s arms and barrelling down the street to greet me. This happy moment, though, was about to be cut short and, in retrospect, felt more like a tranquil lull in a slasher film.
When I opened our apartment door, I discovered my son had broken part of the toy wooden garage I’d spent an hour assembling that morning. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except that as I attempted to fix it, he grew impatient and began throwing its various parts at the walls, with one plank narrowly missing my eye. I recited the rules of the house (no throwing, no hitting). He picked up another large wooden plank. I ducked. He reached for the screwdriver. The scene ended with a time-out in his cot.
What some teachers don’t want you to learn
Knowledge is power, but it is not always welcome. The Los Angeles Times just completed an extensive study of how individual teachers have fared at raising their students’ math and English test scores in the state’s most populous city. The raw data have been available to the L.A. Unified School District for years, but it never bothered to crunch those numbers, let alone share them with parents. The Times has pledged to publish its ratings of 6,000 elementary school instructors.
Reaction of the local teachers union? It has called for a “massive boycott” of the Times.
Needs Improvement: Where Teacher Report Cards Fall Short
Local school districts have started to grade teachers based on student test scores, but the early results suggest the effort deserves an incomplete.
The new type of teacher evaluations make use of the standardized tests that have become an annual rite for American public-school students. The tests mainly have been used to measure the progress of students and schools, but with some statistical finesse they can be transformed into a lens for identifying which teachers are producing the best test results.
At least, that’s the hope among some education experts. But the performance numbers that have emerged from these studies rely on a flawed statistical approach.
One perplexing finding: A large proportion of teachers who rate highly one year fall to the bottom of the charts the next year. For example, in a group of elementary-school math teachers who ranked in the top 20% in five Florida counties early last decade, more than three in five didn’t stay in the top quintile the following year, according to a study published last year in the journal Education Finance and Policy.
Related: Standards Based Report Cards and Value Added Assessment.
Study: NJ and Newark lead nation in black male graduation rates
It is always news to me when I hear or read something good about the Newark school system, so I took notice when the Schott Foundation for Public Education released a new study saying that both that city, and the state of New Jersey, lead the nation in the percent of black male students graduating from high school.
Schott’s report focused on the abysmal national graduation rate for black males, only 47 percent in the 2007-08 school year, but it heralded the New Jersey results, and gave credit to that state’s heavy spending and innovative measures to raise graduation rates for everyone.
It said New Jersey had a graduation rate for black males of 69 percent in 2007-08, with the next closest states being Maryland (55 percent), California (54 percent) and Pennsylvania (53 percent). In Newark, the graduation rate for black males was 76 percent. The other school districts nearest that level were Fort Bend, Tex. (68 percent), Baltimore County, Md. (67 percent) and Montgomery County, Md. (65 percent). The list only included states with more than 100,000 black male students and districts with more than 10,000 black male students.
Looking at Tutors as an Investment
WITH only a few weeks left until school starts, the tutoring business is gearing up. And it is one industry in America that seems immune to recession. More parents are paying for tutors for their children.
Spending on tutors is growing at more than 5 percent a year, said Steve Pines, executive director of the Education Industry Association. This is down from yearly growth of 8 to 10 percent in 2007, when the education research firm EduVentures estimated the size of the tutoring industry at $5 billion to $7 billion a year. But it is still strong, given the state of most people’s personal finances. And Sandi Ayaz, executive director of the National Tutoring Association, said the number of tutors her organization had certified had grown 18 percent in each of the last five years.
While tutors once focused on helping children who were falling behind in particular subjects or had a learning disability, they are now being used far more to guide students through particularly tough courses, insure their grades are equal to or above their peers’ and, in the end, polish a child’s college application. This costs parents a lot of money, and the question is, What returns should they expect for their investment? And how does that desire mesh with what is right?
Parents’ role as education partners growing as school year begins in D.C.
As summer vacation comes to an end, District students are not alone in their transition from leisure to learning. Parents must also prepare to be involved for another year of academic growth.
According to the Harvard Family Research Project, parental involvement is key to student achievement. Public, private and charter schools are becoming more insistent that parents get involved with their children’s education inside and outside the classroom.
“We need to be encouraging them to participate in their child’s education,” said Kaye E. Savage, founder and chief executive of Excel Academy Public Charter School, an all-girls school in Southeast.
Savage said each parent at her school must sign a “covenant of excellence” to ensure their involvement.
Prepping for the Playdate Test
Good eye contact, a firm handshake and self confidence can pave the way to a good interview. Turns out, that’s the case even if the applicant is 4 or 5 years old.
In the frenzy to get kindergarteners into the top private schools, parents are now hiring consultants to coach their children on the art of the interview.
For years, such preparations have been the norm for the standardized tests children must take to get into private schools, the so-called ERBs, which measure IQ and are administered by the Educational Records Bureau. But after a cottage industry devoted to test-prep materials and classes developed, parents say scoring in the top percentile or two became the norm rather than the exception; schools such as Horace Mann, Dalton and Collegiate began placing more emphasis on the interview and getting more granular in their assessments.
Since New York parents have a tendency to exaggerate their sons’ and daughters’ piano or French skills, admissions directors say they like to see any special talents with their own eyes.
Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century
This book is depressing because it is so persuasive. There is a school of thought in America which argues that the government must be the main force that provides help to the black community. This shibboleth is predicated upon another one: that such government efforts will make a serious difference in disparities between blacks and whites. Amy Wax not only argues that such efforts have failed, she also suggests that such efforts cannot bring equality, and therefore must be abandoned. Wax identifies the illusion that mars American thinking on this subject as the myth of reverse causation–that if racism was the cause of a problem, then eliminating racism will solve it. If only this were true. But it isn’t true: racism can set in motion cultural patterns that take on a life of their own.
Wax appeals to a parable in which a pedestrian is run over by a truck and must learn to walk again. The truck driver pays the pedestrian’s medical bills, but the only way the pedestrian will walk again is through his own efforts. The pedestrian may insist that the driver do more, that justice has not occurred until the driver has himself made the pedestrian learn to walk again. But the sad fact is that justice, under this analysis, is impossible. The legal theory about remedies, Wax points out, grapples with this inconvenience–and the history of the descendants of African slaves, no matter how horrific, cannot upend its implacable logic. As she puts it, “That blacks did not, in an important sense, cause their current predicament does not preclude charging them with alleviating it if nothing else will work.”
Wealthy Seek Special-Ed Cash
Families in the most affluent New York City school districts, including the Upper East and Upper West sides, file more claims than other parts of the city seeking reimbursement of their children’s private-school tuition, according to Department of Education data.
The department last year spent $116 million in tuition and legal expenses to cover special-education students whose parents sued the DOE alleging that their public-school options were not appropriate. The number is more than double three years ago, and the costs are expected to continue to rise.
Parents have been helped by a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that strengthened their legal position to sue school districts. The most recent case was last summer.
“No one begrudges parents the right to send their children to private school,” said Michael Best, general counsel at the DOE. “But this system was not intended as a way for private school parents to get the taxpayers to fund their children’s tuition.”
Teachers, by the numbers A team of Times reporters is giving the public its first glimpse of some surprising findings on teachers and their performance in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The Los Angeles Unified School District has done an admirable job of collecting useful data about its teachers — which ones have the classroom magic that makes students learn and which ones annually let their students down. Yet it has never used that valuable information to analyze what successful teachers have in common, so that others can learn from them, or to let less effective teachers know how they’re doing.
For the record: This editorial says the federal Race to the Top grant program pushed states to make students’ test scores count for half or more of a teacher’s performance evaluation. Although the program has encouraged this by awarding its first grants to states that promised to do so, it has not formally required it.
If it weren’t for the work of a team of Times reporters, this information might have remained uselessly locked away. Now that the paper is reporting on the wide disparities among teachers, the public is getting its first glimpse of some surprising findings.
Marketplace has more as does Daniel Willingham.
Birth Order Affects Child’s Intelligence and Personality
Birth order within families has long sparked sibling rivalry, but it might also impact the child’s personality and intelligence, a new study suggests. First-borns are typically smarter, while younger siblings get better grades and are more outgoing, the researchers say.
The findings weigh in on a long-standing debate: What effect if any does birth order have on a person’s life? While numerous studies have been conducted, researchers have yet to draw any definitive conclusions.
The results lend support to some previous hypotheses — for instance, that the eldest sibling tends to have higher aptitude. But the study also contradicts other proposed ideas, for example, that first-borns tend to be more extroverted.
Growing Power’s National-International Urban & Small Farm Conference
Come to Milwaukee and help grow the good food revolution. Hosted by Growing Power–a national organization headed by the sustainable urban farmer and MacArthur Fellow Will Allen–this international conference will teach the participant how to plan, develop and grow small farms in urban and rural areas. Learn how you can grow food year-round, no matter what the climate, and how you can build markets for small farms. See how you can play a part in creating a new food system that fosters better health and more closely-knit communities.
America: Land of Loners?
Science-fiction writers make the best seers. In the late 1950s far-sighted Isaac Asimov imagined a sunny planet called Solaria, on which a scant 20,000 humans dwelt on far-flung estates and visited one another only virtually, by materializing as “trimensional images”–avatars, in other words. “They live completely apart,” a helpful robot explained to a visiting earthling, “and never see one another except under the most extraordinary circumstances.”
We have not, of course, turned into Solarians here on earth, strictly limiting our numbers and shunning our fellow humans in revulsion. Yet it’s hard not to see some Solarian parallels in modern life. Since Asimov wrote The Naked Sun, Americans have been engaged in wholesale flight from one another, decamping for suburbs and Sunbelt, splintering into ever smaller households, and conducting more and more of their relationships online, where avatars flourish. The churn rate of domestic relations is especially remarkable, and has rendered family life in the United States uniquely unstable. “No other comparable nation,” the sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin observes, “has such a high level of multiple marital and cohabiting unions.”
Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain
Todd Braver emerges from a tent nestled against the canyon wall. He has a slight tan, except for a slim pale band around his wrist.
For the first time in three days in the wilderness, Mr. Braver is not wearing his watch. “I forgot,” he says.
It is a small thing, the kind of change many vacationers notice in themselves as they unwind and lose track of time. But for Mr. Braver and his companions, these moments lead to a question: What is happening to our brains?
Mr. Braver, a psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, was one of five neuroscientists on an unusual journey. They spent a week in late May in this remote area of southern Utah, rafting the San Juan River, camping on the soft banks and hiking the tributary canyons.
‘Free’ Iowa preschool will cost some kids
Iowa parents who thought a shift to public preschool meant less money out of their pockets are in for a surprise.
Parents of 4-year-old students in some Iowa school districts will be charged tuition, despite the nearly $65 million Iowa taxpayers will pump this year into a statewide preschool expansion led by Gov. Chet Culver.
The practice could fuel an election-year debate about whether taxpayers should foot the bill for preschool. Terry Branstad, Culver’s Republican opponent, said he will scrap universal preschool if he wins the Nov. 2 election.
Book Learning vs. Wisdom – Where to Place One’s Emphasis
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education – Mark Twain.
Our new, wired world has brought forth many positives. One of the simplest, yet powerful, of the new tools available is the ability to bookmark worthy Internet materials for future use.
Even more powerful is the ability to share those materials indirectly through the use of sites like Delicious. We subscribe so as to have the most popular education bookmarks forwarded to us on a daily basis.
The Old College Try A flood of new entrepreneurs find it often pays to go back to school
Jordan Holt needed a business plan. So he went back to school.
A technician for a military contractor in Yuma, Ariz., Mr. Holt launched a side business last year, servicing and repairing generators–and quickly realized he would need to write up a formal plan if he ever wanted to borrow money for equipment. But after doing some online research, putting together a plan “looked complicated and overwhelming,” he says.
He decided to get the help he needed from a business-plan development course at Arizona Western College in Yuma. “I was able to take everything in my head and put it down on paper,” says Mr. Holt, a 29-year-old ex-Marine. “I truly think it could work.”
A Deeper Look at Madison’s National Merit Scholar Results
Madison and nearby school districts annually publicize their National Merit Scholar counts.
Consequently, I read with interest Madison School Board member Ed Hughes’ recent blog post:
We brag about how well Wisconsin students do on the ACT, and this is certainly good. But about 30 states have higher cut scores than Wisconsin when it comes to identifying National Merit Scholars, which means that their top 1% of students taking the test score higher than our top 1% do. (We in the MMSD are justly proud of our inordinate number of National Merit semi-finalists, but if – heaven forbid – MMSD were to be plopped down in the middle of Illinois, our number of semi-finalists would go down, perhaps significantly so. Illinois students need a higher score on the PSAT to be designated a National Merit semi-finalist than Wisconsin students do.)
I asked a few people who know about such things and received this response:
The critical cut score for identifying National Merit Semifinalist varies from state to state depending on the number of students who took the test and how well those students did on the test. In 2009, a score of 207 would put a student amongst the top 1% of test takers in Wisconsin and qualify them as a National Merit Semifinalist. However this score would not be high enough to qualify the student as a semifinalist in 36 other states or the District of Columbia.
View individual state cut scores, by year here. In 2010, Minnesota’s cut score was 215, Illinois’ 214, Iowa 209 and Michigan 209. Wisconsin’s was 207.
Video Résumés Reveal Too Much, Too Soon
If you want a little entertainment, you could check out a movie or head to the bookstore. But you might have better luck firing up YouTube to watch the latest crop of video résumés. Since the start of the recession, thousands of unemployed hopefuls have posted clips of themselves wooing imaginary recruiters, and many seem to have gone mad in their quest for a job. They look tired, they look bored, they look angry. They talk about themselves in the third person. And they don’t mind making their private ambitions public. As one candidate told the camera, “I just want to commit my life to, you know, a job that, you know, my life can be committed to.”
Video résumés aren’t new, but as high unemployment drags on, they’re increasingly pitched to job hunters looking to stand out. Colleen Aylward, CEO of video service InterviewStudio.com, says she sees a new competitor launch just about every week. The services are popular with career counselors as well. Todd Lempicke, founder of OptimalResume.com, says more than 260 colleges, libraries and job centers will be offering his video services to their constituents, double the number in 2009.
A video résumé can run you anywhere from $7,000 (for “executive Web portfolio” packages) to $50 (for guided tutorials that have candidates recording presentations with a webcam). And, of course, many folks take the DIY route. When done right, the results can be impressive: It’s a chance to flaunt engaging qualities that a paper CV can’t capture. But more often, the effort goes horribly wrong.
Scissors, Glue, Pencils? Check. Cleaning Spray?
When Emily Cooper headed off to first grade in Moody, Ala., last week, she was prepared with all the stuff on her elementary school’s must-bring list: two double rolls of paper towels, three packages of Clorox wipes, three boxes of baby wipes, two boxes of garbage bags, liquid soap, Kleenex and Ziplocs.
“The first time I saw it, my mouth hit the floor,” Emily’s mother, Kristin Cooper, said of the list, which also included perennials like glue sticks, scissors and crayons.
Schools across the country are beginning the new school year with shrinking budgets and outsize demands for basic supplies. And while many parents are wincing at picking up the bill, retailers are rushing to cash in by expanding the back-to-school category like never before.
UC Berkeley will not send students DNA results
Under pressure from state public health officials, the professors behind UC Berkeley’s controversial plan to genetically test incoming freshmen and transfer students said Thursday they will scale back the program so that participants will not receive personal results from their DNA samples.
The university raised the ire of genetic watchdog and privacy groups in May when it first launched “Bring Your Genes to Cal.” The voluntary program is believed to be the largest genetic testing project at a U.S. university.
The 5,500 incoming freshman and transfer students for the fall semester received testing kits in the mail and were asked to submit cheek swabs of their DNA to kick off a yearly exercise to involve the new students in a common educational experience centered on a theme. This year’s theme is personalized medicine.
Students were to receive personal information about three of their genes – those related to the ability to break down lactose, metabolize alcohol and absorb folates. This information was to be the basis of lectures and discussions on such topics as the ethical, social and legal interpretations of genetic testing.
But what was meant to be a group educational exercise turned into a lesson for the university on the politics and policy of medical testing.
Assembly hearing
The program was the subject of a state Assembly committee hearing on Tuesday in Sacramento. On Wednesday, officials from the state Department of Public Health said the university must use certified laboratories that meet specific standards, rather than the campus labs, if the school planned to release individualized test results, identified only by barcodes, to students.
“The California Department of Public Health made the determination that what we’re doing isn’t really actual research or education; that what we’re doing is providing medical information, conducting a test,” said Dr. Mark Schlissel, dean of biological sciences at UC Berkeley’s College of Letters & Science and a professor of molecular and cell biology.
Schlissel said he disagreed with that assessment, but said the university will comply with state regulators. UC officials have asked the Department of Public Health to provide legal authority for its interpretation.
The university still plans to analyze the DNA samples in a campus research lab, but students will not have access to their personal results. Instead, the test results will be presented in aggregate to students during lectures and panel discussions this fall.
Schlissel said the controversy and intervention by state regulators has raised interesting questions for the discussions. “Who has authority to tell an individual what they’re allowed to know about themselves?” he said. “I don’t know the answer to that.”
About 700 students have already submitted their samples.
Critics’ concerns
Critics had raised questions about how the genetic information, even seemingly innocuous, could be misinterpreted or misused. For example, students who learn they metabolize alcohol well may mistakenly think they can overindulge without consequence.
Jeremy Gruber, who testified at Tuesday’s hearing before the Assembly Committee on Higher Education in his role as president of the Council for Responsible Genetics, still has lingering concerns about how the samples will be handled and whether students had the proper amount of information before offering consent to provide them.
“The fact it required the intervention of the Department of Public Health before they would act in the best interest of their students is absolutely appalling,” he said.
UC Berkeley officials have said the university will incinerate the samples after they are tested in the next few weeks. Jesse Reynolds, policy analyst at the Center for Genetics and Society in Berkeley, had opposed the university’s program primarily over privacy concerns and what he considered the lack of research into the implications of such a mass experiment.
He said restricting students from receiving information about their personal genetics essentially cancels the “personalized medicine” aspect of the program. He said that although students signed consent forms to participate as part of submitting their DNA samples, he is concerned they have now signed consent forms for what is to be a different program.
“Genetic testing in general and personalized medicine specifically are likely to be an increasing part of our lives,” Reynolds said. “More education is certainly needed, but this was not the way to go about it.”
Packing for College, 2010 Style Hidden financial traps are snaring even the best and brightest on campus–and their parents. Here is how to make sure you don’t flunk Money 101.
As you help pack up the minifridge, laptop and extra-long twin sheets for your college freshman, you might consider a few other last-minute chores:
• Scour your health-insurance coverage for loopholes.
• Reread your homeowner’s insurance policy.
• Call your lawyer.
Sending a child off to college for the first time is wrenching enough, but a slew of conflicting rules and changing banking and health-care laws are making this year’s move-in season more confusing than ever.
And with college costs and student debt at record levels, it is all the more important for students–and their parents–to avoid the new financial traps cropping up on campuses these days, from debit cards to health insurance.
Overlooking small details now, in the frenzied rush to campus, can invite much stress later on.
Hong Kong pupils head north for a new class system
Fion Chan Chui-tung could barely utter a complete sentence in Putonghua or English a year ago.
Now, after 12 months at Utahloy International School, a sprawling and pristine international school in Guangzhou, the Hong Kong teen converses effortlessly with her ethnically diverse schoolmates.
Fion, 18, is one of a growing number of pupils who have upped sticks and headed north to study. Enrollment of Hongkongers in international schools in Guangzhou and Shenzhen is rising by 5 to 10 per cent a year.
Parents who spurn prestigious international schools in Hong Kong in favour of mainland ones cite a list of factors: lower tuition fees, low living costs, a strict teaching regimen and bucolic campuses where not a word of Cantonese is spoken.
Fion’s mother, Luk Yim-fong, a businesswoman, transferred her daughter from Heung To Secondary School in Tseung Kwan O to Utahloy so that she would not be surrounded by Cantonese speakers. “Although Heung To offers Putonghua classes, all the students speak Cantonese after class,” she says. “From my business dealings with multinational corporations like Samsung, even Korean businessmen speak fluent Putonghua. Mandarin is a language my daughter must master in order to thrive in future.”
More college students mentally ill, study shows
The number of college students who are afflicted with a serious mental illness is rising, according to data presented Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in San Diego.
The findings came from an analysis of 3,265 college students who used campus counseling services between September 1997 and August 2009. The students were screened for mental disorders, suicidal thoughts and self-injurious behavior.
In 1998, 93 percent of the students seeking counseling were diagnosed with one mental disorder, compared to 96 percent of students in 2009. The percentage of students with moderate to severe depression rose from 34 percent to 41 percent while the number of students on psychiatric medications increased from 11 percent to 24 percent.
Why Does College Cost So Much?
One of the most popular articles on Digg yesterday was titled, “Why Does College Cost So Much?” — I guess it’s that time of year. The article was written by a pair of economics professors who have written a forthcoming book on the subject. The authors argue that the primary factors driving college-tuition inflation are:
1. The labor-hours needed to provide this “artisanal” service have not declined;
2. The cost of employing the highly educated workers needed to provide the service has gone up; and
3. The cost of the technologies employed in higher education has risen faster than the cost of other technologies.
I’m interested to see what kind of evidence the authors provide for this thesis in their book, because I’m not at all persuaded by this article. The authors don’t bother to mention the argument, even for the purpose of dismissing it, that the primary factor driving college-tuition inflation is actually ballooning federal tuition support: Tuition keeps going up because the federal government ensures that students can afford to pay it.
Hundreds of Colleges Fail to Make the Grade on Financial Responsibility
Goldie Blumenstyk, Brian O’Leary, and Alex Richards
A total of 319 degree-granting private institutions have failed the Education Department’s financial-responsibility test at some point in the past three years, receiving a composite score below 1.5.
Classroom Wars in South Korea: An education paradox
Education in South Korea is a paradox, where two big truths clash. Koreans are incredibly keen, and on many measures do very well. Yet nobody – students, parents, teachers or the authorities – is happy. And now battles are raging, on everything from testing and elitism to teachers’ politics, free school meals and corporal punishment.
Let’s start with the positive. I’m a bit skeptical when Koreans tell you how their Confucian heritage values learning. In theory yes, yet for centuries hardly anyone got to study except a tiny male scholar elite. Modern education – girls not excluded – only arrived with Christian missionaries in the late 19th century. Mass schooling for all is newer still. As recently as 1945, when Japan’s harsh 40-year rule ended, less than a quarter of Korean adults (22%) were literate.
They’ve certainly made up for lost time since. South Korea’s first rulers were no democrats, but they knew that so resource-poor a country needed human capital to develop. Hence even after a terrible war in 1950-53 and despite being poorer than much of Africa – yes, really – at that stage, under Syngman Rhee (1948-1960) primary education was vastly expanded. General Park Chung-hee (1961-1979) extended this to secondary and vocational schooling. By 1987, when South Koreans wrested back democracy from another general (Chun Doo-hwan), one third of high school-leavers went on to higher education: more than in the UK at that time.
Learning by doing How schools are trying to inculcate intelligent giving in their pupils
CHILDREN can be tender souls. Pitch them a sob story and they often swallow it whole. Reflect the harsh reality outside the school gates, however, and they develop sophisticated strategies for making hard choices. That, at least, is the early experience of an initiative to teach philanthropy to young teenagers.
Two years ago the Big Give, an organisation which collates information about 6,000 charities worldwide in an attempt to foster philanthropy, asked the fee-paying Dragon School in Oxford to run a pilot programme. It gave the school £1,250 to donate to charity and asked 13-year-old pupils to decide where the money should go.
