Search Results for: We have the children
Adderall Suicide
The Sunday Times carries a long front-page article about a young man, Richard Fee, who committed suicide.
The article claims: “Medications like Adderall can markedly improve the lives of children and others with the disorder. But the tunnel-like focus the medicines provide has led growing numbers of teenagers and young adults to fake symptoms to obtain steady prescriptions for highly addictive medications that carry serious psychological dangers.”
But the article contains no evidence or proof of this claim that “growing numbers of teenagers and young adults” have faked symptoms. It’s a claim that would be hard to prove, because you’d have to rely on someone self-reporting that they lied, and anyone who admits that they lied is someone whose testimony might well be considered not 100% reliable.
The article goes on to blame Fee’s doctor and the drug manufacturer for his suicide. Fee himself, and his parents, don’t get blamed or scrutinized much at all.
How to Bridge the Generational Hope Divide
Almost all fifth- through 12th-graders — 95% — say it is likely they will have a better life than their parents. However, in a separate Gallup poll, half of U.S. adults aged 18 and older say they doubt today’s youth will have a better life than their parents.
This hope divide might limit the support that adults are willing to give children to help them reach their full potential. Undoubtedly, some adults will be tempted to explain to children that there are economic and political circumstances in the world that children can’t understand — ones that make their future look less rosy. Adults might even point out that many children are fantasizing about a future that is out of their reach. These cautions are grounded in some wisdom, but they also might be associated with the pessimism adults have about our own future, our personal vulnerabilities, or our profound inability to predict the future.
To bridge the hope divide we have to do three things.
Strife and Progress: Portfolio Strategies For Managing Urban Schools
Paul Hill, Christine Campbell, Betheny Gross, via a kind Deb Britt email:
This new book from Paul Hill and colleagues Christine Campbell and Betheny Gross explains the underlying idea of the portfolio strategy. Based on findings from studies of portfolio school districts, the book shows how mayors and other city leaders have introduced the strategy, compares different cities’ implementation, tells about the civic coalitions that come together to support it, and analyzes the intense and colorful conflicts it can set off. The book also offers a clear, concise explanation of the main components of the strategy and how they work together under a model of continuous improvement to create a unified strategy.
One core theme is that entrenched interests are sure to fight any reform initiative that is strong enough to make a difference in big city education. The authors explain how the fact that no adult group’s interests perfectly match those of children makes conflict inevitable and often productive.
The book also takes stock of results to date, which are mixed, though generally positive in the cities that have pursued the strategy most aggressively. However, Hill, Campbell, and Gross make clear that early reform leaders like Joel Klein in New York and Paul Pastorek in Louisiana have been too optimistic, assuming that the results would be so obviously good that careful assessment was unnecessary. The authors show what kinds of proof are necessary for a portfolio strategy and how far short the available evidence falls.
Act 10 will hurt state, education in long run
Retired High School Teacher Rose Locander:
The public schools in Wisconsin are some of the best in the country. Over the years, businesses have moved into this state knowing their employees will be able to feel confident sending their children to the local public schools.
What will happen as the years go by and the public schools in this state lose their ability to meet the expectations of excellence in education? Exactly what will attract businesses to this state when the public schools are no longer quality schools? Are we going to woo companies with the promise of our wonderful weather?
Too many of us have taken our public schools for granted. From early childhood through high school, we have become used to well-trained, dedicated teachers, quality educational programs, identification and early intervention of learning issues and a host of other resources found only in the public schools. We expect this of our public schools, but with Act 10, these opportunities that were of great value to all of our children will continue to disappear.Related: www.wisconsin2.org
Special needs vouchers are an empty promise
Gary E. Myrah, Janis Serak and Lisa Pugh: As a new legislative session gets underway, a statewide group concerned about the education of students with disabilities is waving a yellow caution flag. Parents often say what is most important to them about their children’s education is that they receive quality instruction, they are safe and […]
Ritalin Gone Wrong
THREE million children in this country take drugs for problems in focusing. Toward the end of last year, many of their parents were deeply alarmed because there was a shortage of drugs like Ritalin and Adderall that they considered absolutely essential to their children’s functioning.
But are these drugs really helping children? Should we really keep expanding the number of prescriptions filled?
In 30 years there has been a twentyfold increase in the consumption of drugs for attention-deficit disorder.
As a psychologist who has been studying the development of troubled children for more than 40 years, I believe we should be asking why we rely so heavily on these drugs.
Attention-deficit drugs increase concentration in the short term, which is why they work so well for college students cramming for exams. But when given to children over long periods of time, they neither improve school achievement nor reduce behavior problems. The drugs can also have serious side effects, including stunting growth.
Families and how to survive them: How differences that isolate individuals can unite humanity
Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. By Andrew Solomon. Scribner; 962 pages; $37.50. To be published in Britain by Chatto & Windus in February; £30. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
ANDREW SOLOMON never knew a time when he was not gay. He chose pink balloons over blue ones and described operas on the school bus rather than trade baseball cards. He was teased at school for being effete and ignored by children issuing party invitations. In his teens Mr Solomon began to suffer from depression. His parents, supportive and understanding, would have preferred their son to be straight and encouraged him to marry a woman and have a family. The recognition that he was gay came only when he understood that gayness was not a matter of behaviour, but of identity; and identity is learned by observing and being part of a subculture outside the family.
The case for school choice
This year over 41,000 students took advantage of Wisconsin’s open-enrollment policy to transfer to public schools outside their home district, according to the Department of Public Instruction. An additional 37,000 students attend over 200 charter schools. Over 25,000 students participate in the Milwaukee and Racine voucher programs, while 137,000 students attend over 900 private schools. Clearly demand for choice by parents and students is strong.
Yet choice is not without its critics. Some argue school choice is an effort to “privatize” public education. But Wisconsin is constitutionally required to provide public schools. And certainly families who are happy with traditional public schools (of which there are many) are not going to abandon them.
This fear of “privatization” begs the question: Is the goal of public education to achieve an educated public, or the creation of a certain type of school? Focusing on form over function is a mistake.
Others believe choice starves public schools of critical funding. But as the number of families exercising choice over the past few decades has grown dramatically, so have public school expenditures. According to the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, from 1999 to 2011 real inflation-adjusted per pupil public school expenditures in Wisconsin have increased almost 16 percent, from $10,912 to $12,653.
In addition, a University of Arkansas study on the Milwaukee voucher program estimates it saved Wisconsin taxpayers nearly $52 million in 2011 due to the voucher amount being far less than what Milwaukee public schools typically spend per student. Arguing that choice has hurt public school finances is not supported by the evidence.
Another frequent criticism of school choice is the objection to taxpayer money being spent on private educational institutions. But our government spends taxpayer dollars on products and services from private companies all the time. Why is it OK to pay private contractors to build our schools, private publishing companies to provide the books and private transport companies to bus our children, but when the teacher or administrator is not a government employee we cry foul?
Our focus should be on educating children and preparing them for life, through whatever school form that might take.
Innovative lenses will boost learning
Sir, You identify the life-changing potential of glasses for children in the developing world, shortlisted for the Design Museum’s Design of the Year award (“Design shortlist balances form against function“, January 14), but credit for the design belongs not to me personally but to the team at the Centre for Vision in the Developing World, of which I am CEO, and consultants Goodwin Hartshorn.
The true innovation of these glasses is not that their size is adjustable but that the wearer can – under the supervision of, for instance, a schoolteacher – adjust the power of each lens to correct his or her own vision.
Clinical trials (references are available at cvdw.org) have shown that young people aged 12-18 as well as adults are able to achieve good correction by this process of self-refraction. We estimate that today at least 60m short-sighted children in the developing world lack access to accurate vision correction.
Transfer Students & London Achievement
I wrote a piece yesterday on the continued astonishing rise of London’s state schools. One of my brilliant colleagues posed an interesting question: what happens if a child moves into London?
Below, I have published how children who lived outside London at the age of 11 went on to do in their GCSEs (using our usual point score) at the age of 16.
I have divided this set of pupils twice: first, by whether they had moved into London by the age of 16 or not and second by how well they did in standardised tests at the age of 11.
ORCA K-8 teachers join boycott of district-required (MAP) exams
Linda Shaw: Eleven teachers and instructional assistants at ORCA K-8 have decided that they, too, will boycott district-required tests known as the MAP, according to ORCA teacher Matt Carter. The Orca staffers join the staff at Garfield High, where all teachers who were scheduled to administer the Measures of Academic Progress exams are refusing, with […]
Will longer school year help or hurt US students?
Did your kids moan that winter break was way too short as you got them ready for the first day back in school? They might get their wish of more holiday time off under proposals catching on around the country to lengthen the school year.
But there’s a catch: a much shorter summer vacation.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a chief proponent of the longer school year, says American students have fallen behind the world academically.
“Whether educators have more time to enrich instruction or students have more time to learn how to play an instrument and write computer code, adding meaningful in-school hours is a critical investment that better prepares children to be successful in the 21st century,” he said in December when five states announced they would add at least 300 hours to the academic calendar in some schools beginning this year.
New Mexico Kids Count Report
4MB PDF via New Mexico Voices for Children:
The national KIDS COUNT Program, using the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), a standardized test that allows comparability of reading scores across states, ranks New Mexico 50th–dead last–among the states in 4th grade reading proficiency. Only about 20 percent–just two out of every ten New Mexico 4th graders–can read at a proficient level. If we consider the results from New Mexico’s own 3rd grade reading proficiency test, the results are not any more encouraging. While in six school districts as many as 70 percent to 80 percent of 3rd graders score at a “proficient and above” level, in too many others–more than one-third of our public school districts – only 50 percent or less of the 3rd graders read proficiently or above. This does not bode well for many students’ potential to succeed as they progress into higher grade levels.
This concern seems justified when we consider the low math proficiency rates of New Mexico’s 8th graders. In only 11 out of the state’s 89 public school districts do 60 percent or more of the 8th graders score at a “proficient or above” level. In two-thirds (60) of the school districts less than half the students can do math at the required level.
Given that skill in mathematics is considered vital for 21st century technical jobs, low proficiency in mathematics is alarming in its implications for New Mexico’s future workforce capacity.
These low proficiency scores have an effect on the state’s high school graduation rate. A 2012 report from the U.S. Department of Education ranked only one state lower than New Mexico in terms of the on-time high school graduation rate.5 The state’s graduation rate, 63 percent (only 56 percent for economically disadvantaged students), means that more than one-third (37 percent) of our youth do not graduate from high school within four years.
There are better performance rates, however. Some public school districts-most of them in small communities-have graduation rates of 90 percent and above.
Third Grade Follow-up to the Head Start Impact Study
Looking across the full study period, from the beginning of Head Start through 3rd grade, the evidence is clear that access to Head Start improved children’s preschool outcomes across developmental domains, but had few impacts on children in kindergarten through 3rd grade. Providing access to Head Start was found to have a positive impact on the types and quality of preschool programs that children attended, with the study finding statistically significant differences between the Head Start group and the control group on every measure of children’s preschool experiences in the first year of the study. In contrast, there was little rd evidence of systematic differences in children’s elementary school experiences through 3 grade, between children provided access to Head Start and their counterparts in the control group.
In terms of children’s well-being, there is also clear evidence that access to Head Start had an impact on children’s language and literacy development while children were in Head Start. These effects, albeit modest in magnitude, were found for both age cohorts during their first year of admission to the Head Start program. However, these early effects rapidly dissipated in elementary school, with only a single impact remaining at the end of 3rd grade for children in each age cohort.
With regard to children’s social-emotional development, the results differed by age cohort and by the person describing the child’s behavior. For children in the 4-year-old cohort, there were no observed impacts through the end of kindergarten but favorable impacts reported by parents and unfavorable impacts reported by teachers emerged at the end of 1st and 3rd grades.
One unfavorable impact on the children’s self-report emerged at the end of 3rd grade. In contrast to the 4-year-old cohort, for the 3-year-old cohort there were favorable impacts on parent- reported social emotional outcomes in the early years of the study that continued into early elementary school. However, there were no impacts on teacher-reported measures of social- emotional development for the 3-year-old cohort at any data collection point or on the children’s self-reports in 3rd grade.
In Support of The Milwaukee Public Schools
In his Jan. 6 column, Alan J. Borsuk says that a new vision for education in Milwaukee is needed to get beyond the stale and failed answers of the past. He is right.
Milwaukee has had voucher schools since 1990, longer than any school district in the nation. Students in the voucher schools perform no better than those in the public schools.
Milwaukee has had charter schools for about 20 years. Students in the charter schools do no better than those in the public schools.
As the other sectors have grown, Milwaukee Public Schools has experienced sharply declining enrollment. At the same time, the number of students with disabilities is far greater in the public schools than in either the voucher or charter schools. The latter are unable or unwilling to take the children who are most challenging and most expensive to educate. Thus, MPS is “competing” with two sectors that skim off the ablest students and reject the ones they don’t want. Most people would say this is not a level playing field.
Parenthood & Life Expectancy
PARENTS often complain that their lives are being shortened by the stress of having children, yet numerous studies suggest the opposite: that it is the childless who die young, not those who have procreated. Such research has, however, failed to find out whether it is the actual absence of children which causes early mortality or whether, rather, it is brought about by the state of mind that leads some people not to have children in the first place.
To resolve the point Esben Agerbo of the University of Aarhus in Denmark and his colleagues conducted an investigation that tried to take the question of wanting children out of the equation, by looking only at those people who had demonstrated a desire to be parents by undergoing in vitro fertilisation (IVF). They discovered, as they report in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, that there really does seem to be something about the presence of kids which makes a difference to the length of people’s lives.
State law change keeps Wisconsin principal evaluations under wraps
A change in state law creating a new teacher and principal evaluation system also exempts those evaluations from public disclosure, even though the public has previously had access to principal evaluations.
Open government advocates were unaware of the new exemption to the state’s open records law, but said the Legislature should revisit the principal evaluation issue.
“I hope that there would be some willingness to reassess this decision,” said Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council. “There are few issues that matter more to ordinary people than the quality of their children’s education. For that reason the evaluations of the top school official, the principal, have traditionally been open, and we think they should stay that way.”
Jim Lynch, executive director of the Association of Wisconsin School Administrators, said the group of state education leaders who designed the evaluation system recommended the records exemption in the law based on the purpose of the new system, which is not to compare educators.
“The focus of this is to have assessments meant for organizations to make human resources decisions and for people to learn and grow,” Lynch said. “That is done best in a confidential environment.”
Math in a Child’s World: Policy and Practical Challenges for Preschool Mathematics
Several studies have shown that basic math concepts acquired at a preschool level–including counting, sorting, and recognizing simple patterns and shapes–are the most powerful predictors of later learning, even more than reading.
But preschools face many challenges in implementing a high quality math curriculum, including:
The paucity of math content in preschool teacher preparation;
The uneven quality or lack of professional development and in-service learning opportunities for teachers;
Linking what children learn in preschool with what they are expected to learn in the K-3 grades;
The barriers imposed by “math anxiety” among many preschool teaching staff
5 Most Inspirational Videos of 2012
These five short videos will remind you what’s important in life and work.
This has been a difficult few days for everybody, especially for those of us who have children in primary school.
I had already selected the following five clips as the most inspirational and motivational videos of the year.
I think they are testament to the fact that the human spirit is greater than tragedy and to remind us that the reason we all work so hard is because we want to make a difference in the world.
2013 Wisconsin DPI Superintendent and Madison School Board Candidates
Patrick Marley & Erin Richards:
“I’ve been frustrated with the fact that our educational system continues to go downhill even with all the money the Legislature puts into it,” he said.
Pridemore said he will release more details about his educational agenda in forthcoming policy statements and has several education bills in the drafting phase. Asked if he believed schools should have armed teachers, he said that was a matter that should be left entirely to local school boards to decide.
Evers, who has been school superintendent since 2009, is seeking a second term. He has previously served as a teacher, principal, local school superintendent and deputy state schools superintendent.
Wisconsin’s education landscape has undergone some major changes during his tenure, including significant reductions in school spending and limits on collective bargaining for public workers that weakened teachers unions, which have supported Evers in the past.
Evers wants to redesign the funding formula that determines aid for each of Wisconsin’s 424 school districts and to provide more aid to schools. Also, he wants to reinvigorate technical education and to require all high schools to administer a new suite of tests that would offer a better way to track students’ academic progress and preparation for the ACT college admissions exam.Don Pridemore links: SIS, Clusty, Blekko, Google and link farming. Incumbent Tony Evers: SIS, Clusty, Blekko, Google and link farming.
Matthew DeFour:School Board president James Howard, the lone incumbent seeking re-election, faces a challenge from Greg Packnett, a legislative aide active with the local Democratic Party. The seats are officially nonpartisan.
Two candidates, low-income housing provider Dean Loumos and recently retired Madison police lieutenant Wayne Strong, are vying for Moss’ seat.
The race for Cole’s seat will include a primary on Feb. 19, the first one for a Madison School Board seat in six years. The candidates are Sarah Manski, a Green Party political activist who runs a website that encourages buying local; Ananda Mirilli, social justice coordinator for the YWCA who has a student at Nuestro Mundo Community School; and T.J. Mertz, an Edgewood College history instructor and local education blogger whose children attend West High and Randall Elementary schools.
Jerry Brown pushes new funding system for California schools
Gov. Jerry Brown is pushing hard to overhaul California’s convoluted school funding system. His plan has two major objectives: Give K-12 districts greater control over how they spend money, and send more dollars to impoverished students and English learners.
Studies show that such children require more public help to reach the same level of achievement as their well-off peers. But as rich and poor communities alike clamor for money in the wake of funding cuts, Brown’s plan could leave wealthy suburbs with fewer new dollars than poorer urban and rural districts.
That makes perfect sense, said Michael W. Kirst, president of the State Board of Education and a Stanford University professor who co-wrote a 2008 paper that became the model for Brown’s proposal.
“Low-income people have less resources to invest in their children,” Kirst said. “A lot of investment comes from parental ability to buy external things for their kids that provide a better education. In the case of low-income groups, they can’t buy tutors, after-school programs or summer experiences.”
Is big disruption good for urban school districts?
My colleague Emma Brown has been looking closely at Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s plans to close one of every six traditional D.C. public schools.
In one piece, she cited activists who raised the possibility that the education system of our nation’s capital might, as a consequence of the downsizing, be split in two: Charter schools would rule the low-income neighborhoods, while regular public schools would thrive only in the affluent areas where achievement rates remain high.
This is not some wild nightmare. Education finance lawyer Mary Levy, a careful and longtime analyst of D.C. schools, said at one meeting: “What we are rapidly approaching is a [public school system] concentrated west of Rock Creek Park and perhaps around Capitol Hill, and a separate charter school system filled by lottery in most of the rest of the city.”
This is upsetting to many D.C. residents and people in the region who work or have lived in the city. But to some reformers, it is a great opportunity, a way to let parent choice energize the schools and give urban children more chances for success.
Like the neighborhood, not the school? Author understands your problem.
In my 30 years writing about schools, one reader question outnumbers all others: “I like where I live, but I have kids now and the local school doesn’t look good to me. What should I do?”
I tell them how to investigate their neighborhood school. I explain that children of education-focused parents learn much no matter what school they attend. Then I advise them to go with their gut. Even if everybody thinks their local school is great, if it doesn’t feel right they should send their kids elsewhere.
I’ve done a long magazine piece and lots of columns on this, but I have never seen the issue dissected as well as in a new book by Washington-area parent Michael J. Petrilli, “The Diverse Schools Dilemma: A Parent’s Guide to Socioeconomically Mixed Public Schools.” It is deep, up to date, blessedly short (119 pages) and wonderfully personal. He shares all the frustrations and embarrassments he and his wife suffered while looking for schools for their two young sons.
Common Core: The Totalitarian Temptation
Jonah Goldberg
Liberal Fascism
New York: Doubleday, 2007, pp. 326-327
…Progressive education has two parents, Prussia and John Dewey. The kindergarten was transplanted into the United States from Prussia in the nineteenth century because American reformers were so enamored of the order and patriotic indoctrination young children received outside the home (the better to weed out the un-American traits of immigrants). One of the core tenets of the early kindergarten was the dogma that “the government is the true parent of the children, the state is sovereign over the family.” The progressive followers of John Dewey expanded this program to make public schools incubators of a national religion. They discarded the militaristic rigidity of the Prussian model, but retained the aim of indoctrinating children. The methods were informal, couched in the sincere desire to make learning “fun,” “relevant,” and “empowering.” The self-esteem obsession that saturates our schools today harks back to the Deweyan reforms from before World War II. But beneath the individualist rhetoric lies a mission for democratic social justice, a mission Dewey himself defined as a religion. For other progressives, capturing children in schools was part of the larger effort to break the backbone of the nuclear family, the institution most resistant to political indoctrination.
National Socialist educators had a similar mission in mind. And as odd as it might seem, they also discarded the Prussian discipline of the past and embraced self-esteem and empowerment in the name of social justice. In the early days of the Third Reich, grade-schoolers burned their multicolored caps in a protest against class distinctions. Parents complained, “We no longer have rights over our children.” According to the historian Michael Burleigh, “Their children became strangers, contemptuous of monarchy or religion, and perpetually barking and shouting like pint-sized Prussian sergeant-majors…Denunciation of parents by children was encouraged, not least by schoolteachers who set essays entitled ‘What does your family talk about at home?'”
Now, the liberal project Hillary Clinton represents is in no way a Nazi project. The last thing she would want is to promote ethnic nationalism, anti-Semitism, or aggressive wars of conquest. But it must be kept in mind that while these things were of enormous importance to Hitler and his ideologues, they were in an important sense secondary to the underlying mission and appeal of Nazism, which was to create a new politics and a new nation committed to social justice, radical egalitarianism (albeit for “true Germans”), and the destruction of the traditions of the old order. So while there are light-years of distance between the programs of liberals and those of Nazis or Italian Fascists or even the nationalist progressives of yore, the underlying impulse, the totalitarian temptation, is present in both.
The Chinese Communists under Mao pursued the Chinese way, the Russians under Stalin followed their own version of communism in one state. But we are still comfortable observing that they were both communist nations. Hitler wanted to wipe out the Jews; Mussolini wanted no such thing. And yet we are comfortable calling both fascists. Liberal fascists don’t want to mimic generic fascists or communists in myriad ways, but they share a sweeping vision of social justice and community and the need for the state to realize that vision. In short, collectivists of all stripes share the same totalitarian temptation to create a politics of meaning; what differs between them–and this is the most crucial difference of all–is how they act upon that temptation.============
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
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Stop Subsidizing Obesity
Mark Bittman Not long ago few doctors – not even pediatricians – concerned themselves much with nutrition. This has changed, and dramatically: As childhood obesity gains recognition as a true health crisis, more and more doctors are publicly expressing alarm at the impact the standard American diet is having on health. “I never saw Type […]
Global Burden of Disease Study 2010
The Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (GBD 2010) is the largest ever systematic effort to describe the global distribution and causes of a wide array of major diseases, injuries, and health risk factors. The results show that infectious diseases, maternal and child illness, and malnutrition now cause fewer deaths and less illness than they did twenty years ago. As a result, fewer children are dying every year, but more young and middle-aged adults are dying and suffering from disease and injury, as non-communicable diseases, such as cancer and heart disease, become the dominant causes of death and disability worldwide.
Since 1970, men and women worldwide have gained slightly more than ten years of life expectancy overall, but they spend more years living with injury and illness.
GBD 2010 consists of seven Articles, each containing a wealth of data on different aspects of the study (including data for different countries and world regions, men and women, and different age groups), while accompanying Comments include reactions to the study’s publication from WHO Director-General Margaret Chan and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim. The study is described by Lancet Editor-in-Chief Dr Richard Horton as “a critical contribution to our understanding of present and future health priorities for countries and the global community.”
No more Flori-duh. State’s fourth-grade readers go from bottom of the nation to top of the world
Mike Thomas, via a kind reader’s email:
Kids in Singapore and Finland have long distinguished themselves on international academic tests, leaving American kids far, far, far behind.
They would rule the 21st Century while our kids would assemble snow globes, sew sneakers, man the call centers and figure out how to pay their parents’ entitlements on 93 cents a day.
If things weren’t bad enough, now we have the results of international fourth grade reading assessments. And not only were the usual suspects at the top of the list, we have a new nation to rub its superiority in our face, a nation that bested even Singapore and Finland.
The kids there not only significantly outperformed American kids, they had almost triple the percent of students reading at an advanced level when compared to the international average.The PIRLS results are better than you may realize.
Last week, the results of the 2011 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) were published. This test compared reading ability in 4th grade children.
U.S. fourth-graders ranked 6th among 45 participating countries. Even better, US kids scored significantly better than the last time the test was administered in 2006.
There’s a small but decisive factor that is often forgotten in these discussions: differences in orthography across languages.
Lots of factors go into learning to read. The most obvious is learning to decode–learning the relationship between letters and (in most languages) sounds. Decode is an apt term. The correspondence of letters and sound is a code that must be cracked.
In some languages the correspondence is relatively straightforward, meaning that a given letter or combination of letters reliably corresponds to a given sound. Such languages are said to have a shallow orthography. Examples include Finnish, Italian, and Spanish.
In other languages, the correspondence is less consistent. English is one such language. Consider the letter sequence “ough.” How should that be pronounced? It depends on whether it’s part of the word “cough,” “through,” “although,” or “plough.” In these languages, there are more multi-letter sound units, more context-depenent rules and more out and out quirks.
Montgomery superintendent shows courage in denouncing standardized tests
For more than a decade, school standardized tests have been the magic keys that were supposed to unlock the door to a promised realm of American students able to read and do sums as well as their counterparts in Asia and Europe.
A generation of U.S. education reformers has assured us that if we would just rely mostly on test scores and other hard data to guide decisions, then all manner of good results would ensue. Foundations gave millions of dollars to encourage it. The Obama administration embraced the cause, lest it stand accused of short-changing kids.
It was always a fairy tale. Tests are necessary, of course, but the mania for them has become self-defeating. They don’t account for the vast differences in children’s social, economic and family backgrounds. Good teachers give up on proven classroom techniques and instead “teach to the test.”
Now, finally, somebody with standing is getting attention for denouncing the madness.
The truth-teller is one of our own from the Washington region, Montgomery County Superintendent Joshua P. Starr. He has only been here for a year and a half, but he arrived with an impressive résumé and is emerging as a credible national voice urging a more reasoned and deliberate path to educational progress.
Homework Emancipation Proclamation
The French President’s emancipation proclamation regarding homework may give heart not only to les enfants de la patrie but to the many opponents of homework in this country as well–the parents and the progressive educators who have long insisted that compelling children to draw parallelograms, conjugate irregular verbs, and outline chapters from their textbooks after school hours is (the reasons vary) mindless, unrelated to academic achievement, negatively related to academic achievement, and a major contributor to the great modern evil, stress. M. Hollande, however, is not a progressive educator. He is a socialist. His reason for exercising his powers in this area is to address an inequity. He thinks that homework gives children whose parents are able to help them with it–more educated and affluent parents, presumably–an advantage over children whose parents are not. The President wants to give everyone an equal chance.
Homework is an institution roundly disliked by all who participate in it. Children hate it for healthy and obvious reasons; parents hate it because it makes their children unhappy, but God forbid they should get a check-minus or other less-than-perfect grade on it; and teachers hate it because they have to grade it. Grading homework is teachers’ never-ending homework. Compared to that, Sisyphus lucked out.Via Laura Waters
Don’t blame teachers for achievement gap
With all due respect to John Legend and Geoff Canada, firing teachers is not the solution to the achievement gap in Madison schools. The two spoke in Madison last week, prompting Friday’s article “Reformers: City schools need institutional change.”
I have been a substitute teacher in many classrooms since 2005 in Madison schools. What do I see?
Teachers who come early and stay late. Teachers who keep a stash of granola bars in their desks for the child who doesn’t make it to school on time for breakfast. Aides who lovingly attend to children with serious special needs.
I see 5-year-olds so out of control they can disrupt a classroom in minutes. Kids who live in their cars.
A class of their own: From Obama to Hague, foreign dignitaries are flocking to Myanmar. But as the country grapples with democratic change, its education system risks holding back the next generation
Nayaka sat wrapped in a blanket and an extra set of monk’s robes, shivering in his Swiss hotel room. He pulled three hats on to his shaved head, and wound a thick woollen scarf around his face. The temperature outside was probably in the mid-teens – after all, it was only September. Yet it was the coldest he had ever been.
In spite of the late hour, there was no way he was going to bed. On the other side of the world, tens of thousands of his countrymen had taken to the streets in what many people thought was the start of a revolution, and an end to Myanmar’s military dictatorship. Alongside the crowds of students marched thousands of his fellow Buddhist monks, decked out in their burnt orange robes and red velvet sandals. But U Nayaka would watch it all unfold on the TV news. It was perhaps fitting. U Nayaka (“U” is a Burmese honorific) has spent the past 20 years trying to avoid politics. Instead he has devoted himself to being the headmaster of one of the country’s largest schools, Phaung Daw Oo, where he and his brother help to educate more than 6,000 impoverished children every day. (His visit to Switzerland in late 2007 was for an international education conference.) Yet despite his distaste for politics, U Nayaka – and many others like him – are now key players in the country’s move towards democracy.
Abolish Social Studies
Michael Knox Beran, via Will Fitzhugh:
Emerging as a force in American education a century ago, social studies was intended to remake the high school. But its greatest effect has been in the elementary grades, where it has replaced an older way of learning that initiated children into their culture [and their History?] with one that seeks instead to integrate them into the social group. The result was a revolution in the way America educates its young. The old learning used the resources of culture to develop the child’s individual potential; social studies, by contrast, seeks to adjust him to the mediocrity of the social pack.
Why promote the socialization of children at the expense of their individual development? A product of the Progressive era, social studies ripened in the faith that regimes guided by collectivist social policies could dispense with the competitive striving of individuals and create, as educator George S. Counts wrote, “the most majestic civilization ever fashioned by any people.” Social studies was to mold the properly socialized citizens of this grand future. The dream of a world regenerated through social planning faded long ago, but social studies persists, depriving children of a cultural rite of passage that awakened what Coleridge called “the principle and method of self-development” in the young.
The poverty of social studies would matter less if children could make up its cultural deficits in English [and History?] class. But language instruction in the elementary schools has itself been brought into the business of socializing children and has ceased to use the treasure-house of culture to stimulate their minds. As a result, too many students today complete elementary school with only the slenderest knowledge of a culture that has not only shaped their civilization but also done much to foster individual excellence.
In 1912, the National Education Association, today the largest labor union in the United States, formed a Committee on the Social Studies. In its 1916 report, The Social Studies in Secondary Education, the committee opined that if social studies (defined as studies that relate to “man as a member of a social group”) took a place in American high schools, students would acquire “the social spirit,” and “the youth of the land” would be “steadied by an unwavering faith in humanity.” This was an allusion to the “religion of humanity” preached by the French social thinker Auguste Comte, who believed that a scientifically trained ruling class could build a better world by curtailing individual freedom in the name of the group. In Comtian fashion, the committee rejected the idea that education’s primary object was the cultivation of the individual intellect. “Individual interests and needs,” education scholar Ronald W. Evans writes in his book The Social Studies Wars, were for the committee “secondary to the needs of society as a whole.”
The Young Turks of the social studies movement, known as “Reconstructionists” because of their desire to remake the social order, went further. In the 1920s, Reconstructionists like Counts and Harold Ordway Rugg argued that high schools should be incubators of the social regimes of the future. Teachers would instruct students to “discard dispositions and maxims” derived from America’s “individualistic” ethos, wrote Counts. A professor in Columbia’s Teachers College and president of the American Federation of Teachers, Counts was for a time enamored of Joseph Stalin. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1929, he published A Ford Crosses Soviet Russia, a panegyric on the Bolsheviks’ “new society.” Counts believed that in the future, “all important forms of capital” would “have to be collectively owned,” and in his 1932 essay “Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order?,” he argued that teachers should enlist students in the work of “social regeneration.”
Like Counts, Rugg, a Teachers College professor and cofounder of the National Council for the Social Studies, believed that the American economy was flawed because it was “utterly undesigned and uncontrolled.” In his 1933 book The Great Technology, he called for the “social reconstruction” and “scientific design” of the economy, arguing that it was “now axiomatic that the production and distribution of goods can no longer be left to the vagaries of chance–specifically to the unbridled competitions of self-aggrandizing human nature.” There “must be central control and supervision of the entire [economic] plant” by “trained and experienced technical personnel.” At the same time, he argued, the new social order must “socialize the vast proportion” of wealth and outlaw the activities of “middlemen” who didn’t contribute to the “production of true value.”
Rugg proposed “new materials of instruction” that “shall illustrate fearlessly and dramatically the inevitable consequence of the lack of planning and of central control over the production and distribution of physical things. . . . We shall disseminate a new conception of government–one that will embrace all of the collective activities of men; one that will postulate the need for scientific control and operation of economic activities in the interest of all people; and one that will successfully adjust the psychological problems among men.”
Rugg himself set to work composing the “new materials of instruction.” In An Introduction to Problems of American Culture, his 1931 social studies textbook for junior high school students, Rugg deplored the “lack of planning in American life”:
“Repeatedly throughout this book we have noted the unplanned character of our civilization. In every branch of agriculture, industry, and business this lack of planning reveals itself. For instance, manufacturers in the United States produce billions’ of dollars worth of goods without scientific planning. Each one produces as much as he thinks he can sell, and then each one tries to sell more than his competitors. . . . As a result, hundreds of thousands of owners of land, mines, railroads, and other means of transportation and communication, stores, and businesses of one kind or another, compete with one another without any regard for the total needs of all the people. . . . This lack of national planning has indeed brought about an enormous waste in every outstanding branch of industry. . . . Hence the whole must be planned.
Rugg pointed to Soviet Russia as an example of the comprehensive control that America needed, and he praised Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, which resulted in millions of deaths from famine and forced labor. The “amount of coal to be mined each year in the various regions of Russia,”
Rugg told the junior high schoolers reading his textbook,
“is to be planned. So is the amount of oil to be drilled, the amount of wheat, corn, oats, and other farm products to be raised. The number and size of new factories, power stations, railroads, telegraph and telephone lines, and radio stations to be constructed are planned. So are the number and kind of schools, colleges, social centers, and public buildings to be erected. In fact, every aspect of the economic, social, and political life of a country of 140,000,000 people is being carefully planned! . . . The basis of a secure and comfortable living for the American people lies in a carefully planned economic life.”
During the 1930s, tens of thousands of American students used Rugg’s social studies textbooks.
Toward the end of the decade, school districts began to drop Rugg’s textbooks because of their socialist bias. In 1942, Columbia historian Allan Nevins further undermined social studies’ premises when he argued in The New York Times Magazine that American high schools were failing to give students a “thorough, accurate, and intelligent knowledge of our national past–in so many ways the brightest national record in all world history.” Nevins’s was the first of many critiques that would counteract the collectivist bias of social studies in American high schools, where “old-fashioned” history classes have long been the cornerstone of the social studies curriculum.
Yet possibly because school boards, so vigilant in their superintendence of the high school, were not sure what should be done with younger children, social studies gained a foothold in the primary school such as it never obtained in the secondary school. The chief architect of elementary school social studies was Paul Hanna, who entered Teachers College in 1924 and fell under the spell of Counts and Rugg. “We cannot expect economic security so long as the [economic] machine is conceived as an instrument for the production of profits for private capital rather than as a tool functioning to release mankind from the drudgery of work,” Hanna wrote in 1933.
Hanna was no less determined than Rugg to reform the country through education. “Pupils must be indoctrinated with a determination to make the machine work for society,” he wrote. His methods, however, were subtler than Rugg’s. Unlike Rugg’s textbooks, Hanna’s did not explicitly endorse collectivist ideals. The Hanna books contain no paeans to central planning or a command economy. On the contrary, the illustrations have the naive innocence of the watercolors in Scott Foresman’s Dick and Jane readers. The books depict an idyllic but familiar America, rich in material goods and comfortably middle-class; the fathers and grandfathers wear suits and ties and white handkerchiefs in their breast pockets.
Not only the pictures but the lessons in the books are deceptively innocuous. It is in the back of the books, in the notes and “interpretive outlines,” that Hanna smuggles in his social agenda by instructing teachers how each lesson is to be interpreted so that children learn “desirable patterns of acting and reacting in democratic group living.” A lesson in the second-grade text Susan’s Neighbors at Work, for example, which describes the work of police officers, firefighters, and other public servants, is intended to teach “concerted action” and “cooperation in obeying commands and well-thought-out plans which are for the general welfare.” A lesson in Tom and Susan, a first-grade text, about a ride in grandfather’s red car is meant to teach children to move “from absorption in self toward consideration of what is best in a group situation.” Lessons in Peter’s Family, another first-grade text, seek to inculcate the idea of “socially desirable” work and “cooperative labor.”
Hanna’s efforts to promote “behavior traits” conducive to “group living” would be less objectionable if he balanced them with lessons that acknowledge the importance of ideals and qualities of character that don’t flow from the group–individual exertion, liberty of action, the necessity at times of resisting the will of others. It is precisely Coleridge’s principle of individual “self-development” that is lost in Hanna’s preoccupation with social development. In the Hanna books, the individual is perpetually sunk in the impersonality of the tribe; he is a being defined solely by his group obligations. The result is distorting; the Hanna books fail to show that the prosperous America they depict, if it owes something to the impulse to serve the community, owes as much, or more, to the free striving of individuals pursuing their own ends.
Hanna’s spirit is alive and well in the American elementary school. Not only Scott Foresman but other big scholastic publishers–among them Macmillan/McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt–publish textbooks that dwell continually on the communal group and on the activities that people undertake for its greater good. Lessons from Scott Foresman’s second-grade textbook Social Studies: People and Places (2003) include “Living in a Neighborhood,” “We Belong to Groups,” “A Walk Through a Community,” “How a Community Changes,” “Comparing Communities,” “Services in Our Community,” “Our Country Is Part of Our World,” and “Working Together.” The book’s scarcely distinguishable twin, Macmillan/McGraw-Hill’s We Live Together (2003), is suffused with the same group spirit. Macmillan/McGraw-Hill’s textbook for third-graders, Our Communities (2003), is no less faithful to the Hanna model. The third-grade textbooks of Scott Foresman and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (both titled Communities) are organized on similar lines, while the fourth-grade textbooks concentrate on regional communities. Only in the fifth grade is the mold shattered, as students begin the sequential study of American history; they are by this time in sight of high school, where history has long been paramount.
Today’s social studies textbooks will not turn children into little Maoists. The group happy-speak in which they are composed is more fatuous than polemical; Hanna’s Reconstructionist ideals have been so watered down as to be little more than banalities. The “ultimate goal of the social studies,” according to Michael Berson, a coauthor of the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt series, is to “instigate a response that spreads compassion, understanding, and hope throughout our nation and the global community.” Berson’s textbooks, like those of the other publishers, are generally faithful to this flabby, attenuated Comtism.
Yet feeble though the books are, they are not harmless. Not only do they do too little to acquaint children with their culture’s ideals of individual liberty and initiative; they promote the socialization of the child at the expense of the development of his own individual powers. The contrast between the old and new approaches is nowhere more evident than in the use that each makes of language. The old learning used language both to initiate the child into his culture and to develop his mind. Language and culture are so intimately related that the Greeks, who invented Western primary education, used the same word to designate both: paideia signifies both culture and letters (literature). The child exposed to a particular language gains insight into the culture that the language evolved to describe–for far from being an artifact of speech only, language is the master light of a people’s thought, character, and manners. At the same time, language–particularly the classic and canonical utterances of a people, its primal poetry–[and its History?] has a unique ability to awaken a child’s powers, in part because such utterances, Plato says, sink “furthest into the depths of the soul.”
Social studies, because it is designed not to waken but to suppress individuality, shuns all but the most rudimentary and uninspiring language. Social studies textbooks descend constantly to the vacuity of passages like this one, from People and Places:
“Children all around the world are busy doing the same things. They love to play games and enjoy going to school. They wish for peace. They think that adults should take good care of the Earth. How else do you think these children are like each other? How else do you think they are like you?”
The language of social studies is always at the same dead level of inanity. There is no shadow or mystery, no variation in intensity or alteration of pitch–no romance, no refinement, no awe or wonder. A social studies textbook is a desert of linguistic sterility supporting a meager scrub growth of commonplaces about “community,” “neighborhood,” “change,” and “getting involved.” Take the arid prose in Our Communities:
“San Antonio, Texas, is a large community. It is home to more than one million people, and it is still growing. People in San Antonio care about their community and want to make it better. To make room for new roads and houses, many old trees must be cut down. People in different neighborhoods get together to fix this by planting.”
It might be argued that a richer and more subtle language would be beyond third-graders. Yet in his Third Eclectic Reader, William Holmes McGuffey, a nineteenth-century educator, had eight-year-olds reading Wordsworth and Whittier. His nine-year-olds read the prose of Addison, Dr. Johnson, and Hawthorne and the poetry of Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Southey, and Bryant. His ten-year-olds studied the prose of Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, Sterne, Hazlitt, and Macaulay [History] and the poetry of Pope, Longfellow, Shakespeare, and Milton.
McGuffey adapted to American conditions some of the educational techniques that were first developed by the Greeks. In fifth-century BC Athens, the language of Homer and a handful of other poets formed the core of primary education. With the emergence of Rome, Latin became the principal language of Western culture and for centuries lay at the heart of primary- and grammar-school education. McGuffey had himself received a classical education, but conscious that nineteenth-century America was a post-Latin culture, he revised the content of the old learning even as he preserved its underlying technique of using language as an instrument of cultural initiation and individual self-development. He incorporated, in his Readers, not canonical Latin texts but classic specimens of English prose and poetry [and History].
Because the words of the Readers bit deep–deeper than the words in today’s social studies textbooks do–they awakened individual potential. The writer Hamlin Garland acknowledged his “deep obligation” to McGuffey “for the dignity and literary grace of his selections. From the pages of his readers I learned to know and love the poems of Scott, Byron, Southey, and Words- worth and a long line of the English masters. I got my first taste of Shakespeare from the selected scenes which I read in these books.” Not all, but some children will come away from a course in the old learning stirred to the depths by the language of Blake or Emerson. But no student can feel, after making his way through the groupthink wastelands of a social studies textbook, that he has traveled with Keats in the realms of gold.
It might be objected that primers like the McGuffey Readers were primarily intended to instruct children in reading and writing, something that social studies doesn’t pretend to do. In fact, the Readers, like other primers of the time, were only incidentally language manuals. Their foremost function was cultural: they used language both to introduce children to their cultural heritage [including their History] and to stimulate their individual self-culture. The acultural, group biases of social studies might be pardonable if cultural learning continued to have a place in primary-school English instruction. But primary-school English–or “language arts,” as it has come to be called–no longer introduces children, as it once did, to the canonical language of their culture; it is not uncommon for public school students today to reach the fifth grade without having encountered a single line of classic English prose or poetry. Language arts has become yet another vehicle for the socialization of children. A recent article by educators Karen Wood and Linda Bell Soares in The Reading Teacher distills the essence of contemporary language-arts instruction, arguing that teachers should cultivate not literacy in the classic sense but “critical literacy,” a “pedagogic approach to reading that focuses on the political, sociocultural, and economic forces that shape young students’ lives.”
For educators devoted to the social studies model, the old learning is anathema precisely because it liberates individual potential. It releases the “powers of a young soul,” the classicist educator Werner Jaeger wrote, “breaking down the restraints which hampered it, and leading into a glad activity.” The social educators have revised the classic ideal of education expressed by Pindar: “Become what you are” has given way to “Become what the group would have you be.” Social studies’ verbal drabness is the means by which its contrivers starve the self of the sustenance that nourishes individual growth. A stunted soul can more easily be reduced to an acquiescent dullness than a vital, growing one can; there is no readier way to reduce a people to servile imbecility than to cut them off from the traditions of their language [and their History], as the Party does in George Orwell’s 1984.
Indeed, today’s social studies theorists draw on the same social philosophy that Orwell feared would lead to Newspeak. The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities, a 2006 collection of articles by leading social studies educators, is a socialist smorgasbord of essays on topics like “Marxism and Critical Multicultural Social Studies” and “Decolonizing the Mind for World-Centered Global Education.” The book, too, reveals the pervasive influence of Marxist thinkers like Peter McLaren, a professor of urban schooling at UCLA who advocates “a genuine socialist democracy without market relations,” venerates Che Guevara as a “secular saint,” and regards the individual “self” as a delusion, an artifact of the material “relations which produced it”–“capitalist production, masculinist economies of power and privilege, Eurocentric signifiers of self/other identifications,” all the paraphernalia of bourgeois imposture. For such apostles of the social pack, Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Milton’s and Tennyson’s “soul within,” Spenser’s “my self, my inward self I mean,” and Wordsworth’s aspiration to be “worthy of myself” are expressions of naive faith in a thing that dialectical materialism has revealed to be an accident of matter, a random accumulation of dust and clay.
The test of an educational practice is its power to enable a human being to realize his own promise in a constructive way. Social studies fails this test. Purge it of the social idealism that created and still inspires it, and what remains is an insipid approach to the cultivation of the mind, one that famishes the soul even as it contributes to what Pope called the “progress of dulness.” It should be abolished.
School Choice vs. ‘Familiar Images’
“For Young Latino Readers, an Image Is Missing.”
So goes the headline of a recent New York Times story that cites a lot of multiculturalist mumbo-jumbo to explain the learning gap between white and Hispanic students.
“Hispanic students now make up nearly a quarter of the nation’s public school enrollment,” notes the Times, “yet nonwhite Latino children seldom see themselves in books written for young readers.” The paper would have us believe that this contributes to the underperformance of Latinos on standardized tests. According to Department of Education data for 2011, 18% of Hispanic fourth graders were proficient in reading, compared with 44% of white fourth graders.
“Education experts and teachers who work with large Latino populations say that a lack of familiar images could be an obstacle as young readers work to build stamina and deepen their understanding of story elements like character motivation,” says the article.
Madison & US School Districts vs. The World
The Global Report Card, via a kind reader’s email:
Ever wonder how your public school district stacks up when compared to the rest of the world? What about how your district compares to your state or even the nation?
Tap or click on the images to view larger versions. Learn more about Madison & Wisconsin versus the world at www.wisconsin2.org.
How Does Your Child’s School Rank Against the Rest of the World?
If your kids are in a good American public school, chances are you know it. (In fact, it’s probably the reason you traded in that urban loft for the property taxes of the suburbs.) But what if you woke up one morning and found that a Wizard of Oz-style tornado had dropped your entire district down in the middle of Singapore or Finland? How would your children’s test scores measure up then?
That’s more or less what the Bush Institute wants to you to imagine as you click through its Global Report Card, an interactive graphic that lets you rank your district against 25 other countries. “When you tell people there are problems in education, elites will usually think, ‘Ah, that refers to those poor kids in big cities. It doesn’t have anything to do with me,'” says Jay P. Greene, head of the department of education reform at the University of Arkansas and one of the lead researchers behind the Global Report Card. “The power of denial is so great that people don’t think a finding really has anything to do with them unless you actually name their town.”
Education forum shows divide persists over Madison’s achievement gap strategy
But divisions over strategy, wrapped in ideology, loom as large as ever. The mere mention that the education forum and summit were on tap drew online comments about the connection of school reformers to the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that generates model legislation for conservative causes.
Conspiracy theorists, opponents retorted.
Democratic state Rep. Brett Hulsey walked out early from the fundraising luncheon because he didn’t like what Canada and Legend were saying about the possibility of reform hinging on the ability to fire ineffective teachers.
Thomas J. Mertz, a parent and college instructor who blogs on education issues, expressed in a phone interview Friday his indignation over “flying in outside agitators who have spent no time in our schools and telling us what our problems are.”
Mertz said he also was concerned by the involvement of the Madison School District with events delivering anti-union, anti-public education, pro-charter school messages. The school district, for its part, took pains to say that the $5,000 it donated in staff time was for a Friday workshop session and that it had no involvement with the appearances by Canada and Legend.
Madison doesn’t need a summit to whip up excitement over the achievement gap issue, Mertz said when I asked if the Urban League events didn’t at least accomplish that. “It’s at the point where there’s more heat than light,” he said. “There’s all this agitation, but the work is being neglected.”
That’s a charge that School Board President James Howard, who says that the district might decide to mimic some of the practices presented at the summit, flatly denies. “We’re moving full speed ahead,” he said.
….
Caire told me that the school district and teachers union aren’t ready to give up their control over the school system. “The teachers union should be the entity that embraces change. The resources they get from the public should be used for the children’s advantage. What we’re saying is, ‘Be flexible, look at that contract and see how you can do what works.'”
Madison Teachers Inc. head John Matthews responded in an email to me that MTI contracts often include proposals aimed at improving education, in the best interests of students. “What Mr. Caire apparently objects to is that the contract provides those whom MTI represents due process and social justice, workplace justice that all employees deserve.”
If Caire has his way, Madison — and the state — are up for another round of debate over how radically to change education infrastructure to boost achievement of students of color.
Why Asians are Better than Americans at Math
Since elementary school, we learned basic mathematics skills as little children. As we grew older, our math improved as we learned new concepts. Yet have people ever wondered why Americans lag behind Eastern Asian countries, such as China, in math? The answer might not easily be what you think:
The answer lies not only in the practice that Asian students receive but also, surprisingly, in the language we speak. Examine the following numbers: 8,2,4,6,7,5,1. Now look away for twenty seconds, and try to memorize the order of the numbers presented. Research has shown that you have a 50% chance of accurately memorizing that sequence perfectly, if you speak English.
Yet for those who speak Chinese, it is almost assured that you will get that sequence right. The reason is not due to intelligence, but actually the phonetics of our languages. Our brain is programmed to store numbers in a repetitive loop that lasts for only a short period of time. Chinese speakers are able to fit those 7 numbers into that span of time, while English speakers cannot. Hence, the Chinese speakers can memorize those numbers at a much more efficient rate than English speakers. How is this important?
Suburban Milwaukee schools take on minority students’ achievement gap
Means, the superintendent of Mequon-Thiensville schools and the most prominent African-American involved in education in Milwaukee suburban schools, is pushing to have constructive conversations about a subject few have wanted to discuss publicly: the lower achievement overall of minority children in suburban schools, at a time when the number of minority children in those schools is rising.
Means’ presentation came on a recent evening before 35 people at Wauwatosa West High School, a session hosted by Wauwatosa and West Allis-West Milwaukee school officials.
A few weeks earlier, Means made a similar presentation at Whitefish Bay High School. He has made the same pitch in the district where he works and just about anywhere else people will listen to him.
He is spearheading the launch of a collaborative effort involving at least a half-dozen suburban districts aimed at taking new runs at improving the picture.
The gaps are widespread and persistent. Black kids and Hispanic kids do not do as well in school as their white peers, even in the schools with the highest incomes, best facilities, most stable teaching staffs and highest test scores.
But Means told the Wauwatosa audience that schools shouldn’t focus on societal factors they can’t control. There are things schools can do, he said, such as making more meaningful commitments to high expectations for all students, insisting on rigor in classrooms, and ensuring that culturally responsive teaching styles and relationship-building are prevalent.
Means advocated three broad routes for schools:Mequon-Thiensville’s 2012-2013 budget is $51,286,130 or $14,024 for 3,657 students. Madison will spend $15,132 per student during the 2012-2013 school year.
Schools try longer days, academic years
Kids may groan when their parents hire a tutor or drag them to music lessons. But some educators say that extra learning gives them a leg up on students who can’t afford after-school activities. So today, school and government officials, nonprofits and the Ford Foundation announced that almost 20,000 students will spend more time in school, starting next fall.
“The question we have is can we give all children the opportunity that our most affluent kids have,” said Luis Ubinas, president of the Ford Foundation.
To answer that question, the Ford Foundation and the National Center on Time and Learning have signed up dozens of public schools for a pilot program. They can opt for a longer school day or year.
Randi Weingarten heads the American Federation of Teachers union. She’s backing the program, albeit cautiously.
Disrupting Class
My mission is to create a student-centric education system so that all children have an education that allows them to find their passions and fulfill their human potential, just as mine did for me. Today’s education system doesn’t do that; it’s modeled after a factory and is built to standardize the way we teach and test. The problem with this is that every child has different learning needs at different times. If we hope to educate each child effectively–an imperative in today’s society–then we need a system that can customize to meet each child’s unique needs. With the growth of online learning–a disruptive innovation–we stand at an unprecedented moment in human history where education is being transformed. If we leverage this innovation properly, over the next decade, we will be able to deliver a high-quality, customized learning experience to all children no matter their circumstances and transform not just the delivery of education, but the hopes, dreams, and realities for all children.
Michael B. Horn is the cofounder and Education Executive Director of Innosight Institute (http://www.innosightinstitute.org/), a non-profit think tank devoted to applying the theories of disruptive innovation to solve problems in the social sector. He is the coauthor of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (http://www.amazon.com/Disrupting-Class-Expanded-Edition-Disruptive/dp/0071749101/). Tech&Learning magazine named him to its list of the 100 most important people in the creation and advancement of the use of technology in education.
About TEDx, x = independently organized event
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized. (Subject to certain rules and regulations.)
A Passionate, Unapologetic Plea for Creative Writing in Schools
“I’m not sure if eight-year-olds should be permitted to have death or murder references in their short stories,” said a New York City public school principal to me at the end of the day today. “But I’ll set a meeting with my teachers tomorrow to discuss your views and theirs and see where we get.”
Three hours later, I am still moved and humbled by the principal’s thoughtful consideration of a topic so new and strange to her. We had just started a residency in her school. We had discussed a no-censorship approach for this workshop and the children had immediately come to life when they were told they could write a fictional story about anything they wanted.
But by week two, some of the teachers were concerned to see the heavy material that emerged, here and there, throughout the grade, from the special ed class to the “gifted and talented.” Human beings young and old love exploring dark, fantastical themes. But what are we supposed to think when our youngest members do it? When should our admiration turn to worry, and when does it become a school’s responsibility?
It is not easy to teach creative writing within the confinement of school. It is not easy to tackle the issues that arise, and it’s not easy to learn how to teach fiction and memoir writing well. But it is possible. And many teachers are doing it, and doing it well, across the country.
Helping Parents Score on the Homework Front
Homework can be as monumental a task for parents as it is for children. So what’s the best strategy to get a kid to finish it all? Where’s the line between helping with an assignment and doing the assignment? And should a parent nag a procrastinating preteen to focus–or let the child fall behind and learn a hard lesson?
As schools pile on more homework as early as preschool, many parents are confused about how to assist, says a 2012 research review at Johns Hopkins University. Some 87% of parents have a positive view of helping with homework, and see it as a beneficial way to spend time with their kids, says the study, co-authored by Joyce Epstein, a research professor of sociology and education.
Yet sometimes parental intervention may actually hurt student performance. During the middle-school years, such help was linked to lower academic achievement in a 2009 review of 50 studies by researchers at Duke University. Parents who apply too much pressure, explain material in different ways than teachers or intervene without being asked may undermine these students’ growing desire for independence, according to the study, published in Developmental Psychology.
Treating our kids like suspects
One of the best lines in the movie “Lean on Me” was delivered by high school Principal Joe Clark, who told a custodian to “tear down” the cages in the cafeteria that were used to protect the cooks from the students.
“If you treat them like animals, that’s exactly how they will behave,” said Clark, portrayed by Morgan Freeman.
Clark is right, and that’s why Milwaukee Public Schools should not subject thousands of children to daily metal detector scans.
Metal detectors and hand-held wands only give educators, students and parents the false illusion that their schools are safe, when there is little proof that they cut down on violence.
The district says it does the scans to be proactive in light of the workplace and school shootings that have taken place across the country since 1999’s attack at Columbine High School in Colorado.
MPS spokesman Tony Tagliavia said, “We’d much rather have a conversation on why we scan instead of having the conversation on why we didn’t.”
In the Book Bag, More Garden Tools
In the East Village, children planted garlic bulbs and harvested Swiss chard before Thanksgiving. On the other side of town, in Greenwich Village, they learned about storm water runoff, solar energy and wind turbines. And in Queens, students and teachers cultivated flowers that attract butterflies and pollinators.
Across New York City, gardens and miniature farms — whether on rooftops or at ground level — are joining smart boards and digital darkrooms as must-have teaching tools. They are being used in subjects as varied as science, art, mathematics and social studies. In the past two years, the number of school-based gardens registered with the city jumped to 232, from 40, according to GreenThumb, a division of the parks department that provides schools with technical support.
But few of them come with the credential of the 2,400-square-foot garden at Avenue B and Fifth Street in the East Village, on top of a red-brick building that houses three public schools: the Earth School, Public School 64 and Tompkins Square Middle School. Michael Arad, the architect who designed the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan, was a driving force behind the garden, called the Fifth Street Farm.
On US K-12 Staff Growth: Greater than Student Growth
In a recent opinion piece, James L. Huffman requests Oregonians to ask “why those who run our public schools have seen fit to increase their own ranks at three times the rate of growth in student enrollment while allowing for a small decline in the number of teachers relative to students” (“Oregon’s schools: Are we putting money into staff at students’ expense?” Commentary, Nov. 17).
He references a report by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice that uses data from the National Center for Education Statistics to document that K-12 personnel growth has outstripped K-12 student enrollment growth. The data are completely accurate, but the conclusions Huffman and the report reach are erroneous.
Huffman writes that some might be suspicious of the foundation as the source of the data. In reading the report’s conclusion (pages 19-22), such suspicion is justified.Related: The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools:
America’s K-12 public education system has experienced tremendous historical growth in employment, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. Between fiscal year (FY) 1950 and FY 2009, the number of K-12 public school students in the United States increased by 96 percent while the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) school employees grew 386 percent. Public schools grew staffing at a rate four times faster than the increase in students over that time period. Of those personnel, teachers’ numbers increased 252 percent while administrators and other staff experienced growth of 702 percent, more than seven times the increase in students.
In a recent Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, Lindsey Burke (2012) reports that since 1970, the number of students in American public schools increased by 8 percent while the number of teachers increased 60 percent and the number of non-teaching personnel increased 138 percent.
That hiring pattern has persisted in more recent years as well. This report analyzes the rise in public school personnel relative to the increase in students since FY 1992. Analyses are provided for the nation as a whole and for each state.
Between FY 1992 and FY 2009, the number of K-12 public school students nationwide grew 17 percent while the number of full-time equivalent school employees increased 39 percent, 2.3 times greater than the increase in students over that 18-year period. Among school personnel, teachers’ staffing numbers rose 32 percent while administrators and other staff experienced growth of 46 percent; the growth in the number of administrators and other staff was 2.7 times that of students.1.2MBPDF report and,
Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman:“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).
Younger Students More Likely to Get A.D.H.D. Drugs
Anahad O’Connor A new study of elementary and middle school students has found that those who are the youngest in their grades score worse on standardized tests than their older classmates and are more likely to be prescribed stimulants for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The findings suggest that in a given grade, students born at […]
Brazil education standards contribute to learning crisis: Brazil’s dismal education standards are too low for the world’s No. 6 economy and threaten to stunt the nation’s development.
JUAZEIRO, Brazil — As 6-year-old Ana Jamil skips up to the school gates, she has a simple question for the principal: “Is there class today?”
Children here are in the habit of asking, because their teachers often don’t show up, as hers didn’t the day before.
When Jose Pereira da Silva Municipal School does hold class, students spend just a little more than three hours a day with teachers who are woefully unprepared.
“Around here, there are teachers who can’t even read and write,” principal Maria Olivia Andrade says. “We’re waiting for the government to install air conditioning. We need a library. That’s essential. But by far the thing we need most desperately is training for the teachers.”
With salaries starting at just $350 a month and their jobs as state workers secure, teachers regularly stay at home. Although more kids are showing up for class, partly because of free lunches and government programs, they still have little chance of leaving with a decent education.
At Andrade’s school, the annual goal is that 70% will learn to read and write before they leave at age 14.
Why private school vouchers aren’t enough
If I were a D.C. parent with little money and a child in a bad public school, I would happily accept a taxpayer-supported voucher to send my kid to a private school. But I still don’t think voucher programs are a good use of education dollars, particularly after reading a startling story on The Washington Post’s front page on Sunday.
My colleagues Lyndsey Layton and Emma Brown revealed that the $133 million appropriated for vouchers in the District since 2004 have gone to private schools with no requirements to report publicly how well their students are doing. Some of those schools have dubious curriculums and inadequate facilities. At least eight of the 52 schools with voucher students are not accredited.
Paulette Jones-Imaan poses for a portrait photograph inside the cafeteria of the Academy for Ideal Education. (Astrid Riecken – For The Washington Post) Take a look at the Academy for Ideal Education in Northeast Washington. Almost all of its students are in the voucher program run by the nonprofit D.C. Children and Youth Investment Trust Corp. The school’s founder, Paulette Jones-Imaan, believes in learning through music, stretching and meditation, Layton and Brown report.
The Academy for Ideal Education does not have to reveal its results on the nationally standardized test that voucher students are required to take, but I suspect those children are not learning much. I have some experience with the Ideal Academy, a charter high school also founded by Jones-Imaan. In 2009 I wrote about it having some of the lowest achievement rates in the city, which I knew because charters have to report their test scores. The D.C. authorizing board for charters forced it to close. Sadly, no agency has that power over private schools using vouchers.
Madison Memorial High School Evening Meal Program Aims to Reduce Achievement Gap
Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter:
Often one does not realize how information gathered may be used to benefit others when the information is first received. Such is the case of the Memorial High School Evening Meal Program. Several years ago, Art Camosy, MTI Vice President and MTI’s Senior Faculty Representative for Memorial High School, attended a lecture given by Columbia Teachers’ College Professor Richard Rothstein. The lecture was sponsored by MTI, State Representative Cory Mason (Racine), and several entities within the UW. Professor Rothstein spoke about the impact of poverty on learning, citing, among other things, that a lack of medical and dental care result in lack of readiness for school, one of the causes of an achievement gap for the children growing up in poverty.
According to Rothstein in his book, “Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Achievement Gap” (www.epi.org/publication/books_class_and_schools/), children of high school drop-outs probably know 400 words by the time they enter school; children of high school graduates 1600 words; and children of college graduates 2400 words. That preparedness deficit added to poor nutrition and lack of regular meals makes it almost impossible for a child to catch up with his/her peers who do not experience the described complicating factors. Rothstein states, “Low-income kindergartners whose height and weight are below normal children for their age tend to have lower test scores …. Indeed, the relationship between good nutrition and achievement is so obvious, that some school districts, under pressure recently to increase poor children’s test scores, boosted caloric content of school lunches on test days.”
Having heard Rothstein’s passion on the impact of poverty on nutrition, and nutrition on the achievement gap, Camosy approached MTI Executive Director John Matthews about providing an evening meal at Memorial. Matthews approached United Way President Leslie Howard, who was excited about the idea and offered UWDC support. MTI and United Way met last spring with various Memorial staff, students, parents and community members to get the project rolling. The Memorial Evening Meal Project got under way. Matthews also contacted Madison Mayor Paul Soglin to ensure appropriate bus transportation. Kick-off was last Monday, with 100 meals served and the number of participants rising. Added benefit to the students participating is tutoring by upper level students and teachers, all of whom are volunteering their time and talents. Thanks to the progressive Memorial Principal Bruce Dahmen, who not only has worked with Camosy to make the project a reality, but whose efforts in working with others in the District have made the Evening Meal Program an instant success. Camosy’s idea is sure to spread to other schools. It’s impact on the achievement gap is certain.
Using Just 10% of Your Brain? Think Again
Christopher Chabris & Daniel Simons:
Pop quiz: Which of these statements is false?
1. We use only 10% of our brain.
2. Environments rich in stimuli improve the brains of preschool children.
3. Individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style, whether auditory, visual or kinesthetic.
If you picked the first one, congratulations. The idea that we use only 10% of our brain is patently false. Yet it so permeates popular culture that, among psychologists and neuroscientists, it is known as the “10% myth.” Contrary to popular belief, the entire brain is put to use–unused neurons die and unused circuits atrophy. Reports of neuroimaging research might perpetuate the myth by showing only a small number of areas “lighting up” in a brain scan, but those are just areas that have more than a base line level of activity; the dark regions aren’t dormant or unused.
Arthur Levine – The Suburban Education Gap: The U.S. economy could be $1 trillion a year stronger if Americans only performed at Canada’s level in math
Arthur Levine, via a kind Erich Zellmer email:
Parents nationwide are familiar with the wide academic achievement gaps separating American students of different races, family incomes and ZIP Codes. But a second crucial achievement gap receives far less attention. It is the disparity between children in America’s top suburban schools and their peers in the highest-performing school systems elsewhere in the world.
Of the 70 countries tested by the widely used Program for International Student Assessment, the United States falls in the middle of the pack. This is the case even for relatively well-off American students: Of American 15-year-olds with at least one college-educated parent, only 42% are proficient in math, according to a Harvard University study of the PISA results. That is compared with 75% proficiency for all 15-year-olds in Shanghai and 50% for those in Canada.
Compared with big urban centers, America’s affluent suburbs have roughly four times as many students performing at the academic level of their international peers in math. But when American suburbs are compared with two of the top school systems in the world–in Finland and Singapore–very few, such as Evanston, Ill., and Scarsdale, N.Y., outperform the international competition. Most of the other major suburban areas underperform the international competition. That includes the likes of Grosse Point, Mich., Montgomery County, Md., and Greenwich, Conn. And most underperform substantially, according to the Global Report Card database of the George W. Bush Presidential Center.Related: The Global Report: Compare US School Districts to the World.
Teacher Union Governance: A Seat in the Room?
United Teachers Los Angeles may be on the brink of an unwelcome change. Currently, there is a groundswell of teachers nominating themselves for the UTLA House of Representatives – teachers who have not been actively involved in UTLA in the past but who are motivated to do something now. For teachers who are alienated by the current brand of union rhetoric or feel de-professionalized by narrow perspectives, this is a terribly important time. It’s election time at the union.
The UTLA House of Reps is the policy-making body of the union. Decisions made here are binding on UTLA leadership. A UTLA member can nominate herself and likely be “elected” in an uncontested race until November 9. What an excellent opportunity this is for bringing children and education to the forefront of policy debate, and for hearing education professionals who currently feel alienated or unrepresented. This is also, perhaps, not in the best interest of the status quo.
Technology Changing How Students Learn, Teachers Say
Matt Richtel There is a widespread belief among teachers that students’ constant use of digital technology is hampering their attention spans and ability to persevere in the face of challenging tasks, according to two surveys of teachers being released on Thursday. The researchers note that their findings represent the subjective views of teachers and should […]
If Smart Is the Norm, Stupidity Gets More Interesting
Few of us are as smart as we’d like to be. You’re sharper than Jim (maybe) but dull next to Jane. Human intelligence varies. And this matters, because smarter people generally earn more money, enjoy better health, raise smarter children, feel happier and, just to rub it in, live longer as well.
But where does intelligence come from? How is it built? Researchers have tried hard to find the answer in our genes. With the rise of inexpensive genome sequencing, they’ve analyzed the genomes of thousands of people, looking for gene variants that clearly affect intelligence, and have found a grand total of two.
One determines the risk of Alzheimer’s and affects I.Q. only late in life; the other seems to build a bigger brain, but on average it raises I.Q. by all of 1.29 points.
Other genetic factors may be at work: A report last year concluded that several hundred gene variants taken together seemed to account for 40 to 50 percent of the differences in intelligence among the 3,500 subjects in the study. But the authors couldn’t tell which of these genes created any significant effect. And when they tried to use the genes to predict differences in intelligence, they could account for only 1 percent of the differences in I.Q.
The price of admission
Almost three decades ago, I applied to Cambridge university in England for an undergraduate degree. Just before my interview, a schoolteacher proffered some advice: “Don’t mention that your father went to Cambridge – or not unless you are asked!”
The reason? Back then in 1980s Britain, there was an aversion to the idea that family connections could help students get an elite university place. Indeed, the only thing considered more taboo by admissions officers was the idea that somebody could “buy” their way into a university with charitable donations, coupled with family ties.
How times change. Or, more accurately, how perceptions vary according to geography and social customs. This autumn, the children of several American friends entered a clutch of elite US colleges, such as Brown, Harvard and Princeton. Most of these kids have earned their places, in the sense of having high-performing SAT tests and a curriculum vitae packed with accolades. And yet these intelligent teenagers had another advantage: connections. More specifically, their parents and relatives are usually alumni of those elite universities, visibly involved in the alumni network and have often made philanthropic donations.
Martin to discuss 90-year study on longevity
Want to live a long, healthy and happy life?
It’s not all about broccoli or jogging or vitamins, says a noted researcher, who re-examined and updated results of a famous longevity study that started in the 1920s to determine that much of contemporary advice on aging well is wrong.
Wearing your seat belt, watching stress, being cheerful and optimistic — all may be factors in making one’s life more enjoyable,Leslie Martin and co-author Howard Friedman wrote in “The Longevity Project.”
But their study findings “clearly revealed that the best childhood personality predictor of longevity was conscientiousness,” they wrote. People who had aged well tended to have shown — already as children and consistently through life — the qualities of prudence, persistence and organization.
The Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics Education
In American schools, mathematics is taught as a dark art. Learn these sacred methods and you will become master of the ancient symbols. You must memorize the techniques to our satisfaction or your performance on the state standardized exams will be so poor that they will be forced to lower the passing grades. Never mind the foundational principles, proofs, or derivations – you’ll learn those in due course.
Why? Why do math? Because you’ll need it, that’s why. You’ll use it in your physics classes. And I’m sure I can think of examples of how you’ll use math in real life, whatever your chosen career may be. Right? Right. I hear engineers have to know how to solve differential equations, for example, and before you can do differential equations you need to learn logarithms. So get back to chapter 14 and get working.
This is the message we’re giving our children, and it’s no wonder so few students develop an interest in mathematics. Ask any math major: Math isn’t about memorizing some formulas and learning how to factor polynomials. It’s… well, it’s something much deeper. It’s fascinating. But what is it exactly?
Recent lawsuit against Camden schools may really be about school vouchers
This past Monday, parents of three young Camden City Public Schools students filed a class action complaint with N.J. Education Commissioner Chris Cerf. The parents contend that enrollment in Camden’s bleak public school system constitutes a breach of their children’s constitutional right to a “thorough and efficient public education system.”
Are the parents’ children being denied their constitutional rights? Sure. Twenty-three of Camden’s 26 schools are on the State’s list of our worst schools (the bottom 5 percent). Based on SAT scores, less than 1 percent of Camden High School’s graduates are ready for college. One plaintiff has a twelve-year-old son, Keanu Vargas, who attends 7th grade at Pyne Point Family School. The most recent data from the N.J. DOE (2010-2011) shows that hardly any kids at Pyne Point pass the state standardized tests in language arts and math. Forty-two percent of the student body was suspended during the year.
Not so hard to make an argument that Keanu doesn’t have access to a decent education system. By way of contrast, at Cherry Hill Public Schools, a mere seven miles away, just about all kids achieve proficiency on state tests.
More on the math wars
The Milgram/Bishop essay that Boaler said has unfairly damaged her reputation is called “A Close Examination of Jo Boaler’s Railside Report,” and appears on Milgram’s Stanford website. (“Railside” refers to one of the schools Boaler studied.) The piece says that Boaler’s claims are “grossly exaggerated,” and yet expresses fear that they could be influential and so need to be rebutted. Under federal privacy protection requirements for work involving schoolchildren, Boaler agreed to keep confidential the schools she studied and, by extension, information about teachers and students. The Milgram/Bishop essay claims to have identified some of those schools and says this is why they were able to challenge her data.
Boaler said — in her essay and in an interview — that this puts her in a bind. She cannot reveal more about the schools without violating confidentiality pledges, even though she is being accused of distorting data. While the essay by Milgram and Bishop looks like a journal article, Boaler notes that it has in fact never been published, in contrast to her work, which has been subjected to peer review in multiple journals and by various funding agencies.
Further, she notes that Milgram’s and Bishop’s accusations were investigated by Stanford when Milgram in 2006 made a formal charge of research misconduct against her, questioning the validity of her data collection. She notes in her new essay that the charges “could have destroyed my career.” Boaler said that her final copy of the initial investigation was deemed confidential by the university, but she provided a copy of the conclusions, which rejected the idea that there had been any misconduct.
A Right to Choose Single-Sex Education
Kay Bailey Hutchison & Barbara Mikulski:
For some children, learning in girls-only or boys-only classes pays off. Opponents of the idea are irresponsible.
Education proponents across the political spectrum were dismayed by recent attempts to eradicate the single-gender options in public schools in Virginia, West Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Maine and Florida. We were particularly troubled at efforts to thwart education choice for American students and their families because it is a cause we have worked hard to advance.
Studies have shown that some students learn better in a single-gender environment, particularly in math and science. But federal regulations used to prevent public schools from offering that option. So in 2001 we joined with then-Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Susan Collins to author legislation that allowed public schools to offer single-sex education. It was an epic bipartisan battle against entrenched bureaucracy, but well worth the fight.
Since our amendment passed, thousands of American children have benefited. Now, though, some civil libertarians are claiming that single-sex public-school programs are discriminatory and thus illegal.
It’s Not Just Writing: Math Needs a Revolution, Too
Barry Garelick, via a kind email
In The Atlantic’s ongoing debate about how to teach writing in schools, Robert Pondiscio wrote an eye-opening piece called “How Self-Expression Damaged My Students.” In it, he tells of how he used modern-day techniques for teaching writing–not teaching rules of grammar or correcting errors but treating the students as little writers and having them write. He notes, however that “good writers don’t just do stuff. They know stuff. … And if this is not explicitly taught, it will rarely develop by osmosis among children who do not grow up in language-rich homes.”
What Pondiscio describes on the writing front has also been happening with mathematics education in K-6 for the past two decades. I first became aware of it over 10 years ago when I saw what passed for math instruction in my daughter’s second grade class. I was concerned that she was not learning her addition and subtraction facts. Other parents we knew had the same concerns. Teachers told them not to worry because kids eventually “get it.”
One teacher tried to explain the new method. “It used to be that if you missed a concept or method in math, then you were lost for the rest of the year. But the way we do it now, kids have a lot of ways to do things, like adding and subtracting, so that math topics from day to day aren’t dependent on kids’ mastering a previous lesson.”
This was my initiation into the world of reform math. It is a world where understanding takes precedence over procedure and process trumps content. In this world, memorization is looked down upon as “rote learning” and thus addition and subtraction facts are not drilled in the classroom–it’s something for students to learn at home. Inefficient methods for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing are taught in the belief that such methods expose the conceptual underpinning of what is happening during these operations. The standard (and efficient) methods for these operations are delayed sometimes until 4th and 5th grades, when students are deemed ready to learn procedural fluency.
School Choice Marches Forward
One year ago, the Wall Street Journal dubbed 2011 “the year of school choice,” opining that “this year is shaping up as the best for reformers in a very long time.” Such quotes were bound to circulate among education reformers and give traditional opponents of school choice, such as teachers unions, heartburn. Thirteen states enacted new programs that allow K-12 students to choose a public or private school instead of attending their assigned school, and similar bills were under consideration in more than two dozen states.
With so much activity, school choice moved from the margins of education reform debates and became the headline. In January 2012, Washington Post education reporter Michael Alison Chandler said school choice has become “a mantra of 21st-century education reform,” citing policies across the country that have traditional public schools competing for students alongside charter schools and private schools. “It took us 20 years to pass the first 20 private school-choice programs in America and in the 21st year we passed 7 new programs,” says Scott Jensen with the American Federation for Children (AFC), a school-choice advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. “So we went from passing, on average, one each year, to seven in one fell swoop.” Programs enacted in 2011 include:
a tax-credit scholarship program in North Carolina
Arizona’s education savings account system for K-12 students
German Celebrity Chef on School Meals ‘Many People Don’t Care Enough about Nutrition’
A recent outbreak of illness among German schoolchildren has highlighted the questionable quality of meals served in schools. German TV chef Cornelia Poletto says that one way to improve nutrition is to get parents involved in preparing lunches — and to teach children what they are eating.
Cornelia Poletto, 41, is a well-known German chef and the mother of a 10-year-old daughter. She owns a restaurant and specialty food shop in Hamburg and appears regularly as a professional chef on television.
SPIEGEL: Ms. Poletto, you have tested many school cafeterias. What experiences have you had in doing so?
Poletto: Very different ones! But I can say this: It is only in places where parents actively volunteer that truly good food is provided.
Attention Disorder or Not, Pills to Help in School
When Dr. Michael Anderson hears about his low-income patients struggling in elementary school, he usually gives them a taste of some powerful medicine: Adderall.
The pills boost focus and impulse control in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Although A.D.H.D is the diagnosis Dr. Anderson makes, he calls the disorder “made up” and “an excuse” to prescribe the pills to treat what he considers the children’s true ill — poor academic performance in inadequate schools.
“I don’t have a whole lot of choice,” said Dr. Anderson, a pediatrician for many poor families in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta. “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.”
Before a Test, a Poverty of Words
Gina Bellafante Not too long ago, I witnessed a child, about two months shy of 3, welcome the return of some furniture to his family’s apartment with the enthusiastic declaration “Ottoman is back!” The child understood that the stout cylindrical object from which he liked to jump had a name and that its absence had […]
Tiger mothers in Singapore: Losing Their Edge?
ONCE upon a time most of the tiny island-state of Singapore was a jungle. That is nearly all gone now, but the country is still heavily populated by tigers. These strict, unyielding felines, celebrated by Amy Chua in her book on the superiority of Chinese parenting, “The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”, load their cubs down with extra homework and tuition to make them excel at school. Western parents are usually horrified at the pressure the tiger mums exert on their children to get better grades or become concert violinists, preferably before puberty. But in Singapore this style of parenting, especially among the ethnic Chinese majority, is rarely questioned.
Imagine, then, the surprise when the prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, launched an attack on tiger mothers in a speech in late August to mark Singapore’s national day. Most of his remarks celebrated Singapore’s success, as usual. But then he berated parents for coaching their three- or four-year-old children to give them that extra edge over the five-year-old competition. And he added: “Please let your children have their childhood…Instead of growing up balanced and happy, he grows up narrow and neurotic. No homework is not a bad thing. It’s good for young children to play, and to learn through play.”
No Appetite for Good-for-You School Lunches
Outside Pittsburgh, they are proclaiming a strike, taking to Twitter and Facebook to spread the word. In a village near Milwaukee, hundreds staged a boycott. In a small farming and ranching community in western Kansas, they have produced a parody video. And in Parsippany, N.J., the protest is six days old and counting.
They are high school students, and their complaint is about lunch — healthier, smaller and more expensive than ever.
The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which required public schools to follow new nutritional guidelines this academic year to receive extra federal lunch aid, has created a nationwide version of the age-old parental challenge: persuading children to eat what is good for them.
Wisconsin Schools face new, tougher report cards
One of the most dramatic signs of the momentous changes in how Wisconsin is trying to improve schools, teachers and student performance is about to hit every public school community in the state.
There have been a lot of warnings that a new way of picturing how schools are doing is coming and that the view isn’t going to be as cheery as the old grades. But it’s unlikely many people except school officials have been paying attention.
You can bet a lot more people will take notice when the state Department of Public Instruction releases report cards for every school and school district on Oct. 22.
The new data is going to be massive and sometimes complex. There will be a two-page summary report on each school, as well as an 18-page report.
Backers of the new approach – and a broad array of education and political figures – say that the report cards are a pillar of efforts to get more children in Wisconsin better prepared to go on to college and the work world.
But a lot of people almost surely will look at the grades for their local schools and ask: What in heaven’s name is going on? How did local schools we thought were A or B quality suddenly get worse?
Portage parents form group to fight heroin
Don and Jan Weideman lost their youngest son in June after a year-and-a-half battle with heroin, and they have formed a group to address the growing concern about heroin in Columbia County.
Don Weideman found his son, Cody, dead in their home from a heroin overdose.
Cody’s addiction was triggered by a girlfriend who also used the drug. His parents went through inpatient and outpatient programs, counseling and treatment options.
It’s an experience Don Weideman described as “a living hell.”
“Children are supposed to bury parents. Parents aren’t supposed to bury children,” Don Weideman said.
When tablet turns teacher
Six months ago, they dropped dozens of boxed iPads into two extremely remote villages in Ethiopia, where the population was completely illiterate, dirt poor and had no prior exposure to electronics. They did not leave any instructions, aside from telling the village elders that the iPads were designed for kids aged four to 11. They also showed one adult how to charge the iPads with a solar-powered device. Then the researchers vanished and monitored what happened next by making occasional visits and tracking the behaviour of the children via Sim cards, USB sticks and cameras installed in the iPads.
The results, which will be unveiled in Boston later this month, are thought-provoking, particularly for anyone involved in the education business. Within minutes of the iPads landing among the mud huts, the kids had unpacked the boxes and worked out how to turn them on.
Then, in both villages, activity coalesced around a couple of child leaders, who made the mental leap to explore those tablets – and taught the others what to do. In one village, this leader turned out to be a partly disabled child: although he had never been a dominant personality before, he was a natural explorer, so became the teacher.
The discovery process then became intense. When the children used the iPads, they did not behave like western adults might, namely sitting with a machine each on their laps in isolation. Instead they huddled together, touching and watching each other’s machines, constantly swapping knowledge. Within days, they were using the pre-installed apps, with games, movies and educational lessons. After a couple of months, some were singing the American “alphabet song” and recognising letters (at the request of the Ethiopian government, the machines were all in English). More startling still, one gang of kids even worked out how to disable a block that the Boston-based researchers had installed into the machines, which was supposed to stop them taking pictures of themselves. And all of this apparently happened without any adult supervision – and anyone in those mud huts having handled text before.
Hybrids of History Teaching
One answer looks at how external testing, state academic standards, federal accountability regulations, teacher certification, and the unofficial national curriculum of Advanced Placement influence what teachers present. These largely unnoticed structures in the policy landscape set the boundaries within which teachers teach. To answer the above question on why teachers tilt toward “traditional” teaching, then, I also want to identify other factors that often go unmentioned by those eager to improve the teaching of history in K-12 schools.
Consider that cultural beliefs about the function of public schools to socialize children and youth into the dominant civic and social values (e.g., honesty, respect for others’ values, cooperating) are anchored in age-graded school structures. They become a powerful organizational mechanism for carrying out societal expectations (i.e., kindergarten prepares children for the first grade, a high school diploma is essential to going to college or getting a decent job). Teachers operating separately in their classrooms move 25 to 30-plus students through a 700-page history text, and give frequent tests to see whether students have learned the required knowledge and skills.
How much is that rowdy kid interfering with your child’s learning?
Daniel Willingham Anyone who has spent much time in classrooms has the sense that just a couple of disorderly kids can really disrupt learning for everyone. These kids distract the other students, and the teacher must allocate a disproportionate amount of attention to them to keep them on task. Obvious though this point seems, there […]
KU studies link recession, education opportunities
The economic downturn has made it more difficult for lower-income people to obtain educational opportunities they need to improve their lot in life, University of Kansas researchers found.
Their studies looked at the instability caused by the Great Recession and the effect on the educational opportunities for children. The conclusions were that lower-income residents lacked the financial assets to weather the downturn and still have money for college.
“Assets do affect educational achievement in the long run,” said William Elliott III, one of the authors of the reports. “The educational path is being weakened. That’s one of the main aspects of the American dream: that you can achieve through education.”
Is Teacher Union “Collective Bargaining” Good for Students?
The Madison School Board has scheduled [PDF] a 2:00p.m. meeting tomorrow, Sunday 30 September for an “Initial exchange of proposals and supporting rationale for such proposals in regard to collective bargaining negotiations regarding the Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBA) for MMSD Madison Teachers, Inc. (MTI) Teachers, Substitute Teachers, Educational Assistants, Supportive Educational Employees (SEE), and School Security Assistants (SSA), held as a public meeting pursuant to Wis. Stat. §111.70(4)(cm)”.
The School Board along with other Madison area governments have moved quickly to negotiate or extend agreements with several public sector unions after a judicial decision overturning parts of Wisconsin’s Act 10. The controversial passage of Act 10 changed the dynamic between public sector organizations and organized labor.
I’ve contemplated these events and thought back to a couple of first hand experiences:
In the first example, two Madison School District teacher positions were being reduced to one. Evidently, under the CBA, both had identical tenure so the choice was a coin toss. The far less qualified teacher “won”, while the other was laid off.
In the second example, a Madison School District teacher and parent lamented to me the poor teacher one of their children experienced (in the same District) and that “there is nothing that can be done about it”.
In the third example, a parent, after several years of their child’s “mediocre” reading and writing experiences asked that they be given the “best teacher”. The response was that they are “all good”. Maybe so.
Conversely, I’ve seen a number of teachers go far out of their way to help students learn, including extra time after school and rogue curricula such as phonics and Singapore Math.
I am unaware of the School Board meeting on a Sunday, on short notice, to address the District’s long time reading problems.
A bit of background:
Exhibit 1, written in 2005 illustrating the tyranny of low expectations” “When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before”.
Exhibit 2, 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use.
Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 Madison speech to the Madison Rotary Club is worth reading:“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).
William Rowe has commented here frequently on the challenges of teacher evaluation schemes.
This being said, I do find it informative to observe the Board’s priorities in light of the District’s very serious reading problems.
This article is worth reading in light of local property taxes and spending priorities: The American Dream of upward mobility has been losing ground as the economy shifts. Without a college diploma, working hard is no longer enough.Unlike his parents, John Sherry enrolled in college after graduating from high school in Grand Junction, a boom-bust, agriculture-and-energy outpost of 100,000 inhabitants on Colorado’s western edge. John lasted two years at Metropolitan State University in Denver before he dropped out, first to bag groceries at Safeway, later to teach preschool children, a job he still holds. He knew it was time to quit college when he failed statistics two semesters in a row. Years passed before John realized just how much the economic statistics were stacked against him, in a way they never were against his father.
Greg Sherry, who works for a railroad, is 58 and is chugging toward retirement with an $80,000-a-year salary, a full pension, and a promise of health coverage for life. John scrapes by on $11 an hour, with few health benefits. “I feel like I’m working really hard,” he says, “but I’m not getting ahead.”
This isn’t the lifestyle that John’s parents wished upon their younger child. But it reflects the state of upward–or downward–mobility in the American economy today.Related: Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding.
TJ Mertz comments on collective bargaining, here and here.
Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes: Didn’t See That One Coming: How the Madison School Board Ended Up Back in Collective Bargaining.
The Capital Times: Should local governments negotiate with employees while the constitutionality of the collective bargaining law is being appealed?
Progress in Identifying the Genetic Roots of Autism
One of the most agonizing questions that parents of children with autism ask is–why?
Now, a growing number of genetic tests are providing some answers.
Scientists say that roughly 20% of autism cases can be linked to known genetic abnormalities, and many more may be discovered.
Pinpointing a genetic explanation can help predict whether siblings are likely to have the disorder–and even point to new, targeted treatments. Last week, for example, researchers reported that an experimental drug, arbaclofen, reduced social withdrawal and challenging behaviors in children and adults with Fragile X syndrome, the single most common genetic cause of autism.
Emanuel’s push for more Chicago charter schools is in full swing: Now that the teachers strike is over, mayor is free to expand charter schools in Chicago
Jeff Coen, David Heinzmann and John Chase:
Chicago Public Schools officials expect about 53,000 of the district’s roughly 400,000 students will attend charter schools this year, and the number of charters will increase to more than 100. The city is aiming to add 60 charter schools in the next five years with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is trying to expand charters across the country.
The biggest push for charter schools locally comes from some of the wealthiest backers of Emanuel, including Bruce Rauner, a venture capitalist who regularly advises the mayor. At a seminar of business and political leaders held the same day teachers voted to return to school, Rauner said the strike would only energize reform efforts that he called a “multiyear revolution.”
“I think we’re going to have a coalescing of interests that’s a focus and drive some major change. And there are some plans in the works, some charter community education innovators who are now focusing on Chicago, and I think in the coming years we can innovate,” he said.
Experts called the union’s stand against privately run networks unique in the United States, where several big cities, including New York, also have pushed charter schools.
“What’s different is this is really the first mass movement against that comprehensive strategy” for privatization, said Janelle Scott, an associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies school policy.Related:
- “Presumptions of invalidity”: Closing the Window on Charters in Madison?.
- Charter Caps, Laser Pointers and SuperPACs
- Milwaukee is wisely embracing charter schools.
- 60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use.
- Notes and links on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy – rejected by the Madison School Board.
- Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman in a 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club:
“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).
KIPP gains survive new scrutiny, with a footnote
Jay Matthews: New research on the nation’s largest and best-performing charter school network has a dull title — “Student Selection, Attrition, and Replacement in KIPP Middle Schools” — but it adds fuel to a fierce national debate over why KIPP looks so good and whether schools should follow its example. No charter school network has […]
KIPP gains survive new scrutiny, with a footnote
New research on the nation’s largest and best-performing charter school network has a dull title — “Student Selection, Attrition, and Replacement in KIPP Middle Schools” — but it adds fuel to a fierce national debate over why KIPP looks so good and whether schools should follow its example.
No charter school network has been researched as much as KIPP, which has 125 schools and 39,000 students in 20 states and the District. Most of the studies say its schools have had large and positive impacts on student achievement when compared to regular public schools. But some smart critics, including scholars Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation and Gary Miron of Western Michigan University, have found a potential glitch in the analysis.
Most KIPP campuses are fifth-through-eighth-grade middle schools. Students arrive far below grade level but flourish because of KIPP’s longer school days and years and careful teacher selection, training and support.
Nonetheless, some KIPP parents move away or decide KIPP is not right for their children. Kahlenberg and Miron say that inflates the average scores of students who stay, compared to regular schools: At KIPP schools, they argue, lower-performing students who leave early are not replaced by incoming low scorers as they are in regular schools.
Rejecting test scores as a core value
It wasn’t about money. It was about respect.
That’s what Chicago teachers union president Karen Lewis kept reminding the public during the seven-day teachers strike that had parents scrambling and kept 350,000 children out of class.
But there was way more than respect at stake in the dispute. It was a clash between an impatient mayor and a demoralized teaching corps over competing visions of public schools — one side focused on job protection, the other on accountability.Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman in a 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club:
“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).
Young, Gifted and Neglected
Chester E. Finn, Jr. BARACK OBAMA and Mitt Romney both attended elite private high schools. Both are undeniably smart and well educated and owe much of their success to the strong foundation laid by excellent schools. Every motivated, high-potential young American deserves a similar opportunity. But the majority of very smart kids lack the wherewithal […]
Are ADHD Medications Overprescribed?
In recent years, the number of children in the U.S. being treated with prescription medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has grown dramatically.
That trend has led to concern among some doctors, parents and child advocates that many children are taking ADHD medication unnecessarily.
These critics suggest that in many cases ADHD is a mistaken diagnosis for children who are simply immature or undisciplined. And even when the diagnosis is correct, they say, many children who are taking medication for ADHD could do as well or better with alternative treatments, including dietary and behavioral therapies, that have fewer side effects.
Unsure robots make better teachers than know-alls
Douglas Haven, via a kind reader:
The best way to learn is to teach. Now a classroom robot that helps Japanese children learn English has put that old maxim to the test.
Shizuko Matsuzoe and Fumihide Tanaka at the University of Tsukuba, Japan, set up an experiment to find out how different levels of competence in a robot teacher affected children’s success in learning English words for shapes.
They observed how 19 children aged between 4 and 8 interacted with a humanoid Nao robot in a learning game in which each child had to draw the shape that corresponded to an English word such as ‘circle’, ‘square’, ‘crescent’, or ‘heart’.
The researchers operated the robot from a room next to the classroom so that it appeared weak and feeble, and the children were encouraged to take on the role of carers. The robot could then either act as an instructor, drawing the correct shape for the child, or make mistakes and act as if it didn’t know the answer.
There’s a Simple Solution to the Public Schools Crisis
It’s an oft-noted irony of the confrontation in Chicago that Mayor Rahm Emanuel sends his children to the private, $20,000-a-year University of Chicago Lab School, which means his family doesn’t really have much of a personal stake in what happens to the school system he is trying to reform. This is pretty routine behavior for rich people in Chicago, and there’s a pretty good reason for it: Chicago’s public schools are terrible. If you care about your children’s education, and can afford to buy your way out of public schools, as Emanuel can, it’s perfectly reasonable to do so. Barack and Michelle Obama made a similar decision, opting to purchase a quality education for their daughters at Sidwell Friends rather than send them to one of Washington, D.C.’s, deeply troubled public schools.
A lot of Chicago parents with the resources to do so have followed Emanuel’s lead: 17% of schoolchildren in Chicago attend private schools, and so don’t have to trouble themselves with whether or not their local public school has air conditioning, or a library (160 do not), or classes with 45 students. Those kids that don’t attend private schools tend overwhelmingly to be from families with less political power and resources than Emanuel’s: 87% of them are from low-income families, and 86% are black or hispanic.
Chicago Seven: 7 Early Takaways From The Chicago Teachers Strike
As the strike in Chicago enters its second day there is a lot of uncertainty but here are some early takeaways events in Chicago should probably remind us of:
Seriously, it’s not all about the kids. Saying it’s ‘all about the kids’ is education’s version of a routinized benediction. You hear it all the time – and often just preceding or just after some decision that’s actually not that good for kids. The system is more or less still set up for the benefit of adults – and that’s not just teachers unions, it’s management, vendors, and so forth, too. In this case, if the kids really mattered most then almost 400K of them wouldn’t be without places to go today because the adults charged with teaching them decided to strike.
This is a clash of values. This Ed Trust statement calls out the teachers union for low-balling expectations for kids. It’s a good illustration of how underneath the posturing and rhetoric and the substantive disagreements Chicago is really about what kind of school system they city is going to have – the old kind, which was a quasi-jobs program or the new type where performance and execution matter most. In that way the strike is an important national moment.Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman:
“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).
Where first school kids go to college
Sidwell Friends is a special school, an exemplar of the best education we can provide in America for $34,268 a year. It is simlar to many other selective private schools, except that the children of the president of the United States attend. You might call it the First School or High School One.
I was drawn to a page of the most recent Sidwell alumni magazine enumerating where the class of 2012 went to college. Some people have the impression that kids at schools like Sidwell all go to the Ivy League, but that’s not true. One of the most popular colleges among Sidwell’s 123 graduates this year was a state school, the University of Michigan, number 28 on the U.S. News list.. More Sidwell students (15) were admitted there than any other college sought by the senior class, and more (6) chose it than any other college.
Chicago Teachers Union on Strike – Administration offered 16% Salary Increase over 4 Years, Charter Schools Unaffected
Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah, Joel Hood and Kristen Mack:
“This is about as much as we can do,” Vitale said. “There is only so much money in the system.”
The district said it offered teachers a 16 percent pay raise over four years and a host of benefit proposals.
“This is not a small commitment we’re handing out at a time when our fiscal situation is really challenged,” Vitale said.
Lewis said the two sides are close on teacher compensation but the union has serious concerns about the cost of health benefits, the makeup of the teacher evaluation system and job security.More from
Justin Katz and Daily Kos.Chicago teachers are officially on strike.We stand with @ctulocal1 because they are fighting for what is best for our students.
— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) September 10, 2012
Analysis: Striking Chicago teachers take on national education reform.Chicago teachers walk picket lines for first time in 25 years.
Update: Madison Teachers’, Inc. [PDF] on the CTU Strike:MTI Stands with Chicago Teachers
In August, over 90% of the members of the Chicago Teachers’ Union voted for authorization to strike. Our CTU brothers and sisters have long been fighting against the charter school initiatives supported by Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel and a Democratic city council. On August 22, several MTI members attended a “Solidarity with CTU” night at SCFL. MTI members made up almost half the room. CTU member Becca Kelly spoke passionately about the injustice, inequity and blatant racism present in Chicago Public School policies and closures. In an interview, Chicago Teachers’ Union President Karen Lewis stated, “Our students deserve smaller class sizes, a robust, well-rounded curriculum, and in-school services that address their social, emotional, intellectual and health needs. They deserve culturally-sensitive non-biased and equitable education, especially students with IEPs, emergent bilingual students and early childhood children. And all of our students deserve professional teachers who are treated as such, fully resourced school buildings and a school system that partners with parents.” This is what the CTU is fighting for.
This past year CTU fought side by side with parents to halt 17 schools closings or “turn arounds” in the city. The parents did secure a meeting with the city council, but all 17 schools were closed. Next year, Kelly shared, there are over 70 Chicago Public Schools identified for “turn around or closing.”
On August 22, the MTI Board voted unanimously to support the resolutions put forth by the CTU. The MTI Board also recommended further fundraising efforts. MTI President Kerry Motoviloff spoke in support of the CTU that evening. She called for MTI members to stand with our CTU brothers and sisters as they stood with us when we called them. Speaking of the anti-worker movement, she said, “This is not a Madison issue. This is not a Chicago issue. This is not a Wisconsin issue. This is not even limited to a union issue. This is a worker issue.” She continued, “Scott Walker, Rahm Emanuel, they cannot define us. They can make things difficult. They can give us hoops to jump thorough. They can try to throw us off our focus to play defense. But the more we control our message, our voice, the more potent our acts become. This is all one fight. We are all one movement. We will win this.” The Chicago Teachers Union has published a booklet and a page of 10 talking points, both can be downloaded in PDF on the CTU website. Members are encouraged to visit it for more details. MTI will keep members abreast of future solidarity actions.CTU Parent Flyer (PDF) and CTU in the news (PDF).
Stephanie Banchero:The Chicago battle has pitted Karen Lewis, one of the country’s most vocal labor leaders, against Mr. Emanuel, one of its most prominent mayors and the former White House chief of staff for President Barack Obama. The Democratic mayor has made efforts to overhaul the city’s public education a centerpiece of his administration.
The two sides have been negotiating for months over issues including wages, health-care benefits and job security. The city has offered teachers a 3% pay raise the first year and 2% annual raises for the next three years. The average teacher salary in Chicago is about $70,000.
On Sunday night, city officials and union leaders said the wage issues aren’t the sticking point. Rather, the two sides are at loggerheads over a new teacher-evaluation system and how much of it should be weighted on student test scores, and over job security for teachers laid off from low-performing schools.
Adjusting for inflaton, the cost of attending a public, in-state college rose 268% from 1981 to 2011
Late summer is when parents bring their children to college. As they drive to campus they’re worried about tuition increases, the burden of student debt and whether their children will find jobs when they graduate.
Some parents and high-school students are beginning to question the value of a four-year college degree in this post-Great Recession world. And you can certainly understand why they have these concerns:
College costs keep rising. The College Board reports that from 1981 to 2011, after adjusting for inflation, the average published cost of going to college is up 180% for private, nonprofit four-year colleges and 268% for in-state, public four-year colleges.Wow. I remember my first semester at the UW- Madison 31 years ago. In state tuition was $399/semester. That is $944 in 2010, according to this calculator. Current in state UW-Madison tuition is about 5,000/semester. Crazy.
Suits Challenge Classrooms That Segregate Boys, Girls
Public-school students in some parts of the country this year are going back to very different classrooms than they are used to: ones with both boys and girls.
A decade long campaign to separate genders in schools–based on the theory that children learn better that way–has sparked a backlash that is chalking up victories. Critics have sued three districts to end their single-sex classes, and sent letters of concern to 15 others.
A judge in one of those lawsuits last week ordered a school district in West Virginia to halt its single-sex program, and a handful of other districts around the country have voluntarily suspended their own split-gender classes for the new school year.
Disappearing Mothers
If, from beyond the grave, Betty Friedan were to review the Facebook habits of the over-30 set, I am afraid she would be very disappointed in us. By this I mean specifically the trend of women using photographs of their children instead of themselves as the main picture on their Facebook profiles. You click on a friend’s name and what comes into focus is not a photograph of her face, but a sleeping blond four-year-old, or a sun-hatted toddler running on the beach. Here, harmlessly embedded in one of our favourite methods of procrastination, is a potent symbol for the new century. Where have all of these women gone? What, some earnest future historian may very well ask, do all of these babies on our Facebook pages say about “the construction of women’s identity” at this particular moment in time?
Madison Teachers’ Solidarity Newsletter
Madison Teachers’, Inc. 65K PDF, via a kind Jeannie Bettner email:
Members of MTI’s Board of Directors and Union staff greeted the District’s newly hired teachers at New Teacher Orientation on Monday. There are 250 new members of MTI’s teacher bargaining unit.
MTI Executive Director John Matthews addressed the District’s new teachers during their Tuesday session. In doing so, Matthews provided a brief history of the Union, its reputation of negotiating outstanding Collective Bargaining Agreements which provide both employment security and economic security, and in explaining the threat to both, given Act 10, said all MTI members would need to pull together to preserve the Madison Metropolitan School District as a quality place to teach.
Matthews told the new hires that these benefits and rights, along with MTI’s action to assure due process and workplace justice, has earned MTI the reputation of being one of the best Unions in the country. To illustrate the magnitude of MTI’s accomplishments over the years, Matthews told about school board policy mandating female teachers, through the early 1970’s, having to advise their principal “immediately upon becoming pregnant”, and being obligated to resign when the pregnancy “began showing.” As a result of MTI’s accomplishments, such antiquated, degrading policies are history, he said.
Matthews also cited MTI’s precedent setting accomplishments in advancing employee rights regarding race, religion, sexual orientation, and negotiating such things as the school calendar and health insurance. Until the early 1970’s, the school calendar only accommodated Christian holidays. MTI’s litigation expanded the benefit to cover all religions.
Continue the Awareness, Continue the Protest, Wear Red for Education
Since February, 2011, MTI members have been tirelessly protesting and working to end the disastrous impact on public sector workers of Governor Scott Walker’s union busting destructive budget. The most important reasons for resistance vary from one union member to another and include: the Legislation jeopardizes children’s future and the viability of public education and other public services; its provisions are dishonest and immoral; they constitute an attack on Wisconsin’s working-class and middle-class values; they ask for no shared sacrifice from the wealthy or profitable corporations.
Payroll checks for all public employees have been substantially lessened because of Act 10, causing financial hardship for many families. Walker’s Law forces all public employees to pay 50% of retirement contributions, even though MTI and the Madison Metropolitan School District have agreed as part of one’s total compensation package dating to the early 1970’s, that the District would pay 100% of the contribution and many have increased contributions for health insurance.
MTI leaders are working with other public sector union leaders across Wisconsin to reverse this disastrous legislation.
Ready, Set, Goal Conferences
As previously reported in MTI Solidarity!, the Ready, Set Goal (RSG) memorandum has been amended, as a result of grievance mediation.
The Memorandum of Understanding between MTI and the Madison Metropolitan School District, which governs RSG Conferences has been amended to include the following parameters which apply, when determining the amount of compensation due a teacher for holding RSG Conferences during times other than scheduled school day(s)/ hours:
- Teachers receive up to 15 minutes per student for conference preparation.
- Teachers receive up to 30 minutes for each conference held.
- Teachers are compensated for up to two parent “no shows” per student, at 30 minutes per scheduled conference. Teachers are not obligated to schedule a RSG conference after there have been two parent “no shows”. However, a teacher will be compensated pursuant to Section 2b (second bullet above), if the teacher thereafter holds a RSG conference for the student.
- Compensation will continue to include traveling to/from homes of parents, or other mutually agreed upon meeting place(s), or traveling to/from school if the conferences are not at a time adjacent to the Contract day. Mileage shall be paid in accordance with the terms and conditions of the Collective Bargaining Agreement and reasonable expenses for refreshments shall be reimbursed.
The full RSG agreement is located on MTI’s website (www.madisonteachers.org). Questions can be directed to Assistant Director Eve Degen at MTI (257-4091 or degene@madisonteachers.org).
Welcoming today’s youth at school w/ big smiles, friendly demeanor & high expectations. It’s going to be a good year for our future leaders.
— Madison Teachers Inc (@MtiMadison) September 4, 2012
On Harlem School Choice
But in interviews in recent weeks, Harlem parents described two drastically different public school experiences, expressing frustration that, among other things, there were still a limited number of high-quality choices and that many schools continued to underperform.
Those fortunate enough to get their sons or daughters into one of the high-performing schools said, for the most part, that they were thrilled with the quality of the teaching and extracurricular programs. Some of the parents who grew up in the neighborhood said that until a few years ago, they would never have imagined such options even existing.
Yet, while most of the charter schools perform relatively well on tests, a majority of Harlem’s students attend schools that do not. Among elementary schools in Harlem and East Harlem, only a few of the some 25 traditional neighborhood schools with students taking statewide tests had at least 50 percent of children reading at or above grade level.
Close look at KIPP charter school challenges
I have been following the progress of KIPP public charter schools since 2001. Initially this charter network was just one story out of many. But when its first school here, the KIPP DC: KEY Academy, began performing better than Northwest Washington schools with many middle class children, I made it a regular stop.
I also spent time with the network’s founders, Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg, visited about 40 of their other schools and wrote a book about KIPP, “Work Hard. Be Nice,” published in 2009.
This summer there are 125 KIPP schools with a total of 39,000 students in 20 states and the District. Eighty-seven percent of KIPP students are from families poor enough to qualify for federal lunch subsidies. Fifty-nine percent are black and 36 percent Hispanic.
The future of education in Africa is mobile
Education systems are under stress.
It is a problem felt in many parts of the world, but in Africa, the strain is even more acute.
In sub-Saharan Africa, 10m children drop out of primary school every year. Even those fortunate enough to complete primary school often leave with literacy and numeracy skills far below expected levels.
In addition, there is a major shortage of trained and motivated teachers. It is estimated that to ensure that every child has access to quality education by 2015, sub-Saharan Africa will need to recruit 350,000 new teachers every year. It seems increasingly unlikely that this will happen.
Throw in one of the highest concentrations of illiterate adults in the world, and you begin to understand the scale of the problem.
In the last decade many African countries have, against these significant odds, made solid progress in improving their education levels. However, the challenges are often too large. The “usual” tried and tested methods of delivering education are not enough.
Yet there is a potential solution.
While education struggles to cope, mobile communication has grown exponentially. Africa is today the fastest growing and second largest mobile phone market in the world. While in some countries – including Botswana, Gabon and Namibia – there are more mobile subscriptions than inhabitants, Africa still has the lowest mobile penetration of any market. There is plenty more growth to come. Over 620 million mobile subscriptions mean that for the first time in the history of the continent, its people are connected.
Pascal’s Other Apology
Carlos Bueno: That means, as teachers, we’re probably starting in the wrong place. It don’t think it has to be this way. What do we expect children to understand about math? Negative numbers, zero, exponents, the square root of two, pi. In those boring little facts I see hope, precisely because they are boring little […]
Tools of the Mind: Promising pre-k curriculum looking less promising
Daniel Willingham A lot of data from the last couple of decades shows a strong association between executive functions (the ability to inhibit impulses, to direct attention, and to use working memory) and positive outcomes in school and out of school (see review here). Kids with stronger executive functions get better grades, are more likely […]
Where American Education Lines Up Against China
It’s no secret that America’s educational systems could use some help. New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow charges that the country is in dire straits. Lining up statistics from a recent report, Blow details how students in the United States have little chance of besting their competitors — specifically, students in China.
This week, the Center for American Progress and the Center for the Next Generation released a report entitled “The Race That Really Matters: Comparing U.S., Chinese and Indian Investments in the Next Generation Workforce.” The findings were breathtaking:
Half of U.S. children get no early childhood education, and we have no national strategy to increase enrollment.
Wisconsin’s ACT scores tell story of student benchmarks
The first question when ACT releases its annual wave of data on college entrance test results is: What’s our score?
The statewide answer in the results released last week was pretty good, which is to say, almost exactly the same as every year for more than a decade. Wisconsin (22.1 overall average score) did better than the nation as a whole (21.1). Some schools and districts were up, some down, most almost exactly the same.
But if you really want to know how we did, there are insights in the results that go deeper than one number. They deserve attention not only in schools but in every home where children are at the start of a new school year. Let’s look at four:
Early grades: In addition to college entrance tests, ACT offers tests such as EXPLORE, which assesses whether eighth-graders are on track to succeed. In fact, as part of the new “waiver” plan to improve student success, Wisconsin officials are going to push to have that test used more widely.
An eye-catching result, based on national data: ACT determines what percentage of eighth graders meets some or all of four benchmark goals. The percentages of kids who meet zero, one, two, three or all four goals in eighth grade are almost exactly the same as the percentages who meet comparable benchmarks in 12th grade.Related: Madison’s ACT scores lowest since 1995, still above average.
Commentary on Teacher Pay for Performance
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
As Wisconsin school districts enter their second year in a post-Act 10 world, some are beginning to experiment with performance-based pay. It’s a good idea.
But it’s also an idea that will work only if it’s based on sound measures to determine who gets that extra pay.
A few districts, including Hartland-Lakeside in Waukesha County, are trying performance-based pay on a voluntary basis this year; it would be mandatory for all teachers by 2015 in that district, reports the Journal Sentinel’s Erin Richards.
We think districts are wise to wait for full implementation until a new statewide educator evaluation system is in place. The Educator Effectiveness System is being piloted in a few districts this year and is expected to be implemented during the 2014-2015 school year.
“We have to get the evaluation part right in the beginning, or this won’t work,” state Superintendent Tony Evers said during a meeting with the Editorial Board last week. He’s right.
It’s important to acknowledge a few facts of life:In an effort to improve teacher quality, legislators and education reformers now are turning to performance-based pay.
Their aim appears to be noble: improving student outcomes.
But I can tell you from experience, it won’t work. And, in fact, it may be harmful if the whole range of factors that affects achievement isn’t considered.
Performance-based pay is a formula derived from behaviorist business models. Like the laboratory mouse and wheel, performance-based pay distributes rewards for correctly modeled behavior.
But this isn’t a realistic model for education; educators aren’t like employees in the business world where incentives are based on profit growth.
Why create an environment that breeds competition among colleagues, that creates situations in which one teacher is rewarded because her class gets high marks while another has less success because of the variables of her students in that particular year?
Also, since student success on standardized tests may be a large part of a teacher’s evaluation, a flaw with performance-based pay is that decision-makers haven’t decided yet on what our children should be learning. Do they want students to learn how to pass tests or to gain tools that will sustain them through life and careers?
Merit pay also will produce educators who teach to the test, which hurts students and teachers alike. As noted in the 2000 article by John R. Deckop and Carol C. Cirka, “The Risk and Reward of a Double-edged Sword: Effects of a Merit Pay Program on Intrinsic Motivation,” teachers are largely driven by two factors: helping students achieve and collaborating with colleagues. Effective teachers are motivated by their collective efforts to ensure the day-to-day growth of students.
Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2016
This year’s entering college class of 2016 was born into cyberspace and they have therefore measured their output in the fundamental particles of life: bits, bytes, and bauds. They have come to political consciousness during a time of increasing doubts about America’s future, and are entering college bombarded by questions about jobs and the value of a college degree. They have never needed an actual airline “ticket,” a set of bound encyclopedias, or Romper Room. Members of this year’s freshman class, most of them born in 1994, are probably the most tribal generation in history and they despise being separated from contact with friends. They prefer to watch television everywhere except on a television, have seen a woman lead the U.S. State Department for most of their lives, and can carry school books-those that are not on their e-Readers-in backpacks that roll.
The class of 2016 was born the year of the professional baseball strike and the last year for NFL football in Los Angeles. They have spent much of their lives educating their parents to understand that you don’t take pictures on “film” and that CDs and DVDs are not “tapes.” Those parents have been able to review the crime statistics for the colleges their children have applied to and then pop an Aleve as needed. In these students’ lifetimes, with MP3 players and iPods, they seldom listen to the car radio. A quarter of the entering students already have suffered some hearing loss. Since they’ve been born, the United States has measured progress by a 2 percent jump in unemployment and a 16-cent rise in the price of a first class postage stamp.
Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List, providing a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall. The creation of Beloit’s former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief and Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride, authors of The Mindset Lists of American History: From Typewriters to Text Messages, What Ten Generations of Americans Think Is Normal (John Wiley and Sons), it was originally created as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references. It quickly became an internationally monitored catalog of the changing worldview of each new college generation. Mindset List websites at themindsetlist.com and Beloit.edu, as well as the Mediasite webcast and their Facebook page receive more than a million visits annually.
Playtime: why holidays are so important
Tara Jenkins and Karen Pittar:
What makes a memorable family holiday? Certainly not the organisation: packing for five, finding someone to look after the family pet, stopping the newspaper delivery and buying a vat of sunscreen. So why, year after year, do we put ourselves through it?
Family holidays are all about building special bonds and memories, according to Kathy Wong Kin-ho, executive director of Playright Children’s Play Association in Hong Kong.
“They are a time for play and new experiences, a chance for adventure and exploration, and importantly, for rest and relationship building.”
Family holidays don’t have to be expensive or far-flung, Wong says – just fairly regular. “We all need time every day for rest, play, sleep, love and communication. The problem is we all live in cities, and city life has taken these basic things away from us. Family holidays are a time for us to re-experience these things, and we should look forward to a break every year, as much as possible.”
National education policy — oh, how it’s changed
The way legislators, experts and other opinion leaders discuss the role of parents and schools in reducing educational inequalities has changed dramatically since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act first passed in 1965. Put simply, parents were viewed as part of the problem then, with schools seen as the solution. In recent years, with No Child Left Behind and more school choice options, these roles have flipped.
“There has been a continued focus on reducing educational inequalities; however, there are stark contrasts in the way policymakers and experts talked about what they saw as the root problems and how to solve them from 1965 to 2001 — especially the roles of parents and schools,” said Emily Meanwell, sociology doctoral student in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington.
The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act was the federal government’s first major education policy and is described by Meanwell as “one of the most important education policies in American history. Created to reduce educational inequalities found across the country, its goal was to increase opportunities for poor and disadvantaged children as part of the War on Poverty.”
