Search Results for: English 10
Common Core Flop/Flip & Flip/Flop
Wheeler Report (PDF): For this reason, many of us were initially encouraged when you indicated that you would defund Wisconsin’s participation in the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) via your proposed 2015-2017 biennial budget. We hoped for substantive movement, at long last, on an issue that affects most children, parents, and teachers in Wisconsin. However, […]
Public School Educators Get Second Reminder of Ban on Tutoring
Luo Ruiyao: (Beijing) – The government has again told teachers they are prohibited from tutoring students after class for extra cash, but experts say the latest reminder will have little effect if educators are not paid more. On July 6, the Ministry of Education reiterated that primary and middle schools and their teachers cannot host […]
Why Johnny and Joanie Can’t Write, Revisited
Gerald Graff COMPLAINTS THAT American high school and college graduates can’t write have been pervasive for so long that they almost go without saying. Last year, when the Society for Human Resource Management asked managers about the skills of recent college graduates, 49 percent of them rated those graduates deficient in “the knowledge and basic […]
Common Core Is Leaving My Students Behind
Brian Zorn: The mission of American education is “No Child Left Behind.” For me as a special-education teacher in New York state, that means making my students feel worthwhile and giving them the confidence they need to succeed—academically and socially. Yet New York’s statewide English language arts (ELA) and mathematics exams unduly humiliate children in […]
America’s most controversial educator
Robert Pondsco: If you don’t live in New York City or within the education policy universe, Eva Moskowitz might not be on your radar screen. She should be. With a recent front page piece in The New York Times about the extraordinary results posted by her network of 32 Success Academy charter schools and how […]
Social Studies [and history] Education in Crisis
Gorman Lee, via Will Fitzhugh: The Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education’s decision to indefinitely suspend the History and Social Science MCAS in 2009 has placed social studies education in a high risk of marginalization in K-12 public school districts across the Commonwealth. The problem has only exacerbated with increased emphases of English language […]
Finland’s reforms won’t scrap subjects altogether
Pasi Sahlberg: Finland’s plans to replace the teaching of classic school subjects such as history or English with broader, cross-cutting “topics” as part of a major education reform have been getting global attention, thanks to an article in The Independent, one of the UK’s trusted newspapers. Stay calm: despite the reforms, Finnish schools will continue […]
Finally, Some Unbiased Educational Statistics on Newark Public Schools
Laura Waters: Comparison in student outcomes between traditional and charter schools: “A substantial and persistent achievement gap exists in pass rates among students in Newark traditional public schools and charter schools. For example, while 71 percent of charter school students in Newark passed 3rd grade language arts tests in 2013–14 — higher than the state […]
State Of Parenting
Parent Toolkit: While it may be true that divorce rates are still high and Americans are delaying marriage, the idea that American families are worse off and continuing to decline is up for debate. The findings of this new NBC News State of Parenting Poll which was sponsored by Pearson, paint a different story. The […]
Tsinghua, Peking Universities Rise in Reputation Rankings
Xu Heqian & Wang Yucheng Two top mainland universities climbed in the latest rankings of colleges around the world that is produced by a leading education publication in Britain. Tsinghua University was ranked No. 26 in the 2015 Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings published on March 12 – an improvement of 10 spots for […]
Study praises Wisconsin for raising the bar on state exams; RIP WKCE Low Standards?
Erin Richards Eight years ago, a study found Wisconsin had one of the lowest bars in the country for rating students proficient in reading and math on the state standardized test. That means children here looked more academically accomplished than they probably really were — something the state aimed to remedy by raising the scores […]
Addressing racial disparity in schools
Christian Schneider: When the Madison Metropolitan School District School Board met in October of last year, members listened to teachers tell stories of being hit, bitten and kicked by students. The teachers were objecting to a new school district plan that sought to both allay the wide racial disparity in student suspensions and keep children […]
The “Wild West” of Academic Publishing
Craig Lambert: Last summer, Harvard University Press (HUP) asked a book designer to create a T-shirt for its softball squad’s intramural season. The front of the shirt bore the expression r > g, signifying that the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of growth in income (g)—the central thesis of […]
DPI Standard of the Week: Using phonics as building blocks for reading
Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email: The Department of Public Instruction chooses an English Language Arts standard each week and posts resources and ideas for practicing in the classroom and at home. The standard for the week of January 5 is phonics. Follow this link to the site http://dpi.wi.gov/my-wi-standards/ela/1-6-15 As is usually the case […]
Racial Isolation in Public Schools
NY Times: This is not an easy problem to solve. But the state cannot just throw up its hands. It has a moral obligation to ensure that as many children as possible escape failing schools for ones that give them a fighting chance. And history has shown that districts can dramatically improve educational opportunities for […]
Who was behind the Common Core math standards, and will they survive?
Sarah Garland: Every Saturday morning at 10 a.m., Jason Zimba begins a math tutoring session for his two young daughters with the same ritual. His youngest, Claire, 4, draws on a worksheet while his oldest, Abigail, 7, pulls math problems written on strips of paper out of an old Kleenex box, decorated like a piggy […]
Mind the Generation Gap….
Jonathan Margolis: Do you send emails in literate, properly spelt English, broken down into crisp, relevant paragraphs, signed at the end, even with the mandatory extra space inserted after each full stop? If you do, you are almost certainly old. How old? From a not hugely scientific study of everyone I happen to know, I’d […]
Pearson chief promises a big push into China’s education sector
Wang Zhuoqiong: Pearson Plc’s pavilion at a book fair in Beijing. The global education service company said that its business revenue in China reached $300 million last year from $10 million in 2007 when it entered the Chinese market. Global giant to take mixed, blended learning approach for success Pearson Plc, the global education service […]
Who Killed Wikipedia?
Virginia Postrel: Wikipedia is the sixth most popular website in the world. It’s the quickest way to get the lowdown on the Battle of Nashville, find out exactly how old Ruth Bader Ginsburg is, or discover who invented Hot Pockets. You can find more authoritative specialized resources online—from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to IMDb— […]
What do you know? A simple way to revolutionise teacher quality1 2
Tom Bennett: I want to talk about a topic so volatile and delicate it could be a kitten made of nitroglycerin: subject knowledge. And, for once, I don’t mean looking at what children know, because that’s a discussion that can currently be enjoyed on channels 1-100 on your Sky box (other cable providers are, of […]
NPR & School Discipline
Ross T:
Teaching to the Authentic Assessment
Barry Garelick, via a kind email: Back in September, when I was doing my sub-assignment for the high school, I attended a math department meeting the day before school began. Sally from the District office presided, and among the many things she told us at that session was that this year the students in the […]
Lone Geniuses Are Overrated
Jeffrey Goldberg: Somewhat to my surprise, Walter Isaacson’s new book, The Innovators, a group portrait of the men and women who invented computers and the Internet, is riveting, propulsive and at times deeply moving. My surprise is not rooted in doubts about Isaacson’s skills; he is considered to be the leading biographer of the digital […]
Managing Dyslexia Forum 25 October 2014
Lake Superior Tutoring Center (PDF) Guest Speaker: Shantell Barrett Shantell Barrett has a B.A. in English from BYU specializing in language processing deficits and behavioral issues. She is a former teacher and a parent of a child with dyslexia. She is also the Dyslexia Specialist and Director of Training for Reading Horizons. To learn more […]
Germany’s great tuition fees U-turn
Howard Hotson: During the past eight years, university tuition fees were introduced into most west German federal states. Yet in a few months, every single state will have abolished them. These facts raise a series of topical questions that cast current English higher education policy in a fresh and revealing light. Why did Germany introduce […]
“They are intellectually underpowered and full of themselves, because they’ve been told their whole life how wonderful they are”
Michael Schulson: In the spring of 2008, William Deresiewicz taught his last class at Yale. In the summer of 2008, he published an essay explaining how an Ivy League education had messed up his life, and the lives of his students. Elite schools, Deresiewicz argued, give their students an inflated sense of self-worth. They reward […]
Reading and Curricular Suggestions & Links as the school year begins
Wisconsin Reading Coalition via a kind email: With the beginning of a new school year, here is some timely information and inspiration. You can make a difference: At WRC, we are often focused on top-down systemic change that can improve reading outcomes for students across our state. However, bottom-up, individual efforts are equally important. A […]
American Horror, Ivy League Edition
Alexander Nazaryan In 1911, the fictional Dink Stover arrived at Yale, “leisurely divested himself of his trim overcoat” and coolly strolled into campus life. “He had come to conquer,” writes Owen Johnson in the 1912 novel called Stover at Yale, “and zest was in his step.” Stover’s zest has little to do with intellectual inquest, […]
An Interview with Will Fitzhugh: Peer Scholars Helping and Mentoring Budding Scholars
Professor Michael F. Shaughnessy 1) Will, you have been editing The Concord Review for ages. When did you begin, and what are you trying to accomplish? Since 1987, when I got started, the goals have been to: (1) find and celebrate exemplary history research papers by secondary students from the English-speaking world, and (2) to […]
Best state in America: Massachusetts, for its educational success
Reid Wilson: That’s according to the Education Week Research Center, a nonpartisan group that measured indicators such as preschool and kindergarten enrollment, high school graduation rates, and higher education attainment. The yearly study also considered family income and parental employment, which are linked to educational achievement. In almost every category, the Bay State beats the […]
Year after Rocketship’s scrutinized Milwaukee launch, signs point to progress; Status Quo in Madison
Erin Richards: What were the highlights of Rocketship’s first year here? Strong growth. Rocketship set a goal of having 65% of its Milwaukee students meet the national average for reading and math growth over the course of the year. In fact, 72% of the school’s students, almost all of whom are low-income and Hispanic or […]
Self-Delusion Spreads from Professional to Graduate Education; Consternation Curiously Absent
Bernie Burk: I want to be clear at the outset: I love literature. I was an English major, and I’ve never regretted it for a moment. I seriously considered pursuing a Ph.D. in English. I could not have a deeper faith in the liberal arts as a path to the betterment of all mankind. So […]
Poor progress of UK disadvantaged pupils a waste of talent, says Alan Milburn
Richard Adams: England’s education system is wasting young talent “on an industrial scale” because of poor progress made by the brightest disadvantaged children once they leave primary school, Alan Milburn, chair of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, said after publication of a report detailing the educational differences that emerge by the age of […]
Self-Delusion Spreads from Professional to Graduate Education; Consternation Curiously Absent
Bernie Burk: I want to be clear at the outset: I love literature. I was an English major, and I’ve never regretted it for a moment. I seriously considered pursuing a Ph.D. in English. I could not have a deeper faith in the liberal arts as a path to the betterment of all mankind. So […]
2014 Teacher Prep Review Findings
National Council on Teacher Quality: Our Approach There’s widespread public interest in strengthening teacher preparation — but there’s a significant data gap on what’s working. We aim to fill this gap, providing information that aspiring teachers and school leaders need to become strategic consumers and that institutions and states need in order to rapidly improve […]
South Korea’s Millionaire Tutors: The vast sums spent on preparing children for tests are causing unease
Simon Mundy: Kim Ki-hoon has risen to stardom of a sort that exists in few places outside South Korea. As the country’s highest-earning celebrity English teacher, he estimates he made about $4m last year from his online language lessons – and then there is the income from his educational publishing company, which turned over about […]
We Need to Talk About the Test: A problem with the common core
Elizabeth Phillips I’D like to tell you what was wrong with the tests my students took last week, but I can’t. Pearson’s $32 million contract with New York State to design the exams prohibits the state from making the tests public and imposes a gag order on educators who administer them. So teachers watched hundreds […]
Illustration by Stanley Mouse Field Trippin’ One high school teacher’s account of a trip he didn’t mean to take
John Moss: We were barely past MacArthur when I felt it beginning to take hold. It was a big Friday for me, taking 40 students on a walking field trip to our local bookstore, then a tour of the Community Center and, if there was enough time, a little sit-under-a-tree-and-read time for the students in […]
Academia Under the Influence
Eleanor J Bader: While we may tend to romanticize universities as bastions of free thought and intellectual rigor, Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira’s new book, The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, demonstrates their subjection to the same ideological underpinnings as the general body politic. The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, Edited […]
I’ll Have a Dose of Confirmation Bias, Heavy on the Bias
Matthew Ladner: So how do private school students do in Science compared to public school students. I wasn’t sure, so I went to the NAEP data explorer to find out. Private school students outscore public school students, but private school students tend to be more affluent than public school students, and there can be differences […]
Chinese parents scramble to send children to top British schools
Helen Warrell: Packed into a grey minibus, 22 Chinese parents are trundling down a bumpy driveway towards Cobham Hall, a girls boarding school set in 70 hectares of Kent countryside. The red-brick Tudor mansion, with its octagonal wing turrets, looks like something out of an Enid Blyton novel. But there is nothing fanciful about the […]
Why India’s landmark education law is shutting down schools
Alays Francis In an unauthorised colony of labourers in Delhi, a class of six-year-olds is reciting English, a language their parents hope will get them jobs in call centres and offices. But later this month the classes will stop. Ramditi JRN Deepalaya is among hundreds of small private schools – which have multiplied in India […]
Please Excuse my Grammar
Austin Walters: This is a long story, but I feel sheds light on education in general and why academia and educational institutions function so poorly that they drive the brightest into the dark. More than once I have told by an academic advisor that I am going to fail 2nd grade was my first brush […]
Educators launch defense of Common Core at Senate hearing
Erin Richards: More than more than 100 superintendents and school board members packed a Senate chamber Thursday in opposition to a bill that could derail the transition to new educational standards in Wisconsin. At issue are the Common Core State Standards, a set of expectations for English and math instruction that most states have adopted […]
UK Free schools will stumble – the test is how well they recover
Fraser Nelson: Nothing tempts fate more than adding the word “flagship” to a government project. When Britain’s first profit-seeking state school opened in Suffolk 18 months ago, it perhaps had a little too much going in its favour. The blessing of the local MP, the skills minister Matthew Hancock. The backing of Sweden’s most successful […]
A Conversation with Leigh Turner
Jim Zellmer: Good afternoon, Leigh Let’s begin with your education. Leigh Turner: Like increasing numbers of people in today’s modern world, I grew up in several countries, in Nigeria, in Britain, then again in Lesotho, in southern Africa, and then again in Britain. I went to several different, as we would say in English, schools […]
Madison Schools’ Student Assessment Plan Proposed Changes
Madison School District 500K PDF Slideware: Phase Out: WKCE, Explore, and Plan Phase In: PALS 2, Smarter Balanced, Aspire, Work Keys Required State Assessments PALS (4K-2) WKCE Science & Social Studies (3-8) ACCESS for English Language Learners Aspire (9, 10) ACT + Writing (11) Work Keys (12) Related: Madison Schools’ MAP results
The Pleasures Of ‘Teaching To the Test’
Is standardized testing anti-student? Many educators and commentators believe so, vehemently. No more “drill and kill,” some detractors demand. Kids are not robots goes another refrain. Others argue that standardized testing is a soul-sapping exercise in rote learning that devalues critical thinking and favors students of higher-income parents who can afford test-prep classes or private tutors.
On the contrary: Testing is good for the intellectual health of students. It is also an excellent way for teachers to better understand the particular academic challenges their students face.
First, standardized tests are a critical thinker’s dream. Multiple-choice questions often ask students to evaluate evidence and make inferences. Consider a sample multiple-choice question for the New York State English Language Arts test, which is administered in the public schools. It asks students to identify the tone of a paragraph excerpted from Andrew Carnegie’s “The Gospel of Wealth” (1889).
Eva Moskowitz: Teachers Union Enemy No. 1
For several months running, the Bill and Eva Show has been the talk of New York City politics. He is the new mayor, Bill de Blasio, an unapologetic old-school liberal Democrat, scourge of the rich and of public charter schools. She is Eva Moskowitz, fellow Democrat and educational-reform champion who runs the city’s largest charter network.
How did Ms. Moskowitz, a hero to thousands of New Yorkers of modest means whose children have been able to get a better education than their local public schools offered, end up becoming public enemy No. 1?
She is the city’s most prominent, and vocal, advocate for charter schools, and therefore a threat to the powerful teachers union that had been counting the days until the de Blasio administration took over last month from the charter-friendly Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Assailed by Mayor de Blasio and union leaders, Ms. Moskowitz is fighting back with typically sharp elbows.
“A progressive Democrat should be embracing charters, not rejecting them,” she says. “It’s just wacky.”
As she reminds every audience, the 6,700 students at her 22 Success Academy Charter Schools are overwhelmingly from poor, minority families and scored in the top 1% in math and top 7% in English on the most recent state test. Four in five charters in the city outperformed comparable schools.
An Approach That Uses Computers a Bit to Ask Questions on Numbers and Stuff in Big School
Here I attempt to write the abstract for my thesis, ‘A Partially-automated Approach to the Assessment of Mathematics in Higher Education’, “using only the ten hundred words people use the most often”.
Katie Steckles pointed out via the latest Carnival of Mathematics that quantum computer scientist Scott Aaronson posted an explanation of his research using only the 1000 most common words in English, inspired by the xkcd comic ‘Up-Goer Five’, which did the same for a labelled diagram of the Saturn V rocket (the ‘Up-Goer Five’). Scott’s post links to The Up-Goer Five text editor, a fabulous innovation that allows typing in a box and highlights when a word isn’t on the same list of words used in the xkcd diagram. I used this to write a version of my thesis abstract. Beyond what the text editor wanted, I also voluntarily adjusted some terms that are on the list, but presumably not in the way I mean them. Particularly, ‘deep learning’ and ‘open-ended questions’ didn’t get highlighted. I’ve gone for a fairly close, word-by-word translation, though clearly some parts could be rewritten completely to be clearer.
My thesis abstract (the version I handed in) is in a previous blog post, if you want to view it for comparison. Here’s my Up-Goer Five version.
Big names dominate FT MBA ranking top spots
The FT Global MBA ranking and the English football Premier League have one thing in common. Pundits may argue about who will head the table, but most years there is little doubt about the top five.
So it is for 2014: Harvard Business School fended off competitors and kept the crown it regained last year. This is the fifth time Harvard has topped the rankings since they began in 1999. Stanford Graduate School of Business remained second, while London Business School leapfrogged the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania, pushing the latter into fourth place. Columbia Business School and Insead are joint fifth.
The FT ranking is based on two surveys of the business schools and their alumni who graduated in 2010. MBA programmes are assessed according to the career progression of their alumni, the school’s idea generation and the diversity of students and faculty.
Harvard leads the field for idea generation, coming first for research and second for its doctoral programme. The school’s alumni also boast the second-highest average salary three years after graduation (behind Stanford) and above-average salary increase. Harvard is also among the top schools for career progression and its MBA was the most highly commended by graduates from other schools.
2013 Madison Summer School Report
The district provided a comprehensive extended learning summer school program, K-Ready through 12th grade, at ten sites and served 5,097 students. At each of the K-8 sites, there was direction by a principal, professional Leopold, Chavez, Black Hawk and Toki, and oral language development was offered at Blackhawk and Toki. The 4th grade promotion classes were held at each elementary school, and 8th grade promotion classes were held at the two middle school sites.
Students in grades K-2 who received a 1 or 2 on their report card in literacy, and students in grades 3-5 who received a 1 or 2 in math or literacy, were invited to attend SLA. The 6-7 grade students who received a GPA of 2.0 or lower, or a 1 or 2 on WKCE, were invited to attend SLA. As in 2012, students with report cards indicating behavioral concerns were invited to attend summer school. Additionally, the summer school criterion for grades 5K-7th included consideration for students receiving a 3 or 4 asterisk grade on their report card (an asterisk grade indicates the student receives modified curriculum). In total, the academic program served 2,910 students, ranging from those entering five-year-old kindergarten through 8th grade.
High school courses were offered for credit recovery, first-time credit, and electives including English/language arts, math, science, social studies, health, physical education, keyboarding, computer literacy, art, study skills, algebra prep, ACT/SAT prep, and work experience. The high school program served a total of 1,536 students, with 74 students having completed their graduation requirements at the end of the summer.
All academic summer school teachers received approximately 20 hours of professional development prior to the start of the six-week program. Kindergarten-Ready teachers as well as primary literacy and math teachers also had access to job embedded professional development. In 2013, there were 476 certified staff employed in SLA.Jennifer Cheatham:
Key Enhancements for Summer School 2014
A) Provide teachers with a pay increase without increasing overall cost of summer school.
Teacher salary increase of 3% ($53,887).
B) Smaller Learning Environments: Create smaller learning environments, with fewer students per summer school site compared to previous years, to achieve the following: increase student access to high quality learning, increase the number of students who can walk to school, and reduce number of people in the building when temperatures are high. ($50,482)
C) Innovations: Pilot at Wright Middle School and Lindbergh Elementary School where students receive instruction in a familiar environment, from a familiar teacher. These school sites were selected based on identification as intense focus schools along with having high poverty rates when compared to the rest of the district. Pilot character building curriculum at Sandburg Elementary School. ($37,529)
D) Student Engagement: Increase student engagement with high quality curriculum and instruction along with incentives such as Friday pep rallies and afternoon MSCR fieldtrips. ($25,000)
E) High School Professional Development: First-time-offered, to increase quality of instruction and student engagement in learning. ($12,083)
F) Student Selection: Utilize an enhanced student selection process that better aligns with school’s multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) so that student services intervention teams (SSIT) have time to problem solve, and recommend students for SLA. Recommendations are based on student grades and standardized assessment scores, such as a MAP score below the 25th percentile at grades 3-5, or a score of minimal on the WKCE in language arts, math, science, and social studies at grades 3-5. (no cost)
Estimated total cost: $185,709.00
Summer School Program Reductions
The following changes would allow enhancements to summer school and implementation of innovative pilots:
A) Professional development (PD): reduce PD days for teachers grades K-8 by one day. This change will save money and provide teachers with an extra day off of work before the start of summer school (save $49,344.60).
B) Materials reduction: the purchase of Mondo materials in 2013 allows for the reduction of general literacy curricular materials in 2014 (save $5,000).
C) Madison Virtual Campus (MVC): MVC is not a reimbursable summer school program as students are not in classroom seats. This program could be offered separate from summer school in the future (save $18,000).
D) Librarians: reduce 3 positions, assigning librarians to support two sites. Students will continue to have access to the expertise of the librarian and can utilize library resources including electronic equipment (save $12,903.84).
E) Reading Interventionists: reduce 8 positions, as summer school is a student intervention, it allows students additional learning time in literacy and math. With new Mondo materials and student data profiles, students can be grouped for the most effective instruction when appropriate (save $48,492).
F) PBS Coach: reduce 8 positions, combining the coach and interventionist positions to create one position (coach/interventionist) that supports teachers in setting up classes and school wide systems, along with providing individual student interventions. With smaller learning sites, there would be less need for two separate positions (save $24,408).
G) Literacy and Math Coach Positions: reduce from 16 to 5 positions, combining the role and purpose of the literacy and math coach. Each position supports two schools for both math and literacy. Teachers can meet weekly with literacy/math coach to plan and collaborate around curriculum and student needs (save $27,601.60).
Estimated Total Savings: $185,750.04
Strategic Framework:
The role of the Summer Learning Academy (SLA) is critical to preparing students for college career and community readiness. Research tells us that over 50% of the achievement gap between lower and higher income students is directly related to unequal learning opportunities over the summer (Alexander et al., 2007). Research based practices and interventions are utilized in SLA to increase opportunities for learning and to raise student achievement across the District (Odden & Archibald, 2008). The SLA is a valuable time for students to receive additional support in learning core concepts in literacy and math to move them toward MMSD benchmarks (Augustine et.al., 2013). SLA aligns with the following Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Strategic Framework goals:
A) Every student is on-track to graduate as measured by student growth and achievement at key milestones. Milestones of reading by grade 3, proficiency in reading and math in grade 5, high school readiness in grade 8, college readiness in grade 11, and high school graduation and completion rate.
B) Every student has access to challenging and well-rounded education as measured by programmatic access and participation data. Access to fine arts and world languages, extra-curricular and co-curricular activities, and advanced coursework.
The Humanities Have Forgotten Their Humanity When Shakespeare lost out to ‘rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class’ at UCLA, something vital was harmed.
In 2011, the University of California at Los Angeles wrecked its English major. Such a development may seem insignificant, compared with, say, the federal takeover of health care. It is not. What happened at UCLA is part of a momentous shift that bears on our relationship to the past–and to civilization itself.
Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton–the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the “Empire,” UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing.
In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent to whether an English major had ever read a word of Chaucer, Milton or Shakespeare, but the department was determined to expose students, according to the course catalog, to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”
5 Things Faculty Can Actually Do About the Academy, Part 3: The Humanities Resembles a Pyramid Scheme, and We Should Be Bothered By That
Earlier this fall semester, Dr. Anne-Marie Womack (Tulane), a colleague from my graduate institution, and I had a piece about the academic job market in English published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In the piece, we make the argument that departments should strive to make the first round of job applications free of cost for candidates. The idea for this piece arose when we were on a flight together to campus visits and we got into a discussion about how much money we had spent on Interfolio during the job search “season”. Both of us had applied to more than 100 jobs, and for myself the Interfolio cost alone was north of $600. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Interfolio, it is a dossier service that allows a candidate to put his or her materials together, including confidential letters of recommendation, and send them as one package to the hiring committee responsible for the job search. The minimum cost for sending a dossier through Interfolio is $6, and in the case of print materials, the price increases as the page count goes up. For most jobs I applied to, the committee required at minimum a CV, three confidential letters of recommendation, a teaching philosophy, a writing sample, and a job letter in the first round of application.
Due to the volume of this type of application, the cost for a single Interfolio dossier could go as high as $20. Given such a high cost to applicants, most often graduate students, adjuncts, and postdoctoral fellows, and the fact that many jobs in English had as many as 500 applicants in the first round, we argued that departments and schools should work to make the process free to applicants by requiring only an electronic submission of a CV and job letter in the first round.
We further argued that this system would also provide feedback and reassurance to applicants advanced to the next round of the search by contacting them for materials like the writing sample and confidential letters of recommendation. Requesting more materials from a short list, we claimed, “would also alert us of our success and would mark a significant personal accomplishment in what can be a very anonymous process.”
Is College Necessary? Ask Recent Graduates
Lately the question “Is College Necessary?” has been under debate. One factor sparking the debate is the record 85 percent of recent college grads living with their parents. While economists and academics argue about the benefits of a college education and the loan debt incurred by many students, what are recent college grads thinking, especially those who can’t find jobs or if they do, cannot support themselves?
In this guest post, Cristina Schreil, a 2011 graduate of New York University who majored in English Literature and Journalism, investigated how her generation feels about the expectations they had and what they feel now–diplomas in hand. Like many of her peers, she admits, “in no way am I supporting myself 100 percent, but I am still pursuing the goal of working in journalism full time. I think it’s going to be a long journey.” Here is what Cristina learned about her peer’s attitudes and struggles:
Report urges Michigan to replace MEAP with Smarter Balanced test
A new report urges state lawmakers to proceed with plans to introduce the Smarter Balanced exam as a replacement for the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, saying it remains the only viable option for the 2014-15 school year.
Michigan education officials released the 23-page report Monday outlining options for a new state assessment tool to be used as early as next year to test K-12 students under Common Core state standards. State schools administered the MEAP for what is supposed to be the last time this fall.
The report, requested by lawmakers in late October after they removed a funding block for implementation of Common Core, examines 12 test options in the marketplace.
The report provides summaries on the cost of each test, scoring and reporting methods, test security transparency and overall design.
Of the 12 options, only Smarter Balanced and two other tests were aligned to Common Core, a more rigorous set of standards adopted by the State Board of Education in 2010 for math and English. The other exams aligned to the standards are Measured Progress and PARCC.
Madison School Board Policy on Policies
The Madison School District (PDF):
BOARD POLICIES and PROCEDURES represent the BOARD’s vision for the DISTRICT and set the general direction for the DISTRICT. It is an essential function of the BOARD to establish BOARD POLICIES and the BOARD PROCEDURES necessary to eaffect those POLICIES and PROCEDURES. In order to carry out this function in an effective, efficient, consistent and transparent manner, the BOARD believes it is imperative to have a well-defined procedure for creating, maintaining and modifying such POLICIES and PROCEDURES as needed.
…
Beginning in the 2014-2015 school year, except for POLICIES and PROCEDURES that are reviewed on an annual basis, see IV.H, below, the SUPERINTENDENT or his/her designee shall review all BOARD POLICIES and PROCEDURES shall be reviewed pursuant to the following three-year review cycle:
Year 1: Chapter 4000 (Pupils), Chapter 5000 (Auxiliary Services), Chapter 6000 (Operations)
Year 2: Chapter 2000 (Administration), Chapter 3000 (Instruction), Chapter 7000 (Community Relations), Chapter 10000 (Charter Schools)
Year 3: Chapter 1000 (Board of Education), Chapter 8000 (Personnel), Chapter 9000 (Ethics)
Following said review, the SUPERINTENDENT shall present his/her recommendations at a WORK GROUP meeting for review and approval by the BOARD. The review cycle does not preclude the BOARD from taking action on any POLICY determined to be in need of revision.
During the course of the three-year review cycle, all
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Formatted: Indent: Left: 1.5″
Formatted: Normal
POLICIES and PROCEDURES shall be translated into Spanish and additional languages, as possible. Translated POLICIES and PROCEDURES shall be subject to the same revisions as their English-language counterparts.
Wisconsin Reading Coalition: 2013 Reading Report Card
Wisconsin Reading Coalition (PDF), via a kind email:
he National Center for Education Statistics has released the 2013 scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the “Nation’s Report Card.” While the press has rightly focused on Wisconsin’s scores for black students (lowest in the country) and the black-white gap (largest in the country), the data indicates many other areas of concern. Here are some major takeaways from the critical 4th grade reading performance:
- Wisconsin’s average score (221) in 2013 is identical to 2011, and is statistically unchanged from our first NAEP score (224) in 1992.While we have remained stagnant, many other jurisdictions have seen statistically significant increases.
- Wisconsin ranked 31st out of 52 jurisdictions that participated in NAEP this year. In 1994, we ranked 3rd.
- Since 2007, the number of jurisdictions scoring significantly lower than Wisconsin has shrunk from 21 to 11. The number scoring significantly higher has grown from 8 to 15. Wisconsin sits in the lower half of the “middle” group of 26 jurisdictions.
- Only 8% of Wisconsin students scored at the advanced level, while 32% were below basic, the lowest level.
- Compared to their peer groups nationwide, Wisconsin’s white, black, Hispanic, Asian, low income, and disabled students all scored below their respective national averages.
- Wisconsin had the lowest scores for black students in the nation.
- Wisconsin had the largest gap between white and black students in the nation.
How will Wisconsin respond?
Social and economic disadvantages affect achievement for many students, but other states do better at mitigating those realities. Wisconsin must look within the education system itself for improvement opportunities, starting with teacher preparation. Beginning in 2014, the Foundations of Reading exam will require prospective teachers to understand the science of reading that is woven through the Common Core State Standards and that is necessary for successful intervention with struggling readers. As DPI revises the regulations governing educator licensure and preparation program approval, it will be important to align them with the only comprehensive guidelines available, the Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading (Moats, Carreker, Davis, Meisel, Spear-Swerling, Wilson, 2010), and to encourage independent, objective program reviews for campuses. Equally important, our state and districts need to provide practicing teachers with that same knowledge of language structure and reading acquisition, and to track the impact of professional development on student performance outcomes. Programs like LETRS from Sopris Learning and the online coursework and coaching offerings from the Science of Reading Partnership deserve attention. Only then can we hope to see student outcomes begin to reflect the efforts of our dedicated educators.
The pie charts below show the breakdown of proficiency levels of Wisconsin students as a whole and broken into sub-groups. The line graphs show the trend over time in Wisconsin scores compared to Massachusetts, Florida, and Washington, D.C., where the science of reading has found a greater acceptance in education, as well as the changes in national ranking for Massachusetts, Florida, and Wisconsin.
Related: Madison’s disastrous reading results and Wisconsin adopts the MTEL-90 (Massachusetts) elementary teacher English content knowledge requirements.
Just Say No to College
Paul Gu is the winner of a Thiel Fellowship-a two-year $100,000 grant designed to encourage teenagers to skip college and pursue scientific or entrepreneurial projects in the real world. He is also the founder of Upstart, a human capital contract firm that allows investors to fund an individual’s education in exchange for a share of their future earnings. Gu spoke with reasonintern Michael Bruschini in August about his experience with the Thiel fellowship, his start-up, and the future of higher education.
Q: You came here from China at six without any knowledge of English. How did you climb the ladder to attend Yale and become a Thiel Fellow?
A: I developed a streak for independent thinking early on and generally preferred to try beating the system instead of doing what I was told. I loved my time at Yale, but after two years, it was obvious to me that I was more of a self-learner and was getting impatient to get in the “real world.” So when I saw the Thiel opportunity come along, it was a no-brainer for me.
Florida’s long-term NAEP gains easily outpace the nation
Florida made small gains over the last NAEP cycle, but how does its growth compare over the long haul? Pretty good.
If you go all the way back to the beginning of NAEP time (which can vary from 1990 to 2003 depending on the grade, subject and sub-group), Florida’s gains since then best the national gains in 38 of 40 categories. If NAEP gains were heavyweight boxing, Florida’s career record would be 38-2 with 11 KO’s (beating the average by 10 or more points).
Florida’s average gain per category is 21.5 points (about two grade levels worth of advancement). Its average spread over the national gain is 7.1 points (nearly a grade level).
One caveat: In the two areas where Florida was beat by the national average (4th grade math by English Language Learners (ELL) and 8th grade math by low-income Hispanics) the results may be biased because so few states had enough ELL and Hispanic students to compare.
University exam brings South Korea to standstill
Time was put on hold in South Koreaon Thursday as financial markets and public offices opened late to ensure calm when more than 650,000 students sat the annual university entrance exam. Success in the test is critical to millions of young students’ career and marriage prospects.
Trading at the Korea Stock Exchange and the country’s foreign exchange market began at 10am, an hour later than usual, to keep roads clear while aircraft will be grounded in the afternoon during the English listening test. About 65 commercial flights have been rescheduled to avoid take-off or landing for 30 minutes from 1.05pm.
Classes at primary and secondary schools started an hour later than usual while civil servants and most employees in the private sector were also asked to go to work an hour later than usual to ease traffic congestion to ensure that students arrive at their exam sites on time.
The university entrance exam is one of the most critical annual events for young people in the country – where seven out of every 10 high school students go on to higher education – as a diploma from top schools is widely regarded as a ticket to success in Asia’s fourth-largest economy. An almost cult-like devotion to learning has been among the driving forces behind the country’s rapid economic development over the past half century, creating one of the world’s most highly educated workforces.
Boston Charter School Demand and Effectiveness
Sarah R. Cohodes, Elizabeth M. Setren, Christopher R. Walters, Joshua D. Angrist & Parag A. Pathak:
Boston charter schools have had many reasons to tout their performance in 2013. Research reports and MCAS scores have shown exceptional progress by charter students. But while we were buoyed by these findings, the Boston Foundation and NewSchools Venture Fund sought to better understand in more detail not only how well charters are working, but for whom.
The answer–or at least the beginnings of it–is described in this report by a team of researchers from MIT’s School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative (SEII). This is the third in a series of studies examining charter and Boston Public Schools (BPS) student performance. The first, released in 2009, was groundbreaking in its use of individual student data, its research design–which incorporated an observational study–and a lottery analysis. The second report, released in May 2013, examined Boston’s charter high schools and found gains in their students’ MCAS, Advanced Placement and SAT scores compared to their peers in the Boston Public Schools.
This report updates the 2009 study and uses a similar methodology. It examines the performance of all students enrolled in Boston’s charter schools as well as that of important subgroups of high-needs students, including those whose first language isn’t English or who have special needs. Importantly, this report also examines demand and enrollment patterns and finds a changing student population that includes more of these subgroups.
Like earlier studies, this report finds that attending a charter school in Boston dramatically improves students’ MCAS performance and proficiency rates. The largest gains appear to be for students of color and particularly large gains were found for English Language Learners.
At the same time, it is important to note that the analysis showed that charter school students are less likely to have special needs or to be designated as English Language Learners. While that gap has narrowed since the passage of education reform in 2010, the charters’ success with high-needs students should provide an even greater impetus to connect those student populations with charter schools.
In addition, the research team found that charter schools continue to be a popular option for Boston families. As the number of available seats grows, so too does the number of applicants. Nonetheless, the report finds that the odds of receiving a charter offer are roughly comparable to a student receiving his or her first choice through the BPS school-assignment process.
Readers of this report will draw many different conclusions, but the takeaway for us is clear: charters work for their students. It’s not only evident that we need more of these schools, but we must also redouble our efforts to ensure that students who have the most to gain are afforded greater access to them.
On the non-payment of adjuncts at CUNY
An email landed in my inbox this morning about widespread non-payment of adjuncts in the CUNY system. I’ll reprint it below the fold. IANAL, but those who are might want to comment on this in light of NY’s “Wage Theft” law.
Here, though, read how Anthony Galluzo, one of those affected, describes his situation:I’m supposed to be paid–finally–tomorrow, although classes started the last week of August. The explanation? Well, I was hired late–the week before said classes began–and there is a state mandated pay schedule. Fantastic. A system apparently designed with long term employees in mind, hence the glacial in-processing, even though it now runs on casualized permatemps hired at the last minute. This scenario was compounded by the fact that the secretary in the English department only submitted materials for one of my courses. I am teaching three. A fluke that happens all too often, as I’ve since learned from other adjuncts. Of the several adjuncts I talk to, I don’t know one who was paid on time.
If you’ve been affected by non-payment, late payment, or partial payment, contact Debbie Bell dbell@pscmail.org. To offer support of any kind, contact Jonathan Buschbaum. Below the fold, more details:
The Decline of Wikipedia
The sixth most widely used website in the world is not run anything like the others in the top 10. It is not operated by a sophisticated corporation but by a leaderless collection of volunteers who generally work under pseudonyms and habitually bicker with each other. It rarely tries new things in the hope of luring visitors; in fact, it has changed little in a decade. And yet every month 10 billion pages are viewed on the English version of Wikipedia alone. When a major news event takes place, such as the Boston Marathon bombings, complex, widely sourced entries spring up within hours and evolve by the minute. Because there is no other free information source like it, many online services rely on Wikipedia. Look something up on Google or ask Siri a question on your iPhone, and you’ll often get back tidbits of information pulled from the encyclopedia and delivered as straight-up facts.
Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia–and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation–has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-ranking quality scores.
“I Quit Academia,” an Important, Growing Subgenre of American Essays
Sarah Kendzior, Al-Jazeera English’s firebrand of social and economic justice, suggested this week that there should be a Norton Anthology of Academics Declaring They Quit, among whose august contributions she would place Zachary Ernst’s “Why I Jumped Off the Ivory Tower.” Ernst’s Oct. 20 essay is a deeply honest account of his acrimonious departure from what many would consider a dream job: a tenured position as a philosophy professor at the University of Missouri.
Ernst’s contribution is indeed part of a raucous subgenre of “I Quit Lit” in (or rather, out of) academe, which includes Kendzior’s own acidic “The Closing of American Academia,” Alexandra Lord’s surprisingly controversial “Location, Location, Location,” and my own satirical public breakdown. All of us faced, and continue to face, the impressively verbose wrath of a discipline scorned, which itself is the completing gesture of initiation into the I Quit Oeuvre.
“I Quit Academia,” an Important, Growing Subgenre of American Essays
Sarah Kendzior, Al-Jazeera English’s firebrand of social and economic justice, suggested this week that there should be a Norton Anthology of Academics Declaring They Quit, among whose august contributions she would place Zachary Ernst’s “Why I Jumped Off the Ivory Tower.” Ernst’s Oct. 20 essay is a deeply honest account of his acrimonious departure from what many would consider a dream job: a tenured position as a philosophy professor at the University of Missouri.
Ernst’s contribution is indeed part of a raucous subgenre of “I Quit Lit” in (or rather, out of) academe, which includes Kendzior’s own acidic “The Closing of American Academia,” Alexandra Lord’s surprisingly controversial “Location, Location, Location,” and my own satirical public breakdown. All of us faced, and continue to face, the impressively verbose wrath of a discipline scorned, which itself is the completing gesture of initiation into the I Quit Oeuvre.
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Ernst’s “Why I Jumped” is thus not unusual in and of itself: Academe is a profession full of erudite free-thinkers who feel disillusioned by a toxic labor system in which criticism is not tolerated–so those who leave often relish the newfound ability to say anything they want (talking about “a friend” here). In its insularity and single-mindedness, academe is also very similar to a fundamentalist religion (or, dare I say, cult), and thus those who abdicate often feel compelled to confess.
Wisconsin’s Common Core education standards face public, GOP scrutiny
Tom Larson is one of the legislators responsible for reviewing the set of academic standards for public schools in Wisconsin, yet the rural Colfax assemblyman admitted last week that he was still trying to catch up with the arguments swirling around the “Common Core.”
In 2010, state schools Superintendent Tony Evers voluntarily agreed to adopt the Common Core State Standards, which cover math and English and promote literacy in history/social studies, science and technical subjects for students from kindergarten through high school. According to the Common Core website, the standards also define a vision of what it means to be a literate person in the 21st century.
On paper, that all sounds good, but, in the real world, the Common Core standards have sparked a firestorm of controversy in the Badger State and elsewhere.
Speaking Monday before a group of local education officials in Eau Claire, Larson said he had been selected as one of nine representatives to sit on the Assembly Select Committee on Common Core Standards.Related: the oft criticized WKCE.
Millennials Face Uphill Climb
The on-ramp to adulthood is delayed and harder to reach for young people today, a reality that is changing the country’s society and economy, according to a new report.
More demanding job requirements, coupled with the pressures of the recession, have delayed the transition to adulthood for young people in the past decade and earned them the title of “the new lost generation,” according to the report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, published Monday.
James Roy dropped out of college and now works at a coffee shop in a Chicago suburb. The 26-year-old calls his outlook ‘kind of grim.’
James Roy, 26, has spent the past six years paying off $14,000 in student loans for two years of college by skating from job to job. Now working as a supervisor for a coffee shop in the Chicago suburb of St. Charles, Ill., Mr. Roy describes his outlook as “kind of grim.”
“It seems to me that if you went to college and took on student debt, there used to be greater assurance that you could pay it off with a good job,” said the Colorado native, who majored in English before dropping out. “But now, for people living in this economy and in our age group, it’s a rough deal.”
Baraboo teacher named state’s middle school teacher of the year
An area English language arts teacher has been named Wisconsin’s middle school teacher of the year.
Jane McMahon was honored on Monday in a surprise ceremony at Jack Young Middle School in Baraboo.
McMahon will receive $3,000 from the Herb Kohl Educational Foundation.
“For our students to succeed, we need great educators in our schools,” said Tony Evers, state superintendent of schools, in a news release from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
Generation Monoglot
AS THE new term starts across England, schools are chewing over this summer’s results in the 16-plus exams. One trend is clear–the coalition’s emphasis on pupils achieving five core academic subjects, including a language, in its new EBACC (English Baccalaureate) qualification has raised the number of candidates taking language exams.
This marks a reversal of a long period in which English schools turned out a rising number of monoglots (see chart). The past two decades have witnessed a sharp decline in the numbers of teenagers poring over French verbs, let alone the oddities of German, which as Mark Twain, a 19th-century American writer, observed, renders a girl neuter but a turnip feminine.
In 1993 over 315,000 pupils sat the 16-plus exam in French, compared with just over 177,000 this year. German had 108,000 entrants in 1993; there are fewer than 63,000 now. Only Spanish fared better, with 91,000 GCSE entrants this year, rising from 32,000 in 1993. Largely to blame for the slump was a decision by the Labour government in 2002 to end the compulsory status of a language in secondary schools. That accelerated a longer period of modern-languages decline, as pupils switched to subjects perceived to be easier or more practical. Now the coalition is claiming that the rise in this year’s exam entries at 16 marks the first step to correcting the resulting monolingualism. Yet progress has been modest–the number of GCSE French entrants, for example, merely returned to 2010 levels, around half the numbers of the 1990s.
Why do people view teaching as a ‘B-list’ job?
It happens a lot: I’ll introduce myself to a group of people I don’t know well, explaining that I’m a high school English teacher. And someone will invariably respond, “But you’re smart, what do you really want to do?” As backhanded compliments go, that one really rankles. What I find most irksome isn’t even the implication that my colleagues and I are typically mundane or that my work of the last decade has been a waste of my time. The most frustrating thing about hearing that I’m “too smart” for teaching is the counter-productive mentality about my profession that such a comment underscores.
In the early half of the 20th century, a bright woman’s best career option was to be a teacher. Now, thankfully, most every path is open to women, the only downside of which is the inevitable matriculation of top female graduates away from the field of teaching due to a plethora of other choices. This trend is compounded by the fact that teaching is now seen as a B-list job: Most top graduates of my college went into law, medicine, business, or academia. Those who did go into teaching, myself included, constantly encountered the assumption that this would be a short-term gig, the ubiquitous two-year foray (through Teach for America or the like) that would ultimately pad graduate school applications. For many, it was. Teaching wasn’t, and – 10 years later – still isn’t, seen as a “prestigious” career, even by liberal university graduates who would all agree that strong public education is an inviolable social good.
From Mr Average … to superman
The needle is 21 gauge, 1.5in. A hogsticker. Forty of them arrived in a package from Greece. Ever received a package from overseas? You get that puff of air when you rip it open – air that’s travelled thousands of miles. Foreign, like stepping into a stranger’s house. The syringe wrapper has instructions in Italian, French, Greek and Arabic – not a word of English. But it’s a needle. Operation is self-explanatory. I had put them out on my work desk a few days ago – an unignorable fact. An invitation. A threat.
Buck up, laddie. Fortune favours the brave.
What’s inside looks like oily urine. 1cc of Equipoise – a veterinary drug normally injected into beef cattle – and 2cc of Testosterone Cypionate: 10 times the testosterone a man my size produces naturally in a week.
It was going into my backside; plenty of meat there. But the sciatic nerve radiates from my hips; plus, if I hit a vein I could go into cardiac collapse. I tucked a bag of frozen corn beneath my underwear to numb the injection site. The hash marks on the syringe were smudged away by my sweaty hands. That couldn’t be a sign of quality medical equipment, could it?
New MMSD director of multicultural and global education excited for new school year
Silvia Romero-Johnson is the Madison Metropolitan School District’s new executive director of multicultural and global education and she could not be more excited.
“This time of year right now is a very exciting time for me,” she tells The Madison Times. “It’s an exciting time when we start preparing for the year and we get our teams back together. I will be out in the schools on the very first day and after that will be visiting them regularly. It is exciting.”
But late August has always been an exciting time for Romero-Johnson who started out teaching as an English as a Foreign Language teacher in her home country of Argentina. After immigrating to the United States, she was a bilingual resource specialist (BRS), a bilingual classroom teacher, and a program support teacher (PST) for bilingual education programs. Two years later, she became the coordinator for Bilingual Education and Dual Language Immersion.
“I’ve had multiple roles in the District working in classrooms and supporting classrooms,” Romero-Johnson says. “I think I’ve done every position that our division supervises so that gives me experience and hopefully empathy for how the work takes place and how the work is done.”
Daytona State, school districts reach agreements on dual enrollment
As opening days for fall classes draw near, agreements in support of dual enrollment have been reached between Daytona State College and Volusia and Flagler school districts.
The college’s District Board of Trustees on Aug. 13 approved agreements to cover the majority of the schools’ costs for services associated with dual enrollment in 2013-14.
The Volusia and Flagler school boards will vote on the agreements in upcoming weeks.
Dual enrollment provides college-credit classes on Daytona State campuses, giving college-bound students a head start on their higher education, at no cost to them.Related:Obtaining credit for non Madison School District Courses has been an ongoing challeng. Perhaps this issue has faded away as past practices die? Madison’snon-diverse or homogeneous governance model inflictsnumerous cost, fromone size fits all curricula to growth in the ‘burbs accompanied byever increasing property taxes on top of stagnant or declining income.
Is Beloit College’s pop culture review a Mindset List or Mindlessness?
For most teens starting college this fall, a chat has seldom involved talking, GM means food that’s Genetically Modified and a tablet is no longer something you take in the morning.
Each August since 1998, Beloit College has rolled out its internationally known Mindset List, originally aimed at giving faculty witty glimpses of the pop culture that has shaped the lives of incoming freshmen, so they can avoid dated references.
Over time, the list has become a public relations gold mine for the small liberal arts college in Beloit, each year generating a million hits on its website.
The Class of 2017 may be the last to have its own Mindset List, though, if two anonymous professors — one from a large public university and the other from a community college — can torpedo it.
The two — who write as “John Q. Angry” and “Disgruntled Prof” and say they have no connection to the college — launched a blog this week called Beloit Mindlessness, “dedicated to the mockery and eventual destruction of the Beloit Mindset List.”
The blog’s introduction says it will lay out the case against The Mindset List “through a thorough examination of each of the 1,000+ items that have appeared on the list over the past 16 years.”
Why all the hate?
The list “is a poorly written compendium of trivia, stereotypes and lazy generalizations, insulting to both students and their professors, and based on nothing more than the uninformed speculation of its authors,” according to Beloit Mindlessness. “It inspires lazy, inaccurate journalism and is an embarrassment to academia.”
The Mindset List is the brainchild of Ron Nief, emeritus director of public affairs for Beloit College, and Tom McBride, an English professor there.
Seeking Better Teachers, City Evaluates Local Colleges That Train Them
The results released on Wednesday showed that even some of the country’s most prestigious programs have room for improvement. For example, one in five recent graduates of teaching programs at Columbia University and New York University were given low marks for how much they were able to improve student test scores; by contrast, 1 in 10 teachers who graduated from City College of New York received poor marks.
City officials cautioned against drawing sweeping conclusions from the data, saying the numbers were meant to provoke conversation, not rivalry. They noted that sample sizes were small; that test scores were available only in certain grades, in math and English; and that the data reflected only information from the past four years.
But in New York City, where competitive streaks are widespread, education leaders could not resist a little jockeying.
David M. Steiner, dean of Hunter College School of Education, said the results would prompt schools like Columbia and N.Y.U. to rethink elements of their program.
“These are places that are very well known for their research and scholarship,” Dr. Steiner, a former state education commissioner, said. “Is it possible that they need to pay more attention to their clinical preparation of teachers?”
Thomas James, provost of Teachers College at Columbia, said the reports prompted the school to examine how closely its curriculum aligned with city academic standards. He said the data also spurred interest in increasing the number of teachers who pursue certification in special education, where city data showed the school lagged behind its peers.Related: National Council on Teacher Quality.
Chinese students coming to US middle schools? It’s starting to happen.
Peggy Wang has lived in China her entire life. A successful, English-speaking executive, she frequently travels abroad for work, but never imagined that her most recent itinerary would include dropping off her 15-year-old daughter at a prestigious boarding school outside Washington.
While there is a long history of Chinese students pursuing advanced degrees abroad, especially in the United States, Ms. Wang’s daughter, Susan Li, is part of a rapidly growing trend in which Chinese students are choosing to seek their education overseas as early as middle school or high school.
In the 2010-11 school year alone, nearly 24,000 high school-age Chinese were studying in the US, more than 15 percent of the total number of Chinese students in the US overall, up from virtually none five years ago. US middle schools hosted 6,725 Chinese middle schoolers in 2011, up from just 65 in 2006, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
This phenomenon, known as students “growing younger” in Chinese, is seen as resulting from two key interrelated factors: the rigidity of the Chinese education system, and a desire to avoid the gaokao, the country’s rigorous college-entrance exam, for which six-day-a-week preparation begins in 9th grade.
Not surprisingly, officials at schools with a significant number of Chinese students say the students have heightened the sense of competition and achievement. But they also say the students have helped others see a more nuanced and human view of China. For many of the Chinese students themselves, it is most likely the beginning of lives lived abroad, given that the core of their education will have come in English – and without the gaokao.
WEAC: An advocate for students as well as teachers WEAC has worked with Republicans and Democrats for the benefit of children.
By Morris Andrews former Executive Secretary Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) 1972-1992
Lost in the two-month maelstrom at the state Capitol is the role of teachers and their union, WEAC, as the chief advocates for school quality in Wisconsin. Scott Walker and the Fitzgeraids paint WEAC as a destroyer. They say eradicate WEAC, an organization they know almost nothing about except that it opposes their antisteacher agenda. Should they succeed in killing the voice of organized teachers, the real loser wilt be our public schools.
Teachers have fought hard to make schools better over the past four decades. And it was Republican and Democratic votes in support of WEAC issues that resulted in the passage of pro-education bills. Such bipartisanship is but one casualty of today’s polarized politics.
Beginning in the 1970s WEAC became a political force, mainly by deciding to start backing legislative candidates. To receive WE/C’s endorsement, a candidate had to support a list of education-related issues. Many Republicans did support these school improvement issues. And WEAC members consequently worked to help them win election or reelection. One Republican who received a WEAC endorsement was Tommy Thompson when he was in the Assembly.
Today it seems unbelievable that the 1977 collective bargaining bill now reviled by the governor passed with Republican support. At the time, there were 11 Republicans in the Senate; five of them supported the bill. When the law’s three-year trial period was about to expire, a group of Senate Republicans voted to extend it–despite a veto by Republican Governor Lee Dreyfus. Notably, Mike Ellis (then in the Assembly) was among a group of Republicans who jumped party lines on procedural votes that saved it.
Our members then also reflected views across the spectrum. They identified themselves this way: Independents, 37%; Democrats, 35%; and Republicans, 27%. This spectrum was reflected at the annual WEAC convention, held a few days before the 1976 presidential election, when Gerald Ford and Walter Mondale both spoke to the huge assembly. Today, these numbers have changed as the Republicans shift further and further to the extremes.
Did WEAC work to improve teacher pay and benefits? Yes, of course. But we were also committed to changing the wide variation in school quality from district to district.
At the top of WEAC’s school improvement list was getting a set of minimum educational standards that applied to every school district. In 1974, with Republican support, we succeeded. Today these standards are taken for granted. Among the many changes were requirements that every district must:
establish a remedial reading program for underachieving Ke3 student
offer music art, health, and physical education.
have a kindergarten for five-year olds.
ensure that school facilities are safe. (Many aging buildings were crumbling)
provide emergency nursing services.
require teachers in Wisconsin to go through continuing education and to have their licenses renewed once every five years. (Prior to enactment of minimum standards. districts were empbying unlicensed teachers for whom they secured an emergency license that they would hold year after year).
On this foundation of programs Wisconsin students rose to the top of the national ACT scores for decades.
The state Department of Public instruction (DPI), headed by State Superintendent Barbara Thompson, was charged with implementing the minimum standards. She accepted most of WEAC’s recommendations. WEAC backed Thompson, a Republican with strong GOP support for her reelection in 1977.
We sought common ground with Republicans. When Democratic Governer Pat Lucey proposed strict cost controls on school budgets in 1975, it was Republicans and Democrats in the Senate 110 coalesced with WEAC and school boards against Democrats on the Joint Finance Committee to ease the restrictions. Years later, when Republican Governor lee Dreyfus vetoed a measure to raise the cost control ceiling, the WEAC-supported override succeeded with the votes of 23 Assembly Republicans and eight Senate Republicans against the Republican governor.
As late as 1984, Wisconsin had no uniform high school graduation requirements. WEAC supported Gov. Tony Earl’s efforts requiring graduates to have a specified number of credits in English, maths science, social studies, physical education, health, and computer science.
To curb underage drinking, WEAC Joined with a coalition of organizations on a bill that gave teachers and administrators legal protection to remove students suspected of drinking from school premises and events. All Assembly Democrats and all but three Republicans voted for the bill. In the Senate all Republicans voted for it and all but two Democrats voted for it.
WEAC allied with Republicans and Democrats to repeal a longestanding provision that gave city councils in 41 of our largest cities veto power over their school boards’ budgets.
The fate of students with special needs also concerned WEAC in 1973, four years before Congress passed the federal special education law, WEAC successfully lobbied the Wisconsin Legislature for a state special education law that required every district to have a special education program. The chief sponsor was James Devitt, a Republican state senator.
In 1976, the Legislature approved WEAC-backed bills to require tests of newborns for signs of mental retardation, and require children under age five to undergo a test for visual impairment. During this time WEAC successfully supported a bill that required teachers to report suspected child abuse, which has helped protect children across the state from life-altering harm.
In the 1970s, sex discrimination in school athletics was a major issue. In most school districts many sports were for boys only. This changed after WEAC joined with women’s groups to ensure that girls who wanted to play in sports have the same opportunity as boys. There were less than half as many WIAA-sponsored statewide tournaments for girls as there were for boys 14 for boys, six for girls. WEAC filed sex discrimination lawsuits against both the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletics Association (WIAA) and the DPI that helped correct this inequality. WEAC also convinced the Legislature to budget the additional state funding needed to add programs for girls.
Working with the Great Lakes lnter-Tribal Council, which represents Native Americans on ten reservations, WEAC successfully lobbied for a bill that provided state aid to districts that employed home/school coordinators for Native American students. And for passage of a law allowing Native Americans without certification to teach native culture and endangered native languages.
Citizens who wanted to add new or replace old school buildings asked WEAC to help them pass local bond referendums. Monroe was one district where WEAC’s help resulted in passage of a school bond for a much needed elementary school. The measure had failed in four previous elections. With WEAC help it won by a huge margin on the fifth attempt.
Property taxes are a major source of school funding. VVEAC recognized that tax increases place a burden on low income homeowners, especially retirees on fixed incomes. To help these people, we backed an expanded homestead tax-relief program. Another action in support of low income citizens was creation of the Citizens Utility Board (CUB). CUB fights for affordable electricity and telephone service on behalf of Wisconsin customers before regulatory agencies, the Legislature, and the courts. Two organizations that fought hardest for CUB were WEAC and the United Auto Workers. All Wisconsin utilities opposed it.
The key to these achievements in the 1970s and ’80s was the cooperative spirit between WEAC and politicians of both parties. People from different sides of the aisle respected and listened to one another. We socialized outside of the Capitol. We grew to like each other, even if we disagreed on political issues.
Today there is no middle ground. Compromise is deemed “caving in.” Winning is not enough for the extremists. The “enemy must be completely destroyed. But if teacher unions are silenced, who will replace them as effective advocates for students?
Free dual enrollment is a big deal for many Roanoke students; Madison continues one size fits all approach
It’s now even easier and cheaper for local high school students to get a college education.
At a joint meeting between City Council, The Roanoke City School Board and Virginia Western the community college talked about it’s newest program.
Back in March, Virginia Western announced it’s waiving tuition for students taking dual enrollment classes.
Those are classes students can take in high school and earn college credit, but many students weren’t.
They can now.Related: Obtaining credit for non Madison School District Courses has been an ongoing challenge. Perhaps this issue has faded away as past practices die? Madison’s non-diverse or homogeneous governance model inflicts numerous costs, from one size fits all curricula to growth in the ‘burbs accompanied by ever increasing property taxes on top of stagnant or declining income.
A Free Market for Teaching Talent – The $4 Million Teacher South Korea’s students rank among the best in the world, and its top teachers can make a fortune. Can the U.S. learn from this academic superpower?
Kim Ki-hoon earns $4 million a year in South Korea, where he is known as a rock-star teacher–a combination of words not typically heard in the rest of the world. Mr. Kim has been teaching for over 20 years, all of them in the country’s private, after-school tutoring academies, known as hagwons. Unlike most teachers across the globe, he is paid according to the demand for his skills–and he is in high demand.
Kim Ki-Hoon, who teaches in a private after-school academy, earns most of his money from students who watch his lectures online. ‘The harder I work, the more I make,’ he says. ‘I like that.’
Mr. Kim works about 60 hours a week teaching English, although he spends only three of those hours giving lectures. His classes are recorded on video, and the Internet has turned them into commodities, available for purchase online at the rate of $4 an hour. He spends most of his week responding to students’ online requests for help, developing lesson plans and writing accompanying textbooks and workbooks (some 200 to date).
“The harder I work, the more I make,” he says matter of factly. “I like that.”
I traveled to South Korea to see what a free market for teaching talent looks like–one stop in a global tour to discover what the U.S. can learn from the world’s other education superpowers. Thanks in part to such tutoring services, South Korea has dramatically improved its education system over the past several decades and now routinely outperforms the U.S. Sixty years ago, most South Koreans were illiterate; today, South Korean 15-year-olds rank No. 2 in the world in reading, behind Shanghai. The country now has a 93% high-school graduation rate, compared with 77% in the U.S.
….
No country has all the answers. But in an information-driven global economy, a few truths are becoming universal: Children need to know how to think critically in math, reading and science; they must be driven; and they must learn how to adapt, since they will be doing it all their lives. These demands require that schools change, too–or the free market may do it for them.The Madison School Board President recently wrote: “The notion that parents inherently know what school is best for their kids is an example of conservative magical thinking.”; “For whatever reason, parents as a group tend to undervalue the benefits of diversity in the public schools….”
Related: www.wisconsin2.org.
Ms. Ripley is an Emerson Fellow at the New America Foundation. This essay is adapted from her forthcoming book, “The Smartest Kids in the World–and How They Got That Way,” to be published Aug. 13 by Simon & Schuster.
Teacher training program uses rigorous preparation to produce great instructors
Ben Velderman The Match Education organization has developed a reputation over the past 12 years for operating several high-quality charter schools throughout the Boston area. Now the organization is garnering national attention for its approach to training future teachers. It all began in 2008, when Match officials opened a two-year teacher training program for graduate […]
You can’t fire your way to Finland. You actually have to build the capacity of teachers.
Peter Cookson, Jr., via a kind reader’s email
ES: What are your thoughts about evaluating teachers by their students’ standardized test scores? What’s missing from the public debate?
LD-H: Teacher-bashing infuriates me. The commitment of individuals who go into teaching in this country is extraordinary. And many teachers are highly able. We do have a wide range of access to knowledge for teachers, just like we have a wide range of access to knowledge for students. That means that teachers are left with one hand tied behind their backs if they aren’t given the knowledge and the skills they need.
Evaluation has to begin at the very beginning of the career. Finland’s rise to the top of the international rankings is typically attributed by the Finns to the deep training of teachers in a highly professionalized master’s degree program. [In Finland education] students have strong content background, and they study teaching methods while they spend a year in a model school, pursuing a clinically supported internship. In addition, there is a lot of attention to learning how to teach special education students and to personalize teaching for all students. The idea is if you can teach kids who struggle to learn, then you can teach anyone. It really pays off. Finally, teachers learn how to use and conduct research, and [each writes] a thesis in which he or she researches an educational issue as part of the master’s degree.
In Finland there is very little formal evaluation that happens after teachers get into the profession because the bar is so high at the beginning, and there are so many supports to get better. There are some analysts who have claimed, “Oh, if you fire the bottom 10 percent of teachers every year, you’ll get educational outcomes like those in Finland.” In fact, that is not how Finland gets high educational outcomes. You can’t fire your way to Finland. You actually have to build the capacity of teachers.
We ought to be having a conversation about performance assessments for entering the field. [American Federation of Teachers President] Randi Weingarten has called for a “bar exam” for teachers. I’ve been involved in building teacher performance assessments in which beginning teachers demonstrate that they can plan a curriculum, teach it, produce and evaluate student learning. We find that these assessments improve teaching and improve the quality of teacher education.Related: Wisconsin adopts its first teacher content knowledge licensing requirement – for elementary English candidates, from Massachusetts (MTEL).
Wisconsin hopes to mirror Massachusetts’ test success for teaching reading
A second-grade teacher notices that one of her students lacks fluency when reading aloud. The first thing the teacher should do to help this student is assess whether the student also has difficulties with:
A. predicting
B. inferring
C. metacognition
D. decoding
Don’t worry if you’re not into metacognition. The correct answer is decoding — at least according to the people who put together the test teachers must pass in Massachusetts if they are going to teach children to read.
The Massachusetts test is about to become the Wisconsin test, a step that advocates see as important to increasing the quality of reading instruction statewide and, in the long term, raising the overall reading abilities of Wisconsin students. As for those who aren’t advocates (including some who are professors in schools of education), they are going along, sometimes with a more dubious attitude to what this will prove.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction officially launched the era of the new test for reading licenses with a memo sent last week to heads of all teacher preparation programs in the state. The memo spelled out the details of implementing a law passed in 2011 that called for Wisconsin to use the Massachusetts test. The memo included setting the passing score, which, after a short phase-in period, will match what is regarded as the demanding Massachusetts standard.
In a nutshell, after Jan. 31, 2014, anyone who wants to get a license that allows them to teach reading in Wisconsin will have to pass this test, with 100 multiple choice questions and two essay questions, aimed at making sure they are adequately prepared to do so. (Those currently licensed will not need to pass the test.)
Why Massachusetts? Because in the 1990s, Massachusetts launched initiatives, including requiring students to pass a high school graduation test, requiring teachers to pass licensure tests specific to the subjects they teach, and increasing spending on education, especially in schools serving low-income children.
At that point, Wisconsin and Massachusetts were pretty much tied, and down the list of states a bit, when it came to how students were doing. Within a few years, scores in Massachusetts rose significantly. The state has led the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math achievement for a decade. Wisconsin scores have stayed flat.Many notes and links on Wisconsin’s adoption of Massachusetts (MTEL) elementary English teacher content knowledge standards. UW-Madison Professor Mark Seidenberg’s recommended Wisconsin’s adoption of MTEL.
Charter Schools Receive a Passing Grade: Overall Reading Gains Stronger Than on Regular Public Campuses, but Results Vary Widely by State
Students attending publicly funded, privately run charter schools posted slightly higher learning gains overall in reading than their peers in traditional public schools and about the same gains in math, but the results varied drastically by state, according to one of the most comprehensive studies of U.S. charter schools.
The study [PDF], published Tuesday by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, found that charter students in Rhode Island, for example, gained the equivalent of an additional 86 days of reading comprehension and 108 days of math comprehension annually compared with peers in traditional public schools. In Nevada, however, charter students had 115 fewer days of learning in reading and 137 fewer in math annually, the study found.
Overall, the new study found that charter students gained an additional eight days of reading, while the math gains were identical. Low-income Hispanic and African-American students did much better in charters than their peers in the traditional school option, while white children did worse in charters.
The researchers and some charter proponents said the results suggest some states need to be more particular about which groups they award charters, and more aggressive about shutting low-performers.Center for Research on Education Outcomes Press Release:
According to the 26-state study:
- Students in poverty, black students, and those who are English language learners (ELL) gain significantly more days of learning each year in both reading and math compared to their traditional public school peers. Performance differences between charter school students and their traditional public school peers were especially strong among black and Hispanic students in poverty and Hispanic students who are ELL in both reading and math.
- Charter school enrollment has grown among students who are in poverty, black students, and Hispanic students.
- The 11 new states added marginally to the mathematics gains seen since the 2009 study, but more so to gains in reading.
More from Stephanie Simon.
Related:One year in, Oconomowoc High School staff, students adjusting to change and May, 2012: Budget Cuts: We Won’t Be as Bold and Innovative as Oconomowoc, and That’s Okay.
A majority of Madison school board members rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School in 2012.
Madison’s long term, disastrous reading scores.
Putting your own kids at risk for an ideal Advice from a parent already trying to lead a ‘textured life’
In his revealing book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” Charles Murray spends hundreds of pages using statistics to illustrate the rising inequality that is increasingly putting the white working class on the path toward generational poverty.
Murray concludes by suggesting that the “new upper class” — which increasingly is cloistered in pockets of rich, highly educated super-neighborhoods — move into the communities of “regular” people.
“Age-old human wisdom has understood that a life well lived requires engagement with those around us,” writes Murray, who himself lives in what he describes as an increasingly troubled “blue-collar and agricultural region of Maryland.”
He closes: “A civic Great Awakening among the new upper class can arise in part from the renewed understanding that it can be pleasant to lead a glossy life, but it is ultimately more rewarding — and more fun — to lead a textured life, and be in the midst of others who are leading textured lives.”
Murray’s invocation sprung to mind a few weeks ago as I was reading stay-at-home dad Andy Hinds’ “Why I Want to Choose the ‘Disadvantaged’ Local School (and Why I Might Not)” on The New York Times’ “Motherlode” blog.
Hinds describes the gut-wrenching choice he has to make about whether to put his “mixed-race, socioeconomically advantaged, English-proficient twin girls” into the good school where his neighbors’ kids go or into the troubled school only a five-minute walk from his home. His idealism makes him wonder if he and a group of caring, motivated parents could change a school with 100% poverty and a predominantly Hispanic student body. Ultimately, such participation could make a difference for the whole community.
Stronger teacher preparation needed to improve schools
We Californians like to think our state is the national leader in policy change and innovation, that new ideas are born here and other states follow our lead.
In one area, I am sad to say, that is not the case.
California is short-selling too many of its public school students because of education programs that inadequately prepare the next generation of teachers. A new review from the National Council on Teacher Quality that evaluates educational institutions, state by state, produced some sobering results for anyone who cares about what’s going on inside California schools of education.
Among the more disturbing findings from the institutions that provided data:
- Half of 72 programs for elementary school preparation failed the evaluation, a higher failure rate than programs in any other state.
- California’s secondary certification structure combined with inadequate coursework requirements, particularly in the sciences and social sciences, showed that only 17 percent of programs adequately prepared secondary teaching candidates in core subjects. That compared with 34 percent nationally.
- Coursework in a majority (63 percent) of California elementary programs did not mention a single strategy for teaching reading to English language learners.
- Of the 139 elementary and secondary programs that were evaluated on a four-star rating system, 33 programs earned no stars and only three earned as many as three. Not a single program earned four stars.
Related: Richard Askey: Examinations for Teachers Past and Present:
I have written about the problem in mathematics and hope that some others will use the resouces which exist to write about similar problems in other areas.
In his American Educational Research Association Presidential Address, which was published in Educational Researcher in 1986, Lee Shulman introduced the phrase “pedagogical content knowledge”. This is a mixture of content and knowing how to teach this content and is the one thing from his speech which has been picked up by the education community. However, there are a number of other points which he made which are important. Here is an early paragraph from this speech:
ESF teacher’s quest to visit every province in China
The strangeness of English Schools Foundation teacher Chris Taylor’s quest to visit every mainland province dawned on him as he sat down on a bench in a town square in Ningxia – an obscure northwestern chunk of China most foreigners have never heard of, let alone considered visiting.
Alone and nearly 2,000 kilometres away from his family in Hong Kong and his job as head of senior school at Sha Tin College, the 43-year-old suddenly found himself surrounded by a throng of locals. “They just sat really close to me and stared and stared,” he recalls.
“As soon as I did anything like get my notebook out, everyone would be really interested and lean over and stare. I distinctly remember just wanting to be left alone and sitting there doing nothing until people finally dispersed and gave me a bit of space.”
Being the object of intense curiosity is an experience Taylor relived in different ways throughout 10 years visiting all 27 provinces and five autonomous regions of the mainland, an adventure recounted in his newly published book, Riding the Dragon.
Is Coding the New Second Language?
It’s first period at Harlem’s Cristo Rey high school, a private Catholic school for motivated low-income kids. In a third floor classroom, 10 sophomores and juniors stare into their wide Apple monitors and puzzle over what line of code they need to add to their rudimentary computer programs in order to make their names appear in a gray block between the word “‘Welcome” and an exclamation point.
Their teacher, Kevin Mitchell, 29, is a software engineer and volunteer at the tiny nonprofit startup, ScriptEd, which provides coding instruction in underserved high schools in New York City. Mitchell, a calm figure with an easy smile, suggests his students write a line of code: a word bookended by some simple punctuation. The students diligently attempt to implement it on their own.
For some, the code works on the first try. Welcome Jorge! Welcome Sonya! Around the room, a few other students make low groans–unexpected results. “Did you forget your curly brackets,” queries Mitchell, referring to the punctuation that looks like this “}” Other students have gotten no results at all.
Byron Acosta, a junior at Cristo Rey, seems satisfied when his name pops up. Before he took this class, Acosta says he didn’t know anyone with the skills he was learning in class. Even though he’s a self-described “English and history guy” he jumped at the chance to learn some basics. So far, he likes it. And he’s absorbed Mitchell’s Golden Rule: “You have to be specific in your language,” he offers. “One typo and you can mess everything up.”
Mitchell walks among the students, troubleshooting. Writing code is like giving commands, he tells the students. “The computer can’t know what you don’t tell it.”
Many Well-Prepared US High School Grads Don’t Enroll/Persist in College
Nearly one in five 2011 U.S. high school graduates who were prepared to succeed in first-year college coursework either never enrolled in college or didn’t return for a second year, according to national and state-specific reports from ACT entitled The Reality of College Readiness 2013.
The data show 19 percent of college-ready, ACT-tested 2011 graduates were not enrolled in a two- or four-year college a little more than a year later, in the fall of 2012, including 10 percent who had never enrolled. Those data are based on graduates who had achieved the ACT College Readiness Benchmark scores on at least three of the four sections (English, math, reading and science) of the ACT® college readiness exam, suggesting they were ready for success in first-year college coursework in core subject areas from an academic standpoint.
“Academic readiness is vital to college success, but other factors such as self-discipline, financial stress and effective educational planning can also have an impact,” said Steve Kappler, head of postsecondary strategy for ACT. “It’s important for students to find the right college, be aware of financial aid opportunities and ensure their major matches their personal interests, among other things. We need to pay attention to multiple dimensions of readiness in helping students achieve their educational goals.”
Chinese Students Adjust to American Education When East meets West, differences abound
Lili Gu recalls his initial trepidation at the flood of white faces in his Massachusetts high school when he came to America for 10th grade. There was the hulking football player who noticed that Gu was lost one day and said–here, Gu speaks in a guttural half-grunt–“‘Hey, you want to go to the gym?’ And I’m like, dude, is this guy going to rob me?” He struggled with English, too. The writing skills he arrived with, he says, would be at home in the fourth grade. But an English-as-second-language program made him comfortable after a semester. Then his formidable Chinese secondary education kicked in.
Gu (ENG’13) says he breezed through high school, especially math, sprinting through the curriculum and into Harvard night school for advanced calculus. The easy ride ended at BU, however. If Chinese high schools are more rigorous than those in the United States, the reverse is true for universities, Gu says. Back home, “as soon as you step in the front door of a great university, it’s almost like your motivation ends, because in China, GPA is not a big deal. Whether I’m a C student or D student, as long as I have that diploma, I’m awesome. If I wanted to graduate from BU with Cs, I’d probably have had a very good time.”
A Team Approach to Get Students College Ready
When Parker Sheffy, a first-year teacher in the Bronx Leadership Academy II, a high school in the South Bronx, talks shop with friends who are also new teachers, he often hears about the problems they are facing: students not showing up to class on time, not understanding their work, not doing homework. “I’m thinking: I don’t have that problem… I don’t have that problem…” Sheffy recalled. In his ninth grade integrated algebra class, he estimates that 80 to 90 percent are on track to pass the Regents exam, more than double last year’s figure.
“But I have to remind myself that this is not just because of me,” Sheffy said. “I’m one of six people who have created this class.”
Sheffy’s school is one of three New York City public schools working with an organization called Blue Engine, which recruits and places recent college graduates as full-time teaching assistants in high schools, helps teachers shift to a small-group classroom model with a ratio of one instructor for roughly every six students, uses data tracking to generate rapid-fire feedback so problems can be quickly addressed, and provides weekly instruction in “social cognition” classes, where students are introduced to skills and concepts — such as the difference between a “fixed” and a “growth” mind-set — that can help them grasp their untapped potential.
Blue Engine also targets algebra, geometry and English language arts in the ninth and 10th grades because performance in these so-called “gateway” courses is associated with college success.
Despite its modest size and short track record, Blue Engine has already seized the attention of educators and attracted notice from President Obama. Last year, in its schools, as a result of the program, the number of students who met the “college ready” standard — scoring above 80 on their Regents exams in algebra, geometry or English language arts — nearly tripled, from 49 to 140.
School “Pay for Performance” Plan Shorts Low-Income, Urban Students
In his proposed budget, Governor Walker recommends setting aside a portion of education funding to distribute to schools based on their performance. While this proposal might sound attractive on the surface, it will result in significant funding increases for schools with few low-income students, disabled students, or English language learners. Schools with larger percentages of those students would be allocated a much smaller share of funding.
The Governor is advocating allocating the following amounts for schools over the coming two-year budget period, based on a school report card accountability measure developed by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction:
$24 million for schools that score in the highest category in DPI’s school report cards;
$30 million for schools that improve their score on the school report cards by at least three points over the previous year; and
$10 million for schools that score in the category of “fails to meet expectations,” if the school submits an improvement plan that is approved by DPI.
The disparities in the student population in the schools, and the higher dollar amount allocated for high-rated schools means that low-income students get relatively little out of this deal. Only one year of school report card data has been published so far, so it’s hard to know what kind of schools would be eligible for the money allocated for schools that improve their score. But we can make some generalizations on how the money would be distributed among the best- and worst-rated schools based using 2011-12 school report cards.
A Team Approach to Get Students College Ready
David Bornstein When Parker Sheffy, a first-year teacher in the Bronx Leadership Academy II, a high school in the South Bronx, talks shop with friends who are also new teachers, he often hears about the problems they are facing: students not showing up to class on time, not understanding their work, not doing homework. “I’m […]
What’s at Stake With Grade Inflation?
“By the time my students reach my classes, they’ve been deeply handicapped by a secondary-school system that teaches testing, not writing, and a culture that discourages what we once understood to be thinking.”
Truth, we’re told, is the first casualty of war. But as I hunker in my office bunker, the dull thud of history term papers landing on my desk, columns of sleep-deprived and anxiety-ridden students trudging past the door, I’m convinced that truth is also the first casualty of undergraduate paper writing. It is not only the historical truths trampled in the mangled and muddied papers written by my students. More insidiously, a deeper truth also suffers. Only tatters remain of the contract, implicit but immemorial, that teachers will grade student papers fairly and honestly. This shared conviction, that the students’ level of writing can be raised only if the teacher levels with them, now seems a historical artifact.
At the start of the spring semester, as with every semester, I told my students that while this was a history course, the most important thing I could teach them in 15 weeks was not the nature of the French revolutionary tradition, but instead to be better writers. Channeling George Orwell, I told my students that slovenliness of writing leads to foolish thoughts. Referring to France’s “mission civilisatrice,” I declared that to write well is not just a crucial skill: It is also a moral duty. They could not hope to think clearly, I intoned, if they could not write clearly. Failing this, I continued, we will also fail as citizens.
As I climbed into higher dudgeon, I said I would hold them to the highest standards–that if their writing was as sloppy at the end of the semester as it was at the start, I would have failed as a teacher. And…well, you get the idea.
To be honest, I’ve mostly failed. It is not, I think, for want of effort. I urge students to hand in rough drafts. Invariably, few take me up on the offer, and those rough drafts I receive I cover in red ink. As for the first batch of papers, I’m no less generous with corrections and suggestions. And just as my comments are in red, so too is the red line of grades: A’s are rare, C’s are common. I’ve drawn the line, and I mean business!
But, to be honest, I mean mostly funny business. Many of the final papers are as garbled as the first papers. As for the good papers, they are mostly the work of students who knew how to write when they arrived. And yet, an odd alchemy begins to crackle and pop. While the tenor of my comments remains as sharp as ever, the paper grades begin to rise toward the heavens. Or, more accurately, the grading standard–the one supposedly locked in that empyrean place–begins to sink earthward.
This has little to do with the papers, and everything to do with me.
I’ve discovered I’m weaving a fairy tale that will let me sleep at night. Not only must I believe I can repair failing writing skills and push against the tides of an increasingly post-literate popular culture, but I must also believe in my relevance as a teacher. But the future of my relevance is yoked to my students’ immediate pasts in our national high schools. By the time my students reach my classes, they’ve been deeply handicapped by a secondary-school system that teaches testing, not writing, and a culture that discourages what we once understood to be thinking.
Our mad rush to testing is, of course, the perverse consequence of our laudable determination to hold schools responsible for our children’s education. But the tests do little more than transform our schools into educational Potemkin villages. Our administrators affirm the necessity of standards, but when they are not lowering the bar, they are busily stripping from their curricula a sustained and serious apprenticeship in writing. As the graduation rate becomes the bottom line for our high schools, the pressure to pass grows irresistible–this is perhaps the most decisive factor in the “grade” the schools in turn receive every year.
Is there a similar logic at work with university professors? That the “grade” we receive in student evaluations, based on the grades we distribute, determines the making or breaking of our classes? Short of transforming my upper-level history classes into writing-composition courses–a class that my history majors do not need for their major any more than my Ph.D. in history trained me to teach–I become the students’ accomplice, not their instructor, and society’s enabler, not its critic.
Yes, this means that truth is a casualty. But we must not lose sight of who is really suffering: our students. Last year the National Assessment of Educational Progress released its “report card” on the performance in 2011 of our nation’s schools. They are flunking. Less than a quarter of high-school students performed at a proficient level of writing; only 3 percent rose to an advanced level. Increasingly, professors are called upon to teach remedial English, but often in courses based on the student’s ability to write (and read) at a proficient or advanced level. Neither student nor professor is willing to confront that truth, so we join hands in ignoring it.
The result, of course, is not the shattering of the illusions fostered by our testing culture, but their reinforcement. As Orwell sighed, we are all complicit in making lies sound respectable.Robert Zaretsky, a professor of French history at the University of Houston Honors College, is the author of Albert Camus: Elements of a Life (Cornell University Press, 2010). His next book, A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, will be published this fall by Harvard University Press.
Republicans Should Love ‘Common Core’ National standards can revive the way we teach math and science.
The Common Core State Standards are a set of rigorous academic standards in mathematics and English language arts. They are the culmination of a meticulous, 20-year process initiated by the states and involving teachers, educators, business leaders and policy makers from across the country and both sides of the aisle.
The standards form a foundation for a high-quality education, have been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia, and are slated for full implementation in 2014.
Unfortunately, the Republican National Committee recently adopted a resolution rejecting the Core Standards, calling them a “nationwide straitjacket on academic freedom and achievement.” This resolution and efforts under way to repeal the Core Standards in several states are misguided and have to be resisted.
Mathematical education in the U.S. is in deep crisis. The World Economic Forum ranks the quality of math and science education in the U.S. a dismal 48th. This is one of the reasons the 2010 report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” by the National Academies warned that America’s ability to compete effectively with other nations is fading.
California School Brawl: Planned Funding Overhaul Pits Low-Income Districts Against Wealthier Ones
A battle is heating up in California over Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposal to boost funding for all schools, but funnel more money to districts where many students are poor and struggle with English and less to wealthier districts.
Since Mr. Brown, a Democrat, unveiled the “weighted funding” plan in January, school chiefs in poorer areas have pushed hard for the state legislature to pass it.
But superintendents in richer districts argue that the proposed redistribution is unfair and that they want a bigger slice of the pie now that the state’s finances have improved, thanks to a stronger economy and a tax increase.
Public schools in California, as in other states, are financed by a mix of federal, state and local dollars. Local funding includes property taxes and donations, which tend to bring in more money in wealthier areas.Federal funding, which includes Title I funding for low-income districts, generally brings more money to low-income districts.
2012-13 MMSD WKCE Results
Tap or click to view a larger version.Higher bar for WKCE results paints different picture of student achievement
Matt DeFour
Wisconsin student test scores released Tuesday look very different than they did a year ago, though not because of any major shift in student performance.
Similar to recent years, the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam results show gains in math and reading over the past five years, a persistent and growing performance gap between black and white students, and Milwaukee and Racine public school students outperforming their peers in the private school voucher program.
But the biggest difference is the scores reflect a higher bar for what students in each grade level should know and be able to do.
Only 36.2 percent of students who took the reading test last October met the new proficiency bar. Fewer than half, 48.1 percent, of students were proficient in math. When 2011-12 results were released last spring, those figures were both closer to 80 percent.
The change doesn’t reflect a precipitous drop in student test scores. The average scores in reading and math are about the same as last year for each grade level.
Instead, the change reflects a more rigorous standard for proficiency similar to what is used for the National Assessment of Educational Progress. NAEP is administered to a sample of students in each state every other year and is referred to as “the nation’s report card.”
The state agreed to raise the proficiency benchmark in math and reading last year in order to qualify for a waiver from requirements under the federal No Child Left Behind law. The benchmark did not rise for the language arts, science and social studies tests.
“Adjusting to higher expectations will take time and effort,” State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers said. “But these are necessary changes that will ultimately help our schools better prepare all students to be college and career ready and link with work being done throughout the state to implement new standards.”
Evers also called on the Legislature to include private voucher schools in the state’s new accountability system.
He highlighted that test scores for all Milwaukee and Racine students need to improve. Among Milwaukee voucher students, 10.8 percent in reading and 11.9 percent in math scored proficient or better. Among Milwaukee public school students, it was 14.2 percent in reading and 19.7 percent in math.
Gov. Scott Walker has proposed expanding the state’s voucher program, including to such districts as Madison.
Changes in Dane County
The state previously announced how the changing bar would affect scores statewide and parents have seen their own students’ results in recent weeks, but the new figures for the first time show the impact on entire schools and districts.
In Dane County school districts, the percentage of students scoring proficient or better on the test dropped on average by 42 percentage points in reading and 25 percentage points in math.
Madison schools had one of the smallest drops compared to its neighboring districts.
Madison superintendent Jennifer Cheatham noted schools with a higher number of students scoring in the “advanced” category experienced less of a drop. Madison’s smaller drop could reflect a higher proportion of students scoring in the top tier.
At the same time, Madison didn’t narrow the gap between minority and white student test results. Only 9 percent of black sixth-graders and only 2 percent of sixth-grade English language learners scored proficient in reading.
“It reinforces the importance of our work in the years ahead,” Cheatham said. “We’re going to work on accelerating student outcomes.”
Middleton-Cross Plains School Board president Ellen Lindgren said she hasn’t heard many complaints from parents whose students suddenly dropped a tier on the test. Like Madison and other districts across the state, Middleton-Cross Plains sent home letters bracing parents for the change.
But Lindgren fears the changing standards come at the worst time for public schools, which have faced tougher scrutiny and reduced state support.
“I’m glad that the standards have been raised by the state, because they were low, but this interim year, hopefully people won’t panic too much,” Lindgren said. “The public has been sold on the idea that we’re failing in our education system, and I just don’t believe that’s true.”
Next fall will be the last year students in grades 3-8 and 10 take the paper-and-pencil WKCE math and reading tests. Wisconsin is part of a coalition of states planning to administer a new computer-based test in the 2014-15 school year.
The proposed state budget also provides for students in grades 9-11 to take the EXPLORE, PLAN and ACT college and career readiness tests in future years.Superintendent Cheatham is to be commended for her informed, intelligent and honest reaction to the MMSD’s results when compared to those of neighboring districts.
View a WKCE summary here (PDF).
Deja Vu? Education Experts to Review the Madison School District
Superintendent’s Teaching and Learning Transition Team to Begin Work This Week
A group of national and local education experts will support Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham’s entry plan work, the district announced today. The Superintendent’s Teaching and Learning Transition Team will begin work this week.
“Instruction and leadership are critical components of systemic improvement,” Superintendent Cheatham said. “This team of local and national practitioners will join district and school staff in assessing and analyzing strengths, areas of opportunities and priorities for improving teaching and learning in Madison schools.”
The eight member team brings together education experts from Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as educational practitioners from other urban school districts.
“We are fortunate to have access to national experts with a wide range of expertise from standards based instruction and leadership development, to bilingual and special education, to family and community involvement,” Cheatham said. “This team will help to deepen and strengthen my ongoing understanding of the strengths and challenges of our district. Their national perspective, coupled with the local perspective shared by principals, staff, parents and community members, will support us in narrowing our focus to only the most high leverage strategies for ensuring every student is college and career ready.”
The team, which was selected by the superintendent and will be funded through community and private foundations, will be chaired by Dr. Robert Peterkin, Professor Emeritus of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and includes: Maree Sneed, partner at Hogan and Lovells US LLC; John Diamond, sociologist of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; Sheila Brown, Co-Director at the Aspen Institute’s Education and Society Program; Allan Odden, Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; John Peterburs, Executive Director of Quarles & Brady; Wilma Valero, Coordinator for English Language Learner Programs in Elgin, Il; and Gloria Ladson-Billings, Professor of Urban Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As Superintendent Cheatham continues the listening and learning phase of her entry plan, the Teaching and Learning Transition Team will also meet with central office leaders, conduct focus groups with teachers, principals, and parents as needed, and review a variety of relevant data.
At the end of their work, the team will present the superintendent with a report of what they have learned and recommendations for moving forward systemically with best practices. That report will be used, along with data collected by the superintendent in school visits and other entry plan activities, to refine the district’s goals and strategic priorities.Related:
THURSDAY, MARCH 1, 2001 (additional background here)
Updated Strategic Plan Results in Priority Action Teams
Five Strategic Priority Action Teams, centered around the most critical challenges facing the Madison Metropolitan School District, are among the outcomes of the recently-completed strategic plan.
“The immediate and emerging challenges facing the district are addressed in our revitalized strategic plan,” said Superintendent Art Rainwater, “and the Action Teams are focused on five important priorities for us.”
The five strategic priorities are:
Instructional Excellence – improving student achievement; offering challenging, diverse and contemporary curriculum and instruction
Student Support – assuring a safe, respectful and welcoming learning environment
Staff Effectiveness – recruiting, developing and retaining a highly competent workforce that reflects the diversity of our students
Home and Community Partnerships – strengthening community and family partnerships and communication
Fiscal Responsibility – using resources efficiently and strategically
The five Strategic Priority Action Teams, one for each of the five priorities, are taking on the responsibility for continuous improvement toward “their” priority.
The Action Teams, which will have both staff members and non-staff members, will be responsible for existing initiatives. In addition they will identify and recommend benchmarks to use in assessing school district performance.
“We have a huge number of initiatives,” said Rainwater. “This strategic plan gives us a systemic approach to change, so that every initiative, everything we do, leads us to these established goals. I believe it is critical to our district’s success that we follow this strategic plan and use it as a decision filter against which we measure our activities.”
Two other outcomes from the updated strategic plan are:
a set of beliefs about children, families, enhanced learning, and the quality of life and learning, all of which are integrated with an identified District vision and mission.
improved cost efficiency and effectiveness of many central office functions, which are being addressed on an ongoing basis.
Madison Schools’ initial strategic plan came about in 1991, and provided direction until this update.
“As a result of this project,” said Rainwater, “all of us who are stakeholders — parents, students, teachers and staff, administrators and community members — will share a renewed sense of clarity, while seeing an ever-more efficient deployment of resources.”
You can see the complete strategic plan on the district’s Web site: http://www.mmsd.org.- Teachers Dispute District Standards: Superintendent Cheryl Wilhoyte’s Biggest Goals have become caught up in the contract battle with Madison Teachers.:
Amid the picket signs Madison teachers carried at a rally last month protesting slow-moving contract talks, some teachers also carried a bright purple flier.
On one side was written the heading “standards and benchmarks.” On the other, “Dimensions of Learning.” Beneath each, and filling the entire page, was one uninterrupted string of text: “Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah. . . .”
While hardly erudite — some would call it juvenile — the flier expressed the sentiment many teachers have toward two of Superintendent Cheryl Wilhoyte’s biggest initiatives: the effort to create districtwide academic standards, and the teacher-training program that goes along with it.
Neither issue is a subject of bargaining. But the programs have become a sort of catch-all target for teachers who blame Wilhoyte for everything from the poor state of labor-management relations to the current contract impasse.
Wilhoyte, who was hired in part to implement the district’s 1991 strategic plan, including establishing rigorous standards, says carrying out that plan is central to the compact she has with the …- The 2009 update to Madison’s “Strategic Planning Process“.
- Madison’s 2012-2013 $392,000,000 budget (just under $15k per student)
- Madison’s long term disastrous reading results
- The Madison school district’s recent “achievement gap and accountability plan“.
- The Capital Times (9.21.1992):
Wilhoyte, on the other hand, has demonstrated that she is a tough, hands-on administrator in her role as assistant superintendent for instruction and school administration in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. And even those who have tangled with her praise her philosophy, which is to put kids first.
She has been a leader in Maryland in shaking up the educational status quo, of moving it forward to meeat the needs of the children, even while juggling new programs with budget cuts. The big question remaining about her: She has never been a superintendent. How would she handle the top job?- Retiring Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary club.
- Madison Teachers, Inc. on the Madison Schools 2000 “Participatory Management”
- Notes and links on recent Madison Superintendent hires”
Matthew DeFour summarizes and collects some feedback on the District’s press release here. It would be useful to dig into the archives and review the various strategic plans and initiatives over the years and compare the words and spending with results.
Deja vu.
School Choice Expansion: The Power of a Fiscal Note
At the start my public policy career I had the good fortune to work with someone who fully understood the power of the Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB) in influencing Wisconsin policy debates. To paraphrase my colleague, legislators want answers, and LFB is the respected authority that provides them. It follows that the content of LFB fiscal notes are often the catalyst, or death knell, for major potential policy changes.
It will bear watching how yesterday’s LFB memo on the fiscal impact of the Governor’s proposed school voucher expansion to nine different communities plays out. The note, available here, is, like just about all LFB work, well done.
First the note points out the obvious. When a student switches from a public school to private school via the theoretical choice program the district loses revenue. Why? Each student attending a public school district generates somewhere around $10,000 in state aid and local revenue (this is an estimate for ease of understanding, the actual amount varies by district). When a student leaves for any reason, the district will eventually lose the $10,000 per-kid. If you look at Table 4 on page 5 the first column shows the eventual estimated impact on participating district revenue limits.
School districts will naturally get worked up about this; they want the market-share and the revenue that comes with it. However, it is hard to justify that districts should be receiving funds for students they are no longer educating.
The more problematic part of the note for school choice advocates is the next three columns. The first column shows the aid reduction to public school districts to pay for 38.4% of the new choice program. Districts don’t lose this money, they offset it with the property tax levy. In most cases, the local per-pupil cost for a choice program is less than the local per-pupil cost for a public school student, so on the surface it appears taxpayers are getting a bargain. However, the next column is where things get more complicated.
That column, labeled “Aid Formula Reduction,” reflects two things. First, the loss of state aid that would have been generated by each pupil that leaves the district. Second, the change in distribution of state and local aid caused by having fewer students in the per-member property value calculation. In English (or something closer to it), when a student leaves a district the district’s per-member property value increases, which lowers the portion of their revenue that comes from state aid and increases the portion that comes from the local property tax.
That is why, against all logic, that last column shows a levy increase despite the lower cost of the choice program. To put in even simpler, when a student leaves for any reason it does impact the state aid/property tax split for students the district is still educating.
Republicans Against Vouchers: GOP legislators join unions to oppose reform in Wisconsin.
School vouchers are usually opposed by teachers unions and their Democratic allies, but a dirty little secret is that some suburban Republicans oppose them too. The latter is the case in Wisconsin, where GOP Governor Scott Walker’s plan to get more kids out of failing schools is facing opposition from short-sighted members of his own party.
The Badger State’s 22-year-old voucher program currently covers Milwaukee and Racine. But in his budget for fiscal 2014-15, Mr. Walker wants to expand it to nine of the state’s worst school districts and increase funding by 9%. Under the proposed formula, students in districts that have at least two schools that get a D or F on their 2011-2012 performance report cards could use a voucher at a private school.
The plan would cover 500 new students in the first year, 1,000 in the second, and thereafter as many as qualified under the formula, which extends the voucher to students in failing schools whose families make 300% of the poverty level. The new areas include Beloit, Green Bay, Kenosha, Waukesha and Fond du Lac, and more than 40,000 children who currently attend lousy public schools would be eligible.
……
While Wisconsin schools score better than most, in 2010 the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that Wisconsin’s black fourth grade students had the worst reading scores in the country. By eighth grade, black students did worse on English tests than students for whom English was a second language.
