Mayors Go Door to Door, Personally Encouraging Students to Stay in the Game for Their Own Good — and for the Sake of the City
As the financial meltdown and economic slump hold the national spotlight, another potential crisis is on the horizon: a persistently high dropout rate that educators and mayors across the country say increases the threat to the country’s strength and prosperity.
According to one study, only half of the high school students in the nation’s 50 largest cities are graduating in four years, with a figure as low as 25% in Detroit. And while concern over dropouts isn’t new, the problem now has officials outside of public education worried enough to get directly involved.
The U.S. Conference of Mayors [PDF Report] is focusing its education efforts on dropouts. Mayors in Houston and other Texas cities go door to door to the homes of dropouts, encouraging them to return to school. Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin meets on weekends with students and helps them with life planning. Other cities, like Milwaukee and Kansas City, Mo., have dropout prevention programs.
Some new studies show far fewer students completing high school with diplomas than long believed. “Whereas the conventional wisdom had long placed the graduation rate around 85%, a growing consensus has emerged that only about seven in 10 students are actually successfully finishing high school” in four years, said a study by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, a nonprofit group based in Bethesda, Md. It was released this year by America’s Promise Alliance, a nonpartisan advocacy group for youth. In the nation’s 50 largest cities, the graduation rate was 52%.
Reaching an Autistic Teenager
On a typical Monday morning at an atypical high school, teenage boys yanked open the glass doors to the First Baptist Church of Decatur, Ga. Half-awake, iPod wires curling from their ears, their backpacks unbuckled and their jeans baggy, the guys headed for the elevator. Arriving at Morning Meeting in the third-floor conference room, Stephen, his face hidden under long black bangs, dropped into a chair, sprawled across the table and went back to sleep. The Community School, or T.C.S., is a small private school for teenage boys with autism or related disorders. Sleep disturbances are common in this student body of 10, so a boy’s staggering need for sleep is respected. Nick Boswell, a tall fellow with thick sideburns, arrived and began his usual pacing along the windows that overlook the church parking lot and baseball diamond. Edwick, with spiky brown hair and a few black whiskers, tumbled backward with a splat into a beanbag chair on the floor.
“O.K., guys, let’s talk about your spring schedules,” said Dave Nelson, the 45-year-old founding director. He wore a green polo shirt, cargo shorts and sneakers and had a buzz haircut and an open, suntanned face. After his son Graham, 19, was given a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (A.S.D.) as a young child, Nelson left the business world and went into teaching and clinical and counseling work. On that Monday, he was instantly interrupted.
“I had a very bad night!” Edwick yelled from the floor. “Nightmares all night!”
A System That Scores Low Marks
The president of Berlin’s Free University on why the muddled education system is underfunded, outdated and unlikely to change
Hierarchy of Needs
The hierarchy of needs is an idea associated with one man, Abraham Maslow (see article), the most influential anthropologist ever to have worked in industry. It is a theory about the way in which people are motivated. First presented in a paper (“A Theory of Human Motivation”) published in the Psychological Review in 1943, it postulated that human needs fall into five different categories. Needs in the lower categories have to be satisfied before needs in the higher ones can act as motivators. Thus a violinist who is starving cannot be motivated to play Mozart, and a shop worker without a lunch break is less productive in the afternoon than one who has had a break.
The theory arose out of a sense that classic economics was not giving managers much help because it failed to take into account the complexity of human motivation. Maslow divided needs into five:
The “Value of Ignorance“.
The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn
Key Concepts
- Storytelling is a human universal, and common themes appear in tales throughout history and all over the the world.
- These characteristics of stories, and our natural affinity toward them, reveal clues about our evolutionary history and the roots of emotion and empathy in the mind.
- By studying narrative’s power to influence beliefs, researchers are discovering how we analyze information and accept new ideas.
When Brad Pitt tells Eric Bana in the 2004 film Troy that “there are no pacts between lions and men,” he is not reciting a clever line from the pen of a Hollywood screenwriter. He is speaking Achilles’ words in English as Homer wrote them in Greek more than 2,000 years ago in the Iliad. The tale of the Trojan War has captivated generations of audiences while evolving from its origins as an oral epic to written versions and, finally, to several film adaptations. The power of this story to transcend time, language and culture is clear even today, evidenced by Troy’s robust success around the world.
Popular tales do far more than entertain, however. Psychologists and neuroscientists have recently become fascinated by the human predilection for storytelling. Why does our brain seem to be wired to enjoy stories? And how do the emotional and cognitive effects of a narrative influence our beliefs and real-world decisions?
School Efforts to Stem Violence Offer A Textbook Case of Limits on Speech
With the nation’s school systems roiled by campus shootings over the past decade, and on the lookout for conflict, students are being asked to check a broader array of free-speech rights at the door — raising questions about what lesson that is teaching them.
Public-school administrators are hewing to a zero-tolerance policy on expression they believe incites violence, and they are doing so with the backing of the courts. Controversial clothing has been a common casualty. Struggling with racial tensions at his high school, a principal in Maryville, Tenn., banned depictions of the Confederate flag in 2005 and was supported by a federal court. Last month, the Aurora Frontier K-8 School in Aurora, Colo., suspended an 11-year-old who refused to remove a homemade T-shirt that read, “Obama is a terrorist’s best friend.” The shirt caused “a very loud argument on the playground,” according to a statement from the school.
Since such actions stem from a concern over the safety of adolescents, even free-speech advocates acknowledge a need for some degree of deference to educators. But an argument of imminent danger is hard to make in many of these cases. Some think educators may be inadvertently teaching children that suppressing speech is the ready solution to ideological conflict.
What Does it Mean to be an Educated Person?
New Roots to rethink old education model
Tina Nilsen-Hodges:
The State University of New York Board of Trustees approved the charter application last week for the New Roots Charter School, an innovative new high school that will be one of the first fully integrated models of education for sustainability at the secondary level in the nation. Students in my spring 2007 “Teaching Sustainability” course contributed to the development of the initial school concept paper, which provided the foundation for the charter application submitted in June.
Why this school, why here and why now? New Roots Charter School answers the call of the U.N. Decade for Education for Sustainable Development for the rethinking of education necessary to address the problems of the 21st century. Gov. David Paterson was quoted as saying, “Global warming presents each of us with a question. Do we continue with the status quo or are we ready to make significant cultural and lifestyle alterations?”
Consider our energy crisis, expanding poverty and the degradation of essential ecosystem services, and Paterson’s conclusion becomes even more urgent. “Future actions will require a fundamental change of philosophy in how we live our lives,” he said.
Green Charter Schools National Conference in Madison on November 7- 9
The Urban Environment:
HER giggling friends suddenly quiet down when Jamilka Carrasquillo, her large silver hoop earrings swinging, describes the day her class killed chickens.
“We actually had to go up to the woods to do it,” she says, perched on the back of a chair in a classroom at Common Ground High School in New Haven.
Each student who wanted one got a bird. Following a modified-kosher method (no rabbi), the students stunned the birds with an electric shock, hung them upside down and cut the jugular vein. They call the chickens “meat birds” to maintain emotional distance, but the experience can be difficult.
Jamilka cried; others, even teachers, did too. A lot emerged as vegetarians. Jamilka did not, but she says she came to understand that the pinkish slabs wrapped in plastic on the grocery shelf actually come from living animals. She pledged not to waste food.
The Anti-Schoolers
ONE morning early last month, long after that frantic hour between 7 and 8 when most New York City parents were hustling their 4-, 5- and 6-year-olds out the door and into their first day of kindergarten, Benny Rendell, the 5-year-old son of Joanne Rendell, a novelist, and Brad Lewis, a New York University professor, lay sprawled asleep in his bed, enjoying what his mother described as his first day of unkindergarten.
Benny stayed asleep, as is his habit, until well past 11 a.m., while his mother, whose first book, “The Professors’ Wives’ Club,” was just published by NAL Accent, worked on her new novel. When Benny awoke, he and his mother slowly made their way to a friend’s house in Brooklyn, with Benny reading the subway stops out loud on the way, and counting out change at a vegetable stand.
They spent the afternoon in a Fort Greene backyard; while Benny played with his pals in the mud, the grown-ups looked on, and shared a cold one.
The College Track: Onward & Upward
The plans, proclivities, and politics of college students.
Forty years ago, when the data series analyzed here began, just three in ten college freshmen had fathers who had a college education. Now, a majority do. Young college students today have higher education goals than their predecessors did a generation ago. The changes have been particularly dramatic for young women, with a fivefold increase in the number who plan to become doctors, and a threefold increase in the number who plan to get a Ph.D.
Amusing, but Not Funny
Sara Rimer of The Times wrote an article last week that gave us a startling glimpse of just how mindless and self-destructive the U.S. is becoming.
Consider the lead paragraph:
“The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued.”
The idea that the U.S. won’t even properly develop the skills of young people who could perform at the highest intellectual levels is breathtaking — breathtakingly stupid, that is.
The authors of the study, published in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, concluded that American culture does not value talent in math very highly. I suppose we’re busy with other things, like text-messaging while jay-walking. The math thing is seen as something for Asians and nerds.
Related: Math Forum.
The Frugal Teenager, Ready or Not
WHEN Wendy Postle’s two children were younger, saying “yes” gave her great joy. Yes to all those toys. The music lessons. The blowout birthday parties.
ut as her son and daughter approached adolescence, yes turned into a weary default. “Sometimes it was just easier to say, ‘O.K., whatever,’ than to have the battle of ‘no,’ ” said Mrs. Postle, a working mother who lives in Hilliard, Ohio, a middle-class suburb of Columbus.
This year her husband’s 401(k) savings are evaporating. Medical bills are nipping at the couple’s heels. Gas prices are still taking a toll. Mrs. Postle recently decided that although she and her husband had always sacrificed their own luxuries for Zach, 13, and Kaitlyn, 15, the teenagers would now have to cut back as well.
“No” could no longer be the starting gun of family fights. It would have to be an absolute.
Janet Mertz Study: Math Skills Suffer in US, Study Finds
It’s been nearly four years since Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, made his controversial comments about the source of the gender gap in math and science careers. Still, the ripple effect continues – most recently in a study made public today on the world’s top female math competitors.
The study, to be published in next month’s Notices of the American Mathematical Society, identifies women of extraordinary math ability by sifting through the winners of the world’s most elite math competitions. It found that small nations that nurtured female mathematicians often produced more top competitors than far larger and wealthier nations.
The message: Cultural or environmental factors, not intellect, are what really limit women’s math achievements.
The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued.
The study suggests that while many girls have exceptional talent in math — the talent to become top math researchers, scientists and engineers — they are rarely identified in the United States. A major reason, according to the study, is that American culture does not highly value talent in math, and so discourages girls — and boys, for that matter — from excelling in the field. The study will be published Friday in Notices of the American Mathematical Society.
“We’re living in a culture that is telling girls you can’t do math — that’s telling everybody that only Asians and nerds do math,” said the study’s lead author, Janet E. Mertz, an oncology professor at the University of Wisconsin, whose son is a winner of what is viewed as the world’s most-demanding math competitions. “Kids in high school, where social interactions are really important, think, ‘If I’m not an Asian or a nerd, I’d better not be on the math team.’ Kids are self selecting. For social reasons they’re not even trying.”
Many studies have examined and debated gender differences and math, but most rely on the results of the SAT and other standardized tests, Dr. Mertz and many mathematicians say. But those tests were never intended to measure the dazzling creativity, insight and reasoning skills required to solve math problems at the highest levels, Dr. Mertz and others say.
Dr. Mertz asserts that the new study is the first to examine data from the most difficult math competitions for young people, including the USA and International Mathematical Olympiads for high school students, and the Putnam Mathematical Competition for college undergraduates. For winners of these competitions, the Michael Phelpses and Kobe Bryants of math, getting an 800 on the math SAT is routine. The study found that many students from the United States in these competitions are immigrants or children of immigrants from countries where education in mathematics is prized and mathematical talent is thought to be widely distributed and able to be cultivated through hard work and persistence.
Complete report 650K PDF.
Related: Math Forum.
Much more on Janet Mertz here.
Students take a step for safety in surveying their walks to school
Garfield Elementary pupils note broken sidewalks, speeding motorists and other hazards in hopes that Santa Ana will correct them.
n the first day of class, Chris Marx asks his fifth-grade students how they get to school and what they encounter along the way.
Even though most students at Garfield Elementary in Santa Ana walk only a few blocks to class, they often trudge over broken sidewalks and through littered alleyways, rub up against graffiti-covered walls and step over rubble from construction sites. Some dodge roving dogs, homeless people or gang members.
“You ask the kids how many times they’ve heard gunshots and there are some hands raised,” Marx said.
Students at thousands of schools nationwide walked en masse to school Wednesday in events timed for International Walk to School Day, meant to encourage physical fitness and to reduce carbon emissions.
Great Kids Books About Financial Ruin
Mom, What’s a Credit Default Swap?
The first time I heard the word recession, I was 10 years old. It was 1978, and my parents, like everyone we knew, were cranky and stressed out about gas shortages and rising food prices. One of the ways I coped was by burying my nose in books and discovering kids who had it worse than I did. Like Ramona Quimby, whose dad got fired and took up residence on the couch. And Laura Ingalls, whose dad kept hitching up the wagon to drag his bonneted brood to the middle of nowhere. Many of the books I discovered during the late ’70s featured themes of economic hardship that made my circumstances seem manageable by comparison–a happy coincidence, I thought at the time. Looking back, I’m not so sure this was an accident.
Status of Girls in Wisconsin
The Alverno College Research Center for Women and Girls, in collaboration with the Women’s Fund of Greater Milwaukee, the Girl Scouts of Wisconsin, and the Wisconsin Women’s Council, is pleased to present our collaborative exploration of the status of girls (ages 10 to 19) in Wisconsin. After the Status of Women in Wisconsin reports were issued in 2002 and 2004, these organizations and others that serve girls in the State raised awareness for the need for companion research on girls as a natural next step. Since a great deal of information about Wisconsin girls is scattered in many different and often difficult-to-find places and documents, a primary goal of this project has been to centralize the information and to make it accessible, not only in print but also via the internet, to a variety of agencies, groups and institutions who have the needs and interests of Wisconsin’s girls in mind.
Out of the Ordinary: Historical Fiction for Middle Grade Readers
Excerpt from Chapter 1: The Crime
“Woosh! Splat!’ A gooshy, white spitball whizzed past Julia’s ear. It smushed onto the blackboard and stuck. Julia watched a wet stream travel down from the wad. It left a shiny black trail on the board. There was only one person in the room who would do such a thing. Julia knew who it was.
Julia knew what would happen next. It was the same thing that happened every time Teddy Parker misbehaved.
Miss Crawford, the teacher, spun around and faced the class like a fighter squaring off against an opponent. “Who made this spitball?” she demanded.
Julia clamped her skinny legs together and froze in her seat. Her knobby knees bumped each other.
“Who made this spitball?” Miss Crawford repeated.
“It wasn’t any of the sixth graders,” said Frank O’Malley, a blond haired, Irish boy. He stood, as was the custom, to speak for his age group.
Julia knew she was expected to answer. She was the only fifth grader in the room who spoke English. The other fifth grade girl sat wide-eyed with sealed lips.
Julia wished they didn’t have to go through this ritual every time Teddy Parker acted up. Teddy’s family came to Phippsburg long before Julia’s. Teddy lived in a real house. Julia’s family lived in an old boxcar that had been taken off of the rails. There were other families from Italy, Ireland, and Greece living in the boxcar section of town.
Julia didn’t know why Teddy was a trouble maker. He was luckier than all of the other kids. Teddy’s father ran the coal mine where everyone else’s father worked.
The fourth graders didn’t do it,” said a girl popping up and down in one motion.
Julia had missed her turn to answer.
“It wasn’t any of the third graders, Miss Crawford,” said another girl.
“The second graders didn’t do it,” said Teddy’s sister, Paulina.
A small boy stood. “It wasn’t the first grade, Teacher,” he said.
There will be a punishment for this, “Miss Crawford Said.
“Whoever made this spitball will have to come to the front of the room.”
Julia watched Miss Crawford focus on Teddy. He shifted in his wooden seat at the end of the sixth grade row.
“What do you have to say, Teddy?” asked Miss Crawford.
Julia looked at Teddy sitting in his new clothes from Denver. He wore a new shirt under a new sweater, new knickers, and new knee socks. Julia guessed his underwear was new, too. Teddy’s clothes were the right size, not patched and baggy hand-me-downs like Julia’s. Most of the kids were dressed like her, in clothes that had once been worn by their parents.
Julia watched Teddy slowly rise. He stepped out to the side of his desk. Julia waited for Teddy to make his confession. It was his chance to show off every day. She knew in a moment he would proudly walk to the front of the room, stand on tip toe, and place his nose on a chalk dot Miss Crawford drew on the board. The class would watch him stand there on pointed toe while he took his punishment. Miss Crawford wouldn’t make Teddy stand at the board for a whole hour like she would any other student. Teddy was her pet. She’d call off his punishment after five or ten minutes.
It was the same every time. Nothing exciting ever happened in Phippsburg. Why couldn’t it be a little bit different this once?
Julia reached up and felt a rag curl in her hair. Mama tied the rags into her hair last night. Julia liked how the curls made a soft half circle around her plain face.
Julia closed her eyes and made one silent wish. “Please let something exciting happen today for a change.”
She opened her eyes and blinked three times for good luck.
Miss Crawford was waiting for an answer. Teddy straightened his shoulders and drew in a long, deep breath.
“Miss Crawford, I must tell the truth,” he said.
“Yes, you must,” said Miss Crawford.
All eyes were glued on Teddy Parker.
“It was…Julia!” he announced.
School Buses: Still Vehicles for Change
High Transportation Costs Are Forcing Kids Back To Neighborhood Schools, Limiting Diversity
A generation ago, the yellow school bus became a symbol of school desegregation, with thousands of the iconic vehicles ferrying minority children away from schools in their own neighborhoods to others in higher-income white areas.
Although the Supreme Court has tightly restricted such overt racial integration efforts in recent years, buses are still crucial to many magnet schools, open-enrollment programs and other school-choice strategies designed to encourage diversity and provide options for students in low-performing schools, as is required under the No Child Left Behind law.
But more and more school districts are curtailing bus service for such programs as a result of higher fuel costs and other financial pressures. That has sparked fears that the only choice for many students will be neighborhood schools attended by classmates of their own race and economic background, which has the unintended effect of re-segregating schools.
“Basically, you can’t have racial and class diversity of any sort if you don’t provide transportation,” says Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project, a research group at the University of California at Los Angeles. “This is kind of closing the last door for urgently needed opportunities for kids who are in schools that are really dysfunctional and inadequate.”
California boarding schools? It’s not an oxymoron
As a young woman living in Southern California, Kelly Boss never thought much about boarding schools. They were a mystery or at most a cinematic fancy embodied by Brookfield of “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” or the Welton Academy of “Dead Poets Society.”
That changed when her daughter Mackenzie learned about the Thacher School in Ojai and its horse and outdoor program. Although she would never have imagined her daughter there, the Bosses came to view it as the perfect fit.
But Kelly Boss understood the reactions of other parents who appeared aghast at the idea.
“Other mothers look at you like how can you possibly send your daughter away, and I’ve had parents say, you two don’t look like you don’t get along,” said Boss, a Santa Barbara resident.
Although boarding schools have a long tradition in Europe and the Northeast, Californians are still apt to equate them with troubled youths or disinterested parents.
Homework Anxiety in Madison
This parental approach — providing a consistent, supportive environment — is a good way to lessen the stress that can accompany homework, said Dr. Marcia Slattery, a child and adolescent psychiatrist with UW Health.
Each year, Slattery said she and her colleagues treat hundreds of children who are anxious about school-related issues, including homework. For some, the problem is limited to homework. For others, homework exacerbates an existing anxiety disorder or indicates other problems, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder or an underlying learning problem.
“There’s an inherent quality to homework that evokes a certain amount of stress, and that can be good, because it pushes us to learn,” Slattery said. “But for some children, the anxiety is so pronounced it basically freezes them.”
Let Them be Themselves:
Seminar offers help, advice to parents raising gifted children
Doug Carroll, via a kind reader’s email:
Jim Delisle tells the story of a bright little girl who went with her parents to buy a bicycle.
After the bike had been selected, the parents presented their credit card to complete the purchase.
“Don’t you know the interest rate they charge on credit cards?” the girl said in a scolding tone. “If we wait until Christmas, Santa will bring it — and it won’t cost anything!”
The anecdote illustrates the challenges that can be involved in parenting a gifted child, who may be light-years ahead of the pack intellectually but all too typical in other respects.
A two-day seminar at Blue Harbor Resort and Conference Center, which concluded Friday, addressed issues specific to the development and education of gifted children and was attended by more than 300 schoolteachers, administrators, parents and students.
High School Taps Institute on Ethics
East County’s largest school district has introduced a character education program that aims to reduce cheating and other bad conduct by promoting ethical behavior.
“What you allow, you encourage,” said ethics expert Michael Josephson, who is working with the Grossmont Union High School District on the Character Counts program. “It’s about helping kids form better values, make better choices.”
The Josephson Institute of Ethics plans to release in a few weeks its 2008 national survey of student attitudes and behavior.
Two years ago, the institute’s survey of more than 30,000 students showed alarming rates of cheating, lying and theft at schools across the United States.
Six out of 10 high school students said they had cheated at least once during a test during the past year.
Maya Angelou Public Charter School offers hope and an education to kids in trouble
The job of a juvenile public defender is as much social worker as lawyer. In Washington, D.C., the juvenile court still operates, at least on paper, as the founders of the system envisioned over a century ago. Judges are supposed to provide for the care and rehabilitation of the child, as well as protect the safety of the community. In practice, this means that if a lawyer can find a program in the community that meets a client’s needs, there is a decent chance that the judge will put the child there instead of locking him up (see Figure 1).
The more I learned about Eddie’s life, the more depressed I became. When he was eight, he was physically abused by his stepfather, who resented the competition for Eddie’s mother’s attention. When he was 10 he began to act out in school, picking fights with other kids and refusing to do his homework. Eventually, he was forced to repeat two grades. At age 13, he was kicked out of school and referred to an “alternative” school for troubled kids. He wandered in and out of this school–nobody really kept track of his attendance–for a few years, until he was arrested and sent to Oak Hill. And now, at maybe the lowest point in an unremittingly dismal life, Eddie was asking me to get him “a program” so that he could go home. As I struggled to respond to Eddie’s request, my depression turned to hopelessness. I knew that the city was throwing all kinds of resources into this case. There was money to pay the police who had arrested Eddie, money for the prosecutor who charged him, money for the expert witness who came to court and testified that Eddie’s fingerprints were found in the house. There was money to pay me, the public defender. And there would be money for the state–on behalf of we the people–to incarcerate Eddie in a juvenile prison, at a cost of more than $50,000 a year.
Chicago Parents Seek More Public School Input
Parents of Chicago public school students living on the West Side overwhelmingly want to have more of a say on school decisions and want better communication from the district when it comes to school-restructuring efforts, according to the findings of a five-month survey released Friday.
The survey conducted by the Parents & Residents Invested in School & Education Reform (PRISE Reform), queried 504 households of students in the 6th through 12th grades in the Humboldt Park, Garfield Park and Austin neighborhoods.
Academic Fitness
The NACAC Testing Commission has just released its report [PDF]on the benefits of, and problems with, current standardized admission tests. The Commission says that “a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach for the use of standardized tests in undergraduate admission does not reflect the realities facing our nation’s many and varied colleges and universities.”
It might be pointed out, by an outside observer, that standardized tests not only do not reflect the realities of acceptance for high school students receiving athletic scholarships, but such tests have nothing whatever to do with whether high school athletes are recruited or not and nothing to do with whether they receive college athletic scholarships or not.
Athletic scholarships are based on athletic performance in particular athletic activities, not on tests of the athletic or physical fitness of high school athletes. The cost of failure for college coaches is too high for them to think of relying on any standardized test of sports knowledge or of anything else in their efforts to recruit the best high school athletes they can.
The NACAC Testing Commission also says that standardized tests may not do a good enough job of telling whether applicants to college are academically fit. They recommend the development and use of good subject matter tests which are “more closely linked to the high school curriculum” than the SAT and ACT exams.
This suggestion begins to approach the rigor of assessment in the recruiting and selection of high school athletes, but there are still important differences. The high school athletic curriculum includes such subjects as football, basketball, soccer, baseball, etc., but college coaches do not rely on tests of athletes’ knowledge of these sports as determined by sport-specific tests. They need to know a lot about the actual performance of candidates in those sports in which they have competed.
The parallel is not perfect, because of course students who can demonstrate knowledge of history, biology, literature, math, chemistry, and so on, are clearly more likely to manage the demands of college history, biology, literature, math and chemistry courses when they get there, while athletes who know a lot about their sport may still perform poorly in it.
But college academic work does not just consist of taking courses and passing tests. In math there are problem sets. In biology, chemistry, etc., there is lab work to do. And in history courses there are history books to read and research papers to write. Such performance tasks are not yet part of the recommended tests for college admission.
It is now possible, for example, for a student who can do well on a subject matter test in history to graduate from high school without ever having read a complete history book or written a real history research paper in high school. That student may indeed do well in history courses in college, but it seems likely that they will have a steep learning curve in their mastery of the reading lists and paper requirements they will face in those courses.
New standard college admissions tests in specific academic subjects will no doubt bring more emphasis on academic knowledge for the high school students who are preparing for them, but a standard independent assessment of their research papers would surely make it more likely that they would not plan to enter college without ever having done one in high school.
The reading of complete nonfiction books is still an unknown for college admissions officers. Interviewers may ask what books students have read, but there is no actual standard expectation for the content, difficulty and number of nonfiction books high school students are expected to have read before college.
The increased emphasis on subject matter tests is surely a good step closer to the seriousness routinely seen in the assessments for college athletic scholarships, but it seems to me that some regular examination of the reading of nonfiction books and an external assessment of at least one serious research paper by high school students would help in their preparation for college, as well as in the assessment of their actual demonstrated academic fitness which, as the Commission points out, is not now provided by the SAT and ACT tests.
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Under Pressure
Intense, highly involved parenting can create star children like golf prodigies Josh and Zach Martin. But it can also come at a cost. What’s driving hard-driving parents?
Bowie and Julie Martin shuttled their sons for five years to a never-ending series of practices, lessons and games in a half-dozen sports before finally suggesting the boys focus on a single pursuit, golf, the game where the children showed the most promise.
Josh and Zach Martin were 6 and 8.
“I just wanted them to be great at something,” Mr. Martin explains.
So far, so good. Today, the Martin family’s single-minded pursuit has produced perhaps the two best young golfers living under the same roof anywhere. Their two-bedroom townhouse beside the 17th hole of a golf course in Pinehurst, N.C., is an exhibit space for dozens of oversized silver and crystal trophies that Josh and Zach have won, including 11 at international tournaments.
Adolescent Anxiety: The Musical
He was never much of a student, but Jason Robert Brown was a precocious kid. Growing up in Monsey, N.Y., about an hour north of Manhattan, he became enthralled by music at age 4, was taking lessons at 5. At his first recital — age 6 — he not only outplayed his teacher’s other students, he also supplied the verbal patter of a natural entertainer.
“He just started chatting with the audience,” his mother, Deborah Brown, recalled. “I was floored. Nobody knew where it came from.”
Once, before he could write in script, he filched a checkbook from one of his parents, wrote out a check and sent it to a mail-order record club. Fortunately he didn’t get all the particulars right, and the check was returned because it was unsigned. Teachers plucked him from third grade and plopped him into the fourth, not because of straight A’s but because he wasn’t paying attention.
“He was good in everything, but if it wasn’t music, he didn’t do the work,” said Mrs. Brown, a former English teacher.
The Spellings Plan for College Student Aid Simplification
In a speech tonight at Harvard University, the U.S. education secretary will unveil a proposal to greatly simplify the process by which students apply for federal financial aid. Under the plan, which flows from a set of ideas floated by Under Secretary Sara Martinez Tucker at an Education Department summit in July, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid would shrink from more than 100 questions to 26, and students would find out before their senior year of high school how much federal financial aid they would qualify for.
“This all flies under the rubric of needing to make this process much much less burdensome,” Spellings said in an interview in her office Monday. “Right now, it’s like we’re trying to keep people out of college, not get them in…. The whole thing is, ‘You want to go to college? Here are seven pages of bureaucracy, and here’s what you’re going to have to do to get it.’ As opposed to, ‘Here’s a simple way to do it, and here’s what we’re going to do for you, so you can get it.’ It’s the whole psychology.”
A Broader Definition of Merit: The Trouble With College Entry Exams
Imagine yourself an admissions director of a status-seeking college that wants desperately to move up in the rankings. With next year’s freshman class nearly filled, you are choosing between two applicants. The first has very high SAT scores, but little else to recommend him. The second is an aspiring doctor who tests poorly but graduated near the top of his high school class while volunteering as an emergency medical technician in his rural county.
This applicant has the kind of background that higher education has always claimed to covet. But the pressures that are driving colleges — and the country as a whole — to give college entry exams more weight than they were ever intended to have would clearly work against him. Those same pressures are distorting the admissions process, corrupting education generally and slanting the field toward students whose families can afford test preparation classes.
Consider the admissions director at our hypothetical college. He knows that college ranking systems take SAT’s and ACT’s into account. He knows that bond-rating companies look at the same scores when judging a college’s credit worthiness. And in lean times like these, he would be especially eager for a share of the so-called merit scholarship money that state legislators give students who test well.
Parents Give Up Youths Under Law Meant for Babies
The abandonments began on Sept. 1, when a mother left her 14-year-old son in a police station here.
y Sept. 23, two more boys and one girl, ages 11 to 14, had been abandoned in hospitals in Omaha and Lincoln. Then a 15-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl were left.
The biggest shock to public officials came last week, when a single father walked into an Omaha hospital and surrendered nine of his 10 children, ages 1 to 17, saying that his wife had died and he could no longer cope with the burden of raising them.
In total last month, 15 older children in Nebraska were dropped off by a beleaguered parent or custodial aunt or grandmother who said the children were unmanageable.
Madison School District Facing Class-Action Lawsuit Over Open Enrollment
he Madison Metropolitan School District is facing a federal class-action lawsuit.
An East High School parent claims a request to transfer her daughter out of the district was been denied based on race.
The class-action lawsuit, filed in federal court on Wednesday, claims the Madison school district discriminated against a white, female student who wanted to transfer from East High School using open enrollment.
At the time, in the 2006-2007 school year, the transfer request was denied because it would increase the racial imbalance in the district. It was the district’s policy at the time, but that policy was changed earlier this year after a Supreme Court ruling involving school districts in Seattle and Louisville, WISC-TV reported.
“I believe this district had a policy that was absolutely consistent with state law,” Madison Schools Superintendent Daniel Nerad said. “When there was a legal decision by the highest court of the land… that was no longer a factor. I believe the district responded very responsibly in making a change in the policy.”
Much more on open enrollment here.
More:
- Madison Schools’ Using race to deny white student transfers to be topic for the School Board
- Race out as reason to deny Madison school transfers
Andy Hall has more:
In the 2006-07 school year, Madison was the only one of the state’s 426 school districts to deny transfer requests because of race, rejecting 126 white students’ applications to enroll in other districts, including online schools, records show.
3 Madison schools offer free fresh fruit, veggies
The Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program has expanded to 56 schools in Wisconsin this year, including three Madison elementary schools, providing free fresh fruit and vegetables during the school day to all students wanting a quick nutritious snack.
The state received $870,994 in the national farm bill for the program, which works out to $51 per student for the 17,000 state students served.
The program started in 2002 as a way to combat obesity in kids. Funding is geared to schools with a higher incidence of students from economically disadvantaged families.
Madison schools getting funding through the program for fresh fruits and vegetables include Falk Elementary ($15,700), Glendale Elementary ($20,696) and Hawthorne Elementary ($16,312).
Owl Creek neighborhood raises red flags for city, schools
The first thing the school principal noticed was the large number of new students coming from a tiny, isolated neighborhood that didn’t exist two years ago.
Then it was the repeated fights — which would begin on the bus ride home, fester in the neighborhood, then come back to school the next day, said Glendale Elementary School Principal Mickey Buhl.
And there were other troubling signs — youngsters shaving their eyebrows and cutting their hair in ways that Buhl said indicated flirtation with the idea of gangs. Glendale staff who went to the Owl Creek neighborhood, off Voges Road on the southeast side near McFarland, saw an unfinished development sandwiched between two industrial parks and far from stores, social services and bus lines.
Madison police also noticed problems. From March 1 to June 30 of this year, police responded to 81 calls for service, ranging from theft to battery, in the tiny development, said Lt. Carl Strasburg.
Related: Police calls near Madison area high schools: 1996-2006.
Lost Cause: Why do My Children Lose Everything?
ere must be a hidden graveyard for them or a coach who picks them up after practice and cuts them up to make leather jackets. Two Fridays ago, we had four soccer balls: two for 8-year-old Eli to practice with; a slightly smaller one for his younger brother, Simon; and a special, pristine ball that Eli’s teammates in Washington, D.C., signed for him when he left the team last summer because we were moving to a new city. Last Friday, five minutes before Simon’s soccer practice, we had only one ball. The unblemished one with the signatures. Understandably, Eli didn’t want Simon to take it to practice. But where had all the other ones gone? Neither of my boys knew. I tore around the house and the garage. Well, actually, Eli allowed, one or maybe two of the balls had somehow failed to make it home from practice the previous week. What to do now? Fume.
“Lose something every day. Accept the fluster/ of lost door keys, the hour badly spent./ The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote. Yet I can’t accept the fluster. My children’s penchant for leaving their belongings strewn behind them–a long tail of balls and toys and lunchboxes and socks and shoes and sweatshirts–makes me fear that they are heedless prima donnas who will never be ready for the responsibilities of adulthood. And then, of course, I’m forced to concede that I seem to have raised them to be this way. The ritual of losing things makes me wonder about the line between taking good care of your kids and impossibly coddling them. Have middle-class American parents like us forever blurred the distinction?
To School or Not to School: Parents Skip Lesson Plans
It’s safe to say my wife and I considered keeping our kids out of school about as much as we considered not feeding and clothing them.
Joanne Rendell, a New York City novelist and mother of a near-5-year-old, is taking a very different approach. She wrote recently on the Babble parenting Web site about a philosophy she and some other parents are adhering to: unschooling. Ms. Rendell’s son, Benny, by age would be starting kindergarten around now, but instead she and her partner are keeping him at home for a much more loosely structured experience.
So, rather than wake up early to rush to regimented lessons in a big building, Benny wakes up at midday and heads with his mother to Brooklyn for a playgroup with other unschooled kids. Ms. Rendell writes: “[U]n-kindergarten for us … means we don’t have to worry about bedtimes and can go out on the town with friends any night of the week. He can read a book on sharks when he feels like it. He can experiment with bungee cords while eating his breakfast at noon.”
The New Paternalism in Urban Schools
By the time youngsters reach high school in the United States, the achievement gap is immense. The average black 12th grader has the reading and writing skills of a typical white 8th grader and the math skills of a typical white 7th grader. The gap between white and Hispanic students is similar. But some remarkable inner-city schools are showing that the achievement gap can be closed, even at the middle and high school level, if poor minority kids are given the right kind of instruction.
Over the past two years, I have visited six outstanding schools. (For a list of schools, see sidebar.) All of these educational gems enroll minority youngsters from rough urban neighborhoods with initially poor to mediocre academic skills; all but one are open-admission schools that admit students mostly by lottery. Their middle school students perform as well as their white peers, and in some middle schools, minority students learn at a rate comparable to that of affluent white students in their state’s top schools. (For one impressive example, see Figure 1.) At the high school level, low-income minority students are more likely to matriculate to college than their more advantaged peers, with more than 95 percent of graduates gaining admission to college. Not surprisingly, they all have gifted, deeply committed teachers and dedicated, forceful principals. They also have rigorous academic standards, test students frequently, and carefully monitor students’ academic performance to assess where students need help. “Accountability,” for both teachers and students, is not a loaded code word but a lodestar. Students take a college-prep curriculum and are not tracked into vocational or noncollege-bound classes. Most of the schools have uniforms or a dress code, an extended school day, and three weeks of summer school.
2008 Education Next-PEPG Public Opinion Survey
William G. Howell, Martin R. West and Paul E. Peterson:
Americans think less of their schools than of their police departments and post offices
Americans clearly have had their fill of a sluggish economy and an unpopular war. Their frustration now may also extend to public education. In this, the second annual national survey of U.S. adults conducted under the auspices of Education Next and the Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at Harvard University, we observe a public that takes an increasingly critical view both of public schools as they exist today and, perhaps ironically, of many prominent reforms designed to improve them.
Local public schools receive lower marks than they did a year ago. More significantly, perhaps, survey respondents claim that their local post offices and police forces outperform their local schools. Meanwhile, support for the most far-reaching federal effort to reform public schools–the No Child Left Behind Act–has slipped. A considerable portion of the public remains undecided about charter schools. And the poll found no enthusiasm for the use of income rather than race as a basis for assigning students to schools.
This does not mean that Americans are unwilling to explore alternate ways of educating young people. A large majority of Americans would let their child take some high school courses for credit over the Internet. An equally large majority favor the education of students with emotional and behavioral disabilities in separate classrooms rather than “mainstreaming” them, as is common practice. A plurality support giving parents the option of sending their child to an all-boys or all-girls public school. And a rising number of Americans know someone who is home schooling a child.
Packers Launch Anti-Steroid Initiative in 7 Wisconsin High Schools
The Green Bay Packers will partner with seven Wisconsin high schools to implement the NFL ATLAS & ATHENA Schools Program, a nationally-acclaimed initiative designed to promote healthy living and reduce the use of steroids and other drugs among high school athletes.
The high schools, Ashwaubenon, Columbus, De Pere, Gibraltar, New Holstein, Two Rivers and West De Pere, will complete the program sessions during the 2008-09 school year. The schools were chosen based on interviews with program administrators and school-wide commitment from the principal, athletic director and coaches.
This local opportunity was created as a result of a $2.8 million grant from the NFL Youth Football Fund to Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). The Green Bay Packers, other NFL teams and the NFL Players Association all contribute to the NFL Youth Football Fund. The NFL grant is one of a series of improvements to the NFL and NFL Players Association’s policy and program on anabolic steroids and related substances. It will be used to disseminate ATLAS and ATHENA to 36,000 high school athletes and 1,200 coaches in 80 high schools during the 2008-2009 school year. Participating teams include the Arizona Cardinals, Baltimore Ravens, Chicago Bears, Kansas City Chiefs, Miami Dolphins, Minnesota Vikings, Oakland Raiders, Pittsburgh Steelers, San Diego Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, Seattle Seahawks, St. Louis Rams, and Washington Redskins.
At Amherst college, 1% of first-year students have landlines, 99% have Facebook accounts
Peter Schilling — the director of information technology at Amherst College — crunched the numbers on the technological habits of this year’s incoming class, and discovered some fascinating stuff. He’s published it online as the “IT Index“, crafted in the style of a Harper’s Index, and it’s an intriguing snapshot of some of the technologically-driven behavioral changes that will mark the next generation.
Below are a few of my favorite stats, culled from the list. As you read, keep in mind that this incoming class has 438 students in it:
“Open Detroit School District to Choices”
When I covered the Detroit Public Schools for the Free Press in the mid 1990s, writing umpteen stories about failed programs, stolen money and incompetent management, I reached a point where it seemed to me better just to shut the system down and start fresh, to build something that worked, rather than continuing with what clearly didn’t.
People laughed when I would say that out loud. What would you do with the kids? You can’t just give up on the whole thing.
But who’d be laughing now? If I said it’s time to embrace the rapid decommissioning of the very idea of a Detroit Public Schools system, would I even get a chuckle?
The truth is that the system is imploding, and every family with the ability to roll with something other than DPS appears to be grabbing that choice. The student population plummeted by an estimated 17,000 over the past year, equal to the total number of people living in Auburn Hills.
K-12 Outreach & Distance Education
Texas Tech University, via a kind reader’s email:
TTUISD has a comprehensive curriculum – coursework is offered in all required subject areas from kindergarten through high school. Our Credit by Examinations (CBEs) allow students to test out of subjects.
TTUISD offers all courses required for a high school diploma in the state of Texas. Our elementary level lesson plans require no prior teaching experience to use, and all TTUISD courses are written by Texas-certified teachers.
TTUISD high school students may choose between a Minimum Graduation Plan and a Recommended Graduation Plan (College Preparatory Program). Students who successfully complete high school requirements and pass the exit-level TAKS will earn an accredited Texas high school diploma.
Students must take a minimum of four full courses to be considered a full-time TTUISD student. CBEs do not count when determining full-time student status.
Perhaps nearby UW-Madison will give K-12 another try?
Reinventing the School Lunch
Speaking at the 2007 EG conference, “renegade lunch lady” Ann Cooper shares her passionate belief in remaking the school lunch. She uses scathing language to describe how most American kids are fed at the noon bell, out of cans, boxes and plastic bags — sowing the seeds of the obesity epidemic that is spreading from the US around the globe. But, she says, there’s a coming revolution in the way kids eat at school — local, sustainable, seasonal and even educational food. (Recorded December 2007 in Los Angeles, California. Duration: 19:42.)
When Tough Times Weigh on the Kids
At a little under three years of age, Bailey Haag can’t understand the turmoil on Wall Street. But last week, the little girl’s brow furrowed and her face grew sad as she overheard her mother on the phone, reacting to a ripple effect of the nation’s economic problems — her father’s layoff.
Although her mother, Claire Crawford Haag, had hoped to shield Bailey from stress, the child knew from her mother’s voice that “it was not a good conversation,” Ms. Haag says. Noticing her daughter’s face crumple, Ms. Haag began fashioning in her head an explanation a small child could understand.
Amid fallout from the nation’s worsening financial picture, many parents are trying to protect their children from worries about layoffs and financial hardship. But children are actually silent carriers of family financial stress, research shows. They’re not only keenly aware of it, but it makes them more likely to behave badly or develop emotional problems. To help kids cope, psychologists and researchers say, parents need to communicate in ways they can understand, keep family relationships on track, and give children a role in helping solve family problems.
Spare the Rod: Why You Shouldn’t Hit Your Kids
The typical parent, when whacking a misbehaving child, doesn’t pause to wonder: “What does science have to say about the efficacy of corporal punishment?” If they are thinking anything at all, it’s: “Here comes justice!” And while the typical parent may not know or care, the science on corporal punishment of kids is pretty clear. Despite the rise of the timeout and other nonphysical forms of punishment, most American parents hit, pinch, shake, or otherwise lay violent hands on their youngsters: 63 percent of parents physically discipline their 1- to 2-year-olds, and 85 percent of adolescents have been physically punished by their parents. Parents cite children’s aggression and failure to comply with a request as the most common reasons for hitting them.
The science also shows that corporal punishment is like smoking: It’s a rare human being who can refrain from stepping up from a mild, relatively harmless dose to an excessive and harmful one. Three cigarettes a month won’t hurt you much, and a little smack on the behind once a month won’t harm your child. But who smokes three cigarettes a month? To call corporal punishment addictive would be imprecise, but there’s a strong natural tendency to escalate the frequency and severity of punishment. More than one-third of all parents who start out with relatively mild punishments end up crossing the line drawn by the state to define child abuse: hitting with an object, harsh and cruel hitting, and so on. Children, endowed with wonderful flexibility and ability to learn, typically adapt to punishment faster than parents can escalate it, which helps encourage a little hitting to lead to a lot of hitting. And, like frequent smoking, frequent corporal punishment has serious, well-proven bad effects.
Is a university degree still worth the time and money it takes?
“MORE will mean worse,” wrote an angry Kingsley Amis in 1961, contemplating plans to expand university education. His prediction has been tested past anything he could have imagined, as that era’s new universities were joined by the ex-polytechnics in the 1990s, and the proportion of youngsters who go on to university rose from less than 10% to almost 40% now. The 430,000 new undergraduates heading off to freshers’ weeks later this month will find themselves part of Britain’s largest university cohort ever.
Similar rumblings have continued since Amis’s jeremiad. With less government money (in real terms) per student than in his day, universities have to pack them in and keep them in to balance the books. Paul Buckland, an archaeology professor at Bournemouth University, resigned when administrators overruled his failing grades for ten students (last month he won a case for “constructive dismissal”). In June a barnstorming lecture by Geoffrey Alderman, of Buckingham University, gained wide attention with its claims of impotent external examiners, widespread unpunished plagiarism and a “grotesque bidding game” in which universities dished out good grades in order to claw their way up league tables.
The Special Needs Kindergarten Crunch
It’s the third week of pre-school. Kids are still settling in, and many are still crying when their parents drop them off in the morning. During these first weeks of school, pre-school teachers do a lot of waiting and wondering — waiting patiently for the separation tears to end and wondering what fascinating young characters will begin to emerge in this year’s class. My students’ parents, however, are already thinking about next year — they’re worried about getting their kids into kindergarten.
As a pre-school special needs teacher in New York, I’ve learned that the city’s culture of cut-throat competition extends to kindergarten admissions. And from that, an unexpected part of my job has evolved — providing psychological and emotional support to parents as they undertake the daunting task of finding an appropriate placement for their child. Securing a good spot in an oversubscribed New York City kindergarten, whether public or private, is difficult enough for most parents. But for the parents of children with special needs, it is especially challenging.
Perceiving the World in Alternative Terms
Because really good teaching is about not seeing the world the way that everyone else does. Teaching is about being what people are now prone to call “counterintuitive” but to the teacher means simply being honest. The historian sees the election not through the latest news blast but in the context of presidential politics from George Washington to the present. The biologist sees a natural world that’s not calmly picturesque but a jostling, striving, evolving contest of creatures in quest of reproduction and survival. The literature professor won’t accept the current run of standard clichés but demands bursting metaphors and ironies of an insinuatingly serpentine sort. The philosopher demands an argument as escapeproof as an iron box: what currently passes for logic makes him want to grasp himself by the hair and yank himself out of his seat.
Good teachers perceive the world in alternative terms, and they push their students to test out these new, potentially enriching perspectives. Sometimes they do so in ways that are, to say the least, peculiar. The philosophy professor steps in the window the first day of class and asks her students to write down the definition of the word “door.” Another sees that it’s hard to figure out how the solar system works by looking at the astronomy book. So he takes his friends outside and designates one the sun, the other the earth and gets them rotating and revolving in the grassy field. (For reasons of his own, he plays the part of the moon.) The high-school teacher, struck by his kids’ conformity, performs an experiment. He sends the hippest guy in the class off on an errand and while he’s gone draws pairs of lines on the board, some equal, some unequal. When the hip kid comes back, the teacher asks the class, who are in on the game, which lines are the same length and which are different and, as they’ve been instructed, they answer the wrong way. They’re surprised at how often the cool kid disobeys the evidence of his own eyes and goes along with the pack. A few hours later, at home, they’re surprised at how good they were at fooling their friend and how much pleasure they took in making him the butt of the experiment.
Questions for Charles Murray: Head of the Class
Although attending college has long been a staple of the American dream, you argue in your new book, “Real Education,” that too many kids are now heading to four-year colleges and wasting their time in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree. Yes. Let’s stop this business of the B.A., this meaningless credential. And let’s talk about having something kids can take to an employer that says what they know, not where they learned it.
Much more on Charles Murray, here.
Schools Sour on Giving Students Sweet Rewards
Schools around the Washington region are quietly removing Jolly Ranchers and Tootsie Pops from the teacher’s desk, ending a long tradition of rewarding classroom obeisance with candy.
In the District and many suburbs, school systems have imposed rules during the past two years that discourage teachers from using candy or other junk food as an incentive. Some policies reject any offer of food as reward, or denial of food as punishment, on the theory that students should not be taught it is a privilege to eat.
Regulation of classroom candy is part of a broader “wellness” movement that has swept public schools this decade. Federal law required school systems to establish rules by fall 2006 to govern Gummi Worms in cafeterias and sodas in vending machines, birthday cupcake parties and Halloween binges, physical education and recess, as well as the proliferation of candy and other food of questionable nutritional value in contests, promotions and everyday classroom activities.
History Lesson
Bob McGum:
Want to read another story about the dumbing down of American students? How far SAT scores have dropped or standards fallen?
If so, look elsewhere.
We wish instead to draw your attention to one of those little starbursts of intelligence sparkling over our dreary educational landscape: The Concord Review. The first and only academic journal dedicated to the work of high school students, The Concord Review has published essays on everything from the sinking of the Lusitania to the Pullman Strike of 1894 and the Harlem Renaissance. Appropriately enough, it is published out of the same town where, more than two centuries back, embattled farmers fired the shot heard ’round the world.
The Review is the child of Will Fitzhugh, a Harvard alumnus who started publishing it out of his own home in 1987 while a high school teacher himself. The next year he quit his job and dedicated himself to the journal full-time. Not least of the spurs behind his decision was having witnessed two of his fellow Concord teachers propose an after-school program to help a select group of students prepare a serious history essay-only to be shot down by the administration on the grounds of “elitism.”
Like most such academic adventures, the Review isn’t going to challenge People magazine any time soon; it still has only about 850 subscribers, and among the high schools that don’t subscribe are a number whose students have been published in the Review itself. But it is attracting attention. The Concord Review has received endorsements from a cross-section of prominent historians such as David McCullough, Eugene Genovese, Diane Ravitch, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who says “there should be a copy in every high school.” Another fan is James Basker, a Barnard and Columbia professor who also serves as president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
“Students rise to the expectations you have of them,” states Mr. Basker. “All you have to do is show them they are capable of writing serious historical essays, and off they go.” To emphasize the point, his institute will on June 10 inaugurate three annual Gilder Lehrman Essay Prizes in American History drawn from Concord Review essayists. This year’s first prize, for $5,000, goes to Hannah S. Field for her contribution about library efforts to suppress Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz.
All this acclaim notwithstanding, Mr. Fitzhugh believes today’s culture retains a pronounced bias against academic achievement and excellence. He cites the example of a Concord Review essayist from Connecticut who subsequently went on to Dartmouth and will be studying medicine this fall at Harvard. When Mr. Fitzhugh paid a visit to her high school, he found that though everyone knew she was all-state in soccer, no one knew that an essay of hers had appeared in the Review, beating out hundreds of the finest student essays from not only the U.S. but other parts of the English-speaking world. It’s one of the things that tells him that the need for such a journal remains strong.
“Varsity athletics and athletes are celebrated everywhere,” Mr. Fitzhugh says. “We’ve decided to celebrate varsity academics.”
Recalculating The 8th-Grade Algebra Rush
Nobody writing about schools has been a bigger supporter of getting more students into eighth-grade algebra than I have been. I wrote a two-part series for the front page six years ago that pointed out how important it is to be able to handle algebra’s abstractions and unknown quantities before starting high school. I have argued that we should rate middle schools by the percentage of students who complete Algebra I by eighth grade.
Now, because of a startling study being released today, I am having second thoughts.
Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, has looked at the worst math students, those scoring in the bottom 10th on the National Assessment of Educational Progress eighth-grade test. He discovered that 28.6 percent of them — let me make that clear: nearly three out of every 10 — were enrolled in first-year algebra, geometry or second-year algebra. Almost all were grossly misplaced, probably because of the push to get kids into algebra sooner.
The report (to be available at http://www.brookings.edu/brown.aspx ) reprints this simple NAEP problem:
There were 90 employees in a company last year. This year the number of employees increased by 10 percent. How many employees are in the company this year?
A) 9
B) 81
C) 91
D) 99
E) 100
The correct answer is D. Ten percent of 90 is 9. Add that to 90 and you get 99. How many of the misplaced students got it right? Just 9.8 percent. Not good.
The Harmful Mistakes of Sex Education in School
Those who can, do, according to the old saying, and those who can’t, teach. That has always seemed to me unfair. However, I have come to think that those who can’t teach, teach sex education.
Judged by its results – not a bad way of judging – sex education has been an utter failure. The increase in sex education here in recent years has coincided with an explosion of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease (STD) far worse than anywhere else in Europe. Since the government’s teenage pregnancy strategy was introduced in 1999, the number of girls having abortions has soared. You might well be tempted to argue that sex education causes sexual delinquency.
Only two months ago the Health Protection Agency reported that a culture of promiscuity among the young had driven the rate of STDs to a record. Almost 400,000 people – half of them under 25 – were newly diagnosed, 6% more than in 2006.
When something fails, the usual procedure is to drop it and try something else. With sex education, the worse it gets, the more people cry out for more of it and earlier. Ministers are considering whether to make schools offer more sex education, offer it earlier and deny parents the right to withdraw their children from it.
Teens, Video Games & Civics
Amanda Lenhart Joseph Kahne Ellen Middaugh Alexandra Rankin Macgill Chris Evans Jessica Vitak:
The first national survey of its kind finds that virtually all American teens play computer, console, or cell phone games and that the gaming experience is rich and varied, with a significant amount of social interaction and potential for civic engagement. The survey was conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, an initiative of the Pew Research Center and was supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The primary findings in the survey of 1,102 youth ages 12-17 include —
Game playing is universal, with almost all teens playing games and at least half playing games on a given day. Game playing experiences are diverse, with the most popular games falling into the racing, puzzle, sports, action and adventure categories.
Game playing is also social, with most teens playing games with others at least some of the time and can incorporate many aspects of civic and political life.
Mentoring, in addition to metal detectors, are needed to curb violence in schools.
Milwaukee Journal – Sentinel Editorial:
The stabbing at Hamilton High School last week, in which a 15-year-old girl was attacked with a knife by another girl in a bathroom, came on the day the school was to roll out its airport-quality metal detector.
But while metal detectors can keep weapons out of schools when properly used, we believe no machine could have guaranteed this attack wouldn’t have happened. Students can be attacked anywhere. In order to get a handle on violence, more mentoring is needed among at-risk youth.
The Violence-Free Zones program, now in use in seven local high schools, has been successful in reducing violence and suspensions by offering a big brother, big sister type of approach.
Police calls at and near Madison high schools: 1996-2006.
College Applicants, Beware: Your Facebook Page Is Showing
High-school seniors already fretting about grades and test scores now have another worry: Will their Facebook or MySpace pages count against them in college admissions?
A new survey of 500 top colleges found that 10% of admissions officers acknowledged looking at social-networking sites to evaluate applicants. Of those colleges making use of the online information, 38% said that what they saw “negatively affected” their views of the applicant. Only a quarter of the schools checking the sites said their views were improved, according to the survey by education company Kaplan, a unit of Washington Post Co.
Some admissions officers said they had rejected students because of material on the sites. Jeff Olson, who heads research for Kaplan’s test-preparation division, says one university did so after the student gushed about the school while visiting the campus, then trashed it online. Kaplan promised anonymity to the colleges, of which 320 responded. The company surveyed schools with the most selective admissions.
History Scholar
Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review
9/18/2008
College scholarships for specific abilities and achievements are not news. There are football scholarships and volleyball scholarships and music scholarships and cheerleading scholarships, and so on – there is a long list of sources of money to attract and reward high school students who have talent and accomplishments if those are not academic.
Consider an example: there is a high school student in Georgia, in an IB program, who spent a year and a half working on an independent study of the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s. This paper, a bit more than 15,000 words, with endnotes and bibliography was published in the Fall 2008 issue of The Concord Review, the only journal in the world for the academic research papers of secondary students, and it is a strong candidate for the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize. If he were an outstanding baseball player, a number of college baseball coaches would have heard about him, and would be doing what they could to persuade him to accept an athletic (baseball) scholarship to their colleges.
But suppose he were not a HS athlete, but only a HS history students of extraordinary academic promise at the high school level. Would college professors of history know about and take an interest in his work? No. Would there be college history scholarships competing for him? No. Would his teacher, who worked with him on his independent study, attract attention from his peers at the college and university level? No.
I hope I am wrong, but based on what I have found out so far, there are no college scholarships available specifically for outstanding secondary students of history. There is abundant moaning and gnashing of teeth by edupundits and professors about the widespread ignorance of history among our young people, but when someone shows unusually strong knowledge of history at the Lower Education Level, no one pays any attention at the Higher Education Level.
In 21 years of working to publish 824 history research papers by secondary students of history from 44 states and 34 other countries in The Concord Review, I have not learned of a single instance of an author being offered a college scholarship based on their academic work in history.
When we lament that our adolescents seem more interested in sports than in academics, we might consider how differently we celebrate and reward those activities. High school coaches who are well known to and almost treated as peers by their college counterparts, receive no attention at all for their work as teachers, no matter how unusually productive that work may happen to be. Higher Education simply does not care about the academic work being done by teachers and students at the Lower Education level.
Behavioral psychology argues that by ignoring some behavior you will tend to get less of if, and by paying attention to and rewarding other behavior you are likely to find that there is more of it.
I know that students are being recruited for college scholarships in cheerleading, and I would dearly love to hear from anyone who can tell me of students being recruited for their specific academic work in a high school subject, like history, literature, physics, Chinese, chemistry and so on.
I realize there are scholarships for disadvantaged students, for students of high general intellectual ability, and the like, but where are the scholarships for specific HS academic achievement? After all, athletic and dance scholarships are not awarded on the basis of general tests of physical fitness, but because of achievement in the actual performance of particular athletic or artistic activities.
It is said that you get what you pay for, and it seems likely that you get more of what you value and reward in academics as well. If we continue to overlook and ignore the academic achievement of our secondary-level scholars of history and other subjects, that does not mean that some students will no longer work hard in their areas of academic interest. There may be fewer of them, and fewer teachers who see the point of putting in the extra coaching time with exceptionally diligent students, but if we continue down this road, at least folks in Higher Education ought to be aware that they are working just as hard to discourage good academic work at the secondary level as anyone, and they should stop complaining about the attitudes toward scholarship of the students in their classrooms, which, after all, are in part a result of their own contempt for and neglect of academic work at the secondary (aka “pre-college”) level.
Will Fitzhugh [founder], Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987], Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998], TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24, Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007, www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org, Varsity Academics®
Unprepared high school grads focus of state education hearing
David Morales never thought much about going to college. But in 12th grade he watched his aunt graduate from The Richard Stockton College in Galloway Town-ship.
“After seeing her succeed in everything she wanted to do and watching her face light up with her own accomplishment, this inspired me to change my mind,” Morales told the state Board of Education on Wednesday.
It was too late to switch to college preparatory classes, but Morales thought that since he had received all A’s and B’s in his courses, he could still handle college. But when he took the Accuplacer placement test at Cumberland County College, he found he would have to take remedial courses first.
“Now I will be in school a year longer to get my degree (in radiology),” he said.
Morales was one of three current and former Cumberland County College students who spoke to the board about their high school experiences. CCC President Ken Ender brought them to the meeting to demonstrate the consequences for students who meet the current high school graduation requirements but are still not ready for college.
Educating Migrant Children
How migrants fare in school, and what schools can learn from them.
MOST teachers admit that occasionally, when a lesson is going badly, they suspect the problem lies not with the subject or pedagogy, but with the pupils. Some children just seem harder to teach than others. But why? Is it because of, say, cultural factors: parents from some backgrounds place a low value on education and do not push their children? Or is it to do with schools themselves, and their capacity to teach children of different abilities?
It might seem impossible to answer such a question. To do so would require exposing similar sorts of children to many different education systems and see which does best. As it happens, however, an experiment along those lines already exists–as a result of mass migration. Children of migrants from a single country of origin come as near to being a test of the question as you are likely to find.
New school year, new programs in Minneapolis, St. Paul
As a host of new charter schools opened this year in the metro area, trying to lure disaffected parents away from public school systems, both Minneapolis and St Paul public schools are rolling out new programs and programming changes to keep these families – and the state funding dollars that come with them – in the school systems. In particular, Minneapolis public schools have fired the opening salvo in a multi-year offensive against their poor reputation, with a thorough-going re-design of district high schools.
St Paul
Fortunately for St. Paul Public Schools (SPPS), the district does not have as serious a credibility problem as Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS). St Paul school board members Tom Goldstein and Keith Hardy told this reporter in July that district leadership believes not all parents want a “one-size-fits-all” public school. Some parents, Hardy said, are looking for specific types of programming, such as gender-segregated education or career-specific training in high school, and the district has to provide these or risk losing these families to charter schools.
An Email to Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad on Credit for non MMSD Courses
Dear Superintendent Nerad:
I was rather surprised to learn today from the Wisconsin State Journal that:
“The district and the union also have quarreled over the role of MTI members in online learning for seven years. Under the new agreement, ANY (my emphasis) instruction of district students will be supervised by Madison teachers. The deal doesn’t change existing practice but confirms that that practice will continue.”
You are quite new to the MMSD. I am EXTREMELY disappointed that you would “cave in” to MTI regarding a long-standing quarrel it has had with the MMSD without first taking the time to get input from ALL affected parties, i.e., students and their parents as well as teachers who might not agree with Matthews on this issue. Does this agreement deal only with online learning or ALL non-MMSD courses (e.g., correspondence ones done by mail; UW and MATC courses not taken via the YOP)? Given we have been waiting 7 years to resolve this issue, there was clearly no urgent need for you to do so this rapidly and so soon after coming on board. The reality is that it is an outright LIE that the deal you just struck with MTI is not a change from the practice that existed 7 years ago when MTI first demanded a change in unofficial policy. I have copies of student transcripts that can unequivocally PROVE that some MMSD students used to be able to receive high school credit for courses they took elsewhere even when the MMSD offered a comparable course. These courses include high school biology and history courses taken via UW-Extension, high school chemistry taken via Northwestern University’s Center for Talent Development, and mathematics, computer science, and history courses taken at UW-Madison outside of the YOP. One of these transcripts shows credit for a course taken as recently as fall, 2005; without this particular 1/2 course credit, this student would have been lacking a course in modern US history, a requirement for a high school diploma from the State of Wisconsin.
The MMSD BOE was well aware that they had never written and approved a clear policy regarding this matter, leaving each school in the district deciding for themselves whether or not to approve for credit non-MMSD courses. They were well aware that Madison West HAD been giving many students credit in the past for non-MMSD courses. The fact is that the BOE voted in January, 2007 to “freeze” policy at whatever each school had been doing until such time as they approved an official policy. Rainwater then chose to ignore this official vote of the BOE, telling the guidance departments to stop giving students credit for such courses regardless of whether they had in the past. The fact is that the BOE was in the process of working to create a uniform policy regarding non-MMSD courses last spring. As an employee of the BOE, you should not have signed an agreement with MTI until AFTER the BOE had determined official MMSD policy on this topic. By doing so, you pre-empted the process.
There exist dozens of students per year in the MMSD whose academic needs are not adequately met to the courses currently offered by MTI teachers, including through the District’s online offerings. These include students with a wide variety of disabilities, medical problems, and other types of special needs as well as academically gifted ones. By taking appropriate online and correspondence courses and non-MMSD courses they can physically access within Madison, these students can work at their own pace or in their own way or at an accessible location that enables them to succeed. “Success for all” must include these students as well. Your deal with MTI will result in dozens of students per year dropping out of school, failing to graduate, or transferring to other schools or school districts that are more willing to better meet their “special” individual needs.
Your rush to resolve this issue sends a VERY bad message to many families in the MMSD. We were hoping you might be different from Rainwater. Unfortunately, it says to them that you don’t really care what they think. It says to them that the demands of Matthews take primarily over the needs of their children. Does the MMSD exist for Matthews or for the children of this District? As you yourself said, the MMSD is at a “tipping point”, with there currently being almost 50% “free and reduced lunch” students. Families were waiting and hoping that you might be different. As they learn that you are not based upon your actions, the exodus of middle class families from the MMSD’s public schools will only accelerate. It will be on your watch as superintendent that the MMSD irreversibly turns into yet another troubled inner city school district. I urge you to take the time to learn more about the MMSD, including getting input from all interested parties, before you act in the future.
VERY disappointingly yours,
Janet Mertz
parent of 2 Madison West graduates
Tamira Madsen has more:
“Tuesday’s agreement also will implement a measure that requires a licensed teacher from the bargaining unit supervise virtual/online classes within the district. The district and union have bickered on-and-off for nearly seven years over the virtual/online education issue. Matthews said the district was violating the collective bargaining contract with development of its virtual school learning program that offered online courses taught by teachers who are not members of MTI.
In the agreement announced Tuesday, there were no program changes made to the current virtual/online curriculum, but requirements outlined in the agreement assure that classes are supervised by district teachers.
During the 2007-08 school year, there were 10 district students and 40 students from across the state who took MMSD online courses.
Though Nerad has been on the job for less than three months, Matthews said he is pleased with his initial dealings and working relationship with the new superintendent.
“This is that foundation we need,” Matthews said. “There was a lot of trust level that was built up here and a lot of learning of each other’s personalities, style and philosophy. All those things are important.
“It’s going to be good for the entire school district if we’re able to do this kind of thing, and we’re already talking about what’s next.”
Read On Wisconsin Website Launched
Greetings and welcome to the updated website! Read On Wisconsin, is my book club for students and book-lovers across the state. I hope you will get involved in this statewide book club by reading and discussing fascinating books. This year’s top picks are recommended by students and educators across the state. Through the club, students, teachers, and parents can read and discuss award-winning books in and outside of the classroom.
I hope you will use the improved Student and Teacher Web Logs, and the Events section to keep you informed of school visits. I really encourage you to post your opinions and reactions to the books.
Navigator’s for the College Bound
WHAT may be largest high school senior class ever in the United States is applying to college this fall. And thousands of students will look beyond their high school guidance counselors to help them get into the schools of their choice.
Private educational consultants take up where overburdened high school guidance counselors leave off. Charging by the hour or offering a package of services, these consultants usually meet multiple times with a student to talk about goals for college and beyond. They synthesize information from parents, transcripts and other sources to help create a list of colleges that might be a good match. Then they guide students through the application process, reviewing essays, preparing them for interviews and keeping them organized to meet deadlines.
There are 4,000 to 5,000 private educational consultants in the United States focused on college admissions, according to Mark Sklarow, executive director of the Independent Educational Consultants Association, based in Fairfax, Va. The number has doubled in the last five years, Mr. Sklarow said, and is expected to double again in the next three to five years. Consultants are most heavily concentrated on the East and West Coasts, and in larger cities and affluent suburbs across the rest of the country.
Performance Artist Writes ‘Mother on Fire’
Scott Simon @ NPR continues the Sandra Tsing Loh media frenzy:
Artist and author Sandra Tsing Loh has a new book about her life as a mother of two young children and the agony and ecstasy of sending them to Los Angeles public schools.
audio
Tsing Loh contrasts fine arts in the public schools versus “general music”.
School Choice Better Choice for Poor
Barack Obama, whose campaign is heavily funded by teachers unions, plans to funnel more money into the existing public education system. In this system, poor kids remain the only ones who don’t get to choose which school they attend. Mr. McCain is a strong supporter of school choice and has a record of this in Arizona.
As a teacher of 30 years, I am outraged that the liberal leaders in this country pretend to champion the poor, while, through their opposition to school choice, they act to keep the poor uneducated and poor.
Fossil hunts, music classes, museum trips and more. Our picks for some of the best bets in educational travel
As a kid, going back to school was never quite like this.
As part of a shipboard education program, Marty Zafman, a retired human-resources consultant, worked with Mother Teresa in Calcutta and dined in Havana — while Fidel Castro spoke to him and his classmates for four hours.
On a hunt for fossils in Mexico, Warren Stortroen, a former insurance-claims manager, led a paleontologist and fellow diggers to the remains of a giant glyptodont, a three-million-year-old ancestor of the armadillo that’s the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.
And as part of a cultural tour of Morocco this spring, Paul Tausche, a retired international marketer, rode a camel to the top of a desert dune at sunset, then enjoyed dinner and a musical performance around a campfire before retiring to a nomadic tent.
Are Too Many People Going to College?
America’s university system is creating a class-riven nation. There has to be a better way.
To ask whether too many people are going to college requires us to think about the importance and nature of a liberal education. “Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining their livelihood,” John Stuart Mill told students at the University of St. Andrews in 1867. “Their object is not to make skillful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings.” If this is true (and I agree that it is), why say that too many people are going to college? Surely a mass democracy should encourage as many people as possible to become “capable and cultivated human beings” in Mill’s sense. We should not restrict the availability of a liberal education to a rarefied intellectual elite. More people should be going to college, not fewer.
Yes and no. More people should be getting the basics of a liberal education. But for most students, the places to provide those basics are elementary and middle school. E. D. Hirsch Jr. is the indispensable thinker on this topic, beginning with his 1987 book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Part of his argument involves the importance of a body of core knowledge in fostering reading speed and comprehension. With regard to a liberal education, Hirsch makes three points that are germane here:
To Raise Smart and Successful Children, Focus on Developing a Work Ethic
In one of Kurt Vonnegut’s most enduring short stories, Harrison Bergeron, everyone is finally equal thanks to the efforts of the Handicapper General. However, one of the many lasting messages of the story is a derisive one. In the futuristic world of Harrison Bergeron, accomplishment is no longer the measure of stature. Instead, it is all about trying, of recognizing effort, regardless of result.
However, a recent summary of three decades of research reveals that when it comes to raising smart children, developing their work ethic is in fact the most critical component. Whether it is success in school or in life, research indicates that innate intelligence and ability are simply not as important as a person’s level of effort.
When Achievement Push Comes to Shove
We have some of the top schools in the country in Arlington County. Is there some point with our children at which we could back off and not continue to push for rising achievement, an official goal of the county schools? Is there a way we can say, good enough is good enough?
My oldest son is in middle school. He is a talented but not gifted math student. Midway through this past school year, it was clear that he was not ready for algebraic thinking, and his seventh-grade math teacher compassionately helped us help him decide to move back to a more appropriate math level. Because I teach human development, I was able to help him understand that this wasn’t about being dumb, but a developmental marker he had not yet hit. He moved back to repeat the math class he took last year.
Now I have a boy who is not enthusiastic about math. He doesn’t believe he is good at it and doesn’t think math is fun, all because we want rising achievement for all students.
2008 Presidential Candidates & School Choices
As usual, Bruce Fuller and Lance Izumi , my fellow Education Watch contributors, make some fascinating points, none more startling to me than Lance’s casual throw-away that Barack Obama sends his children to private school. As a rabid public school Democrat, I crumpled in despair at the news.
Look, I am not in politics, I get no money from foundations, I do not get invited to lecture on third world eco-sustainability on luxury cruises. I have no highly placed blue-state friends and I will soon be a divorced woman because my die-hard Democratic husband will not brook any dissent, public or private, about our party.
Candidate websites: Bob Barr, McCain/Palin, McKinney/Clemente, Obama/Biden
Megan Mcardle @ the Atlantic has more.
WHERE WE STAND: America’s Schools in the 21st Century
Via a kind reader’s email:
Monday, September 15th
9:00 p.m. on Milwaukee Public Television (Channel 10)
11:00 p.m. on Wisconsin Public Television stations
In 1995, America’s college graduation rate was second in the world. Ten years later, it ranked 15th. As so many nations around the world continue to improve their systems of education, America can no longer afford to maintain the status quo. In an ever-changing, increasingly competitive global economy, is the U.S. doing all it can to prepare its students to enter the workforce of the 21st century and ensure our country’s place as a world leader?
WHERE WE STAND: America’s Schools in the 21st Century examines the major challenges for U.S. schools in the face of a changing world. Divided into five segments, topics include globalization; measuring student progress; ensuring that all students achieve; the current school funding system, and teacher quality.
WHERE WE STAND is airing at a critical time in our country’s history. Along with its companion website and a variety of dynamic outreach activities across the country, the program will inspire a national dialogue in the weeks prior to the November elections. Nationally recognized education experts and leading proponents of educational reform will put these examples in context. They include Geoffrey Canada, CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone; Diane Ravitch, education historian; Wendy Puriefoy, President of Public Education Network; Chester Finn, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute; Rick Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies, AEI; Michael Rebell, Executive Director of the Campaign for Educational Equity; and Sharon Lynn Kagan, Associate Dean for Policy, Teacher’s College at Columbia University.
Plugging In, Tuning Out
The digital culture has changed the way kids learn, but at the expense of literacy and cultural awareness.
I ask students on the first day of my journalism classes to fill out a questionnaire. Most questions inquire about their interest in journalism and any experience they have that is journalism-related. One question is: “What do you read, at least fairly regularly?”
Used to be, they would say The New York Times or Newsweek or Sports Illustrated. A few would list the local newspaper, or The New Yorker or The Economist to impress me. In recent years, the answers more often have been CNN.com, ESPN.com, blogs and other Internet offerings.
And then, at the beginning of the last semester, a student who claimed to be interested in journalism wrote this about what she reads: “Nothing.”
Her answer astonished me but shouldn’t have, because it epitomized the lack of intellectual curiosity in students that I have noticed in recent years, along with a decline in such basic skills as grammar, spelling and simple math. A sense of history? History is what happened since they left middle school.
As both a teacher and a father of two multi-tasking teenage daughters, I had long suspected that something was going on. While some students seem just as smart or smarter than they did 15 years ago, I’m also confronted with college sophomores who can’t identify Henry Kissinger or perform simple percentage exercises; who argue, as one did, that misspelling someone’s name was no big deal because I knew who she meant; students who begin sentences with lower-case letters and embellish news stories by adding their own facts.
Thanks to a kind fellow traveller for pointing this out.
9% of state students habitually truant
More than 9% of Wisconsin’s students had at least five unexcused absences a semester in the 2006-’07 school year, according to a report released today by the state Legislative Audit Bureau.
The report, a statewide review of best practices in public school districts’ truancy reduction efforts, also found that nearly half of all Milwaukee Public Schools students, 46%, are habitually truant. The district has worked with the Milwaukee Police Department since 1993 to operate the Truancy Abatement and Burglary Suppression program.
Goal by Goal
I WAS born and raised in Milwaukee, the youngest of five children. My mother worked as a postal clerk, and my father was a welder and line supervisor.
My parents set a goal that all of their kids would go to college. All five of us have college degrees. My mother had started college at 16, but had finished only a year and half when her mother became ill and she had to quit. My father never had the means to go to college.
Recently, my mother told me, “Our best friends were the people at our credit union.” My parents borrowed money at the beginning of each school year and hurried to try to pay back that loan before the next school year started.
Their unspoken message was that the sky is the limit. They never said that because you are an African-American, you can go only this far or do only this or that. They just said, “Go for it.”
The Freshman 15
The parents are gone. You’ve unpacked everything from your bins. Now the nerves, homesickness and restlessness are setting in. Leaving home for college requires a twofold acclimation: one to campus and one to the area where you now live. We can’t help you become comfortable at school, but here we point out some things you should know about visiting and living in Washington. None of these bits of advice will blow your mind, but maybe they’ll make your first semester easier or more interesting, or at least make you laugh. Which is how you’ll get through this year anyway.
Prep Huddle: Who has toughest job? It’s the kids
Sure, it’s no picnic trying to keep tabs on the many teams from the 119 high schools in 19 conferences around Southern Wisconsin that we try to cover.
But I doubt it’s the most difficult job in high school sports.
Of course, that begs th�e question: Who has the toughest job in high school sports?
Is it WIAA executive director Doug Chickering, who must deal with a growing roster of high school sports advocates and their conflicting agendas?
Is it the school board members who love the exposure their district gets when a team makes it to a state tournament but wish someone else would pay the expense of getting them on the field?
Is it the parents who believe their child is being mishandled by their coach and have enough class not to say anything to avoid embarrassing themselves or their child?
Is it the parents who decide to make a stink about the situation, successfully orchestrate the removal of the coach and watch the team struggle to a 2-19 record the next season?
Sex ed in schools: Little connection between what’s taught, teen behavior
Another pregnant teenager in the limelight has focused new attention on just how much teens know about sex and when they know it.
This pregnant teen, of course, is the 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, and the pregnancy has reignited the national debate over two different approaches to sex education: abstinence-only vs. comprehensive. But as it turns out, there’s no systematic tracking of what U.S. schools are teaching kids about sex — and either way, there seems to be little connection between what they’re taught and their behaviors, researchers say.
Grand Prairie (Texas) parents drop schools not making grade
Rae Ann Forester was losing confidence in Grand Prairie High School’s academic program. Even though she was president of the Parent Teacher Student Association, she took a decisive step away from the school.
Parents whose children attend struggling public schools may feel like there’s no way out. But Ms. Forester and other persistent parents are taking control of their children’s education and finding options.
“What do you do in a school that’s low-performing?” Ms. Forester asked. “If we can’t get what we need from that specific campus, we do what we need to as a family. I do want people to have options, and that’s what I’m advocating.”
After the Texas Education Agency rated Grand Prairie High School “academically unacceptable” the previous two years, the school’s poor reputation prompted some families to act.
Greetings, Parents
Prince William County, Maryland Pupils Still Grapple With Math Test
New state test results show that Prince William County’s third-graders are struggling to score at the highest level since the implementation of a controversial math program that was intended to boost performance.
The scores, which are the first state Standards of Learning (SOL) results to gauge the new program’s effectiveness, reveal that fewer than half of Prince William’s third-graders scored in the advanced category this year, the first that the Pearson math program “Investigations in Number, Data, and Space” was taught in that grade. Last year, third-graders who had not begun “Investigations” posted the same results.
The flat scores are a sizable decline since 2006, when 56 percent of third-graders reached the advanced level in math.
” ‘Investigations’ didn’t cure the problem,” said Vern Williams, a Fairfax County teacher and former member of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel who was invited by the Prince William School Board to speak at its work session later this month.
It will be interesting to see what, if any effect the soon to be released Madison Math Task Force report has on the local curriculum.
Math Forum
24/7 School Reform
In an election season when Democrats find themselves unusually unified on everything from tax policy to foreign affairs, one issue still divides them: education. It is a surprising fault line, perhaps, given the party’s long dominance on the issue. Voters consistently say they trust the Democrats over the Republicans on education, by a wide margin. But the split in the party is real, deep and intense, and it shows no signs of healing any time soon.
On one side are the members of the two huge teachers’ unions and the many parents who support them. To them, the big problem in public education is No Child Left Behind, President Bush’s signature education law. Teachers have many complaints about the law: it encourages “teaching to the test” at the expense of art, music and other electives, they say; it blames teachers, especially those in inner-city schools, for the poor performance of disadvantaged children; and it demands better results without providing educators with the resources they need.
On the other side are the party’s self-defined “education reformers.” Members of this group — a loose coalition of mayors and superintendents, charter-school proponents and civil rights advocates — actually admire the accountability provisions in No Child Left Behind, although they often criticize the law’s implementation. They point instead to a bigger, more systemic crisis. These reformers describe the underperformance of the country’s schoolchildren, and especially of poor minorities, as a national crisis that demands a drastic overhaul of the way schools are run. In order to get better teachers into failing classrooms, they support performance bonuses, less protection for low-performing teachers, alternative certification programs to attract young, ambitious teachers and flexible contracts that could allow for longer school days and an extended school year. The unions see these proposals as attacks on their members’ job security — which, in many ways, they are.
Obama’s contention is that the traditional Democratic solution — more money for public schools — is no longer enough. In February, in an interview with the editorial board of The Journal Sentinel in Milwaukee, he called for “a cultural change in education in inner-city communities and low-income communities across the country — not just inner-city, but also rural.” In many low-income communities, Obama said, “there’s this sense that education is somehow a passive activity, and you tip your head over and pour education in somebody’s ear. And that’s not how it works. So we’re going to have to work with parents.”
Finland’s Lesson: Education
Like many other foreign journalists, I made the obligatory pilgrimage to Helsinki, Finland, to learn how this country has climbed to the top spots in key international rankings measuring economic, political and social success. The answer, I was told, is amazingly simple.
First, the facts. Finland ranks first among 179 countries in Transparency International’s index of the least corrupt nations in the world (the United States is No.20); No.1 in Freedom House’s ranking of the world’s most democratic countries (the U.S. ranks No.15); No.1 in the world in 15-year-old students’ standardized test scores in science (the U.S. ranks No.29), and is among the 10 most competitive economies in the World Economic Forum’s annual competitiveness index (the U.S. topped the list this year).
A small country of 5.3 million, which only two decades ago was by most measures the poorest country in northern Europe, Finland also boasts the headquarters of the world’s biggest cellphone maker — Nokia — and cutting-edge paper and pulp-technology firms.
Healthy school meal vs a Big Mac. Which one wins? Ask your inner child
England is bringing in ‘the most robust nutrient standards for school lunches in the world’ – but we might have to force them down children’s throats
This week “the most robust nutrient standards for school lunches in the world” come into force in English primary schools. The new menus announced by the schools secretary, Ed Balls, include healthy versions of lunchroom standards – “from traditional roasts to chilli con carne and shepherd’s pie; from homemade salmon fingers and stir fries to risotto, with fresh fruit, vegetables and salads”.
Junk food is already banned from school canteens and vending machines – but the new standards specify the maximum (fat, saturated fat, sugar, salt) and minimum (carbohydrate, protein, fibre, vitamin A, vitamin C, folate, calcium, iron, zinc) nutrient value of an average school lunch.
Getting high-quality food into schools is only half the issue. According to Balls, many children who eat healthy lunches at primary school stop when they go to senior school – put off by long queues, unpopular menus or having to eat in the same room as teenagers six or seven years older. The guidelines move into new territory by suggesting kids won’t be put off school meals if they are treated “like the paying customers they are”.
Online tools let parents peer into their kids’ school day
What’s he eating for lunch? Is she showing up for class? What subjects are they weak in? Software is helping unravel the mystery.
It’s tough sending little Bobby or Suzy back to school. Parents may worry what kinds of teachers their children will encounter, whether they’ll be as smart as their classmates and whether bullies will steal their lunch money.
But technology is helping eliminate some of the guesswork about what happens after kids climb onto the bus. Increasingly common Web programs let parents track lunch-money spending, schoolwork habits and tardiness.
“There’s this black box — a child goes away and comes home, what happened during this time?” said Shelley Pasnik, director of the nonprofit Center for Children and Technology in New York. “Now, new information and communications technology allows for the mystery of what transpires on any given day to unravel.”
The programs, from companies such as Pearson School Systems, Aries Technology Inc. and Horizon Software International, are gaining popularity as more parents demand transparency in schools, Pasnik said.
Successful use of these systems is a wonderful thing for parental involvement. That requires teacher AND parent participation.
US Senator Herb Kohl Supports Merit Pay for Teachers
Kohl spoke at length about education, especially the failure of the public school system in Milwaukee, “where many neighborhoods are not inhabitable … a problem spread across the country. When we have a large number of people unproductive, who do you think pays for it? We all do.”
In answer to a question about school choice, and what the questioner called the “horrible” academic gap here in Racine, Kohl responded: “Anybody who had the answer would be lauded and sainted.”
He mentioned meeting with New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and NY School Chancellor Joel Klein, and hearing from them “how important high standards and accountability are. We all know it’s not only the schools that fail; it’s the homes and neighborhoods the kids come out of. I would have very high, very high accountability, and reward good teachers, measure teachers. We need to find a way to pay teachers more, and the better ones more than that, and schools that fail should be closed.”
Kohl related his approach toward education to his firing of the Bucks GM and coach last year. “We were not getting the job done.” Ditto in education. “For too long we’ve not been willing to do enough to get the job done.”
World Class Writing
Over the past few weeks, much has been said by Senator Clinton, Michelle Obama and Senator Obama about “world class education”. Those three words have resounded in all of their speeches of late. I would like to acknowledge some “world class writing” which has recently appeared in The Concord Review, edited by Will Fitzhugh.
Below are the papers, the authors, and the high school with which the student is affiliated or enrolled. We should acknowledge the teachers, and principals of these schools, as well as the parents of these fine “world class writers”.
Congratulations to these fine young scholars on their exemplary research and writing.
Bessemer Process…Pearson W. Miller……Hunter College High School, Manhattan Island, New York.
Soviet- Afghan War…Colin Rhys Hill…….Atlanta International School, Atlanta, Georgia
Silencio!…Ines Melicias Geraldes Cardoso …Frank C. Carlucci American International School of Lisbon
Jews in England…Milo Brendan Barisof…Homescholar, Santa Cruz, California
United States Frigates…Caleb Greinke….Park Hill South High School, Riverside, Missouri
Roxy Stinson….Elizabeth W. Doe….Deerfield Academy, Deerfield, Massachusetts
Mary, Queen of Scots….Elizabeth Pitts….Charlotte Country Day School, Charlotte, North Carolina
Viking Gifts….Elisabeth Rosen….St. Ann’s School, Brooklyn, New York
Hugh Dowding….Connor Rowntree…William Hall High School, West Hartford, Connecticut
Confederate Gold….Steffi Delcourt….Frederica Academy, St. Simons Island, Georgia
Max Weber…Diane (Elly) Brinkley….Dalton School, Manhattan Island, New York
I daresay that social studies, history teachers and even history professors would learn a great deal about a variety of topics by reading these essays.Further, I would hope that these essays would serve as models of excellent scholarship and writing for high school students across America.
Schools warned of pupils hooked on energy drinks
Children are becoming dependent on energy drinks that have dramatic effects on their concentration and behaviour in schools, drug experts have warned.
Schools are being advised to observe children for signs of agitation which could be a result of excessive caffeine consumption. It follows reports of pupils drinking large quantities of energy drinks or taking caffeine-based pills.
The warning, from the anti-drugs advisory group Drug Education UK, comes as ministers prepare to unveil new measures tomorrow to improve school dinners and advise parents on children’s packed lunches.
Bob Tait, from Drug Education UK, said: “There is a growing problem of caffeine abuse in schools. Most schools have a drug education programme to advise kids against illegal drugs, but there is less known about legal highs.”
He made his warning at a conference of school nurses this week, the Nursing Standard reported. Tait said: “Children will drink them on the walk to school, at break and lunch time. If you have got a child who is worked up on an energy drink, they are going to be agitated during lesson time.”
Soda Bans & Schools
Eliminate soft drinks at schools and you’ll make a change in how many sodas the nation’s kids slurp down, right? Hmm. A new study in the Journal of the American Dietetic Assn. suggests that the effect is less than huge.
The study, by Meenakshi Fernandes at the Pardee RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica, analyzed data from nearly 11,000 fifth-graders in more than 2,000 schools in 40 states. She looked at how many soft drinks the kids consumed overall, and how many soft drinks they consumed in school. She also compared the consumption rates for kids who went to schools that banned soft drinks with those that permitted them.
Fernandes’ conclusion from this: Soft drink bans in schools led to a 4% reduction in soft drink consumption. “Greater reductions in children’s consumption of soft drinks will require policy changes that go beyond food availability in school,” she writes.
Head of the Class: Finding the Right School for Your Child
For 20 years Sandra Tsing Loh has taken satirical shots at Los Angeles and her own growing pains without making the tiresome error, committed by nonnative observers from Joan Didion to Caitlin Flanagan, of conflating the two. Her aim is generally dead-on; her gun emplacement is even better. We not only can read the Malibu-raised Loh in The Atlantic Monthly, where she’s a contributing editor, on her Los Angeles Times blog, and in comic memoirs like A Year in Van Nuys. We can also hear her on KPCC and see her turn her elegant Chinese German face to Silly Putty in performance pieces.
Whatever the target–eye bags, ethnicity, envy, Christmas–Loh’s a linguistic Muhammad Ali, floating and stinging at a pace that would drive a hummingbird to wing splints. At times her approach has left some of her frailer subjects exhausted along with her audience. With Mother on Fire (Crown, 320 pages, $23), her new memoir expanding on the one-woman show of the same name that debuted in 2005, she’s taken on an issue scary enough to warrant her biggest guns: getting your child an education.
How harrowing, you tax-gouged nonparents may wonder, can this be? In my experience the trauma of a difficult birth is nothing compared with the scars of being polite to a teacher who has forbidden a second grader to look at a book that intrigues her “because it’s too hard.” These don’t fade even after said child has obtained a graduate degree. Schooling, in short, pushes buttons. In Los Angeles, it’s also tied to a full range of inflammatory issues, from immigration to celebrity.
Clusty Search: Sandra Tsing Lo.
New Study Raises More Questions Over Antidepressants, Teen Suicide
A new study raises fresh questions over whether strong warnings about the use of antidepressants among young people have sparked an increase in teen-age suicides.
Researchers said an analysis that included 2005 data — the latest available — indicates that a surprising rise seen in the suicide rate in 2004 continued into the next year. While the rate dropped somewhat in 2005, researchers say, it remained higher than expected.
Last fall, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a widely publicized finding, said the suicide rate for 10-to-24-year-olds increased by 8% from 2003 to 2004 — after a drop totaling more than 28% from 1990 to 2003. But the agency cautioned that it didn’t know if the rise was “short-lived” or the “beginning of a trend.”
The CDC has monitored the data since then, but has not come to a conclusion, saying several years of data are needed. The new analysis by outside researchers suggests the prior increase “was not a single-year anomaly” and may reflect “an emerging public health crisis,” according to a paper being published in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association.
Related:
- Columbia University’s Teen Screen Program
- Journal of the American Medical Association: Suicide Trends Among Youths Aged 10 to 19 Years in the United Google News Search by Jeffrey Bridge and Joel Greenhouse.
Spot on Popularity Scale Speaks to the Future; Middle Has Its Rewards
The cult of popularity that reigns in high school can look quaint from a safe distance, like your 20th reunion. By then the social order may have turned over like an hourglass: teenagers who were socially invisible have emerged as colorful characters, confident, transformed. Others seem preserved in time, same as ever, while some former princes and queen bees are diminished or simply absent, now invisible themselves.
For years researchers focused much attention on those prominent teenagers, tracking their traits and behaviors. The studies found, to no one’s surprise, that social dominance in adolescence often involves an aggressive, selfish streak that may not play well outside the locker-lined corridors.
The cult disbands, and the rules change.
Yet high school students know in their gut that popularity is far more than a superficial, temporary competition, and in recent years psychologists have confirmed that intuition. The newer findings suggest that adolescents’ niche in school — their popularity, and how they understand and exploit it — offers important clues to their later psychological well-being.
Why Some Kids Aren’t Heading to School Today
Choosing the most radical education reform there is
So we frown on radicalism. Yet we have embarked on one of the most radical endeavors families can undertake: home-schooling. Given preconceptions about this practice, I should note that we are not anti-government wingnuts living on a compound. We like literature, and nice wines, and Celeste would stab me in the heart with a spoon if I gave her one of those head bonnets the Amish women wear. We are not, in other words, stereotypical home-schooling parents. But neither are most actual home-schooling parents.
Even though Ma and Pa Ingalls sent their children off to the little schoolhouse in Walnut Grove, we’ve decided to start our own. In the eyes of Kansas authorities that’s exactly what we’ve done; regulations require us to establish a school and name it. Ours is the Woodlief Homestead School. I wanted to go with something like: “The School of Revolutionary Resistance,” but Celeste said that was just inviting trouble.
The reason we’ve broken with tradition, or perhaps reverted to a deeper tradition, is not because we oppose sex education, or because we think their egos are too tender for public schools. It’s because we can do a superior job of educating our children. We want to cultivate in them an intellectual breadth and curiosity that public schools no longer offer.
Somewhere there is now an indignant teacher typing an email to instruct me about his profession’s nobility. Perhaps some public schools educate children in multiple languages and musical instruments, have them reading classic literature by age seven, offer intensive studies of math, science, logic, and history, and coach them in public speaking and writing. The thing is, I don’t know where those schools are.
A wise friend recently mentioned that “choice is good”. It will be interesting to see if the upcoming Madison School District math review addresses ongoing concerns over reduced rigor. Math Forum audio / video.
Study: “Ohio State Tests Invalid for Rating Schools”
This is the table of contents to the final findings from the research study of Ohio school district performance on the OPT and OSRC. This site is the data, graph, links, and comment page for Hoover’s research study of Ohio school district proficiency test and school report card performance accountability. These data and findings have been released to the public as of February 27, 2000. The entire study is available online for your use. If you wish to be included in the emailing list of updates about OPT and OSRC issues, click on the logo at the top of this page and send me your request.
The graphs and data presented here are from the final replication of the study. This final analysis represents the culmination of several hundred hours of work put forth to gain empirical insights into OPT performance across all Ohio school districts. At the time the study was completed there were 611 school districts in the State of Ohio. This study uses data from 593 districts out of the 611 total. 18 districts were not included in the study because of incomplete data or because the districts were too small such as North Bass Island. All data were taken from EMIS online data and no data other than the data presented by the State of Ohio were used. My confidence level is high that there are very few errors in the data array. Though errors are certainly possible, I am confident that if they exist they are minor and do not significantly affect the overall conclusions of this study. (RLH)
Scott Elliott has more.
Related: The Madison School District’s “Value Added Assessment” program uses the Wisconsin Department of Public instruction’s WKCE results. The WKCE’s rigor has been criticized.
To Be Young and Anxiety-Free
Last fall, 12-year-old John Morganti was a very anxious kid. He was too scared to ride the bus to school or have sleepovers at friends’ houses. He had frequent stomachaches, hid out in the nurse’s office and begged his mother to let him skip school.
“He would get so scared, he would be in a little ball in the corner,” says John’s mother, Danielle Morganti, of Pittsgrove, N.J.
John was later diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and underwent a treatment known as cognitive behavioral therapy. By spring, he had largely recovered and was happily taking the bus and playing with friends at parties.
Historically, anxiety disorders were seen as something that primarily hit teens and adults. Anxious kids, many experts thought, would simply grow out of their fears. But now, many doctors believe that John’s illness was caught at the ideal time. Indeed, there’s a new push by doctors and therapists to identify children afflicted with anxiety disorders — even those as young as preschool age — and treat them early.
Regarding alcohol, middle and high schools’ only message is ‘just say no.’ That leaves alcohol education to parents and, increasingly, colleges, where newfound freedom can send students off track.
Whether the legal drinking age is 18, 21 or something in between, at some point the odds are better than even that eventually a young adult is going to have that first drink. About 61% of American adults 18 or older said they’ve had alcohol in the last year, according to a 2006 national survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For the most part, lessons in how to drink come through experimentation with excess, essentially trial and error, exploring how much can be consumed, as young people go through what has become a rite of passage to adulthood.
“It’s a forbidden-fruit sort of thing,” says Brenda Chabon, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Montefiore Medical Center, New York. “We haven’t done a good job on educating kids. We kind of demonize alcohol on one hand and embrace it in another way.”
With ignorance as a guide, the long-awaited rite of passage too often ends up with mangled cars and ruined lives.
But whose job is it to teach responsible drinking? Middle and high schools have their hands tied, says Robert Turrisi, professor of biobehavioral health at the Prevention Research Center at Pennsylvania State University. “School-based programs teach abstinence only,” he says. “Schools can’t legally teach how to do illegal behaviors.”
Related: A debate on lowering the drinking age (Yes, from my perspective).
You Need to Take My Son to Jail
MY husband and I were sitting down to dinner when the police called. It was a female dispatcher whose voice I recognized from previous incidents involving my 20-year-old son, Andrew, who has autism.
In recent years, this police department has picked him up for shoplifting, taken reports from restaurants where he had dined and dashed, and once even brought him back from the airport after he tried to stow away on a plane.
Roughly half of the force has lectured me about keeping a closer eye on him, placing him in a secure facility, and finding a better psychiatrist, while the other half has been sweet and apologetic, concerned about how I’m bearing up.
On this occasion the dispatcher explained that my car, which I had earlier reported stolen, had been found on the side of the highway some 70 miles away in St. Cloud, Minn. — scratched, filthy and out of gas but otherwise undamaged. I would need to retrieve it from the impound lot. My son, unhurt, was waiting at the station. When would I be able to pick him up?
I swallowed a sip of Chianti and recited the line I had been rehearsing all afternoon: “I want to press charges.”
“I told you, the car is fine. Your son is fine. All you have to do is come pick them both up.”
“I want to press charges,” I said again, resolved to see this through.
“Against your son?” she asked, incredulous.
Helping Kids Who Hate High School
A couple of years ago I debated Chris Peters, a thoughtful and energetic high school teacher in San Bernardino, Calif., about vocational education. He thought it had more value than I did and could energize students who can’t stand dry academics. I thought high schools were incapable of doing vocational ed well, and too often made it a dumping ground for students from low-income families thought incapable of college.
We did not convince each other, but my recent column on the surprising results of research into high school career academies, showing they had great benefit for students’ job and family prospects, led him to conclude I was still educable on the subject. He came back to me with a plan to shake up high school in a way that would give both college-oriented and job-oriented students an equal chance, rather than force kids who don’t like school to stew in English and science classes.
Peters’ plan, which he conceived without benefit of well-paid staff, shares important elements with the very expensive report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, which Peters had not seen until I pointed it out to him. Many people, it seems, want to fix high school in this way, which I trashed in a previous column.
The Pencil
A book by Allan Ahlberg & Bruce Ingman:
“One day that little pencil made a move, shivered slightly, quivered somewhat . . . and began to draw.”
Welcome back Banjo, the boy from THE RUNAWAY DINNER! Once a pencil draws him, there’s no telling what will come next — a dog, a cat, a chase (of course), and a paintbrush to color in an ever-expanding group of family and friends. But it’s not long before the complaints begin — “This hat looks silly!” “My ears are too big!” — until the poor pencil has no choice but to draw . . . an eraser. Oh no! In the hands of Allan Ahlberg and Bruce Ingman, can anything but havoc and hilarity ensue?
The creators of THE RUNAWAY DINNER and PREVIOUSLY team up to imagine the comical world that comes to life when a lonely pencil starts to draw.
Safety Climate: A look at Police Calls to Madison High Schools
Total police calls to Madison’s four main high schools declined 38 percent from the fall semester of 2006 to last spring. But those figures tell only a partial story, and not a very meaningful one.
That’s because the numbers include all police calls, including ones for 911 disconnects, parking lot crashes and stranded baby ducks. (It happened at La Follette last May.)
The State Journal then looked at police calls in eight categories closely related to safety — aggravated batteries, batteries, weapons offenses, fights, bomb threats, disturbances, robberies and sexual assaults. Those calls are down 46 percent from fall 2006 to spring 2008.
The schools varied little last spring in the eight categories. Memorial and West each had 13 such calls, La Follette 14 and East 16.
School officials are relieved by the downward trend but careful not to read too much into the figures.
“We know there’s almost a cyclical nature to crime statistics and even to individual behavior,” said Luis Yudice, who is beginning his third year as district security coordinator.
Art Camosy, a veteran science teacher at Memorial, said he thinks the climate is improving at his school. Yet he views the police figures skeptically, in part because the numbers are “blips in time” but also because he wonders if the district’s central office is behind the drop.
“Are our building administrators being pressured not to call police as often?” he asks.
John Matthews, the longtime executive director of Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI), the district’s teachers union, contends that the district’s leadership has indeed done this from time to time, directing building administrators to hold off on calling police so often.
Yudice, a former Madison police captain, said there was a time years ago when the district was extremely sensitive about appearing to have a large police presence at its schools. He rejects that notion now.
“It’s just the opposite,” he said. “We are more openly acknowledging that we have issues that need to be dealt with by the police. Since I’ve been working here, there has never been a directive to me or the school principals to minimize the involvement of police.”
All four Madison high schools feature an open campus. It appears that Erickson only reviewed calls to the High Schools, not those nearby. 1996-2006 police calls near Madison High Schools is worth a look along with the Gangs & School violence forum.
Finally, I hope that the Madison Police Department will begin publishing all police calls online, daily, so that the public can review and evaluate the information.
West Adams High, A Model For The Future?
Many seniors at L.A.’s West Adams Preparatory High School are actually looking forward to returning to school. The brand new institution is based on a mission to help students realize their dreams in a multicultural world. This is far from common in Southern California.
audio
Raising the Bar: How Parents Can Fix Education
Everyone, it seems, has a complaint about the schools. Indifferent bureaucracy, change-averse unions, faddish curricula, soaring school taxes matched with mediocre student performance — the list is long and seemingly unchanging.
At the start of yet another school year, it’s time for some radical change in your local schools — a specific change that only parents can bring about. It’s a thing already being done in some far-off countries but that remains strangely rare here in America. It’s something I’ve tried — and, despite the skepticism of friends and neighbors, it seems to work.
What is this miracle that lies within the reach of nearly every family? It’s simple. All you have to do is to start insisting that your children fully apply themselves to their studies — and commit yourself to doing your part. That means making sure they do all the work expected of them as well as their abilities allow. It also means making sure everything at home stands behind these principles and supports the idea of learning.
These will sound like obvious ideas. In fact, given all the distractions of modern life, it is a radical departure from the normal order of things. Let’s face it: More than budgets or bureaucrats, more than textbooks or teachers, parents are the reason that kids perform as they do in school.
A Well-Rounded Education Doesn’t Have to Start with College
I’m going to step back from economics for a moment and write about teaching economics to both undergraduates and graduate students. Based on that experience, I have some advice for talented high school students: Don’t go to college.
And advice for talented college graduates: Don’t get a job.
A Complete Education
Of course there is a caveat. You should do both of them eventually, just not right away. Take a year off, either after high school or after college.
Use that year to do something interesting that you’ll likely never be able to do again: write a book, hike the Appalachian Trail, live with your grandparents, trek in Katmandu, volunteer at a health clinic in India, or serve your country in the military.
Just do something that will make you a more complete person. I suspect that it’ll also make you appreciate your education more (and, ironically, make you more attractive when you do apply for college or enter the job market).
