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Here are the problems from this past Sunday’s Moscow Math Festival for Grade 6 [PDF] (1,275 participants) and Grade 7 [PDF] (888 participants), along with a few photos (the competition was held at Moscow State University, using three buildings).
Letters to the Editor: NY Times:
“Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes” (news article, Feb. 18) indicates a rather recent phenomenon among college students.
Students from the earliest grades are encouraged to work hard and told that the rewards will follow. Students must realize that a grade is earned for achievement and not for the effort expended.
Yes, some students can achieve at higher levels with far less effort than others.
This mirrors the world beyond college as well.
In my experience as dean, when students complain about a professor’s grading, they seem to focus more on their “creative” justifications (excuses) rather than on remedies. Most faculty members stress the remedy that leads to achievement of instructional goals.
The time-honored mastery of the material should remain paramount. After all, this is what our society expects!
Alfred S. Posamentier
Dean, School of Education
City College of New York, CUNY
New York, Feb. 18, 2009
•
To the Editor:
As someone who recently went through the ordeal of contesting a grade, I was quite impassioned on reading your article. I have done this only once in four years, so not all of us take the matter lightly.
I resent the suggestion that students feel “entitled” to “get/receive” good grades.
What is so irrational about believing that hard work should warrant a high grade? I would argue that the very core of the American dream is the sentiment that one can achieve any greatness that he or she aspires to if he or she works hard enough.
When one puts one’s all into a class, it’s not shameful to hope that grades reflect that. The same applies to professionals and their salaries. Instead of psychoanalyzing their students, perhaps these professors should ask themselves this question: If your students are all really this despicable, why are you teaching?
Aimee La Fountain
New York, Feb. 18, 2009
The writer is a senior at Marymount Manhattan College.
A new report calls on English instructors to design a new curriculum and develop new pedagogies — from kindergarten through graduate school — responding to the reality that students mostly “write to the net.”
“Pencils are good; we won’t be abandoning them,” said Kathleen Blake Yancey, author of “Writing in the 21st Century,” a report from the National Council of Teachers of English.”They’re necessary, as a philosopher would put it, but not sufficient to the purpose.”
Yancey, a professor of English at Florida State University and immediate past president of NCTE, described by way of example the case of Tiffany Monk, a Florida teen who, during a flood caused by Tropical Storm Fay, observed that her neighbors were trapped in their homes. She took photos and sent an e-mail to a radio station; help soon arrived.
“This was composing in the 21st century. She chose the right technology, she wrote to the right audience,” Yancey said, during a panel presentation at the National Press Club Monday.
Where did Monk learn to do this? Not in school, said Yancey, where “we write on a topic we haven’t necessarily chosen. We write to a teacher; we write for a grade.”
Also on Monday, NCTE announced a National Day of Writing (October 20) and plans to develop a National Gallery of Writing intended to expand conventional notions of composition. Starting this spring, NCTE is inviting anyone and everyone to submit a composition of importance to them, in audio, text or video form; acceptable submissions for the gallery include letters, e-mail or text messages, journal entries, reports, electronic presentations, blog posts, documentary clips, poetry readings, how-to directions, short stories and memos.
Amid all the focus on new platforms for writing, a panelist who made his name as a nonfiction writer in pre-digital days, Gay Talese, made a case for old-fashioned research methods. Research, he said, “means leaving the desk; it means going out and spending lots of time with people [or books? Will F.]…The art of hanging out, I call it.”
“Googling your way through life, acquiring information without getting up, I think that’s dangerous,” Talese said.
“The modality isn’t what’s crucial,” said Kent Williamson, executive director of NCTE. What is, he continued, is “a commitment to the process” and deep engagement with a subject.
— Elizabeth Redden
Complete report [436K PDF]
My schooldays were totally great. I went to an all-girls convent and I just remember us all being extremely silly and laughing a lot at the completely stupid things we did.
There were lots of rules so we became extremely creative and were masters at creating totally believable excuses to manoeuvre our way through the system.
Actually, thinking about it I’ve never laughed like we did at school. But it was nice laughter and we never hurt anyone.
My happiest memory was winning a dancing competition.
I’d never won anything in my life before.
My worst memory was sewing the same apron for two years. I had to keep unpicking it and doing it again because it was always so bad. Even today just trying to thread a needle can reduce me to tears.
I went to Lacey Green Primary School in Wilmslow, near Manchester in England.
Well-off children and very poor children were mixed together and I felt very sad for some of them but sometimes made up nasty songs about them with the others.
It was my son’s decision to board at Eton, even though he already had a scholarship to a prestigious day school,” said Mr Bali, an engineer with his own consultancy firm.
“Our misgivings were emotional rather than academic. We are a close family. We see him every weekend. Pastoral care is an important issue when choosing a boarding school.
“In some schools pastoral care amounts to pampering, which might appeal to mothers but I think it should be balanced. Boys must learn to stand on their own two feet.”
Mr Bali’s son eventually managed to convince him that he should go to Eton but the caring father said parents had to be very careful about which boarding school they picked.
Academic standards had to be on a par with top day schools for boarding to be good value.
He was speaking in the wake of a report that found parents considered boarding schools in Britain to be good value for money despite steep fee rises in recent years.
The first-ever National Parent Survey carried out by Britain’s Boarding Schools Association (BSA) found that almost three quarters of parents who chose boarding education for their children said it was worth it.
But the Good Schools Guide warned that although parents were broadly in favour of boarding, fee levels were now approaching the psychological £10,000 (HK$111,000) a term mark and schools would have to work harder to justify the cost.
Lack of understanding of the credit crunch is magnifying its damage
THE BBC’s “Today” programme is the main current-affairs show on British radio. Last year it recruited a new presenter, Evan Davis, who is also an economist. An amusing pattern has since developed. Quizzed about the credit crunch, a politician delivers some carefully memorised remark about, say, quantitative easing. Then the guest experiences an audible moment of existential horror, as Mr Davis ungallantly presses him for details.
The tide has gone out and, with a very few exceptions, Britain is swimming naked: almost nobody appears to know what he is talking about. The havoc of the financial crisis has stretched and outstripped even most economists. The British political class is befogged. Ordinary people are overwhelmed. And just as the interaction between banking and economic woes is proving poisonous, so the interplay of public and political ignorance is damaging the country’s prospects.
Start with the government, whose ministers are still oscillating between prophesying economic Armageddon and gamely predicting the best of all possible recoveries. Gordon Brown is learned in economic history–indeed, he is at his most animated and endearing when discussing it. But the prime minister’s grip on the history he is living through is less masterful. The government’s implicit strategy is to try something and, when that does not work, try something else: the approach modestly outlined by Barack Obama, but rather less honest.
Most everyone agrees that something is very wrong with the six-page federal form for families seeking help with college costs.
Created in 1992 to simplify applying for financial aid, it has become so intimidating — with more than 100 questions — that critics say it scares off the very families most in need, preventing some teenagers from going to college.
Then, too, some families have begun paying for professional help with the form, known as the Fafsa,a situation that experts say indicates just how far awry the whole process has gone.
“We’re getting thousands of calls a day,” said Craig V. Carroll, chief executive of Student Financial Aid Services Inc., whose fafsa.com charges $80 to $100 to fill out the form. “Our calls for the month of January are up about 35 percent from last year. There’s been a huge increase in the desperation of families.”
As part of an effort to make college more affordable, higher-education leaders in Maryland are trying to keep textbook prices down.
The Board of Regents of the University System of Maryland unanimously approved guidelines Friday to make it easier for students to search for cheaper books.
“This is a real victory for students,” said Josh Michael, a junior at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and a student regent.
When Michael started college, he said, he spent almost $500 on books for his first four courses. He bought everything his professors suggested, then discovered as the semester went on that he didn’t really need extra Spanish workbooks and study guides.
Textbook prices have risen far more quickly than inflation. One reason, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office study conducted several years ago, is that they often come with lots of extras, such as CDs. Publishers say such features help students learn, but they often go unused.
Parents, it’s time for your pre-schoolers to begin becoming schoolers.
Kindergarten registration is set for Monday, March 2, from 1-6 p.m. at all Madison Metropolitan School District elementary schools.
Parents or guardians should register their child at the school he or she will attend. To be eligible for kindergarten, a child must be five years old by Sept. 1, 2009.
When registering, show proof of age for the child (birth certificate, baptismal record, medical assistance card), proof of residency (utility bill, lease, mortgage) and an immunization record.
via a kind reader’s email:
You are invited to participate in the MMSD climate survey for elementary parents. Your feedback is important. Please click the link below to begin the survey.
http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=U2BJLUT3TE6U
Is there a difference between a stupid teen trick – passing around a girl’s naked picture she’d earlier provided her now-ex-boyfriend – and child molestation?
Without a doubt.
Is there a difference even between that stupid teen behavior and being a teenager who threatens to use naked pictures obtained under a ruse as ammo for extorting sex?
Of course.
But under state law, all of them could become convicted felons who land on the state’s registry of sex offenders, leaving little distance between them. They would, most likely, be vilified and haunted by the label for decades, if not life, and increasingly told by communities where they can and cannot live.
Dangerous, devious sex offenders who are a risk to public safety deserve it.
Teens with unbelievably cavalier attitudes about sexual limits, to the point of stupidity, do not.
Parents, educators, communities and – we can only hope – kids have had their eyes opened by recent, revolting revelations.
The earlier case, as described in criminal charges, involved since-expelled New Berlin Eisenhower student Anthony Stancl, 18, who, pretending to be a girl on Facebook, got at least 31 boys to send him pictures of themselves naked. Threatening to circulate the pictures to schoolmates, he coerced at least seven of them into sex acts.
Why am I so ill-tempered when I read a sensible report like “Bridging the Gap: How to Strengthen the Pk-16 Pipeline to Improve College Readiness”?
The authors, Ulrich Boser and Stephen Burd, know their stuff. The sponsoring organization, New America Foundation, has a great reputation. (Bias alert: It also employs one of my sons as a senior fellow, but he does California politics and direct democracy, not national education policy.)
My problem is that smart and industrious experts like Boser and Burd often unearth startling facts but don’t follow through. “Bridging the Gap,” available at Newamerica.net, details the large percentage of first-year college students in remedial courses and the duplication in federal college preparation programs. This is interesting information of which few people are aware.
But their recommendations follow the standard line: Let’s have more meetings and spend more money. Example: “We recommend that the federal government provide states with incentives to come together and adopt national college and work-readiness standards in math, science and the language arts.”
Or: “The federal government should work directly with states to foster partnerships between high schools and postsecondary institutions to smooth the transition between high school and college.”
You might think that sounds reasonable. I think it misses an opportunity. Why not harness the energy and ambition of a new president to shake things up?
The Obama administration doesn’t have much money to spend getting more students ready for college. The Education Department’s $100 billion in stimulus funds will mostly go to less sophisticated projects that create jobs fast.
Julie Zingeser texts at home, at school, in the car while her mother is driving. She texts during homework, after pompon practice and as she walks the family dog. She takes her cellphone with her to bed.
Every so often, the hum of a new message rouses the Rockville teen from sleep. “I would die without it,” Julie, 15, says of her text life.
This does not surprise her mother, Pam, who on one recent afternoon scans the phone bill for the eye-popping number that puts an exclamation point on how growing up has changed in the digital age. In one busy month, Pam finds, her youngest daughter sent and received 6,473 text messages.
For Pam Zingeser, the big issue is not cost — it’s $30 a month for the family’s unlimited texting plan — but the effects of so much messaging. Pam wonders: What will this generation learn and what will they lose in the relentless stream of sentence fragments, abbreviations and emoticons? “Life’s issues are not always settled in sound bites,” Pam says.
THE wireless network at Mayhem Manor spreads from the router in the workroom to the living area of the one-storey hillside dwelling, but not as far as the bedrooms. And that’s important.
Your correspondent has often been tempted to upgrade his WiFi router with the latest 802.11n technology–as much for the increased range as for the four-fold boost in speed. Being eight time-zones behind many of his colleagues, he often checks e-mail in the middle of the night. His trusty little Hewlett-Packard palmtop computer, with its Cisco wireless card, would slip easily under the pillow.
But he’s resisted boosting Mayhem Manor’s wireless signal for several reasons. First, while it would quicken transfers between computers in the house, the internet connection would be no faster. Its speed is governed by the pathetic dribble of a broadband connection that’s 15,000 feet from the nearest telephone exchange in the village below.
The other reason for not upgrading is that he would prefer his tweenage daughter to do all her web surfing, e-mailing, online gaming and social networking not from the privacy of a bedroom, but from a common area of the house where an adult is invariably present.
The Madison Police Department is posting police call data on crimereports.com. Check out these links:
Dozens of students who barricaded themselves inside a New York University cafeteria have rejected the possibility of leaving the building as negotiations with school officials continue into Friday morning.
Members of the coalition Take Back NYU! have been occupying the cafeteria of the Helen & Martin Kimmel Center for University Life for more than 24 hours.
A spokeswoman for the students said that NYU told them that they could face expulsion or arrest if they didn’t leave the building by 1 a.m. Friday.
A crowd outside the building scuffled with police officers about a half hour after the deadline.
The students are calling for a series of changes, including increased transparency of the school’s finances. They want full budget and endowment disclosure, affordable education, and increased student participation in the university’s operation.
IF YOU know what deep learning and functional skills are, then you are already on the way to understanding eduspeak. But there are other terms that must be grasped to attain an A* in the subject.
Satisfactory. One of the four possible judgments of the schools inspectorate (the other three are inadequate, good and outstanding). It means “unsatisfactory”. (“Inadequate” for its part means “dire”.) This explains the chief schools inspector’s pronouncement that satisfactory schools are “not good enough”.
Excellence and enjoyment are mutually exclusive. The first is used for what matters (literacy and numeracy), the second for what does not (everything else). “Enjoying reading” and “excelling in music” are howlers in eduspeak.
Non-statutory depends on context. It can mean “optional”, but in the National Primary Strategy, a set of “guidelines” on teaching literacy and numeracy, it means “obligatory”–unless a school wants to risk being deemed “satisfactory”.
Gifted and talented refer to the top 5-10% in academic and non-academic pursuits respectively, who are to be encouraged in their gifts and talents. The terms are necessary as a sop to middle-class parents concerned that their children are not being stretched enough. To deflect the charge of elitism, levelled by many teachers, the categories have proliferated to include the capacity to “make sound judgments”, to show “great sensitivity or empathy” or to be “fascinated by a particular subject”.
This study examines the No Child Left Behind Act system and Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) rules for 28 states. We selected 36 real schools (half elementary, half middle) that vary by size, achievement, diversity, etc. and determined which of them would or would not make AYP when evaluated under each state’s accountability rules. If a school that made AYP in Washington were relocated to Wisconsin or Ohio, would that same school make AYP there? Based on this analysis, we can see how AYP varies across the country and evaluate the effectiveness of NCLB.
Wisconsin report [259K PDF]:
More schools make AYP in 2008 under Wisconsin’s accountability system than in any other state in our sample. This is likely due to the fact that Wisconsin’s proficiency standards (or cut scores) are relatively easy compared to other states (all of them are below the 30th percentile). Second, Wisconsin’s minimum subgroup size for students with disabilities is 50, which is a bit larger than most other states (the size for their other subgroups is comparable to other states’). This means that Wisconsin schools must have more students with disabilities in order for that group to be held separately accountable. Third, Wisconsin’s 99 percent confidence interval provides schools with greater leniency than the more commonly used 95 percent confidence interval. Last, unlike most states, Wisconsin measures its student performance with a proficiency index, which gives partial credit for students achieving “partial proficiency.” All of these factors work together so that 17 out of 18 elementary schools make AYP in Wisconsin, more than any other state in the study.
AP:
Some schools deemed to be failing in one state would get passing grades in another under the No Child Left Behind law, a national study found.
The study underscores wide variation in academic standards from state to state. It was to be issued today by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which conducted the study with the Kingsbury Center at the Northwest Evaluation Association.
The study comes as the Obama administration indicates it will encourage states to adopt common standards, an often controversial issue on which previous presidents have trod lightly.
“I know that talking about standards can make people nervous,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said recently.
“But the notion that we have 50 different goal posts doesn’t make sense,” Duncan said. “A high school diploma needs to mean something, no matter where it’s from.”
Every state, he said, needs standards that make kids college- and career-ready and are benchmarked against international standards.
The Fordham study measured test scores of 36 elementary and middle schools against accountability rules in 28 states.
I had a working mom, so I assumed my wife would be one, too. Clarissa Acuña, the woman I married, also planned on having a career of her own.
But we were both wrong. Clarissa hasn’t worked since the summer of 1991, shortly before she had delivered our third child.
At the time, it no longer made sense financially for her to work. After paying taxes on her wages and child care for three children, we wouldn’t have come out ahead.
[Cheapskate] Getty Images
But over the years, that fateful decision has locked us into two different roles. I work and earn. She takes care of the kids.
Having a stay-at-home wife has given me enormous career flexibility. Unlike some of my colleagues, I’ve never missed days because of a sick child. I’ve been able to work late when needed, travel whenever I wanted for stories, and move around the country for better jobs.
That’s the upside. There are also big downsides. There’s good reason to believe that Clarissa, who is bilingual and has a marketing degree, would have been successful in a multitude of careers. She never got the chance.
And as the kids grew older, living on one salary was a squeeze financially. I come from a long line of cheapskates. But I’ve been made cheaper because it was tough supporting three kids — particularly putting the eldest two through college — on one salary.
Periodically, I bring up the subject of Clarissa rejoining the work force. It’s not so much the extra money, though I do worry about our household being completely dependent on one wage earner in a contracting economy. Mostly, I just think she’s ready for something new, and she’s very talented.
Prof. Marshall Grossman has come to expect complaints whenever he returns graded papers in his English classes at the University of Maryland.
Prof. Ellen Greenberger studied what she found to be an increased sense of entitlement among college students.
“Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.”
He attributes those complaints to his students’ sense of entitlement.
“I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C,” he said. “That is the default grade. They see the default grade as an A.”
A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.
“I noticed an increased sense of entitlement in my students and wanted to discover what was causing it,” said Ellen Greenberger, the lead author of the study, called “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors,” which appeared last year in The Journal of Youth and Adolescence.
Professor Greenberger said that the sense of entitlement could be related to increased parental pressure, competition among peers and family members and a heightened sense of achievement anxiety.
Research on choosing colleges takes many forms, including visiting campuses and studying the schools’ Web sites. But for a lot of high-school students and their parents, finding a centralized resource containing information about numerous schools still means buying one of the thick, costly printed guides to college that have been around for years. The Web versions of these books are surprisingly dry.
But there’s a new, free Web site that, while overseen by paid editors, is built on lively content submitted by current students at the colleges. The information isn’t just words and numbers, but includes numerous photos and videos for most schools. You also can create a small social network of people interested in the same schools or who share other common traits.
In other words, this is a college-information resource built for the age of YouTube and Facebook.
The site, Unigo.com, costs nothing to use and supports itself with ads. Although it’s only a few months old, it already covers about 250 colleges and universities, and claims to average dozens of student-created reviews, photos and videos for each college. Its sophisticated search engine lets applicants comb all this material to find just what applies to them. For example, Unigo would let you see all content relevant to an Asian-American female applicant with conservative political views.
It is an actual true fact that many if not most educators in our high schools do not allow students in general to see the exemplary academic work of their peers in their own school. (Academic work in this case does not include dance, drama, newspaper, music, band, yearbook, etc.).
The feeling seems to be that if students are exposed to this good work they will be surprised, envious, discouraged, intimidated, and more likely just to give up and stop trying to do good academic work themselves.
For these reasons, it is another actual true fact that many history and social studies teachers at the high school level have taken care not to let their students see the exemplary history research papers published in The Concord Review over the last twenty years, for many of the same reasons, including a general desire to protect their students from the dangerous and damaging effects of academic competition, which are believed to have the same risk of producing those feelings of envy, depression, anxiety, and intimidation mentioned above.
Putting aside for the moment those risks seen to be attendant on having students shown and/or told about the exemplary academic work of their high school peers, isn’t it about time that we turned our attention to another potential source of those same harmful feelings we have described?
In fact, many, if not most, high school basketball players are known not only to be exposed to and to watch games played by other students at their own school, but also they may be found, in season, watching college basketball games, and even professional NBA games, with no educator or counselor even monitoring them while they do.
Surely, the chances of the majority of high school basketball players getting a four-year college athletic scholarship are slim, and their chances are vanishingly small of ever playing for an NBA team. And yet, we carelessly allow them to watch these players, whose skill and performance may far exceed their own, even though the chance of their experiencing envy, anxiety, intimidation, and so on, must be as great as they would feel in being exposed to exemplary academic work, which we carefully guard them from!
While there may be nothing we can practically do at present to prevent them from watching school concerts, plays, dance recitals, and band performances, or reading the school newspaper, we must take a firmer line when it comes to allowing them, especially in their own homes, or visiting with their friends, to watch college and professional sports presentations.
We should try to be consistent. If we truly believe that showing students and/or telling them about fine academic work by people their own age is harmful, we must take a firmer stand in blocking their access to games and matches, particularly on national television, which expose them to superior athletic performances.
Police and school officials are urging parents to check for naked photos on their children’s cell phones after a 14-year-old girl learned that her nude photo ended up in the hands of hundreds of area high school students.
The Waukesha West High School [Map] student sent the photo to her boyfriend, but when the couple broke up, he forwarded it to other students using his cell phone, Waukesha police Capt. Mark Stigler said Tuesday. Police have talked to the core group responsible and may recommend felony possession of child pornography charges, he said. Police have recovered computers belonging to the teens to investigate whether they also sent the photos over the Internet.
“We know it’s a hard stance, but how else do we deal with this?” Stigler said. “Kids are being immature and doing foolish things.”
An automated phone message from the Waukesha School District went to parents Monday and Tuesday asking them to talk to their children and check the phones for illicit photos.
Police want parents to delete any inappropriate photos because the magnitude of the potential proliferation of photos is too large to investigate, Stigler said.
Related: Textual Misconduct What to do about teens and their dumb naked photos of themselves.
John Mark sez, “Some past Boing Boing posts have talked about how children’s lives in the UK and North America have become more and more stifled by overprotective adults in the last few decades. This 2007 book by Tim Gill, now free in its entirety online, show how many of these efforts are largely misdirected, and even counterproductive. Focusing on the UK, but also touching on other countries, the book includes accounts and data to show how resources are wasted on dubious and costly playground modifications and ‘stranger danger’ paranoia, when we could instead foster safer and more mature kids by focusing more on independence, social support, and traffic safety.”
No Fear joins the increasingly vigorous debate about the role and nature of childhood in the UK. Over the past 30 years activities that previous generations of children enjoyed without a second thought have been relabelled as troubling or dangerous, and the adults who permit them branded as irresponsible. No Fear argues that childhood is being undermined by the growth of risk aversion and its intrusion into every aspect of children’s lives. This restricts children’s play, limits their freedom of movement, corrodes their relationships with adults and constrains their exploration of physical, social and virtual worlds.
AP:
Fewer than 1% of American teens are likely to need cholesterol drugs, says a new study that offers some reassuring news on the childhood obesity front.
Last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued eyebrow-raising new guidelines: Doctors were urged to consider cholesterol drugs for more kids, even as young as 8, if they had high levels of “bad cholesterol,” or LDL, along with other health problems like obesity and high blood pressure.
The academy didn’t address how many children might fall into that category. Now, a new study published online Monday in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation helps allay concerns that “many, many” children might need to be on cholesterol drugs, said Stephen Daniels, lead author of the pediatric guidelines.
“The concern was I think, because there’s an increasing level in obesity, that it would lead to higher and higher cholesterol levels. They don’t seem to be going up,” he said.
The new pediatrics guidance was based on growing evidence that damage leading to heart disease begins early in life. At the same time, recent research has shown that cholesterol-fighting drugs are generally safe for children.
As happens in every recession, Washington area school systems are cutting back. It’s depressing. Here’s an antidote: Harness the creativity of educators, parents and students to improve our schools without more spending. Some teachers I trust helped me come up with these seven ideas.
1. Replace elementary school homework with free reading. Throw away the expensive take-home textbooks, the boring worksheets and the fiendish make-a-log-cabin-out-of-Tootsie-Rolls projects. One of the clearest (and most ignored) findings of educational research is that elementary students who do lots of homework don’t learn more than students who do none. Eliminating traditional homework for this age group will save paper, reduce textbook losses and sweeten home life. Students should be asked instead to read something, maybe with their parents — at least 10 minutes a night for first-graders, 20 minutes for second-graders and so on. Teachers can ask a few kids each day what they learned from their reading to discourage shirkers.
2. Unleash charter schools. I know, I know. Many good people find this suggestion as welcome as a call from a collection agency. They think charter schools, public schools that make their own rules, are draining money from school systems, but the opposite seems to be true. In most states, charters receive fewer tax dollars per child than regular public schools. Yet they often attract creative principals and teachers who do more with less. School finance experts don’t all agree, but I am convinced that charters are a bargain. So let’s have more. That won’t save money in the District, one of the few places that pay as much for charters as regular schools, but Maryland and Virginia would find more charters a boon if they dropped their suburban, aren’t-we-great notions and listened to what imaginative educators in a few little charter schools could teach them.
3. Have teachers call or e-mail parents — once a day would be fine — with praise for their children. Some great classroom teachers make a habit of contacting parents when kids do something well. Jason Kamras, 2005 national teacher of the year and now a leading D.C. schools executive, used to punch up the parent’s number on his cellphone while standing next to a student’s desk. It doesn’t take long. It doesn’t cost much. But it nurtures bonds among teachers, students and parents that can lead to wonderful things.
In the land of high cuisine, even lunch in preschool is a culinary delight. French culinary traditions and knowledge are cultivated at a very young age. Even toddlers in day care centers are taught how to sit at a table and are encouraged to eat all kinds of foods.
Reacting to an online swell of suspicion about changes to Facebook’s terms of service, the company’s chief executive moved to reassure users on Monday that the users, not the Web site, “own and control their information.”
The online exchanges reflected the uneasy and evolving balance between sharing information and retaining control over that information on the Internet. The subject arose when a consumer advocate’s blog shined an unflattering light onto the pages of legal language that many users accept without reading when they use a Web site.
The pages, called terms of service, generally outline appropriate conduct and grant a license to companies to store users’ data. Unknown to many users, the terms frequently give broad power to Web site operators.
This month, when Facebook updated its terms, it deleted a provision that said users could remove their content at any time, at which time the license would expire. Further, it added new language that said Facebook would retain users’ content and licenses after an account was terminated.
Say you’re a middle school principal who has just confiscated a cell phone from a 14-year-old boy, only to discover it contains a nude photo of his 13-year-old girlfriend. Do you: a) call the boy’s parents in despair, b) call the girl’s parents in despair, or c) call the police? More and more, the answer is d) all of the above. Which could result in criminal charges for both of your students and their eventual designation as sex offenders.
Sexting is the clever new name for the act of sending, receiving, or forwarding naked photos via your cell phone. I wasn’t fully persuaded that America was facing a sexting epidemic, as opposed to a journalists-writing-about-sexting epidemic, until I saw a new survey done by the National Campaign To Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. The survey has one teen in five reporting he has have sent or posted naked photos of himself. Whether all this reflects a new child porn epidemic or just a new iteration of the old shortsighted teen narcissism epidemic remains unclear.
Last month, three girls (ages 14 or 15) in Greensburg, Pa., were charged with disseminating child pornography for sexting their boyfriends. The boys who received the images were charged with possession. A teenager in Indiana faces felony obscenity charges for sending a picture of his genitals to female classmates. A 15-year-old girl in Ohio and a 14-year-old girl in Michigan were charged with felonies for sending along nude images of themselves to classmates. Some of these teens have pleaded guilty to lesser charges; others have not. If convicted, these young people may have to register as sex offenders, in some cases for a decade or two. Similar charges have been filed in cases in Alabama, Connecticut, Florida, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin.
Sure, students work hard to get into this elite college. But so does the admissions committee, assures Dean Bill Fitzsimmons
In the U.S., few competitions are more cutthroat than the college admissions game. And every year it grows more intense as an ever-larger pool of high school seniors apply for one of the coveted spots at the nation’s top colleges, thus ensuring that even more will have their hopes dashed. Meanwhile, the elite colleges have been stepping up their efforts to woo the best and brightest students–the prized pupils who will help increase the prestige of their campuses.
You might assume that Harvard College–blessed with higher ed’s greatest brand name, and an endowment second to none–could afford to remain relatively aloof from this battle. But in reality, “There is no place that works harder than we do,” says William R. “Bill” Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s veteran dean of admissions.
THREE-PART PLAN. Certainly Harvard’s results are the envy of higher education. For the class of 2010, which will start in September, Harvard received a near-record 23,000 applications. Of these, it accepted a mere 2,100–or just 9%–ranking it as the nation’s most selective college. Even more impressive, some 80% of the chosen ultimately decided to attend Harvard–a yield rate that is easily the highest among colleges and universities. By contrast, a handful of other elites–including Yale and Stanford–have yield rates around 70%. But even such well-known schools as Williams, Duke, and Dartmouth have yields of 50% or less.
A 9-year-old Dane County boy wrote about being shot with a BB gun, and now his father is charged with child abuse.
The boy had written an essay about the “painful afternoon my Dad shot me with a BB gun.”
The elementary-school teacher turned the essay over to authorities.
Prosecutors charged 36-year-old David J. Peschl on Friday with one felony count of child abuse.
For the last twenty years of so, I and others have argued, without much success, that our high schools should assign students complete nonfiction books and serious academic research papers at least once in their high school careers, so that if they decide to go on to college, they will be partly prepared for the reading lists of nonfiction books and the term paper assignments they would find there.
I now realize that I have been going about this all the wrong way. Instead of publishing 846 exemplary history research papers by high school students from 36 countries since 1987, in an effort to inspire high school students and their teachers to give more attention to real history books and research papers, I should have lobbied for a change in the academic requirements at the college level instead!
If colleges could simply extend many of their current efforts to eliminate books by dead white males, and to have students write more about themselves in expository writing courses, and could gradually guide students away from the requirements for reading nonfiction books and writing term papers, then the pressure to raise academic standards for reading and writing in our high schools could be further relaxed, relieving our students of all that pressure to become well educated.
Many colleges are leading the way in this endeavor, abandoning courses in United States history, and reducing the number of assigned books, many of which are even older than the students themselves. It is felt that movies by Oliver Stone and creative fiction about vampires may be more relevant to today’s 21st Century students than musty old plays by Shakespeare, which were not even written in today’s English, and long difficult history books written about events that probably happened before our students were even born!
Courses about the oppression of women, which inform students that all American presidents so far have been men, and courses which analyze the various Dracula movies, are much easier for many students to relate to, if they have never read a single nonfiction book or written one history research paper in their high school years.
What Web sites do parents, schools, and small businesses censor the most on their networks? Porn? Time wasters? Shopping? Social networks? All of the above!
These are currently the ten most-blocked Web sites on home, school, and small business networks, via OpenDNS’s domain filtering tool.
1. MySpace.com
2. Facebook.com
3. YouTube.com
4. Playboy.com
5. Ebay.com
6. Meebo.com
7. Friendster.com
8. Orkut.com
9. AdultFriendFinder.com
10. Espn.com
Everyday I receive an email from somebody about how their account was hacked, how a friend tagged them in the photo and they want a way to avoid it, as well as a number of other complications related to their privacy on Facebook. Over the weekend one individual contacted me to let me know that he would be removing me as a friend from Facebook because he was “going to make a shift with my Facebook use – going to just mostly family stuff.”
Perhaps he was tired of receiving my status updates or perhaps he didn’t want me to view photos from his personal life. Whatever the reason for ending our Facebook friendship, I figured that many people would benefit from a thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook. Below is a step by step process for protecting your privacy.
Compared with the students in the 1970s, today’s accounting students are uneducated and unfit for a college education.
I have been teaching full time for over thirty years. If you toss in my apprenticeship teaching as a graduate student, I have taught for almost thirty-five years. During that span of time, one sees many, many students, and it amazes me how different they have been over time, and the inequality continues to grow. Compared with the students in the 1970s, today’s students are uneducated and unfit for a college education.
Before proceeding, let me enunciate two premises. First, I do not think there is any significant difference between the two groups in terms of native, raw intelligence. Instead, the distinction between yesterday’s and today’s students when they first set foot on college campuses rests in their educational backgrounds, analytical thinking, quantitative skills, reading abilities, willingness to work, and their attitudes concerning the educational process. In short, they differ in terms of their readiness for college. Second, I am focusing on the average student who majors in accounting. Both groups arise from a distribution of students. The lower tail of yesteryear’s population had some weak students, and the upper tail of the present-day population has some very strong students; however, when one focuses on the means of these two distributions, he or she finds a huge gap.
To begin, today’s average accounting major cannot perform what used to be Algebra I and II in high school. Students cannot solve simultaneous equations. Students have difficulty with present value computations, not to mention formula derivations. Students even have difficulty employing the high-low method to derive a cost function, something that merely requires one to estimate a straight line from two points.
I would like to discuss in class the partial derivative of a present value formula to ascertain the impact of changes in interest rates, but that has become a fruitless enterprise. Even if students had a course in calculus, the exams probably had multiple choice questions so students guessed their way through the course, they don’t remember what they learned, and whatever they learned was mechanical and superficial.
Related:
Unless University of Wisconsin students specifically restrict access to their directory information, businesses such as credit card companies and lenders can get a list of every student’s name, address, phone number and more from the university for a nominal fee.
Some parents of Wisconsin college students questioned how student information was released after they received official-looking letters in recent weeks urging them to pay $49 to apply for financial aid.
The letters included student names and where they attended school, leading some parents to believe the fee was required by the university, but the mailings were from College Financial Advisory, a business that charges money for information available free online.
Faye A. Ara, executive vice president of operations for the San Diego-based company, said the names were purchased from private vendors, none of which Ara would name.
UW-Madison did not provide the names to the company, said Registrar Joanne Berg. After some UW-Madison parents called the university to ask about the letters, the school made clear it does not endorse the business and posted a warning online.
In recognition of Black History Month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has presented a flattering economic sketch of black people in the United States. In this drawing by the numbers, we are seen as a relatively young and hearty workforce — 17 million black people strong — poised to weather the difficult economic times ahead.
Nearly two-thirds of us are 45 and younger, according to the bureau. And more than one in four are employed in education and health service fields — where some of the fastest growing occupations are expected to be found through 2016.
The portrait, based on 2008 data, is relentlessly upbeat, without even a hint that 2.2 million black people were unemployed last year. It is as though they had been airbrushed from the picture altogether.
Yet, if you really want to cut black unemployment, who better to look at than those of us who have jobs? What you’ll see is a strong correlation between work and education. Hard to tell that when the numbers crunchers start whittling away at school programs in a recession.
Ah Ho’s story is more common than many realise. Lee Tak-wai, an outreach worker with the Hong Kong Playground Association, says bullying has become a pervasive problem in schools.
“In the past, things were black and white: we had the bad youngsters and the good ones. But the line has become blurred and problematic behaviour is more common among teenagers,” Lee says. “Bullying has spread like an epidemic.”
A survey of 1,552 lower secondary students last year found that aggressive physical action – including shoving and kicking – had increased by 31 per cent compared with a similar study in 2001. Conducted jointly by the Playground Association and City University, the survey found that threatening behaviour such as taking others’ belongings and forcing victims to pay for snacks had risen by 42 per cent.
Educators and social workers view most bullies as products of circumstance. “School bullies are usually low achievers,” Lee says. “They often don’t receive sufficient attention from their parents and their relationships with teachers are strained. Since they can’t get a sense of achievement in school, they resort to improper behaviour to draw people’s attention and build their self-image. It’s a vicious cycle.”
Katherine Evans said she was frustrated with her English teacher for ignoring her pleas for help with assignments and a brusque reproach when she missed class to attend a school blood drive.
So Ms. Evans, who was then a high school senior and honor student, logged onto the networking site Facebook and wrote a rant against the teacher, Sarah Phelps.
“To those select students who have had the displeasure of having Ms. Sarah Phelps, or simply knowing her and her insane antics: Here is the place to express your feelings of hatred,” she wrote.
Her posting drew a handful of responses, some of which were in support of the teacher and critical of Ms. Evans. “Whatever your reasons for hating her are, they’re probably very immature,” a former student of Ms. Phelps wrote in her defense.
A few days later, Ms. Evans removed the post from her Facebook page and went about the business of preparing for graduation and studying journalism in the fall.
But two months after her online venting, Ms. Evans was called into the principal’s office and was told she was being suspended for “cyberbullying,” a blemish on her record that she said she feared could keep her from getting into graduate schools or landing her dream job.
T. Keung Hui via a kind reader’s email:
North Carolina’s two largest school systems have taken vastly different approaches to two thorny issues — student reassignment and educating low-income students with hefty academic deficiencies.
Wake County, the state’s largest district, has used buses instead of greenbacks to address the academic needs of low-income students.
To meet the demands of growth and support a diversity policy aimed at reducing the number of high-poverty schools, Wake’s system moves thousands of students each year to different schools, sometimes sending kids on bus rides of more than 20 miles.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, the second-largest district in North Carolina, has shifted to a system of largely neighborhood schools, resulting in a stratified mix of affluent schools in the suburbs and high-poverty schools near downtown Charlotte.
Instead of busing kids to balance out the level of low-income students at each school, the district pours millions of dollars into these high-poverty schools each year to boost the performance of academically disadvantaged students.
Charles J. Sykes:
“Dumbing Down Our Kids–What’s Really Wrong With Outcome Based Education”
Charles J. Sykes, Wisconsin Interest, reprinted in Network News & Views 2/94, pp. 9-18
Joan Wittig is not an expert, nor is she an activist. She just didn’t understand why her children weren’t learning to write, spell, or read very well. She didn’t understand why they kept coming home with sloppy papers filled with spelling mistakes and bad grammar and why teachers never corrected them or demanded better work. Nor could she fathom why her child’s fourth-grade teacher would write, “I love your story, especially the spelling,” on a story jammed with misspelled words. (It began: “Once a pona time I visited a tropical rian forist.”)
While Wittig did not have a degree in education, she did have some college-level credits in education and a “background of training others to perform accurately and competently in my numerous job positions, beginning in my high school years.” That experience was enough for her to sense something was wrong. She was not easily brushed off by assurances that her children were being taught “whole language skills.” For two years, she agonized before transferring her children from New Berlin’s public schools to private schools.
After only a semester at the private schools, her children were writing and reading at a markedly higher level. Their papers were neatly written, grammatical, and their spelling was systematically corrected.
Earlier this year, she decided to take her story to her local school board.
As a parent, I thought I knew a few things about teenagers. And as a male, I figured I understood how guys think.
After hearing last week about the New Berlin Facebook sextortionist, I’m not so sure.
It made me wonder:
Did Anthony Stancl, the 18-year-old defendant, just one day dream up this scheme he’s charged with and decide to prey on his classmates at Eisenhower High and risk going to prison? Was sex by blackmail really his best hookup option?
Could he have dreamed that 31 guys, tricked into believing he was a female classmate on Facebook, would send along a naked photo or video of themselves? How many said no is not clear, but 31 thought, yeah, where’s my camera?
Do guys now have a good reason to believe that a girl at school truly wants naked pictures of them? And that she’ll send one of herself back to them? And that it’s perfectly safe to swap pics on the Internet where nothing ever falls into the wrong hands?
Isn’t everyone who approaches you online potentially someone other than who they say they are? Kids are adults. Boys are girls. Girls are cops.
Isn’t the Internet both the most fantastic and most monstrous invention in our lifetime?
Collin Levy interviews Chicago Mayor Richard Daley:
Mayor Daley also sees an important role for charter schools. “You can’t have a monopoly and think a monopoly works. Slowly it dissolves. And I think that charter schools are good to compete with public schools.” Nobody says there’s something wrong with public universities facing competition from private ones. “I think the more competition we have, the better off we are in Chicago.”
But the mayor won’t support vouchers. “School choice is hard. You’re going back to arguing,” he says, trailing off without making clear whether he means the politics. But he does think it’s notable that, while federal money and Pell grants can be used to finance an education at a private college, federal money can’t be used to help students get a private education at the K-12 level.
Ron Huberman, Mr. Daley’s former chief of staff and head of the Chicago Transit Authority, is anything but an education bureaucrat, and that’s just what the mayor wants in the man he named to replace Mr. Duncan as chief of Chicago schools. Too often in the past, before the mayor took over, the city would bring in schools chiefs who seemed to be riding an education lazy-susan from school to school. “We’d give them big bonuses to come here and then when we’d fire them they’d go to other school systems.”
ince September’s financial meltdown, community colleges and universities offering free personal-finance courses online have seen a sharp increase in enrollment.
Many people are turning to the more than 180 business courses offered through the OpenCourseWare Consortium — a group of about 250 universities world-wide, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of California-Irvine. These courses aren’t exactly classes, but they offer free access to online syllabi and study materials, along with lecture notes and exams.
An MIT initiative called OpenCourseWare offers business courses online.
One course, “Fundamentals of Financial Planning,” has seen a 27% increase in traffic since September, according to the school. With 48,000 viewers, it has become the most popular of the University of California-Irvine’s OpenCourseWare offerings, the school says. Class takers are given worksheets and assessments to help them negotiate topics like college planning and retirement savings, says Gary Matkin, dean of continuing education. “It’s a cross between a reference and a learning experience,” says Mr. Matkin. As more people are affected by the downturn, he expects the number of course takers to grow.
Jacqui Seibel and Mark Johnson:
A former New Berlin Eisenhower student was accused Wednesday of a pattern of manipulation and deception using the social networking site Facebook to coerce male schoolmates into sexual encounters.
Anthony R. Stancl, 18, posing as a female on Facebook, persuaded at least 31 boys to send him naked pictures of themselves and then blackmailed some of the boys into performing sex acts under the threat that the pictures would be released to the rest of the high school, according a criminal complaint.
All 31 boys attend New Berlin Eisenhower Middle/High School, said Waukesha County District Attorney Brad Schimel.
The sexual assaults occurred in a bathroom at the high school, the school parking lot, a New Berlin Public Library restroom, Valley View Park, Malone Park, Minooka Park and at some of the victims’ homes.
At least seven boys, 15 to 17, were forced into performing sex acts, Schimel said. The incidents occurred from spring 2008 until the time of Stancl’s arrest in November. Stancl had 300 photos and movie clips on his computer of boys from the school, ages 13 to 19, Schimel said.
Higher education can be a financial disaster. Especially with the return on degrees down and student loan sharks on the prowl.
As steadily as ivy creeps up the walls of its well-groomed campuses, the education industrial complex has cultivated the image of college as a sure-fire path to a life of social and economic privilege.
Joel Kellum says he’s living proof that the claim is a lie. A 40-year-old Los Angeles resident, Kellum did everything he was supposed to do to get ahead in life. He worked hard as a high schooler, got into the University of Virginia and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history.
Accepted into the California Western School of Law, a private San Diego institution, Kellum couldn’t swing the $36,000 in annual tuition with financial aid and part-time work. So he did what friends and professors said was the smart move and took out $60,000 in student loans.
Kellum’s law school sweetheart, Jennifer Coultas, did much the same. By the time they graduated in 1995, the couple was $194,000 in debt. They eventually married and each landed a six-figure job. Yet even with Kellum moonlighting, they had to scrounge to come up with $145,000 in loan payments. With interest accruing at up to 12% a year, that whittled away only $21,000 in principal. Their remaining bill: $173,000 and counting.
Gov. Jim Doyle is stumping for a bill that would require insurance companies to cover autism.
Most insurance companies don’t cover autism because it is classified as an emotional disorder rather than a neurological condition.
A host of lawmakers and Drew Goldsmith, a 12-year-old autistic boy from Middleton, backed Doyle at a press conference in his office Tuesday.
Doyle is proposing strengthening current legislation to include minimum coverage levels of $60,000 for intensive treatment and $30,000 for post-intensive services. He said it would cut the waiting list to join a state-run program for autism services by a third.
Lawmakers on Tuesday said they hope to win support for the bill in the Legislature.
Via a kind reader’s email. Three surveys for families that have left the Madison School District for the following destinations [PDF]:
Related Links:
The Madison School District’s tax and spending authority is based on its enrollment.
ebro, who had never been to America before arriving in Palo Alto in late September 2005, had dreams of earning a degree in economics and going to work for a venerable bank, either in finance or computer systems.
Now, the 21-year-old Sebro is months shy of graduating. Financial markets have convulsed and unemployment is climbing. And Sebro, who interned at Goldman Sachs in New York in September, had a front row, white-knuckle seat as Lehman – once the nation’s fourth-largest investment bank – went bankrupt.
Sebro, who listens to friends talk about job offers rescinded and about the possibility of taking a fifth year of school in hopes the market will recover, is rethinking his own strategy as he prepares to leave the cocoon of college and make it on his own.
“I learned a lot from this crisis,” says Sebro, an economics major. “We do not know who will fail next. There is a total change in what is considered risky.”
Sebro added, “Nobody knows if a job offer is real these days. I’ve realized I can’t tie my fortune to a big bank. My thinking now is that starting my own business is going to be less risky than going to work for someone else.”
Seems like a simple question, but given how much time and money we spend on it, it has a wide range of answers, many unexplored, some contradictory. I have a few thoughts about education, how we use it to market ourselves and compete, and I realized that without a common place to start, it’s hard to figure out what to do.
So, a starter list. The purpose of school is to:
- Become an informed citizen
- Be able to read for pleasure
- Be trained in the rudimentary skills necessary for employment
- Do well on standardized tests
- Homogenize society, at least a bit
- Pasteurize out the dangerous ideas
- Give kids something to do while parents work
- Teach future citizens how to conform
- Teach future consumers how to desire….
The consumption aspects of this list are useful to consider, particularly in light of some reform textbooks.
City dwellers want out
“City residents disproportionately are more likely than people living in other types of communities to say they would prefer to live in a place other than a city,” Morin says. “Fewer than half of all city residents say there is no better place to live than in a city.”
A smaller proportion of women express the desire to live in the nation’s largest cities. “Women are less drawn to big cities,” says Robert Lang, co-director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. “It could be safety.”
Wanting to live outside cities doesn’t necessarily mean people reject urban lifestyles, however. The appeal of developments with an urban flair — ones that combine housing, stores and offices in a neighborhood setting — is growing.
The complete report can be found here.
I was honored to be part of the Madison School District’s “Strategic Planning Process” this weekend. More than 60 community members, students, parents, board members and district employees participated.
The process, which included meetings Thursday (1/29/2009) from 8 to 6 Friday (1/30/2009) from 8 to 5 and Saturday (1/31/2009) from 8 to 12, thus far, resulted in the following words:
MMSD Mission Statement (1/30/2009):
Our mission is to cultivate the potential in every student to thrive as a global citizen by inspiring a love of learning and civic engagement, by challenging and supporting every student to achieve academic excellence, and by embracing the full richness and diversity of our community.
Draft Strategic Priorities
1. Student:
We will eliminate the achievement gap by ensuring that all students reach their highest potential. To do this, we will prepare every student for kindergarten, create meaningful student-adult relationships, and provide student-centered programs and supports that lead to prepared graduates. (see also student outcomes)
2. Resource/Capacity:
We will rigorously evaluate programs, services and personnel through a collaborative, data-driven process to prioritize and allocate resources effectively and equitably, and vigorously pursue the resources necessary to achieve our mission.
3. Staff
We will implement a formal system to support and inspire continuous development of effective teaching and leadership skills of all staff who serve to engage our diverse student body while furthering development of programs that target the recruitment and retent ion of staff members who reflect the cultural composition of our student body.
4. Curriculum
We will revolutionize the educational model to engage and support all students in a comprehensive participatory educational experience defined by rigorous, culturally relevant and accelerated learning opportunities where authentic assessment is paired with flexible instruction.
5. Organization/Systems:
We will proudly leverage our rich diversity as our greatest strength and provide a learning environment in which all our children experience what we want for each of our children. We will:
Several parents from Jefferson Middle School have been meeting with Dr. Nerad and administrators to discuss the evolution of the standards based report cards in Middle School.
After much research on my part, it is clear standard based report cards are the “new” thing and a result of NCLB. It is easily adaptable at the elementary school, but very FEW school districts have implemented these changes in the middle school and in the high school it is almost nonexistent due to the difficulty adapting them for college entrance. It seems the goal of standard based report cards from the NCLB legistation is to make sure teachers teach the standards. It is kind of backwards that way but many teachers feel it makes sure they cover all the required standards.
Our local concerns and response from district include:
I accept with many reservations that we are doing standards based reporting for middle school students. I am angry that the district picked Infinite Campus at about the same time they were discussing going to Standards Based Report cards and did not realize 2/3 of the students will not benefit from IC. I am also upset that a pilot of the middle school report card was not conducted with staff, parents and student input. At Jefferson the staff feel under trained, overwhelmed and as though this was pushed down their throats. It says to me the staff were not consulted. When the staff person that was in charge of training the rest of the staff at Jefferson is not even using the I.C. it says a lot about the implementation of the middle school reporting. As far as standards based report cards moving to high school for MMSD, this would be very difficult. Not just due to college entrance but because MMSD high schools do not have standards to base the report cards upon.
Faced with a dismal market for college summer internships, a growing number of anxious parents are pitching in to help — by buying their kids a foot in the door.
Some are paying for-profit companies to place their college students in internships that are mostly unpaid. Others are hiring marketing consultants to create direct-mail campaigns promoting their children’s workplace potential. Still other parents are buying internships outright in online charity auctions.
Even as the economy slows, internship-placement programs are seeing demand rise by 15% to 25% over a year ago. Critics of the programs say they deepen the divide between the haves and have-nots by giving students from more affluent families an advantage. But parents say the fees are a small price for giving their children a toehold in a treacherous job market. And operators of the programs claim they actually broaden access to internships by opening them to students who lack personal or political connections to big employers.
The whole idea of paying cash so your kid can work is sometimes jarring at first to parents accustomed to finding jobs the old-fashioned way — by pounding the pavement. Susan and Raymond Sommer of tiny St. Libory, Ill., were dismayed when their daughter Megan, then a junior at a Kentucky university, asked them to spend $8,000 so she could get an unpaid sports-marketing internship last summer in New York City. Paying to work “was something people don’t do around here,” says Ms. Sommer, a retired concrete-company office worker; her husband, a retired electrical superintendent, objected that if “you work for a company, you should be getting paid.”
Trinity Episcopal School survived Hurricane Ike last fall. But then another storm hit — the economy.
The Galveston, Texas, school, where tuition is between $5,000 and $8,000 a year, has seen its enrollment drop 12%, says David Dearman, the head of the school. Many parents of its students were among the 3,000 workers laid off by the area’s largest employer, the University of Texas Medical Branch. At the end of 2008, the school’s endowment was $800,000, down about 20% from July.
The school has ramped up donation efforts through its Web site, and held car washes and bake sales. It stopped using substitute teachers — other staff members now step in when a teacher is out sick. “Our school will survive, but it will take years to recover,” Mr. Dearman says.
Trinity Episcopal School is one of many kindergarten-through-12th-grade private schools caught in the middle of an economic tempest: anemic endowments, dwindling donations, financially strapped parents slashing tuition from the family budget, and an exodus to suburbs with more appealing public schools where costs are lower.
“The discourse has shifting from sustainability to survivability,” says Myra McGovern, a spokeswoman for the National Association of Independent Schools.
But there is controversy with 4K, and not just because of the cost. In other districts that have started programs, operators of private centers that stand to lose tuition dollars have emerged as opponents.
That’s unlikely to be true for Renee Zaman, director of Orchard Ridge Nursery School on Madison’s west side, who said last week that her center would be in a good position to participate with a 4K program because they already teach 84 4-year-olds and because all of their early childhood teachers are state certified.
But Zaman also said she hopes that the district doesn’t push a 4K program through too quickly. She is particularly worried that the curriculum might focus too heavily on academics.
One sticking point in past 4K discussions in Madison was concern from the teachers union, Madison Teachers Inc., that preschool teachers at off-site programming centers might not be employees of the school district.
But Nerad and MTI Executive Director John Matthews have had many discussions about 4K over the past several months, and Matthews said as long as no district teachers are displaced, he is in favor of the program.
Related: Marc Eisen on “Missed Opportunities for 4K and High School Redesign”.
Fanta Konneh is the first girl in her family to go to school. Not the first to go to college, or to graduate from high school. Fanta, 18, who grew up in Guinea after her family fled Liberia, became the first to walk into a classroom of any kind last year.
“Just the boys go to school, so I always knew I was left out,” said Fanta, a student at Ellis Preparatory Academy in the South Bronx. “But here, I am trying. I can say many things I did not know before. I can learn things more.”
New York City classrooms have long been filled with children from all over the world, and the education challenges they bring with them. But hidden among the nearly 150,000 students across the city still struggling to learn English are an estimated 15,100 who, like Fanta, have had little or no formal schooling and are often illiterate in their native languages.
More than half of these arrive as older teenagers and land in the city’s high schools, where they must learn how to learn even as their peers prepare for state subject exams required for a diploma.
Joyce Roche CEO of Girls, Inc.:
I WAS born in Iberville, La. My mom moved to New Orleans after my dad died in an accident. I have seven sisters and three brothers; all but one brother are still living. At the time we moved, I was the baby of the family. My mom had two other children after she remarried.
When I was growing up, segregation was real. When we rode the bus, there was something we called the screen. African-Americans, or Negroes as we were called then, were expected to sit behind a piece of wood. Since where we lived had movie theaters and grocery stores, it was only when we traveled to Canal Street to department stores that segregation was most noticeable.
One of my older sisters moved in with my Aunt Rose, my mother’s sister, who was married but had no children of her own. Soon I lived there almost permanently, too. She made sure I was doing well in everything at school. As a black female, I expected to be a nurse, a teacher or a social worker. I had an English teacher in high school who made me feel like an A student, even though I was a strong B student. She became the person I could see myself being.
Wisconsin parents who want to send their children to a school outside the district in which they live can start applying Feb. 2.
The open enrollment period for next school year ends three weeks later on Feb. 20.
The program has grown in popularity since it started in the fall of 1998. Only about 2,400 students participated that school year. But last year, nearly 26,000 did.
Parents interested in enrolling their children are encouraged to do so online at the Department of Public Instruction’s Web site. Parents will be notified April 10 about whether their request has been approved or denied.
Senior class president Christopher Jolly says suspensions are so common at Anacostia High School — where eight students were injured, including three who were stabbed, in a melee two months ago — that they have become meaningless as a form of discipline.
“The fact that everyone knows someone who has been suspended before often causes kids not to respect the suspension process,” Jolly said at a community forum this month on D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee’s proposal to revise the District’s student behavior code.
Rhee’s changes would move the system in a direction that makes sense to Jolly: away from out-of-school suspension as the disciplinary method of choice and toward counseling, peer influence and more options for keeping suspended students in school.
Officials said reliable data on suspensions are hard to come by because recordkeeping has been slipshod. But the available numbers suggest a dramatic surge. According to District figures, suspensions grew 72 percent between the 2006-07 and 2007-08 school years, from 1,303 to 2,245. That represents 4.5 percent of total enrollment. Numbers through November, the latest available for the current academic year, show suspensions running slightly behind last year.
Are your kids safe online? A recent report about this sensitive subject is stirring up controversy.
The study, released by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, finds that it’s far more likely that children will be bullied by their peers than approached by an adult predator online.
The 278-page document cites studies showing that sexual solicitation of minors by adults via the Web appears to be on the decline. “The image presented by the media of an older male deceiving and preying on a young child does not paint an accurate picture,” reads one of document’s conclusions. “The risks minors face online are complex and multifaceted and are in most cases not significantly different than those they face offline.”
In other words, children are about as savvy online as they are offline, said Ernie Allen, president of the Alexandria-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which contributed to the report.
“The vast majority of kids in this country have heard the messages about the risks online and are basically dealing with them as a nuisance, as a fact of life, and aren’t particularly vulnerable,” he said. “This report should not be read as saying there are not adults out there doing this.”
The argument over what to do about America’s struggling schools is still raging. Programs such as No Child Left Behind have achieved some success by introducing a measure of accountability into the process. But American students continue to get clobbered on international tests by other countries whose school systems spend less money per student and have larger average class sizes.
Facing budget realities in a down economy, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently proposed shortening the school year by five days to contribute $1.1 billion in savings toward the state’s $42 billion budget shortfall.
State school superintendent Jack O’Donnell vehemently disagreed, saying a longer school year was needed to prepare students for “the competitive global economy.”
The operative word here is “competitive.” Success in the marketplace depends on being able to produce the best product at the lowest cost. Competition in the business world produces a better product at less cost. Why shouldn’t it be so in education? Well, it is.
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 70% of the countries that outperformed the U.S. in combined math and science literacy among 15-year-olds had more schools competing for students. Countries ranging from Japan to Latvia all had more education options than American students.
Memphis high-tech entrepreneur Bob Compton, producer of the stirring documentary “Two Million Minutes,” has been suggesting, in his genial way, that I am a head-in-the-sand ignoramus. This is because I panned his film as alarmist nonsense for suggesting, based on profiles of a grand total of six teenagers, that the Indian and Chinese education systems were superior to what we have here in the much-beleaguered United States. When we debated the issue on CNBC, Bob told me I should get on a plane and see for myself instead of relying on my memories of living in Asia in the 1970s and 1980s and my reading of recent work by other reporters.
Sadly, even in the days when The Washington Post was flush with cash, there was no money to send the education columnist abroad. But I am happy to report I don’t have to go because an upcoming book from education scholar James Tooley goes much deeper into the Chinese and Indian school systems than Bob or I ever have, and takes my side. Tooley shows that India and China, despite their economic successes, have public education systems that are, in many ways, a sham.
Tooley’s book, “The Beautiful Tree,” reveals him to be the kind of traveler who often strays off the main roads, driving official escorts crazy. He covers not only China and India, but also Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya. He wants to discover how the world’s poorest people are educating themselves, and surprises himself repeatedly.
A new report from a higher education research center says Gov. Jim Doyle’s Wisconsin Covenant program needs to fund the initiative with state money for financial aid if it truly wants to boost enrollment of low-income students.
The program currently guarantees a spot in college for students who maintain good grades and take the right classes in high school, but it doesn’t promise automatic funding.
The privately funded Wisconsin Covenant endowment and Fund for Wisconsin Scholars will use their combined $215 million to offer scholarships that complement the covenant pledge, but that’s not likely enough to cover all the Covenant Scholars’ full need.
“First and foremost, we’d like to see some money, some public money, put toward this goal because up to this point there hasn’t been any sort of state-managed funds,” said Beth Stransky, who co-authored the report by the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education.
The policy brief, issued this week, does not suggest a specific amount for the state to invest. The push comes at a time when Wisconsin faces a two-year, $5.4 billion deficit that is certain to mean cuts for the UW System.
Doyle said he was committed to funding higher education and providing scholarships and financial aid to students who are eligible and do the work, but he wouldn’t give a firm commitment to a dollar figure, or to an increase in Covenant funding for scholarships.
Brickbats are flying over President Obama’s plan to expand government-funded preschool. Advocates argue all children need access to preschool; opponents cite studies pointing only to benefits for disadvantaged kids. The debate leaves parents wondering how much — if any — preschool their children really need.
Weighing the decision last year, Peter Canale, father of three small children, got caught in the crossfire. Co-workers and family members warned him, “you’d be crazy not to send your kid to some kind of preschool,” he says. But the Yonkers, N.Y., financial-services manager, who never attended preschool himself and whose wife stays home with their children, was skeptical; “I thought pre-K was a fad,” he says.
Actually, all kinds of kids reap some academic benefits from preschool, a growing body of research shows. Among 22 scholarly studies I reviewed, the five that encompass children from middle- and high-income families show preschool grads enter kindergarten with better pre-reading and math skills than those in other kinds of care or at home with their parents. To be sure, the benefits for mainstream kids are smaller than for children from poor or disadvantaged homes, but they’re still significant.
Political indoctrination in the guise of “Residence Life” programs took a pounding during a National Association of Scholars debate.
In last week’s Clarion Call, I wrote about the debate over academic freedom at the recent National Association of Scholars conference in Washington, D.C. But equally important was the contentious final session, devoted to the agenda of the “Residence Life” movement.
That movement is a nationwide initiative that has managers of student dorms teaching a leftist political catechism to students under their control in an effort to radicalize them.
The discussion focused on the infamous ResLife program at the University of Delaware. It took some interesting turns, including opposition to the programs from AAUP president Cary Nelson. He is a man of the left, but nevertheless doesn’t want to see curriculum and instruction handed over to people who aren’t even remotely scholars.
First to speak was Adam Kissel of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He explained the objectives of the Residence Life movement generally and concentrated on the University of Delaware, where the program was first seen in all its authoritarian splendor: prying questions, indoctrination sessions, and special “treatment” for students who were either uncooperative or, worse, had the temerity to disagree. Kissel made it clear that the ResLife agenda consists of clumsy, authoritarian indoctrination of students meant to color their thinking toward leftist bromides about the environment, capitalism, institutional racism and so forth.
BBC:
“Home education”, where children study at home rather than at school, is to face a review in England.
“There are concerns that some children are not receiving the education they need,” said Children’s Minister Baroness Delyth Morgan.
The government says there are no plans to remove the right to educate children at home.
But home educators’ charity, Education Otherwise, said it was “infuriated” by the proposed investigation.
There is no legal obligation for children to be sent to school – but parents have to provide a suitable education.
In previous columns and in a recent book I have argued that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world.
This is a very old idea that has received periodic re-formulations. Here is a statement by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott that may stand as a representative example: “There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.”
Understanding and explaining what? The answer is understanding and explaining anything as long as the exercise is not performed with the purpose of intervening in the social and political crises of the moment, as long, that is, as the activity is not regarded as instrumental – valued for its contribution to something more important than itself.
This view of higher education as an enterprise characterized by a determined inutility has often been challenged, and the debates between its proponents and those who argue for a more engaged university experience are lively and apparently perennial. The question such debates avoid is whether the Oakeshottian ideal (celebrated before him by Aristotle, Kant and Max Weber (German sociologist), among others) can really flourish in today’s educational landscape. It may be fun to argue its merits (as I have done), but that argument may be merely academic – in the pejorative sense of the word – if it has no support in the real world from which it rhetorically distances itself. In today’s climate, does it have a chance?
Stephen Kreider Yoder & Isaac Yoder:
A couple days after I signed up for the SAT last year, I began to panic. Getting a good score was key to getting into a good college, I thought, yet I hadn’t even begun studying. Many of my schoolmates who had gotten good scores had regularly used pricey tutors, and my older brother used a tutor a couple of times to prepare for the ACT. So it seemed natural for me to do the same. And mandatory for me to get the score I needed.
I walked upstairs to where my dad was working and asked him how much he’d be willing to pay for an SAT class or tutor.
“I’ll pay as much as you think it’s worth,” he told me.
I went downstairs and looked over the information I had on the tutor I had picked out. I thought about it for a while and decided it just wasn’t worth it. The next day I checked out a book of SAT practice tests from my school at no cost and got to work.
I ended up doing great on it. I’m convinced that the SAT book I borrowed did just as much for me as any tutor would have. Sure, I had to motivate myself to practice — which wouldn’t be necessary with a regular tutor — but I don’t think I lost anything else by not paying for help.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the benefits of a tutor. There have been plenty of times when I’ve fallen behind in class and getting a tutor would have helped me catch up. And having a regular tutor would have kept me more organized with things like searching for a college. A friend hired a counselor to help her narrow her list of potential colleges and to pick the perfect essay for her applications.
Poor test scores. High dropout rates. Enormous schools. Large class sizes. These are the words that come to Milena Skollar’s mind when you ask the transplant about sending her children to school in Georgia.
“It’s not fun to be 50th in the nation in SAT scores — plus the size of the schools is very disturbing,” the mother of three said. “I believe in public education. I just wish the schools were better for my children.”
Eric Johnson is a Republican state senator from Savannah. Skollar, a New Jersey native, is also a school social worker employed by a metro Atlanta school system. She is among the 68 percent of Georgia voters in a recent poll who support offering parents the option to transfer their children to a private school with a voucher.
As we commence another session of the General Assembly, it’s time to start thinking about parents such as Skollar and stop offering a one-size-fits-all education model to Georgia students. It’s time to offer a school voucher program for parents who want it for their children who need it.
Because both of her daughters excel in the classroom, Skollar believes her Fulton County public schools cannot challenge them enough as they get older and that a private school with smaller classes may be more appropriate. She would like more options.
As they grapple with crippling budget shortfalls, states are weighing whether to cut back on merit-aid scholarship programs that benefit hundreds of thousands of college students every year.
Since the early 1990s, more than 15 states have launched broad-based programs that offer students scholarships and tuition breaks based solely on grades, class rank and test scores. Supporters say such programs boost college-enrollment rates and help persuade high achievers to remain in their home states. Critics maintain that the programs siphon aid money away from students with financial need in favor of some who probably could have afforded college without the help.
The National Association of State Student Grant and Aid Programs, an organization of agencies responsible for state financial-aid programs, says merit grants accounted for $2.08 billion, or 28%, of all state-sponsored grants awarded in its latest tally, covering the 2006-2007 academic year. That’s up from $458.9 million in 1996-1997, when merit-aid accounted for about 15% of all state grants.
But the economic crisis has raised fears that such growth may be unsustainable, as tax revenue plunges and legislatures make drastic cuts to other state programs. And the pinch comes just as layoffs and investment losses affecting millions of families are likely to boost demand for financial aid based on need.
It is a familiar drill in nearly all of the nation’s Roman Catholic school systems: a new alarm every few years over falling enrollment; church leaders huddling over what to do; parents rallying to save their schools. And then the bad news.
When the Diocese of Brooklyn last week proposed closing 14 more elementary schools, it was not the deepest but only the latest of a thousand cuts suffered, one tearful closing announcement at a time, as enrollment in the nation’s Catholic schools has steadily dropped by more than half from its peak of five million 40 years ago.
But recently, after years of what frustrated parents describe as inertia in the church hierarchy, a sense of urgency seems to be gripping many Catholics who suddenly see in the shrinking enrollment a once unimaginable prospect: a country without Catholic schools.
From the ranks of national church leaders to the faithful in the pews, there are dozens of local efforts to forge a new future for parochial education by rescuing the remaining schools or, if need be, reinventing them. The efforts are all being driven, in one way or another, by a question in a University of Notre Dame task force report in 2006: “Will it be said of our generation that we presided over the demise” of Catholic schools?
WITH unemployment rising, house sales falling and retirement accounts shrivelling, college students are not at the top of most people’s worry lists. But they face a miserable set of financial circumstances. Tuition costs and other fees are soaring: up 439% since the early 1980s, says a recent report from the National Centre for Public Policy and Higher Education. Family incomes have not begun to keep pace. This year’s average bill from a private college is about $25,000, according to the College Board, a body that, as well as managing standardised tests such as the SAT, also studies financial aid for students. Public universities are far more affordable, with an average price tag of $6,500 for in-state tuition. But that is still a big chunk of the budget for a poor or middle-class family. And living expenses quickly run up the tab, even if a student makes do with a grotty apartment and lives on noodles.
The unsurprising result is that more students are borrowing to finance their education. According to the College Board, student debt has ballooned from $41 billion ten years ago (in 2007 dollars) to $87 billion today. Nearly two-thirds of those who graduate from a four-year programme, public or private, are in debt. Last year a borrower’s average burden, according to the Project on Student Debt, was slightly more than $20,000.
I’m always interested in finding new ways to learn better and faster. As a graduate student who is also a full-time science writer, the amount of time I have to spend learning new things is limited. It’s important to get the most educational value out of my time as possible. However, retention, recall and transfer are also critical. I need to be able to accurately remember the information I learn, recall it at a later time and utilize it effectively in a wide variety of situations.
1. Memory Improvement Basics
I’ve written before about some of the best ways to improve memory. Basic tips such as improving focus, avoiding cram sessions and structuring your study time are a good place to start, but there are even more lessons from psychology that can dramatically improve your learning efficiency.
For years, I took care of a very rude child. When he was 3, I called him rambunctious — and I talked to his mother about “setting limits.” At 4, I called him “demanding.” At 5, he was still screaming at his mother if she didn’t do what he wanted, he still swatted me whenever I tried to examine him, and his mother asked me worriedly if I thought he was ready for kindergarten.
I could go on (he didn’t have an easy time in school), but it would sound like a Victorian tale: The Rude Boy. I never used the word “rude” or even “manners” when I spoke to his mother. I don’t describe my patients as rude or polite in the medical record. But I do pass judgment, and so does every pediatrician I know.
It’s always popular — and easy — to bewail the deterioration of manners; there is an often quoted (and often disputed) story about Socrates’ complaining that the young Athenians have “bad manners, contempt for authority.” Sure, certain social rubrics have broken down or blurred, and sure, electronic communication seems to have given adults as well as children new ways to be rude. But the age-old parental job remains.
And that job is to start with a being who has no thought for the feelings of others, no code of behavior beyond its own needs and comforts — and, guided by love and duty, to do your best to transform that being into what your grandmother (or Socrates) might call a mensch. To use a term that has fallen out of favor, your assignment is to “civilize” the object of your affections.
The Internet Safety Technical Task Force was created in February 2008 in accordance with the Joint Statement on Key Principles of Social Networking Safety announced in January 2008 by the Attorneys General Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking and MySpace. The scope of the Task Force’s inquiry was to consider those technologies that industry and end users – including parents – can use to help keep minors safer on the Internet.
Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers
New York: Little, Brown, 2008, pp. 247-249:
Every four years, an international group of educators administers a comprehensive mathematics and science test to elementary and junior high students around the world. It’s the TIMSS (the same test you read about earlier, in the discussion of fourth graders born near the beginning of a school cutoff date and those born near the end of the date), and the point of the TIMSS is to compare the educational achievement of one country with another’s.
When students sit down to take the TIMSS exam, they also have to fill out a questionnaire. It asks them all kinds of things, such as what their parents’ level of education is, and what their views about math are, and what their friends are like. It’s not a trivial exercise. It’s about 120 questions long. In fact, it’s so tedious and demanding that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank.
Now, here’s the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. It is possible, in fact, to rank all the participating countries according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire. Now, what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math ranking on the TIMSS? They are exactly the same. In other words, countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems.
The person who discovered this fact is an educational researcher at the University of Pennsylvania named Erling Boe, and he stumbled across it by accident. “It came out of the blue,” he says. Boe hasn’t even been able to publish his findings in a scientific journal, because, he says, it’s just a bit too weird. Remember, he’s not saying that the ability to finish the questionnaire and the ability to excel on the math test are related. He’s saying that they are the same: If you compare the two rankings, they are identical.
Think about this another way. Imagine that every year, there was a Math Olympics in some fabulous city in the world. And every country in the world sent its own team of one thousand eighth graders. Boe’s point is that we could predict precisely the order in which every country would finish in the Math Olympics without asking a single math question. All we would have to do is give them some task measuring how hard they were willing to work. In fact, we wouldn’t even have to give them a task. We should be able to predict which countries are best at math simply by looking at which national cultures place the highest emphasis on effort and hard work.
So, which places are at the top of both lists? The answer shouldn’t surprise you: Singapore, South Korea, China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, and Japan. What those five have in common, of course, is that they are all cultures shaped by the tradition of wet-rice agriculture and meaningful work. They are the kinds of places where, for hundreds of years, penniless peasants, slaving away in the rice paddies three thousand hours a year, said things to one another like “No man who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.” *
* note: There is actually a significant scientific literature measuring Asian “persistence.” In a typical study, Priscilla Blinco gave large groups of Japanese and American first graders a very difficult puzzle and measured how long they worked at it before they gave up. The American children lasted, on average, 9.47 minutes The Japanese children lasted 13.93 minutes, roughly 40 percent longer.
The Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability [3MB PDF Report]
Our country’s system of higher education — long extolled as the best in the world — is showing serious fault lines that threaten capacity to meet future needs for an educated citizenry. There are many causes for concern, but chief among them is a system of finance that will be hard to sustain in the current economic environment.
To be sure, higher education has gone through hard times before. But looking at the economic and political horizon in January of 2009, only the rosiest of optimists can believe that what lies ahead is going to be similar to what we have seen before. The shock waves from the international upheaval in credit markets are just now beginning to be felt — in greater demand for student aid, tightening loan availability, dips in endowment assets and earnings, rising costs of debt payments, and deep state budget cuts. Families are going to find it harder to find the resources to pay for the almost-automatic increases in student tuitions that have been the fuel for higher education in the past decade. Even with increases in tuition, most institutions will still face deficits that require deep spending cuts.
Individual state data (Wisconsin).
Jack Stripling:
Most college students are carrying a greater share of the cost of their education, even as institutions spend less on teaching them, according to a report released today.
The report, published by the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability, gives a potentially troubling picture of spending and revenue trends in higher education. Spanning from 2002 to 2006, the report indicates that tuition hikes have resulted in little if any new spending on classroom instruction at public research universities.
“The public’s got it exactly right,” said Jane Wellman, head of the Delta Project. “They are jacking up tuition, and they’re not re-investing it in quality.”
There’s plenty of blame to go around, however, for this predicament. With state support waning for public colleges, rising tuition dollars are merely being used to make up for lost revenue — not for hiring more faculty or taking other steps that would arguably improve classroom instruction, the report asserts. On the other hand, the Delta Project suggests that colleges haven’t made the hard choices required for adapting to lower subsidies, as evidenced by relatively small changes in spending levels.
According to a study released today by the social-policy research group MDRC, a nonpartisan organization perhaps best known for evaluating state welfare-to-work programs, cash incentives combined with counseling offered “real hope” to low-income and nontraditional students at two Louisiana community colleges. The program for low-income parents, funded by the Louisiana Department of Social Services and the Louisiana Workforce Commission, was simple: enroll in college at least half-time, maintain at least a C average and earn $1,000 a semester for up to two terms. Participants, who were randomly selected, were 30% more likely to register for a second semester than were students who were not offered the supplemental financial aid. And the participants who were first offered cash incentives in spring 2004 — and thus whose progress was tracked for longer than that of subsequent groups before Hurricane Katrina abruptly forced researchers to suspend the survey for several months in August 2005 — were also more likely than their peers to be enrolled in college a year after they had finished the two-term program. (Read “Putting College Tuition on Plastic.”)
Students offered cash incentives in the Louisiana program didn’t just enroll in more classes; they earned more credits and were more likely to attain a C average than were nonparticipants. And they showed psychological benefits too, reporting more positive feelings about themselves and their abilities to accomplish their goals for the future. “It’s not very often that you see effects of this magnitude for anything that we test,” notes Thomas Brock, MDRC’s director for young adults and postsecondary-education policy.
Kneeling on a furry white rug at Friends Childcare and Preschool in Bremerton, 3-year-old Damari Bowers leans forward as teacher Wanda Selg-Gonzales reads from a book of rhymes.
“Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John,” she reads, pausing to look at her students. “What rhymes with John?”
“Lawn! Fawn!” Damari shouts, throwing his hands up in the air.
“That’s right,” answers Selg-Gonzales, who since 1999 has operated the child care from her home on Cogean Avenue.
Selg-Gonzales runs an independent child care, but her tight connection to the Bremerton School District for the past four years means she receives training and classroom materials from the district.
As a result, her child-care kids are already familiar with the district reading curriculum, called Open Court, and other important academic skills before they hit kindergarten classrooms.
In the weeks following an underage drinking party near Waunakee in September 2007, rumors swirled about why the School District didn’t move more quickly to discipline football players who were involved.
Though the insinuation in some circles was school officials were dragging their feet to keep Waunakee at full strength in the playoffs, recently released documents show the district investigation was delayed at the insistence of a Dane County sheriff’s detective investigating criminal activity at the party.
State law allows law enforcement agencies to release reports that could help school officials discipline students, but individual police departments set their own policies and not everyone agrees on the best policy.
If a police agency is stingy with how it chooses to share information, it can delay the school’s ability to mete out swift punishment intended to deter underage drinking in the first place.
In the case of the Waunakee football players, the district got mixed messages from the Dane County Sheriff’s Office.
WORKLESS children were “idling in the streets” and “tumbling about in the gutters”, wrote one observer in 1861 of the supposedly baleful effects of a reduction in the use of child labour. Such concerns eventually led to schooling being made mandatory for under-tens in 1880. The minimum school-leaving age has been raised five times since then and now stands at 16; but panic about feral youths menacing upright citizens and misspending the best years of their lives has not gone away.
Today’s equivalent of the Victorian street urchin is the “NEET”–a youth “not in education, employment or training”. And the same remedy is being prescribed: by 2013 all teenagers will have to continue in education or training until age 17, and by 2015 until 18. Now there are political rumours that the education-leaving age could be raised sooner, perhaps as early as this autumn. Bringing the measure forward is said to be among the proposals being prepared for the “jobs summit” Gordon Brown has grandly announced.
During downturns young people tend to have more difficulty finding, and staying in, work than older ones. So a policy that would keep them off the jobless register has obvious appeal for the government. Youngsters who have studied for longer may, moreover, be better placed for an eventual upturn, whenever that might be. And, unlike other measures on Mr Brown’s wish-list, this one is achievable by ministerial edict.
With two massive parental revolts nearing victory in Fairfax County, and mothers and fathers elsewhere in the area plotting similar insurgencies, it is time to disclose a great truth about even the best educators I know: As much as they deny it, they really don’t like outsiders messing with the way they do their jobs.
I don’t like that either. Do you? We know what we are doing. Most other folks don’t. We are polite to outsiders, but only to mollify them so we can hang up and get back to work.
The problem is that schools, unlike most institutions, are handling parents’ most precious possessions, their children. That aggravates the emotional side of the discussion. It makes it more likely that smart educators are going to write off parents as interfering idiots, even if they actually have a good idea and data to prove it.
I was a school parent for 30 years. The last kid graduated from college in 2007, but a grandchild has just appeared. That sound you hear is California teachers muttering at the thought of me at their door, brimming with helpful suggestions. I know how this works. The school people smile and nod, but nothing happens. Sure, some parent ideas are daft. But important queries are also shrugged off.
As Chicago schools chief, Arne Duncan has found innovative ways to skirt the restrictive cap on the number of charter schools that can operate in Illinois, thus expanding opportunities for low-income kids. So it’s instructive to contrast Mr. Duncan’s can-do attitude with that of Florida Governor Charlie Crist, whose inaction last week handed a victory to opponents of school choice.
On December 2 a Florida District Court struck down a law that created the Florida Schools of Excellence Commission, an alternative authorizer of charter schools formed in 2006 under Governor Crist’s predecessor, Jeb Bush. The state had 30 days to appeal to the Florida Supreme Court but let the deadline pass last week.
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The upshot is that only local school boards will be able to authorize charter schools, creating a fox-in-the-hen-house situation in which the same institutions that most oppose school choice will be in a position to block its expansion. Charter schools compete with district schools for students and teachers. And the teachers unions that control the traditional public school system fear that more charters mean smaller school districts and fewer dues-paying union jobs.
Locally, the Studio School charter initiative was killed by a slight Madison School Board majority.
The chain reaction was something out of central casting. A medical journal starts it off by announcing a study comparing teens who take a pledge of virginity until marriage with those who don’t. Lo and behold, when they crunch the numbers, they find not much difference between pledgers and nonpledgers: most do not make it to the marriage bed as virgins.
Like a pack of randy 15-year-old boys, the press dives right in.
“Virginity Pledges Don’t Stop Teen Sex,” screams CBS News. “Virginity pledges don’t mean much,” adds CNN. “Study questions virginity pledges,” says the Chicago Tribune. “Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective, Study Finds,” heralds the Washington Post. “Virginity Pledges Fail to Trump Teen Lust in Look at Older Data,” reports Bloomberg. And on it goes.
In other words, teens will be teens, and moms or dads who believe that concepts such as restraint or morality have any application today are living in a dream world. Typical was the lead for the CBS News story: “Teenagers who take virginity pledges are no less sexually active than other teens, according to a new study.”
Here’s the rub: It just isn’t true.
In fact, the only way the study’s author, Janet Elise Rosenbaum of Johns Hopkins University, could reach such results was by comparing teens who take a virginity pledge with a very small subset of other teens: those who are just as religious and conservative as the pledge-takers. The study is called “Patient Teenagers? A Comparison of the Sexual Behavior of Virginity Pledgers and Matched Nonpledgers,” and it was published in the Jan. 1 edition of Pediatrics.
The first to notice something lost in the translation was Dr. Bernadine Healy, the former head of both the Red Cross and the National Institutes of Health. Today she serves as health editor for U.S. News & World Report. And in her dispatch on this study, Dr. Healy pointed out that “virginity pledging teens were considerably more conservative in their overall sexual behaviors than teens in general — a fact that many media reports have missed cold.”
http://www.walletpop.com/specials/best-and-worst-public-school-systems-in-us
The most interesting part of this evaluation is the continued poor rating our standards receive. Those lovely standards we are basing our new middle school report cards upon. Otherwise Wisconsin stacks up pretty well.
THE baby is just one day old and has not yet left hospital. She is quiet but alert. Twenty centimetres from her face researchers have placed a white card with two black spots on it. She stares at it intently. A researcher removes the card and replaces it by another, this time with the spots differently spaced. As the cards alternate, her gaze starts to wander–until a third, with three black spots, is presented. Her gaze returns: she looks at it for twice as long as she did at the previous card. Can she tell that the number two is different from three, just 24 hours after coming into the world?
Or do newborns simply prefer more to fewer? The same experiment, but with three spots preceding two, shows the same revival of interest when the number of spots changes. Perhaps it is just the newness? When slightly older babies were shown cards with pictures of household objects instead of dots (a comb, a key, an orange and so on), changing the number of items had an effect separate from changing the items themselves. Could it be the pattern that two things make, as opposed to three? No again. Babies paid more attention to rectangles moving randomly on a screen when their number changed from two to three, or vice versa. The effect even crosses between senses. Babies who were repeatedly shown two spots perked up more when they then heard three drumbeats than when they heard just two; likewise when the researchers started with drumbeats and moved to spots.
More than half of adolescent MySpace users mention risky behaviors such as sex, violence or substance use on their personal Web profiles.
That’s according to the findings of Megan Moreno, assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, and other researchers who analyzed 500 MySpace profiles in 46 states to determine how young people use the Internet as a means of presenting themselves to their peers.
The study, along with a companion study on how to reduce such postings, is published in the January issue of Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine. Moreno was co-leader of the study while a research fellow at Seattle Children’s Hospital.
According to Moreno, 37 percent of profiles mentioned alcohol use, 24 percent mentioned sex, 14 percent mentioned or implied they were involved in acts of violence, and 13 percent mentioned tobacco use. In a number of cases, the profilers claimed to have engaged in several of these activities.
It grates on me when I hear people talk about “soft skills.” Although definitions vary, soft skills generally refer to the ability to communicate effectively, knit a group of people together toward achieving a goal, and create a sense of shared community and purpose. CareerBuilder.com’s Kate Lorenz describes these as “interpersonal skills and leadership qualities to guide teams of diverse professionals.”[i]
“Firms today are having a very difficult time finding managers who have superior ‘soft skills’ says John P. Kreiss, president of SullivanKreiss, a recruitment and placement firm for design and construction professionals.[ii] Based on my own consulting practice, I would have to agree that most workplaces could do with more soft skills.
Our language is part of the problem. By calling them “soft,” we are demoting this constellation of abilities and skills to something frilly, mushy and largely unimportant. Let’s find a more fitting term for them.
ACLU:
Police arrests of students at Hartford-area schools are on the rise, according to a new American Civil Liberties Union report released today, a trend that disproportionately impacts children of color.
The ACLU report, entitled “Hard Lessons: School Resource Officer Programs and School-Based Arrests in Three Connecticut Towns,” also shows how the use by school districts in Hartford, East Hartford and West Hartford of school resource officers who are not adequately trained and whose objectives are not clearly defined leads to the criminalization of students at the expense of their education.
The report’s findings are just the latest examples of a disturbing national trend known as the “school to prison pipeline” wherein children are over-aggressively funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.
“Our goal is to ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to receive a quality education,” said Jamie Dycus, staff attorney with the ACLU Racial Justice Program and the primary author of the report. “Relying too heavily on arrests as a disciplinary measure impedes that goal and only serves to ensure that some of our most vulnerable populations are criminalized at very young ages before alternatives are exhausted that could lead to academic success.”
According to the report, students in West Hartford and East Hartford are arrested at school at a rate far out of proportion to their numbers. During the 2006-07 school year, for example, black and Hispanic students together accounted for 69 percent of East Hartford’s student population, but experienced 85 percent of its school-based arrests. In West Hartford during the same year, black and Hispanic students accounted for 24 percent of the population, but experienced 63 percent of the arrests.
Related:
The ranks of America’s home-schooled children have continued a steady climb over the past five years, and new research suggests broader reasons for the appeal.
The number of home-schooled kids hit 1.5 million in 2007, up 74% from when the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics started keeping track in 1999, and up 36% since 2003. The percentage of the school-age population that was home-schooled increased from 2.2% in 2003 to 2.9% in 2007. “There’s no reason to believe it would not keep going up,” says Gail Mulligan, a statistician at the center.
Traditionally, the biggest motivations for parents to teach their children at home have been moral or religious reasons, and that remains a top pick when parents are asked to explain their choice.
The 2003 survey gave parents six reasons to pick as their motivation. (They could choose more than one.) The 2007 survey added a seventh: an interest in a “non-traditional approach,” a reference to parents dubbed “unschoolers,” who regard standard curriculum methods and standardized testing as counterproductive to a quality education.
“We wanted to identify the parents who are part of the ‘unschooling’ movement,” Mulligan says. The “unschooling” group is viewed by educators as a subset of home-schoolers, who generally follow standard curriculum and grading systems. “Unschoolers” create their own systems.
If you’re looking for good news about Milwaukee Public Schools, consider this: The graduation rate has risen steadily in recent years and is more than 18 percentage points higher than it was in 1996-’97.
Those who say only half of MPS students graduate are right – if they’re using figures from a few years ago. But they’re wrong now. The official graduation rate is pushing 70%, and even independent analysts, using different ways of calculating the rate, put the figure at closer to 60%.
It appears clear that MPS is doing a better job of keeping teens in school and getting them to the point where they cross a stage and receive a diploma.
Maybe the cause is the creation of a couple of dozen small high schools or changes in the programs inside some of the remaining big schools. Or maybe it’s simply success in spreading the message that a diploma is important. But dropout rates are down and kids who used to drift away from school are staying connected.
Before you get too cheery about the improving picture, however, you might want to consider a few more aspects of the crucial question of whether MPS is graduating a sufficiently large number of students who are ready for life after graduation.
To sum up: There just isn’t much evidence that MPS high school students are actually doing much better academically. In short, graduation is up, but actual readiness to take on the world might not have changed much.
I AM not adopted; I have mysterious origins.
I have said that sentence many times in the course of my life as an adopted person. I like it so much I put it into the mouth of a character in the novel I’m writing. The character and I are both fond of the idea. We can think of ourselves as living in the dense pages of 19th-century fiction, where one’s origins — the exact mother and father — are not nearly as important as one’s “circumstances.”
Some might say I came to this rationalization because, until recently, everything surrounding my adoption was kept secret from me. Even the date it was finalized was a secret. (The woman on the phone said, “Those records are sealed.” I said, “I know I can’t see what’s in them, but can I find out the date from which I couldn’t see what’s in them?” She replied, “Even the outsides of the records are sealed” — a confounding statement, as I envisioned envelopes surrounding envelopes, all sealed into infinity.)
Of course, mysterious origins are a confusing business these days. One might be gestated in an unknown womb while having genes from some combination of one’s mother and father and a stranger; from a mother’s womb with some combination of known and unknown genes — not to mention the complication of untold numbers of half-siblings who might be out there from the sperm donations of one man. There are adoptive parents and biological parents, surrogates and donors — adults of all sorts claiming parenthood by right of blood, genes, birth, law and affection.
Ullman is author of The Bug.
While their friends played video games in pajamas or vacationed in the tropics, a dozen sixth graders spent winter break at Elite Academy in Flushing, Queens, memorizing word roots. Time was ticking as they prepared to face the thing they had talked about, dreamed about and lost sleep over for much of the past year: the Hunter College High School admissions exam, a strenuous three-hour test that weeds out about 90 percent of those who take it.
On Wednesday, the final day of test-prep boot camp before the Jan. 9 exam, there seemed to be nothing more terrifying to these 11-year-olds than the risk of failure.
Some had taken up coffee; others, crossword puzzles and cable news shows to glean vocabulary words. A few of their parents had hired private tutors and imposed strict study hours, and several had paid up to $3,000 for a few months of English and math classes at Elite, a regimen modeled on the cram schools of South Korea, China and Japan.
The five girls and seven boys at Elite on Wednesday seemed to delight in their onerous routine, unwilling or unable to imagine life any other way.
When Ryan T. Muneio was tailgating with his parents at a Michigan State football game this fall, he noticed a big tent emblazoned with a Bank of America logo. Inside, bank representatives were offering free T-shirts and other merchandise to those who applied for credit cards and other banking products.
“They did a good job,” Mr. Muneio, 21 and a junior at Michigan State, said of the tactic. “It was good advertising.”
Bank of America’s relationship with the university extends well beyond marketing at sports events. The bank has an $8.4 million, seven-year contract with Michigan State giving it access to students’ names and addresses and use of the university’s logo. The more students who take the banks’ credit cards, the more money the university gets. Under certain circumstances, Michigan State even stands to receive more money if students carry a balance on these cards.
Hundreds of colleges have contracts with lenders. But at a time of rising concern about student debt — and overall consumer debt — the arrangements have sounded alarm bells, and some student groups are starting to push back.
The relationships are reminiscent of those uncovered two years ago between student loan companies and universities. In those, some lenders offered universities an incentive to steer potential borrowers their way.
Unigo is a new platform for college students to share reviews, photos, videos, documents, and more with students on their campus and across the country.
It’s also the best place for high school students to find out what life is really like at North America’s colleges, and to make friends who can help them find the school that’s right for them.
Unigo is the result of a community of students across the country dedicated to getting the truth out about college life, and it’s growing bigger every day.
A series of potentially controversial proposals will be outlined next week as residents are invited to help shape how math is taught in the Madison School District.
Among the recommendations from a task force that recently completed a one-year study:
• Switch to full-time math teachers for all students in grades five through eight.
• The math task force’s executive summary and full report
• Substantially boost the training of math teachers.
• Seriously consider selecting a single textbook for each grade level or course in the district, rather than having a variety of textbooks used in schools across the district.
The task force was created in 2006 by the Madison School Board to independently review the district’s math programs and seek ways to improve students’ performance.
Related links:
schoolinfosystem.org
