The history we are taught usually features the lives and times of the great and the good, of the haves but not the have-nots. However, the monarchs, aristocrats and magnates could not have existed without the battalions of minions who performed the tasks that were beneath their masters and mistresses.
In this website, we take you on a journey through 2,000 years of British history and the worst jobs of each era, as seen in both Channel 4 Worst Jobs series. Tony Robinson has devised a quiz to see how suited you would be to certain jobs, and we have an extract from his book on the worst children’s jobs. The skills agency learndirect has provided information on offbeat careers, and we show you how to take your interest further.
New High-School Elective: Put Off College
Like many motivated, focused high-school students, Lillian Kivel had worked hard academically and in community service in hopes that her efforts would win her acceptance into a good college. It did. Trouble was, Ms. Kivel’s focus was much less clear when she had to decide which college to attend — the Boston-area senior had applied to 38 schools because her interests were so varied.
At the suggestion of friends, Ms. Kivel decided to take a gap year — a year outside of academia between high-school graduation and college matriculation. It wasn’t rest and relaxation that Ms. Kivel sought, but rather an opportunity to gain life experience and focus her goals. Gappers, as they’re called, typically feel that taking a year off will give them a head start in college — and life. “I [have] the opportunity to explore my interests, like medicine and China, outside the classroom,” she says.
Ms. Kivel eventually decided to attend Harvard College, but deferred entrance until fall 2009. Ms. Kivel lived at home this fall and interned at the Boston branch of Partners of Health, a global health outreach nonprofit. She’s also serving as a legislative aide in the Massachusetts Statehouse. And she’s auditing at anthropology class at Harvard.
Murders of Black Teens Are Up 39% Since 2000-01
Homicides in which blacks ages 14 to 17 years old were the victims rose to 927 over the two-year period of 2006-07, the last years for which statistics are available, compared with 666 during 2000-01, according to the study by criminal-justice professors at Boston’s Northeastern University. The 39% increase is much greater than the rise in overall homicides, which jumped 7.4% from 2000-01 to 2006-07.
Murders rose among black teens in 2006 and 2007 as overall homicides dropped compared with the previous year. And the 2000-07 rate of increase among black teens was more than twice the rate of increase among white teens, the study found.
The authors explained that they compared two-year periods to try to limit a statistical skewing of the numbers that might have occurred if they had simply looked at differences in 2000 and 2007.
The data confirm a pattern identified earlier this year by The Wall Street Journal, which found that while most communities in the U.S. were seeing a decline in homicides, many African-American neighborhoods were continuing to see an increase. The Northeastern University research shows that the pattern is more pronounced among juveniles.
10 Lessons of an MIT Education
Lesson One: You can and will work at a desk for seven hours straight, routinely. For several years, I have been teaching 18.30, differential equation, the largest mathematics course at MIT, with more than 300 students. The lectures have been good training in dealing with mass behavior. Every sentence must be perfectly enunciated, preferably twice. Examples on the board must be relevant, if not downright fascinating. Every 15 minutes or so, the lecturer is expected to come up with an interesting aside, joke, historical anecdote, or unusual application of the concept at hand. When a lecturer fails to conform to these inexorable requirements, the students will signify their displeasure by picking by their books and leaving the classroom.
Despite the lecturer’s best efforts, however, it becomes more difficult to hold the attention of the students as the term wears on, and they start falling asleep in class under those circumstances should be a source of satisfaction for a teacher, since it confirms that they have been doing their jobs. There students have been up half the night-maybe all night-finishing problem sets and preparing for their midterm exams.
Four courses in science and engineering each term is a heavy workload for anyone; very few students fail to learn, first and foremost, the discipline of intensive and constant work.
Lesson Two: You learn what you don’t know you are learning. The second lesson is demonstrated, among other places, in 18.313, a course I teach in advanced probability theory. It is a difficult course, one that compresses the material typically taught in a year into one term, and it includes weekly problem sets that are hard, even by the standards of professional mathematicians. (How hard is that? Well, every few years a student taking the course discovers a new solution to a probability problem that merits publication as a research paper in a refereed journal.)
Students join forces on the problem sets, and some students benefit more than others from these weekly collective efforts. The most brilliant students will invariably work out all the problems and let other students copy, and I pretend to be annoyed when I learn that this has happened. But I know that by making the effort to understand the solution of a truly difficult problem discovered by one of their peers, students learn more than they would by working out some less demanding exercise.
Scientist sets High Expectations for Milwaukee High School
High expectations. High performance.
It’s been that way throughout Patricia Hoben‘s life.
A doctorate in biophysics and biochemistry from Yale. Influential work as a science adviser in Washington.
And now: founder and head of a small high school on the south side, where low-income students are being pushed to commit themselves to two things: High expectations. High performance.
In its second year, many of the 140 students of Carmen High School of Science & Technology show signs they are making those commitments. And Hoben shows the traits that make schools like this succeed: Unrelenting dedication, clear vision, an ability to bring people together, and a positive outlook.
Hoben’s personal path to founding the charter school is definitely different from the personal paths, up to this point, of Carmen’s students, more than 90% of them Latino, almost 90% low-income.
That hasn’t stopped them from coming together. It’s too early to see definite results, but the school seems to have its act together more than many schools with such short histories.
Attendance is high, averaging 92%. There is a serious-minded feeling in classrooms and even (comparatively speaking) in the lunchroom. Kids appear to be on-task a high portion of the time. The dress code includes ties for the boys and buttoned shirts with collars for both boys and girls. The aim here is to give teens from an impoverished neighborhood something much like a private high school experience.
The Parent-Teacher Talk Gains a New Participant
For years attendance was minimal at Tefft Middle School’s annual parent-teacher conferences, but the principal did not chalk up the poor response to apathetic or dysfunctional families. Instead, she blamed what she saw as the outmoded, irrelevant way the conferences were conducted.
Roughly 60 percent of the 850 students at Tefft, in this working-class suburb some 30 miles northwest of Chicago, are from low-income families. Many are immigrants, unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the tradition of parents perched in pint-size chairs, listening intently as a teacher delivers a 15-minute soliloquy on their child’s academic progress, or lack thereof.
“Five years ago, the most important person — the student — was left out of the parent-teacher conference,” Tefft’s principal, Lavonne Smiley, said. “The old conferences were such a negative thing, so we turned it around by removing all the barriers and obstacles,” including allowing students not only to attend but also to lead the gatherings instead of anxiously awaiting their parents’ return home with the teacher’s verdict on their classroom performance.
Obama’s $10,000,000,000 Early Childhood Education Pledge
Advocates for early childhood education are understandably excited about their prospects under President-elect Barack Obama’s administration. During the campaign, Mr. Obama pledged to increase federal early education spending by $10 billion annually.
Currently, the two largest federal early childhood programs, Head Start and the Child Care and Development Block Grant, spend about $12 billion annually combined. A $10 billion increase would almost double that investment.
Just as remarkably, Mr. Obama deliberately singled out early education as an important investment he would prioritize even in tight economic times. Add in a potentially $1 trillion economic stimulus package that’s raising the prospects for even previously inconceivable public investments, and advocates are downright giddy.
It seems terribly Grinch-like to throw cold water on these hopes. But in fact this is a dangerous moment for both Mr. Obama and the early education movement.
In College, But Only Marginally
Globe Editorial
The Boston Globe
In college, but only marginally
December 23, 2008
MUCH SOUL-SEARCHING is taking place on local college campuses after a recent study showing that college was a bust for almost two-thirds of Boston high school graduates in the class of 2000. Students attending two-year community colleges–the least-expensive option–fared the worst in the survey by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, with an abysmal 12 percent graduation rate.
Specific results for all public and private colleges in the study should be available shortly after Christmas. But some figures are trickling in. Roxbury Community College fell flat. Of the 101 students from the high school class of 2000 who enrolled in RCC shortly after high school, only 6 percent would go on to earn a diploma there–or anywhere else–by June 2007. Quincy College, a low-profile, two-year college on the South Shore, did comparatively well (but not good enough) by its 62 Boston students, posting a 19 percent graduation rate. Bunker Hill Community College, which drew 155 enrollees from Boston’s class of 2000, yielded a 14 percent graduation rate.
The study, which was funded by the Boston Foundation, strips away some of the hype about college attendance rates in Boston. Seven out of 10 public school graduates may get into college, but many lack the preparation to succeed. At Bunker Hill, for example, more than 80 percent of the Boston students from the class of 2000 required a remedial math course. Wisely, Bunker Hill and Boston school officials are now introducing students at some city high schools to the placement exams they will face on campus in the coming year.
The study should put an end to common claims by community college officials that their graduation rates don’t reveal much because many of their students transfer to four-year colleges before earning associate degrees. In this study, a student merely needed to earn a diploma or certificate from any institution of higher education, not just the original college. And by providing at least a six-year window, the study made allowances for students who often juggle college with work or family obligations. Rationalizations are now off the table.
How Not to Get Into College: Submit a Robotic Application
Swamped by a rise in early applications from the biggest class of high-school seniors ever, college admissions officials have some advice for the class of 2009: Be yourself.
Although this year’s applicant pool is by many measures the most highly qualified yet, admissions deans at a dozen top-tier colleges and universities said in interviews last week that they’re also seeing a disappointing trend: Too many students are submitting “professionalized” applications rendered all too slick by misguided attempts at perfection, parental meddling and what one admissions dean describes as the robotlike approach teens are taking in presenting themselves.
Among the symptoms: Too many formulaic, passionless personal essays. Too many voluminous résumés devoid of true commitment. And too many pointless emails and calls from overanxious students and parents — a trend one dean labels “admissions stalking.”
“We keep looking for authenticity and genuineness, for kids who are their true selves,” says Jennifer Delahunty, dean of admissions at Ohio’s Kenyon College. Instead, anxious students, and the adults who help them overpolish their applications, “leach all the personality out” of them, she says.
Scientists discover gene that explains why naughty children are popular
Researchers found that people find those who are more likely to break the rules more likeable, even after meeting them for just a short time.
They found that the people who achieve popularity by defying authority all tend to carry a specific “rebel” gene.
The findings could explain how Just William inspired the devotion of his bunch of Outlaws in the famous novels and why children labelled “teachers’ pets” have traditionally attracted the attention of bullies.
“The idea is that your genes predispose you to certain behaviours and those behaviours elicit different kinds of social reactions from others,” said Alexandra Burt, assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University.
“And so what’s happening is, your genes are to some extent driving your social experiences.
“So the gene predisposes (people) to rule-breaking behaviour and their rule-breaking behaviour made them more popular,” Burt said.
More here.
Fast food + nearby schools = fat kids
Youth who study just a short walk from a fast-food outlet eat fewer fruit and vegetables, drink more soda and are more likely to be obese than students at other schools, according to research published Tuesday.
The study, which involved more than 500,000 adolescents at middle schools and high schools in California, lends new fuel to a growing backlash against the fast-food industry as studies suggest they contribute to the rising obesity epidemic in the United States.
“We’ve basically discovered that kids who are going to a school that is near a fast-food restaurant have a higher chance of being overweight and obese than kids who are at a school that is not near a fast-food restaurant,” said Brennan Davis of Azusa Pacific University in California, whose study appears in the American Journal of Public Health.
U.S. youth obesity rates have tripled since 1980, although they leveled off this decade. The government says 32 percent of U.S. children are overweight and 16 percent are obese.
Benjamin Zander Talk
Well worth watching as Zander discusses giving students an A on their first assignment. Zander begins with a discussion of living in either the “Downward Spiral” or an alternative world of “Possibilities”. A 15 year old cello player makes an appearance. Clusty search on Benjamin Zander.
University Applications in Britain
FOR the 300,000 or so British youngsters putting the finishing touches to university-application forms over the Christmas holidays, it is decision time. Which institutions to choose? Which of the myriad alluringly (and sometimes improbably) titled degree courses? Weighty decisions, no doubt, but evidence is mounting that the more crucial choices were made two years earlier, when students picked which three or four subjects they would continue to study until leaving school.
According to research published earlier this month, many may have chosen the wrong ones, and damaged their chances of getting into a highly regarded university. Policy Exchange, a centre-right think-tank, looked at the A-levels offered by successful applicants to a group of 27 very selective universities–some ancient, some modern–and concluded that, despite the fact that all subjects are notionally equal, in reality admissions tutors think more of some than of others.
A tenth of all A-levels are in art and design, or drama, film and media studies–but only a twentieth of those taken by students who gained places at top universities. They were also less likely than the average A-level candidate to have studied psychology or sociology, and more likely to have studied maths or a science. The think-tank concluded that although only two universities, Cambridge and the London School of Economics (LSE), openly list the A-levels they are less keen on, others have similar, unstated, biases. They should come clean, it said, in order to avoid penalising students whose schools (or parents) are not wise to the unwritten distinction between “hard” and “soft” A-levels.
On Nashville School Demographics
Her father, Tim Clo, was asked if he would send her to a public school in East Nashville, a working-class neighborhood that over the past decade has attracted legions of young professionals and their families.
The oddity was that East Nashville parents and neighbors seemed as interested in Kenya’s education as her parents, Clo said. Parents were adamant that Clo should send his daughter to Lockeland Design Center elementary school.
“It was word of mouth more than anything,” Clo said, as he waited for Kenya, now 5, outside the school. “We had these conversations in parks, by the pool, with people asking where we were going to go for kindergarten. In general, at first, what we heard was that public schools were not that good. We thought about private school.”
For years, many white parents like Clo would choose private schools over Metro public schools for their children.
Lockeland enrollment figures show that parents of white students have bucked that trend.
The student population is 60 percent white and 35 percent African-American, with the rest divided between Asians and Hispanics. The removal of two pre-kindergarten classes, which were predominantly black, helped boost the numbers.
Home Schooling Goes Mainstream
“I never really told anybody about my music at school, only my really close friends,” Cheyenne Kimball told People Magazine in 2006. “Then [school officials] actually aired the show around the whole entire school, and that caused a lot of problems. I was a straight-A student and all of a sudden I didn’t want to go to school anymore because of the things people were saying. That’s why I’m homeschooled now.” Cheyenne, winner of NBC’s America’s Most Talented Kid at age 12, recording artist, and star of her own MTV show, is just one of many high-profile Americans whose educational choice is home schooling. Movie stars Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, married in 1997, home school their two children along with Will’s nephew. Why? “For flexibility,” Pinkett Smith told an Essence reporter, “so they can stay with us when we travel, and also because the school system in this country–public and private–is designed for the industrial age. We’re in a technological age. We don’t want our kids to memorize. We want them to learn.” While home schooling may have particular appeal to celebrities, over the last decade families of all kinds have embraced the practice for widely varying reasons: no longer is home schooling exclusive to Christian fundamentalism and the countercultural Left. Along with growing acceptance of home schooling nationally has come increasing diversification of who home schools and of what home schooling actually means.
Though parents and tutors have been teaching children in the home for centuries, in the late 1960s and 1970s there emerged for the first time in the United States a political movement that adopted this practice as a radical, countercultural critique of the public education system. Conservatives who felt the public schools had sold out to secularism and progressivism joined with progressives who felt the public schools were bastions of conservative conformity to challenge the notion that all children should attend them. By the early 1990s they had won the right to home school in every state. Some home-school advocacy groups have attempted to secure a federal law or Supreme Court ruling that would establish uniform national guidelines grounded in First or Fourteenth Amendment rights, but to date such efforts have failed (to the great relief of home-school advocacy groups that oppose this strategy). Home schooling thus falls under state law, and these laws vary widely. A complex matrix of specific statutory language and judicial interpretations emerged out of the maelstrom of political activism over the issue that started in the late 1970s. In Indiana and Michigan, for example, there are virtually no restrictions on home schoolers and very little accountability to government. Home-schooling parents are not even required to register. In Pennsylvania and New York, state agencies oversee and regulate home schooling in a number of ways, from curricular requirements to parental qualifications to mandatory home visits by certified personnel to obligatory standardized testing.
School Choice Group Recruits 10,000 New Supporters in Just Five Weeks
More than 10,000 people signed up to join a coalition supporting school vouchers and scholarship tax credit programs over the past five weeks, the Alliance for School Choice announced today. The Alliance, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., had anticipated reaching its goal of recruiting 10,000 new supporters by the end of January.
The new supporters are members of the School Choice Works campaign, which officially launched in mid-November. Membership in School Choice Works is free. School Choice Works is the first national interactive and social media campaign launched by the coordinated school choice movement. More information is available at www.LetParentsChoose.org.
The Alliance, which is the nation’s largest organization promoting school choice, provides members with free bumper stickers, e-mail action updates, free news magazines, and information on how they can help promote education reform in their states.
“The quick and overwhelming success of this campaign is testament to the strength of support for school choice across the country,” said Andrew Campanella, national campaign director for the School Choice Works project. “We look forward to continuing to recruit individuals who want to make a difference in education reform in their states.”
Dane County High School AP Course Offering Comparison
The College Board recently updated their AP Course Audit data. Dane County offerings are noted below, including changes from 2007-2008:
- Abundant Life Christian School: 3 Courses in 2007/2008 and 3 in 2008/2009
- Cambridge High School: 1 Course in 2007/2008 and 0 in 2008/2009
- De Forest High School: 8 Courses in 2007/2008 and 8 in 2008/2009
- Madison East High School: 12 Courses in 2007/2008 and 12 in 2008/2009
- Madison Edgewood High School: 11 Courses in 2007/2008 and 10 in 2008/2009 (11 are on offer this year. There’s been a paperwork delay for the 11th course, AP Biology due to a new teacher)
- Madison LaFollette High School: 12 Courses in 2007/2008 and 6 in 2008/2009
- Madison Memorial High School: 18 Courses in 2007/2008 and 17 in 2008/2009
- Madison West High School: 6 Courses in 2007/2008 and 0 in 2008/2009 (I’m told that West has 6, but the College Board has a paperwork problem)
- Marshall High School: 5 Courses in 2007/2008 and 5 in 2008/2009
- McFarland High School: 6 Courses in 2007/2008 and 6 in 2008/2009
- Middleton-Cross Plains High School: 8 Courses in 2007/2008 and 8 in 2008/2009
- Monona Grove High School: 9 Courses in 2007/2008 and 8 in 2008/2009
- Mt. Horeb High School: 5 Courses in 2007/2008 and 5 in 2008/2009
- Oregon High School: 9 Courses in 2007/2008 and 9 in 2008/2009
- Sauk Prairie High School: 10 Courses in 2007/2008 and 10 in 2008/2009
- Stoughton High School: 7 Courses in 2007/2008 and 10 in 2008/2009
- Sun Prairie High School: 15 Courses in 2007/2008 and 17 in 2008/2009
- Verona High School: 10 Courses in 2007/2008 and 11 in 2008/2009
- Waunakee High School: 6 Courses in 2007/2008 and 6 in 2008/2009
- Wisconsin Heights High School: 6 Courses in 2007/2008 and 6 in 2008/2009
Related: Dual Enrollment, Small Learning Communities and Part and Full Time Wisconsin Open Enrollment.
My Daughters/My Self
There was something about last week’s column that left me dissatisfied. I wrote about the difficulty of helping my 8-year-old daughter Emilie process disturbing news, particularly when she tends to over-focus on life’s ugliness.
But what I really wanted to discuss – via the vehicle of our obsessive replaying of the death of the trampled Wal-Mart worker Jdimytai Damour – was emotional enmeshment.
I find myself these days, to a surprising degree, dealing with the problem of enmeshment. This surprises me because not so long ago I wrote a book that was largely a polemic against enmeshment: against the boundary collapsing that I think is the signature characteristic of motherhood (and parenthood) in our time.
Clusty search: Judith Warner.
The New Examined Life
In the first week of January, New York graphic designer Nicholas Felton will boil down everything he did in 2008 into charts, graphs, maps and lists.
The 2007 edition of his yearly retrospective notes that he received 13 postcards, lost six games of pool and read 4,736 book pages. He tracked every New York street he walked and sorted the 632 beers he consumed by country of origin.
Part experimentation, part self-help, such “personal informatics” projects, as they are known, are gathering steam thanks to people like Mr. Felton who find meaning in the mundane. At their disposal are a host of virtual tools to help them become their own forensic accountants, including Web sites such as Dopplr, which allows people to manage and share travel itineraries, and Mon.thly.Info, for tracking menstrual cycles. Parents can document infant feeding schedules with Trixie Tracker. And couples can go from between the sheets to spreadsheets with Bedpost, which helps users keep track of their amorous activities.
The objective for Mr. Felton and others is to seize data back from the statisticians and the scientists and incorporate it into our daily lives. Everyone creates data — every smile, conversation and car ride is a potential datapoint. These quotidan aggregators believe that the compilation of our daily activities can reveal the secret patterns that govern the way we live. For students of personal informatics, the practice is liberating because it shows that our lives aren’t random, and are more orderly than some might expect.
More Families Move to Lock In Tuition Rates
As the stock market swoons and tuition costs soar, more families are deciding to pay for college in advance through their 529 plans.
For years, families have preferred the savings type of 529 plan — named for the relevant section of the tax code — salting away after-tax dollars, investing them in mutual funds and other investments, and then taking the money out, tax-free, when the time comes to pay for school. But as many of these accounts have been savaged by the market’s plunge this year, families are now turning to the prepaid variety of 529.
Prepaid plans allow families to lock in current tuition rates by making an upfront cash payment in exchange for tuition contracts or credits tied to current rates. They can prepay either the full tuition bill or a portion of it, typically based on the average tuition costs in the state. States usually manage the money, and when a student finally enrolls, he won’t have to pay more — no matter how much tuition costs have risen.
If investors buy only a portion, that same amount is credited toward future tuition bills. In general, the tuition guarantee applies only to state schools within that state, though you can use the money to pay for out-of-state schools. If a beneficiary elects not to attend a college covered by the plan, the investor can withdraw his contributions, usually with interest.
Flirting goes high-tech with racy photos shared on cellphones, Web
Passing a flirtatious note to get someone’s attention is so yesterday. These days, young people use technology instead.
About a third of young adults 20-26 and 20% of teens say they’ve sent or posted naked or semi-naked photos or videos of themselves, mostly to be “fun or flirtatious,” a survey finds.
A third of teen boys and 40% of young men say they’ve seen nude or semi-nude images sent to someone else; about a quarter of teen girls and young adult women have. And 39% of teens and 59% of those ages 20-26 say they’ve sent suggestive text messages.
“One of the reasons we wanted to do the survey was to put some sort of structure around the anecdotes,” says Marisa Nightingale of the non-profit National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, which commissioned the survey with the Hearst Digital Media site CosmoGirl.com. Chicago-based market research firm Teenage Research Unlimited surveyed 1,280 teens and young adults online Sept. 25 to Oct. 3.
Painful Choices as College Bills Wallop Families
The day after Thanksgiving, Glen O’Brien had bad news for his two children, who were visiting from college. With his electronics business pummeled by weak demand, he told them he couldn’t afford to keep paying their bills at New York University.
“We were both completely in shock,” recalls his daughter Caitlin, a junior majoring in Spanish. She was looking forward to spending her spring semester abroad in Chile. Instead, she is planning to move back to California, get a job and take cheaper courses at a state college. She hopes to return to NYU next fall. The school costs about $50,000 a year for tuition, room and board, and fees.
As the economy shrinks, joblessness expands and small-business owners lose income, many students and their parents are struggling to make payments for the second half of the academic year, which are typically due this month or in January. Midyear applications for financial aid, typically rare, are up at a number of colleges, as families who believed they wouldn’t need help earlier in the year are now feeling squeezed. Michigan State University, where students have been hit hard by the woes of the auto industry, last month set up a $500,000 fund for families hurt by the economy’s slide.
Gangs in Dane County? Yes, they’re everywhere, detective says
Gangs are everywhere in Dane County, from the largest Madison high schools to the smallest rural hamlets.
In the latest of a series of informational meetings led by a Dane County detective who monitors local gang activity, Sun Prairie parents were told their help is needed.
Detective Joel Wagner estimated that 3 to 4 percent of Dane County youths are involved in a gang. Recruiting begins in the fourth grade, he said; gang members can be of any race and socioeconomic status, but are primarily kids who have fallen away from school and family and are looking for a group to belong to.
“The best thing is prevention,” Wagner said. “We need to get back to eyes and ears.”
“Know your children’s friends. Know them well,” he said. “Know your children’s friends’ parents. Know them better.”
Wednesday night’s meeting at Sun Prairie High School stretched more than two hours and included disturbing video of gang fights and other violence from Dane County and across the nation as well as online photos of gang members who identify themselves as being from Sun Prairie and other Dane County communities.
Particularly disturbing was video — not from Dane County — of a gang initiation in which a teen’s head was smashed into a cement curb and into a florescent light tube. In another video, a teen was beaten in a bathroom as part of an initiation.
Related:
- Gangs & School Violence Forum Audio & Video.
- Educating the Community on Gangs in Madison
- Art Rainwater’s Memo on School Violence
- Madison police calls near local high schools: 1996-2006
Where Children Find Hope
Wide world of greed
by Yvonne Abraham
Globe Columnist / December 7, 2008
The Boston Globe
The Dorchester Eagles, the powerhouse of their Pop Warner football league, had another undefeated season this year.
Their regional championship earned them a spot in the national playoffs in Florida. Oh, and a week of acute anxiety over how to get there.
It’s as messed up as it is predictable. Every year around this time, talented kids and their coaches across the country scramble to raise tens of thousands of dollars so they can compete in the Pop Warner superbowl.
Little Leaguers go to their World Series in Williamsport, Pa., for free. Why do Pop Warner teams have to come up with as much as 45 grand to go to the playoffs they’ve spent an entire season working toward?
One big reason: unlike Little League, Pop Warner doesn’t have its own stadium or dorms. So, for more than a decade now, the Super Bowl has been held at Disney’s Wide World of Sports Complex in Orlando.
And under its contract with Pop Warner, Disney has the whole thing locked down. To compete in Disney’s pristine facilities, players must stay at Disney hotels and buy passes to its theme parks. They eat in Disney restaurants, with nonrefundable Disney dining cards, and they use Disney transportation.
Safe & Sound: A Parent’s Nightmare
‘Liz, you have to come to the hospital now,” my husband, David, said in the office voicemail message that late April morning. “We’re in an ambulance. … Something happened to Georgia. She had some kind of seizure. I don’t know. Just come.”
My 3-year-old daughter — who just days earlier was hosting a tea party for me and her dolls — was in trouble. That’s how this mystery begins.
I rushed from the office and grabbed a taxi to our local hospital in Brooklyn. “She’s unresponsive to pain, to everything,” David told me when I called him from the taxi.
Georgia’s breathing had slowed to nearly a full stop, he said. The EMTs had jabbed her heel with a needle to gauge her responsiveness, he said. Nothing. They had then given her a shot of seizure medication. Still nothing.
I arrived through the swinging emergency-room doors to see my daughter’s tiny feet on a gurney through a gap in the white curtains. At least a dozen doctors and nurses huddled around her, working to push a tube down her throat and get her started on a mechanical ventilator.
America’s Best High Schools 2008
Balls & Brains: The quality of a man’s sperm depends on how intelligent he is, and vice versa
THERE are few better ways of upsetting a certain sort of politically correct person than to suggest that intelligence (or, rather, the variation in intelligence between individuals) is under genetic control. That, however, is one implication of a paper about to be published in Intelligence by Rosalind Arden of King’s College, London, and her colleagues. Another is that brainy people are intrinsically healthier than those less intellectually endowed. And the third, a consequence of the second, is that intelligence is sexy. The most surprising thing of all, though, is that these results have emerged from an unrelated study of the quality of men’s sperm.
Ms Arden is one of a group of researchers looking into the connections between intelligence, genetics and health. General intelligence (the extent to which specific, measurable aspects of intelligence, such as linguistic facility, mathematical aptitude and spatial awareness, are correlated in a given individual) is measured by psychologists using a value called Spearman’s g. Recently, it has been discovered that an individual’s g value is correlated with many aspects of his health, up to and including his lifespan. One possible explanation for this is that intelligent people make better choices about how to conduct their lives. They may, for example, be less likely to smoke, more likely to eat healthy foods or to exercise, and so on.
Alternatively (or in addition) it may be that intelligence is one manifestation of an underlying, genetically based healthiness. That is a view held by many evolutionary biologists, and was propounded in its modern form by Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico, who is one of Ms Arden’s co-authors (and, as it happens, her husband). These biologists believe intelligence, as manifested in things like artistic and musical ability, is such a reliable indicator of underlying genetic fitness that it has been chosen by members of the opposite sex over the millennia. In the ensuing arms race to show off and get a mate it has been exaggerated in the way that a peacock’s tail is. This process of sexual selection, Dr Miller and his followers believe, is the reason people have become so brainy.
After Quake, Parents In China Start Over
Ten days after his daughter died in May’s earthquake, Zhu Jianming thought of having another child. Five weeks later, he had a reverse vasectomy, paying for it in part with money he received from the government.
Now, the lean miner, who is 50 years old, and wife Lu Shuhua, 45, are trying to conceive again. Though still mourning, the aging couple felt they had to move quickly if they wanted to start a new family. “If we don’t try now, we will totally miss the chance,” Mr. Zhu says
Moving fast is something of a specialty for China, a nation that has sprung from the poverty of the Cultural Revolution to being the world’s fourth-largest economy in a single lifetime. So it is with many of the survivors of the Sichuan earthquake, which left nearly 90,000 people dead or missing. The most devastating natural disaster to hit China in three decades, the quake was one of several big challenges to the Chinese leadership in a tumultuous year that included protests in Tibet, the Olympic Games in Beijing and an economic slowdown that is erasing thousands of factory jobs.
A 12 Year Old Takes up Boxing
Changing the Tuition Discussion
If tuition policy is a vexed question in normal budget years for public universities, it will be especially challenging to discuss public policy on the subject this year. States are facing record deficits and many public colleges are seeing enrollment and application increases — a formula that could combine to create large, unpopular tuition increases.
In this environment, the leaders of a national association of public universities hope to shift the debate — calling for better information about what really is going on with college costs, and also urging colleges to consider some potentially radical ways to control their costs. “University Tuition, Consumer Choice and College Affordability,” being released today by the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, both defends public higher education and criticizes it. While suggesting that colleges are more affordable than many people realize today, the report sees a “looming affordability challenge” in which public institutions could move out of the reach of many Americans, a potential shift that the association sees as counter to the values of its institutions.
The beginning of the report — consistent with efforts by others in higher education — tries to shift public attention away from colleges’ sticker prices and broad generalizations about affordability, arguing that sticker prices rarely reflect what students actually pay and that affordability depends both on the charges of a college and the means of a student, and is thus unique for individual circumstances. The report then goes on to suggest that much is unknown about whether colleges can save money through various means — such as providing more instruction online — and suggests that now is the time for serious research on such questions. The report faults universities for not having the data that would allow for better decision making.
SEED School receives $2 million pledge
The SEED School of Wisconsin said Tuesday that the Elizabeth A. Brinn Foundation is pledging $2 million towards SEED’s campaign to bring a public, urban boarding school to the state.
The boarding school is being proposed by a local coalition of leaders, cooperating with The SEED Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that operates boarding schools in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. Both schools are publicly funded and educate children who start, on average, with skills two to three years behind grade level. More than 98 percent of SEED school graduates have been accepted at a four-year college, according to The SEED Foundation.
“The children of Milwaukee and other challenged communities around the state will benefit from the Brinn Foundation’s gracious gift,” said Robert Sowinski, president of The SEED School of Wisconsin’s board of directors.
Financial Literacy
I SUPPOSE I could be described as financially literate. I have a doctorate in economics; my dissertation focused on financial decision-making. I write about economics and finance, and I’ve worked in the financial industry, designing investment strategies. But, when I look at the balance of my brokerage account (those low-fee global-equity index funds do not seem like such a good idea at the moment) or my credit card statement (peppered with frivolous impulse purchases), I question my financial savvy.
Nonetheless, I have volunteered to provide financial-literacy training to young mothers at a local homeless shelter. This is the first time I have volunteered since school, when my guidance counsellor forced me into it. She thought the experience would look good on my college applications.
I always justified not volunteering by figuring that my actual time was worth less to the charity than the monetary value of my time. But something about this project intrigued me. I thought I’d learn from the experience; it could make me a better economist. I even spent weeks fancying myself the next Suze Orman, empowering the financially downtrodden with my economic knowledge.
Poor behavioral effects on gifted students due to them sitting bored and stagnant in classes
What Do They See in Me That I Don’t See in Myself?:
Jesse wished he could run away, far away. Someplace where no one knew him. A place where everything wasn’t his fault and nothing was beyond his reach… Jesse Hardaway is used to things being his fault. It’s just him and his mom at home, and she’s always yelling at him. School is like home, only about ten times worse! He’s in fifth grade special education and has to battle ADHD and an anger/behavior disorder every day. If he isn’t in trouble, he’s getting into it. The only thing Jesse is sure of is that the world is against him, and he is ready to give up.
One good thing Jesse has in his life is his best friend Davess, who never stops trying to look out for him. At school, Mrs. Abogar and Ms. Dubose try to look out for him too, though Jesse doesn’t know why and wishes they would stop.
Here it comes, Jesse thought, the thing that drives me nuts. That irritating thing that they are so known for. That thing that makes you wonder whether you should hug them or yell at them. The famous Punishment-with-a-Smile. I hate it… But very soon he is about to discover that these two women not only understand him, for some reason they actually care about him.
via a Nikki Callahan email.
Media Bombardment Is Linked To Ill Effects During Childhood
In a detailed look at nearly 30 years of research on how television, music, movies and other media affect the lives of children and adolescents, a new study released today found an array of negative health effects linked to greater use.
The report found strong connections between media exposure and problems of childhood obesity and tobacco use. Nearly as strong was the link to early sexual behavior.
Researchers from the National Institutes of Health and Yale University said they were surprised that so many studies pointed in the same direction. In all, 173 research efforts, going back to 1980, were analyzed, rated and brought together in what the researchers said was the first comprehensive view of the topic. About 80 percent of the studies showed a link between a negative health outcome and media hours or content.
“We need to factor that in as we consider our social policies and as parents think about how they raise their kids,” said lead researcher Ezekiel J. Emanuel, director of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, which took on the project with the nonprofit organization Common Sense Media. “We tend not to think of this as a health issue, and it is a health issue.”
The average modern child spends nearly 45 hours a week with television, movies, magazines, music, the Internet, cellphones and video games, the study reported. By comparison, children spend 17 hours a week with their parents on average and 30 hours a week in school, the study said.
“Our kids are sponges, and we really need to remember they learn from their environment,” said coauthor Cary P. Gross, professor at Yale School of Medicine. He said researchers found it notable how much content mattered; it was not only the sheer number of hours of screen time. Children “pick up character traits and behaviors” from those they watch or hear, he said.
It’s 3 p.m. – do you know where your kids are?
As a child, 9:59 p.m. was a crucial time for me.
The local television news was about to begin. My dad was asleep in his easy chair in the living room. If he woke up, the first words he’d say would be “up to bed,” and then I’d never know what happened in the world outside my Iowa farm. To delay the inevitable I crept over to the TV set (we didn’t have remotes back then) and turned the volume down so the news program’s theme song wouldn’t disturb him.
Standing inches from the television, I heard this public service announcement every night: “It’s 10 p.m.: Do you know where your children are?”
I didn’t understand that. Where else would I be, but home? Even as a teenager I was in my room most nights giving my parents little reason to wonder or worry about my location. They had it too easy.
Many parents today aren’t so lucky.
More moms and dads are working outside the home and their jobs demand more hours than ever before. They’d love to be home when their kids finish school in the afternoon or during winter and summer breaks from school, but many can’t be there.
Continue reading here.
The “Secret to Raising Smart Kids”
Hint: Don’t tell your kids that they are. More than three decades of research shows that a focus on effort–not on intelligence or ability–is key to success in school and in life.
A brilliant student, Jonathan sailed through grade school. He completed his assignments easily and routinely earned As. Jonathan puzzled over why some of his classmates struggled, and his parents told him he had a special gift. In the seventh grade, however, Jonathan suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to do homework or study for tests. As a consequence, his grades plummeted. His parents tried to boost their son’s confidence by assuring him that he was very smart. But their attempts failed to motivate Jonathan (who is a composite drawn from several children). Schoolwork, their son maintained, was boring and pointless.
Our society worships talent, and many people assume that possessing superior intelligence or ability–along with confidence in that ability–is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than 30 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.
The result plays out in children like Jonathan, who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.
Praising children’s innate abilities, as Jonathan’s parents did, reinforces this mind-set, which can also prevent young athletes or people in the workforce and even marriages from living up to their potential. On the other hand, our studies show that teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.
Survey Finds Growing Deceit Among Teens
64 Percent Admit Cheating on Test In High School
In the past year, 30 percent of U.S. high school students have stolen from a store and 64 percent have cheated on a test, according to a new, large-scale survey suggesting that Americans are apathetic about ethical standards.
Educators reacting to the findings questioned any suggestion that today’s young people are less honest than previous generations, but several agreed that intensified pressures are prompting many students to cut corners.
“The competition is greater, the pressures on kids have increased dramatically,” said Mel Riddle of the National Association of Secondary School Principals. “They have opportunities their predecessors didn’t have [to cheat]. The temptation is greater.”
The Josephson Institute, a Los Angeles-based ethics institute, surveyed 29,760 students at 100 randomly selected high schools nationwide, both public and private. All students in the selected schools were given the survey in class; their anonymity was assured.
Michael Josephson, the institute’s founder and president, said he was most dismayed by the findings about theft. The survey found that 35 percent of boys and 26 percent of girls — 30 percent overall — acknowledged stealing from a store within the past year. One-fifth said they stole something from a friend; 23 percent said they stole something from a parent or other relative.
Why can’t Johnny adapt?
Physician & Author Gabor Mate, via a kind reader’s email:
Among the major challenges we face, as a society, is the widespread lack of resilience of many young people. Resilience is the capacity to overcome adversity, to let go of what doesn’t work, to adapt and to mature. Growing evidence of its absence among the young is as ominous for our future as the threat of climate change or financial crisis.
A disturbing measure is the increasing number of children diagnosed with mental-health conditions characterized by rigid and self-harming attitudes and behaviours, such as bipolar disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, eating disorders and “conduct” disorders. Hundreds of thousands of American children under 12 are being prescribed heavy-duty antipsychotic medications to control behaviours deemed unacceptable and unmanageable.
Canadian statistics are less dire but typically follow that trend. University of British Columbia psychologists have warned that today’s children between 6 and 12 “will be the first generation to have poorer health status as adults than their parents, if measures are not taken now to address their developmental needs.” Their report was presented in Winnipeg at last week’s National Dialogue on Resilience in Youth. The conference itself was a marker of the alarm among those concerned with the well-being of youth – educators, business people, people in government.
Beyond mental pathology, many young people exhibit difficulties adapting, as indicated by burgeoning drug use, aggression, bullying and violence. These tendencies all manifest alienation and frustration – that is, an inability to deal creatively and powerfully with life’s inevitable setbacks. The less resilient we are, the more prone we become to addictions and aggressive behaviours, including self-harm. We also become more attached to objects. A young Ottawa man was recently killed when he refused to surrender his iPod to a knife-wielding assailant. “I’d rather be stabbed than give up my iPod,” a 17-year-old woman told The Globe.
Immersion: A Fascinating Look at Kids & Video Games
On Obama’s School Choice
n Washington, we have these arguments every time a rich Democrat sends his kids to private schools, which is very often. The real issue is why the public schools are unacceptable to pretty much anyone, liberal or conservative, who has other options.
Most Washington public schools are hellholes. So parents here — including the first family — find hypocrisy a small price to pay for fulfilling their parental obligations.
According to data compiled by the Washington Post in 2007, of the 100 largest school districts in the country, D.C. ranks third in spending for each student, around $13,000 a pupil, but last in spending on instruction. More than half of every dollar of education spending goes to the salaries of administrators. Test scores are abysmal; the campuses are often unsafe.
Michelle Rhee, D.C.’s new school chancellor, in 17 months has already made meaningful improvements. But that’s grading on an enormous curve. The Post recently reported that on observing a bad teacher in a classroom, Rhee complained to the principal. “Would you put your grandchild in that class?” she asked. “If that’s the standard,” replied the principal, “we don’t have any effective teachers in my school.”
So if Obama and other politicians don’t want to send their kids to schools where even the principals have such views, that’s no scandal. The scandal is that these politicians tolerate such awful schools at all. For anyone.
It was reported last week that the Obamas have chosen the elite, $30,000 per year Sidwell Friends School for their daughters. On blogs, there are the predictable arguments about whether President-elect Obama should have chosen a public school instead, with reasonable ripostes about the daughters’ safety.
These arguments, overall, are mundane and avoid the point since the Obamas enjoy the same freedom of personal decision as everyone else in terms of choosing a school within the limits of their finances. Furthermore, no matter what school they attend, Malia and Sasha Obama have all of the advantages in the world. If they truly couldn’t be expected to turn out as decent, 18-year-old products of the District of Columbia School system, then the whole enterprise of public schooling should conceivably be scrapped.
I taught students the same age as Malia and Sasha for a few years in urban Los Angeles. My school was 100% racial minority: 75% Hispanic, 25% African-American. While Sidwell’s exhaustive website notes that the school’s missions include “prizing diversity” and “environmental stewardship,” our motto was simply, “Be respectful, responsible and safe.” I made sure my students abided by that credo, and I’ve lived to write a book and numerous articles about those experiences.
An Interview with Will Fitzhugh: About Academic Excellence and Writing
Michael F. Shaughnessy:
1) Will, you recently gave a talk in Madison, Wisconsin. What exactly did you speak about?
WF: A group of professors, teachers, business people, lawyers and community people invited me to speak at the University of Wisconsin in Madison about the work of The Concord Review since 1987, and about the problems of college readiness and academic writing for high school students.
The Boston Public Schools just reported that 67% of the graduating class of 2000 who had gone on to higher education had failed to earn a certificate, an associate’s degree or a bachelor’s degree by 2008. Also, the Strong American Schools program just reported that more than a million of our high school graduates are in remedial education in college each year.
I recommend their report: Diploma to Nowhere, which came out last summer. While many foundations, such as Gates, and others, have focused on getting our students into college, too little attention has been paid to how few are ready for college work and how many drop out without any degree.
2) “We believe that the pursuit of academic excellence in secondary schools should be given the same attention as the pursuit of excellence in sports and other extracurricular activities.” This is a quote from The Concord Review. Now, I am asking you to hypothesize here–why do you think high schools across America seem to be preoccupied with sports and not academics?
WF: In Madison I also had a chance to speak about the huge imbalance in our attention to scholars and athletes at the high school level. I had recently seen a nationally televised high school football game in which, at breaks in the action, an athlete would come to the sidelines, and announce, to the national audience, which college he had decided to “sign” with. This is a far cry from what happens for high school scholars. High school coaches get a lot of attention for their best athletes, but if the coach also happens to be a history teacher, he or she will hear nothing from a college in the way of interest in his or her most outstanding history student.
When Kareem Abdul Jabbar was a very tall high school senior at Power Memorial Academy in New York, he not only heard from the head coaches at 60 college basketball programs, he also got a personal letter from Jackie Robinson of baseball fame and from Ralph Bunche at the United Nations, urging him to go to UCLA, which he did. That same year, in the U.S., the top ten high school history students heard from no one, and it has been that way every year since.
The lobby of every public high school is full of trophies for sports, and there is usually nothing about academic achievement. For some odd reason, attention to exemplary work in academics is seen as elitist, while heaps of attention to athletic achievement is not seen in the same way. Strange…The Boston Globe has 150 pages on year on high school athletes and no pages on high school academic achievement. Do we somehow believe that our society needs good athletes far more than it needs good students, and that is why we are so reluctant to celebrate fine academic work?
How I Got Into College: 6 Stories
Many seniors in the Class of ’09 — that’s more than 3.3 million students — are now applying to college. For many, it’s a time fraught with paperwork, essays, interviews and road trips. And after all that work, it comes down to a letter or an email: In or out?
Admissions are expected to be as competitive as ever, and many schools say even the economic downturn has not slowed the onslaught of early applications. At Cornell University, early applications are up 9% from what they were this time last year; at Amherst College, they are up 5%; and at Barnard College, the rise is 8%. The acceptance odds are still long; many highly selective schools accept fewer than 20% of applicants.
Counselors, admissions staff and parents can all provide useful advice for getting in, but some of the best tips can come from the most recent veterans of the application frenzy: college freshmen. We’ve asked a range of students to share what they’ve learned.
Dare to Dream
Matthew Crowley was set on going to Stanford University last fall, but all the signs told him he wouldn’t make the cut. He plugged his grades and test scores into a computer program that tracked college-acceptance statistics and came out on the low end of a graph for Stanford. Guidance counselors at Kent Denver, a private school he attended in Englewood, Colo., did not include Stanford on a list of suggested colleges. And he says a college adviser his family hired for $2,800 told him not to bother applying.
Children Who Live in Public Housing Suffer in School, Study Says
Manny Fernandez
New York City children who live in public housing perform worse in school than students who live in other types of housing, according to a study by New York University researchers.
The study, which is being released on Monday, found that students living in public housing are more likely to drop out of high school and less likely to graduate in four years than those who do not live in public housing.
It also showed that fifth graders living in public housing did worse on standardized math and reading tests than fifth graders who lived elsewhere. Researchers found this disparity in fifth-grade test scores even when comparing students at the same school who shared similar demographics, like race, gender and poverty status.
The report is the first large-scale study of the academic performance of children growing up in the city’s 343 public housing complexes, researchers said. They suggest that those children face social and economic hurdles at home that affect their success in the classroom and illustrate the often-overlooked role that housing can play in education. The report was done by the university’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy and its Institute for Education and Social Policy.
College student sets ambitious goals
GOAL DIGGER
goal-digger09.blogspot.com
UPSHOT: For three years, the editorial page has followed Sade Daniels, a driven former foster child from Oakland, as she navigated the pitfalls of California’s foster care system in a heroic effort to graduate from high school and go on to college. Daniels is now a sophomore at Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Ark. She’s just started a blog, which makes it easy for everyone in the Bay Area to cheer her on.
SUBJECT MATTER: The title says it all: Daniels is all about having goals. Some of those goals are very serious (getting good grades is No. 1), some less so (growing her hair out).
TONE: If only I felt this excited about my to-do list. Daniels discusses everything with irrepressible charm and enthusiasm. Goals sound like fun, not work.
Will Fitzhugh’s Madison Talk – Audio
Author, publisher, entrepreneur and good guy Will Fitzhugh recently visited Madison. Listen to the 90 minute event via this 41MB mp3 audio file [CTRL-Click to Download]. (Please note that the audio level varies a bit during the talk – sorry). Video version is available here.
I’d like to thank www.activecitizensforeducation.org, www.madisonunited.org and supporters who wish to remain anonymous for making Will’s visit a reality.
Anything but Knowledge
“Why Johnny’s Teacher Can’t Teach” (1998)
from The Burden of Bad Ideas
Heather Mac Donald
Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000, pp. 82ff.
America’s nearly last-place finish in the Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study of student achievement caused widespread consternation this February, except in the one place it should have mattered most: the nation’s teacher education schools. Those schools have far more important things to do than worrying about test scores–things like stamping out racism in aspiring teachers. “Let’s be honest,” darkly commanded Professor Valerie Henning-Piedmont to a lecture hall of education students at Columbia University’s Teachers College last February. “What labels do you place on young people based on your biases?” It would be difficult to imagine a less likely group of bigots than these idealistic young people, happily toting around their handbooks of multicultural education and their exposés of sexism in the classroom. But Teachers College knows better. It knows that most of its students, by virtue of being white, are complicitous in an unjust power structure.
The crusade against racism is just the latest irrelevancy to seize the nation’s teacher education schools. For over eighty years, teacher education in America has been in the grip of an immutable dogma, responsible for endless educational nonsense. That dogma may be summed up in the phrase: Anything But Knowledge. Schools are about many things, teacher educators say (depending on the decade)–self-actualization, following one’s joy, social adjustment, or multicultural sensitivity–but the one thing they are not about is knowledge. Oh, sure, educators will occasionally allow the word to pass their lips, but it is always in a compromised position, as in “constructing one’s own knowledge,” or “contextualized knowledge.” Plain old knowledge, the kind passed down in books, the kind for which Faust sold his soul, that is out.
The education profession currently stands ready to tighten its already viselike grip on teacher credentialing, persuading both the federal government and the states to “professionalize” teaching further. In New York, as elsewhere, that means closing off routes to the classroom that do not pass through an education school. But before caving in to the educrats’ pressure, we had better take a hard look at what education schools teach.
The course in “Curriculum and Teaching in Elementary Education” that Professor Anne Nelson (a pseudonym) teaches at the City College of New York is a good place to start. Dressed in a tailored brown suit, and with close-cropped hair, Nelson is a charismatic teacher, with a commanding repertoire of voices and personae. And yet, for all her obvious experience and common sense, her course is a remarkable exercise in vacuousness.
Pros, cons of kids missing school for vacation
When my son, Rowan, was little, the idea that anything on his schedule would ever take priority over my expiring frequent-flier miles, or the opportunity to go on a vacation when the rest of the child-rearing hordes were in school, seemed to me like giving in.
It was like admitting I was one of Them – those overly involved, rule-abiding parents whose world revolved around PTA and soccer schedules, and crafting elaborate dioramas of Indian pueblos. After all, I reasoned, wasn’t the experience of seeing the Duomo in Florence or hiking Hawaii’s Na Pali Coast state park with your family as valuable as reading “The Very Hungry Caterpillar?”
Part of my nonchalance, I think, stemmed from the fact that when I was in school, summer vacation stretched for three languorous months, winter break for three weeks, and we had both a ski week and an Easter week.
Allen family’s costs pile up for kids’ education
Parents know putting three kids through public school can be expensive.
The Swiateks in Allen know exactly how much.
At The Dallas Morning News’ request, the family agreed to keep a tab on how much they spend on school-related expenses for their three children.
tually look at the numbers and add it up,” said Beth Swiatek, who says she takes pride in spending money wisely.
Rachael is a high school senior, Erin is a high school freshman and Joel is in sixth grade.
Before the school year had even begun, the Swiateks paid nearly $2,800 to ready their children for the school year. That total did not include school clothes, but it did pull in the first payments for the two oldest children to go on a band trip. That trip to Hawaii will cost $2,200 per child.
“The Obamas Walk Away from Public Schools” and a Look at Sidwell Friends
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, it’s wonderful that the Obamas had such a broad range of public and private school choices available to them. What’s puzzling is that the president-elect opposes programs that would bring that same easy choice of schools within reach of families who lack his personal wealth. By his actions, Senator Obama is demonstrating that he is not willing to wait for his own policy prescriptions to “fix and improve” public schools, but he expects folks with less ample bank accounts to patiently await his hoped-for change.
And while many reports will no doubt trumpet the $25,000+ tuition at Sidwell Friends, implying that this is extravagantly beyond what is spent in D.C. public schools, they will be mistaken. As I wrote in the Washington Post and on this blog, D.C. public schools also spent about $25,000 per child in the 2007-08 school year.
It’s not that president-elect Obama is against spending a lot of money on other people’s kids — he’s just against letting their parents choose where that money is spent.
It is the Quaker ethos that is the most striking feature of Sidwell Friends School, the one chosen by President-elect Obama for his daughters Sasha and Malia. A sense of community, equality and friendship runs through every classroom: children are encouraged to strive for their best, but to value above all their relations with each other and their place in the school family.
For any president trying to ensure that his children enjoy as normal an education as possible, such an ethos is invaluable. However rich, influential or politically important the parents – as many at Sidwell are – what matters is the “inner light” in every child. Pupils are not ranked by academic scores, and Sidwell never releases its SAT scores or college admission list. In race, wealth and nationality and in all else, all are treated the same. The two Obama girls will find their White House address is officially all but irrelevant.
Sidwell, founded in 1883 and now enrolling more than 1,000 children from kindergarten to 18, was a committed pioneer of integration and coeducation. More than one third of its intake belongs to ethnic minorities and one fifth receives financial assistance to help with the fees. The only preference is to those with Quaker connections. Since my wife and I went to Quaker schools, our daughter spent three happy primary years there during my time as bureau chief in Washington.
Alan Kay: A powerful idea about teaching ideas
TED Talks:
The Test Passes, Colleges Fail
FOR some years now, many elite American colleges have been downgrading the role of standardized tests like the SAT in deciding which applicants are admitted, or have even discarded their use altogether. While some institutions justify this move primarily as a way to enroll a more diverse group of students, an increasing number claim that the SAT is a poor predictor of academic success in college, especially compared with high school grade-point averages.
Are they correct? To get an answer, we need to first decide on a good measure of “academic success.” Given inconsistent grading standards for college courses, the most easily comparable metric is the graduation rate. Students’ families and society both want college entrants to graduate, and we all know that having a college degree translates into higher income. Further, graduation rates among students and institutions vary much more widely than do college grades, making them a clearer indicator of how students are faring.
So, here is the question: do SATs predict graduation rates more accurately than high school grade-point averages? If we look merely at studies that statistically correlate SAT scores and high school grades with graduation rates, we find that, indeed, the two standards are roughly equivalent, meaning that the better that applicants do on either of these indicators the more likely they are to graduate from college. However, since students with high SAT scores tend to have better high school grade-point averages, this data doesn’t tell us which of the indicators — independent of the other — is a better predictor of college success.
You are Invited: Varsity Academics in Madison Tonight, 11/19 @ 7:00p.m.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008; 7:00p.m. in Madison. [PDF Flyer]
Lecture Hall 1345
Health Sciences Learning Center (HSLC)
750 Highland Avenue Madison, WI [Map]
We hope that Mr. Fitzhugh’s appearance will create new academic opportunities for Wisconsin students.
Parking
Metered parking is available at the University Hospital (UWHC) Patient/Visitor Lot [Map], just south of the HSLC. Free parking is available in Lot 85, across the street from the HSLC and next to the Pharmacy Building at 2245 Observatory Drive [Map].
About the Speaker:
Low standards led Will Fitzhugh to quit his job as a history teacher in 1987 and begin publishing the journal [The Concord Review] out of his home in Concord, Mass.
Concerned that schools were becoming anti-intellectual and holding students to low standards, he thought the venture could fuel a national–even international–interest in student research and writing in the humanities.
“As a teacher, it is not uncommon to have your consciousness end at the classroom wall. But I came to realize that there was a national concern about students’ ignorance of history and inability to write,” he said.
During his 10 years of teaching at Concord-Carlisle High School, the 62-year-old educator said in a recent interview, he always had a handful of students who did more than he asked, and whose papers reflected serious research.Those students “just had higher standards, and I was always impressed by that,” Mr. Fitzhugh said. “I figured there have got to be some wonderful essays just sitting out there. I wanted to recognize and encourage kids who are already working hard, and to challenge the kids who are not.”
Fitzhugh will discuss the problems of reading, writing and college readiness at the high school level. There will be an extended discussion period.
For more information, or to schedule some time with Mr. Fitzhugh during
his visit, contact Jim Zellmer (608 213-0434 or zellmer@gmail.com), Lauren Cunningham (608 469-4474) or Laurie Frost (608 238-6375).
Wisconsin Poll on Public Education:
A Slight Majority Believe They Received a Better Education than Students Do Today
Residents Support Major Reforms in Teacher Compensation
Wisconsin Policy Research Institute:
There are some issues that seemingly never change. Twenty years ago 49% of Wisconsin residents thought they had received a better education in elementary and secondary schools than students today. In 2008, 47% of Wisconsin residents had the same view. Twenty years ago 70% of our residents rated their local schools as excellent or very good. Today, 69% rated their local schools as excellent or good.
Twenty years ago 76% of our residents supported merit pay for teachers; today 77% of our residents support merit pay for teachers. Twenty years ago 58% of our residents thought that discipline in our public schools was too lenient; today 60% hold this view.
These are among the key findings about statewide policy issues from the most recent survey of 600 Wisconsin residents conducted by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, Inc. and Diversified Research between November 9 and 10, 2008.
The Overall Quality Of Education
47% of the respondents in this survey thought that they had received a better education at the elementary and secondary level than students do today; 44% disagreed. Twenty years ago 49% thought they had received a better education and 45% thought they had not. Demographically there is a large gap in this response based on race–46% of Whites in 2008 thought they had received a better education, but 90% of Black respondents thought they had received a better education and only 10% thought that students today received a better education.
My Son Was Autistic. Is He Still?
Paging through 176 MRI scans of my 9-year-old’s brain on my home computer, I discovered a button that let me play them as a movie. Gray swirls burst onto the screen, dissolving into one another and revealing a new set of patterns. Beams of light faded in and out, some curving and traveling around the different regions of his brain. I saw the squiggly folds of his cerebral cortex, the gray matter that is the center of human intelligence.
These scans, the most intimate pictures I had ever seen of my son, Leo, may help researchers understand what’s going on in his head — and relieve him of a diagnosis that I have devoted several years to helping him overcome.
Leo, identified as No. C1059, underwent the scans as part of a research study at the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut. He was thrilled to earn $200 for taking part. I smiled along with him, because I could remember the days when he had a limited range of emotions, and pride was not one of them.
On College Choice
Stephen Kreider Yorder & Isaac Yoder:
When we get lots of reader email, we know we’ve struck a chord. College choice is clearly a chord.
After our column discussing how much college is worth — and my plan to narrow my search to small liberal-arts schools — many readers agreed with us that getting the best-fitting education is the top priority.
Marina E. Marra from Tucson, Ariz., writes that her son, like me, “was very concerned about spending his parents’ money for a degree that can be purchased for less elsewhere. I, too, advised him that it is his job to be accepted at the best school possible with the best education and it is my job to figure out how to pay for it.” She adds: “There is an intangible element that isn’t apparent in a cost/benefit comparison among colleges, something that can be found only at smaller liberal-arts colleges.”
Others held that price should be a top consideration. “YES — Price DOES Matter!,” writes Pat Diamond, also of Tucson. “I can’t understand why either of you would consider going into debt for a college education when there’s the option of a perfectly good state university system that would provide an education equal to that of a small expensive elite liberal-arts college.”
An expensive education is fine if I know what I plan to do with it, writes Robert Lowrie of Georgetown, Texas. “To spend $48,000/year, and then not know what he’s going to do with the B.A. degree after four years, is insanity,” he says, suggesting that I “look into getting [my] bachelor’s degree at a less expensive state university, and then enter a small, probably more prestigious and expensive school for [my] graduate studies.”
Public vs. Private Schooling: Is There A Wrong Answer?
NPR:
As the Obama family prepares to transition into the White House, one of the most pressing matters is choosing a school for their two daughters, Sasha and Malia. Mary Lord, of D.C. State Board of Education; Mark Gooden, an education professor and Jay Matthews, education columnist for the Washington Post talk about the sometimes complicated choice between public or private schooling for children.
Obama and the War on Brains
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Barack Obama’s election is a milestone in more than his pigmentation. The second most remarkable thing about his election is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual.
We can’t solve our educational challenges when, according to polls, Americans are approximately as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution, and when one-fifth of Americans believe that the sun orbits the Earth.
Yet times may be changing. How else do we explain the election in 2008 of an Ivy League-educated law professor who has favorite philosophers and poets?
Granted, Mr. Obama may have been protected from accusations of excessive intelligence by his race. That distracted everyone, and as a black man he didn’t fit the stereotype of a pointy-head ivory tower elitist.
An intellectual is a person interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity. Intellectuals read the classics, even when no one is looking, because they appreciate the lessons of Sophocles and Shakespeare that the world abounds in uncertainties and contradictions….
ADHD Primer for Parents Part I
Although called Attention Deficit Disorder, and thus many parents and teachers believe that the primary problem is distractibility or poor attention, in reality this disorder is primarily a disorder of impaired executive function. When an individual has ADHD, executive functions are not emerging or unfolding as expected for the child chronological age. By executive functions I refer to a wide range of central control process of the brain that temporaneously connect, prioritize and integrate cognitive functions in the same manner that a conductor directs a band. Clearly, this does not refer to a single task at a given point in time such as focusing on getting a hamburger when hungry, or pushing a button at a given moment in order to stop a character is a video game from going forward. But, it does mean there is impairment in the ability to sustain concentrated focus on a task that requires constant monitoring and adjustment, as well as intermediate and long-term projection into the future such as driving a car, following a complicate classroom lecture or interacting with others and anticipating their reactions and the long-term outcomes of my statements or actions. In short, impaired executive functions negatively impact the real stuff of day to day life.
Competing for Grammar School
It’s a brisk Friday morning and a skinny little boy in a large blazer stands shivering by locked school gates. Close beside him are his mother, his father and his two grandmothers, both in saris. The trembling child is right to be anxious. He is about to sit the entrance tests for Queen Elizabeth’s School in Barnet, north London, one of England’s leading grammar schools, and the odds against him passing through this narrow gateway to academic success are extremely slim. There are just 180 places available in the school’s Year Seven each year and 1,200 boys hoping to fill them.
Grammar schools have always been popular but with the financial meltdown affecting many affluent families, a free education in a traditional environment is looking highly attractive to parents of bright 10-year-olds. Fees for three children at independent secondary schools cost £50,000 or more a year, and four out of five parents pay those fees out of income.
Jenny Jones, secretary of the National Grammar Schools Association, a non-political body of parents, teachers and heads promoting grammar schools, confirms that “there have definitely been more applications from families who would normally go to independent schools”.
AP Students Forced to Accept Less
A teacher with the sign-on name of pfelcher posted a provocative comment on the Web version of my Nov. 3 column for the Post’s Metro section. I was repeating for the 4,897th time my view that even low-income students who have not performed well in school can learn in a college-level high school course, like Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate, if given extra time and encouragement.
Pfelcher would have none of my argument. To support his opinion, he cited a personal experience in his classroom. I always find first-person accounts helpful when debating this issue. I decided to send his comment to a few other AP teachers I knew, and see what they had to say.
Here is the post from pfelcher, whom I do not know and cannot identify further, followed by the reactions of three teachers, plus a student who sent me his view. If we want to make our high schools better, we have to work this out. I think such exchanges help us figure out what to do:
……
It’s not about who wins in a class of students with such disparate preparation and skill; it’s about who loses. The students ready to march ahead are forced instead to grind to a halt as the other students have to be taught the basics with which they should have entered the class.
At the end of the year, those unprepared students who might have gained from my class but who still had too far to go to attain the literacy and competence the test requires, failed miserably on the AP exam. So, did these lower-end students gain from the experience? Yes, they did to some degree, even though egos that had never really been tried suffered when they saw how they compared to the nation.
Vouchers in Texas, A Worthy Experiment
THE Edgewood independent school district covers an unassuming part of west San Antonio, a district of fast-food joints and car-body shops, with houses that run from modest to ramshackle. It is mostly poor and mostly Hispanic, and in 1968 its government-funded public schools were so bad that a parents’ group sued the state, prompting a debate over school funding that lasted for decades. By 1998 the situation had improved. The National Education Association, America’s largest teachers’ union, said that Edgewood could be a model for other urban school districts.
Then its voucher programme started. In 1998 the Children’s Educational Opportunity Foundation, a private group, announced that it would put up $50m over the next ten years to provide vouchers for private education to any low-income Edgewood student who wanted one. The “Horizon” plan was meant to show legislators that vouchers could help students and motivate schools through competition.
Critics said the programme would take money from a school district that was poor already. One teacher wrote an angry editorial comparing Horizon to Napoleons invasion of Russia“>Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, destined for “history’s trash heap of bad ideas”.
But a report published in September [3.5MB PDF Report] by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a conservative think-tank, argues that the programme was a hit over its ten-year span. More than 4,000 students claimed the vouchers; their test scores jumped, and only two dropped out.
The Best Places in the USA to Raise Your Children
A Chicago suburb beats out thousands of other communities around the U.S. as the best, most affordable place to raise kids.
Mount Prospect, Ill., is a quiet Chicago suburb with a population of just over 56,000. It is a tight-knit town where over the past eight years Prospect High School’s football team won three state championships, its Marching Knights picked up their 26th straight grand champion title at the annual state marching band festival, and just last month the school itself ranked 12th among all state high schools. Now the town is also the winner of Businessweek’s second annual roundup of the Best Places in America to Raise Kids.
Founded by German immigrants and incorporated in 1917, Mount Prospect hasn’t strayed far from its values of fiscal conservatism and community involvement, even as it has expanded to include new immigrants from Poland, Mexico, Korea, and India. It is a middle-class community with low crime, affordable homes, award-winning schools, ethnic restaurants, a major regional mall, and a small-town charm that makes the big city less than an hour away seem much farther away.
Other cities mentioned include: Euless, TX, Murfreesboro, TN, Huntsville, AL and Eau Claire, WI.
How Much Homework is Too Much?
Q: My son is in elementary school and has already gotten far more homework than last year, going from fourth to fifth grade. The work isn’t difficult, but there’s a lot of it. Keeping him on task is a nightly struggle at our house. I’ve talked with his teacher and she says no one else has complained. How much is too much homework?
A: I hate homework. Do I lose my mom sash and crown for admitting that?
I understand the importance of homework: It gives students a chance to review what they’re learning in class; it is feedback for teachers so they’ll know whether students understand the subjects covered in school; it’s a way to extend learning by having students discover new information about a subject; it’s practice; it gives parents an opportunity to be involved in their kids’ education. That’s all positive. But some nights, the homework routine in our house makes me feel like a crinkled, crumpled sheet of notebook paper.
Seattle Public Schools requires its teachers to assign homework. The district’s homework policy was adopted way back in 1983 and hasn’t been modified since. Here are the district’s guidelines for the minimum/maximum amount of homework a student should receive:
Grades K-2: Five to 10 minutes per day or 20 to 40 minutes each week
Grades 3-4: 10 to 20 minutes per day, 40-80 minutes each week
Grades 5-6: 20 to 40 minutes per day, 80-160 minutes a week
Middle School: One to two hours per night, five to 10 hours per week
High School: Two hours per night, 10 hours each week
Obese kids have arteries of 45-year-old
Neck arteries of obese children as young as 10 resembled those of a typical 45-year-old, a new study has found.
The research is more evidence that the process of artery disease can begin early in life, increasing the risk of premature heart disease in adulthood.
“These findings confirm some of our big picture concerns about childhood obesity,” said Aaron Carrel, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “It is a very direct link with disease.”
Carrel, who was not a part of the research, said artery disease in obese children was something that doctors had long suspected, but the level of disease found in the study was higher than anticipated.
UW doctors also have been finding abnormally high levels of cholesterol in obese kids ages 5 to 18, Carrel said.
ACT or SAT? More Students Answering ‘All Of the Above’
For students in the Washington region, picking a college entrance test has become a multiple-choice question.
The SAT has long dominated the bustling college-prep market in the District and its suburbs. But the rival ACT is making inroads, buoyed by a shift in conventional wisdom, which now holds that the tests are of about equal value and that a student would be wise to take both. Colleges are driving the trend because admission officers are spreading the word that it doesn’t matter which test students take.
The ascendance of the ACT has brought Hertz-Avis style competition to the test-obsessed D.C. region. It’s a boon to students, who find they have more ways than ever to impress colleges. The SAT tests how students think. The ACT measures what they have learned. Each is a better fit for some students than others.
On Class Size & Adversity
The man who boasts of walking seven miles to school, barefoot, every morning, happily drives his own grandchildren ten blocks in an S.U.V. We have become convinced that the surest path to success for our children involves providing them with a carefully optimized educational experience: the “best” schools, the most highly educated teachers, the smallest classrooms, the shiniest facilities, the greatest variety of colors in the art-room paint box. But one need only look at countries where schoolchildren outperform their American counterparts–despite larger classes, shabbier schools, and smaller budgets–to wonder if our wholesale embrace of the advantages of advantages isn’t as simplistic as Carnegie’s wholesale embrace of the advantages of disadvantages.
In E. J. Kahn’s Profile, he tells the story of a C.E.O. retreat that Weinberg attended, organized by Averell Harriman. It was at Sun Valley, Harriman’s ski resort, where, Kahn writes, it emerged that Weinberg had never skied before:
A School District Asks: Where Are the Parents?
Then teachers and administrators noticed something else: Jericho High School’s 90-member orchestra had become 70 percent Asian-American (the student body over all is about 30 percent Asian-American), but it still played for a mostly white audience at concerts with many empty seats.
The Chinese and Korean families that flocked to Jericho for its stellar schools shared their Jewish and Italian predecessors’ priorities on excellent education. But the new diversity of the district has revealed a cultural chasm over the meaning of parental involvement. Many of the Asian-Americans whose children now make up a third of the district’s enrollment grew up in places where parents showed up on campus only when their children were in trouble.
“They think, ‘My kids are doing well — why should I come?’ ” said Sophia Bae, 38, a Korean immigrant who shied away from P.T.A. meetings when she first moved here from Queens four years ago. Now a member of the organization, she invites other Koreans to her home and encourages them to participate in pretzel sales. “They don’t realize it’s necessary to come and join the school to understand their kids’ lives.”
Parental involvement is a perennial struggle in poor urban neighborhoods, where many innovative school leaders have run parent academies and strongly encouraged school visits or committee membership in hopes of mimicking the success of the suburbs. Now Jericho is taking a page from that handbook, trying to lure Asian parents into the schools with free English classes and a multicultural advisory committee that, among other things, taught one Chinese mother what to wear and what to bring to a bar mitzvah. The P.T.A. has been trying to recruit more minority members and groom them for leadership roles.
Should Kids Be Able to Graduate After 10th Grade?
High school sophomores should be ready for college by age 16. That’s the message from New Hampshire education officials, who announced plans Oct. 30 for a new rigorous state board of exams to be given to 10th graders. Students who pass will be prepared to move on to the state’s community or technical colleges, skipping the last two years of high school. (See pictures of teens and how they would vote.)
Once implemented, the new battery of tests is expected to guarantee higher competency in core school subjects, lower dropout rates and free up millions of education dollars. Students may take the exams — which are modeled on existing AP or International Baccalaureate tests — as many times as they need to pass. Or those who want to go to a prestigious university may stay and finish the final two years, taking a second, more difficult set of exams senior year. “We want students who are ready to be able to move on to their higher education,” says Lyonel Tracy, New Hampshire’s Commissioner for Education. “And then we can focus even more attention on those kids who need more help to get there.”
School Bake Sales Fall Victim to Push for Healthier Foods
Tommy Cornelius and the other members of the Piedmont High School boys water polo team never expected to find themselves running through school in their Speedos to promote a bake sale across the street. But times have been tough since the school banned homemade brownies and cupcakes.
The old-fashioned school bake sale, once as American as apple pie, is fast becoming obsolete in California, a result of strict new state nutrition standards for public schools that regulate the types of food that can be sold to students. The guidelines were passed by lawmakers in 2005 and took effect in July 2007. They require that snacks sold during the school day contain no more than 35 percent sugar by weight and derive no more than 35 percent of their calories from fat and no more than 10 percent of their calories from saturated fat.
The Piedmont High water polo team falls woefully short of these standards, selling cupcakes, caramel apples and lemon bars off campus in a flagrant act of nutritional disobedience.
The Obamas: Public or Private School?
This is a tricky subject. School choice is very personal. The president-elect’s fifth-grade daughter, Malia, and second-grade daughter, Sasha, have been attending the first-rate, private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. I bet they transfer to Georgetown Day School, a good fit because of its similarity to their current school, its historic role as the city’s first racially integrated school and the presence of Obama senior legal adviser Eric H. Holder Jr. on its board of trustees. It would be a sensible decision by two smart, caring people.
But it wouldn’t hurt to look around first. Georgetown Day, like other private schools, would charge them nearly $56,000 a year for two kids. Why not see what their tax dollars are paying for? One educational gem happens to be the closest public school to their new home. Strong John Thomson Elementary School is at 1200 L St. NW, three-fifths of a mile from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Go north on 15th, turn right on L and three blocks farther it’s on the right.
Greg Toppo has more along with the AP.
20,000 Milwaukee Students Now Use Vouchers
The number of Milwaukee children attending private schools using publicly funded vouchers has crossed 20,000 for the first time, according to data released by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
At the same time, the number of students in the main roster of Milwaukee Public Schools elementary, middle and high schools has fallen below 80,000 for the first time in well over a decade and declined for at least the 10th year in a row.
Amid a host of other factors shaping the school landscape in Milwaukee, those two trends point to some of the key stresses and looming issues for both MPS, which remains one of the nation’s larger school systems, and the voucher program, the largest, oldest and arguably most significant urban school voucher program in the United States.
For MPS, declining enrollment means greater financial pressure, a need to close school buildings and a continual search for ways to attract students and raise overall levels of achievement.
For the voucher program, the increase means the state-imposed cap on its size is coming into view, and issues related to the property-tax impact of the funding program are becoming more urgent. In addition, with Democrats having gained control of the state Legislature, efforts to impose more regulations on schools with voucher students are likely to become much more serious.
Nationwide, the momentum behind support for voucher programs such as the one in Milwaukee has been limited, and most likely has lost further steam with the election of Sen. Barack Obama to be president. Although Obama favors charter schools – generally, independent publicly funded schools that have more public accountability than private schools – he has not favored vouchers, and the Congress, controlled firmly by Democrats, is not going to support such plans either.
Somewhat related: A Madison School District enrollment analysis discloses an increase in outbound open enrollment.
Athletes Choose Colleges
They’re good to go For some top high school athletes, decision on college comes this week
Her dazzling fastball and sizzling bat have been on the radar of college coaches for quite a while. As a junior at Ashland High School, Nicole D’Argento was named the state’s softball player of the year.
Letters from colleges started arriving for D’Argento, a senior this year, in the summer of 2005, before her freshman year. Now, that stack of letters sits in her living room and “looks at least a foot tall,” she said recently with a laugh.
Softball has long been a year-round commitment for D’Argento. Her older brother, Russ, played baseball at Old Dominion and the University of Connecticut after helping propel Ashland High to the Division 3 state title in 2000.
Last spring, Nicole hurled the Clocker softball team to a perfect 28-0 season, and the Division 2 state title. She has a career earned-run average hovering under 0.50 and she will enter her senior season just 16 strikeouts shy of the exclusive 500 mark for her high school career.
With so many colleges lining up for her services, D’Argento made her decision early.
Last fall, she made a nonbinding verbal agreement to attend Boston College, which nosed out the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Virginia.
Parents expect way too much from their kids.
Because parents love their children and want the best for them, they worry about them a lot, and one of the things that parents worry about most is whether their children are hitting age-appropriate targets for behavior. Shouldn’t a child be toilet trained by the age of 4? Should a 10-year-old to be able to sit down and do an hour of homework? One reason why such questions produce so much conflict and woe in the home is that parents’ expectations for their children’s behavior tend to be too high. I’m not talking about permissiveness or strictness here; I’m talking about accurately estimating children’s actual abilities. A reliable body of research shows that we expect our children to do things they’re not yet able to do and that we judge and punish them according to that expectation.
Singing Our Song
6 November 2008
Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,
My name is Lindsay Brown, and I am the chair of the history department at St. Andrew’s School in Delaware. I have been thinking about the role of academics and athletics in college placement for some time, and being at a boarding school I wear many hats and so see multiple sides of this issue. I do a great deal of work with athletes that I coach in the sport of rowing, helping them to be recruits for college coaches. I began talking to people and commenting about how I had never done any recruiting for our top history students, and that there was a significant contrast between athletic and academic interest in the admission process for colleges.
With these vague thoughts, I decided to write something, possibly to send to some publication(?) or maybe just to do some therapeutic venting on my keyboard. I sent a draft of my thoughts to several of my colleagues, including our librarian who is a relentless researcher. In response to my short essay, she sent me your article on the “History Scholar” on very similar ideas–I guess I wasn’t as original as I thought! But I wanted to send you my thoughts, ask if you had a moment to give me any feedback, and then also ask if you think it was acceptable for me to potentially send my essay out–where exactly I’m not sure.
In any case, I was impressed with your work and your information on this topic.
Many thanks,
Lindsay Brown
History
St. Andrew’s School
My essay is copied below and attached:
The headlines are meant to grab our attention and alert us to a crisis in education: “High school graduates are not ready for college” or some variation on this idea that college freshmen can’t do the work their professors demand of them. Colleges and professors lament this situation, and, in a related vein, often complain that athletics and athletic recruiting are running out of control to the detriment of the academic mission of their institutions. And not just the big schools that compete for national championships in football or basketball are sounding this alarm; even top tier, highly selective colleges and universities sing a similar melody. What should happen to correct this situation?
Ironically, I would like to suggest that colleges look to their athletic departments for inspiration and a possible way to improve the academic strength of their student body.
Are We Pushing Our Young Athletes Too Hard?
When Lori Molitor’s 9-year-old daughter, Madison, participates in gymnastics, she wears a heel cushion. After her training session she ices. And before she goes to bed she stretches. All of this is done in hopes of keeping her injury-free as she continues her progression as a budding gymnast.
The Verona mother’s cautious approach with her daughter was borne partially from observing her eldest daughter deal with injuries while competing in sports, but many parents remain in the dark about the dangers of overtraining.
To address that problem, Harbor Athletic Club will host a presentation on the topic on Tuesday, Nov. 11. Guest speakers include Dr. David Bernhardt, a pediatric physician at UW Sports Medicine, and Kierstin Kloeckner, a personal trainer at the Middleton club.
Their message: Young athletes may think they’re indestructible, but they must be treated with care.
Discouraging political trashtalk in kids
As a parent, I am very bothered when I hear other parents teach their children that it’s acceptable or useful to mock or insult candidates or the President in ways that aren’t directly related to issues. I hate hearing children spout nasty, ad hominem stuff like “Bush is stupid.” When I hear that from a child or teenager, I challenge him or her to clearly articulate at least three substantive policy issues on which they disagree with Bush. If they can’t, I point out that calling him “stupid” only draws attention to their own ignorance on the issues. And frankly, in my anecdotal experience (your mileage may vary), it’s more likely to be progressive/liberal parents who encourage this sort of political trashtalk from their children, some too young to even understand what the president even does.
Personal finance urged for Oregon schools
Since she started working at the mall six months ago, Joy Stout has come close to draining her bank account to buy clothes and eat out with friends.
The Cleveland High School senior hoped to save about half the cash from her weekend job at Jamba Juice in the Lloyd Center but found she was going paycheck to paycheck.
She’s getting better — her parents encouraged her to open a bank account and keep track of where her money went. And this fall, only a couple of months into her first personal finance class, she’s learning lessons about spending and saving that can take years to master.
“When you are trying to figure out whether to buy something, you got to ask yourself if you want this or if you need it,” says Stout, 18. “If you only want it, is it worth spending on if you could save money for later? I want to save money to have a car.”
Sun Prairie Family Adopts 10 Children, Advocates For Adoption
November is National Adoption Month, and in the United States, about 51,000 children were adopted in 2006, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
With this in mind, one local family shared their adoption experience they said in hopes of encouraging others to do so, WISC-TV reported.
Ten years ago, Reed and Sharon Leonard adopted their daughter from China.
“On the plane ride home, my wife said, ‘Well, we have our daughter, we’re done.’ I said, ‘No, I think we’ll be back,'” said Reed Leonard.
“I said no way,” laughed Sharon Leonard.
No middle school report cards??!!
I received a newsletter in the mail yesterday from Toki Middle School, where my son is now a sixth-grader. The principal’s letter says:
“With the introduction of standards-based middle school report cards, we decided to send first quarter progress reports only to students currently not meeting grade level standards in curricular areas.”
So, assuming my child meets the standards, he just doesn’t matter? He’s not worth the time to figure out how to fill out the new report cards? The teachers are taking an extra half day today (early release: 11:30) to work more on dealing with these new report cards – and they’ve already taken at least one or two other days – but it’s still too hard to give my child a report card?
What if I want to know how well my child is doing? What if I want to know if he’s EXCEEDING the standards? Oh, wait…. I forgot. MMSD doesn’t care if he exceeds them. They just want to know if he MEETS them. God forbid I learn how MUCH he’s exceeding them by, or if he’s just skating and is merely meeting the standards. Or if he excels in one subject but is simply OK in another. We went through this in elementary school, so I suppose it should be no surprise that it’s happening in middle school.
I know there’s a teacher conference coming up, but if they’re not giving us report cards, then I’m thinking 15 minutes isn’t enough time to really lay out my child’s strengths and weaknesses in several different subjects. It’s not enough time for the teacher to give me a thorough assessment of my child’s progress. Oh, wait….I forgot. MMSD doesn’t care about giving me a thorough assessment. Judging from our experience in elementary school, the teachers just want you in and out of there as quickly as possible. They don’t want to answer my questions about how we can help him at home so he can do better in any subjects. (“Your son is a joy to have in class. He’s doing well in all subjects. He talks a little too much, but we’re working on that. Thanks for coming!”)
They DID send home a note asking if I needed to meet with any of his Unified Arts teachers (in addition to just his homeroom teacher) – but I checked no, because I assumed we’d be getting report cards with information from all his teachers! Nice of MMSD to wait until AFTER those papers had been turned in to let us know we wouldn’t be GETTING report cards. (Yes, I’ll be emailing the principal to let her know I’ve changed my mind.)
Oh, and I CAN sign in to Infinite Campus to see what’s going on with my child’s record (which hopefully is updated more often that the Toki Web site, which we were told would be updated every three or four weeks, but hasn’t been updated since before the beginning of school). But to do this, I have to **go into the school during school hours** with a photo ID. I can’t just use social security numbers or anything else to access this online. Could they be more clear in the message that they’d rather you not use Infinite Campus?
Isn’t it bad enough that MMSD doesn’t do thorough third-quarter report cards, because they believe not enough time has elapsed between the second and third quarters to make any discernible improvement? If my child isn’t making any improvement, if my child’s work isn’t worthy of a report card, then WHAT’S HE DOING IN SCHOOL?
We moved here four years ago, so looking forward to the “great” Madison schools. We couldn’t have been more wrong. My bright children are lagging. My sixth-grade son who tested as gifted before we moved to Madison is no longer (witness his dropping test scores – oh, wait…they’re still average or above, so MMSD doesn’t care).
I’ve brought up my concerns repeatedly. I’ve offered constructive suggestions. I’ve offered to help, at school and at home. I did two years as a PTO president in the elementary school and struggled unsuccessfully to get improvements. I might as well have thrown myself in front of a semi truck for all the good it’s done and for how beaten down I feel by this school system. The minute this housing market turns around, I’m investigating the nearby schooling options with an eye toward getting the heck out of here. I’m SO FED UP with MMSD and it’s reverse-discrimination against children who are average and above.
Class-action lawsuit, anyone?
Meet a ‘Mother on Fire’ for public school
Last June, when Los Angeles performance artist and public radio commentator Sandra Tsing Loh helped lead a rally to the California Capitol for more school funding, perhaps no one was more surprised than Loh herself. Her transformation from popular author and comic to public schools activist began four years earlier, when her plans to get her older daughter into a good kindergarten went awry. She eventually started an organization called Burning Moms. Loh recounts the journey in Mother on Fire (Crown, $23). She talks with USA TODAY about her experience.
Q: It’s 2004. You, your musician husband and your two daughters live in Van Nuys. Your 4-year-old is in preschool and you begin searching for a kindergarten. What happens next?
A: We’re a middle-class family, which feels like we’re the last middle-class family in Los Angeles — the last one had packed up the Volvo wagon and gone to Portland a year earlier. When kids hit school age, people just start fleeing the city unexplained. So I didn’t have much real information. … I’d go on www.greatschools.net, look at the statistics, freak out and not even visit my local school, which is what many parents do.
Q: You began looking into private schools, but many had “nosebleed tuition.”
A: I found that the religious ones were more affordable — the more religious, the more affordable. Catholics were more expensive, Lutherans middle and Baptists were the only ones we could afford. The Quakers were off the charts, particularly if there’s the word “Friends” in the title — or if the kids were being taught in an old Quaker wooden schoolhouse with authentic Shaker furniture.
Much more on Sandra Tsing Loh here.
Fixing the Freshman Factor
The ninth-grader slouched in the chair one fall day, avoiding the principal’s glare. He had the body of a boy, but he was deciding right there what kind of man he would be.
At the start of the school year, this child’s education was flying off the rails. Mark E. Fossett, principal of Suitland High School in Prince George’s County, called up the boy’s attendance record on a computer and rattled off a lengthy list of days missed and classes cut. Unless something changed, he would fail ninth grade.
As schools push to raise graduation rates, many educators are homing in on ninth grade as a moment of high academic risk. Call it the freshman factor.
Last week, Maryland reported that one of every six seniors statewide is at risk of not receiving a diploma in spring because they have not reached minimum scores on four basic tests in algebra, biology, government and English. At Suitland High and countywide in Prince George’s, more than a third of seniors are in jeopardy. But for many of those students, troubles began in their freshmen year. That’s often when the state algebra test is taken.
Study First to Link TV Sex To Real Teen Pregnancies
Teenagers who watch a lot of television featuring flirting, necking, discussion of sex and sex scenes are much more likely than their peers to get pregnant or get a partner pregnant, according to the first study to directly link steamy programming to teen pregnancy.
The study, which tracked more than 700 12-to-17-year-olds for three years, found that those who viewed the most sexual content on TV were about twice as likely to be involved in a pregnancy as those who saw the least.
“Watching this kind of sexual content on television is a powerful factor in increasing the likelihood of a teen pregnancy,” said lead researcher Anita Chandra. “We found a strong association.” The study is being published today in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
There is rising concern about teen pregnancy rates, which after decades of decline may have started inching up again, fueling an intense debate about what factors are to blame. Although TV viewing is unlikely to entirely explain the possible uptick in teen pregnancies, Chandra and others said, the study provides the first direct evidence that it could be playing a significant role.
Madison School District Enrollment Data Analysis
The Madison Metropolitan School District [724K PDF]:
The following document explores enrollment trends based on four different factors: intemal transfers, private school enrollments, inter-district Open Enrollment, and home based enrollments. The most current data is provided in each case. Not all data are from the current school year. Certain data are based on DPI reports and there are lags in the dates upon which reports are published.
Summary
Most internal transfers within the MMSD are a function of two factors: programs not offered at each home school (e.g., ESL centers) and students moving between attendance areas and wishing to remain in the school they had been attending prior to the move. Notable schools in regard to transfers include Shorewood Elementary which has both a very high transfer in rate and a very low transfer out rate, Marquette which has a high transfer in rate, and Emerson which has a high transfer out rate.
Based on data reported to the Department of Public Instruction (DPI), private school enrollments within the MMSD attendance area have held fairly steady for the past several years, with a slight increase in the most recent two years. The District’s percentage of private school enrollment is roughly average among two separate benchmark cohort groups: the largest Wisconsin school districts and the Dane County school districts. Using data supplied annually to the MMSD by ten area private schools it appears that for the past three year period private school elementary enrollment is declining slightly, middle school enrollment is constant, and high school enrollment has been variable. Stephens, Midvale, Leopold, and Crestwood Elementary Schools, and Cherokee and Whitehorse Middle Schools have experienced declines in private school enrollment during this period. Hawthorne and Emerson Elementary Schools, Toki and (to a lesser extent) Sherman Middle Schools, and West and Memorial High Schools have experienced increases in private school enrollments. The East attendance area has very limited private school enrollment.
Home based education has remained very steady over the past six years based on data reported to the DPI. There is no discernible trend either upward or downward. Roughly 420 to 450 students residing within the MMSD area are reported as participating in home based instruction during this period. Like private school enrollment, the MMSD’s percentage of home based enrollment is roughly average among two separate benchmark cohort groups: the largest Wisconsin school districts and the Dane County school districts.
Open Enrollment, which allows for parents to apply to enroll their Children in districts other than their home district, is by far the largest contributor to enrollment shifts relative to this list of factors. In 2008-09, there are now over 450 students leaving the MMSD to attend other districts compared with just under 170 students entering the MMSD. Transition grades appear to be critical decision points for parents. Certain schools are particularly affected by Open Enrollment decisions and these tend to be schools near locations within close proximity to surrounding school districts. Virtual school options do not appear to be increasing in popularity relative to physical school altematives.
On an Amazing Journey, and He’s Only 12
A FEW weeks ago, the youngest of the 20,953 students at the Storrs campus of the University of Connecticut went shopping for a calculator. Colin Carlson, who lives in nearby Coventry, took his mother along, as she had the driver’s license and the money. He also took a reputation well beyond his 12 years.
Another male student spotted him and said, “Hey, Colin, I hear you’re a babe magnet.” The boy smiled. But with a full course load and the usual schedule of public appearances ahead of him, he had yet to make finding a girlfriend a priority. So he suspected a bit of social manipulation afoot. The guys know that several female students have become friendly with Colin, and, in his view, they’re cozying up to him so that women will notice them.
Even at Colin’s tender age, his emergence at Storrs is no longer an oddity. He became a full-time student this fall, but has been a familiar face since he was 8, beginning with a course in French, and a year later in environmental physics and European history. This made him a local celebrity but also resulted in a view in some academic quarters that he is too small for his breeches.
Fewer Children Entering Gifted Programs
Elissa Gootman & Robert Gegeloff:
The number of children entering New York City public school gifted programs dropped by half this year from last under a new policy intended to equalize access, with 28 schools lacking enough students to open planned gifted classes, and 13 others proceeding with fewer than a dozen children.
The policy, which based admission on a citywide cutoff score on two standardized tests, also failed to diversify the historically coveted classes, according to a New York Times analysis of new Education Department data.
In a school system in which 17 percent of kindergartners and first graders are white, 48 percent of this year’s new gifted students are white, compared with 33 percent of elementary students admitted to the programs under previous entrance policies. The percentage of Asians is also higher, while those of blacks and Hispanics are lower.
Parents, teachers and principals involved in the programs, already worried at reports this spring that the new system tilted programs for the gifted further toward rich neighborhoods, have complained since school began that they were wasteful and frustrating, with high-performing children in the smallest classes in a school system plagued by pockets of overcrowding.
O’Conner on the Crisis in K-12 Civics Education
A survey shows more young people today can name the Three Stooges than the three branches of government, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor told a packed auditorium Friday at the University of Tennessee. Civic education has “really lost ground” in the United States, and “unless we do something to reverse that disturbing trend, the joke may be on us,” O’Connor said at the 1,000-seat Cox Auditorium at the UT Alumni Memorial Building.
O’Connor was at UT to celebrate the opening of the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy.
“Only an educated citizen can ensure our nation’s commitment to liberty is upheld. If we fail to educate young people to be active and informed participants at all levels, our democracy will fail,” said O’Connor, the first woman on the nation’s high court.
She spoke about the need for civic education, citing three problems with what she calls “civic illiberty”: the lack of time schools spend teaching civics; a static approach to civic education; and the lack of modern teaching methods such as computer programs in teaching civics.
“Creating engaged and active citizens is too important a priority to shortchange in curriculum planning in schools,” she said.
O’Connor, 78, is co-chairwoman of the National Advisory Council of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, a group with which the Baker Center works. The campaign promotes civic education and provides K-12 curriculum.
Graduate Opportunities 2009
The biggest winner from recession may be the teaching profession–particularly in maths and physics, where it has long struggled to compete for talent with banking and finance. Applications for teacher training in these subjects go up when the government offers golden hellos and other incentives, say Alan Smithers and Pamela Robinson of Buckingham University–but high graduate unemployment causes a surge too. It looks as if the pattern is set to repeat: the Training and Development Agency, which oversees teacher training, says its website has received a third more hits this year than last, and registrations of interest are also up. Hidden inside one crisis may be the solution to another.
No Dropouts Left Behind: New Rules on Graduation Rates
It’s a staggering statistic: one in four American teenagers drops out of school before graduation, a rate that rises to one in three among black and Hispanic students. But there’s no federal system keeping track of the more than 7,000 American teenagers who drop out of school each day.
That appears to be changing. On Oct. 28, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings issued new rules that will force states to adopt a common system to monitor dropouts. Critics of No Child Left Behind have long accused the federal legislation not only of leading more schools to teach to the test, but of letting — or perhaps even encouraging — struggling students to drop out before they can lower average test scores. But Spellings is trying to address this problem with new regulations that will set a uniform graduation rate so that a high school’s annual progress will now be measured both by how students perform on standardized tests and by how many of them graduate within four years.
Schools that do not improve their graduation rates will face consequences, such as having to pay for tutoring or replace principals. “For too long, we’ve allowed this crisis to be hidden and obscured,” Spellings said in her announcement, made nearly seven years after No Child Left Behind was signed into law. “Where graduation rates are low, we must take aggressive action.”
Playing the Market, These Kids Are Losing a Lot of Play Money
Michael Ashworth slumped by his computer, weary from another rough day in the stock market. All his favorite picks — Domino’s Pizza Inc., Hershey Co. and Gap Inc. — were down.
I’ll be honest with you,” he confided. “Before all this, I asked my mom to get me stocks for Christmas,” but then “I told her not to do it. I asked for a parakeet instead.”
Michael, a 13-year-old at Wilmington’s Skyline Middle School, is one of 700,000 players in the “Stock Market Game,” a scholastic contest in which students from grades four through 12 get a hypothetical $100,000 to invest in stocks, bonds or mutual funds.
The game is run by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, Wall Street’s biggest trade group. Schools pay about $16 a team for a curriculum that includes access to a computer system that executes the simulated trades and ranks teams by states and age group. At the end, the teams in each state with the best returns take home bull-and-bear trophies, gift certificates or other prizes.
Students Learning from Financial Crisis
Alex Gould paced the stage of an auditorium at Stanford University last week, imploring students to think about why the U.S. Treasury bought preferred stock rather than common stock in nine major banks, and how the nation’s economic meltdown began with home mortgages.
Gould, who teaches a course at Stanford on money, banking and the financial markets, searched the faces of his 100 students, many of whom are preparing to graduate in the spring. Students asked questions about their midterm exam, but many grappled with a bigger question: What does a destabilized economy mean for their future?
Related story: A case of balance as credit card rules change.
Educators across the Bay Area are using the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression to teach everything from behavioral finance and social justice to the recasting of capitalism.
“What’s happening now affects every one of us,” Gould said. “It provides an unparalleled laboratory of real-world applications upon which to test theories.”
Solution for the Education Maelstrom
CNET Story on OLPC — a comment
In the comments to a CNET article discussing One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO computer, the commentator below perhaps hit a key point.
by tudza October 24, 2008 5:55 PM PDT
Let’s not forget that almost all the K12 classes in the U.S. get are getting a bad reputation for not teaching those students well. Switching technologies from new to old doesn’t necessarily get you any better results.
The true solution is to buy everyone Korean parents.
Korean parents for sale
You say you’re not all
That you want to be
You say you got a bad environment
Your work at school’s not going well
Korean parents for sale
You say you need a little discipline
Someone to whip you into shape
They’ll be strict but they’ll be fair
Look at the numbers
That’s all I ask
Who’s at the head of every class?
You really think
They’re smarter than you are
They just work their ***** off
Their parents make them do it
America’s Most Overrated Product: The Bachelor’s Degree
Among my saddest moments as a career counselor is when I hear a story like this: “I wasn’t a good student in high school, but I wanted to prove that I can get a college diploma. I’d be the first one in my family to do it. But it’s been five years and $80,000, and I still have 45 credits to go.”
I have a hard time telling such people the killer statistic: Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. That figure is from a study cited by Clifford Adelman, a former research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education and now a senior research associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. Yet four-year colleges admit and take money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year!
Even worse, most of those college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education. So it’s not surprising that when you hop into a cab or walk into a restaurant, you’re likely to meet workers who spent years and their family’s life savings on college, only to end up with a job they could have done as a high-school dropout.
For ’09 Grads, Job Prospects Take a Dive
College seniors may have more trouble landing a job next spring than recent graduates, as employers trim their hiring outlooks in response to the slowing economy and financial-sector turmoil.
Employers plan to hire just 1.3% more graduates in 2009 than they hired this year, according to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
That’s the weakest outlook in six years and reflects a sharp recent downturn. Just two months ago, a survey by the same group projected a 6.1% increase in hiring. The August survey included 219 employers, 146 of whom responded to the new survey, conducted earlier this month. The big drop in hiring projections is “extremely unusual,” says Edwin Koc, the association’s director of strategic research.
The results continue a pattern of diminishing job prospects for college graduates. A year ago, employers told the association they would increase hiring for the class of 2008 by 16%. By this spring, though, the projected increase had fallen to 8%. The association doesn’t report how actual hiring compares with its projections.
The ‘Trophy Kids’ Go to Work
With Wall Street in turmoil and a financial system in crisis mode, companies are facing another major challenge: figuring out how to manage a new crop of young people in the work force — the millennial generation. Born between 1980 and 2001, the millennials were coddled by their parents and nurtured with a strong sense of entitlement. In this adaptation from “The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace,” Ron Alsop, a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, describes the workplace attitudes of the millennials and employers’ efforts to manage these demanding rookies.
When Gretchen Neels, a Boston-based consultant, was coaching a group of college students for job interviews, she asked them how they believe employers view them. She gave them a clue, telling them that the word she was looking for begins with the letter “e.” One young man shouted out, “excellent.” Other students chimed in with “enthusiastic” and “energetic.” Not even close. The correct answer, she said, is “entitled.” “Huh?” the students responded, surprised and even hurt to think that managers are offended by their highfalutin opinions of themselves.
If there is one overriding perception of the millennial generation, it’s that these young people have great — and sometimes outlandish — expectations. Employers realize the millennials are their future work force, but they are concerned about this generation’s desire to shape their jobs to fit their lives rather than adapt their lives to the workplace.
Kids’ Cereals Saltier, Report Says
Cereal makers that reduce the amount of sugar in kids’ cereals tend to ratchet up the salt content to improve flavor, says a report expected to be released Tuesday by Consumers International.
Cereal makers have been under pressure from consumer groups to reduce the sugar content of their kids’ cereals, and Consumers International, in its report, “Cereal Offenses,” says “manufacturers are likely to add salt to boost the flavor of the product, and may use salt to maintain customer appeal when sugar levels are reduced.”
The London-based organization, an umbrella group representing 220 consumer groups globally, focused on products made by two of the world’s largest makers of cereal for children, Nestlé SA of Vevey, Switzerland, and Kellogg Co., Battle Creek, Mich. The group defined children’s cereals as those that feature cartoon characters on the packaging, are endorsed by celebrities popular with kids and are advertised on kids’ television programming.
School Choices: What to Look For?
Tomorrow morning my husband and I are going on our very first public school tour. Our son is only 3, but he’ll be attending universal pre-kindergarten next year and we hope to make use of the good public schools in our area. We’ve also been encouraged to attend tours at two other elementary schools in our district and to make use of a kindergarten fair held at a nearby YWHA next week. It seems awfully soon to think about kindergarten for a kid who enters in fall of 2010. But as other parents have pointed out to me, there’s a lottery system in place in New York City and knowing which schools you are most interested in is important.
After I got over the surprise of school tours taking place a full four months before applications were even available, I realized something. I don’t really know what to look for in a school. Outside of a desire for smaller class size, caring teachers and a decent reputation in the community, I’m not really sure what these tours and fairs are supposed to teach me.
Consortium for Varsity Academics: Video Interviews
Thanks to Craig Evans, there is now a page on the tcr website for the Consortium for Varsity Academics®. Click on the page for The Concord Review…
There are QuickTime clips of the interviews with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Bill Fitzsimmons of Harvard, and Sarah Valkenburgh [Emerson Prize winner, summa cum laude graduate of Dartmouth, and graduate of Harvard Medical School].
Will Fitzhugh
www.tcr.org
NAEP Writing Assessment 2011
An Interview with Will Fitzhugh: About Assessing Writing EdNews.org Houston, Texas, 24 January 2007
Michael F. Shaughnessy Senior Columnist EdNews.org:
1) I understand that you have just finished a stint on the ACT/NAGB Steering Committee for the 2011 NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) Writing Assessment. What was that like? (And what does NAGB stand for?)
WF: NAGB is the National Assessment Governing Board, which runs the NAEP, “America’s Report Card,” as they say. I was glad that Diane Ravitch recommended me for the Steering Committee for the new national writing assessment scheduled for 2011. I was very impressed with the intelligence and competence of Mary Crovo, representing NAEP, and Rosanne Cook, who is running the project for American College Testing. Many people on the Committee were from the National Council of Teachers of English and the College Composition world, which have little interest in having students read history books or write history research papers. In fact that world favors, or has favored in the past, personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay, which do a terrible job of preparing high school students for the nonfiction books and the academic term papers most will be asked to cope with in college.
2) Given the paucity of writing that goes on in the high schools of America, is it really fair to ask high school students to engage in a robust writing assessment?
WF: It would not be fair to ask high school students to play in a football game if they hadn’t had an opportunity for lots of practice, and it is very hard to ask high school students to do the sort of academic expository writing they should be doing if they have never done it in all their years in school. But we need to start somewhere. Every high school student does not need to be able to play football, but they all need to be able to read nonfiction books and write serious term papers.
3) On the other hand, since so much of the college experience is writing, are high school teachers doing students a disservice by NOT requiring more writing?
WF: High school teachers would make terrible football coaches and their teams would lose most if not all of their games, if the teacher/coaches did not have time to practice their teams. We take football seriously, and we take band seriously, so ample time and money are made available to produce the best teams and the best bands the high school can manage. We allow really no time for a public high school teacher to work with students on heavy-duty term papers. We don’t make time for them, because we don’t think they are that important. Not as important as drama practice, yearbook, chorus, debate or a host of other activities. As a result our high school students are, once again, ill-prepared for college reading and writing. AP courses in history do not require, in most cases, that students read a complete nonfiction book, and most of the AP teachers say they don’t have time to ask the student to write a research paper, because they “have to get students ready for the AP Exam.”
Brightstorm Raises $6 Million For Online High School Video Tutorials
If high-school education is failing in the U.S., maybe Web video can help. Founded last April, Brightstorm is a Web video site that brings bright, talented teachers together with students who need some extra help. Backed by Korea’s KTB Ventures, which invested the entire $6 million in the startup’s A round, Brightstorm is launching today to the public.
There are about 20 teachers on the site offering video courses in subjects such as Geometry, the SAT, and A.P. U.S. History. Each course is broken up into episodes that are about 10 to 20 minutes each. Each course is $50, which is split between Brightstorm and the teachers. Students can watch a free promotional video to decide if they like the teacher and want to purchase the course. These tend to be overproduced with cheesy video graphics (stop with the jump cuts already), but they do the job of getting across each teacher’s personality and teaching style.
The videos are supplemented with interactive challenges, pop-up quizzes, and other bonus material. You can certainly see the appeal. If you were a high school student who needed a tutor, wouldn’t you rather watch videos on your computer for ten minutes a day than endure a live tutorial for an hour or more? Now, whether you are actually going to learn more is still debatable.
But there are plenty of startups trying. Here in the U.S., there is PrepMe, ePrep, Teach The People, and Grockit. In Asia, there is iKnow in Japan and perhaps the biggest success to date is Korea’s Megastudy.
Related: Credit for non-Madison School District courses.
