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History of School Reform Offers Glimmer of Hope
“Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning” (Belknap Press, 336 pages, $25.95) by Paul E. Peterson: Education reformers have left the essential teacher-pupil relationship untouched for more than a century, fighting instead for changes outside the classroom: desegregation, teacher pay hikes, funding equality, increased testing, vouchers and changes in curriculum.
Harvard University government professor Paul Peterson argues that although many of those efforts have been well-intentioned, even noble, American schools haven’t kept pace with changes in society. And they’re just not very good.
In a compelling and enlightening narrative, “Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning,” Peterson traces a variety of reform movements by profiling their leaders or other key players. Horace Mann fostered public schools nationwide, creating a global model in the 19th century; in the early 1900s, John Dewey pushed for education that respected children as individuals and erased social strata; the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., in leading the civil rights movement, forced schools to start doing as courts and legislators told them; Albert Shanker pushed for better pay and conditions for teachers; a series of “rights” reformers tried to improve quality across the board, while a series of scholars measuring their work found precious little benefit, and that led to the “adequacy” and choice movements, including the push for publicly funded vouchers and charter schools, which together involve less than 10 percent of U.S. schoolchildren.
Wisconsin Reading test scores are terrible, but let’s not write black kids off
Black fourth-graders in Wisconsin are bringing up the rear in national reading tests for the nation’s schoolchildren, according to a recent government report.
This news has led to another round of the usual handwringing, head-shaking and general consternation about the state of public education in cities like Milwaukee, where the largest population of black students lives.
For many, the main concern about failing black students is the assumption many won’t be able to contribute productively to society because of their lack of reading skills. In that event, some fear, failing black students will eventually end up behind bars.
If that happens, some will have their education continue with people like James Patterson.
Patterson is an education specialist with the Racine Youthful Offender Correctional Facility, where inmates 15 to 24 are held for various juvenile and adult offenses. During their time at the facility, many inmates attend classes and work toward earning a high school equivalency diploma.
Illinois State Senate OKs school vouchers
Parents with students in the lowest-performing elementary schools in Chicago could obtain vouchers to move their children into better-performing private schools under a plan that passed the Illinois Senate on Thursday.
The voucher legislation pushed by Sen. James Meeks (D-Chicago) passed 33-20, with three voting present, could affect thousands of children in the lowest-performing 10 percent of city schools. It now moves to the House.
“By passing this bill, we’ll give 22,000 kids an opportunity to have a choice on whether or not they’ll continue in their failing school or go to another non-public school within the city of Chicago,” Meeks said.
“Just as we came up with and passed charter schools to help children, now is an opportunity to pass this bill so we can help more children escape the dismal realities of Chicago’s public schools,” Meeks said.
Test time for Madison school board candidates James Howard and Tom Farley
Madison voters will soon be put to a test, perhaps one of the more important ones they’ve faced in recent years. On April 6, they’ll get to decide who will fill an open seat on the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education during its biggest financial crisis.
It’s apt, then, that the opposing candidates — James Howard and Tom Farley — also be put to the test. We gave them a series of essay questions on a range of pertinent topics, from how they’d cut the school budget to challenges they’ve faced with their own children in Madison schools.
Their answers, lightly edited for length and style, follow.
Isthmus: What are two specific programs you would suggest cutting or policies you would suggest changing due to ongoing budget challenges, and why?
Howard: In Wisconsin, for 17 years, since 1993, we have had a school funding plan that caps a school district’s annual revenue increase at 2.1%, although the actual cost to run a school district has averaged 4% during those years. Secondly, the state of Wisconsin is supposed to pay two-thirds of the cost of schools. This has never happened. So I’d suggest lifting the revenue caps and legislating complete state funding of public education.
Farley: Certainly, the state’s funding formulas and current economic cycles have had a major effect on this current budget crisis. However, budget challenges will be “ongoing” until the district addresses our own systemic issues. Policies regarding talented and gifted students should be based on national best practices. We should also address length of school year and school day, which are far too limiting and lag other countries.
Parents & The Detroit Public Schools
Less than five months after Detroit voters passed a $500.5 million school construction plan, nearly half of the 18 schools that were to be rebuilt or renovated are now headed for closure or plans for them have been altered.
The changes have outraged some supporters of the Proposal S bond who say they feel cheated for voting for a plan they were told would mean new construction or renovation in their neighborhood, but instead their schools will be shuttered as soon as this summer, according to the facilities plan released this week by Robert Bobb, emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools.
“It’s a slap in the face to the community,” said Tia Shepherd, whose children’s schools, Cooley High School and Bethune Academy, were slated for $17 million in upgrades but now are closing. “Our community got shortchanged twice.”
Duncan’s staff kept list of politicians’ school requests
Azam Ahmed and Stephanie Banchero:
While many Chicago parents took formal routes to land their children in the best schools, the well-connected also sought help through a shadowy appeals system created in recent years under former schools chief Arne Duncan.
Whispers have long swirled that some children get spots in the city’s premier schools based on whom their parents know. But a list maintained over several years in Duncan’s office and obtained by the Tribune lends further evidence to those charges. Duncan is now secretary of education under President Barack Obama.
The log is a compilation of politicians and influential business people who interceded on behalf of children during Duncan’s tenure. It includes 25 aldermen, Mayor Richard Daley’s office, House Speaker Michael Madigan, his daughter Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, former White House social secretary Desiree Rogers and former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun.
Non-connected parents, such as those who sought spots for their special-needs child or who were new to the city, also appear on the log. But the politically connected make up about three-quarters of those making requests in the documents obtained by the Tribune.
“Anything But Knowledge”: “Why Johnny’s Teacher Can’t Teach”
from The Burden of Bad Ideas Heather Mac Donald, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000, pp. 82ff.
America’s nearly last-place finish in the Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study of student achievement caused widespread consternation this February, except in the one place it should have mattered most: the nation’s teacher education schools. Those schools have far more important things to do than worrying about test scores–things like stamping out racism in aspiring teachers. “Let’s be honest,” darkly commanded Professor Valerie Henning-Piedmont to a lecture hall of education students at Columbia University’s Teachers College last February. “What labels do you place on young people based on your biases?” It would be difficult to imagine a less likely group of bigots than these idealistic young people, happily toting around their handbooks of multicultural education and their exposés of sexism in the classroom. But Teachers College knows better. It knows that most of its students, by virtue of being white, are complicitous in an unjust power structure.
The crusade against racism is just the latest irrelevancy to seize the nation’s teacher education schools. For over eighty years, teacher education in America has been in the grip of an immutable dogma, responsible for endless educational nonsense. That dogma may be summed up in the phrase: Anything But Knowledge. Schools are about many things, teacher educators say (depending on the decade)–self-actualization, following one’s joy, social adjustment, or multicultural sensitivity–but the one thing they are not about is knowledge. Oh, sure, educators will occasionally allow the word to pass their lips, but it is always in a compromised position, as in “constructing one’s own knowledge,” or “contextualized knowledge.” Plain old knowledge, the kind passed down in books, the kind for which Faust sold his soul, that is out.
The education profession currently stands ready to tighten its already viselike grip on teacher credentialing, persuading both the federal government and the states to “professionalize” teaching further. In New York, as elsewhere, that means closing off routes to the classroom that do not pass through an education school. But before caving in to the educrats’ pressure, we had better take a hard look at what education schools teach.
The course in “Curriculum and Teaching in Elementary Education” that Professor Anne Nelson (a pseudonym) teaches at the City College of New York is a good place to start. Dressed in a tailored brown suit, and with close-cropped hair, Nelson is a charismatic teacher, with a commanding repertoire of voices and personae. And yet, for all her obvious experience and common sense, her course is a remarkable exercise in vacuousness.
As with most education classes, the title of Professor Nelson’s course doesn’t give a clear sense of what it is about. Unfortunately, Professor Nelson doesn’t either. The semester began, she said in a pre-class interview, by “building a community, rich of talk, in which students look at what they themselves are doing by in-class writing.” On this, the third meeting of the semester, Professor Nelson said that she would be “getting the students to develop the subtext of what they’re doing.” I would soon discover why Professor Nelson was so vague.
“Developing the subtext” turns out to involve a chain reaction of solipsistic moments. After taking attendance and–most admirably–quickly checking the students’ weekly handwriting practice, Professor Nelson begins the main work of the day: generating feather-light “texts,” both written and oral, for immediate group analysis. She asks the students to write for seven minutes on each of three questions; “What excites me about teaching?” “What concerns me about teaching?” and then, the moment that brands this class as hopelessly steeped in the Anything But Knowledge credo: “What was it like to do this writing?”
Seattle Math Group Update
Thanks to all the people who have written, expressing your support and dedication to this effort, and also to those who have so generously made financial donations. We are many, many people nationwide standing in solidarity in our commitment to make effective math education accessible to all students.
I apologize to those who have looked for news recently on this blog: I’ve been following other math ed news, but little has been happening directly regarding our lawsuit, so I haven’t sat down to give updates.
In the last 6 weeks, there has been an outpouring of support for our lawsuit and its outcome, as well a surge of determination to deflect the tide of inquiry-based math instruction that has flooded so many of our schools. I’ve been very moved by letters from parents who have struggled (heroically, and often poignantly, it seems to me) to support their children in developing strong math skills despite curricula that they found confusing, unintelligible, and deeply discouraging. I strongly believe that, whether the Seattle School District’s appeal of Judge Spector’s decision succeeds or fails, the continuing legal action will only heighten public awareness of the tragic and devastating results of the nationwide inquiry-based math experiment. The public NEEDS TO KNOW about this debacle. I think/hope that our lawsuit and its aftermath are helping this to happen.
Biases Said to Hinder Women in Math, Science
A report on the underrepresentation of women in science and math by the American Association of University Women, to be released today, found that although women have made gains, stereotypes and cultural biases still impede their success.
The report, “Why So Few?” supported by the National Science Foundation, examined decades of research to gather recommendations for drawing more women into science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the so-called STEM fields.
“We scanned the literature for research with immediate applicability,” said Catherine Hill, the university women’s research director and lead author of the report. “We found a lot of small things can make a difference, like a course in spatial skills for women going into engineering, or teaching children that math ability is not fixed, but grows with effort.”
“Don’t blame teachers unions for our failing schools”
Before the debate:
24% FOR 43% AGAINST 33% UNDECIDED
After the debate:
25% FOR 68% AGAINST 7% UNDECIDED
Robert Rozenkranz: Thank you all very much for coming. It’s my pleasure to welcome you. My job in these evenings is to frame the debate. And we thought this one would be interesting because it seems like unions would be acting in their own self interest and in the interest of their members. In the context of public education, this might mean fighting to have the highest number of dues paying members at the highest possible levels of pay and benefits. With the greatest possible jobs security. It implies resistance to technological innovation, to charter schools, to measuring and rewarding merit and to dismissals for almost any reason at all. Qualifications, defined as degrees from teacher’s colleges, trump subject matter expertise. Seniority trumps classroom performance. Individual teachers, perhaps the overwhelming majority of them do care about their students but the union’s job is to advocate for teachers, not for education. But is that a reason to blame teachers unions for failing schools? The right way to think about this is to hold all other variables constant. Failing schools are often in failing neighborhoods where crime and drugs are common and two parent families are rare. Children may not be taught at home to restrain their impulses or to work now for rewards in the future, or the value and importance of education. Even the most able students might find it hard to progress in classrooms dominated by students of lesser ability who may be disinterested at best and disruptive at worse. In these difficult conditions, maybe teachers know better than remote administrators what their students need and the unions give them an effective voice. Maybe unions do have their own agenda. But is that really the problem? Is there strong statistical evidence that incentive pay improves classroom performance? Or is that charter schools produce better results? Or that strong unions spell weak educational outcomes, holding everything else constant? That it seems to us is the correct way to frame tonight’s debate, why we expect it will give you ample reason to think twice.
The Case for Saturday School
Kids in China already attend school 41 days a year more than students in the U.S. Now, schools across the country are cutting back to four-day weeks. Chester E. Finn Jr. on how to build a smarter education system.
“He who labors diligently need never despair, for all things are accomplished by diligence and labor.” –Menander
How many days a year did the future Alexander the Great study with Aristotle? Did Socrates teach Plato on Saturdays as well as weekdays? During summer’s heat and winter’s chill?
Though such details remain shrouded in mystery, historians have unearthed some information about education in ancient times. Spartans famously put their children through a rigorous public education system, although the focus was on military training rather than reading and writing. Students in Mesopotamia attended their schools from sunrise to sunset.
In the face of budget shortfalls, school districts in many parts of the United States today are moving toward four-day weeks. This is despite evidence that longer school weeks and years can improve academic performance. Schoolchildren in China attend school 41 days a year more than most young Americans–and receive 30% more hours of instruction. Schools in Singapore operate 40 weeks a year. Saturday classes are the norm in Korea and other Asian countries–and Japanese authorities are having second thoughts about their 1998 decision to cease Saturday-morning instruction. This additional time spent learning is one big reason that youngsters from many Asian nations routinely out-score their American counterparts on international tests of science and math.
The New Public Option
How has the United States responded to this global challenge in education? We continue to lower our standards. While No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was a major step in education reform, it has inadvertently created a system where states continue to lower the expectations bar. In 2007, only 18% of Mississippi students scored proficient in the standardized national reading test. However, 88% scored proficient in the standardized state reading test. While Mississippi can be considered an extreme, a Department of Education report acknowledged, “state-defined proficiency standards are often far lower than proficiency standards on the NAEP.” While under this system test scores have improved slightly, our student’s education level has remained constant. As states are under enormous pressure to show improvements in test scores, standards are lowered. While politicians avoid future trouble, our children inherit it.
Even our once seemingly monopoly on higher education has eroded in recent years. While ranking 2nd in the world in older adults with a college diploma, the U.S. has slipped to 8th in the world in young adults with a college diploma. As other countries continue to provide numerous incentives for their students to attend universities, the United States seems content in allowing higher education to climb ever higher out of the reach of ordinary Americans. Furthermore, China and other Asian countries have created a higher education system that is far more useful in equipping its students with the needs to survive in a 21st century economy. More than 50 percent of undergraduate degrees awarded in China are in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math, compared to just 16 percent in the United States. While we are focused on creating litigators and lawyers, China and our competitors are creating the entrepreneurs and engineers of the future.
British boy receives pioneering stem cell surgery – from his own cells
AFP:
British and Italian doctors have carried out groundbreaking surgery to rebuild the windpipe of a 10-year-old British boy using stem cells developed within his own body, they said.
In an operation Monday lasting nearly nine hours, doctors at London’s Great Ormond Street children’s hospital implanted the boy with a donor trachea, or windpipe, that had been stripped of its cells and injected with his own.
Over the next month, doctors expect the boy’s bone marrow stem cells to begin transforming themselves within his body into tracheal cells — a process that, if successful, could lead to a revolution in regenerative medicine.
The new organ should not be rejected by the boy’s immune system, a risk in traditional transplants, because the cells are derived from his own tissue.
“This procedure is different in a number of ways, and we believe it’s a real milestone,” said Professor Martin Birchall, head of translational regenerative medicine at University College London.
Madison School Board Candidate Issue Essays
Tom Farley School district must shift philosophy:
an Madison afford a new School Board member who requires time to understand the issues, study the research, or develop a good relationship with board members and union leaders? These are all certainly desirable objectives, and over time it is important that they occur. Yet these are exceptional times for Madison and its public school system.
The federal government has demanded that educational leaders in every community must start demonstrating a willingness to challenge the status quo, seek innovative solutions, and begin executing change management efforts. Only those school districts that show a willingness to radically alter their approaches to education, in order to achieve real results, will be supported and funded. The time has come to bring that level of leadership to the Madison School Board.
Management of the Madison School District cannot continue operating in its present form, or under its current philosophies. We have called for additional funding and referendums to increase taxes, and this has not produced the promised results. Clearly, it is not lack of money that hinders our education system; it is the system itself. That needs to change.
James Howard: We must make cuts, but not in classroom
As parents, teachers, taxpayers and voters evaluate the financial woes our Madison public schools face, there are several key points to keep in mind.
First, the taxpayers in our district have been very generous by passing several referendums that have helped close the gap between what schools can spend and what it really costs to educate our kids. However, due to the depressed economy voters are focused on direct family financial impacts and less on the indirect costs that result from any decline in quality of our public schools. Since the district is currently operating under a three-year recurring referendum, it would be a lot to ask of taxpayers to vote yes on a new referendum.
That means we must look elsewhere for answers on how to close what might be a gap of as much as $30 million. Let me be very clear as to where I wouldn’t look: the classroom. We need to protect learning by keeping class sizes small; by funding initiatives that help at-risk children perform up to grade level in basic subjects; and by funding those things that make Madison schools so special, like programs in the arts and athletics.
National School Standards, at Last
The countries that have left the United States behind in math and science education have one thing in common: They offer the same high education standards — often the same curriculum — from one end of the nation to the other. The United States relies on a generally mediocre patchwork of standards that vary, not just from state to state, but often from district to district. A child’s education depends primarily on ZIP code.
That could eventually change if the states adopt the new rigorous standards proposed last week by the National Governors Association and a group representing state school superintendents. The proposal lays out clear, ambitious goals for what children should learn year to year and could change curriculums, tests and teacher training.
Loud noises pose hearing-loss risk to kids
For football fans, the indelible image of last month’s Super Bowl might have been quarterback Drew Brees’ fourth-quarter touchdown pass that put the New Orleans Saints ahead for good. But for audiologists around the nation, the highlight came after the game – when Brees, in a shower of confetti, held aloft his 1-year-old son, Baylen.
The boy was wearing what looked like the headphones worn by his father’s coaches on the sideline, but they were actually low-cost, low-tech earmuffs meant to protect his hearing from the stadium’s roar.
Specialists say such safeguards are critical for young ears in a deafening world. Hearing loss from exposure to loud noises is cumulative and irreversible; if such exposure starts in infancy, children can live “half their lives with hearing loss,” said Brian Fligor, director of diagnostic audiology at Children’s Hospital Boston.
Algebra in Wonderland
SINCE “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” was published, in 1865, scholars have noted how its characters are based on real people in the life of its author, Charles Dodgson, who wrote under the name Lewis Carroll. Alice is Alice Pleasance Liddell, the daughter of an Oxford dean; the Lory and Eaglet are Alice’s sisters Lorina and Edith; Dodgson himself, a stutterer, is the Dodo (“Do-Do-Dodgson”).
But Alice’s adventures with the Caterpillar, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and so on have often been assumed to be based purely on wild imagination. Just fantastical tales for children — and, as such, ideal material for the fanciful movie director Tim Burton, whose “Alice in Wonderland” opened on Friday.
Yet Dodgson most likely had real models for the strange happenings in Wonderland, too. He was a tutor in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, and Alice’s search for a beautiful garden can be neatly interpreted as a mishmash of satire directed at the advances taking place in Dodgson’s field.
In the mid-19th century, mathematics was rapidly blossoming into what it is today: a finely honed language for describing the conceptual relations between things. Dodgson found the radical new math illogical and lacking in intellectual rigor. In “Alice,” he attacked some of the new ideas as nonsense — using a technique familiar from Euclid’s proofs, reductio ad absurdum, where the validity of an idea is tested by taking its premises to their logical extreme.
Education reformers making progress
ittle Johnny can’t read or write because, in government schools, the interests of teachers’ unions prevail over the interests of children. Unions may be beneficial to educators, but they are indifferent — if not hostile — to the intellectual development of children.
But education reformers nationwide are celebrating a rare victory for the kids. Last month in Rhode Island, Superintendant Frances Gallo fired the entire staff of Central Falls High School — a total of 93 people. The grateful citizens of Central Falls have erected a billboard in Gallo’s honor. Rightly so. Gallo, Rhode Island Education Commissioner Deborah Gist and the Central Falls school board (which approved the firings on a 5-2 vote) are an inspiration to the public school reform movement.
Central Falls High is one of the worst schools in Rhode Island. Only 45 percent of the students are proficient in reading, 29 percent in writing and, incredibly, only 4 percent in math. Compare those abysmal numbers to Rhode Island’s (somewhat less embarrassing) statewide averages in the same subjects: 69, 42 and 27 percent, respectively. Furthermore, half of the students at Central Falls are failing every subject, and the school’s graduation rate is 48 percent.
Only teachers’ unions could defend such a spectacular failure. Several hundred bused-in, placard-waving educators and their union representatives showed up in Central Falls hours before the firings. “We are behind Central Falls teachers,” proclaimed Mark Bostic of the American Federation of Teachers, “and we will be here as long as it takes to get justice.” But on Tuesday, the Central Falls union publicly pledged to support Gallo’s reforms, and she said she’s willing to negotiate.
Bill Ayers and friends eat their young
Amidst the Race to the Top excitement this week, an important story may have gotten lost in the buzz. On Wednesday, my colleague Jamie Davies O’Leary, a 27 year-old Princeton grad, liberal Democrat, and Teach For America alumna described her surprise bookshop encounter with former Weatherman and lefty school reformer Bill Ayers.
If Bill Ayers and Fred and Mike Klonsky were 22 again, they would be signing up for Teach For America. The whole thing is worth reading (it’s a great story) but note this passage in particular, about Ayers’ talk:[Ayers] answered a young woman’s question about New York Teaching Fellows and Teach For America with a diatribe about how such programs can’t fix public education and consist of a bunch of ivy leaguers and white missionaries more interested in a resume boost than in helping students. Whoa.
And:
As someone who read Savage Inequalities years ago and attribute my decision to become a teacher partially to the social justice message, I almost felt embarrassed. But that was before I learned a bit of context, nuance, data, and evidence surrounding education policy debates. It’s as if Bill Ayers hasn’t been on the planet for the last two decades.Almost as soon as Jamie’s essay was posted, the Klonsky brothers (Fred and Mike–both longtime friends and associates of Ayers, both involved in progressive education causes) went after her. Fred posted a missive titled, “File under misguided sense of one’s own importance.” Mike tweeted that her depiction of the encounter was a “fantasy.”
Cops vs Kids
If you don’t think the police in New York City need to be reined in, consider the way the cops and their agents are treating youngsters in the city’s schools.
In March 2009, a girl and a boy in the sixth grade at the Hunts Point School in the Bronx were fooling around and each drew a line on the other’s desk with an erasable marker. The teacher told them to erase the lines, and the kids went to get tissues. This blew up into a major offense when school safety officers became involved.
The safety officers, who have been accused in many instances of mistreating children, are peace officers assigned to the schools. They wear uniforms, work for the New York Police Department and have the power to detain, search, handcuff and arrest students. They do not carry guns.
In this case, the officers seized the two pupils and handcuffed them. Before long, an armed police officer showed up to question the youngsters. The girl asked for her mother and began to cry. Tears were no defense in the minds of the brave New York City law enforcers surrounding this errant child. They were determined to keep the city safe from sixth graders armed with Magic Markers.
40,000 Teachers Give Their Views on Education Reform in “Primary Sources: America’s Teachers on America’s Schools”
Teachers call for engaging curriculum, supportive leadership, clear standards common across states in survey by Scholastic Inc. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Scholastic Inc. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today released Primary Sources: America’s Teachers on America’s Schools, a landmark report presenting the results of a national survey of more than 40,000 public school teachers in grades pre-K to 12. The survey reveals that, while teachers have high expectations for their students, they overwhelmingly agree that too many students are leaving unprepared for success beyond high school. Primary Sources reveals teachers’ thoughtful, nuanced views on issues at the heart of education reform – from performance pay and standardized tests to academic standards and teacher evaluation. Teacher responses reveal five powerful solutions to raise student achievement.
“Teachers are a critical part of preparing our children for the future, and their voices are an essential addition to the national debate on education,” said Margery Mayer, Executive Vice President and President, Scholastic Education. “At Scholastic, we work daily with teachers and we know that they have powerful ideas on how best to tackle the challenges facing our schools. Since teachers are the frontline of delivering education in the classroom, the reform movement will not succeed without their active support. Primary Sources is a step in ensuring that teachers’ voices are a part of this important conversation.”
Jay Matthews has more.
Fire the teachers? When schools fail, it may work
When all the teachers were fired from Central Falls High School last week in a sweeping effort at school reform, their superintendent gave them a taste of the accountability President Barack Obama says is necessary.
It is a strategy that has been used elsewhere, such as in Chicago and Los Angeles. But while there have been some improvements in test scores, schools where most teachers have been replaced still grapple with problems of poverty and discipline. Even advocates of the approach say firing a teaching staff is just one of several crucial steps that must be taken to turn around a school.
Central Falls teachers have appealed the firings and both they and the administration are now indicating a willingness to go back to the table to avoid mass firings. Teachers say wholesale firings unfairly target instructors who work with impoverished children who have been neglected for years.
“We believe the teachers have been scapegoated here,” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said of the Central Falls firings this week.
The key to education
I wish to take issue with some of the assumptions made by the four teachers who were interviewed concerning the Gates Foundation grant (“Teachers in transition,” Views, Feb. 28).
It was said several times that good parenting is essential for children’s success in school. Not true! My two brothers and I grew up in a totally dysfunctional home, filled with constant criticism, hatred, anger, punishment, a mostly absent father, and one in which our mother constantly set us one against the other. There were no books, no magazines, no art on the walls and certainly no love or encouragement. Never once did we hear, “I’m proud of you!” or “Good job!”
We should have been poster children for not succeeding in school, but we weren’t. Today, my older brother is a medical doctor. My younger brother has two master’s degrees and is a life-long learner with a huge book collection. I started and completed my BA in English at age 25, with two toddlers to care for and no help from anyone, graduated in three years and had a successful career. We all still read voraciously.
Life Among the ‘Yakkity Yaks’
‘Who do you think made the first stone spear?” asks Temple Grandin. “That wasn’t the yakkity yaks sitting around the campfire. It was some Asperger sitting in the back of a cave figuring out how to chip rocks into spearheads. Without some autistic traits you wouldn’t even have a recording device to record this conversation on.”
As many as one in 110 American children are affected by autism spectrum disorders, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Boys are four times more likely to be diagnosed than girls. But what causes this developmental disorder, characterized by severe social disconnection and communication impairment, remains a mystery.
Nevertheless, with aggressive early intervention and tremendous discipline many people with autism can lead productive, even remarkable, lives. And Ms. Grandin–doctor of animal science, ground-breaking cattle expert, easily the most famous autistic woman in the world–is one of them.
Earlier this month, HBO released a film about her to critical acclaim. Claire Danes captures her with such precision that Ms. Grandin tells me watching the movie feels like “a weird time machine” to the 1960s and ’70s and that it shows “exactly how my mind works.”
Spring reading: The Demise of the Venerable Codex, or Bound Book….
The demise of the venerable codex, or bound book, has been predicted at least since 1899, when HG Wells in The Sleeper Awakes envisaged the entire corpus of human literature reduced to a mini-library of “peculiar double cylinders” that would be viewable on a screen. More informed commentators have been arguing since the computer became domesticised in the 1980s that it would herald the end of print but, each time, the predicted end of days has rolled around with no sign of an apocalypse. As the joke goes, books are still cheap, robust and portable, and the battery life is great.
Most of us are in no hurry to see them go. This week the UK’s early version of World Book Day rolls around with its freight of £1 children’s books (the rest of the world gets around to it on April 23). Meanwhile, Oxford has just launched upon the public its lavish Companion to the Book, a vast work of reference seven years in the making in which some 400 scholars chart the forms that books have taken since mankind began scratching out characters.
But it seems reasonable to think that change is afoot. At the time of writing, an American court is in the process of reconsidering the settlement that Google reached with the Authors Guild in 2008, allowing the company to digitise thousands of books, including many still in copyright. The case has caused heated debate – court documents this week revealed that more than 6,500 authors, many well-known, have decided to opt out of the Google settlement. The case continues: its outcome promises to transform the way in which we view and access information. If Google has its way, one of the world’s largest companies will end up with unchallenged distribution rights over one of the world’s largest book collections.
Parent Feedback on the Madison School District’s “Branding” Expenditures
via a kind reader’s email: Parent Diane Harrington:
Dear Board Members, Dr. Nerad, and Madison Alders,
My 11-year-old and I visited John Muir Elementary for basketball practice one recent evening. Their gym has banners noting that for several years they’ve been named a “School of Excellence.”
Ben’s school, Orchard Ridge Elementary, had just been dubbed a “School of Promise.”
Which school would YOU rather go to?
But Ben didn’t need a marketing effort to tell him which school was which; he knows some John Muir kids. Ben, too, would like to go to a school where kids are expected to learn and to behave instead of just encouraged to.
Just like those banners, the very idea of your upcoming, $86,000 “branding” effort isn’t fooling anyone.
You don’t need to improve your image. You need to improve your schools.
Stop condescending to children, to parents and to the public. Skip the silly labels and the PR plans.
Instead, just do your #^%* job. (If you need help filling in that blank, head to ORE or Toki. Plenty of kids – some as young as kindergarten – use several colorful words in the hallways, classrooms, lunchroom and playground without even a second look, much less disciplinary action, from a teacher or principal.)
Create an environment that strives for excellence, not mediocrity. Guide children to go above and beyond, rather than considering your job done once they’ve met the minimum requirements.
Until then, it’s all too obvious that any effort to “cultivate relationships with community partners” is just what you’re branding it: marketing. It’s just about as meaningless as that “promise” label on ORE or the “honor roll” that my 13-year-old and half the Toki seventh graders are on.
P.S. At my neighborhood association’s annual Winter Social earlier tonight, one parent of a soon-to-be-elementary-age child begged me to tell him there was some way to get a voucher so he could avoid sending his daughter to ORE. His family can’t afford private school. Another parent told me her soon-to-be-elementary-age kids definitely (whew!) were going to St. Maria Goretti instead of ORE. A friend – even though her son was finishing up at ORE this year – pulled her daughter out after kindergarten (yes, to send her to Goretti), because the atmosphere at ORE is just too destructive and her child wasn’t learning anything. These people aren’t going to be fooled by a branding effort. And you’re only fooling yourselves (and wasting taxpayer money) if you think otherwise.
Regarding the Madison School District’s $86,000 “branding campaign,” recent polls have surveyed the many families who have left the district for private schools, virtual academies, home schooling or open enrollment in other districts.
Public schools are tuition free and close to home, so why have these parents chosen more expensive, less convenient options? The survey results are clear: because Madison schools have disregarded their children’s learning needs.
Top issues mentioned include a lack of challenging academics and out-of-control behavior problems. Families are leaving because of real experience in the schools, not “bad press” or “street corner stories.”
How will the district brand that?
Lorie Raihala Madison
The charter school test case that didn’t happen
If they hadn’t been mostly shut out of bids to run a slew of new L.A. Unified campuses, the groups might have demonstrated how they handle students with challenging needs.
Los Angeles school officials lost a chance this week to test whether the booming charter movement can take on all the problems of the district’s traditional, and often troubled, schools.
On Tuesday, the Board of Education denied proposals from three major charter organizations that had sought to run newly built neighborhood schools, which would have included substantial numbers of limited-English speakers, special education students, foster children and low-income families.
That is exactly the population that charter schools have been criticized for not sufficiently reaching.
Charters are independently managed and exempt from some rules that govern traditional schools. They’re also schools of choice — campuses that parents seek and select. And researchers have found that charters enroll fewer students with more challenging, and often more expensive, needs.
Despite Madison’s relative affluence, poverty rate growing rapidly
Mike Ivey, via a kind reader’s email:
The doors at the Society of St. Vincent de Paul food pantry on Fish Hatchery Road don’t open for another 30 minutes, but a line has already formed.
They wait quietly, for the most part, this rainbow coalition of all ages: African-American grandmothers, Latino families, young women with pierced tongues, disabled seniors and working fathers.
What they have in common is poverty. Once a month, with a valid photo ID, clients get enough groceries to last a week.
“As my kids get older, I just keep having to cook more, so every bit helps,” says Belinda Washington, 44, who has four children at home ages 4 to 17.
A Chicago native, Washington moved to Madison 17 years ago and lives in the Lake Point neighborhood off West Broadway on the city’s south side. Her resume includes food service, catering and factory work but she’s been unemployed since her youngest was born. “I keep applying but the jobs are hard to come by,” she says.
To Lynch a Child: Bullying and Gender Non-Conformity in Our Nation’s Schools
n January 2010, a 9-year old boy named Montana Lance hung himself in a bathroom at the Texas elementary school he attended. Although certainly shocking, such acts are unfortunately becoming less and less unusual. In fact, the suicide of Montana Lance is very reminiscent of what happened in April 2009 when two 11-year-old boys, one in Massachusetts and one in Georgia, likewise committed suicide just days apart. What would cause these children to end their lives? The answer in each case is the same: all three suffered extreme levels of victimization at the hands of school bullies–bullying that others have described as involving “relentless homophobic taunts.” And, as we can see from the fate of these three little boys, this form of harassment was obviously very traumatic.
In this article, I look at the growing problem of school bullying in America today. Now, almost all children are teased and most will even face at least some form of bullying during their childhood. However, studies reveal that some children will unfortunately become chronic victims of school bullying. Chief among that group are those children whose gender expression is at odds with what society considers “appropriate.” As my article explores, the gender stereotypes that exist within our society are frequently to blame for the more extreme levels of bullying currently being carried out in our nation’s schools. And the impact this bullying has on its victims is staggering. Earlier I mentioned three children who took their own lives as a result of bullying. These are but three examples of those who have lost their lives to gender-based bullying. However, there are countless other victims who, although not paying with their lives, are nonetheless paying dearly in other ways. Specifically, the psychological literature on the emotional impacts that befall these chronic victims of bullying reveals a whole host of resulting problems–debilitating consequences that can last a lifetime.
Hysteria Around School Turnarounds
The NYTimes ran a story with this misleading headline and byline:
A Vote to Fire All Teachers at a Failing High School
CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — A plan to dismiss the entire faculty and staff of the only public high school in this small city just west of the Massachusetts border was approved Tuesday night at an emotional public meeting of the school board.When the teachers failed to adopt a ‘transformation’ plan that included a modest lengthening of the day, the superintendent shifted to Plan B, what federal School Improvement Grants (SIG) call Turnaround, which requires that at least 50% of the staff be replaced. Under Rhode Island law, teachers must be notified of the potential for nonrenewal by March 20, hence the board vote and notices. All the teachers will have the opportunity to reapply, up to half will be rehired.
The hysteria is now reverberating on CNN and papers around the country. Central Falls may be an early example but there are thousands to come. As I began reporting in October, SIG will cause widespread urban disruption. But we’ll all need to be cautious to use language carefully and differentiate between ‘firing all the teachers’ and notifying them of the requirement to reapply for their positions.
Related: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s speech to the Madison Rotary:
Last Wednesday, Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman spoke to the Madison Rotary Club on “What Wisconsin’s Public Education Model Needs to Learn from General Motors Before it is too late.” 7MB mp3 audio (the audio quality is not great, but you can hear the talk if you turn up the volume!).
Zimman’s talk ranged far and wide. He discussed Wisconsin’s K-12 funding formula (it is important to remember that school spending increases annually (from 1987 to 2005, spending grew by 5.10% annually in Wisconsin and 5.25% in the Madison School District), though perhaps not in areas some would prefer.
“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).
Will Fitzhugh…has been fighting for more non-fiction for years: Help pick non-fiction for schools
Jay Matthews:
It wasn’t until I was in my fifties that I realized how restricted my high school reading lists had been, and how little they had changed for my three children. They were enthusiastic readers, as my wife and I were. But all, or almost all, of the required books for either generation were fiction.
I am not dismissing the delights of Twain, Crane, Buck, Saroyan and Wilder, all of which I read in high school. But I think I would also have enjoyed Theodore H. White, John Hersey, Barbara Tuchman and Bruce Catton if they had been assigned.
Maybe that’s changing. Maybe rebellious teens these days are fleeing Faulkner, Hemingway, Austen, and Baldwin, or whoever is on the 12th grade English list, and furtively reading Malcolm Gladwell, David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin and other non-fiction stars.
Sadly, no.
The Renaissance Learning company released a list of what 4.6 million students read in the 2008-2009 school year, based on its Accelerated Reader program that encourages children to choose their own books. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter has given way to the hormonal allure of Stephenie Meyer’s teen vampire books, but both school and non-school books are still almost all fiction.
When I ask local school districts why this is, some get defensive and insist they do require non-fiction. But the only title that comes up with any frequency is Night, Elie Wiesel’s story of his boyhood in the Holocaust. It is one of only two nonfiction works to appear in the top 20 of Accelerated Reader’s list of books read by high schoolers. The other is ‘A Child Called ‘It,’ Dave Pelzer’s account of his alleged abuse as a child by his alcoholic mother.
Will Fitzhugh, whose Concord Review quarterly publishes research papers by high school students, has been fighting for more non-fiction for years. I agree with him that high school English departments’ allegiance to novels leads impressionable students to think, incorrectly, that non-fiction is a bore. That in turn makes them prefer fiction writing assignments to anything that could be described by that dreaded word “research.”
A relatively new trend in student writing is called “creative nonfiction.” It makes Fitzhugh shudder. “It allows high school students (mostly girls) to complete writing assignments and participate in ‘essay contests’ by writing about their hopes, experiences, doubts, relationships, worries, victimization (if any), and parents, as well as more existential questions such as ‘How do I look?’ and ‘What should I wear to school?'” he said in a 2008 essay for EducationNews.org.
Educators say non-fiction is more difficult than fiction for students to comprehend. It requires more factual knowledge, beyond fiction’s simple truths of love, hate, passion and remorse. So we have a pathetic cycle. Students don’t know enough about the real world because they don’t read non-fiction and they can’t read non-fiction because they don’t know enough about the real world.
Educational theorist E.D. Hirsch Jr. insists this is what keeps many students from acquiring the communication skills they need for successful lives. “Language mastery is not some abstract skill,” he said in his latest book, The Making of Americans. “It depends on possessing broad general knowledge shared by other competent people within the language community.”
I think we can help. Post comments here, or send an email to mathewsj@washpost.com, with non-fiction titles that would appeal to teens. I will discuss your choices in a future column. I can see why students hate writing research papers when their history and science reading has been confined to the flaccid prose of their textbooks. But what if they first read Longitude by Dava Sobel or A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar? What magical exploration of reality would you add to your favorite teenager’s reading list?
Raising the realtime child
Amazingly enough, tomorrow will mark the one-year anniversary of the start of Rough Type’s Realtime Chronicles. Time flies, and realtime flies like a bat out of hell.
Since I began writing the series, I have received innumerable emails and texts from panicked parents worried that they may be failing in what has become the central challenge of modern parenting: ensuring that children grow up to be well adapted to the realtime environment. These parents are concerned – and rightly so – that their kids will be at a disadvantage in the realtime milieu in which we all increasingly live, work, love, and compete for the small bits of attention that, in the aggregate, define the success, or failure, of our days. If maladapted to realtime existence, these parents understand, their progeny will end up socially ostracized, with few friends and even fewer followers. “Can we even be said to be alive,” one agitated young mother wrote me, “if our status updates go unread?” The answer, of course, is no. In the realtime environment, the absence of interactive stimuli, even for brief periods of “time,” may result in a state of reflective passivity indistinguishable from nonexistence. On a more practical level, a lack of realtime skills is sure to constrain a young person’s long-term job prospects. At best, he or she will be fated to spend his or her days involved in some form of manual labor, possibly even working out of doors with severely limited access to screens. At worst, he or she will have to find a non-tenure-track position in academia.
Lift the cap on Wisconsin virtual schools
In Wisconsin, we have always been proud of our strong education system. New demands and technology are changing the way we prepare our children to enter the 21st century workforce. We must ensure that our state’s education system remains a national leader by providing our children with the skills that are needed to compete in a global economy.
It has been proven that not every child learns the same way. In fact, some students learn best outside of the traditional bricks-and-mortar school setting. For these children, virtual schools have come to fill an educational need. Virtual schools involve long-distance learning that use computers and Internet connections. These schools employ vigorous and challenging curricula along with regular interaction with state-certified teachers.
However, virtual schools were nearly wiped out in 2007 due to a court challenge by WEAC, the state’s teachers union.
In response, in the last legislative session I led the charge to ensure that virtual schools remain an option for Wisconsin’s parents and children. A bipartisan compromise was reached to keep the schools open but included a cap of 5,250 students requested by critics until a legislative audit could be conducted.
Friends School of Baltimore Teaches 8th-Graders About Islam
Most American schoolchildren learn about Islam in a social studies classroom. But at the Friends School in Baltimore, eighth-graders make their own mini-pilgrimage every year, to the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C.
As their bus rattles along the highway south to Washington, most of the kids are busy making up songs about each other. But 12-year-old Julia Potter is counting off the Five Pillars of Islam on her fingers: charity, prayer, fasting, profession of faith, and the pilgrimage to Mecca.
These kids are well-versed in the basics of Islam and more: In class, they learn about Judaism, Hinduism and Christianity; about prophets, taboos and holy laws. And every year, eighth-graders visit the Islamic Center — though every year, according to teacher Deloris Jones, they get there late. “There’s absolutely nothing over the years I have been able to do to keep this thing on time,” Jones says.
Change and Race to the Top
Which brings us to this next item, one with twist and turns not completely understandable at this point, but certainly not held up by people like myself as a model of how to “get the job properly done” — to use Herbert’s words.
Diane Ravitch, an intellectual on education policy, difficult to pigeonhole politically (appointed to public office by both G.H.W. Bush and Clinton), but best described as an independent, co-writes a blog with Deborah Meier that some of our readers may be familiar with called “Bridging Differences.” This past week she highlighted a possibly disturbing development in the Race to the Top competition program of the Department of Education, that dangles $4.3 billion to the states with a possible $1.3 billion to follow. Ravitch’s critique suggests that this competition is not run by pragmatists, but rather by ideologues who are led by the Bill Gates Foundation.If this election had been held five years ago, the department would be insisting on small schools, but because Gates has already tried and discarded that approach, the department is promoting the new Gates remedies: charter schools, privatization, and evaluating teachers by student test scores.
Two of the top lieutenants of the Gates Foundation were placed in charge of the competition by Secretary Arne Duncan. Both have backgrounds as leaders in organisations dedicated to creating privately managed schools that operate with public money.
None of this is terribly surprising (See the Sunlight Foundation’s excellent work on the Obama Administration’s insider dealings with PhRMA). Jeff Henriques did a lot of work looking at the Madison School District’s foray into Small Learning Communities.
Is it possible to change the current K-12 bureacracy from within? Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman spoke about the “adult employment” focus of the K-12 world:
“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).
I suspect that Duncan and many others are trying to significantly change the adult to student process, rather than simply pumping more money into the current K-12 monopoly structures.
They are to be commended for this.
Will there be waste, fraud and abuse? Certainly. Will there be waste fraud and abuse if the funds are spent on traditional K-12 District organizations? Of course. John Stossel notes that when one puts together the numbers, Washington, DC’s schools spend $26,000 per student, while they provide $7,500 to the voucher schools…..
We’re better off with diffused governance across the board. Milwaukee despite its many travails, is developing a rich K-12 environment.
The Verona school board narrowly approved a new Mandarin immersion charter school on a 4-3 vote recently These citizen initiatives offer some hope for new opportunities for our children. I hope we see more of this.
Finally, all of this presents an interesting contrast to what appears to be the Madison School District Administration’s ongoing “same service” governance approach.
Give students a reality check: Assign more nonfiction books.
It wasn’t until I was in my 50s that I realized how restricted my high school reading lists had been and how little they had changed for my three children. They were enthusiastic readers, as my wife and I were. But all, or almost all, of the required books for both generations were fiction.
I am not dismissing the delights of Twain, Crane, Buck, Saroyan and Wilder, all of which I read in high school. But I think I also would have enjoyed Theodore H. White, John Hersey, Barbara Tuchman and Bruce Catton if they had been assigned.
Could that be changing? Maybe rebellious teens these days are fleeing Faulkner, Hemingway, Austen and Baldwin, or whoever is on the 12th grade English list, and furtively reading Malcolm Gladwell, David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin and other nonfiction stars.
Sadly, no. The Renaissance Learning company released a list of what 4.6 million students read in the 2008-09 school year, based on its Accelerated Reader program, which encourages children to choose their own books. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter has given way to the hormonal allure of Stephenie Meyer’s teen vampire books, but both school and non-school books are still almost all fiction.
Fine-arts teachers connect the educational dots
First-year elementary school teachers must take a “generalist” exam to be in compliance with federal standards. The Texas Education Agency has successfully fought for a waiver that would exempt fine-arts teachers from the test.
While I certainly realize the time and expense involved in testing as many as 30,000 new teachers statewide and understand TEA’s desire to cut that number, I feel that such an exemption is a big mistake.
Elementary school is a time when children learn about the world around them and make connections between subjects. More detailed instruction in various disciplines comes at the secondary level. With the current emphasis on testing in math, reading, science and social studies, classroom teachers find themselves working to see that basic concepts in each of these subjects are learned by their students. Time constraints make lessons with numerous “connections” difficult to achieve.
What better place to weave many subjects together than in the music or art class? I have always chosen to teach this way but have discovered than many music teachers do not, perhaps because they do not see the necessity or because they may not see the connections themselves. A test of general knowledge may help.
New Plan on San Francisco School Selection, but Still Discontent
After years of complaints from parents, the San Francisco Unified School District has just taken a serious step toward revamping its well-meaning but labyrinthine student-assignment system, which decides the educational homes for tens of thousands of children.
The current system — designed to meet the terms of a settlement in a long-fought federal desegregation case — involves a complicated computer algorithm that creates student “profiles,” using various economic and educational factors, with the aim of sending students of different backgrounds to the same schools.
It has resulted instead in more segregation and has aggravated parents to a point where efforts to manipulate the system have become endemic.
This month, the school district rolled out a new plan. It is designed to more closely consider proximity between a student’s home and classroom. It is to be applied to every child headed for kindergarten.
Rhode Island Education Chief Gist Chat Transcript on Teacher Quality, Parenting, Firing all Central Falls High School Teachers
Deborah Gist & Pamela Reinsel Cotter:
Deborah Gist: Chasm: Seniority is no longer a way in which teachers will be selected and assigned in our state. I sent a letter to all superintendents last fall to remind them that the Basic Education Program Regulation in going in effect this summer, and seniority policies would be inconsistent with that regulation. Unfortunately, state statute requires that layoffs be done on a “first in, first out” policy. Legislation would be required to change that, and I would wholeheartedly support it if it were introduced. I will do whatever is necessary to ensure that the very highest quality teacher is in every classroom in our state.
Deborah Gist: I can’t imagine how any district or school leader could interpret my words or actions to be anything other than ensuring the top quality, so “change for change’s sake” would be contradictory to that.
Bob: Please run for governor. I love your go getter attitude!
Deborah Gist: I appreciate your support very much. Make sure to keep watching and hold me accountable for results!
Parent: As a parent of 2 children, I know how crucial parent involvement is. Has anyone looked at educating the parents of the kids of these failing schools? You can replace the teachers….and you can give new teachers incentives to change things around. But this is a band aid. Teachers are blamed for too many problems. They can’t be expected to solve the problems of society. Teachers have many many challenges these days- more so than 25 years ago. Kis and parents need to take responsibility for on education. Just look at math grades around the state. Kids don’t know how to deal with fractions because they don’t know how to tell time on an analgoue clock. But the teachers are blamed. Let’s take a look at the real problems. Educate the kids – the parents- look around the country at other programs. Please don’t make this mistake.
Deborah Gist: Parent involvement is important, and supportive, engaged parents are important partners in a child’s education. Fortunately, we know that great teaching can overcome those instances when children have parents who are unable to provide that level of support. I don’t blame teachers, but I do hold them accountable for results. I also hold myself and everyone on my team accountable.
Matt: Will you apologize for repeatedly saying that “we recruit the majority of our teachers from the bottom third of high school students going to college”? The studies that you cite do not back this up.
Deborah Gist: Matt: As a traditionally trained teacher, I know this is difficult to hear. I don’t like it either. Unfortunately, it is true. While there are many extraordinarily intelligent educators throughout Rhode Island and our country, the US–unlike other high performing countries–recruits our teachers from the lowest performers in our secondary schools based on SAT scores and other performance data.
Deborah Gist: If you have a source that shows otherwise, I’d love to see that. I’m always open to learning new resources. So, I’d be happy for you to share that.
Clusty Search: Deborah Gist. Deborah Gist’s website and Twitter account.
A must read.
Questioning the Way Colleges Are Managed
Ninety percent of parents believe it is likely that their children will attend college, and most of them believe that any student can get the loans or financial aid required. But a new survey, reported on by my colleague, Tamar Lewin, finds that parents don’t have a lot of confidence in the way colleges are managed.
Increasingly, parents think colleges are too focused on their own finances, rather than the educational experience of students, the survey found.“One of the really disturbing things about this, for those of us who work in higher education,” said Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, “is the vote of no confidence we’re getting from the public. They think college is important, but they’re really losing trust in the management and leadership.”
In English-Crazy China, 8D World Teaches Kids To Speak In Virtual Worlds; Lands A Deal With CCTV
In China, learning spoken English is giving rise to a huge and growing market. For instance, in addition to English classes in public schools, parents send their children to about 50,000 for-profit training schools around the country, where English is the most popular subject. Instead of American Idol, on CCTV, the national government-owned TV network, they have the Star of Outlook English Talent Competition. This is possibly the largest nationwide competition in China. Last year, 400,000 students between the ages of 6 and 14 took part in it.
This year, the competition is adding a virtual twist, and a startup based in Massachusetts called 8D World is at the center of it. 8D World runs a virtual world called Wiz World Online for Chinese-speaking kids who want to learn English. In what is a huge coup for the startup, this year’s CCTV English competition will use Wiz World Online as its official training and competition platform. Wiz World will be used to screen contestants and will be promoted to millions of Chinese viewers.
Honored teacher added to Milwaukee Public Schools casualty list
Seventeen days ago, Jessica Deibel stood in front of the Milwaukee School Board, accepting praise for her accomplishments. Superintendent William Andrekopoulos gave her a plaque. Each board member shook her hand.
Deibel and only seven other teachers in Milwaukee Public Schools were recognized for receiving in the past year national board certification, a prestigious credential for teachers.
Congratulations, Ms. Deibel. And now you’re going to be bounced out of your job.
The school you love – where you send your own children – is taking it on the chin as the financial picture of MPS takes major steps into deeper financial distress. The staff will shrink at this little school where student achievement exceeds city averages by wide margins. Class size will go up sharply. Time with music, art and gym teachers will be reduced or eliminated.
Even with your new certification, the product of months of work, you have the least seniority in this small school and you will be the first one required to leave, Ms. Deibel.
“It was kind of like a slap in the face,” Deibel said of the recognition at the School Board meeting. “Here’s your reward, but you can’t stay here.”
Politicians and Pundits Respond to New Jersey Governor Christie’s Education Cuts
Senate Majority Leader Barbara Buono on Gov. Christie’s plan to force school districts to use surpluses in lieu of state aid when that money would typically go back to residents in the form of property tax relief: “It’s a solution to the budget crisis that falls disproportionately on the backs of middle-class homeowners, which is something I can’t support.”
Senate President Stephen M. Sweeney: “So much for a handshake. Governing by executive order and keeping plans secret until the last minute is not bipartisanship.”Assembly Education Committee Chairman Patrick J. Diegnan, Jr. on Christie’s plans to cut state aid to schools: “Democrats were able last year to increase school aid even as we slashed the state budget, so Gov. Christie’s plan to cut resources for our schools and children is the wrong approach for our state. New Jerseyans have long had a shared commitment to the nearly 1.5 million children in our public schools, but Gov. Christie’s approach steers us in a different direction.”
Progressive Dane to host Madison School Board Candidate Forum 2/21/2010
via a TJ Mertz email [PDF Flyer]:
What: Public Forum featuring all candidates for Madison Board of Education.
When: Sunday February 21, 2010; 1:30 to 3:30 PM.
Where: JC Wright Middle School, 1717 Fish Hatchery Rd. Madison, WI.
Contact: Thomas J. Mertz, tjmertz@sbcglobal.net; (608) 255-4550
On Sunday, February 21, voters in the Madison Metropolitan School District will have their first opportunity to hear and question the School Board candidates on the ballot in the April 6 election. Unopposed incumbents Beth Moss and Maya Cole will begin with short statements on their service and why they are seeking re-election. Next the candidates for Seat 4, James Howard and Tom Farley, will answer questions from Progressive Dane and the audience. Madison District 12 Alder and member of the Board of Education
– Common Council Liaison Committee Satya Rhodes-Conway will serve as the moderator.
Progressive Dane is hosting this event as a public service to increase awareness of this important election.”The seven people on the School Board are responsible for the education of about 24,000 students and an annual budget of roughly $400 million.” explained Progressive Dane Co-Chair and Education Task Force Chair Thomas J. Mertz. “We want people to know what is going on, choose their candidate wisely and get
involved.
Candidates Tom Farley and James Howard welcome this opportunity to communicate with the voters. Farley expects a substantive discussion; he is “looking forward to participating in the Progressive Dane forum. It will certainly be our most in-depth public discussion of the issues – and most likely the liveliest and most enjoyable one too.”
Howard expressed his appreciation for “this opportunity to talk to the voters about my record of service with public schools and my unique perspective that I will add to the Board of Education” and is also ready to discuss “how to maintain and strengthen Madison schools.”
Incumbents Cole and Moss are also pleased to take part. Cole said she is “happy to have this opportunity to meet with members of our community to discuss the work of the Board, to listen to their concerns and to share the opportunities we are embracing to make our district better for all children. Moss also appreciates the chance to share her thoughts on “the good work that is going on in the schools and some of the challenges we face.”
Progressive Dane is a progressive political party in Dane County, Wisconsin. Progressive Dane is working to make Dane County a better place for everyone (no exceptions!). Progressive Dane helps community members organize around issues that are important to them and also works on the grassroots level to elect progressive political candidates.
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HOPE Christian schools go quietly about business of teaching
It’s easy to miss the school tucked into the corner of a strip mall at N. 25th St. and W. North Ave. and its sister building a few miles away, an airy gray metal and brick structure that doesn’t have a sign yet.
The most noticeable school of the three may be at the south end of a nonprofit building on N. King Drive, and that’s because a large banner outside proclaims the high school’s name.
But within these unassuming spaces, HOPE Christian Schools are quietly expanding and changing, figuring out the best way to make sure every child – from kindergarten through 12th grade – is on the path to college.
The schools are without frills because energy and resources at this point are better spent on the elements more closely tied to student success: strong teachers who want to stay year to year, innovative and empowered administrators, testing tools that provide day-to-day and week-to-week feedback about how fast kids are progressing and which ones need more attention.
“We’re still focusing on what our model looks like,” said Andrew Neumann, president of HOPE Christian Schools.
Neumann also is president of the umbrella nonprofit Educational Enterprises, which plans to establish schools nationwide that help populations of disadvantaged, minority children get to college. The schools in Milwaukee are a testing ground; this year, Educational Enterprises opened a HOPE-inspired college prep charter elementary school in Phoenix.
Wisconsin’s Race to the Top Application
via a kind reader’s email: 14MB PDF:
January 15, 2010 Dear Secretary Duncan:
On behalf of Wisconsin’s school children, we are pleased to present to you our application for the US Department of Education’s Race to the Top program. We were honored when President Obama traveled to Wisconsin to announce his vision for this vital program and we are ready to accept the President’s challenge to make education America’s mission.
We are proud of the steps we are taking to align our assessments with high standards, foster effective teachers and leaders, raise student achievement and transform our lowest performing schools. Over the last several months Wisconsin has pushed an educational reform agenda that has brought together over 430 Wisconsin school districts and charter schools together around these central themes.
Race to the Top funding will be instrumental in supporting and accelerating Wisconsin’s education agenda. While Wisconsin has great students, parents, teachers and leaders we recognize that more must be done to ensure that our students are prepared to compete in a global economy. The strong application presented to you today does just that.
Wisconsin’s application contains aggressive goals supported by a comprehensive plan. These goals are targeted at not only high performing schools and students but also address our lowest performers. For example, over the next four years Wisconsin, with your support, is on track to:
- Ensure all of our children are proficient in math and reading.
- Drastically reduce the number of high school dropouts.
- Increase the high school graduation growth rate for Native American, African American and Hispanic students.
- Significantly increase the annual growth in college entrance in 2010 and maintain that level of growth over the next four years.
- Drastically cut our achievement gap.
These goals are supported by a comprehensive plan with a high degree of accountability. Our plan is focused on research proven advancements that tackle many of the challenges facing Wisconsin schools. Advancements such as the following:
- Raising standards — joined consortium with 48 other states to develop and adopt internationally benchmarked standards.
- More useful assessments — changes to our testing process to provide more meaningful information to teachers and parents.
- Expanded data systems — including the ability to tie students to teachers so that we can ultimately learn what works and what doesn’t in education.
- More support for teachers — both for new teachers through mentoring and for other teachers through coaching.
- Increased capacity at the state and regional level to assist with instructional improvement efforts including providing training for coaches and mentors.
- An emphasis on providing additional supports, particularly in early childhood and middle school to high school transition, to ensure that Wisconsin narrows its achievement gap and raises overall achievement.
- Turning around our lowest performing schools — enhancing the capacity for Milwaukee Public Schools and the state to support that effort; contracting out to external organizations with research-proven track records where appropriate.
- Providing wraparound services, complimenting school efforts in specific neighborhoods in Milwaukee to get low income children the supports necessary to succeed within and outside the school yard.
- Investing in STEM — Building off our currently successful Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology efforts to ensure that more students have access to high-quality STEM courses and training.
The agenda that you have before you is one that builds on our great successes yet recognizes that we can and must do more to ensure our children are prepared for success. We appreciate your consideration of Wisconsin’s strong commitment to this mission. We look forward to joining President Obama and you in America’s Race to the Top.
Sincerely, Jim Doyle
Governor
Tony Evers
State Superintendent
Union officials are disturbingly inflexible toward charter schools
IT IS HARD to square the words of American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten with the actions of many of her union’s officials. Even as Ms. Weingarten issues stirring calls for new ways of thinking, labor leaders in places such as New York use their political muscle to block important reforms. Perhaps they don’t think that she means business, or maybe they don’t care; either way, it is the interests of students that are being harmed.
The United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the AFT affiliate that represents teachers in New York City, led the opposition to legislation favored by Gov. David A. Paterson (D) that would have lifted the state’s cap on charter schools. Mr. Paterson, backed by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, had hoped to better position the state for up to $700 million in federal education dollars. The Obama administration has made clear that states that deny parents choice in where their children go to school by limiting the growth of these increasingly popular independent public schools will be penalized in the national competition for $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funds.
Georgia Governor’s race 2010: Jeff Chapman on education
All the candidates for governor are being invited to share their education views with Get Schooled readers. As each piece comes in and is published here, it will be added to a category called Governor 2010. I urge you to read all the pieces.
Here is what GOP candidate Jeff Chapman submitted:
By Jeff Chapman
It is a fact of life that today’s children must have access to a first-rate education if they are to acquire the skills and knowledge needed to compete successfully in a modern, technological society.
It is also true that the quality of education in America, Georgia included, has, in too many cases, not kept pace with the demands of an increasingly complex world. High drop-out rates, low scores on achievement tests and poor classroom discipline are just some of the signs indicating that we must do better in preparing today’s youth for success in college and the workforce.
What are some of the steps we could take to promote quality education and help ensure that every Georgia student has the opportunity to succeed?
A Talk with Ellie Schatz: WCATY Founder and Author of “Grandma Says It’s Good to be Smart”
I enjoyed meeting and talking with Ellie Schatz recently. Listen to the conversation via this 17MB mp3 audio file CTRL-Click to download or read the transcript. Parent and activist Schatz founded WCATY and is, most recently author of “Grandma Says it’s Good to Be Smart“.
I enjoyed visiting with Ellie and found the conversation quite illuminating. Here’s a useful segment from the 37 minute interview:
Jim: What’s the best, most effective education model these days? Obviously, there are traditional schools. There are virtual schools. There are chartered schools. There are magnets. And then there’s the complete open-enrollment thing. Milwaukee has it, where the kids can go wherever they want, public or private, and the taxes follow.
Ellie: [32:52] I think there’s no one best model from the standpoint of those models that you just named. [32:59] What is important within any one of those models is that a key player in making that education available to your child believes that no matter how good the curriculum, no matter how good the model, the children they are about to serve are different, that children are not alike.
[33:30] And that they will have to make differences in the curriculum and in the way the learning takes place for different children.
[33:45] And I have experienced that myself. I’ve served on the boards of several private schools here in the city, and I have given that message: “This may be an excellent curriculum, and I believe it’s an excellent curriculum. But that’s not enough.”
[34:05] You cannot just sit this curriculum down in front of every child in the classroom and say, “We’re going to turn the pages at the same time, and we’re going to write the answers in the same way.” It does not work that way. You must believe in individually paced education.
[34:24] And that’s why I say the WCATY model cannot change. If it’s going to accomplish what I set out for WCATY to do, it must be accelerated from the nature of most of the curriculum that exists out there for kids today.
Thanks to Rick Kiley for arranging this conversation.
Ailing Schools Turn to Voters for Help
The housing boom has left the sprawling school district based in this former rail town on the Little Miami River with gleaming new buildings and a dilemma over how to keep them funded.
Three times in the past 15 months, voters have rejected levies that would have kept the Little Miami School District in the black. Each time, the district fell further behind and had to ask for more. On Tuesday, voters will face the biggest request yet–a new real-estate tax that amounts to $519 per $100,000 of assessed value, nearly twice the rate rejected in November.
Backers say the levy, combined with already deep cuts, is the only way to prevent a fiscal emergency that would force a state takeover of the schools. “It’s the downturn of an entire community. People are going to start looking at moving and your property value is going to go through the floor,” said Julie Salmons Perelman, a 44-year-old part-time veterinary technician with three children in the schools, who sat stuffing bags filled with campaign literature one morning last week.
Bill Nicholson, 54, a longtime opponent of the levies, calls the rising requests in the face of repeated rejections “insanity.” In the past, he has argued on behalf of people with fixed incomes, but he recently lost his own job as a consultant in the perfume industry. “How can I cut a budget of zero” to pay more taxes, he asked.
L.A. Confidential: Seeking Reasons for Autism’s Rise
Why is a child born in northwest Los Angeles four times as likely to be diagnosed with autism as a child born elsewhere in California?
Medical experts have pondered for years why autism rates have soared nationwide, and why the disorder appears to be much more prevalent in certain communities than in others. Now, some recent studies that zero in on California may shed some light on these baffling questions.
A new autism study shows clusters of high autism rates in parts of California. WSJ’s health columnist Melinda Beck joins Simon Constable on the News Hub with more.
Researchers from Columbia University, in a study published in the current Journal of Health & Place, identified an area including West Hollywood, Beverly Hills and some less posh neighborhoods that accounted for 3% of the state’s new cases of autism every year from 1993 to 2001, even though it had only 1% of the population.
Another recent study, from the University of California, Davis, published in Autism Research, also found high rates of autism in children born around Los Angeles, as well as nine other California locations. Autism, usually diagnosed before a child is 3 years old, is a developmental disorder characterized by impaired social interaction and communication and repetitive behavior.
The Economic Benefits From Halving The Dropout Rate: A Boom To Businesses In The Nation’s Largest Metropolitan Areas
Alliance for Excellent Education:
Few people realize the impact that high school dropouts have on a community’s economic, social, and civic health.
Business owners and residents–in particular, those without school-aged children–may not be aware that they have much at stake in the success of their local high schools.
Indeed, everyone–from car dealers and realtors to bank managers and local business owners–benefits when more students graduate from high school.
Nationally, more than seven thousand students become dropouts every school day. That adds up to almost 1.3 million students annually who will not graduate from high school with their peers as scheduled. In addition to the moral imperative to provide every student with an equal opportunity to pursue the American dream, there is also an economic argument for helping more students graduate from high school.
To better understand the various economic benefits that a particular community could expect if it were to reduce its number of high school dropouts, the Alliance for Excellent Education (the Alliance), with the generous support of State Farm®, analyzed the local economies of the nation’s fifty largest cities and their surrounding areas. Using a
sophisticated economic model developed by Economic Modeling Specialists Inc., an Idaho-based economics firm specializing in socioeconomic impact tools, the Alliance calculated economic projections tailored to each of these metro regions.
Book shares Chicago recipe for good schools
I think I have about as good a handle as anyone on the reasons to feel depressed about the Milwaukee school situation. I’ve been giving talks to groups around the city fairly often lately. I jokingly refer to it as my Spreading Gloom tour.
But at heart, I still am optimistic. Why?
Because I’ve had the privilege of visiting some schools lately that offer hope. There are too few of them, but they exist. You find them in the Milwaukee Public Schools system, among the private schools supported by public vouchers, and among the charter schools that operate outside MPS. I expect to feature some of them in upcoming columns.
Because there is ample reason to believe that other urban school systems are doing better than Milwaukee. Every school district that is dominated by children coming from impoverished settings has big struggles. But other cities are showing more success and exhibiting more energy than we are, and I don’t know any convincing reason why Milwaukee needs to be behind the pack so often. Certainly, this could be changed if we did the right things.
Because things have to get better in terms of the educational success of kids for the city, the metropolitan area and even the state to thrive, and I somehow think awareness of that will eventually create enough pressure to bring improvement.
And – my specific subject for today – because of a new book.
Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago.
Education does not need giveaways and gimmicks
Few know the consequences of Hong Kong’s rapidly ageing population as well as public schoolteachers. They are in the front line, wondering how to keep the schools they work for open – and their jobs – as student numbers dwindle. Innovation comes to the fore in such situations and competition to maintain enrolments to stave off closure with gifts and gimmicks is keen. But as much as enterprise is to be lauded, efforts should not be about enticing children with giveaways, but better educating them. Education is not the natural first thought for teachers whose jobs are on the line. They know that when student numbers in a form drop below 61, the Education Bureau starts taking action. In the past five years, five public secondary schools and 72 primary ones have been forced to close. A total of 31 secondary classes have been cut this academic year.
Government-subsidised secondary schools have taken a lead in trying to reverse the trend. They cannot conjure more students from the shrinking pool but can lure them away from one another and look to new arrivals. Tactics vary from handing out free notebook computers to recruiting through booths at railway stations to hiring public relations consultants so that images can be overhauled.
POLITICO Interview: Arne Duncan
MR. ALLEN: Welcome to POLITICO’s video series: “Inside Obama’s Washington.” I’m Mike Allen, Chief White House Correspondent, and we’re here at the Education Department with its leader, Arne Duncan. Mr. Secretary, thank you for having us in.
SECRETARY DUNCAN: Well, thanks for the opportunity. Good to see you.
MR. ALLEN: The President has announced a freeze for a big slice of spending. How’s that going to affect education?
SECRETARY DUNCAN: Well, education’s always been a priority for the President, so we feel very, very good about where we’re going to net out. We’re always going to make tough choices, and things that aren’t working, we’re going to stop investing in. But things that are working, we want to continue to push very hard.
MR. ALLEN: And what’s an example of something where you believe you can pull back, something that’s not working?
SECRETARY DUNCAN: Well, the budget will be forthcoming next week, but there will be a number of things where if we’re not seeing the results we want for children, we think we have a moral obligation not to just perpetuate the status quo, but to invest scarce, scarce dollars in those priorities that are really making a difference in students’ lives.
Newcomers Test Schools In Plano, Texas, Population Shift Prompts Rezoning That Angers Many Parents
This Dallas suburb, a wealthy enclave known for its top-notch schools, is struggling to integrate a flood of poor, minority students.
In a battle mirrored in other districts across the U.S., parents here have been fighting for months over which public high school their kids will attend: one under construction in an affluent corner of the Plano Independent School District, or an older school several miles away in the city’s more diverse downtown.
Last month, the district’s school board angered many parents when it created a Pac-Man-shaped zone that placed their children in the downtown school for grades nine and 10 instead of in the newer, closer campus.
The downtown school has the highest proportion of poor students of all high schools in the district; many are Hispanic and African-American.
“We want to go to our neighborhood school,” said Kelly McBrayer, a white, 48-year-old stay-at-home mother of three who lives near the site of the new high school.
Excellent education: a right or a privilege?
Being deeply entrenched in all things money, I see first-hand the link between quality education and real, lasting economic success. The better schools you attend, the greater the chance you’ll find and prepare for work that will provide satisfaction and financial stability. This is not to say that other factors (such as parent involvement) don’t count or that some people don’t overcome the odds and attain wealth and happiness without attending or graduating from college, but I’m talking the basics here: kindergarten though high school.
The sad fact is that California public schools are in jeopardy. Many are wonderful now, but as the Chron’s Jill Tucker reports, 113 million in funding cuts over two years will change all that. Teachers are facing lay-offs, class size will swell to unmanageable numbers, and programs that make schools appealing to students will be slashed. Want to make kids dislike and devalue formal learning? This will do it. And as a society, we can’t afford to have children reject education. Those who do are more likely to make poor financial and lifestyle choices when they reach adulthood, draining the resources of the population at large.
Better system wanted over Teacher sex offenders
Sex offenders who prey on children strike fear into the hearts of parents. That does not make it any easier to find a balance between protecting the community against these heinous crimes and upholding the rights of offenders who have paid their debt to society. One of these rights is privacy, which is key to a fair chance of rehabilitation. Reconciling this conflict is one reason Hong Kong has yet to follow other jurisdictions in maintaining a confidential sex offenders’ register that can be accessed by employers of people who work with children.
Meanwhile, the Education Bureau’s power to deregister teachers provides a degree of protection because no one can teach in our schools without a valid registration certificate or permit. Parents are entitled to assurance that this screens out applicants who pose a known risk. It is disappointing therefore that the bureau has declined an opportunity to give it, without infringing privacy. It has refused our request to simply say how many of at least 31 teachers and classroom assistants known to have committed sexual offences in the past 10 years are still registered and how many are working in schools. As a result, lawmakers, parent and child protection groups have rightly raised concerns about the vetting procedures.
State of the Union on Education
Unfettered by inside-the-beltway partisan politics, President Obama indisputably has affected more change in the nation’s education policies in his first year in office than any President in modern history.
The boost that the Administration’s Race to the Top initiative – which was accompanied by a record $100 billion increase in general federal aid to education – has given state and local education reform efforts is the Administration’s biggest domestic policy success of 2009 – all without yet expending a dime of the $5 billion Race to the Top fund.
What’s more, while not a single Republican Congressman and only 3 Republican Senators voted for the economic and education reform stimulus package last February, the policy initiatives that Obama and Secretary Duncan put forth have since been embraced through both words and action by state and local elected officials in both parties across the ideological and geographical spectrum.
These accomplishments reflect campaign promises kept – in recognition of the relationship between education reform, jobs, and economic growth – to make education one of three key components of a long-term U.S. economic recovery strategy (the other two being energy and health care which obviously, and to say the least, have not fared as well), an augur well for the work on education reform that is yet to come.
Some effects are immediate – for example, more than a hundred thousand slots have already opened to parents across the country who want to choose a high quality public charter school for their children. Others, such as changes in state academic standards to ensure that students are college and career ready, the development of better tests, more rigorous qualification criteria and better pay for teachers, and fundamental overhauls of chronically failing schools, will pay dividends later this year, and over the next several.
Play, Then Eat: Shift May Bring Gains at School
Tara Parker-Pope
Can something as simple as the timing of recess make a difference in a child’s health and behavior?
Some experts think it can, and now some schools are rescheduling recess — sending students out to play before they sit down for lunch. The switch appears to have led to some surprising changes in both cafeteria and classroom.
Schools that have tried it report that when children play before lunch, there is less food waste and higher consumption of milk, fruit and vegetables. And some teachers say there are fewer behavior problems.
“Kids are calmer after they’ve had recess first,” said Janet Sinkewicz, principal of Sharon Elementary School in Robbinsville, N.J., which made the change last fall. “They feel like they have more time to eat and they don’t have to rush.”
Five areas where colleges could use some schooling
My family has much experience in higher education, not all of it happy. I spent six years as an often struggling undergraduate and grad student. My journalist wife did ten years in higher ed, including three of what she considered hard labor as a visiting professor. Our kids add another 11 years, with the youngest child about to sign up for three more. Please don’t ask me what that will cost.
American colleges and universities are the great strength of our education system. They are revered around the world. But those schools put heavy stress on our families, since getting into, paying for and graduating from the ones we most want often exceeds our capabilities. We need to know more about what they are doing to us, so I am happy to see washingtonpost.com launch two higher education blogs: College Inc. by Daniel de Vise and Campus Overload by Jenna Johnson. Let me celebrate that event by grumbling about what I consider higher education’s five biggest blind spots:
1. College privacy rules are a mess. They are difficult to understand and infuriating when they exacerbate a family crisis. I have heard many stories about students getting into trouble, and their parents being among the last to know. University officials will sometimes take pity on a frantic dad and reveal important things in the kid’s personal file. But why can’t we have more reasonable procedures? Academics who fear intrusive helicopter parents should read the National Survey of Student Engagement report, which reveals that the children of such people do better in college than kids like mine, who didn’t hear much from us.
2. Professors know too little about what high schools are doing to prepare students for their classes.
Values Statement for Seattle Teacher Contract Negotiations
As I mentioned previously, for the past couple of months I have been part of a coalition group to form a joint values statement for parents/community groups to give to the School Board, district and SEA. The groups include Campana Quetzel, Seattle Council PTSA, Successful Schools in Action, CPPS, Stand for Children, the Alliance for Education and others. Organized by the League of Education Voters (our leader is Kelly Munn of LEV), we sought to create a streamlined document that is simple and basic.
Here’s a link to that document, “Give Every Child a Great Education: A Community Value Statement in Support of Public Schools”. We will have, at this writing, shown the document to nearly all the Board members, SEA leaders and school district leaders.
Here is a link to the district’s opening remarks about the negotiations.
Goal for federal stimulus money was to help at-risk students and disabled; is goal realistic?
When Gov. Jim Doyle announced last April that $366 million in federal stimulus money was headed for Wisconsin schools, the stated goal from Washington was to help children with disabilities and at-risk students in poor schools — “while stimulating the economy.”
But it’s unclear if the almost $12 million distributed to the Madison School District, with a third of that going to teacher training and coaching, will accomplish those goals.
“I think at the end of this period we will have spent a lot of money and I don’t know what we’ll have to show for it,” said Lucy Mathiak, vice president of the Madison School Board. “Professional development is a really nice thing, but how do you even measure the in-class result?”
About $1 million of the Madison district’s $11.7 million in stimulus money will buy technology for schools, welcomed by school officials. Programs for students with behavioral and mental health needs will be beefed up as well, and the district estimates about 40 new short-term jobs will be created.
The State of the Madison School District, 2010
588K PDF, Dan Nerad, Superintendent:
Dear Members of Our Community, The mission of the Madison Metropolitan School District is as follows:
Our mission is to cultivate the potential in every student to thrive as a global citizen by inspiring a love of learning and civic engagement, by challenging and supporting every student to achieve academic excellence, and by embracing the full richness and diversity of our community.
A year ago, a group of community and school staff members committed time to develop a revised Strategic Plan for the school district. As part of this, our mission statement was revised. This plan was approved by the Board of Education in September 2009 and will be reviewed and updated annually. For the foreseeable future, the plan will serve as our road map to know if we are making a difference relative to important student learning outcomes and to the future of our community. To make the most difference, we must continue to partner with you, our community. We are indeed very fortunate to be able to educate our children in a very supportive, caring community.
As a school district, our highest priority must be on our work related to teaching and learning. For our students and the community’s children to become proficient learners and caring and contributing members of society, we must remain steadfast in this commitment.
Related to our mission, we have also identified the following belief statements as a district:
- We believe that excellent public education is necessary for ensuring a democratic society.
- Webelieveintheabilitiesofeveryindividualinourcommunityandthevalueof their life experiences.
- We believe in an inclusive community in which all have the right to contribute.
- Webelievewehaveacollectiveresponsibilitytocreateandsustainasafe environment that is respectful, engaging, vibrant and culturally responsive.
- Webelievethateveryindividualcanlearnandwillgrowasalearner.
- We believe in continuous improvement in formed by critical evaluation and reflection.
- We believe that resources are critical to education and we are responsible for their equitable and effective use.
- Webelieveinculturallyrelevanteducationthatprovidestheknowledgeandskills to meet the global challenges and opportunities of the 21st Century.
Purpose of this report
The purpose of this State of the District Report is to provide important information about our District to our community and to share future priorities.
This report will be presented at Monday evening’s Madison School Board meeting.
Former Dem lawmaker, DPI superintendent Grover advocates smaller districts within the Milwaukee Public Schools
Grover is not real sanguine with current education policy ideas, such as Mayor Tom Barrett’s bid for a takeover of Milwaukee public schools. Fundamentally, smaller school districts (500 kids) should be the goal, and structural changes will never trump upbringing and parental involvement in their children’s education, he said.
“The difference between the kid headed to a Milwaukee school and one in Whitefish Bay is what they bring to the school house door,” he said. “The aspiration level of the parents is key. They want the best for their kids.”
As for the contest to succeed Jim Doyle as governor in 2010, Grover isn’t sure Barrett can be tough enough but suggests he’d be an improvement.
“Jim Doyle started out life at third base and thought he hit a triple,” Grover said, using an aphorism to denote “an elitist west side (Madison) upbringing.”
“Barrett is absolutely a decent human being. I have the feeling he won’t be as aggressive as he will need to be. He’s almost like Barack (Obama) …’Let us reason together.'”
Smaller districts certainly make sense, including places like Madison.
Two New Governors Pick Reform Oriented Education Chiefs
Kudos to the country’s two newest governors, Republicans Bob McDonnell of Virginia and Chris Christie of New Jersey, who have tapped strong school choice advocates to head their state education departments.
Last week, Mr. McDonnell chose Gerald Robinson to become Virginia’s next Secretary of Education. Mr. Robinson currently heads the Black Alliance for Educational Options, a national nonprofit that backs charter schools and performance pay for teachers. Meanwhile, Mr. Christie has picked former Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler to serve as his state’s next education commissioner. Mr. Schundler is an unabashed supporter of using education vouchers and charter schools to improve the plight of urban school districts.
This is good news for all school children in both states, but it’s especially auspicious for low-income kids stuck in failing schools who have the most to gain from a state education official who is unafraid to shake up the establishment. Virginia has a grand total of three charter schools, one of the lowest numbers in the nation. New Jersey spends more money per pupil than all but two states, yet test scores in Newark and Jersey City are among the worst in the country.
College- and Career-Ready Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
According to the Florida Department of Education, Manatee High School was not a place parents should have wanted to send their children in 2006. The Bradenton-based school received a “D” rating on the state’s A-F scale of academic performance that year while failing to meet federal No Child Left Behind proficiency standards for the fourth year in a row. At the same time, Boca Raton Community High School was flying high, having just earned its second straight “A” rating and being named among the best high schools in the country by Newsweek magazine.
But while Manatee got dismal marks from state and federal accountability schemes, it was actually quite successful in a number of important ways. It graduated a higher percentage of its students than Boca Raton and sent almost the same percentage of its graduates off to college. Once they arrived on college campuses, Manatee graduates earned higher grades and fewer of them failed remedial, not-for-credit math and English courses than their Boca Raton peers.
In other words, D-rated Manatee was arguably doing a better job at achieving the ultimate goal of high school: preparing students to succeed in college and careers. But because Florida’s accountability systems didn’t measure college and career success in 2006, nobody knew.
Hundreds of students can’t return to Beverly Hills schools
Hundreds of students attending Beverly Hills schools will have to find new campuses in the fall after a unanimous school board vote late Tuesday ended special permits for many children who live outside the city.
Following more than four hours of debate that lasted until almost midnight, the board agreed to allow all current high school students to continue applying for permits each year, an action that won applause from a packed, emotional but civil crowd at Beverly Hills High.
Seventh graders will be allowed to graduate from middle school next year. But students in elementary school and eighth grade will not be allowed to return to district schools for the 2010-2011 academic year unless their families move into the city.
Texas Governor Perry refuses federal education money: What’s this mean for Frisco?
Gov. Rick Perry has refused to compete for up to $700 million in federal education money.
He announced today that the state will not try to snag any of the competitive “Race to the Top” funds that many other states have been going after for months.
“Texas is on the right path toward improved education, and we would be foolish and irresponsible to place our children’s future in the hands of unelected bureaucrats and special interest groups thousands of miles away in Washington, virtually eliminating parents’ participation in their children’s education,” Gov. Perry said in a prepared statement.
The Perry camp argues that the grant isn’t enough to implement the kind of reform needed for almost 5 million schoolchildren in the state.
4K Inches Forward in Madison, Seeks Funding
Listen to the Madison School Board Discussion via this 32MB mp3 audio file (and via a kind reader’s email).
Financing this initiative remains unsettled.
I recommend getting out of the curriculum creation business via the elimination of Teaching & Learning and using those proceeds to begin 4K – assuming the community and Board are convinced that it will be effective and can be managed successfully by the Administration.
I would also like to see the Administration’s much discussed “program/curricular review” implemented prior to adding 4K.
Finally, I think it is likely that redistributed state tax programs to K-12 will decrease, given the State’s spending growth and deficit problems. The financial crunch is an opportunity to rethink spending and determine where the dollars are best used for our children. I recommend a reduction in money spent for “adults to talk with other adults”.
Board member Beth Moss proposed that 4K begin in 2010. This motion was supported by Marj Passman and Ed Hughes (Ed’s spouse, Ann Brickson is on the Board of the Goodman Center, a possible 4K partner). Maya Cole, Lucy Mathiak and Arlene Silveira voted no on a 2010 start. The Board then voted 5-1 (with Ed Hughes voting no) for a 2011 launch pending further discussions on paying for it. Retiring Board member Johnny Winston, Jr. was absent.
I appreciate the thoughtful discussion on this topic, particularly the concern over how it will be financed. Our Federal Government, and perhaps, the State, would simply plow ahead and let our grandchildren continue to pay the growing bill.
Links:
- Gayle Worland:
“I’m going to say it’s the hardest decision I’ve made on the board,” said board member Marj Passman, who along with board members Beth Moss and Ed Hughes voted to implement four-year-old kindergarten in 2010. “To me this is extremely difficult. We have to have 4K. I want it. The question is when.”
But board president Arlene Silveira argued the district’s finances were too unclear to implement four-year-old kindergarten — estimated to serve 1,573 students with a free, half-day educational program — this fall.
“I’m very supportive of four-year-old kindergarten,” she said. “It’s the financing that gives me the most unrest.”
Silveira voted against implementation in the fall, as did Lucy Mathiak and Maya Cole. Board member Johnny Winston, Jr. was absent.
On a second vote the board voted 5-1 to approve 4K for 2011-12. Hughes voted against starting the program in 2011-12, saying it should begin as soon as possible. - Channel3000:
The plan will begin in September 2011. Initially, the board considered a measure to start in 2010, but a vote on that plan was deadlocked 3-3. A second motion to postpone the beginning until the 2011-2012 school year passed by a 5-1 vote.
The board didn’t outline any of the financing as yet. District spokesman Ken Syke said that they’re working on 2010 budget first before planning for the 2011 one.
The board’s decision could have a large impact on the district and taxpayers as the new program would bring in federal funds. - WKOW-TV:
This is the first real commitment from MMSD to establish comprehensive early childhood education.
What they don’t have yet is a plan to pay for it.
It would’ve cost about $12.2 million to start 4k this fall, according to Eric Kass, assistant superintendent for business services.
About $4.5 million would come from existing educational service funds, $4.2 million from a loan, and about $3.5 million would be generated thru a property tax increase.
Some board members said they were uncomfortable approving a funding plan for 4k, because there are still a lot of unanswered questions about the district’s budget as a whole. - NBC15:
Members first deadlocked in a three-to-three tie on whether to start 4-K this fall, then voted five-to-one to implement it the following year.
The cost this year would have been more than $12 million. The decision to delay implementation is due to serious budget problems facing the Madison District.
Nearly 1600 4-year-old students are expected to participate in the half-day kindergarten program. - Don Severson:
The Board of Education is urged to vote NO on the proposal to implement 4-year old Kindergarten in the foreseeable future. In behalf of the public, we cite the following support for taking this action of reject the proposal:
The Board and Administration Has failed to conduct complete due diligence with respect to recognizing the community delivery of programs and services. There are existing bona fide entities, and potential future entities, with capacities to conduct these programs
Is not recognizing that the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Wisconsin authorizes the provision of public education for grades K-12, not including pre-K or 4-year old kindergarten
Has not demonstrated the district capacity, or the responsibility, to manage effectively the funding support that it has been getting for existing K-12 programs and services. The district does not meet existing K-12 needs and it cannot get different results by continuing to do business as usual, with the ‘same service’ budget year-after-year-after-year
The Diary: Barbara Ehrenreich
In the course of their work my brilliant children – a human rights lawyer and a freelance journalist – travel to places such as Phnom Penh and Dubai. In the course of mine Macomb, Illinois, is a more typical destination, involving five hours of flying, including a layover in Detroit and then two hours of driving through snow-covered fields barely interrupted by a couple of semi-boarded-up “towns”, including the intriguingly named Preemption (population 71).
After all this industrial-agricultural wasteland, Macomb is a veritable hive of human, cultural and commercial activity. There is a branch of the state university system, where I have been invited to speak, and until a few months ago, my hosts inform me, there were a total of two Italian restaurants in town, one famed for its Spam-and-Doritos-topped pizza. I’m staying at the Hampton Inn, a minimalist motel chain located opposite a Farm King, an agricultural supply store. I can’t help asking whether this is where the university puts up a genuine celebrity speaker, such as Bill Cosby. “Oh no,” I am told, “he flew in in his private plane and out the same night.”
Ann, a congenial administrator at Western Illinois University, fills me in on the student body. They are mostly white, first-generation college students and, while about a third of them are studying law enforcement with a view to a career in police work, this does not stop them from illegal under-age drinking or, for that matter, smoking pot. We muse on the problem of binge drinking, endemic to American campuses: why go straight from sobriety to vomiting? Haven’t they ever sampled the pleasures of tipsiness? Then Ann tells me one of the saddest things I’ve heard on the perennial subject of Young People Today: they don’t know how to be “silly”, she says, in the sense of whimsy and absurdity. They are strait-laced and even a little timid, unless, of course, they are utterly wasted.
Articles and Books on Mathematics Education
The winter 2009-2010 issue of “American Educator”, has a number of interesting articles. Here are two of interest for people interested in mathematics education.
Daniel Willingham “Is It True That Some People Just Can’t Do Math”
Patsy Wang-Iverson, Perla Myers, and Edmund Lim W.K. “Beyond Singapore’s Mathematics Textbooks – Focused and Flexible Supports for Teaching and
Learning”
The first has a number of useful references as well as comments. Here is one. There have been many papers written in Madison on student’s lack of understanding of the equal sign. I once asked Liping Ma if this was a problem in China. She said that as far as she knew it was not. There is confirmation of this in one of the references.
Four questions asked of sixth grade students in the U.S. and China.
The second article in American Educator has comments on curriculum, teacher induction and education and support while teaching. There is also a one page supplemental article on teacher professional development and evaluation by Susan Sclafani and Edmund Lim W.K.
In addition there have been two very interesting books on school mathematics education written by mathematicians. The first is “Arithmetic for Parents: A Book for Grownups about Children’s Mathematics” by Ron Aharoni, Sumizdat, 2007. An article by Aharoni about his experience teaching mathematics in an elementary school in Israel can be read here. This is a good introduction to his book, and more useful details are in the
book.
The second is “And All the Children Are Above Average: A Review of The End of Ignorance: Multiplying Our Human Potential” by John Mighton, a Canadian mathematician and playwright. The paperback version of this book was published by Vintage Canada. You can read about Mighton here. and there is also information about his math program JUMP here. This program was developed after Mighton learned a number of things while tutoring students who had significant problems in learning elementary mathematics. A review of this book by David Kirshner appeared in the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education in the January, 2010 issue.
Race to the Top Vagueness & Commentary
Some of the most contentious areas of the new legislation include the option to close failing schools, convert them to charter schools or replace the principal and half the staff. Parents could exercise greater power within the public school system, with the possibility of moving children in the lowest-performing schools elsewhere or petition to turn around a chronically failing school.
The transfer option would be available to parents of children at the worst 1,000 schools. Parental petitions would be limited to 75 schools.
However, the implementation of any reforms is hazy, as the federal guidelines for the program cite broad goals, such as “making improvements in teacher effectiveness.”
Mekeel assured the board members that supporting the state’s application would not bind the district to accept the funds, if California is selected as a recipient.
“You’ll have another decision to make before we’re actually involved in this,” he said.
The legislation package also provides a method for linking teacher evaluations to student performance — an aspect arousing the fury of educators statewide.
Autism cluster found in Santa Clara County linked to parent education, not neighborhood toxins
Researchers have identified a cluster of autism cases in the South Bay — but the elevated regional incidence seems linked to parents’ ability to gain a diagnosis for their child, rather than any geographic risk.
A rigorous study of all 2.5 million births in California between 1996 and 2000 revealed 10 places where the disability is more common than elsewhere in the state — including the Sunnyvale-Santa Clara area, the San Carlos-Belmont area and several parts of southern California and Sacramento.
The scientists found a correlation, not cause, concluding that parents of autistic children in these clusters were more likely to be white, live near a major treatment center, be highly educated and
There was a lower incidence of the diagnosis where families were Latino and less educated.
A diagnosis of autism requires considerable advocacy by parents, who must navigate the complex world of pediatrics, psychiatry and autism experts. Once diagnosed, children gain access to all types of specialized services.
UC Davis MIND Institute press release.
Special-Ed Funds Redirected School Districts Shift Millions of Dollars to General Needs After Getting Stimulus Cash
Anne Marie Chaker:
Florida’s Broward County Public Schools saved as many as 900 jobs this school year. Nevada’s Clark County School District just added more math and tutoring programs. And in Connecticut’s Bloomfield Public Schools, eight elementary- and middle-school teachers were spared from layoffs.
These cash-strapped districts covered the costs using a boost in funding intended for special education, drawing an outcry from parents and advocates of special-needs children.
A provision in federal law allows some school districts to spend millions of dollars of special-education money elsewhere, and a government report indicates many more districts plan to take advantage of the provision.
School administrators say shifting the money allows them to save jobs and valuable programs that benefit a wide range of students.
“We absolutely need this,” said James Notter, superintendent of the Broward County Public Schools, the sixth-largest district in the country. He said the provision is “an absolute salvation for us,” because the $32 million reduced from the local budget for special education allows him to save between 600 and 900 jobs that would likely have disappeared this school year.
Poll of Detroit residents finds grim conditions but optimistic outlooks
Dana Hedgpeth & Jennifer Agiesta:
The decline of the auto industry and the nation’s economic slide have left many residents here trapped, without work, in houses they can’t sell, in neighborhoods where they fear for their safety, in schools that offer their children a hard road out.
People across the metro area are feeling the stress of an uncertain financial landscape, with majorities worried about the economy, the cost of health care and having enough money to pay their bills. The region’s bleak jobs situation is residents’ No. 1 concern, by a big margin. That anxiety is compounded by a widely held feeling that the community is divided by race and income.
And yet they haven’t given up.
In a new Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation-Harvard University poll about Detroit, almost all residents of the main three-county metropolitan area see their economy as in ruins. About half say this is a bad place to raise a family; as many describe a declining standard of living, swelling debt, deteriorating neighborhoods and a brutal job market.
Wisconsin Mayoral control bill prompts conflicting testimony
Dozens of speakers passionately disagreed about how to fix Milwaukee Public Schools during a daylong state Senate hearing Tuesday, with the only consensus being that a solution is unlikely to come soon in Madison.
Several hundred people packed the auditorium at MPS’ central office to testify before the Senate Education Committee on a bill that would give the city’s mayor more power over Milwaukee Public Schools and a separate measure that would allow the state’s school superintendent to more easily intervene in failing schools in Wisconsin.
Like the Milwaukee legislators who have split over the mayoral-control legislation, members of the public at the hearing were fairly evenly divided about whether allowing the mayor, rather than the School Board, to appoint MPS’ superintendent was necessary to improve academic performance in the school system or a step backward for democratic representation.
“How in the world does excluding parents from selecting their school leadership encourage them to participate in the education of their children?” Milwaukee resident Mike Rosen said.
Former Milwaukee School Board member Jeanette Mitchell said, however, that she supported mayoral control because it would give education a bigger platform in the city. She exhorted legislators to work together to reach a compromise to help students succeed in city schools.
How Good Are University of Washington Students in Math?
As many of you know, I have a strong interest in K-12 math education, motivated by the declining math skills of entering UW freshmen and the poor math educations given to my own children. Last quarter I taught Atmospheric Sciences 101, a large lecture class with a mix of students, and gave them a math diagnostic test as I have done in the past.
The results were stunning, in a very depressing way. This was an easy test, including elementary and middle school math problems. And these are students attending a science class at the State’s flagship university–these should be the creme of the crop of our high school graduates with high GPAs. And yet most of them can’t do essential basic math–operations needed for even the most essential problem solving.
A copy of the graded exam is below (click to enlarge) and a link to a pdf version is at:
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~cliff/101Math2009A1.pdf
Monthly Update From Madison BOE President Arlene Silveira
Reading Programs: The Board received a presentation on Reading Recovery in the district. A number of questions were raised about our reading programs and how programs worked together to ensure we were meeting the needs of all of our students. Therefore, the Board requested a full evaluation of all reading programs at the elementary level so we have a better understanding of the big reading picture.
Superintendent Goals: As part of the Superintendent evaluation process the Board, in conjunction with the Superintendent, developed goals for the Superintendent. There are a lot of details associated with each goal. The Goal area and targeted Results of each goal are below:
1. Goal Area: Increase the percentage of students who are proficient and advanced in reading. Results: Increased proficiency and advanced proficiency on WKCE or its replacement, other district assessment or standards-based tests. By 2012-14, 100% of students will meet this target.
2. Goal Area: Increase the percentage of students at all grade levels who attend school at 96% or more. Results: Increase attendance for students in every grade, with a specific focus on the students in key transition grades. By 2014-15, 96% or more of students will meet this target.
3. Goal Area: Increase the percentage of students on track for credit attainment for graduation in four years. Results: Increased percentage of students on track for credit attainment for graduation. By 2014-15, 90% or more will meet this target.
4. Goal Area: Completion of a review of the District’s organizational structure and organizational systems/processes and develop a plan to align the work of the Administration to the District’s mission and Strategic Plan. Results: This goal will be assessed by Board approval and successful Administrative implementation of a Plan that aligns the work of the Administration with the District’s mission and Strategic Plan and to principles of quality organizations, and is fiscally sustainable over time.
5. Goal Area: Board relations. Results: Development and implementation of a sustainable system for improving and demonstrating effective communication with the Board of Education.
6. Goal Area: Implement the Strategic Plan action steps targeted for year one as approved by the Board of Education. Results: A report in June 2010 outlining progress toward implementation of the action steps including any evaluation of new programs that has occurred using the approved performance measures.
7. Goal Area: Leadership development goal. To focus on encouraging the heart in others and challenging the process.
What’s Up in January?: 2010 will be a busy year. Items of interest on our January agenda: Decision on the implementation of 4-year-old kindergarten; Race to the Top funds; initial presentation of an environmental charter middle school; core performance measures associated with the strategic plan; and kick-off of the 2010-11 budget process.
Thanks for all you do for our children. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments at board@madison.k12.wi.us .
The Replacements: On Substitute Teaching and Days Out of the Classroom
TWO years ago, during lunch with a second-grade teacher in the Chicago area, I mentioned that I was going to substitute teach. The teacher — I’ll call him Dan — started into a story about his own experience with a substitute, which is easily summarized: Dan left a lesson plan; the sub didn’t follow it. So, he ended by asking, how hard can substitute teaching be?
I smiled, said nothing and bit into my Reuben.
Over the next two years, I would learn — as I subbed once a week for a variety of classes, including kindergarten, sixth grade, middle-school social studies, high-school chemistry, phys ed, art, Spanish, and English as a second language — that Dan’s story is standard teacher fare. Last time I heard it, though, I didn’t bite my sandwich or my tongue.
As much as I became frustrated by the lack of training and support, I was most angered by how many days teachers were out of their classrooms. Nationwide, 5.2 percent of teachers are absent on any given day, a rate three times as high as that of professionals outside teaching and more than one and a half times as high as that of teachers in Britain. Teachers in America are most likely to be absent on Fridays, followed by Mondays.
This means that children have substitute teachers for nearly a year of their kindergarten-through-12th-grade education. Taxpayers shell out $4 billion a year for subs.
I subbed for many legitimately ill teachers and for many attending educational conferences. But my first assignment was to fill in for a sixth-grade teacher who went to a home-and-garden show. My last was for a first-grade teacher who said she needed a mental health day because her class was so difficult.
Top-tier schools widen the net Elite institutions seek non-Chinese speakers
Two elite English-medium schools offering the local curriculum have drawn up bold expansion plans that will enable them to admit children from non-Chinese-speaking families.
St Paul’s Co-educational College and Diocesan Boys School are setting up boarding houses and International Baccalaureate programmes and have devised adapted Chinese-language programmes for pupils who are not native speakers of Chinese.
The moves will permit the Direct Subsidy Scheme schools, which require all pupils to study Chinese language, to widen their nets to include children from English-speaking families, as well as foreign pupils and ethnic minority children.
Currently, almost all pupils at the schools, which are obliged to offer the local curriculum and will run the IB Diploma alongside it, have Chinese as their mother tongue and most are permanent residents.
Tracking An Emerging Movement: A Report on Expanded-Time Schools in America
Fifteen years ago, the National Education Commission on Time and Learning explained that the American school calendar of 180 six-hour days stands as the “design flaw” of our education system, for schools could not be expected to enable children to achieve high standards within the confines of the antiquated schedule. Today, a small but growing number of schools have begun to overcome this “flaw” by operating with school days substantially longer than the six-hour norm and, in many cases, a calendar that exceeds the standard 180 days.
The National Center on Time & Learning (NCTL), with the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, has produced this groundbreaking report on the state of what can be called “expanded- time schools.” Through this effort, NCTL has helped to define and bring together this previously unidentified category of schools, while still recog- nizing the considerable diversity among this group. Extracting and analyzing information from NCTL’s newly created database of over 650 schools that feature an expanded day and/or year, this report describes the various trends emerging among these schools, including issues related to costs, time use and student outcomes. The searchable database is available on our website, www.timeandlearning.org.
Why Washington area schools are the best
The end of the year is a time to count blessings. Let’s start with the underappreciated fact that the Washington area is the best place in the country for children to both learn the mysteries of science, math, English and history, and to become comfortable with stark differences in race and culture.
I’ve looked all over the country for schools–particularly high schools–that have a critical mass of committed parents and educators of various backgrounds who are determined to create a lively learning environment for every child. It was hard to find that when I lived in Pasadena, Calif., which was still reeling from massive white flight after a desegregation fight. It wasn’t much better when we moved to Westchester County, N.Y., where schools were very short of minorities and low-income people.
Coming to Washington, it took time to see the difference. As usual, everyone complained about public education. That’s an American pastime. But the more high schools I visited here, the more I realized this was—at least relatively speaking– the Shangri-la of American education. There were more schools in one place than I had ever seen that fit my profile—well-mixed, well-run, with families committed to strong instruction. They shrugged off neighbors who, betraying unexamined biases, wondered how they could send their kids to THOSE schools.
In East Bay, where pollution goes, health problems follow
Sandy Kleffman & Suzanne Bohan:
In some hardscrabble East Bay neighborhoods, people die of heart disease and cancer at three times the rates found just a few miles away in more well-to-do communities.
Children living near busy freeways in Oakland are hospitalized for asthma at 12 times the rate of young people in Lafayette’s wooded housing tracts.
The East Bay’s striking health inequities extend far beyond life expectancy and involve more than differences between the rich and the poor. Disparities exist up and down the East Bay’s socioeconomic ladder, according to data compiled by the Alameda County Public Health Department for Bay Area News Group.
Middle-class communities in Dublin, Castro Valley and Fremont have higher heart disease death rates than wealthier neighborhoods in Walnut Creek and Berkeley, but lower rates than struggling areas of East Oakland and North Richmond.
These facts have led public-health leaders to advocate to equalize opportunities for healthful living, instead of focusing only on a never-ending battle to treat disease.
Cultures clash among classmates at SE Minnesota schools
Abdalla Mursal moved his family from Atlanta to southeastern Minnesota a decade ago to raise his four children in an area with good schools and low crime.
“This city is a very peaceful city and everybody who lives here likes it,” Mursal said of Rochester. “I like this city.”
But in recent months, Mursal and other Somali parents have discovered that their children’s schools aren’t so tranquil, as Somali youngsters have been in fights with white and African American students.
On Oct. 14, another student teased Mursal’s son, Abdirahman, a high school junior, and hit him with a baseball bat at school.
I took a cab some time ago with a Somali Driver in the Western United States. The driver’s cell phone featured a 612 area code – surprising outside of Minneapolis. I asked about this and heard a remarkable story of his entire family leaving Somali as refugees and, finally, in the early 1990’s receiving asylum in the United States. His large family settled in Mineapolis for more than a decade. We had a fascinating discussion about culture, academics, particularly rigor and assimilation.
City Schools’ New Criteria for Diversity Raise Fears
Crystal Yednak & Darnell Little:
The Chicago public schools’ response to a recent court desegregation ruling — a plan to use students’ social and economic profiles instead of race to achieve classroom diversity — is raising fears that it will undermine the district’s slow and incremental progress on racial diversity.
Chicago schools, like the city itself, are hardly a model of racial integration. But a Chicago News Cooperative analysis of school data shows the district has made modest gains in the magnet, gifted, classical and selective-enrollment schools, where, for nearly 30 years, race has been used as an admission criterion. Those advances may be imperiled in the wake of court rulings that have prompted Chicago Public Schools to look for factors other than race when assigning students to such schools.
Nationwide, court rulings have prompted school districts to seek creative ways to diversify classrooms without using a student’s race as a factor. In Chicago, school officials last week moved ahead with their own experiment.
Instead of race as an admissions factor, they now will use socioeconomic data from the student’s neighborhood — income, education levels, single-parent households, owner-occupied homes and the use of language other than English as the primary tongue — in placing children in selective-enrollment schools.
The Gift of Learning
Ellie Schatz, via a kind reader’s email:
What better gift to give that special child than the message that learning is cool. Most children really think that naturally as they begin to explore their world by walking, talking, and gaining new skills at a rapid rate as toddlers and preschoolers. A cartoon in the Dec. 14 “The New Yorker” shows two little kids in a sandbox. The older one says to the younger one: “It’s all learning-is-fun and invented spelling, and then-bam!- second grade.”
What’s wrong with second grade? As a teacher, consultant, longtime educational specialist, it is sad to often see fewer smiles and sparkling eyes with each advancing grade of school. Rather than continuing to believe that learning is fun, cool, an ultimate aim, too many children dumb down, hide their talents, and proceed in a lock-step method of learning that doesn’t fit them and holds little appeal. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Schatz founded WCATY and has written a new book: Grandma Says It’s Good to Be Smart.
AP Juggernaut
NYT: Room for Debate
Advanced Placement classes, once open to only a very small number of top high school students around the country, have grown enormously in the past decade. The number of students taking these courses rose by nearly 50 percent to 1.6 million from 2004 to 2009. Yet in a survey of A.P. teachers released this year, more than half said that “too many students overestimate their abilities and are in over their heads.” Some 60 percent said that “parents push their children into A.P. classes when they really don’t belong there.”
Does the growth in Advanced Placement courses serve students or schools well? Are there downsides to pushing many more students into taking these rigorous courses?
Kristin Klopfenstein, economist
Trevor Packer, College Board
Patrick Welsh, high school teacher
Philip M. Sadler, Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics
David Wakelyn, National Governors Association
Saul Geiser, Center for Studies in Higher Education
“The original point of the A.P. program was to make college-level study possible for advanced high school students…. But now, the A.P. program has been transformed to serve many more purposes…. The new uses of A.P. are not benign…”
“Advanced placement courses and exams are appropriate choices for students who have developed the knowledge and skills to study at the college level in high school. Of course, advanced placement is not a silver bullet if a district or school merely parachutes an A.P. course into a low-performing school without having fostered academic rigor in the grades prior to the A.P…. [T]eachers are right to insist on adequate student preparation for advanced placement work. But studies have indicated that teachers’ preconceived notions of student potential are often at odds with student capability….”
“The original purpose of the Advanced Placement program was a noble one…. In the last 10 years, Advanced Placement has become a game of labels and numbers, a public relations ploy used by school officials who are dumping as many students as they can into A.P. courses to create the illusion that they are raising overall standards…. [T]he College Board is shamelessly pressuring public schools by creating the impression that A.P. courses are the only ones worth taking…”
The Advanced Placement Juggernaut
Advanced Placement classes, once open to only a very small number of top high school students around the country, have grown enormously in the past decade. The number of students taking these courses rose by nearly 50 percent to 1.6 million from 2004 to 2009. Yet in a survey of A.P. teachers released this year, more than half said that “too many students overestimate their abilities and are in over their heads.” Some 60 percent said that “parents push their children into A.P. classes when they really don’t belong there.”
Does the growth in Advanced Placement courses serve students or schools well? Are there downsides to pushing many more students into taking these rigorous courses?
Kristin Klopfenstein, economist
Trevor Packer, College Board
Patrick Welsh, high school teacher
Philip M. Sadler, Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics
David Wakelyn, National Governors Association
Saul Geiser, Center for Studies in Higher Education
90 cameras to be installed outside Chicago Public schools
Ninety cameras will be installed outside Fenger and 39 other Chicago Public high schools to stop what Mayor Daley called the ugly “epidemic of children killing children,” thanks to a $2.25 million gift from the banking giant that employs the mayor’s brother.
Last year, a bloody weekend for CPS students prompted Daley to link 4,844 cameras inside schools and 1,437 exterior school cameras to police districts, squad cars and the 911 center. Until that time, real-time video from school cameras was accessible only to school security.
Thanks to J.P. Morgan Chase, where William Daley serves as Midwest chairman, 40 more high schools will get exterior cameras. They include Fenger, where 16-year-old Derrion Albert was beaten to death in September during a brawl captured on videotape and played around the world.
Another camera will be installed outside Walter H. Dyett High School, 555 E. 51st St., where two students have been murdered this year.
Finally some sense about 21st century skills–part two, the Wagner book
My wife was enjoying a quiet flight back to Washington after a week off in California when I, sitting next to her, started thrashing around. I was reading a book, but in a way that any person would find disturbing. I was marking and remarking pages. I was filling margins with unreadable scrawls. I was flipping back and forth. I was talking to myself: “Whoa! No! Yes!”
“What is that?” she asked.
It’s a good question. The simple answer is: the latest book by school improvement activist Tony Wagner: “The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need.” Wagner is co-director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is also a great writer and speaker. I consider this book more of an experience than a read.
My habit is to write on the last page, next to the inside of the back cover, any column ideas that come to me from a book. The last page of my copy of Wagner’s book is a maze of my jottings. I have been making fun of the 21st century skills movement as a high-cost, high-level, often incomprehensible conversation among people who have forgotten to explain what it means to teachers.
Are Colorado’s Education school graduates ready to teach reading and mathematics in elementary classrooms?
National Council on Teacher Quality [PDF report]:
Improving teacher effectiveness is hgh on the list of most education reformers in colorado, as it is nationally. Effective teaching in the elementary years is of vital importance to ensure not only that children master fundamental skills, but that performance gaps narrow rather than widen beyond repair. We now know that disadvantaged students can catch up academically with their more advantaged peers if they have great elementary teachers several years in a row.
It is for these reasons that the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), a nonpartisan research and advocacy group dedicated to the systemic reform of the teaching profession, evaluates the adequacy of preparation provided by undergraduate education schools. These programs produce 70 percent of our nation’s teachers. We think it is crucial to focus specifically on the quality of preparation of future elementary teachers in the core subjects of reading and mathematics.
Teacher preparation programs, or “ed schools” as they are more commonly known, do not now, nor have they ever, enjoyed a particularly positive reputation. Further, there is a growing body of research demonstrating that teacher preparation does not matter all that much and that a teacher with very little training can be as effective as a teacher who has had a lot of preparation. As a result, many education reformers are proposing that the solution to achieving better teacher quality is simply to attract more talented people into teaching, given that their preparation does not really matter.
In several significant ways, we respectfully disagree. NCTQ is deeply committed to high-quality formal teacher preparation, but, importantly, we are not defenders of the status quo. We also do not believe that it is a realistic strategy to fuel a profession with three million members nationally by only attracting more elite students. Yes, we need to be much more selective about who gets into teaching, and we strenuously advocate for that goal. But even smart people can become better teachers, particularly of young children, if they are provided with purposeful and systematic preparation.
NCTQ has issued two national reports on the reading and mathematics preparation of elementary teachers in undergraduate education schools. The first, What Education Schools Aren’t Teaching about Reading and What Elementary Teachers Aren’t Learning was released in May 2006.1 The second, No Common Denominator: The Preparation of Elementary Teachers in Mathematics by America’s Education Schools, followed just over two years later.2 These reports provide the methodological foundations for this analysis of teacher preparation in every undergraduate program in Colorado.
Reforming Education is Critical
I am a proud graduate of Montgomery’s public schools, and my progression from the railroad tracks in west Montgomery to the halls of Congress proves that education can transform lives. As governor I will do everything in my power to build a public school system that gives our children the chance to cross the bridge that I have walked.
The next governor of Alabama will need to launch a decade-long effort to revitalize public education. In a century where Alabama’s workers must compete globally, we can no longer afford to sit near the bottom of national categories that rank college affordability and high school graduation rates. We cannot be afraid of reform and we cannot dismiss the possibility that new ideas can work.
I will make it a priority to strengthen Alabama’s nationally recognized early learning programs. Our pre-kindergarten program is an Alabama success story, and many more children in our state should have access to it. Similarly, the Alabama Reading Initiative, which helped produce the biggest jump in fourth-grade reading performance in the country, must be broadened to reach middle school and above.
Since hearing, states take little action on restraint in schools
A handful of states have moved to restrict or regulate school staff members who restrain or seclude hard-to-handle children against their will in the wake of abuses exposed by congressional investigators seven months ago. But many more states have done little or nothing, advocates say.
“There has been a lot of attention, a lot of advocacy, a lot of family members involved, but it’s slow going,” says Jane Hudson, an attorney for the National Disability Rights Network, based in Washington, D.C.
Many states still have no rules in place to address how and when school staff can restrain and seclude children, says Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. So he and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., also on the committee, are pushing legislation to set federal rules.
“Without a federal standard to set the bar, it’s the Wild West,” Miller says. “We believe the right approach is a balanced one that provides federal guidance to states but still allows states the flexibility to tailor their regulations to their specific needs.”
Women, Literacy And Angry Young Men
Americans serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are amazed at how poor these places are, and how difficult it is to make a living. On top of that, there are lots of children, who are destined to be even less well off than their parents. This is one reason for Islamic terrorism. There are too many Moslems. At least in the sense that the economies of Islamic countries cannot create enough jobs for all the young people coming of age. Consider that for the last fifty years, the population of all Moslem countries has tripled. That’s population growth that is more than double the rate of the world as a whole, and about ten times the rate of Europe. It’s about five times the rate in the United States.
Many of those unemployed young men are angry, and making war is a typical activity of angry young men. But the women are not too happy either, and this is becoming a major threat to Islamic terrorists. In Islamic societies, women’s activities are greatly restricted. One thing they are encouraged to do is have lots of children. Many women in Islamic countries are rebelling against this. You don’t hear much about this, because women don’t rebel in the same loud, headline grabbing way that men do. What unhappy women often do is stop having children. Not so easy to do, you think? Well, think again.
The Race to the Top Starts Now
It is far past the time for California to step up and reform its education system. As a state, our schools were once the fourth-highest in the nation in reading and math. Now, we now rank below 40. In science, our students were once proudly some of the highest in the nation and now they are now some of the lowest.
This is simply unacceptable.
We have to reform the way we educate our children and, thanks to the Obama administration, we have a chance to do just that.
Thanks to the Race to the Top funds – $4.35 billion worth of competitive grants – states have the opportunity to compete for these funds that are intended to “encourage and reward states that are creating the conditions for education innovation and reform.” Essentially, the White House and Department of Education have issued a challenge to states – come up with a workable plan to fix your failing schools and they will reward you with funding.
Jeff Raikes, The Gates Foundation and Education
It’s lunchtime at the Ashongman School in Accra, the capital city of Ghana, and dozens of children in orange-and-brown uniforms file out to a serving table to pick up plates of jollof rice, a hearty dish with stewed chicken and tomatoes.
As the kids sit down, Jeffrey S. Raikes approaches them with the air of a waiter checking to see if his customers are enjoying their meal. “Do you like the rice?” he asks, as the kids stick their fingers into bowls to scoop up their meals in the dimly lit room. The kids nod, not entirely sure what to make of the stranger.
Raikes isn’t there to gauge if the menu is a hit, nor can the chief executive of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation claim credit for the three-year-old Ghana School Feeding Program. Of the $2.8 billion the foundation doled out last year, not a penny was spent on putting food in the mouths of these children. Instead, Raikes wants to learn why much of the rice eaten by the program’s participants comes from Thailand instead of from farms a few miles away. If Ghana’s farmers can find buyers for their crops, Raikes argues, they will have an incentive to make their land more productive and give this West African nation a more secure food supply. “The real opportunity here is to create a stabilized market,” says Raikes. “You can use the school feeding program to bootstrap those efforts.”
Standards in UK Schools: An unacceptable term’s work
EVER since the cap on the number of children who could be awarded top grades in their GCSE exams was abolished in 1988, the proportion of pupils attaining these heights has relentlessly increased. This week that inexorable progress was revealed to be illusory. Three separate studies showed how Britain is failing its schoolchildren–and shortchanging the country in the process.
All rich countries rightly expect their young people to be literate and numerate by the time they leave school. Some aspire to loftier goals such as scientific prowess, fluency in a foreign language and a rough grasp of history. In a report released on December 1st, Reform, a think-tank, pointed out the poverty of Britain’s ambitions for its children.
Students at 16 are required to take just three academic subjects–English, maths and science–and many study no others. Even if they leave school with vocational qualifications too, they are ill placed to better themselves. Employers consistently value the ability to think above skills that can be learned on the job, and universities that accept students with vocational qualifications do so only after admissions tutors have reassured themselves that the young person in front of them is no dullard. Allowing pupils to choose vocational courses over academic ones–indeed, encouraging it, as vocational qualifications are treated in published school-league tables as if they were worth twice as much as academic ones–does no favours to children from deprived backgrounds. Instead it segregates the workforce and impairs social mobility. Bad at any time, this is appalling now that globalisation has increased competition in the workplace.
60% to 42%: Madison School District’s Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags “National Average”: Administration seeks to continue its use
via a kind reader’s email: Sue Abplanalp, Assistant Superintendent for Elementary Education, Lisa Wachtel, Executive Director, Teaching & Learning, Mary Jo Ziegler, Language Arts/Reading Coordinator, Teaching & Learning, Jennie Allen, Title I, Ellie Schneider, Reading Recovery Teacher Leader [2.6MB PDF]:
Background The Board of Education requested a thorough and neutral review of the Madison Metropolitan School District’s (MMSD) Reading Recovery program, In response to the Board request, this packet contains a review of Reading Recovery and related research, Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Reading Recovery student data analysis, and a matrix summarizing three options for improving early literacy intervention. Below please find a summary of the comprehensive research contained in the Board of Education packet. It is our intent to provide the Board of Education with the research and data analysis in order to facilitate discussion and action toward improved effectiveness of early literacy instruction in MMSD.
Reading Recovery Program Description The Reading Recovery Program is an intensive literacy intervention program based on the work of Dr. Marie Clay in New Zealand in the 1970’s, Reading Recovery is a short-term, intensive literacy intervention for the lowest performing first grade students. Reading Recovery serves two purposes, First, it accelerates the literacy learning of our most at-risk first graders, thus narrowing the achievement gap. Second, it identifies children who may need a long-term intervention, offering systematic observation and analysis to support recommendations for further action.
The Reading Recovery program consists of an approximately 20-week intervention period of one-to-one support from a highly trained Reading Recovery teacher. This Reading Recovery instruction is in addition to classroom literacy instruction delivered by the classroom teacher during the 90-minute literacy block. The program goal is to provide the lowest performing first grade students with effective reading and writing strategies allowing the child to perform within the average range of a typical first grade classroom after a successful intervention period. A successful intervention period allows the child to be “discontinued” from the Reading Recovery program and to function proficiently in regular classroom literacy instruction.
Reading Recovery Program Improvement Efforts The national Reading Recovery data reports the discontinued rate for first grade students at 60%. In 2008-09, the discontinued rate for MMSD students was 42% of the students who received Reading Recovery. The Madison Metropolitan School District has conducted extensive reviews of Reading Recovery every three to four years. In an effort to increase the discontinued rate of Reading Recovery students, MMSD worked to improve the program’s success through three phases.
Reading recovery will be discussed at Monday evening’s Madison School Board meeting.
Related:
- University of Wisconsin-Madison Psychology Professor Mark Seidenberg: Madison schools distort reading data:
In her column, Belmore also emphasized the 80 percent of the children who are doing well, but she provided additional statistics indicating that test scores are improving at the five target schools. Thus she argued that the best thing is to stick with the current program rather than use the Reading First money.
Belmore has provided a lesson in the selective use of statistics. It’s true that third grade reading scores improved at the schools between 1998 and 2004. However, at Hawthorne, scores have been flat (not improving) since 2000; at Glendale, flat since 2001; at Midvale/ Lincoln, flat since 2002; and at Orchard Ridge they have improved since 2002 – bringing them back to slightly higher than where they were in 2001.
In short, these schools are not making steady upward progress, at least as measured by this test.
Belmore’s attitude is that the current program is working at these schools and that the percentage of advanced/proficient readers will eventually reach the districtwide success level. But what happens to the children who have reading problems now? The school district seems to be writing them off.
So why did the school district give the money back? Belmore provided a clue when she said that continuing to take part in the program would mean incrementally ceding control over how reading is taught in Madison’s schools (Capital Times, Oct 16). In other words, Reading First is a push down the slippery slope toward federal control over public education. - Jeff Henriques references a Seidenberg paper on the importance of phonics, published in Psychology Review.
- Ruth Robarts letter to Isthmus on the Madison School District’s reading progress:
Thanks to Jason Shepard for highlighting comments of UW Psychology Professor Mark Seidenberg at the Dec. 13 Madison School Board meeting in his article, Not all good news on reading. Dr. Seidenberg asked important questions following the administrations presentation on the reading program. One question was whether the district should measure the effectiveness of its reading program by the percentages of third-graders scoring at proficient or advanced on the Wisconsin Reading Comprehension Test (WRCT). He suggested that the scores may be improving because the tests arent that rigorous.
I have reflected on his comment and decided that he is correct.
Using success on the WRCT as our measurement of student achievement likely overstates the reading skills of our students. The WRCT—like the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE) given in major subject areas in fourth, eighth and tenth grades— measures student performance against standards developed in Wisconsin. The more teaching in Wisconsin schools aims at success on the WRCT or WKCE, the more likely it is that student scores will improve. If the tests provide an accurate, objective assessment of reading skills, then rising percentages of students who score at the proficient and advanced levels would mean that more children are reaching desirable reading competence. - Madison teacher Barb Williams letter to Isthmus on Madison School District reading scores:
I’m glad Jason Shepard questions MMSD’s public display of self-congratulation over third grade reading test scores. It isn’t that MMSD ought not be proud of progress made as measured by fewer African American students testing at the basic and minimal levels. But there is still a sigificant gap between white students and students of color–a fact easily lost in the headlines. Balanced Literacy, the district’s preferred approach to reading instruction, works well for most kids. Yet there are kids who would do a lot better in a program that emphasizes explicit phonics instruction, like the one offered at Lapham and in some special education classrooms. Kids (arguably too many) are referred to special education because they have not learned to read with balanced literacy and are not lucky enough to land in the extraordinarily expensive Reading Recovery program that serves a very small number of students in one-on-on instruction. (I have witnessed Reading Recovery teachers reject children from their program because they would not receive the necessary support from home.)
Though the scripted lessons typical of most direct instruction programs are offensive to many teachers (and is one reason given that the district rejected the Reading First grant) the irony is that an elementary science program (Foss) that the district is now pushing is also scripted as is Reading Recovery and Everyday Math, all elementary curricula blessed by the district.
I wonder if we might close the achievement gap further if teachers in the district were encouraged to use an approach to reading that emphasizes explicit and systematic phonics instruction for those kids who need it. Maybe we’d have fewer kids in special education and more children of color scoring in the proficient and advanced levels of the third grade reading test.
The Coming Crescendo of China
Piano notes drift up the stairs in a Beijing branch of the Liu Shih Kun Piano School. Perched near the East Glorious Gate of the Forbidden City, the school does a brisk business educating the children of the affluent. In a practice room downstairs, a little girl is flanked by two adults–her teacher and her mother, who watches the proceedings intently. Lessons cost about 150 yuan ($22) per hour, and upright pianos sell for more than 13,000 yuan, substantial sums even for upper or middle-class families.
Still, they come en masse with their children. “Almost every student is accompanied here by the parents,” explains Ba Shan, the young woman manning the reception desk at the school founded by one of China’s first famous pianists. “Almost all of them have pianos at home, too.”
Between several established chains like Liu Shih Kun, thousands of individual schools and uncountable private teachers, there are still no firm figures on the actual number of music students in China. In an interview with the New York Times this year, Jindong Cai, a conductor and professor at Stanford University, estimated that there are 38 million students studying piano alone. A 2007 estimate put violin students at 10 million. And the trend is clearly upward.
