Number 2 Pencil

"Help me (with this algebra problem), Obi-wan Kenobi..."

The Matrix meets the classroom:

Scientists have developed technology to "teleport" holographs of teachers into the classroom.

Equipment which can beam the interactive image of a teacher into schools, where it can hold conversations and make eye contact with pupils, is to go on display at the BETT education technology exhibition next month.

Its creators at the Digital World Centre in Manchester believe it could be used to educate children living in remote areas, or to teach specialist lessons in minority subjets, which would otherwise be uneconomic.

Nifty, but it makes me wonder - given all the disciplinary problems I've read about, and unruly students who ignore real teachers, how on earth is a classroom going to stay under control with a holographic teacher? Or, perhaps, this is a great idea, because the schools can hire bouncers from clubs, or off-duty cops, to make the kids shut up and sit down, while the teacher can beam in from a safe distance away.

Interestingly, this article is actually 6 years old. Given that we don't have holographic teachers yet, does this mean the technology still isn't there? Or did the NEA rise up as one and block this development, seeing as how one good teacher could be beamed into many classrooms at once?

Welcome to school, here's your yellow star

One Florida middle school springs the Holocaust on its students:

Local 6 News reported that eighth-graders with last names beginning with L through Z at Apopka Memorial Middle School were given yellow five-pointed stars for Holocaust Remembrance Day. Other students were privileged, the report said.

Father John Tinnelly said his son was forced to stand in the back of the classroom and not allowed to sit because he was wearing the yellow star. "He was forced to go to the back of the lunch line four times by an administrator," Tinnelly said. Tinnelly said the experiment upset his child. "He was crying," Tinnelly said. "I said, 'What are you crying about?' He said, 'Daddy, I was a Jew today.'"

Other parents and children shared similar stories, Tinnelly said...

"Teachers felt that it would have defeated the purpose to tell the students ahead of time because that would have prepared them," Principal Douglas Guthrie said. "Students came in and all they got was a star."

Well, if the object was to teach children what it feels like to be persecuted, I'd say it was a success. Did the reporter talk to any of the privileged kids? How are they feeling today? If any of them were happy with the way things were, now there's a spot to introduce a lesson.

However, I've always found it odd that some educators believe children have to go through this sort of role-playing in order to truly understand a historical event. Do they really think that the horrors of the Holocaust can't be understood without these sorts of theatrics? Have the qualities of empathy disappeared so fully from today's students that the horrors of anti-Semitism escape them entirely? Whatever happened to teaching students about an event, letting them read texts related to it, and encouraging them to think critically about what happened, and why?

The growing phenomenon of merit pay

Merit pay for better student achievement - it's a growing phenomenon:

In the past year, Minnesota, Florida, Texas and the cities of Houston and Denver have established merit pay programs that partly or completely tie bonuses to student achievement. Other states, including Ohio, Iowa and Mississippi, are considering similar programs. advertisement

Merit pay for teachers has been around for decades in various forms as a way to reward instructors whose salaries are chiefly determined by years of experience and post-graduate degrees. Teachers unions have been critical of most merit pay incentives, arguing the money for such programs would be better - and more fairly - used to raise basic pay.

That's such an odd idea to me, on the face of it. I suppose that's because I've never worked in a field where the idea is to equally distribute all the money in the budget, rather than rank performance and distribute money based on rankings. For the record, however, even if merit pay is a good idea, that doesn't mean tying raises to test scores necessarily is.

Catching up on the Carnivals

I've manged to completely miss the Carnival of Education lately, so here's last week's and here's this week's versions.

Last week's Carnival linked to a fantastic rant about more-pious-than-thee textbooks that mix "social justice" with basic math ("It’s an equation! No, it’s an inequality! No, wait…it’s bullshit!"). This week, there's a great discussion of why Nancy Drew should never be seen text-messaging her crime-solving compatriots ("What's wrong with you? Do you really think our kids are too stupid to understand that things were different back in the day?").

Don't miss.

Is middle class the way to go?

I'm not quite sure why this article expresses such surprise about these educational findings:

A study by academics at University College London (UCL) and Kings College London has given statistical backbone to the view that the overwhelming factor in how well children do is not what type of school they attend- but social class. It appears to show what has often been said but never proved: that the current league tables measure not the best, but the most middle-class schools; and that even the government's "value-added" tables fail to take account of the most crucial factor in educational outcomes - a pupil's address.

I'm not familiar with the "league tables" referenced in this (confusingly-written) article, but it appears they contain rankings of schools, and the authors of the study referenced above appear to have data showing that the rankings correlate highly with the address of the student. The authors are horrified about this "polarization," and hope these data will be used to oppose privitization and school choice. I'm finding it hard to see why allowing middle-class parents and middle-class schools to "find each other" is such a bad thing.

Also, just looking at these results, I don't see a causal relationship. Why are the authors concluding that a middle-class address is a cause, rather than concluding that better children, and more involved parents, actually help produce better schools?

(Disclaimer - I don't have time at the moment to try to find the original study online, if it is online, and I'll confess that I'm not even sure if "middle-class" means the same thing in the UK as it does in the US. So make of my commentary what you will.)

When "the whole child" doesn't get ranked

Where does your kid rank among his high school class? You may not be able to find out:

In the cat-and-mouse maneuvering over admission to prestigious colleges and universities, thousands of high schools have simply stopped providing that information, concluding it could harm the chances of their very good, but not best students.

Canny college officials, in turn, have found a tactical way to respond. Using broad data that high schools often provide, like a distribution of grade averages for an entire senior class, they essentially recreate an applicant’s class rank.

The process has left them exasperated.

Admissions directors note that without ranks, the alternatives are...standardized exams like the SAT. A good thing, I say, but perhaps not what the schools were intending. One principal insists that refusal to rank forces universities to look at "the whole child." Putting aside the argument for a moment that many, many aspects of an entire child have little to no impact on how they may do in a college setting, how likely is this to happen for students wanting to attend a local university - like, say, the University of Miami, which receives 18,500 applications a year?

I'm not saying there's no room for improvement in the college admissions process, especially now that college degrees have gone from being superfluous to being useful to being required. But the withholding of useful data isn't necessarily going to produce the results the high schools are hoping for.

"The Little Mermaid" - coming soon to a marine biology class near you

When is a video an "educational crutch?"

...Loudoun County (VA) School Board member Joseph Guzman (Sugarland Run) says some commercial movies, such as the Lion King, which he says was shown in a science class to illustrate the “Circle of Life,” and another Disney cartoon, Mulan, which he says was used in an AP world history class, cross the line from education to entertainment. Assistant Superintendent of Instruction Sharon Ackerman and her staff are looking into Guzman’s suggestion that commercial movies are used as educational crutches.

A possible conclusion to one proposition

I've seen quite a bit of coverage about this recent review of California's Prop 227:

It doesn't matter whether California students who don't know English are taught in bilingual classrooms or fully immersed in the language, according to a five-year study of California's Proposition 227. What matters is the quality of the education they receive.

"We don't see any compelling evidence that one is better than the other," said study co-director Amy Merickel with the American Institutes for Research. "We've been arguing about the wrong thing for a long time. ... It doesn't appear that forcing the majority of students to take the immersion pill is going to be a solution."

Seven years after California's controversial Prop. 227 passed and reduced the use of bilingual programs throughout the state, the 228-page study largely sidestepped the political debate surrounding English learners. Instead it recommended that educators put less emphasis on dictating specific methods and more on rewarding academic success.

The media is essentially touting the issue as "a draw." It's an interesting one, given the following salient points of the research:

Key findings from the study include:

# Since the passage of Proposition 227, students across all language classifications in all grades have experienced performance gains on state achievement tests.

# During this time, the performance gap between English learners and native English speakers has remained virtually constant in most subject areas for most grades.

# Interviews with representatives of schools and districts among the highest performers in the state with substantial English learner populations further supported the finding that there is no single path to academic excellence among English learners.

The key points also note, though, that there are critical factors here, even if there's not one critical method:

The factors identified as most critical to their success were: staff capacity to address English learners’ linguistic and academic needs; school wide focus on English language development and standards-based instruction; shared priorities and expectations in educating English learners and systematic, ongoing assessment and careful data use to guide instruction.

Thumbprints, basic skills, and lost cameras

One big honkin' post to cover some of the multitudes of testing, education and child-rearing news I've read lately. Enjoy!

Testing news:

Stockton (CA) isn't waiting for students to get in high school - or even finish middle school - before they are exposed to the CAHSEE content.

LSAC folks are wondering what the recent fuss over thumbprinting is all about. I wonder if the Patriot Act is really the issue here, or just a convenient excuse for would-be test-takers to complaint about rigorous identification methods that are implemented solely to thwart cheating.

ETS has put off the proposed modifications to the GRE for one year. A description of the revised test is here, with changes due to be implemented in the fall of 2007. The press release notes that "the delay will better serve test takers and graduate institutions." The snitty quotes from the representative of the Princeton Review in the Dartmouth article are pretty funny to me. First they complain about the test being shorter and adaptive, now they complain about it being longer and non-adaptive.

Arizona aims to add science to the state standardized exams. In addition, the current seniors have to pass all three of the AIMS sections — reading, writing and math — in order to be awarded a diploma. The current numbers aren't that pretty - only 73 percent of current high school sophomores have passed at least one section.

Education news:

I think this is going to be a pretty fascinating article for any parent to read:

The amount of black history integrated into lessons varies not only by state but from classroom to classroom, educators say. While Indiana, Kentucky and Illinois have diversified teachers’ resources, it is up to individual districts and teachers what is actually taught. And some teachers fear that a lack of focus on different cultures in standardized tests pushes that information to the background.

“I think we do get kind of bogged down with the everyday teaching that we kind of overlook a lot of the multiracial issues, not only black but other students as well,” said Peggy Durden, a third-grade teacher at Stockwell Elementary in Evansville. “They’re not concerned, I don’t think, with the issues we’re talking about. (They’re focused on) the basic concepts we teach.”

Funny, those school administrators, insisting that teachers focus on basic skills before focusing on diversity lessons. I find it a tad disturbing that a third-grade teacher would refer to her required lessons in math and reading as "bogging" her down.

Graduate student Rohan Duggan should certainly go enroll elsewhere - perhaps at a university where the grammatical skills and vocabulary knowledge of his professors are at least at the college level.

Child-rearing news:

I agree with BoingBoing that this is an example of some really cruddy child-rearing. Talk about missing the opportunity to teach a lesson in basic manners and morality.

Was this transgression worth an arrest and $10,000 bail? Perhaps we should ask the kid who was standing outside in chilly, drizzly weather for hours with no coat to protect her.

I'll have a Diet Coke, hold the plague germs

Now THIS is what I call a science fair project:

Benito Middle School student Jasmine Roberts examined the amount of bacteria in ice served at fast food restaurants. Her project won the science fair at the New Tampa school, and she hopes to win a top prize at the Hillsborough County Regional Science and Engineering Fair, which starts Tuesday.

The 12-year-old compared the ice used in the drinks with the water from toilet bowls in the same restaurants. Jasmine said she found the results startling. "I thought there might be a little bacteria in the ice, but I never expected it to be this much," she said. "And I never thought the toilet water would be cleaner."

Her discovery: Seventy percent of the time, the ice had more bacteria than the toilet water.

And we're not talking harmless little bugs, either. She found E. coli in three of the five ice samples. I think Tampa's got a bit of a problem - and a budding epidemiologist on its hands.

Zany Blizzard Roundup

As in, a roundup of the zanier education news, while the snow piles up, Dave digs out my car, and the crockpot is bubbling.

"You won't let us in the dance? We'll make our own dance! And we'll freak if we want to!"

You'd think that "Disciplinary Policies To Avoid" would have been covered in Education 101.

Bad enough boys lag so far behind in educational performance, but they're falling behind on their three-day benders, too.

Kids should beware of candy that isn't fattening. Of course, given how schools are reacting lately to sugar, whether it's identified correctly or incorrectly, kids may get in trouble even when their candy is the real deal.

YEOW. In more ways than one.

When X and Y just don't add up

Joanne Jacobs and the LA Times on the sensitive topic of compulsory algebra.

From the Times:

When the Los Angeles Board of Education approved tougher graduation requirements that went into effect in 2003, the intention was to give kids a better education and groom more graduates for college and high-level jobs. For the first time, students had to pass a year of algebra and a year of geometry or an equivalent class to earn diplomas.

The policy was born of a worthy goal but has proved disastrous for students unprepared to meet the new demands. In the fall of 2004, 48,000 ninth-graders took beginning algebra; 44% flunked, nearly twice the failure rate as in English. Seventeen percent finished with Ds. In all, the district that semester handed out Ds and Fs to 29,000 beginning algebra students — enough to fill eight high schools the size of Birmingham.

Among those who repeated the class in the spring, nearly three-quarters flunked again.

Joanne notes:

Passing algebra and geometry has been a district requirement since 2003, a state requirement since 2004. The story implies the requirement is just another fad. But the real problem seems to be that students are enrolled again and again in the same classes they failed before. They give up and zone out.

I think we can all agree that when students don't ever learn the basics, they're doomed to failure. Darren points out that:

The real problem isn't that the students can't pass algebra, it's that in some cases they haven't been prepared to pass algebra. Granted, some don't help themselves (like the girl who missed 62 out of 93 days in the semester), but a healthy share of the problem seems, to me, to be this observation[from the Times]:

At Cal State Northridge, the largest supplier of new teachers to Los Angeles Unified, 35% of future elementary school instructors earned Ds or Fs in their first college-level math class last year. Some of these students had already taken remedial classes that reviewed high school algebra and geometry.

Don't be so surprised. And the NEA and CTA want to keep American Board for the Certification of Teacher Excellence from providing alternative teacher credentialing here in California while keeping our state university programs in tact, focused on fuzzy, and patently irrelevant. Way to go, unions.

If elementary teachers are that shaky in math, their task of preparing students to learn algebra will be that much harder.

The news about math

Two recent articles make for an interesting juxtaposition.

First, we are all apparently alarmed at the lack of math teachers these days:

The lack of certified science and math teachers is a growing quandary for schools around the nation, particularly those in poor neighborhoods. Lawmakers in Washington are proposing to spend billions over the next several years to encourage more teachers to enter those subject fields. Politicians and business leaders say this isn't just about education — it's about global competition. Competent and engaged teachers are needed to inspire American children to pursue a career in math or science. If it doesn't happen, the United States' role as leader in technology development and scientific research will wither, they say.

On the other hand, the NYTimes reports that public school and private school math scores seem to be about the same, once demographic variables are factored out:

large-scale government-financed study has concluded that when it comes to math, students in regular public schools do as well as or significantly better than comparable students in private schools.

The study, by Christopher Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski, of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, compared fourth- and eighth-grade math scores of more than 340,000 students in 13,000 regular public, charter and private schools on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress. The 2003 test was given to 10 times more students than any previous test, giving researchers a trove of new data...

"Over all," it said, "demographic differences between students in public and private schools more than account for the relatively high raw scores of private schools. Indeed, after controlling for these differences, the presumably advantageous private school effect disappears, and even reverses in most cases."

This could mean that everyone, and not just poor public schools, are suffering from a lack of math instructors, and not even our kids in private schools are getting enough instruction to compete with international students.

Some "tough love" for LA freshmen

As if freshman year wasn't tough enough, now there's a summer "boot camp":

The Los Angeles Unified School District created the academic boot camp, called the Freshman Success Summer Bridge, at eight San Fernando Valley high schools last year for incoming students with low English or math scores. But the program had some limitations. Because participation was voluntary, some students who needed it most did not attend, and others dropped out. For some, six weeks was not enough; for others, the work wasn't challenging...

Students included those who scored "below basic" or lower in English or math on standardized tests. In classes of about 25, they spent half their mornings on math, sometimes using laptop computers, and the other half on reading, writing and developing study skills. Students who completed the program earned 10 credits toward the 60 they need to be promoted to 10th grade.

Interesting that some students with low test scores mastered this material quickly enough to be bored by the end of the six weeks. Does this suggest a poor fit between test and curriculum? Do some students not take the test seriously? Or do they flourish with this individual attention?

Odds and ends

Quite a few bits of insanity floating around the edusphere and childrearing world today...

Here's the best "out" I've seen yet for a really difficult and demanding child.

A credit card thief figures out a new plan. But given what all we've heard about teachers' salaries these days, isn't this like stealing from the poor? (Via the Education Wonks.)

Can we make a rule that if your initials are the same as a gang's, you get ownership of those letters?

I suppose this is one way to control fan behavior at games. Depressing that it comes to that, but it certainly seems effective.

Nothing says "excellence" like removing an honor just because a lot of kids strive for it.

Required viewing

Have you set your VCR/TIVO to record this? I have!

For "Stupid in America," a special report ABC will air Friday, we gave identical tests to high school students in New Jersey and in Belgium. The Belgian kids cleaned the American kids' clocks. The Belgian kids called the American students "stupid." We didn't pick smart kids to test in Europe and dumb kids in the United States. The American students attend an above-average school in New Jersey, and New Jersey's kids have test scores that are above average for America.

The Belgians did better because their schools are better...

This should come as no surprise once you remember that public education in the USA is a government monopoly. Don't like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it's good or bad. That's why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.

F's were invented for a reason

NewOldSchoolTeacher is getting ready to start student teaching. I like her ideas:

So anyway, I'll be teaching seniors. The school has three levels, it seems, for social studies--AP, Honors, and regular. As luck would have it, I got the regulars. Again, as you might guess, the regular kids are more difficult to handle and have far lower achievement levels....

...I think that the school has to have a firm internal structure set up to help these low performers, and all students for that matter. This structure should include, but not be limited to, their primary teachers. I'm talking about tutoring, after-school help with teachers, a strong discipline code rigorously enforced (detention!), counseling support, contact with parents, and maybe just a little love. I mean, we all need a little love, right?

Not me, I'm a heartless robot with a soul of steel. Which is one reason I don't have a problem failing students. If a student is so behind that he/she can't catch up during the year, it is in that student's best interest to repeat and acquire the necessary skills. Likewise, a student who never does his/her work should learn that the consequence to that is failure. In the workplace, not doing work gets you fired. Schools can be more humane. Not doing work means you have to do the work anyway.

Failing a grade can turn someone's life around. Even if the student hates it (or you) at the time, it might be the best thing that ever happened to him/her.

Bingo.

I didn't know the movie "Chinatown" was about Kansas City

Nice to know these Kansas schools have successfully mastered all teaching of English, and can move on to the really hard stuff:

A suburban Kansas City-area school district plans to add Chinese to its curriculum next year, making it the third area school system to teach the language. "We just can't ignore the whole area (East Asia) anymore," said Dan Lumley, director of curriculum and instruction for the Lee's Summit School District. "It's just unfair to the kids."

On the Kansas side of the Kansas City area, the Shawnee Mission and Olathe districts teach the language. According to the education departments in Kansas and Missouri, the only other district to teach Chinese in those states is St. Louis' public schools. The Kansas Consortium for Teaching About Asia at the University of Kansas is promoting Chinese instruction in Kansas City-area schools. It is arranging for Chinese exchange teachers for the Lee's Summit and Shawnee Mission districts.

Actually, I kid. I think an opportunity to learn Chinese would be wonderful for American schoolchildren. I also think that Chinese methods of instruction might be wonderful for American teachers to see. I'd love to be a fly on the wall the first time that a Chinese teacher hears an educrat insist that memorization, individual work, and failing grades are harmful to students.

Overscheduled, overfrazzled, and over here

Joanne Jacobs notes that, as far as some seniors are concerned, AP classes take a backseat to manicures and minimum-wage jobs:

My colleagues and I are fully committed to providing [our 12th-grade students] with a world-class academic education, one that regularly produces large numbers of National Merit Scholars and sends students on to do well in Ivy League colleges.

But we do not look out over classrooms full of enthusiastic, prepared and appreciative students as my daughter does in China...Our schools are failing because of the demands and temptations provided by a mass culture that is the primary educator of most of our young people. Even in our advanced placement courses, we deal with students who don't understand why English teachers expect them to read 400-page novels, write papers carefully or do precise study for rigorous tests. They will tell you that they don't have the time.

They are also expected to work 20 hours a week at Target to pay for their cars, fit in their hair, tanning and nail appointments, babysit their mother's younger children, acquire their own meals, plan for the prom and senior week, respond to their phone and computer messages and listen to everything programmed into their iPods. Further, they need to do all of those things after they have worked three hours a day for their coaches and fit in all of their doctor, dentist and therapy appointments.

And we haven't even gotten to the God-given right each American child has to the pursuit of happiness in the form of playing with their PlayStations, watching videos, taking trips to Starbucks, hanging out and napping.

Interesting, that "God-given right" to have a busy life that we seem to teach our youth about. It's probably not a coincidence that at the same time high school teachers wonder why their students can't sit still and focus on academics, a new syndrome has appeared in elementary school - The Overscheduled Child:

Contemporary children get so much more than basic schooling. Many also participate on one or more teams, have lessons in music, art, foreign language, and are tutored in school subjects. Although each activity may be valuable on its own, in aggregate these commitments leave parents and children frazzled, keep children from developing self-reliance, and hurt families...

This is happening because many contemporary parents see their fundamental job as designing a perfect upbringing for their offspring, from conception to college. A child's success—quantified by "achievements" like speaking early, qualifying for the gifted and talented program or earning admission to an elite university—has become the measure of parental accomplishment. Despite knowing in their hearts that their families are over-scheduled, many parents keep rushing because they fear that cutting back could harm their beloved child's future.

That is why the most competitive adult sport is no longer golf. It is parenting.

I know five-year-olds who have taken more sports classes, seen more plays, had more lavish and expensive birthday parties, and have more scheduled dates with their peer group members than I have, or ever will. They also tend to have lovely playrooms filled with toys, but I wonder when they have time to play with any of them.

Poor schools in a wealthy state

For some schools in California, an increase in "quality" might mean simply fixing the water fountain, or increasing the number of textbooks available:

In 2000, Sweetie Williams and his son Eliezer “Eli” Williams—who graduated from high school last June—became the lead plaintiffs in Williams v. California. In the class action, they charged that the conditions of the school Eli attended in the San Francisco Unified School District were “dismal and unacceptable,” according to a statement the elder Williams wrote in 2004 when the case was settled. Restrooms were dirty, toilets didn’t work, fences were rusty, and many teachers didn’t even assign homework because students didn’t have books to take home with them, he added.

“Every child should have the opportunity to go to a school where they are given the basic materials and facilities that all children need to learn,” Sweetie Williams wrote, summing up the case and describing the reasoning behind the inspections that are now mandatory for hundreds of California schools.

The site visits like the one at Pomona’s Ganesha High, which Sepulveda completed with the help of four other team members, are just part of the detailed process through which officials monitor the physical and academic conditions of the schools targeted in the lawsuit.

Doing well in Montana

Great Falls High School is proud of its seven National Merit semi-finalists - the most in 21 years:

Great Falls High School's class of 2006 has seven National Merit semi-finalists this year — more than it has had in one year for at least 21 years, said Counselor Steve Bennetts. This class's kids have more 4.0s, higher standardized test scores and higher GPAs than classes before and after it, according to the counseling office.

Bennetts calls them "the brightest class to ever graduate from Great Falls High."

And they're more than eggheads. (One National Merit semifinalist admits to nearly flunking a calculus test.) They practice tae kwon do, write novels, sew their own prom dresses (off-white with a burgundy border), downhill ski and ace national exams.

One little complaint of mine - I wish someone was teaching the kids how to express humility without downgrading the exam:

Every class has its smart kids, Bennetts said, but the class of 2006 has more than its share. They work hard, take hard classes and something inside drives them.

"It's a desire to learn," Barlow said.

By and large, the National Merit semi-finalists among them downplay that rank.

"You go in, you sit down, you get lucky on a test one day," Hall said.

No, not really, kid. You made your luck that day. It's admirable that they want to be humble about their accomplishments and not flaunt their awards in front of the kids who didn't do as well, but to suggest that the high scores are the result of pure luck is incorrect.

The busy kids

It seems a bit odd to see "standout" students with full schedules complaining about too much homework:

...when Norton, Mass., Middle School officials eliminated two study halls each week, three seventh-grade girls decided they had had enough. erryn Camara, Lynsey Kearns and Audra Schlehuber gathered more than 150 signatures on a petition to restore the study halls, which were scaled back to fulfill state requirements on classroom time..."I know two classes a week doesn't seem like a lot, but a lot of kids are staying up until midnight on their homework," Kearns said. "We don't have enough time to get it all done."

Complaints about homework are a time-honored tradition, but today's protests may be more than idle grumbling. With teachers and schools under increasing pressure to cover more topics and raise standardized test scores, even young students at many suburban schools are saddled with a heavy load of nightly assignments, teachers and parents say.

The complaints seem to be about the loss of family time together, with students complaining that all the time from dinner to 10 pm is homework. But what about before dinner?

Parents have greeted the trend with a resounding chorus of complaints, saying the hours spent on homework are detracting from normal family life. Students are sacrificing sleep to finish work sheets and projects -- and robbing families of what little relaxation time together they have, they say.

The three Norton seventh-graders -- bright, articulate girls described by their principal as standout students -- bounce from activity to activity after school, then study for about two hours each evening, more if they have a test or a project due the next day. "As soon as I finish dinner, I have to start my homework," said Kearns, who goes to basketball practice and theater classes after school. "That takes me till about 10 p.m., and I go right to bed. What ever happened to relaxing?"

Ah. I see (emphasis mine). Spending a couple hours a day on basketball and theater class - that, they understand. That time spent away from family is apparently fine with everyone, and only the time spent on homework is sticking in the parental craws. This seems odd, and I wonder how many parents out there would be willing to tell their younger kids to pick just one activity, and leave the rest of the time for schoolwork.

A diversity puzzle in Boston

Once again, a removal of race-based quotes results in a dip in "diversity":

...inside the accelerated classes at the Hennigan and other public schools in the city, the pipeline to exam schools is starting to look a lot less like Boston's public schools. Black and Hispanic students fill 44 percent of the 968 seats in the accelerated classes in the school district, though they make up more than three-quarters of Boston's students overall. White and Asian students now occupy 55 percent of the seats, though they are only 23 percent of the district.

In particular, the number of black students, now at 239, in the classes has dropped by half since 1999, when the city stopped using racial quotas to assign students to the classes...

''It's not a true picture of what the city is," said Costa, who presides over a majority white and Asian fourth-grade accelerated class in a school that is 85 percent black and Hispanic. ''You can't tell me that all black children aren't capable of achieving like white children. I wouldn't buy that."

No one is saying they aren't capable of achieving. The standardized test score is simply telling you that they aren't achieving, at least not in the numbers Costa would like to see. For some reason, everyone wants to now put the accelerated program under a microscope, instead of asking two simple questions:

1. Does performance on the standardized entrance exam seem to be predictive of whether one will benefit from accelerated learning?
2. If so, then why are black and Hispanic students not scoring well on the exam?

If the test is actually not useful, then other methods should be used. But if the test seems to be useful, the problem is not necessarily with the program or the test. One part of the puzzle might be the attitude that black and Hispanic students can't be expected to do well on objective measures of achievement, and require special set-asides to ensure that they make it to accelerated classes.

Pushing students who don't want to learn

An exasperated Florida teacher takes her students to task in a Sun-Sentinel opinion piece:

...what is most interesting under the No Child Left Behind Act is this tidbit about accountability: "No Child Left Behind holds schools and school districts accountable for results. Schools are responsible for making sure your child is learning." Schools are responsible, yet it seems low-performing schools have fewer and fewer resources to help promote learning gains.

As a teacher, I think the goal of increasing student achievement has much merit. However, we good teachers beat our heads against walls day-in, day-out trying to get our students to grasp not just the standards and benchmarks, but also the importance of reinforcing their education with homework and reading. When I tell students they have to do independent reading, they groan. I actually had an advanced student, when told the School Board expected students to read a new book every two weeks, ask, "Don't they think we have lives?"

The more important word in the phrase "student achievement" is "student." Until the students take responsibility for their own learning, test scores will not improve....

I don't think I would have been able to get away with the "Don't you think I have a life?!" argument in high school.

I'm sensing a link between this teacher's aggravation and this parent's downplaying of the importance of science:

With the single goal of boosting standardized test results, a third year of science will now be required for all incoming freshmen (Class of 2010) at Paso Robles High School. This is the latest action in a continuing trend to force students into academic courses regardless of ability, strengths or interests. While added courses can be a good thing, this change comes at the expense of electives and vocational programs. Many parents and teachers feel that such a reduction of electives will have a negative impact on all students.

All students need a curriculum rich in sensory opportunities, with a chance to do, play and move, and opportunities to learn teamwork, discipline, leadership and hands-on skills. There is not a test score out there that measures this kind of learning, but watching our performing arts students, I, for one, know success when I see it!

...student enrollment in courses such as art, drama, music, life skills, social studies and vocational programs will drop considerably with this change. Inevitably, Paso Robles schools will begin to lose their very qualified and dedicated teachers as well.

Let me get this straight - the entire school is going to go down the tubes just because now students will have to take earth sciences, biology, and chemistry? Are you kidding me? Has it really been announced that all the elective courses are now cancelled because one more science course is required? And has it also been announced that the work in the additional science course is utterly contrary to discipline, hands-on learning, teamwork, and all the other concepts this author believes are important?

Visual and Performing Arts classes are beneficial to high-schoolers - but so is science. I'm failing to understand why, at this high school of all high schools, the two are considered to be in opposition to one another.

Skipping along

Hey, Devoted Readers, I need some advice.

A friend of mine has a lovely and precocious daughter in kindergarten, who is very smart in reading and math, is extroverted, loves school, and is both taller and slightly older than the other kids in her class. She's used to hanging out with her older sister's friends, who are in fourth grade. The public school at which she is due to start first grade next year has recommended to my friend that she be allowed to skip it altogether and start in second grade.

My friend wants to weigh all the options before making such a huge decision. I'd love any links, books, people, advice, etc on this topic that you guys can supply - either email me or put them in the comments section. Personal anecdotes are welcome as well.

The problems for boys

A USA Today editorial asks the provacative question: Boys lag behind - Does anyone care?

Maryland educators opened their latest test results recently and discovered their 10th-grade boys lagging far behind girls in literacy skills. The same thing happened in Kentucky, Vermont and Washington. Teachers and parents can tell you that in elementary school, girls are more facile learners. But gender differences are assumed to level out over the years and clear up by high school.

That's not happening...It gets worse. Boys are twice as likely to land in special education and far more likely to be held back a grade and drop out. At many public universities and some private colleges, barely 40% of the students are male.

Oddly, educators, researchers and philanthropists agree there's no serious effort to figure out why this is happening and what can be done. Other priorities prevail...

Yes, they certainly do, to the extent that some critics today continue to repeat the tired canard that tests and schools are inherently short-changing girls. Even though who have changed their tune and are no longer claiming this are very reluctant to propose that special attention be given to boys - witness the insistence, in the face of contrary data, that the same teaching methods that help girls excel must also help boys excel.

It's very odd, indeed, that the current data is not being taken seriously especially given that this problem wasn't exactly uncovered yesterday.

And if educators and administrators seem unwilling to deal with the fact that boys are falling behind academically, I wonder how willing they'll be to deal with these types of problems within their schools:

Many Hillsborough County middle and high school students lead double lives - one for their parents and one for their peers.

In a districtwide survey, nearly half of high school students and one in five middle school students said they have had sexual intercourse, and a higher percentage of high school boys than girls reported being physically hurt by their "significant others."

Emphasis mine. The survey's past results are here. Kudos goes to the first school district who tackles these problems by admitting that both boys and girls can be abusive, and ensuring that victims of either sex should be unafraid to reach out for help. Then again, if this article is anything to go by, administrators who are unfraid to acknowledge and tackle female violence may find themselves under attack.

: Sometimes the differences seem bizarre:

Faced with students' declining scores in mathematics, Bozeman High School [MT]is strengthening its math program while the school board considers whether to make an additional year of math study a graduation requirement.

Bozeman High will add a remedial math class, increase teacher training and make attendance at a drop-in math lab a requirement for struggling students, instead of an option, Principal Godfrey Saunders told the board...

At Chief Joseph Middle School, 58 percent of eighth-grade boys who took a standardized test showed proficiency in math, down from 76 percent in the previous testing cycle. Girls held steady, at 77.

Emphasis mine. Good grief, what a drop (though a middle school in Montana might have a small enough population that only a couple of boys could make a huge impact; I can't download the software to check here)

I'd like to thank the (Freshmen) Academy

Rock Island High School (IL) announces the end of social promotions:

The Rock Island-Milan school district's Parent Advisory Committee met Wednesday to further discuss what parents want incoming freshmen to get from the federally-funded Smaller Learning Community, or Freshman Academy...

Under the SLC’s plan, next year's ninth graders will receive extra academic, social and motivational support from teachers; lessons that will address different learning styles and cultures; and be identified early for pre-advanced placement and honors classes, or the opposite -- for needing extra help in reading and math.

Former Rocky principal Nate Anderson, who is heading up the SLC, told parents Wednesday he is "not a proponent" of social promotion. Along with that ideal is the token phrase being used to catapult the SLC: "failure is not an option."

More of the principal's message is here:

First, I would like to thank parents who attended the parent information night this past week. We trust that the disseminated information was of value. For those parents who were not able to attend, there were five important steps presented that may assist in strengthening student academic development.

They are:
Encourage mandatory attendance from home
Set high expectations by encouraging your child to make good grades
Insure your child’s engagement in class by asking open-ended questions
Get involved with your child’s education
Be informed of testing, report cards and other pertinent information regarding your child’s high school experience

Sounds good to me.

A failing grade for everyone

This week's Carnival of Education is up, which includes a head-scratching question from Polski3:

A teaching colleague of mine is using an F- grade for those students who utterly fail the class, usually due to a combination of not turning in work and discipline issues. My colleague says it sends a message that the student is REALLY DOING BAD. What do you think? Does it send a message? Or is it overly harsh and redundant?

Also online is Caveon's latest Cheating in the News roundup, which details "mass plagiarism" in the UK:

Examiners say they detected "blatant copying of material from the internet" in some of this year's coursework for GCSE English. Staff at the AQA exam board are said to have been surprised at some of the more obvious examples.

They also said some schools gave students so much help it amounted to "a kind of mass plagiarism".

So here's what we do. If you fail honestly, you get an F, along with tutoring and helpful advice (which may be along the lines of, "Perhaps you should choose a different subject for your major.")

However, if you cheat, then you get a big honking "F-minus" in red permanent ink and 44-point font size. That seems to me like the best solution.

Carding the teacher

Philadelphia teachers are asking their students to give 'em more feedback:

Almost daily, Haverford Middle School science teacher Theresa D'Andrea asks for feedback about how she is doing. And her students answer with a wave of brightly colored index cards.

Green means yes, the student understands the lesson. Yellow means maybe, sorta, kinda. And a red card held aloft is a signal that a student needs an extra dose of instruction. Some days, just a few cards are in the air, and D'Andrea offers a quick refresher and also reminds her students that they can get extra help after school.

The cards function as an early warning system that alerts D'Andrea and her students to lapses in learning.

Nifty (thought this method will be pretty funny to any student who plays soccer). Other examples of "formative assessments" in Philly schools:

At Upper Merion Area High School and elsewhere, for instance, students use handheld clickers to answer a teacher's question, and the instant record of responses shows the entire class whether some, most or all students got the lesson.

And teachers in the Garnet Valley School District use Palm Pilots to take in-class notes on student achievement. Moving from desk to desk, the teacher can observe and record whether a student is at an entry level or advanced understanding of a particular math or reading concept.

The parents' fight against fuzziness

The NYTimes opens an article about the new "innovative" math with a provocative anecdote:

LAST spring, when he was only a sophomore, Jim Munch received a plaque honoring him as top scorer on the high school math team here. He went on to earn the highest mark possible, a 5, on an Advanced Placement exam in calculus. His ambition is to become a theoretical mathematician.

So Jim might have seemed the veritable symbol for the new math curriculum installed over the last seven years in this ambitious, educated suburb of Rochester. Since seventh grade, he had been taking the "constructivist" or "inquiry" program, so named because it emphasizes pupils' constructing their own knowledge through a process of reasoning.

Jim, however, placed the credit elsewhere. His parents, an engineer and an educator, covertly tutored him in traditional math. Several teachers, in the privacy of their own classrooms, contravened the official curriculum to teach the problem-solving formulas that constructivist math denigrates as mindless memorization.

The article does a nice job of capturing the frustration parents feel with math instruction so "progressive" and devoid of "mindless memorization" that their sixth-graders are unable to make change from a $20 bill. What's more, the parents who are helping their children memorize multiplication tables are derided as "helicopter parents":

Susan Gray, the superintendent, attributed the criticism of the math program to "helicopter parents" who are accustomed to being deeply involved in all aspects of their children's lives. "Because the pedagogy has changed, the parents who knew the old ways didn't know how to help their children," she said. "They didn't have the knowledge and skills to support their children at home. There's a security in memorization of math facts, and that security is gone now."

Um, is that supposed to be an advantage of constructivist math? That engineers, scientists, and doctors who used to be able to expect their kids to make change can no longer do so? And I'd like to point out to Ms. Gray that the term "helicopter parents" was developed to mock those overprotective souls who keep a close eye on kids who've left the nest and moved on to college. Applying the term to parents who are horrified at how handicapped their young kids are by lack of "drill and kill" math knowledge is condescending and nasty.

The article's primary shortcoming is its lack of links to bloggers, educators, and teachers who have been fighting this battle for quite some time. At the very least, the author should have linked to Bas Braams and Mike McKeown for their tireless work in this area. To get the best sense of the ongoing battle to return common sense and multiplication tables back to public school math, you can also click on over to the NYHOLD site and just keep scrolling. A recent paper by Stanley Ocken, a professor of mathematics at CUNY-NY, sums things up nicely:

...the New York State 4th and 8th grade assessments are weak in computational and pre-algebra skills. Those exams include lots of word problems dealing with everyday situations, but the actual math skills required are minimal [What's more, such items place a heavy reading load on students, and often end up measuring more reading comprehension than math skills]. That’s a direct result of the vision described in the NCTM Standards: computation with standard algorithms must be removed from its dominant place in the elementary curriculum. After all, you can get the answer with a calculator.

The problem with that recommendation is its effect on students’ future ability to handle algebraic symbolism efficiently, fluently, accurately. It’s necessary, but not sufficient, that kids learn the multiplication table cold. Once that's done, they need to assemble basic operations into more complex tasks. That’s why they still need to practice standard algorithms for multi-digit multiplication and division. It is the experience of sustained number manipulation, with fluency and accuracy as the goal, that establishes a foundation for future success with lengthy algebraic symbol manipulation tasks that are critical in mathematics and science, beginning with a good Algebra II course. And it is the importance of sustained number manipulation that is categorically rejected by the NCTM Standards and by elementary math programs, including Everyday Math, that share the NCTM vision.

This fuzzy math has been lauded by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics for years as more inclusive and beneficial to students in a high-tech age, and a cursory read of their mathematics standards would seem to support their claims. However, the careful reader will note that, despite their claims that there's no one "right" way to teach math, the NCTM pushes collaborative learning over solitary work, and they present "conceptual understanding" as something that contrasts to, rather than results from, the learning of basic skills. Calculators are also a integral (ha) part of their brave new vision.

For more criticism of the NCTM and their plan for teaching "conceptual understanding" without having to memorize any formulas, you can click back to old links of mine here, here, here, and here.

And to end with my own anecdotal evidence of sorts, let's just say that everyone I know who tutors high school math, either on the side or as a full-time job, is not having to hunt for pupils, even in the best school districts where the public schools are considered to be very good. The tutors I've spoken with don't describe their pupils as being pushed by "helicopter parents," either, but say that the outside is tutoring is a necessity to balance the undemanding school curricula.

Gym class for the 21st century

You know, I think this is a great idea:

The Minneapolis school system's online physical education allows kids to choose a physical activity they enjoy, do it for 30 minutes three times a week -- on their own time -- while keeping an online journal. A parent or coach must confirm the student did the activities, and a fitness test at semester's end will turn up any cheaters. Course choices have ranged from weight-lifting to swimming to horseback riding...

Josh Boucher, a 15-year-old sophomore, has a hip condition that makes it difficult for him to run. But he also has a black belt in karate, and last summer was able to turn his training into his phys ed class. "I was doing so much physical activity -- more than most gym classes," Boucher said. "Now I can get credit for it."

He also rejects the idea that the online classes are easier than traditional gym. Students must study the health benefits of their activities and get assignments on related topics like healthy eating. "It's time-consuming," Boucher said. "We had hours of written work where we were learning about fitness and how to better our lives. More than I'd ever had in gym class."

Just think - No stupid uniforms. No having to spend an hour between 8 and 3 playing volleyball with people you may not like. No icky school showers. If your kid's shy, get 'em into something that isn't a contact sport; if your kid's a little demon, they can learn a real competitive skill instead of a watered-down gym class that has to be approved by everyone's parents.

I wish I could have done gym class this way. For most of my life I thought I was completely unathletic because I can't do anything well that requires me to hit a ball. With this option I would have been off the softball field and into a kickboxing class like shot through a goose.

A problem with research?

A perspective published in EdWeek.org argues that good, solid research isn't that helpful in the educational system nowadays:

I no longer believe that education research will turn our schools around. And it’s not likely to help us to fix our ailing schools for very specific reasons. First, research is not readily accessible—either physically or intellectually. The findings tend to be written for other researchers in academicspeak and appear in relatively obscure journals.

True enough. The general incomprehensibility of educational jargon has been widely mocked in the real world.

Second, even if research findings were more accessible, they wouldn’t be widely read. Teachers, principals, superintendents, and politicians are generally not consumers of research.

And whose fault is that? Don't the first three groups listed above generally hold at least a bachelor's degree? If they aren't consumers of research, perhaps the problem lies in their training to be part of the educational system.

The author continues with a few more reasons that research isn't used, or used well, in today's educational environment, before moving on to this:

Sixth, much education research is flawed because it relies so heavily on a flawed measure—standardized test scores.

Anyone surprised that this attitude shows up here? No? Let's move on.

Test scores may be the only “objective” data available, but they’re not necessarily a reliable measure of student learning.

Ah, no. "Reliability" has a very specific meaning when it comes to testing, and in an article that talks about how educators aren't generally consumers of research, it's ironic - or perhaps not - that the author appears to be misusing this technical term. Most, if not all, multiple-choice standardized tests that are developed for use are in fact highly reliable, because reliability in testing means consistency of measurement, or the extent to which the results are similar over different forms of the same test or occasions of test administration. Items that are objectively scored are more likely to produce similar test-retest results for examinees.

Exams composed of primarily multiple-choice items tend to have high reliability, and in fact most test developers shoot for a reliability of .90 for these types of exams. The addition of open-ended items, performance-based items - in fact, all the less-structured types of assessments that so many educators are fond of - usually lessen the reliability of these types of exams.

So I'm not sure why the author used low reliability as a criticism here, since that's probably where the least amount of error appears in this type of exam.

Nor do they measure many of the traits we hope schooling will produce in kids—like good habits of mind and behavior. They don’t measure Howard Gardner’s other intelligences, like artistic talent, athletic prowess, or social skills. After kids leave formal schooling, they’ll be judged for the rest of their lives on the quality of their work and their personal and professional behavior. Test scores are a poor proxy for those qualities and for a wide range of other skills and abilities.

Ah, the old "But my kid is so high in kinesthetic intelligence!" argument. What testing critics are hoping you don't notice with this type of criticism is the fact that, if you can't read and write and do basic calculations - skills for which test scores tend to be extremely good proxies - your chances of economic success in our society are extremely low, regardless of your academic or artistic abilities. Sure, there are kids with rock-bottom SATs who make big bucks on stage or on a playing field, but the percentage of Americans who make a living with those skills alone is pretty darn small.

What this type of testing critic wants you to conclude is that kids who do well on standardized tests have learned many literacy- and numeracy-related facts without really understanding them, that these skills are utterly separate from other mental and physical abilities, and that the development of skills that are measurable with tests always happens at the expense of other critical skills. I think that's nonsense. You want to teach your kids good habits of mind, good social skills, and some touch football or ballet as well? Then explain to them that, unless they're prodigies, they'll be supporting themselves with their minds, not their bodies, later on in life, and skills such as discipline and teamwork will serve them just as well later on life as they will on their upcoming exams.

Does research show that high test scores predict everything a kid will do later in life? Of course not. But I think there's sufficient research to show that low test scores are a sign of a real problem, and a strong indication that intervention is needed. Maybe if schools of education impressed this upon the would-be teachers and principals, educational research would have a bit more impact on education today.

Be a Picky Parent

Authors Bryan and Emily Hassel, who wrote, "The Picky Parent Guide: Choose Your Child's School with Confidence," are interviewed at Connect For Kids. They also have a website, PickyParent.com, which has some interesting lists for parents. My favorite was Top Ten Signs of a Mediocre School, which noted that parents should beware of a school in which test scores are entirely predictable based on race. I find this amusing, as so many test critics insist that all standardized tests are in fact measures of nothing other than race and SES, while so many good schools with high test scores for minority and lower-income students go right on disproving that theory.

The joys of independence without the bother of external standards

The News-Leader (MO) covers a presentation by an educator with a radical plan for schools that might be suitable for, oh, about 1% of the student population:

Just hear me out, educator Bruce Smith told a small crowd Monday at Drury University. Students should set their own schedule, work at their own pace and decide, in many ways, what they want to learn. Smith was providing an overview of the Sudbury schools model, which emphasizes independence and democracy - with students and teachers being the governing force and decision makers.

Here we go again. The fetishization of unstructured learning and the assumption that students today always know enough about what they like to choose anything at all.

Smith is a former Columbia high school teacher who left public schools because he thought the system was squashing the natural curiosity in children. The schools stress independent thinking and de-emphasize standardized testing. Students are encouraged to follow their passions.

I wonder if "follow" means "learn the facts about," or if it's okay to just be independently "interested." One could argue that being passionate yet uninformed about a topic is worse than being ignorant and uninterested.

Students ages 4-19 are accepted. There are no formal grades. Depending on state standards, many Sudbury schools do not require standardized testing.

If there are no formal grades, the anti-testing attitude is a given. Grades, and test scores, imply a set standard to which students are being compared. That standard might be a set amount of facts learned, or how other students are doing with the same material, but it's always there. Except at Sudbury schools, where their philosophy sounds like it would make any sort of useful comparison virtually impossible.

After the presentation, Smith fielded audience questions ranging from student-teacher ratios - although there are no specific ratios, ratios are much smaller than in the public school system - to how the system deals with children with special needs.

I wonder if any questions were along the lines of, "What will you do to ensure that my child learns something in your school? What will you do to ensure that they learn something that will allow them to support themselves as mature adults?"

How does a student know if he's graduated - one man asked. The crowd laughed. In order to graduate, students must prepare and defend a thesis over a six-month period, Smith said.

"Say what? What if my child needs more than six months to explore his chosen passion? What if he doesn't express himself well in writing or in speech, instead choosing interpretive dance? What if his style of learning precludes him being required to defend anything about it to impartial observers? Didn't you say that he gets to decide how quickly his education goes? How dare you set such an arbitrary and unmoving standard! My child is special and can't possibly develop his passionate work of, of, whatever it is, on that sort of schedule! "

And if Sudbury school administrators expect never to hear that, I have some lovely, inhabitable lakefront property in New Orleans to sell them.

One parent speaks out in support of the school:

"I would say one of the biggest ones is the ability for my daughter to be able to know herself and make choices and have freedom," Frey said. Frey is against standardized testing, saying it adds stress at a young age, doesn't test children on skills they will need in real life and places an emphasis on learning how to test, instead of learning.

Because, as we all know, life never requires that you be able to withstand any sort of test, or live by someone else's schedule. Making life choices also never requires the drudgery of learning facts. Life involves no stress, and no restrictions on freedom, and no knowledge of standardized-test friendly skills like literacy and numeracy.

Can you imagine how a child who was actually in this system from ages 4 to 19 would do in the real world? The only one I bet would survive would be the natural scientific geek who - to the horror of the school, I would think - would insist on being taught rigorous mathematics and chemistry and biology. This would be the lucky child who understood intuitively that many of the world's triumphs and adult successes don't involve passion and self-knowledge so much as they involve lots of hard work, stress, and precise calculations.

Carnival time

The latest edition of the Carnival of Education is up, hosted by the delightful Jenny D. Her "Editor's Choice" pick is NewOldSchoolTeacher, blogging at Oh, snap!, who has a funny, understated description of herself on her site:

I am a student at a graduate school of education. Unfortunately, I am also smart and care about education. You see where I'm going with this.

Oh, yes we do. Don't miss her tale of terror, "Teaching a lesson in a progressive school", where the official position is to be "against" quizzes. I love her comments on why the little facts and details are important:

My teachers and others want kids to understand the "big ideas" in history, rather than memorizing facts and details. But I just don't think you can teach these big ideas directly. They are empty and meaningless by themselves. You teach the small stories, the facts, the dates, the chronology, the events, and then out of these, patterns begin to emerge. That's the beautiful part, when the students start to see them. It's like giving them tree after tree after tree, and suddenly they realize it's a forest. Or it's like that painting, by...Seurat? The one with all the little dots. There is no picture without all the dots!

It's funny, because I feel that the teaching strategy I am suggesting is actually more constructivist than my constructivist teachers. It doesn't involve lots of group work, and it doesn't shun facts, and there would have to be a lot of teacher support and prodding, but I think students could come up with a lot of "big ideas" on their own, without us directly telling them. Giving them the facts, rather than a somewhat revisionist thematic interpretation of the facts, actually gives them more power, and a forest full of trees.

No wonder "progressive" teachers hate standardized tests. We keep focusing on those damn trees - sometimes down to the level of individual leaves - while they keep trying to convince students that seeing the forest as a whole is the only important goal.

What's so dumb about New Mexico?

Apparently dumb behavior is par for the course in New Mexico's schools:

The smartest state in the union for the second consecutive year is Massachusetts. The dumbest, for the third year in a row, is New Mexico.

These are the findings of the Education State Rankings, a survey by Morgan Quitno Press of hundreds of public school systems in all 50 states. States were graded on a variety of factors based on how they compare to the national average. These included such positive attributes as per-pupil expenditures, public high school graduation rates, average class size, student reading and math proficiency, and pupil-teacher ratios. States received negative points for high drop-out rates and physical violence.

Wonder how the New Mexicans feel about this? I also wonder how much of the data are driven by student populations that historically do worse on standardized tests, like Hispanics and Native Americans. From what I gather, this was a norm-based survey where all positive factors were weighted the same, and all negative factors were weighted the same.

Amusingly, a negative factor that carries the same weight as in-school violence and dropout rates is "Percent of Public Elementary and Secondary School Staff Who are School District Administrators." In other words, the more administrators you have compared to the teaching staff, the less likely that anything useful gets accomplished.

You can't spell "teamwork" if you can't spell

A Wisconsin middle school has been surveying local businesses to see what they want out of their future employees:

Jack Young Middle School Principal Robert Meicher spoke about the completed Sauk County Labor Skills Survey during Monday's School Board meeting. It was directed at finding out what employers think of local students who are coming to them for jobs, he said.

"Basically they asked the businesses, ... what are you getting, what do you need and what do we need to work on?" Meicher said.

According to the survey results local business and industry managers say important skills for their employees include: a strong work ethic, preparedness and punctuality, ability to follow detailed instructions and to work as a team member, Meicher said. Things that needed improvement in students and graduates are: customer service skills, punctuality, lack of a strong work ethic and responsibility to self, family and workplace...

Schools Superintendent Lance Alwin said administrators from other districts have noted testing was not high on the list of concerns for employers answering the survey. "Almost to a person they noted, there was nothing about academic standardized test scores," he said. "It was a wholesome notation that communities have a greater expectation of schools than just what their test results are."

I'm not surprised. For one thing, most standardized tests used in schools these days are for measurement of basic academic skills. Somehow, I have the feeling that employers assume these fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic will be taught in school, and what they indicated on the survey are the additional life skills that reflect focus and maturation.

To say that employers don't care about standardized test scores is disingenuous. If asked to choose between a literate but immature applicant and one who was nice but couldn't read well, I imagine employers would choose the former. They may not care about the exact test scores, but I'm sure they'd notice if schools stopped focusing on basic skills altogether.

The Tough Teacher of the Year

Mrs. Barbara Benglian of the humongous Upper Darby High School is Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year:

Mrs. Barbara Benglian was named 2006 Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year at a ceremony in Harrisburg on September 27, 2005. Dr. Gerald Zahorchak, Acting Secretary of Education, announced Mrs. Benglian's selection at the conclusion of a ceremony honoring all twelve finalists in the state competition...

Mrs. Barbara Benglian is a music teacher at Upper Darby High School in the Upper Darby School District, where she directs the Chorus, Concert Choir, and Encore Singers...Mrs. Benglian conducts her classes of over 100 students as if each were a formal rehearsal, and she treats her students as professionals, requiring them to notify her by phone if they will miss a class for any reason. Within this carefully maintained structure, musical talent blossoms and even insecure performers develop confidence to perform well on stage and in their everyday lives...

The power of Barbara Benglian’s teaching was the deciding factor in her principal Geoffrey Kramer’s decision to remain at Upper Darby High School. “She has done a phenomenal job. She has built a dynasty.” Her students learn not only music, but discipline and leadership. She describes her classroom structure simply: “Upperclass students mentor new students, and the culture of respectful learning and striving for excellence continues from year to year.”

Emphases all mine. Hmmm, I sense a theme here....

Demanding only the best (fast food)

The old square pizza and spaghetti with meatballs isn't cutting it anymore:

The day started around 4,000 meals ago for Elizabeth Brookins.

She and her staff of 32 have served about 1,200 breakfasts and 2,700 lunches at Felix Varela Senior High's cafeteria, one of the largest in Florida.

They served vegetarians and probably a few vegans, teens with severe allergies and strict diets, a generation raised on Happy Meals and name-brand water and grocery shelves lined with kiddie-themed snacks.

And they cooked up all that food under pressures that Brookins' predecessors never imagined.

Parents demand sound meals that conform to constantly evolving notions about health and nutrition. Students demand the variety and familiarity of home-cooking and fast-food restaurants. Budgets demand stretching every dollar and maximizing use of bulk food donated by the federal government.

Well, I don't know what could be done with the budgets, but it seems like this pressure could be reduced if the schools conveyed to parents and students that, when it comes to cafeteria food, perhaps they should lessen their expectations a tad. Children may be "accustomed" to retail variety and may not be getting a home-cooked meal every night, but I'm not sure why schools believe they should have to step in and fill all the gaps.

And the students who are demanding brand-name fast-food should learn that they'll pay the same amount for it whether it's at school or the mall. Sounds lke a good time for a lesson in economics to me. Peanut allergies are one thing; having taxpayers fund an addiction to KFC is another.

A fear of discipline

Abigail Thernstrom thinks author Jonathan Kozol's educational-reform ideas are pure fantasy:

Jonathan Kozol has a devoted following, and "The Shame of the Nation" will not disappoint his fans. It's vintage Kozol--a jeremiad. His core complaints are familiar: American public schools are segregated, and those that have few whites in them are financially starved. He adds only one new element: The standards, testing and accountability "juggernaut" has crushed the "humane and happy" education we once had.

Principals in segregated schools "create an architecture of adaptive strategies" that include "a relentless emphasis on raising test scores," "scripted lesson plans," "heightened discipline" and other policies that emulate the military--a "command and absolute control" image that Mr. Kozol uses repeatedly.

...[Mr. Kozol] proposes higher taxes, with the revenue "equitably distributed." But "equitable" actually means, by his formula, unequal funding--a great deal more money for urban youngsters than for those who are white and middle-class...Is he suggesting that, with more money to buy those clean places and green spaces, inner-city kids would catch up with their higher-performing peers? Mr. Kozol pays such scant attention to academic achievement that it's unclear. He is against longer school days, summer school for kids who need it, charter schools (and other forms of choice), merit pay and every promising avenue of school reform. He does, as an aside, acknowledge that kids should learn "essential skills," but his main concern is with schools that exude "warmth and playfulness and informality and cheerful camaraderie among the teachers and their children."

One wonders how someone could look at our current inner-city school systems and decide that, of all things, one of the most important issues to address is the "formality" of teachers these days.

I have the feeling that parents who don't let their kids watch TV don't have this problem

Looks like the FCAT is getting ready to become the "F-word"-CAT:

Students say they hear a lot of profanity on television, and a high school easing its penalties for swearing now says television is where they should look for model language. Boca Raton Community High School students used to be suspended from school for cursing. But school administrators found that last year, some of their best students were getting suspended, sullying otherwise clean records.

This year, Principal Geoff McKee said students caught swearing would get a less severe penalty...Students have been told to model their choice of words on television newscasts. The newscasters improvise without using profanity, McKee said.

"It's the only place where they work to have language that's acceptable to all," McKee said.

Simply amazing that McKee doesn't suggest students model their language habits on their home life. This makes one of several assumptions, all of them ugly: (1) that parents cuss so much nowadays that children are forced to turn to TV to learn proper English, (2) that children don't listen to their parents at all, but will listen to TV, or (3) that children are home so little but glued to the TV so much that newscasters are their best role models.

Even at the top, the gap persists

A thought-provoking article from the NYTimes about the pervasiveness of the achievement gap:

An uneasy amalgam of pride and discontent, Caroline Mitchell sat amid the balloons and beach chairs on the front lawn of Princeton High School, watching the Class of 2004 graduate. Her pride was for the seniors' average SAT score of 1237, third-highest in the state, and their admission to elite universities like Harvard, Yale and Duke. As president of the high school alumni association and community liaison for the school district, Ms. Mitchell deserved to bask in the tradition of public-education excellence.

Discontent, though, was what she felt about Blake, her own son. He was receiving his diploma on this June afternoon only after years of struggle - the failed English class in ninth grade, the science teacher who said he was capable only of C's, the assignment to a remedial "basic skills" class. Even at that, Ms. Mitchell realized, Blake had fared better than several friends who were nowhere to be seen in the procession of gowns and mortarboards. They were headed instead for summer school.

"I said to myself: 'Oh, no. Please, no,' " Ms. Mitchell recalled. "I was so hurt. These were bright kids. This shouldn't have been happening."

It did not escape Ms. Mitchell's perception that her son and most of those faltering classmates were black. They were the evidence of a prosperous, accomplished school district's dirty little secret, a racial achievement gap that has been observed, acknowledged and left uncorrected for decades. Now that pattern just may have to change under the pressure of the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Oddly, the NYT asks whether the problem of the achievement gap is due to NCLB, and it's hard to understand why one would think that, unless one subscribes to the notion that this gap wasn't a problem until we started holding schools accountable for it. The parents, on the other hand, seem to know exactly where the problem lies:

As far back as the 1960's, according to the local historical society, black students suffered from "low expectations from teachers" and a high dropout rate. In the early 1990's, an interracial body calling itself the Robeson Group - in homage to Paul Robeson, the most famous product of black Princeton - mobilized to recruit more black teachers and help elect the first black member to the school board.

Despite such efforts, the achievement gap remained. A tracking system for math separates students in middle school. The high school, while not formally tracked, has such a demand for seats in Advanced Placement classes and honors sections that a rigid hierarchy exists in effect. Guidance counselors find their time consumed by writing recommendation letters for seniors who routinely apply to 10 or more high-end schools.

And until the No Child Left Behind law was enacted there were no concrete consequences for failing to address the resulting disparity. Which may be why a number of black parents here credit the federal law with forcing attention on the underside of public education in Princeton. It requires all districts to reveal test results and meet performance standards by various subgroups, including race.

An ill wind might blow some good

Having to start all over might not be a bad thing:

Both in Louisiana and beyond, the wreckage in the Big Easy has sparked thinking about how the city might reinvent its beleaguered school system, in difficult straits long before the storm was but a gentle sea breeze.

“We need some bold, out-of-the-box thinking right now,” said Stephanie Desselle, the senior vice president of the Council for a Better Louisiana, a Baton Rouge-based advocacy group. “We absolutely ought to not return . . . to the school system that they had before.”

Clearly, New Orleans has many urgent needs, with so much of the city still drying out from flooding brought on by the hurricane. But as those priorities were being attended to last week, education thinkers were contemplating a different future for a district that the state already considered in both academic and financial crisis.

Emphasis mine. It shouldn't take a hurricane to prompt these kinds of comments, not when it had this kind of reputation before the storm:

Like many urban school districts, the New Orleans public-school system faces countless social problems. Families are poor. Violence is prevalent. Many parents are uneducated and underemployed.

New Orleans schools have been plagued by scandals and leadership crises that have made a difficult situation even more unmanageable. Led by a squabbling school board that state officials openly deride as incompetent, the system was forced to hire a private management company this summer after it was discovered that the administration was more than $25 million in the red.

There have been four acting or appointed superintendents in the past four years, and a majority of the district's students fail state-mandated English and math tests.

The problem with the middle road

The Education Gadfly has a glowing review of Cheri Yecke's new Fordham Foundation report, Mayhem in the Middle. It's online in .pdf format. The middle of what, you ask?

American middle schools have become the places "where academic achievement goes to die." So says Cheri Yecke, K-12 Education Chancellor of Florida and author of the new Fordham report Mayhem in the Middle: How middle schools have failed America, and how to make them work. Today's middle schools have succumbed to a concept of "middle schoolism" in which a strong academic curriculum is traded for one that focuses more on emotional and social development, and less on learning the basics. And the achievement data reflects "middle schoolism's" results...

According to Fordham President Chester E. Finn, Jr., "Trying to fix high schools while ignoring middle schools is like bandaging a wound before treating it for infection."

Checker has more to say:

That the middle grades can be a time of strong academic growth and marked achievement in core skills and knowledge is demonstrated by numerous effective school examples. Though youngsters between the ages of 10 and 15 can be ornery and exasperating, they can also learn lots of math and history, plenty of literature and science, and an abundance of art and music... Yecke focuses instead on the education philosophy, assumptions, goals, and expectations that drive a school spanning the middle grades and those who lead and teach in it. If they worship at the altar of middle schoolism, their theology tells them not to dwell overmuch on academics; other things matter more. If these leaders and teachers subscribe to standards and results-based accountability, however, they will pay greater heed to their students' long-term prospects than to their short-run adjustments, and to the academic gains that play so large a role in these youngsters' futures. Yecke's goal is to show why middle schoolism should be consigned to history's dustbin—another education fad that, however well intended, now needs to be retired.

Yecke, and Checker, aren't the only ones to quibble with the "middle-school theology." At least one researcher believes gifted children are routinely shortchanged by middle school policies.

Cashing in on an educational research project

Connecticut is covering all the bases by trying out a new and improved tutoring method that includes lots of extra instruction, AND cash:

This week, two dozen middle school students will begin an intensive education program run by the Norwalk Housing Authority, with extra instruction in math and language arts and parent involvement. Aside from the improved grades and standardized test scores that are expected for the sixth- and seventh-graders involved in the Housing Authority's Work Study Academy, the students, who live in public housing, will also receive $1,000 stipends for participating.

Organizers say the money is a way to reward the students for the extra work and teach them early about managing their finances by holding an extra seminar about saving their earnings.

Well, given that they live in public housing, I suppose it's not too much of a stretch to assume that their parents aren't necessarily experts in managing finances. The program wasn't for everyone; student and parents faced an extensive entry process. Thus, the results won't generalize to the entire student-in-public-housing population - but it WILL be interesting to see if it works.

Katrina's educational impact

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings reports on the schoolchildren displaced by Katrina:

In an interview with The Associated Press, Spellings gave the broadest assessment yet of how the hurricane has affected schools at the start of their year. In Louisiana, more than 247,000 public and private school students have been displaced. The storm forced 489 schools to close. At least six parishes have destroyed or damaged buildings, she said. In Mississippi, more than 125,000 students have been forced elsewhere. Some 226 schools in 30 districts are closed. Almost 30 schools have been destroyed.

Spellings declined to estimate how much it will cost states to rebuild school districts or serve displaced students - or how much the federal government will cover. "I shouldn't be talking about the details that I'm in negotiations with the White House and the (Capitol) Hill on,'' Spellings said. "As soon as I can talk about it, I want to talk about it.'' President Bush has told Spellings to develop a plan to provide aid for the states.

Not surprisingly, NCLB requirements are on the minds of those concerned about displaced students:

Last week, as the Houston Independent School District enrolled thousands of young storm survivors, arranged transportation for them and reopened two schools, Spellings met with the National Education Association and other groups to discuss Katrina's aftermath. No conclusions from that meeting were announced. In an interview with National Public Radio, however, Spellings said she was disinclined to waive accountability rules for the Louisianans. "We don't want to write off this school year academically for these kids, and shouldn't, at least not yet," Spellings said.

Her instinct is correct. The school year is just starting. New Orleans children in the care of other states deserve all the attention and encouragement to meet high standards their teachers can lavish. This includes the test preparation that is, for better or worse, the core of today's curricula. But prepping for the TAKS is grueling. It is unfair to make already stressed newcomers worry that bad test scores could harm teachers and schools.

I'm sure the developers of NCLB never imagined that hundreds of thousands of students would suddenly shift from one state to the next - and would do so without housing, funding, or supplies. The NYTimes, however, carries an editorial today urging schools not to give up on NCLB, and lambasting the NEA for requesting a waiver from NCLB for all schools accepting displaced students. Mickey Kaus calls it the "Katrina Ate My Homework" excuse:

In other words, no more accountability for lousy schools in three entire states and in any other district in the entire nation that accepts displaced students. Take some Katrina Kids, get out from under the NCLB! Ineffective teachers in mediocre schools who fear losing their jobs can't say their union is not going to bat for them in Washington.

In related news, the Texas Education Agency has a hotline and a special webpage with guides for educators. Texas is also fast-tracking a temporary certification of teachers in order to cope with the sudden influx of students.

The Million Student Back to School March

NYC goes over the million mark:

Some 74 new schools are making their debut, swelling the ranks of public schools to a record 1,408 to house more than 1.1 million students. A third of the new schools are small, themed public high schools carved out of Costco-sized failing ones. The Education Department is pairing the boutique schools with community groups and capping enrollment at 500 each.

"Let a thousand flowers bloom and we'll see what flourishes," said Clara Hemphill, who publishes school reviews for Insideschools.org.

The mayor has come under fire for setting up untested small schools at a lightning pace, but educrats insist they can't let teens wallow in big schools that have been dying for decades.

Amen to that. With that many students to experiment on, NYC's bound to find something that works well.

Fiction makes the man

William Lasseter gets my vote as coolest teacher of the year:

My son had many fine teachers at his high school, Providence Academy in Plymouth. Had any one in particular made an impact? My son answered promptly: William Lasseter, his literature teacher. What made him unique? The answer startled us.

"He taught us about manhood. All the guys would tell you so."

Over coffee last week, Lasseter agreed that guiding boys to become young men of character is a vital mission. "Our society has spent so much time trying to make boys kinder and gentler. In the process, we've lost the technique of channeling their natural energy. Young men have a drive to create, protect and control. But if it isn't properly directed -- if it isn't focused on the good -- it can become a tendency to violate and destroy. We just saw that in the extreme in New Orleans, where some men were rampaging and raping instead of building and protecting."

Lasseter wants to call young men to be fighters for the good. He's got a powerful arsenal in this struggle: great books. "Literature is a teaching tool for getting young people to understand themselves and their place in the world," he says...Lasseter chooses classics with "guy appeal," tales that feature both the clash of warriors and the clash of great ideas...

...a real man respects others' dignity. He treats young women with regard, and speaks courteously to adults. Lasseter tells students that they can develop self-mastery by attending to the way they speak and dress.

Attitudes like this are what underlie the drive to have single-sex classrooms. According to this article, at least 160 public schools in the US are experimenting with boys-only or girls-only classrooms. I notice, though, that at least one admin in the article is quoting as reassuring parents that the single-sex classroom structure still allows them to "foster diversity." This is a really mushy, PC-way way of expressing what Lasseter says much better - that any effective single-sex schooling must teach boys and girls how to respectfully deal with the opposite sex.

(Via Powerline.)

How do you say "A silly idea" in...?

Is there an educrat-jargon-to-Spanish dictionary available?

Some administrators in Dallas will be required to learn Spanish, under a policy approved by the school board. The new policy, approved on a 5-4 vote last month, requires that all elementary school principals who work in schools in which at least half the students are English-language learners, or formerly carried that designation, must learn the native language of those students.

In Dallas, where 65 percent of the school system’s 160,000 students are Hispanic, that basically means some principals must learn Spanish. Those administrators have one year from now to enroll in Spanish courses and three years to become “proficient,” which isn’t defined in the policy adopted Aug. 25. The district will pay for the courses...

Harley Eckhart, the associate executive director of the Texas Elementary Principals and Supervisors Association, said he considers the policy “another dang mandate” that is going to have a polarizing effect on minority communities. Other districts with large populations of Hispanic residents, he said, might implement similar requirements “without thinking it through.” He added that cities with large concentrations of Vietnamese, or other residents of Asian descent, could argue that principals receive training in those groups’ languages.

You betcha they could, and that would be much more difficult than leanring Spanish. Given the resistance we've seen from schools that resent having to show that students are proficient in English, how are we going to make sure that principals are proficient in these second languages? More testing? Yeah, that'll go over like a pregnant pole vaulter.

Wouldn't it make more sense to find a little more money on the payroll to get community interpreters, or even make the school-parent liason a prestigious volunteer position? Then you could have as many as you needed for as many languages as you had. That, to me, seems much more effective than requiring an administrator, whose skills run more to management than languages, to learn something as tough as Vietnamese. Going forward, on the other hand, something like this could be incorporated in the graduate school curriculum - if you want to be an elementary-school principal in Texas, then you pick up a smattering of Spanish and other languages while you're working on your Ed.D.

Those who can't...

A NYC teacher/blogger gives a vivid description of what happens when schools of education get their hands on some actual education:

What are some of [the] reforms that are driving inspired, and individualistic teachers, in record numbers, out of New York City and into the embrace of suburban districts? Among the most idiotic of all is the disgraced but still mandated "workshop model." It is the new predator in town. If you are the parent of a child in public school, make sure you secure your child and guard against its ravages:

According to this model, which is as much a cult of method as it is an aberration of curriculum, teachers are forbidden from spending more than ten minutes on direct instruction during a forty-five minute subject class. Master, veteran teachers have been severely disciplined for straying from this lockstep mandate.

Classic literature is banned from most classrooms. Textbooks have been banned in many districts. Dictionaries have been put out as garbage because they are dictionaries, not because they are old or damaged.

Use of red pen to grade papers has been prohibited. That color is considered to be suggestive of bloodshed, humiliation, and trauma.

Some principals have ordered teachers to restrict all observations of any child's work and behavior to praise...

Students with the weakest skills are denied the personal attention they need because teachers are browbeaten into compulsory small group activities which encourage and lock the less proficient students into dependency on the more adept ones...

The workshop model is the freak of Columbia Teachers College. Except for the folks who are making money on the model, practically no educational researchers, historians, or teachers in the field think it is anything but a wicked waste of time.

(Via Joanne.)

Katrina Edublogging roundup

The bloggers, educational journalists, and other pundits are weighing in on the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the educational system of those cities hit by the storm, and beyond.

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who thought some good might come of the disaster, if a complete New Orleans school system overhaul does in fact happen. Given that the school system was described as being in turmoil two weeks before Katrina struck, I'd say a complete overhaul is more necessary now than ever.

EdWeek has a nice collection of links to education stories related to Katrina and the aftermath.

This week's Carnival of Education has a lovely classroom dialogue with links related to Katrina discussions.

Michele Catalano's Kids of Katrina school supplies donation fund is gathering steam. So far 6100 refugee students have enrolled in Texas schools; Mississippi isn't sure yet how many new students they'll have. Please take a moment to donate to Kids of Katrina.

Carnival

The latest Carnival of Education is up. Don't miss Polski3's link to What Top Teachers Want for Students.

Also via the EdWonks, there's a lively discussion going on about the recent Georgia initiative to get all schoolchildren to read 25 books a year. It's amazing just how many commenters believe that number is ridiculously high.

He's blinding them with science

Researcher and political scientist Jon Miller has concluded that the majority of Americans "don't have a clue" when it comes to science:

Over the last three decades, Dr. Miller has regularly surveyed his fellow citizens for clients as diverse as the National Science Foundation, European government agencies and the Lance Armstrong Foundation. People who track Americans' attitudes toward science routinely cite his deep knowledge and long track record... Dr. Miller's data reveal some yawning gaps in basic knowledge. American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than that they are really small). Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity. Only about 10 percent know what radiation is. One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century.

At one time, this kind of ignorance may not have meant much for the nation's public life. Dr. Miller, who has delved into 18th-century records of New England town meetings, said that back then, it was enough "if you knew where the bridge should be built, if you knew where the fence should be built"...No more. "Acid rain, nuclear power, infectious diseases - the world is a little different," he said.

One thing that hasn't changed is the attitude of some of the know-nothings; when Miller speaks on the radio about his findings, he always receives postcards from fundamentalists who say they are praying for him.

[Miller] had firsthand experience with local school issues in the 1980's, when he was a young father living in DeKalb, Ill., and teaching at Northern Illinois University. The local school board was considering closing his children's school, and he attended some board meetings to get an idea of members' reasoning. It turned out they were spending far more time on issues like the cost of football tickets than they were on the budget and other classroom matters. "It was shocking," he said.

It continues today. Note this article from the LA Times about how a proposed NCLB extension to high school students is destined to fail:

"High school reform is really hard," said Susan Traiman, director of education for the Business Roundtable, an organization of corporate leaders who recently issued a call to improve the nation's high schools. "The experience in the reform movement is that it takes hold most easily in elementary school."

The reasons are myriad. For one thing, said Tom Loveless, an education specialist at the Brookings Institution, bolstering academic standards would clash with the social, athletic and other elements of high school that are important to many students and their parents. It's "a cultural thing," he said.

"Kids in high school want to spend time on sports, and there's a huge percentage who work part time," Loveless said. Given that most parents seem to want their children's high school years to be filled with proms and football games and socializing, he added, "I don't see any groundswell of support" for extending No Child Left Behind to high schools.

Emphases mine. If we've redefined high school as the time when it's more important to attend football games and proms than gain hard knowledge, no wonder only a quarter of Americans grasp the basics of science.

School bells

Schools are starting! Right on the Left Coast is tired:

I have two Algebra I classes, mostly freshmen...I'm lucky to teach at a school with a pretty good student population. But dang, sometimes it seems like no one ever taught many of these students about "inside voices".

I got a call during 6th period today. My son, on his first day at his new school, fell on the bars (or something boyish like that) and bloodied his nose, bit a small hole in his tongue, and loosened a tooth. Our secretary put his school's secretary though to talk to me and she asked what they should do with him. "Is he bleeding right now?" "No." "Then send him back to class." I'm such a father!

While the Education Wonks, as always, have a point to make:

Since the 1960s, our school has offered every 7th grader a semester course in the fine arts. After our full-time (and first-year) art teacher resigned her post in favor of a better-paying job over on the coast, an administrative decision was made to "close out" the position in favor of hiring of another remedial math teacher.

As we work in a school that serves a mostly lower socio-economic clientele, I'm saddened to see this happen. For many of our pupils, the school's art program was their first (and sometimes only) exposure to the fine arts...

Both the drama and music teachers will now have mixed teaching assignments: three classes of remedial English each day with only two periods of drama and music. Rumor has it that next year both the drama and music programs will be ended.

Interestingly, no administrators have ever been laid-off in the 14 years that I have been employed by our district.

Ouch.

Review is on the way

Finally got my (free!) copy of Jay P. Greene's newest, Education Myths: What Special-Interest Groups Want You to Believe About our Schools– And Why It Isn't So. Expect a review shortly.

Replacing the bad apples

In Washington, DC, it's out with the old, in with the new:

Forty-four D.C. public schools -- about a third of the schools in the system -- will have a new principal when classes start next week, Superintendent Clifford B. Janey announced yesterday.

School officials said the turnover is unprecedented and reflects a high number of retirements and an effort to weed out principals who were not performing adequately. Janey had said in April that 25 percent to 40 percent of the system's principals were not up to par...

In the recruitment of principals, Meria J. Carstarphen, the system's chief accountability officer, said she and her staff were deliberate in finding the school best suited for each candidate. She said they also sought to assemble a team that could help principals at 81 schools identified as "in need of improvement" for failing to make academic benchmarks two or three consecutive years under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Of course the union that represents D.C. principals has filed grievances on behalf of a few of those who are now looking for work. That's to be expected, but I have higher hopes for DC now.

College follies

Joanne notes that in the UK, the A-levels have become inflated and thus aren't as useful in college admissions, whereas in the US, a high school diploma is becoming less useful in gauging who's ready for college:

Only about half of this year's high school graduates have the reading skills they need to succeed in college, and even fewer are prepared for college-level science and math courses, according to a yearly report from ACT, which produces one of the nation's leading college admissions tests.

The report, based on scores of the 2005 high school graduates who took the exam, some 1.2 million students in all, also found that fewer than one in four met the college-readiness benchmarks in all four subjects tested: reading comprehension, English, math and science.

"It is very likely that hundreds of thousands of students will have a disconnect between their plans for college and the cold reality of their readiness for college," Richard L. Ferguson, chief executive of ACT, said in an online news conference yesterday.

Indeed. And don't miss the NYSun's review of the undercover professor and her experience as a freshman at "AnyU":

Although AnyU isn't a recognized top-tier school, the author seems to be genuinely surprised at the lack of intellectual interest and ambition displayed by the students. In a passage in the book about overheard dormitory conversations, she writes: "Although my time sample is very limited, I never once overheard what I would term a political or philosophical discussion."

The most popular class by far was a course on sexuality, taught by a "rock star" professor who laced his lectures with "taboo words." The author describes how students were assigned to interview each other in off-campus locations about their sex lives. (Those discussions provoked one of the three instances in which the author voluntarily disclosed her identity to her classmates.)

For the students, the biggest draw to the ivory towers, she found, was "college culture," which encompasses fun, friendships, partying, life experiences, and late-night talks. It's not exactly the message a university administration wants to send out...

...[But] despite "the rhetoric of student culture," she writes, students are not only studying less, they are also spending less time socializing than students a generation ago. The reason why, she offers, is that they're too busy holding wage-paying jobs...

Lions and tigers and test scores, oh my!

Do you think your child would go crazy if you helped him get ready for school and standardized tests by reading books about school and standardized tests?

That first day is especially exciting for a child entering school for the first time. Here are some suggestions to help you have a good school year with all of your friends as well as some of mine...

FOURTH-GRADE FUSS, by Johanna Hurwitz, illustrated by Andy Hammond, HarperCollins, $15.99; ages 8-12.

The students in Mrs. Schraalenburgh's fourth-grade class know that this year they take the statewide standardized test in April. In October, the other fourth-grade classes are already practicing. Mrs. Schraalenburgh reassures the class not to worry, they will be ready. She doesn't want to spend all the class time getting ready because there are too many other things one needs to learn in fourth grade. Julio and his classmates who appeared in Class Clown are back again. This book will make a good read-aloud not only for fourth grade but also for third-graders who participate in the Illinois Standards Achievement Test. Hurwitz points out that we all take tests throughout life'including driving tests and medical tests. Maybe this will help put students at ease about test taking.

I'm trying to decide if this would be helpful, or just too much like real life to be enjoyable.

The latest carnival has arrived

Ticklish Ears (great blog name!) has the latest update of the Carnival of Education. I'm having a hard time picking out my favorite post for this carnival. It's a toss-up among:

1. The Kentucky school that is - *whew!* - NOT banning mullets,
2. The parent whose behavior should have led to combat pay for teachers, and
3. The math problem that teaches kids that men are tactless.

Mouthing off in school

Students have always picked up some colorful language at school. What seems to have changed is that teachers no longer always correct them for it:

Parents send their children to school expecting them to come home with newfound knowledge of math, science and grammar, but sometimes they're taken aback when their children come home using profanity as well.

It's a common problem, as students are growing up in a cursing culture, says Jim O'Connor, a public relations professional who founded the Cuss Control Academy in Lake Forest, Ill., to help people curb the habit. Children pick up expletives from any number of sources, including television, movies and music. But new social settings, including school, also can be a culprit, he says.

O'Connor says he has talked to many teachers and some say they have given up trying to clean up language used in their classrooms, while others demand, "not in my classroom."

It's very hard for me to imagine a classroom in which teachers allow cursing to go unpunished. If you can't stop that, how could you manage to stop even worse behavior?

The Equation from the Black Lagoon

One wonders why Hollywood screenwriters try so hard to come up with more and bigger and scarier monsters each year, when the scariest creature of all is right under our noses.

In an AP-AOL News poll as students head back to school, almost four in 10 adults surveyed said they hated math in school, a widespread disdain that complicates efforts today to catch up with Asian and European students. Twice as many people said they hated math as said that about any other subject.

Some people like Stewart Fletcher, a homemaker from Suwannee, Ga., are fairly good at math but never learned to like it. "It was cold and calculating," she said. "There was no gray, it was black and white."

Ooh, evil. Black, cold, calculating...Like Dracula, only you have to work long division by hand while he sucks your blood.

The key to making children interested in math is to capture their imaginations at a young age, said Dianne Peterson, a fifth grade math teacher from Merritt Island, Fla. While she must spend part of her class time with basic tasks like multiplication tables and fractions, she tries to make it fun.

"I do a lot with music with them," Peterson said. "I've got some CDs that go over the facts. Some of it is rap and some of it is jazzy songs."

Does she have them learn songs that diss their previous teachers? Because if she has to teach them their multiplication tables in the fifth grade, somebody wasn't doing their job.

The poll results are here, should you choose to peruse them. Me, I can't understand why more people didn't select Phys Ed as the most-hated course. They must have had way more flattering uniforms than my high school offered.

No more lectures, no more books...

Is it just me, or does this seem worrisome?

VIDALIA, La. - Concordia Parish teachers spent Tuesday learning how they are going to teach this year. Pre-written lesson plans, firm dates for units and mostly hands-on learning are the major changes a new comprehensive curriculum will bring to the district.

In keeping with the state's decision to require a standardized curriculum statewide, a committee of local teachers and administrators worked over the summer to write the model curriculum...The district's comprehensive curriculum must align with the state's model curriculum.

Ferriday Junior High teacher Angel White worked on a committee from June 13 to July 29 to rewrite the social studies curriculum. "There's more cooperative learning," she said. "Less teacher direction. The students are responsible for doing their work. There's not a lot of lecturing"...

"It's going to be fabulous," Vidalia Lower teacher Lori Beth Edwards said. "We know exactly what we have to do and when we have to do it. I like it because it's not textbooks. The kids hated (textbook learning) and I hated that."

Click here and then follow the links to check out the standardized curriculum. For the heck of it, I clicked on 5th-grade math. Hmmm. Seven weeks spent on whole number review? Sample activities like the following?

Discuss with students what determines whether an exact answer or an estimate is appropriate for a given situation. Use the following as examples that require either an estimated or exact answer: · An estimate is all that is needed when a friend asks you for the temperature or you want to know about how long a bus trip takes. · An exact number is needed when you want to determine the number of meteorologists that work for a TV station, or you want to find out how many scheduled stops a bus will make.

Have each student go on the Internet or look in a newspaper for numbers in news stories. Ask students to find three numbers that are exact and three numbers that are estimates and copy the full sentences about the numbers. Have them work together in groups to write a problem that can be answered with an estimate and a problem that requires an exact answer. Ask a volunteer from each group to write the group’s two problems on the chalkboard and have the rest of the class solve the problems and discuss the results.

I've never taught math at this level, so I'll ask you - does this seem useful, or like a waste of time? And what, exactly, is the groupwork element supposed to add to this?

Open to all, sort of

Parents in tony Santa Clara are feverishly competing for spots in the city's well-regarded local schools, in the hopes of starting their children off on the right path.

And I do mean start, because we're talking about kindergarten.

When school starts in a few weeks, a chosen few will triumphantly enter Silicon Valley's top-ranked schools.

And then they'll start kindergarten.

Some of California's highest-achieving public schools have a policy of "open enrollment,'' which ostensibly welcomes students from all across each district. But as unwary parents in Santa Clara and Cupertino are finding out, it can be extremely difficult to get their children in. That's because a huge share of kindergarten spots at the most coveted schools go to siblings of students already enrolled. The rest have to take their chances in a lottery.

In some cases, those chances aren't so good. At Santa Clara Unified's Millikin Elementary, one of two schools in the state with perfect standardized test scores, only 4 percent of the spots for this fall went to kids in the lottery.

Why does Millikin Elementary sound familiar? Oh yeah, that's because . That's the I've posted on it before. That's the high-ranking elementary school that values discipline, order, and mission statements that actually mean something useful.

(Are well-to-do parents in affluent, high-tech areas fervently competing to get their kids into schools that value "free expression," ban "rote memorization," and consider testing abusive to children? Just asking.)

Anyway, the school defend the sibling policy on the grounds that it would inconvenient for parents to have kids in different schools. Which makes sense, but it does leave some parents - especially those with only one kid - wondering why Millikin claims to have much of an open enrollment.

Dressing the part - of what?

The most excellent Carnival of Education is up. One post, by a concerned mama, hit home because I, too, have noticed just how sleazy very young girls are encouraged to dress.

Now, things are different, espeically for the little girls. Have you looked closely at the little girls' department lately? It looks like a training school for prostitutes Britney Spears wannabees.

Lingerie, size 6x, with a 'back to school' sign on it.

When did 'toy' lipstick become bright red and start lasting all day? Why would a six-year-old child need to carry a purse to school? Why is there makeup in it? Why does she know how to use it? There are clothes in the little girls' department that nobody would buy except Brooke Shields' mother in "Pretty Baby." Except. . . somebody's mother IS buying them, and probably thinking "doesn't she look pretty" in them...Tiny little girls, wearing makeup and boobless versions of adult slinkwear. What kind of mother dresses her child like a bimbo?

The comments suggest that Mama's experience is not unique.

Doing homework at the minimum wage

The award for Best Blog Post Headline of the Week goes to the Eduwonks:

Do You Want Pi's With That?

A tasty Associated Press story was picked up by a bunch of major newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronice, and Boston Globe.

"Students working at some McDonald's restaurants around the country are getting paid whether they are flipping burgers or flipping through textbooks. At Kathy and Jerry Olinik's two restaurants about 55 miles west of Detroit, high school and college students will be allowed to stay on the clock for an extra hour before or after their shifts this fall, as long as they spend the time doing schoolwork."

McDonald's isn't the only company instituting these programs. It's possible the program could be a useful recruitment tool as well. For the parents in the audience - would you rather your kid worked fewer hours, or worked more hours while getting paid for time spent on the job doing homework?

Driving kids away from books

One English teacher gives his theory of how schools are destroying their students' love of reading:

Faced with declining literacy and the ever-growing distractions of the electronic media, faced with the fact that - Harry Potter fans aside - so few kids curl up with a book and read for pleasure anymore, what do we teachers do? We saddle students with textbooks that would turn off even the most passionate reader.

Just before the school year ended in June, my colleagues in the English department at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., and central office administrators discussed which textbook to adopt for the 9th- and 10th-grade World Literature course for next year.

Of the four texts that the state approved, the choices came down to two: the Elements of Literature: World Literature from Holt, Rinehart and Winston and The Language of Literature: World Literature from McDougal Littell.

The problems with these two tomes are similar to the problems with high school textbooks in most subjects..for all their bulk, the textbooks are feather-weight intellectually...

Take the McDougal Littell text that we finally adopted for 9th- and 10th-graders. It starts off with a unit titled "Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Hebrew Literature," followed by sections on the literature of Ancient India, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Ancient China and Japan. Then comes "Persian and Arabic Literature" and "West African Oral Literature" - and that's only the first third of the book. There are still more than 800 pages to plough through, but it's the same drill - short excerpts from long works - a little Dante here, a little Goethe there and two whole pages dedicated to Shakespeare's plays. One even has a picture of a poster from the film Shakespeare in Love with Joseph Fiennes kissing Gwyneth Paltrow...

Both books are full of obtrusive directions, comments, questions and pictures that would hinder even the attentive readers from becoming absorbed in the readings. Both also "are not reader-friendly. There is no narrative coherence that a student can follow and get excited about. It's a little bit of this and a little bit of that," says T.C. Williams reading specialist Chris Gutierrez, who teaches a course in reading strategies at Shenandoah University in Virginia. For kids who get books and reading opportunities only at school, these types of textbooks will drive them away from reading - perhaps for life.

The tests come in for some bashing, too, but it's good bashing; author Patrick Welsh notes that no school should have to buy 1500-page textbooks to teach kids to pass minimum-competency exams. Not when good books - not textbooks - are in abundance.

In education, there might be one best way for all

In the American Educator column of the AFT newsletter, a cognitive psychologists summarizes some surprising research on learning styles:

Question: What does cognitive science tell us about the existence of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners and the best way to teach them?

Answer: The idea that people may differ in their ability to learn new material depending on its modality—that is, whether the child hears it, sees it, or touches it—has been tested for over 100 years. And the idea that these differences might prove useful in the classroom has been around for at least 40 years.

What cognitive science has taught us is that children do differ in their abilities with different modalities, but teaching the child in his best modality doesn’t affect his educational achievement. What does matter is whether the child is taught in the content’s best modality. All students learn more when content drives the choice of modality. In this column, I will describe some of the research on matching modality strength to the modality of instruction. I will also address why the idea of tailoring instruction to a student’s best modality is so enduring—despite substantial evidence that it is wrong.

Emphasis mine. Thus, if a school believes in teaching students mathematics through songs and artwork, it would be nice if they backed this up with research indicating whether these are effective methods of conveying mathematical knowledge.

Because the vast majority of educational content is stored in terms of meaning and does not rely on visual, auditory, or kinesthetic memory, it is not surprising that researchers have found very little support for the idea that offering instruction in a child’s best modality will have a positive effect on his learning...Although it is technically true that the theory hasn’t been (and will never be) disproved, we can say that the possible effects of matching instructional modality to a student’s modality strength have been extensively studied and have yielded no positive evidence. If there was an effect of any consequence, it is extremely likely that we would know it by now.

Read it all.

Putting a halt to the Dance of the Lemons

Put the Kids First is a proposed initiative for California schools that would make it easier to fire bad teachers:

...the idea of reducing teachers' job protections is popular with many principals and parents concerned about the difficulty of removing poor-performing instructors...

Under state law, school districts can dismiss teachers during their first two years on the job without providing any reason. After two years in the classroom, teachers earn the more protective "permanent status." Before dismissing a permanent-status teacher, district officials must meticulously document poor performance over time, formally declare the intention to dismiss the teacher and then give the instructor 90 days to improve.

Schwarzenegger's measure — known as the Put the Kids First Act — would authorize school districts to dismiss teachers summarily during the first five years. The initiative also would simplify the process for dismissing teachers with permanent status, allowing district officials to fire a teacher after two consecutive unsatisfactory evaluations without declaring their intentions in advance or waiting 90 days.

The teachers' unions, unsurprisingly, oppose this, claiming it fosters a "phenomenon of anger" against teachers. Not as much as the horror stories of bad or inept teachers do. And the Education Wonks wonder when we're going to start getting rid of bad administrators as well.

A teacher tells it like it is

Blogger Ms. Smlph - who I adore at first sight due to her description of the Praxis as "frighteningly easy" - offers an insider's view of teacher certification coursework:

When it came time for me to start my second and last certification-required course, Reading in the Content Areas, there was only one "university" offering the class. This "university" is one that I have long suspected to be a REALLY CRAPPY school...

The instructor of this course...was a kindergarten teacher who had never taught the course before. She used the same assignments as the teacher before her, sometimes not even bothering to change the dates from the previous semester...We had weekly assignments, due on Fridays, that consisted of regurgitating information from the textbook. The on-line grade-book we could access showed that, week after week, the class average on these assignments was 100%. Clearly, if the instructor was reading our responses at all, she was not holding us to very high standards...

Going into the final, I still had 100% in the class. When I heard that, like the midterm, this exam would be open-book, I was confident that I could do fairly well. When the instructor told us it would consist of 25 multiple choice questions (this was the FINAL, people!), I became even more sure of myself. Then...I saw the test. Many of the questions contained obvious typos. Some of the questions had vaguely tricky answers, like this one:

Why should teachers allow students time to think?
a. Being given more time makes students think.
b. being given more time enables students to answer
questions better.
c. It is the polite thing to do.
d. It ensures quick answers.

I was a little torn between a and b. Eventually, I chose b because nothing, not wait-time, not a miracle can MAKE anyone do anything. Tricky questions like these aren't the type of trick questions that I can respect. Rather, they're the type that requires the test-taker to attempt to guess what the test-writer might have been thinking. Of course, I will never understand what my instructor was thinking with this next question:

What educational practices contribute to the students diversity in secondary classrooms?

a. More students entering school from poverty-level homes
b. Immigration
c. Cultural change
d. All of the above

Since when are immigration, cultural change, and poverty EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES????? I chose d because a, b, and c all contribute to diversity, but I hated myself for even having to answer it.

As any intelligent person who is interested in education, not ideology, should be. Also, let me take the opportunity to deem the two items she cites above as the The Worst Test Items In The History Of Testing.

As for this part of one of her rants, I just wish it fit on a bumper sticker:

I have always been of the opinion that, if someone is going to be my instructor, get up in front of me and lecture - or "teach" me over the Internet - that instructor SHOULD KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT WHAT SHE'S TEACHING!!! Does this woman have a single shred of a conscience? Did she not feel bad that she was collecting a paycheck for teaching us nothing?

I wish more teachers believed in the importance of knowing a great deal about the subject matter.

(via Joanne)

La Carnival

Jenny D's got the latest Carnival of Education up, and it's a beaut. Don't miss Tall, Dark, and Mysterious's post on what kids should learn in high school math. It's an eye-opener, not least because it's appalling to realize just how little math students are learning in high school these days.

What's more, if any touchy-feely educators see her post, she'll probably get rude letters explaining just why it's not appropriate to force students to actually memorize the times tables. All those "basic skills" and "rote memorization" are just deadly to the prized "higher-order thinking skills," don't you know.

Starting early

Higher standards for kindergarten classes has some parents working harder at home:

Like many children of the ’80s, Emily Martin remembers kindergarten mainly as a time of play and singalongs. Lessons on cooperation and sharing were the order of the day...

However, today’s kindergartners have less time for make-believe and learning to play well with others. And these tots won’t be caught napping...The increased academic demands present a challenge to parents of soon-to-be kindergartners. Martin already has seen the accelerated curriculum her two older children — Cal Jarrett, 10, and Destiny Dennis, 8 — encountered at Woodruff Elementary School’s full-day kindergarten program in Little Rock. And she wants her youngest child, Marcus Dennis, 5, an incoming kindergartner at Woodruff, to be ready — especially for the Iowa test.

"I have worked with Marcus on sitting down and discipline and self-control because it’s not just playing anymore," Martin said.

I don't think this is a bad thing. You read about teachers complaining that parents fail to teach the basics at home; you read about schools forced to expel children for discipline behaviors at younger and younger ages. I think it's a good thing if everyone realizes that kids should be ready to learn when they enter kindergarten.

...the first years of school can be critical, educators say. Recent studies on the brain have linked early exposure to language and music to future success in school. A 1990 study by Johns Hopkins University education researchers James McPartland and Robert Slavin found that a poor child who attends a school composed largely of other poor children has almost zero chance of graduating from high school if the child isn’t reading at grade level by the third grade and has been retained a grade.

"Kindergarten is really the foundation," said Kim Douglas, a teacher at Seventh Street Elementary School in North Little Rock and the district’s teacher of the year for the 2004-05 school year. "If they can do well in kindergarten, they can do well in the rest of their education." Douglas expects her students, most of whom live in low-income households, to be able to read when they graduate from kindergarten...

To help with this goal, the Arkansas Department of Education has created a handy-dandy checklist to help parents prepare their kids for kindergarten.

No more pencils, no more books...

School's out for summer - unfortunately for some kids:

For the first time in years, only kindergarten, fourth- and sixth-grade students who need additional help with reading and math can attend summer school. [New London, CT] students in other elementary and middle school grades who may have benefited from summertime classes, either by catching up on subjects they struggled with or enriching their education with additional classes, do not have any options for summer school through the public school system.

"That's a quiet tragedy in New London that we aren't able to afford a full summer school that would impact a wide range of students instead of a select few," Superintendent of Schools Dr. Christopher Clouet said.

The select few are those students who scored "below basic" on the Connecticut Mastery Test and kindergarteners identified by their teachers as needing help with early literacy skills.

One big problem is that some middle school students who might have been forced to attend summer school may have just been promoted to high school.

"A vision of resistance" against standardized tests

Education experts tell the teachers what they want to hear:

Educators can combat trends that threaten creative teaching, a Seattle preschool expert said Monday during an opening session of a regional education conference in Liberty. “We can stand really strong. We can plant our feet,” Ann Pelo told about 90 early education and primary school teachers attending the Connecting Learning Communities Conference at Pleasant Valley Baptist Church...

Pelo urged audience members to “create a vision of resistance” against the assessment and standardized-test movement that is strong in education today, especially in the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Is it just me, or do phrases like “create a vision of resistance” seem astonishingly vague and meaningless?

Assessment goals are not necessarily incompatible with imaginative teaching, she said.

Well, that much makes sense, at least.

She told audience members about the time she let her students let their imaginations run wild after they discovered a smelly, cluttered spot underneath a heating grate in the school. The students decided it smelled because a skunk was in there. Pelo asked them to think about how it could have gotten in there. The children also wrote notes to the skunk asking it questions.

This unplanned unit — which Pelo termed an “ordinary moment that held all these extraordinary possibilities” — allowed the students to use skills like writing and logic.

I know we're talking about elementary school kids here, but - writing notes to a skunk? Why not write notes to the principal asking him to get a maintenance man down there and figure out what's going on? And were these notes graded in any way? How 'bout a lesson on skunk biology? Heck, how 'bout a lesson in the local ecology, just to make sure skunks actually exist in their neck of the woods?

Attendees like Gay Gardner embraced Pelo’s message. “I like the idea of just following the children,” said Gardner, an infant and toddler teacher with Head Start in Kansas City. “It’s not about being wrong, it’s not about being right.”

Even for toddlers, I disagree.

A national look at state graduation rates

The US DOE plans to publish high school graduation rates for each state using a common metric:

The department will calculate each state’s graduation rate based on the number of high school graduates in a given year divided by the average of the number of students who entered the 8th grade five years earlier, the 9th grade four years earlier, and the 10th grade three years earlier. The so-called “averaged freshman graduation rate” will be published alongside the graduation rates that states report under the federal No Child Left Behind Act...

States have come under increasing criticism in recent years for publishing graduation rates that are misleading and not comparable across states. Some states, for example, calculate their graduation figures based on the percentage of seniors who earn their diplomas by the end of the school year—a measure that ignores students who drop out before reaching the 12th grade.

I'm sure there will be squabbling about the metric chosen by the Feds, especially in those states where the published rate goes down. At the very least, though, we'll be comparing apples to apples now.

The ultimate focus groups speaks out on high school

So much for the theory that today's teenagers are overworked:

A large majority of high school students say their class work is not very difficult, and almost two-thirds say they would work harder if courses were more demanding or interesting, according to an online nationwide survey of teenagers conducted by the National Governors Association.

The survey, being released on Saturday by the association, also found that fewer than two-thirds believe that their school had done a good job challenging them academically or preparing them for college. About the same number of students said their senior year would be more meaningful if they could take courses related to the jobs they wanted or if some of their courses could be counted toward college credit.

Taken together, the electronic responses of 10,378 teenagers painted a somber picture of how students rate the effectiveness of their schools in preparing them for the future.

Educators are quoted as being surprised, but I'm not. Sure, today's high-schoolers are fed up with all the testing, but they can tell when tests - and the curriculum - are dumbed down. They've heard all the horror stories about remedial coursework in college. They know how difficult it can be to find a good job. And they're worried.

NY targets the seventh-graders

The New York DOE is aiming to stop social promotion for seventh-graders:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Monday that, like third and fifth-graders, seventh-graders will now have to pass citywide standardized reading and math tests to move on to the next grade.

Students who fail either or both of the exams can go to summer school and retake them. If they still don't pass, there's also an appeals process that may allow them to move on to the next grade.

“We’re not going to put any of our students on that trajectory to failure any longer,” said Bloomberg. “Improving students’ performance in the seventh grade will strengthen their possibilities of getting into the high schools they want, and it will give them a foundation in the fundamentals of reading, writing and math that they will need for success in eighth grade, in high school, and most importantly, in life.”

Astonishingly, there's nary an unsupported "Critics say..." comment countering Bloomberg's plan in the entire article, but I'm sure that's just an oversight. Future articles are sure to contain such arguments, in which critics claim that it's far more damaging for a child to repeat seventh grade than to be promoted to high school while practically illiterate.

That much said, there's certainly an argument to be made that retention should not be made on the basis of a single exam. However, multiple retakes, summer school, and a appeals process are available.

Elementary school students are cracking the books

Younger kids are reading better:

Credit Harry Potter, higher standards or tough-as-nails elementary school teachers, but a new federal report says the typical 9-year-old in the USA now reads more each day than a 17-year-old. The difference shows: Statistics released Thursday show that 9-year-olds' reading skills have risen since 1971, and the biggest jump has come in the past five years.

Reading skills of high schoolers have actually dipped since 1999 and are essentially unchanged in a generation. The results come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a congressionally mandated standardized test. They show that 17-year-olds' skills actually declined in both math and reading, while the scores of younger students improved in both. Math scores for 13-year-olds rose sharply, but their reading scores didn't.

Part of the reason for the 9-year-olds' advances might be tucked into a survey released along with the scores. It shows that 25% of elementary schoolers now read more than 20 pages a day in school and for homework, nearly double the percentage of 1984.

Meanwhile, 17-year-olds' reading habits have barely budged. Only 23% of high schoolers read 20 pages or more a day, up from 21% in 1984.

Good Lord. It's hard to be happy for the 9-year-olds when you realize that older teens, despite the recent explosion of young adult literature, are barely cracking the books. The older kids could be putting down ridiculous numbers on the NAEP, which doesn't directly affect them, but the overall picture is still pretty sad.

I'd be interested in a longitudinal analysis of this kind of data. Will the current 9-year-olds continue to do well as they age? Or is there something still flawed in the system that will cause their performance to drop off as they reach the higher grades?

When uno plus dos equals tres

Math isn't always a universal language:

While math has long been regarded as a universal language because of its foundation in numbers, the subject poses nearly as many hurdles for students with limited English as lessons that rely more heavily on reading, many educators say.

That issue has gained renewed attention under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which requires schools and districts to test students annually in both reading and math in grades 3-8 and one in high school and make yearly progress in those subjects.

In addition, the law requires schools and districts to report separately the scores of English-language learners, a provision that many observers say has brought new scrutiny to the needs of that population.

One way to help would be to get rid of overly-wordy math items that depend as much on understanding of esoteric English terms as they do on understanding mathematical concepts. Do any of my more mathematically-focused readers out there have insights on math education for non-native English speakers?

Stepping out of the rat race

Although the Education Wonks aren't sure if they'd recommend this, I heartily agree with the idea of taking a year off:

Many college admissions officers support the idea. While cautioning that a "gap year" between high school and college isn't for everyone -- and that just goofing off isn't worthwhile -- they say many students who take one return more confident and self-aware...

Still, the popularity of gap years appears to be increasing only modestly if at all. Most of a dozen or so colleges contacted in the last week said the number of students who defer admission is relatively small, and flat year to year or even declining as an overall percentage...

But experts say that as the admissions process gets more stressful, the case for a gap year gets stronger. Colleges generally encourage the practice -- as long as students who have committed to one school don't use the extra year to apply elsewhere. Since the 1970s, Harvard has used the letter it sends to admitted applicants to advise them to consider a gap year. Some, like Sarah Lawrence, have sent similar letters after realizing more students than they expected planned to show up in the fall.

I think the gap year is a great idea, for several reasons:

1. Students arrive at college somewhat more mature, and often more removed from the petty high-school drama that can fuel freshmen-year bad behavior.
2. If students use the time to work from home, they get to experience the "full-time job" while still having a safety net.
3. Students who take the opportunity to travel will arrive at college much more worldly-wise, and with some great stories to boot.
4. Students who know they want to go to college will really be ready after a year's wait.
5. When else in life is it possible to take a year off and be relatively sure that you'll end up better than when you started off?

My year off (actually 18 months) was in between undergrad and grad school, but in that time I worked several jobs (some in my chosen field), lived away from home for six months, and got married. I had tolerant parents, who were fine with my working part-time and living at home while being a punky chick who kept night-owl hours (I used to go out at midnight, meet my stepfather for breakfast in the city, then go home and sleep). And I was lucky enough to find part-time work in data entry and statistics tutoring at USC that allowed me to gain experience, make decent money, and still live at home. I had ample time to study for the GREs and my applications looked better to boot.

There was no question that I was going to go to school when I did, and I felt much more prepared for it. Thus, I was amazed at how many of my fellow grad students were amazed that I took time off in between; just like in the CNN article, it was obviously the "thing to do" to rush right to grad school right after undergrad. They never considered doing otherwise. If your life's dream is to get your Ph.D. by the time you're 25, a year off won't work, but otherwise I heartily recommend it. I wish I'd done it before undergrad as well.

Clothes make the teacher

Newsday notes that some schools are now cracking down on revealing clothing - worn by teachers:

In some districts, teachers can get dressed down for wearing skimpy tops, short skirts, flip flops, jeans, T-shirts, spandex or baseball caps. Spaghetti is fine in the cafeteria, but shirts supported by spaghetti straps are not welcome in the classroom.

District 11 in Colorado Springs, Colo., for example, prohibits sexually provocative items. That includes clothing that exposes "cleavage, private parts, the midriff or undergarments," district rules say.

In Georgia's Miller County, skirts must reach the knee. Elsewhere in the state, hair curlers are disallowed in Harris County and male teachers in Talbot County must wear ties two or three times a week.

"There's an impression that teachers are dressing more and more -- well, the good term for it would be 'relaxed,'" said Bill Scharffe, director of bylaws and policy services for the Michigan Association of School Boards. "Another term for it would be 'sloppy.'"

If you were hoping for a slew of quotes in which teachers welcome this sort of regulation, so that others might understand the importance of their profession, think again. While several teachers are indeed quoted as saying they do like to "dress up" (that is, dress like other working professionals) because they feel the kids take them more seriously, we also have comments like the following:

Regulating dress is touchy, teachers say.

Teachers may view policies that get too specific as restrictive and demeaning. And what to do about broad policies that are enforced inconsistently? What works for a physics teacher may not fit a kindergarten teacher who sits with students on the floor...

Why is being told not to bare your midriff demeaning? And what in that dress code prevents a teacher from wearing something that makes it comfortable to sit on the floor?

"What's too short? What's too long? What's too provocative? What's too revealing?" said Jacqueline Oglesby, a representative for the Alabama Education Association, which worries about unfair enforcement of a dress code. "Everyone has their own definition. And besides, this is supposed to be about the education of children, not tattoos or holes in your tongue."

What a stunning lack of judgment on the part of Oglesby, who has apparently taken the "everything is equally good" mantra from education schools and tried to apply it to the professional academic world. I assume she believes these sorts of statement dignify her profession; on the contrary, it suggests that she honestly doesn't see any difference between the professional demeanor of a woman covered in tattoos, baring cleavage and belly, and one wearing comfortable, modest attire.

Getting tough

Talk about getting back to basics:

The elementary school with the top student test scores in the state, located in Tarpon Springs, uses a strict approach. Parents must be involved. Students must behave. If parents and students don't play by the rules at Tarpon Springs Fundamental School, children can be transferred out. The school led the state this year in test scores...Its performance - 100 percent of its kids made the highest scores in writing - makes many schools drool with jealousy.

Now, Hillsborough County public school educators plan to duplicate some elements of the school's unique approach this fall at three elementary schools being converted to fundamental academies. The elementary schools - Just, Potter and Booker T. Washington - are all in poor neighborhoods...

But based on early plans, parents should not expect the Hillsborough version of fundamental schools to be a mirror image of those in Pinellas County. Hillsborough's fundamental schools will be organized and run much differently than those in the neighboring county.

In Pinellas, the rules at fundamental schools are more strict, and children who do not follow them are moved elsewhere. But in Hillsborough, the rules will not be so explicit...

The article refers to the proposed Hillsborough rules as "squishy," but I don't know if I agree. I do find it interesting that it is explicitly stated that schools should have the right to transfer problematic children. Indeed, this is cited as one of the primary reasons for why the Pinellas system works.

Tarpon Springs Fundamental School is described in more detail here. The school policies are here. Note that while the weapons policy is saner than most (i.e., it's got to be a gun, or look just like one, to be considered a weapon), there's zero tolerance for bad behavior, missed homework, and trashy clothes (even parents must adhere to the dress code when on school grounds).

A limited tolerance for zeroes

Despite the recent Praxis flap, it's apparent that at least some teachers understand mathematical concepts like averages:

Some teachers, aware of the devastating effects that one zero can have on a student’s final grade and recognizing the string of perfect scores necessary to negate it, have simply stopped logging zeros. Instead, at some schools, the lowest score students can receive is as high as 50 or 60 – even if they don’t turn in assignments.

The practice challenges a long-held philosophy that if you don’t do the work, you don’t get the grade.

In an article for the education journal Phi Delta Kappan , Douglas Reeves wrote that a zero for work that is not turned in is punished much more severely than work “that is done wretchedly and is worth a D.”

And Reeves' problem with that is? Certainly, a student might have a valid reason for not turning in an assignment, and teachers should have the freedom to extend deadlines. But to simply blow off an assignment shows contempt for the teacher and the class, and students should suffer the consequences. What's more, if a struggling student knows that the difference between (a) ignoring an assignment and (b) struggling with the assignment and failing at it is a mere 10 points or so, why do the assignment at all?

And speaking of math, note that a school board member had to provide a specific example so everyone could understand the concept that averages are affected by outliers:

Virginia Beach School Board member Emma L. Davis offered this example: Consider trying to find the average temperature over five days and recording 85, 82, 83 and 86, then forgetting a day and recording 0. The average temperature would be 67, a figure that does not accurately show the weather from that week.

If those temperatures were grades, a student would fail after consistently earning B’s and C’s.

Pardon my French, but no s--t. But if there are only five assignments in a semester or school year, and a student completely blows off one of them (or 20%, for those math-challenged folks), one could argue that the student deserves to fail the class. If I blew off one-fifth of what my boss asked me to do, I'd be looking for a new job pretty soon. Yes, some students will forget to turn things in, and teachers should be prepared to deal with that in a non-punitive way (constant reminders, stretching deadlines a tad, etc.) But a student who just doesn't bother to turn something in? Stamp a big ol' red zero in the grade book and move on.

I agree that, in the example above, the grade of 67 above is not necessarily a good estimator of the student's overall ability, if we assume that the zero assignment was not missed due to lack of understanding. However, we often hear that it's important for teachers to be able to grade the effort of students in the class, and when it comes to students who don't make an effort, I wholeheartedly agree with the zero approach.

American expectations in public education

The results of ETS's recent bipartisan survey on American opinions about high schools are in. The executive summary highlights some pretty low numbers:

Few (11%) Americans say that schools are working well enough today (the same proportion who said that this was the case four years ago) and they continue to be divided between those who say that we should make minor changes to public schools but basically keep them as is (39%) and those who say that schools need major changes (30%) or a complete overhaul (18%). The desire to improve education leads to strong majority support for a wide range of reform...

Given that NCLB has been in effect for the past four years, it's interesting to see that the proportion who believe the schools are working well has stayed low. It would also be interesting to know if the group who thought schools needed major changes four years ago believe that NCLB has been a helpful change.

I also found this part fascinating:

Most (55%) Americans say that all students, teachers, and schools should be held to the same performance standard even if many students come from disadvantaged backgrounds; once more, endorsing a fundamental precept of NCLB. Only one-quarter (26%) of teachers agree.

Instead, 60% of teachers say that students enter school with different backgrounds and levels of academic preparation, and we should not expect teachers working with disadvantaged students to have their students reach the same performance level as teachers working in more affluent schools.

Sampling information is contained in the Power Point presentation.

Parents battle new math program in CT

The "math wars" continue, this time in Connecticut:

In one [content area] however, Simsbury shares dismal scores with most of the state. Strand 25, known as Integrated Understandings: Mathematical Applications, is consistently the lowest-scoring strand for a large percentage of the state's public schools. In fact, only 17 percent of eighth grade students tested in 2004 achieved mastery level. In Simsbury, that number has fluctuated between 26 and 32 percent since 2000.

So, while Simsbury students are among the state's best when it comes to arithmetic and mathematical operations, they're floundering when applying those skills and demonstrating understanding.

In part to improve those scores, the Simsbury school system has implemented a new math curriculum that eschews traditional teaching methods in favor of a discovery-based program. Rather than simply memorizing facts, formulas and specific operations, students will acquire a working knowledge of math. By deconstructing how a concept works, students will learn to think mathematically.

That program would be Investigations in Number, Data and Space. From the website:

Activity-based investigations encourage students to think creatively, develop their own problem-solving strategies, and work cooperatively. Students write, draw, and talk about math as well as use manipulatives, calculators, and computers.

In other words, "Wheee! What's important is that we make math fun and that we make sure no one gets to sit alone and work on those hard problems by themselves!"

Some parents are, as am I, underwhelmed by this program:

Some Simsbury parents have taken issue with the new program. They say it has lowered grade-level expectations and that there is a decreased emphasis on fundamentals, such as multiplication tables, long division and fractions. Research can be found both supporting and refuting those claims.

A parent-formed website opposing the program can be found here. They link to Mathematically Correct and Bas Braam's collections of the content reviews for this program. Many of the reviews, such as this one for the fifth-grade component, are quite scary:

This program does not teach the standard algorithm for multiplication. If students already know this algorithm, they will still be required to develop other strategies. If they do not know the standard algorithm, the text does not direct them to learn it...

In summary, the instruction in multiplication of whole numbers is not learned from a text and thus is highly dependent upon teacher supervision. While the objective is to get students to devise methods that make sense to them, there is little regularity to any particular approach. The number of practice items is very limited, as is the level of difficulty of the products...

This program received the lowest rating of Mathematical Depth of the fifth-grade programs in this review. The strongest presentation it offers is in the case of multiplication and division of whole numbers. However, these suffer from several drawbacks. The instruction is not learned from a text and is thus highly dependent upon teacher direction. At the same time, the emphasis on having students to devise their own methods leaves open the possibility that the students will not achieve any regular and reliable approaches...

Given the recent Praxis flap, and the fact that education schools are apparently turning out graduates who are lost without calculators, who wouldn't be worried to learn that this new program depends heavily on the teacher's understanding of math?

(Hat tip: NYC Hold.)

Do clothes make the student?

The Education Wonks describe a tale of school uniforms that worked.

It was in response to the high-level of violent gang activity that the California elementary school district in which I teach adopted a policy of "mandatory" student uniforms back in 1997...In fairly rapid fashion, the governing board...adopted a "student uniform policy." The policy was implemented during the 98-99 school year.

On the first day of school, our junior high campus was a "sea of blue bottoms and white tops." We teachers noticed an immediate (and positive) difference in overall student attitudes and behavior...Even though in California parents can "opt-out" of any uniform policy, a surprising number of our district's parents choose not to do so...

For us, student uniforms worked. There was a significant reduction in the amount of gang-related violence in our district's middle and junior high schools.

Was the addition of a school uniform the only change that was made at the time to combat later gang violence, I wonder?

As the Education Wonks note, some disctricts are having to worry about combating gang recruiting at the elementary school level. That, to me, suggests problems that might not be fixed with a bit of fabric.

(Via Joanne.)

Looking for the best schools

The Dallas News reports that affluent black parents are voting with their feet and moving into school districts that promise the best education:

In some school districts where black affluence has increased so has poverty, raising new challenges for schools and questions for families. Do they stay and try to improve the public schools? Or do they use their financial resources to transfer their children into academically superior schools?...

The parents who are interviewed did indeed transfer their kids, but the article points out that black kids can suffer from the "too much too soon" affluenza just like white kids, which, along with the lack of support for education in black popular culture, can be a double whammy. Thus, the recipe for success for black parents doesn't seem to be just about finding the right schools, but also in trying to combat the low expectations that society has for black students.

Speaking the language

The International Herald Tribune covers the problem of teaching assistants who aren't fluent in spoken English:

With a steep rise in the number of foreign graduate students in the past two decades in the United States, undergraduates at large research universities often are in classes and laboratories run by graduate teaching assistants whose mastery of English is less than complete. The issue is found especially in subjects like engineering, where 50 percent of graduate students are foreign born, and math and the physical sciences, where 41 percent of graduate students are foreign born, according to a survey by the Council of Graduate Schools, an association of 450 schools. The issue has spawned legislation in at least 22 states requiring universities to make sure that teachers are proficient in spoken English.

Not surprisingly, the undergrads themselves come under fire for being too "insular" and "lazy" to learn to understand foreign accents. However, it's nice to see that most of the educators quoted understand that it's in everyone's best interest to increase the spoken English fluency of foreign graduate students.

All can walk, but not all can do the work

The San Diego Union-Tribune has a fairly critical article about a San Ysidro middle school that is allowing every eighth-grader to walk in the graduation ceremony - even those who flunked:

Today, San Ysidro Middle School will recognize 516 eighth-graders in a ceremony to promote them to high school, regardless of whether they passed middle school. More than a fourth of them did not. In today's ceremony, 143 students who either flunked classes, didn't earn at least a 2.0 grade-point average, or missed too many days of school will march alongside those who did everything required of them.

Several teachers at the school have protested in staff meetings that students who don't make the grade shouldn't walk in the ceremony. To them, it's a matter of holding students accountable.

"If you don't earn it, you stay home," San Ysidro Middle counselor Rosemarie Ponce said.

The principal, however, notes that all are walking because not one teacher actually filed the paperwork to hold back a student:

Part of Flores' rationale in allowing all comers into the ceremony is that they're all being promoted and leaving the kindergarten-through-eighth-grade San Ysidro School District. No teacher at San Ysidro Middle has filed paperwork to hold back a single student.

Needless to say, the high school teachers awaiting these "graduates" are not happy:

Whether they walk in today's ceremony or not, all 516 students are going to high school next year. And the problem is much worse than the promotion statistics indicate. How many students met promotion criteria and how many walk in the ceremony are irrelevant statistics to Hector Espinoza, principal of San Ysidro High, where today's ceremony will take place. They'll all be his students next year.

He just wants to know whether they're ready for ninth grade. He sent a team of teachers out to test middle school students, and they reported back to him that 70 percent of the incoming freshman class at San Ysidro High is not at grade level.

Emphasis mine. The article reports that while retention at the earlier grades may be helpful, retention at the eighth-grade level allegedly does more harm than good. It may increase the drop-out rate, but it's hard to see why promoting a student who is struggling to ninth grade does much for the drop-out rate, either.

Another Day, Another Carnival

The latest Carnival of Education is up at Jenny D's site. Despite my programming a reminder into my Palm Pilot, I always seem to miss the deadline for submitting to the Carnival each week. Luckily, Jenny added a post of mine on her own.

The latest Carnival of the Cats is at Blog d'Elisson. Forgot to submit anything for that, too.

Hopefully I'll never appear on the Carnival of the Clueless, nor on the Carnival of Classiness.

When the best seat on the bus is empty

Earlier this week, I noted an upswing in school-bus-related violence. Many readers mentioned that adult chaperones might help. But a link from Illuminaria suggests that schools might not have much luck finding volunteer chaperones when they can't even manage to find drivers.

Wanted: Drivers to transport dozens of often-unruly students to school on a 38-foot bus through congested suburban traffic.

Requirements: Extensive training, criminal background checks and physical exams. Sincere affection for young people is strongly preferred, even when they're misbehaving.

Starting salary: $13,920.

Add noisy working conditions to the job description, and it's not surprising that many school districts are having a tough time hiring bus drivers...

Megan Williams, a mother of four, thinks potential bus drivers don't want to put up with disrespectful children, for which she blames parents.

"I am part of the problem. I have four boys. They are the kind that don't sit still and say, 'Yes, ma'am, no, ma'am,"' Williams said. "I drive my van with my four kids in it and that's enough. I can't imagine a bus full of them."

It seems no one wants the responsibility of a bunch of other parents' children - especially when, as it seems these days, parents no longer teach manners at home.

A book of wisdom

I'll definitely be pre-ordering this book:

EDUCATION MYTHS What Special-Interest Groups Want YOU to BELIEVE About our SCHOOLS– AND WHY IT ISN'T SO

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC., 2005
By Jay P.Greene
Foreword by James Q. Wilson

How can we fix our floundering public schools? The conventional wisdom says that schools need a lot more money, that poor and immigrant children can't do as well as most other American kids, that high-stakes tests just produce "teaching to the test," and that vouchers do little to help students while undermining our democracy. But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong?

In this book, Jay P. Greene examines eighteen widely held beliefs about American education, and finds that they just aren't true. In addition to myths about class size and teacher pay, he debunks common views about special education ("special ed. programs burden public schools"); certification "certified or more experienced teachers are more effective"); graduation ("nearly all students graduate from high school"); draining ("choice harms public schools"); segregation ("private schools are more racially segregated"); and a host of other hotly debated issues.

Giving an A for effort?

Jay Mathews addresses the thorny issue of whether teachers should give students credit who struggle, but don't quite get it:

Like most American teachers, Will Crawford includes credit for effort when he fills out the report cards of his government and history students at Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax County. "Grades from assignments indirectly measure effort," he said. "I tell students that as long as they keep up with projects and homework and make an honest effort on tests and quizzes, they won't fail," he said. Six miles away at West Potomac High School in the same school district, chemistry and physics teacher Stephen Rezendes rejects that approach because he believes it sends the wrong message to students, and is against district policy.

"Rewarding effort and not achievement is not helping the student," he said. "It's basically assuming they can't achieve."

I admit I'm torn on the issue. On the one hand, I agree with Rezendes that effort without achievement should not be praised. For one thing, when a student struggles mightily, yet doesn't master the material, that suggests the teacher, the student, or both are doing something wrong. that should be a warning sign, not an opportunity for a higher grade. Such effort should be rewarded only with suggestions for focusing one's energies in a more effective way.

On the other hand, I benefitted mightily from the "A for effort" theory when I took gym, although perhaps that class is an exception. (Some folks have athletic ability, and some - like me - really don't.) And when I taught statistics at the college level, I found myself rewarding those who put in the extra effort. Not big rewards, mind you, but rewards nonetheless - fairly easy extra credit homework assignments, points for attendance, and so on.

Then again, I found effort and achievement to be highly correlated. Those students who worked hard did better; the ones who got bad grades from me were almost without exception those who didn't seem to give a damn. I did have one student who turned in every homework, attended every class, came early for extra help, and yet still turfed on all the exams. There was no way for me to soften the blow of flunking him, and flunk him I did (he had the grace to apologize for his poor performance on the final). As a student, he was certainly more enjoyable to have around that those who habitually came late or ignored assignments, but I suppose the fact that I flunked him shows that deep down, I do believe effort in and of itself is not necessarily deserving of reward.

The teaching of a difficult subject

The Education Wonks note a new "Philadelphia Experiment" in social studies class:

City high school students will be required to take a class in African and African American history to graduate, a move that education experts believe is unique in the nation.

The requirement in the 185,000-student district, which is about two-thirds black, begins with September's freshman class, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported Thursday.

The yearlong course covers subjects including classical African civilizations, civil rights and black nationalism, said Gregory Thornton, the district's chief academic officer. The other social studies requirements are American history, geography and world history.

The Philadelphia Inquirer has more. The textbook for the course is The African-American Odyssey, by Darlene Hine. The reviews are few; anyone out there got an opinion on it?

The potential for good with a course like this is immense, as is the potential for harm, because's there's a right and a wrong way to do this. On the one hand, this type of class could indeed inspire some students who weren't previously history buffs to become more interested in the topic. Africa is indeed "the forgotten continent" in a lot of ways, and I don't think a student of any color would be disadvantaged by understanding more of what has happened there. Certainly, African-American students would benefit greatly from their home culture being treated in depth, rather than squeezed into February lessons each year.

On the other hand, topics like "black nationalism" are notoriously touchy, especially if the discussion veers off from history class to current events. It also seems like it would be impossible to adequately teach African history without covering hot-button topics such as slavery, communism, and extremist religions - all of which are in force today on that continent. Will teachers present a critical, balanced approach that focuses on the ills of Africa along with its triumphs?

My concern with a course like this is that it might depend on, if you'll pardon the term, a "whitewashing" of current events, and that it might stick only to those topics that make students "feel good" about African culture and contributions. Such a sanitized or biased approach would do all of Philly's students a disservice.

Assessments in context

The Kalamazoo Gazette has good advice for parents:

* Look at the scores in context with the child's grades, especially if they are inconsistent. A child who tests well but has mediocre grades may be bored in class and need more academic challenge. A child who has strong grades but poor test results may suffer from test anxiety. "In each case, you need to ask about what's going on," said Standish.

* Look at the scores in context with the child's progress in previous years. Parents need to raise concerns if a child's scores are significantly different than previous years.

* Understand that bombing one round of assessment tests may simply indicate that the child was having a bad day. It's much more significant if several different tests during the school year reflect similar results...

* Know the differences between the tests. Michigan school districts specifically align their curriculum to the MEAP..."It's very fair to ask questions of the principal or teacher" about how the curriculum lines up with the test, Clay said.

I'd substitute "essential" for "very fair" in that last sentence, but otherwise I agree.

Hitting a plateau?

I found this San Jose Mercury News editorial fascinating, in large part because of the alleged critics' worries:

...the state standardized test scores in many of the 23 schools in the Alum Rock Union Elementary School District have continued to rise over the past two years. Of the five schools citywide receiving this year's achievement award from Mayor Ron Gonzales for most-improved test results, four are in Alum Rock.

Their progress is a tribute to teachers' perseverance and ability to stay focused on literacy and the state learning standards. It also helps that the district, despite changes at the top, has not changed its curriculum...

Several factors may have contributed to Alum Rock's improvement. The district has deployed at least one literacy coach in every school. It also uses the phonics-heavy Open Court reading textbook, which many districts don't like because it is scripted and gives teachers less control over lessons. The worry is that students will make strides, then stall at a plateau. But that hasn't turned out to be true at two of the mayor's award winners...

My thoughts, when I read something like this:

1. Why is giving teachers more control over lessons considered more important that using an effective reading lesson?
2. Why is making strides, then reaching a plateau, a worry for a school district that was barely even making strides before?
3. If students have a solid foundation in basic reading, why is there even a worry about a "plateau"? Technically, doesn't everyone "plateau" at some level of reading, beyond which they don't comprehend the material? Do critics of phonics really believe that students with a solid grasp of the alphabet and the method by which English words are constructed will suddenly just stop dead at three-letter words?

Addressing the reading problem

Indiana high schools work on test scores by getting to the root of the matter - reading comprehension:

Organizers of the Adolescent Literacy Conference hope to provide new ideas and recommit teachers to boosting students' basic skills. The three-day summit ends today at Southport Sixth Grade Academy in Perry Township.

While Indiana students' reading skills rate slightly above national averages, many teachers say they have only begun to address a persistent literacy lag. In 2003, the most recent year available, a third of Indiana students rated below a basic level on the Grade 4 reading test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In Grade 8, 23 percent were below the basic level...

If students have difficulty with reading comprehension, it affects their performance on all subjects on standardized tests, from reading to math, several educators said.

One of the issues is the problem of boys, and teachers are wracking their brains for books that boys will enjoy. Might I suggest (and I'm not the only one to do so) a complete turn away from the modern young adult sob stories, and a return to non-fiction, or science, or the heroic young adult's literature of the past?

The Millennials face the music

The class of 2005 faces - surprise! - some very different issues than did their parents:

...as Jessie prepared to graduate this month from Nicolet High School in Glendale, Wis., her parents are pinching themselves. Jessie - yearbook editor, volleyball captain, National Honor Society member, radio station intern, community service club coordinator and actress _has made them proud. After a trip to Appalachia this summer to repair houses for the poor, she'll start at Northwestern University in Illinois, where she vows to "do something to make the world better."

Make the world better? What happened to "Whatever," the Generation X anthem of the 1990s? Or "turn on, tune in, drop out" a 1960s standard? Jessie is part of a new generation, born after 1980, known to some demographers as "the Millennials." They are the largest, most diverse and most techno-savvy generation in American history...

With their emphasis on teamwork, achievement, modesty and respect for authority, today's high school graduates bear little resemblance to their more nihilistic Gen-X siblings and even less to their self-indulgent baby boomer parents, academics and sociologists say...

Indeed, studies show that today's high school graduates are less violent and less inclined to risky behavior than their parents were at the same age...Still, today's teenagers have a host of endemic problems. The number of children with obesity has tripled since 1980. Today's kids are more prone to asthma, attention deficit disorder and depression...Under intense pressure from their parents to succeed and faced with a new, more competitive world economy, today's high school graduates are feeling stress, some of it debilitating. Cheating is on the rise. So are casual sexual encounters...

Related to this are the "helicopter parent," syndrome (when parents hover over kids to the point of writing their college entrance essays) and the "self-esteem" movement in which competition is eliminated and narcissism is fostered.

Are kids today really under that much more pressure? Certainly, they have the additional pressure of virtually unlimited choice of what they want to with their lives; having 100 options is more stressful than having one or two. There's also what I consider to be almost relentless popular-culture pressure in which casual sex, slutty clothing, constant drug use, and rampant materialism are applauded while academic achievement, modesty, and self-discipline are derided.

Perhaps parents today could best take pressure of their kids by making sure the phrase, "You can be anything you want to be," is followed by, "But you better be prepared to work hard for it" and "Turn off the TV!"

Celebrity scholarships

I should have known this was next in the list of "reality" TV shows:

Tonight at 8, ABC will show the first of six installments of "The Scholar," in which 10 high school seniors pursue a scholarship worth as much as $240,000 by outsmarting, out-talking and out-preening one another before a panel of actual college admissions officers. That sum is intended to cover tuition, room and board at an Ivy League or comparable institution for four years, as well as incidentals like books and travel.

There is plenty of tension - in tonight's episode one boy, on the brink of tears, says he cannot bear to inform his immigrant parents that he has just lost an early round of the competition. Still, nobody on "The Scholar" loses: at the least, each contestant will walk away with a $20,000 scholarship. (The grand prize is being supplied by an education foundation created by Eli Broad, a California billionaire; the rest of the money has been given by Wal-Mart.)

The standardized testing hurdle had to be passed first, but other factors came into play (probably selected to make for the most compelling television):

In a parallel to the actual college admissions process - the program was taped in January, before most knew where they had been accepted - each had to write an essay, supply grades and test scores and submit to extensive interviews. To assess how camera-ready they were, each was also required to provide a tape.

The 10 finalists were selected from among about 5,000 applicants recruited through Web sites or their guidance counselors. That rate of acceptance - about 0.2 percent - is far lower than that of Harvard, which was 9 percent this year.

The competing students have diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, as well as life experience. Most were able to demonstrate at least some financial need, and each was able to point to an obstacle that he or she had overcome, whether it was scoliolosis (Melissa, from Tarzana, Calif.), the dangerous streets of Oakland, Calif., (Max) or racism (Gerald, of Commerce, Tex.)

The most profound obstacle that I had to overcome as an early adult was...stage fright. Guess that wouldn't have made me a very good contestant for the show, eh?

Update:TVGasm's coverage is thoughtful:

Anyway, one of the warm and fuzzy elements of the show is that no one actually gets eliminated. Instead, the students are simply not chosen -- a gracious and appropriate route to take, I guess. Similarly, the occasionally soporific "scholarship committee" opts not to instigate conflict but instead provoke thoughtful responses...

My only real problem with the show is that after taking all this time and care to create as nurturing an environment as possible for a reality competition, the most important challenges seem to come down to rote memorization routines. Having students match dates to historical events is an antiquated testing prototype to say the least. Answering quiz-show trivia about authors and their book titles is similarly undemonstrative of actual intellect. There doesn't seem to be an emphasis on abstract thinking (at least not yet), and in this way, The Scholar truly exposes its reality show foundation.

Google can't do everything

Yet another thing to blame on Bill Gates:

It's never been easier for kids to get their fingertips on a keyboard or to cruise cyberspace. Statistics Canada reports three out of four households with school-aged children regularly access the Internet, and a growing number of users are turning to high-speed connections. Our schools now have about a million computers, 93 per cent of which are online...

Yet [...] the evidence is mounting that our obsessive use of information technology is dumbing us down, adults as well as kids. While they can be engaging and resourceful tools for learning -- if used in moderation -- computers and the Internet can also distract kids from homework, encourage superficial and uncritical thinking, replace face-to-face interaction between students and teachers, and lead to compulsive behaviour.

Anyone want to volunteer to email this article to Jackie Goldberg?

I've always thought that access to computers and the web, in and of itself, doesn't improve education. Sure, some math and stat stuff becomes more fun, and online research is often easier on the feet and the eyes. Basic computer usage can also be considered a part of literacy in this technological age. But kids who aren't motivated and don't have the basic skills aren't going to magically become geniuses just because their teacher puts everything online.

University of Munich economists Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Woessmann analyzed the results of the OECD's PISA international standardized tests. Not only did they tap into a massive subject pool -- 174,000 15-year-olds in reading, 97,000 each in math and science from 31 countries (including Canada) -- but they were also able, because participants filled out extensively detailed surveys, to control for other possible outside influences, something remarkably few studies do. Their results, which are only now starting to make waves among pedagogy experts, confirm what many parents have long intuited: the sheer ubiquity of information technology is getting in the way of learning. Once household income and the wealth of a school's resources are taken out of the equation, teens with the greatest access to computers and the Internet at home and school earn the lowest test scores.

This suggests teens are perfectly willing to use the Internet as an alternative to TV, with much the same educational results.

Robbing the smart to pay the dull

It Comes In Pints? discusses a Californian school brouhaha where, once again, standards are modified because people just don't like the "diversity" that is produced by them:

Davis schools are making strides toward being a little more like everyone else. Davis still identified 26 percent of its students as gifted this year, more than three times the state average. But this year's total is a far cry from the 35 percent of students identified last year.

The issue is a contentious one in the college town. Concern that African Americans and Latinos were being disproportionately excluded from the school district's gifted and talented education program, known as GATE, drove the Davis school board to alter the program's admission requirements two years ago...

Tinkering with the district's identification procedure yielded a lower number this year, but in preliminary data presented to the school board May 5, the original problem seemed to have reappeared: Whites and Asians were once again much more likely to be identified as gifted than were African Americans and Latinos.

That prompted three of the five school board members to say they had serious reservations with, at minimum, the basic test the district was using.

ICIP? mentions the phrase, "soft bigotry of low expectations," and I think that phrase is completely appropriate here. Note that the school board members are not quoted as having serious reservations about the quality of education that minority students were receiving at Davis schools, nor about the quality of home life or culture that could be affecting those students negatively, or about anything else that might be the cause of the racial disparities on the GATE admissions assessments. The school board members are not stopping to ask themselves if they really understand why Asian students are six times as likely to be identified as ready to enter a gifted program as Latino students.

Nay, it's all about the admissions assessment and the resulting racial balance, and what the board members are saying here it is more important to admit certain minority students under lower standards than it is to inspire all students to meet higher standards. The trustees are upset that an objective admissions process reveals an achievement gap that they'd like to hide, but one trustee, I believe, lets the cat out of the bag with her comment:

Martha West, another trustee, said she would like to see most GATE classes eliminated and the money used for those programs spent on improving the quality of instruction in all classes.

Tell me this: If students from every ethnic group were equally qualifying for gifted classes, and it was really only a biased admissions process that produced disparities, would trustees be so nervous about the quality of instruction in regular classes that they'd suggest taking money away from the gifted to help the average? Methinks Ms. West has suspicions as to why certain groups aren't doing as well as others, and she knows just how much worse certain groups are doing, too.

When the tests are automatically to blame

Note the subheader of this article: "Standardized testing and other education demands choke fun out of school reading, some experts say." Then look in vain for any evidence whatsoever in the article supporting the argument that standardized testing is the major cause of declining enjoyment of reading for high school students:

Sherre Sachar comes from a book-loving family. Her father, Louis, is an award-winning author, and the graduating senior thinks that settling down with a good book should be one of life's great joys. But as she prepares to leave high school and head to Cornell University in the fall, she is tired of reading.

The extensive required reading in her high school classes in Austin, Texas--including Advanced Placement English literature, in which she flew from one classic writing to another--left her with no time to pick up books she thought would be fun. And she was frustrated by teachers who offered either too little help in understanding the complex texts or conducted tortured efforts to wring symbolism out of every word.

"I haven't read a book for pleasure in about three years," said Sachar, 18. "If I do, it's in the summer, and I might only get through one book because I'm so sick of trying to read. It's not fun anymore."

Allowing students some choice in what they read and helping them understand the content is a difficult balance to strike for today's teachers, educators say.

With high-stakes standardized testing driving curricula and teachers increasingly required to use scripted lesson plans, what is getting lost for many teachers is the freedom to allow students to explore books of their choosing--and the time to explore the meaning, the educators say.

How is it that Sachar's teachers are described as either clueless of the complexities of books or too focused on esoteric details, yet it's tests that get the blame? Even teachers who are following guidelines, or who of aware of the content on state exams, should be able to - especially in an AP class - convey the material in such a way that is thorough yet not mind-numbing. I don't doubt that some teachers out there are teaching to the exams, but to me that's a result of bad teaching, not bad tests.

The focus of this article seems to be that students should be allowed to choose their own books for classes. I don't remember that being the norm before NCLB came along, and it's hard to understand why tests are getting the blame for that now.

And note this segment:

In advanced classes, teachers often rush through tomes and require students to read year-round. Over one Christmas break, Sachar had to read two hefty novels, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Midnight's Children." Summer had its mandatory reading too, and her father, author of the Newbery Medal-winning "Holes," said her experience left him thinking that "sometimes the top schools confuse quantity with quality."

Assuming Sachar's Austin-based high school is in the Austin Unified District, Christmas break lasted from December 17, 2004, to January 3, 2005. One Hundred Years of Solitude is 464 pages, Midnight's Children is 552 pages. Are we to understand that the tests in Texas really require AP students to read a thousand pages of adult prose in two weeks? If that's really the case, it's ridiculous - but I don't see any evidence that testing, rather than poor curriculum choices or plain old bad scheduling, is the culprit here.

Separating wheat from chaff just got that much harder

Class rank sounds like such a simple metric - until you have to create it, or suffer under it:

With pressure coming from students and parents, administrators at many prestigious schools contend that doing away with class rank will help relieve competition within the school--and, paradoxically, help students better compete for spots at the best colleges, which want only top-ranked applicants.

But though some college admissions directors support the move to dump rankings, others worry that they will lose one last check against grade inflation as A's and B's become ubiquitous.

Indeed, some B-average students will graduate in the bottom half of the Stevenson senior class. Every student in the top half--including Dieckelman, who plans to attend the University of Wisconsin at Madison--has at least a 3.37 grade-point average on a 5.0 scale, a so-called weighted system that gives students extra points for the most demanding classes.

Stevenson students put so much importance on class rank that some manipulate their schedules to take classes most likely to boost their standing.

That intense competition has helped fuel the movement away from class rankings. The numbers also can become meaningless, some administrators argue, as a fraction of a decimal can separate top-ranked students. Others contend it's unfair because a 3.0 GPA at a school such as New Trier can leave a student in the bottom of the class, but at the top at a less competitive school.

I agree that at a high-ranked school, class rank isn't that informative when competitive students are separated by decimal places. Of course, there are objective measures that cut across schools, but some schools are getting rid of those as well:

At Ohio State University, which gets up to 20,000 applications a year, admissions officials say losing class rank makes it more difficult to evaluate students at a time when there is also a cry to de-emphasize standardized test scores.

Judging the books by their covers

Does California's legislature think it can improve education by shortening textbooks?

The California Assembly is betting that kids learn more with small books. Lawmakers voted Thursday to ban school districts from purchasing textbooks longer than 200 pages. The bill, believed to be the first of its kind nationwide, was hailed by supporters as a way to revolutionize education.

Critics lambasted Assembly Bill 756 as silly...But Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, a Los Angeles Democrat who chairs the Assembly Education Committee, said critics are thinking too narrowly.

Well, yes, you could consider this "revolutionary" in the same way that banning textbooks altogether would be. That is to say, it could have a profound effect, and not necessarily for the better.

So where are all those excess pages going to go? Why, they've become URLs:

AB 756 would force publishers to condense key ideas, basic problems and basic knowledge into 200 pages, then to provide a rich appendix with Web sites where students can go for more information.

Doesn't this assume that every kid in California has free and easy access to a computer? Doesn't this mean that only those kids with the access and the desire will be exposed to that extra knowledge? Why not let kids stay home and have all the classes and textbooks online, while we're at it?

The Mercury News is incredulous:

...Who knew that making a textbook longer than 200 pages was such a bad idea that there needs to be a law against it? Well, 42 Assembly Democrats knew. On Thursday they approved AB 756, a bill by Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, that says: Neither the State Board of Education nor a local school district "may adopt instructional materials that exceed 200 pages in length.'' Textbooks, the bill's supporters argued, should sum up the basics and then refer students to the Internet and to libraries for the rest. Plus, shorter is lighter and cheaper.

Maybe. Their assumption doesn't seem that obvious to us. It seems like something that ought to be decided -- just brainstorming here -- by actually reading each proposed textbook, as opposed to laying down an arbitrary limit.

The bill doesn't jibe with other instructions (some from the Legislature) that textbook publishers have been getting to avoid textbooks that are just dry columns of words. They must be full of pictures and charts. And in each subject, they have to cover the state's comprehensive curriculum requirements. This makes them longer.

I don't know if I'd go so far as to call this silly bill "bookburning," but the Claremont Institute is doing so:

Following the Sacbee report, other reports on this bill have referred to its "textbook" restrictions in length, while the bill's text refers more broadly to "instructional materials." Thus, books of American political or historical documents, short stories, poems, or memoirs more than 200 pages in length would be forbidden. The number of books that could not be purchased by the California public schools would be rather impressive: Frederick Douglass's Autobiography, virtually any classic novel one can think of, and any book by Winston Churchill and any other great history.

One of Joanne Jacobs' commenters had this to say about Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, the sponsor of the bill:

Only a teacher in L.A.(like me) who for years watched the inane and harmful Jackie Goldberg poison the LAUSD with her Leftist dogma and idiotic motions...then to be elected to the state Assembly, to continue with her thumbing-the-nose and giving-the-bird to Calif. taxpayers, parents and students....can just smile painfully and wonder why the morons in her district keep reelecting her. Dumbing down the textbooks is just the tip of the iceberg...

What else doesn't Jackie Goldberg like, in addition to long textbooks? "Redskins" as an athletic team name, the Iraq war (which she protested after the Iraqi elections were held), gun safety education in schools, and bills that would prevent minors from getting body piercings without parental consent.

Her statement in the body-piercing article is priceless:

Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, cast the lone "no" vote on the bill. Requiring parental consent takes away one of the more innocuous ways for teens to rebel, she said. The government should not be stepping in to tell children about body piercing, Goldberg said, and lawmakers should be more worried about other issues, such as funding schools.

"It will probably get signed ... and it will sound like we will be protecting kids," she said. "We just get too carried away in telling everyone what to do."

But she has no problem with telling every school in California to limit instructional materials to 200 pages, it seems.

(Via Captain's Quarters.)

Update: Quincy has more over at News, The Universe, and Everything:

Ms. Goldberg’s argument has constructivism written all over it. “No need to learn it, you can always look it up!” The basic problem with this is that doing all that websurfing takes time. The reason textbooks exist in the first place is to collect a lot of useful information in one volume that is readily accessable. It takes but a second to say, “Turn to page 201.” Imagine the time wasted if teachers had to send their kids to the web to download and print their math exercises, rather than simply turning to the page in the book?

A painful lesson

A biology teacher pushes the limits:

biology class lesson in Gunnison, Utah involving the dissection of a live dog has outraged some parents and students, according to a report. "I thought that it would be just really a good experience if they could see the digestive system in the living animal," Biology teacher Doug Bierregaard said. Biology teacher Doug Bjerregaard, who is a substitute teacher at Gunnison Valley High School, wanted his students to see how the digestive system of a dog worked.

Bjerregaard made arrangements for his students to be a part of a dissection of a dog that was still alive. The dog was still alive, but the teacher said it was sedated before the dissection began.

I disagree with the students who claim there is nothing to be learned from this - but that doesn't necessarily make it humane, or worth doing, or even acceptable.

(Side note: Does anyone but me see the sick humor in the fact that the sidebar item, "WEEK'S MOST POPULAR" photos, is entitled, "Bizarre Items Found In Kids' Stomachs"? It's really hard to believe that's a coincidence.)

Via Education Wonks.

Overhauling teacher pay

The Sacramento Bee compares and contrasts teacher pay programs in California and Colorado:

Here, the teachers union and the school district have completed six years of negotiation, experimentation and study to come up with a salary system unlike any other. It incorporates concepts Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has said he would like to see in California - merit pay for teachers whose students perform well on tests and bonus pay for teachers who work in tough schools - as well as several other ways teachers can earn raises throughout their careers. Yet the differences are stark.

In California, Schwarzenegger's proposals to change the way teachers are paid have cropped up only in the past five months, and have met fierce opposition from the California Teachers Association. In Denver, the system, known as "ProComp," is the result of years of planning and unusual cooperation between the school district and the teachers union.

Denver prides itself on having done this in a "bottom-up" way. But not everyone at the "bottom" agrees that Denver's system is a good one:

Despite the chance for higher pay, some teachers in the 72,500-student district remain opposed. They say the school district is too disorganized to handle the complex task of tracking student performance and linking it to their paychecks. Others call the system unfair to workers in the teachers union whose jobs are not tied to the standardized tests that partly determine the raises - music and art teachers, librarians, nurses, psychologists and speech therapists.

Go north, young educator

Are educators swarming to Canada for tips on effective education?

School superintendent Angus McBeath has lost track of how many educators from the United States have hopped a plane north in search of answers.

Folks from "Seattle, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Boston, Milwaukee, Atlanta ..." His list goes on.

Administrators, school board members and lawmakers have beaten a well-worn path from U.S. schools to this district on the western plains of Canada. Edmonton Public Schools have won accolades for their unique school choice program and decentralized power structure. And that has educators from Hawaii to Minnesota flocking to Edmonton, hoping to learn the secret of its success. Some have sought advice from the book author who set off the stampede.

Let's see, how many of these rules of success do we think the US teachers' unions and adminstrative educrats will go for? (Emphases mine.)

The district has excelled at customer satisfaction, winning high marks from parents, students and staff by providing a wide range of education options, offering families the freedom to select any school and empowering principals to tailor spending to their schools' specific needs...

...at Meadowlark Christian School, each class spends 10 minutes on a devotion. Students use the time to read scripture or pray...

...The schools in Edmonton are unique, and so are their budgets. The central office doesn't dictate how schools spend their money. Principals decide how many teachers to hire, what training to offer and even whether the school's walls need painting. If they do, the principal can hire district painters or seek a lower price in the private sector...

...Bibles are displayed prominently, and brightly colored alphabet posters teach students that 'A' is for angel, 'B' is for Bible and 'C' is for cross. In her first-grade classroom, Margaret MacDonald recently taught her students how to handle playground conflicts. "If someone pushes you or says something unkind, you can stop and you can say, 'Jesus help me make a good choice,'" she said...

Yeah, we're likely to see changes like that here soon. Debate is still ongoing about the academic effectiveness of such tactics, from critics who say the school's test scores aren't too good, to supporters who note that the schools are doing better than other schools with similar populations.

How Newsweek chose "the best"

Newsweek has compiled a list of the 1,000 Best High Schools in the US. High schools were selected using only the following ratio:

Newsweek's Best High Schools List uses a ratio, the number of Advanced Placement (AP) and/or International Baccalaureate (IB) tests taken by all students at a school in 2004, divided by the number of graduating seniors. Although that doesn't tell the whole story about a school, it's one of the best measures available to compare a wide range of students' readiness for higher-level work, which is more crucial than ever in the postindustrial age.

Blogger Michael Kantor is incredulous:

Why is this list bogus? Because the sole criterion for ranking schools is the average number of Advanced Placement (AP) test taken per student. The grades on the AP tests don’t even matter! Nor do any other measures of academic achievement obtained by the school’s students. If people ever start taking this list seriously, this will create the obvious incentive for high schools to game the system in ways that do nothing to improve the quality of their education.

Even worse, schools that have competitive admissions are excluded, so genuine top public high schools like Stuyvesant High School (“noted for its many accomplished alumni, its rigorous academics, and for sending the most students to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton of any public school in the United States”) are completely ignored.

The staff of the St. Petersburg Times are a tad surprised, too, as one of the schools making the Top Ten, Hillsborough High School, got a D from the state:

The Newsweek list is based on a single factor: the number of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate tests taken by all students at a school, divided by the number of graduating seniors. The students don't have to do well on the tests either. It matters only that they take them.

Test scores? No.

Graduation rates? Nope.

Closing the achievement gap between whites and minorities? Forget it.

Critics say the formula is simplistic. For example, a school's rank can actually improve if it has a high dropout rate.

(Via The Volokh Conspiracy.)

The "black market" of school choice in PA

I've posted before describing how my local high school is absolutely humongous. Turns out local officials are concerned, and with good reason:

"Over the past five to seven years, for many reasons, our privacy has been invaded by those who want an education in our schools, but do not live in Upper Darby and do not pay taxes in Upper Darby," testified Upper Darby Superintendent Joseph Galli. "This act of deceit must be a crime and it must be treated like a crime through the legal system. We are appealing to you, our legislators, to stiffen the laws and help us enforce them."

Upper Darby serves about 12,400 students, has the largest high school in the state and experiences growth of about 400 students a year, according to Galli. Kochman testified that enrollment jumps in recent years have made six of the district's 12 schools overpopulated...

Illegal students come in three main categories, Galli said: those with fraudulent paper work, those who maintain two residences or who have multiple occupancies, and, lastly, foreign families who stay in the country after their visa expires.

Upper Darby is absolutely stuffed with people - moderate housing prices, decent schools, and low crime rates see to that - so it doesn't surprise me to find out that the schools are stuffed as well. Upper Darby is also as multicultural as they come - the graveyard behind me has Greek, Thai, Vietnamese, Irish, and African headstones - so a foreign family of any kind wouldn't have trouble blending in. UDHS cranks out over 800 graduates a year; how they keep track of just the seniors is beyond me.

Oh ho, there's a comment about test scores in here as well:

Kochman testified that once the district finds out that a student is illegal, the process to disenroll takes months and requires the district to pay costly legal fees. The constant influx of new students who have attended multiple schools also lowers standardized test scores, according to Kochman.

Why would it take months to disenroll someone who doesn't live in that school district? That doesn't seem like something for which the school should have to fight so hard. According to this article, the law is already pretty clear, and it's the assessment part that's troublesome:

State law is clear. Students living with a nonparent are entitled to a free public education where they live if the nonparent is financially responsible for the child, and keeps the child in his or her home permanently, not just during the school year. School boards may demand proof of both, and the resident can be held liable for tuition costs for the time an ineligible child attended classes.

"The greatest challenge is that we as educators are neither trained to do investigative policing of residents, nor should we," said Joseph A. Galli, superintendent of the Upper Darby School District in Delaware County.

Volkman said Susquehanna Twp. has hired, for about $130,000 per year, three retired police officers who visit the homes where the students claim to live.

What's the secret to high-flying education?

The National Center for Educational Accountability is seeking the answer to why some schools do better than others:

Over the past decade, an explosion of data on student performance has generated increasing attempts to identify what have been dubbed high-flying schools and learn from them...But the investigations here in Illinois, and in other states affiliated with the Austin, Texas-based National Center for Educational Accountability’s best-practices studies, stand out on several fronts.

...Rather than drawing on the experiences of a handful of high performers, by the end of this year, the NCEA and its state affiliates will have conducted such case studies in more than 400 schools in 17 states, supported in part by a $1.2 million grant from the Los Angeles-based Broad Foundation....

To probe what sets high-performing schools apart from others, the NCEA has designed a best-practices framework that forms the basis for structured interviews with district administrators, principals, and teachers. Underlying the framework, said Ms. Rutherford, are clear and specific academic goals for students, rooted in state content standards. “That clearly has emerged,” she said, “as the bedrock foundation: this penetrating, deep understanding of what it is children are to know and be able to do and how to connect it across grades.”

Oooh, there's that scary "S" word again - standards. Too many schools avoid them, and fail to learn from the actions of the successful St. Louis Belleville School District:

Clear expectations for what students should know and be able to do are communicated through a grade-by-grade skills continuum that the district updates regularly. District exit tests, given at the end of each year and crafted and refined by committees of classroom teachers, measure whether students are learning those objectives. Any changes in the curriculum flow through a district curriculum committee, which meets monthly and includes representatives from every grade and school.

That sounds about as far from the child-centered, anti-testing, free-flowing, "the teacher is your friend" model as one can get. Which is why it works so well.

This caveat, while realistic, seems pessimistic:

Although most education analysts agree that it’s important to identify and learn from high-performing schools, others caution against concluding that schools alone can close achievement gaps between students of different racial and social backgrounds.

“Some schools do a much better job with disadvantaged children than other schools,” said Richard Rothstein, the author of Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap. “I think we know a little bit about what their best practices are, and those should be duplicated and imitated.” Still, he added, “too many people are quick to conclude that because some schools do better than others, therefore, schools can close the achievement gap on their own. There’s no evidence for that.”

Where's the evidence that schools shouldn't try everything in their powers to close that gap? Imitating the successful schools might be the most efficient way of doing that.

What's more important, the teacher or the curriculum?

In Education Week, Anthony Ralston shares his opinions on the real scandal in American mathematics education:

...all the arguments in recent years about curricula and calculators are virtually irrelevant when compared with the single greatest challenge facing American school mathematics: how to do something about the steady decline over the past half-century of the intellectual abilities of those who teach math in our schools...

It is a scandal that so little attention has been paid to attracting better-qualified math teachers to American schools. What can be done?

Instead of all the time and energy spent on arguing about curriculum and related matters, mathematicians and mathematics educators should devote their energies to making the case that those we attract to elementary and secondary mathematics teaching need to be as intellectually able as those attracted to law, medicine, and, yes, the academic world.

Expect some angry replies from education majors soon. Meanwhile, the link to this article was circulated on Bill Evers's listserv, with commentary from Bill: "The author is right that there is a scarcity of qualified math teachers. He is wrong in his attacks on accountability testing and direct instruction (although like anything else these can be done poorly). He should consider targeted boosts in pay scales for science, math, and special ed teachers."

And speaking of such boosts:

"We must treat our teachers like the professionals they are," U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings told more than 300 educators and others attending the Milken Family Foundation National Education Conference today in Washington, D.C. "That means we must reward teachers who make real progress closing the achievement gap in the most challenging classrooms"...

To address the problem, President Bush has proposed a new $500 million Teacher Incentive Fund, Spellings said. The fund will provide states with money to reward teachers who take the toughest jobs and achieve real results. Spellings noted that, according to a recent study by the bipartisan Teaching Commission, 76 percent of Americans and 77 percent of public school teachers supported incentive pay.

Raising the bar for kindergarteners

What basic skills do kids need when entering kindergarten? And do American youngsters possess those skills?

Despite a national trend that shows more children are attending preschool, it appears that fewer children are starting kindergarten with the basic skills needed to get them off to a good start.

Kindergarten teacher Susan Ginsburg laments the fact that a growing number of pupils entering her class don't know how to write their own names. "And some of them can write the names, but they don't know the letters," said Ginsburg, who teaches at Hall School in Lincolnwood and who has been a kindergarten teacher for 20 years.

"I've seen a downward progression over the last 10 years," Ginsburg said.

The rest of the short article is equally anecdotal, but it's still disheartening to hear teachers explain that maybe parents just don't have the time to spend with their kids anymore. If not when the child needs to learn to read and speak and dress themselves, then when?

This article, on the other hand, suggests parents are becoming too concerned with kindergarten readiness, and that part of the problem could lie in rising standards:

The decision [of when to start kindergarten] is much more complicated these days because of increased academic standards and an innate sense that parents want their child to be able to succeed. Moms and dads must mull factors such as birth month, personality traits and gender in an attempt to make sure their kids are up to the task of the first year of public school.

Being "ready" for kindergarten doesn't constitute what it used to mean, either. Remember the old poem, "All I ever needed to know, I learned in kindergarten," which espoused simple pleasures like naps, snacks and friendly socialization? Well, that could be changed to "All I ever needed to know I learned in pre-K class, because kindergarten just got tougher." These days, kids are expected to learn how to read, do basic math functions, have decent handwriting and essentially complete what used to be a first-grade curriculum in kindergarten, which makes it all the more critical that kids are ready.

I'm out of my league here, because I know next to nothing about this topic, but there's a whole website devoted to it, with lots of links, articles, and other resources. And I'd love to know what my Devoted Readers think.

Too few teachers spoil the lessons

The Education Intelligence Agency reports that teachers are the majority of education employees in the US - but just barely.

The ranks of the “non-teachers” include every other public school employee: instructional aides, school staff (principals, assistant principals, librarians, school secretaries), other staff (bus drivers, custodians, security personnel, food service workers), district staff (officials, administrators, instruction coordinators) and employees that work at county or state education agencies.

Eighteen states and the District of Columbia had fewer teachers than non-teachers in their public education work force in 2001. That’s up from 12 states in 1998 and 7 states in 1995. In 1969-70, the percentage of the workforce who were teachers was 60%. In 2001, it was 50.8%. It is highly likely that today, in 2005, the United States employs more non-teachers than teachers in its public
education system

I've always complained that low academic performance was the result of bad teaching, but now it seems more appropriate to say no teaching. If a school district has more vice-principals, secretaries, and administrators than it does teachers, no wonder the hard work of conveying the 3R's doesn't get done.

A boon for some, a bust for others

This is a classic example of a school trying to please everyone, and completely devaluing grades in the process:

Two months off and good grades to boot.

That's the bottom line for students in the Crosby-Ironton School District, where classes were interrupted for nearly two months this semester during an ugly 39-day teachers' strike.

Superintendent Linda Lawrie, carrying out her school board's wishes to make the final weeks of the school year run smoothly, told teachers in a memo this month that she "will assume that all students will receive" A's or B's this semester.

By giving everyone the high grades, Superintendent Lawrie has ensured that the grades will be pretty much meaningless. She cites a pretty inflammatory rationale for this decision, too.

The superintendent said she also was concerned that some teachers might penalize students whose parents opposed the union's position on the issues that led to the strike. She said that before the strike, some teachers did just that, giving some students grades lower than what they deserved. She wouldn't say how widespread that was or identify individual cases, but said "We had a lot of parents complain about that."

Not surprisingly, teachers and their representatives hotly deny this.

(Via Devoted Reader Erin.)

A safety net - or an easy way out?

Kentucky school districts aren't having the best of luck with their secondary GED programs:

Diane Akers, director of pupil personnel, said it became an option this year [to start a secondary GED program] when legislators agreed to allow school districts to offer a secondary GED to try to slow the dropout rate. State standards mandate that students may participate only if they are at least 16 years old, two years behind and achieve a set score on standardized tests to ensure they have the ability to finish the program.

Akers said one problem with the secondary GED was the cost. The district examined two companies that offer a program, both of which had a one-time licensing fee of $5,000, plus fees for each student taking it ranging from $50 to $65...A larger problem, said Akers, is what appears to be a lack of success of students entering the secondary GED program in other districts.

Somerset High School purchased one of the more expensive programs, she said, but it is not going well so far. "They had five students enrolled initially in their program," Akers said. "I spoke to a gentleman that's running the program. ... As of Monday, they had one student still in the program. The student was arrested over the weekend and they're not sure he'll be allowed to come back into the school."

The secondary GED program has had its critics from the start, who say that giving students the option to go right into a GED without being out of school a year doesn't help the students as much as it helps the schools, who don't have to count those students as drop-outs.

A cure for senioritis

The more I hear about this idea, the more I like it - getting rid of senioritis:

Governors in at least nine states are pushing broad-based initiatives to overhaul the senior year of high school. They say the second half of the year in particular wastes students' time and taxpayers' money. "Senioritis" often appears toward the middle of the year, when many students have met graduation requirements and take largely electives...

Among programs already in place:

• In Virginia, seniors can get up to one semester of industry-specific technical training tuition-free.
• In Texas, students in a pilot program at 10 high schools across the state can earn in five years a high school diploma and an associate's degree...
• In North Carolina, the state has increased graduation requirements in English and math...

Anything sounds better than forcing talented students to mark time, or requiring that techie students wait six months before getting started. Some students - I was one - need that entire senior year to mature and do some scholastic exploration, but some will be ready to get the heck out, and should have the chance to do so.

One preschool for all

His push to get more money from smokers has been so successful that actor/director Rob Reiner is going after the limousine liberals (and conservatives) in his quest for universal preschool (link goes to Education Beat's main website; this story is not yet online):

After meeting with legislative leaders to sell his plan for universal preschool last week, actor Rob Reiner is ready to file his initiative for title and summary with the attorney general's office. Sources close to Reiner say the initiative will likely be on the June 2006 ballot. The initiative seeks to raise about $2 billion annually to pay for universal preschool programs for California's pre-kindergartners. To pay for the programs, the initiative will propose a new income tax on couples making more than $800,000 per year, or individuals who make more than $450,000 per year...

Reiner abandoned an earlier preschool initiative that would have boosted the commercial property tax to pay for the new programs. That initiative was co-sponsored by the California Teachers Association, but was tabled before it was ever filed to the AG's office. The CTA is not officially backing the new Reiner proposal as of yet, according to a Reiner spokesman.

My guess is the new initiative goes hand-in-hand with recent studies:

Universal preschool for California's 4-year-olds would bring about $2.62 in benefits for every dollar spent, greatly reducing special education needs, juvenile arrests and the number of children held back a grade, a Rand Corp. study concludes. The report released Tuesday also said a high-quality preschool program would create a more qualified, internationally competitive workforce and foster economic growth. Though other studies have explored the benefits of preschool programs for disadvantaged youngsters, the Rand report is the first to provide a detailed cost analysis for universal preschool in California open to all children without regard to income.

I'm of two minds. Universal preschool sounds like something that could be desperately necessary in some impoverished areas. On the other hand, I wonder how much freedom families will have to opt out of the program, should they choose to. I also wonder how much of the ineffective "progressive" educational theories will filter down to this level. Such a program may be cost-effective if it works, but I'd like to hear more about what's actually going to be taught.

Update: Illuminaria's Voice has scads more on the topic:

...it may very well be that the only children who would benefit from universal preschool would be high risk children who currently do not attend preschool. If we use their assumptions on how many children would enroll in the universal preschool, we see that even though the universal preschool plan would mean that twice as many California 4 year olds would be in public preschool (35% to 70%), the overall rate of preschool attendance would only raise from 65% to 80%. Almost 70% of the new children enrolled in public preschools would be low risk children, most of them moved over from private preschools. Only 5.82% of California 4 year olds would be the high risk children not currently enrolled in preschool that the program would help the most. Instead of doubling costs, costs could be increased by 15% in order to make preschool available for more high risk children.

I certainly agree that putting more high risk children who don’t get stimulation and learning at home into preschool would help break the cycle of poverty. But I see no reason, even with this study, to make universal preschool available.

Private vs. public schools

A surprising conclusion from some recent research on the impact of public vs. private schooling:

Students do better in private schools, according to common wisdom -- and some well-regarded data now more than two decades old. But a recent study of standardized math scores in more than 1,300 public and private schools says the opposite may be true, according to Sarah and Christopher Lubienski, education professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Public school students from similar social and economic backgrounds tested higher in a national math achievement test than their peers in private schools, the Lubienskis say in an article to be published in the May issue of Phi Delta Kappan, an influential education journal. They also are presenting their findings at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), being held April 11-15 in Montreal.

The research uses fourth- and eighth-grade NAEP scores from 2000. When the private school students are compared as an overall group to the public school students, the private schools have higher math means, but when each group is broken down into one of four SES quartiles, the researchers saw higher means for the public schools within each quartile.

How is that possible, you may ask? Well, I haven't seen their data, but I can easily think of one way this could happen. The situation of getting opposite results when using aggregated vs. disaggregated data has been researched for about 40 years and is known as Simpson's Paradox.

Let's start with the assumption that more of the private school kids are wealthy, and more of the public school kids are poor. Thus, if we had 285 kids from each type of school, the quartile sample sizes might break down as follows:

What we see here is that we have more of the private school students in the high SES, and many fewer in the lower two SES groups. So let's say that these are the means we see:

Note that, at each quartile, the public schools do better. But because there are more private school students at the high SES quartiles that have higher mean scores, if I just aggregate across all 285 students in each school group, I end up with a public school mean of 90.84, and a private school mean of 91.63. Thus, at the aggregate level, it looks like private schools do better because private schools have more of the higher performers. The problem here is the disparate sample sizes in the SES groups; the overall picture doesn't reveal that the SES breakdowns within school type are very different.

Even though my example above is just one possible way that the research results could be explained, in general, disaggregating the data are a good idea in this type of analysis. It's also good that the authors caution that this is not a longitudinal study, nor does it tell you what would happen with any particular student who switched schools. It does suggest that the public schools might not be doing as poor a job as some have thought.

(P.S. - If anyone has any idea how to get rid of the gap that's appearing before each table, let me know. I couldn't get rid of it.)

Blurring the line

The Education Wonks link to a fascinating Wall Street Journal on the possible obsolescence of middle schools. It seems that keeping kids in a K-8 elementary school might produce higher test scores and better attitudes towards school in general. And Philadelphia is currently in the process of doing away with many of its middle schools:

The School District of Philadelphia is in the midst of a five-year plan to do away with many of its middle schools -- reducing the number to 21 from 36 by 2008 -- and increase the number of K-8s to 137 from the current 61. The district's chief executive, Paul Vallas, says the district was emboldened by research and anecdotes from other school districts that pointed to the benefits of K-8 grade configurations. Particularly troublesome in Philadelphia was the noticeable decline in test scores after students graduated from elementary schools, which mostly went through the fifth grade. "Sixth-grade test scores were always our lowest," Mr. Vallas says.

Now, an analysis of standardized test scores from 2000 to 2003 shows that reading and math scores are consistently higher for eighth-grade students enrolled in some of Philadelphia's new K-8 schools compared with those in traditional middle schools. The average reading score for K-8 students was 1218 in 2003 compared with 1146 for students in middle school. Also, Mr. Vallas says, K-8 schools have higher attendance rates and fewer incidents of student discipline than do their middle-school counterparts.

Some critics believe that this means helpless first-graders will be bullied by older students. But the potential for bullying exists in any school, and I wonder if the bullying aspect is part of the problem for sixth-graders who suddenly find themselves among seventh- and eighth-graders.

An edublogger hits the big time

Joanne's book is now on Amazon! I'll be putting in an order soon, and if you're at all interested in charter schools, you should do the same.

Getting it in Georgia

Twenty-five public schools in Georgia have been named No Excuses schools.

The No Excuses Schools that beat the odds include 21 elementary schools, three middle schools and one high school. Atlanta Public Schools dominates the list, with 10 elementary schools among the 25 No Excuses Schools. That includes the high-achieving Capitol View Elementary, where 98 percent of students met or exceeded standards in spite of a poverty rate of 89 percent.

Three guesses as to how No Excuses schools view standardized tests, and the first two don't count.

The No Excuses project has identified seven common traits in low-income schools that excel:

Principals are free.
Principals use measurable goals to foster achievement.
Master teachers bring out the best in a faculty.
Rigorous and regular testing testing are used to improve student performance.
Achievement is the key to discipline.
Principals work with parents to make the home a center of learning.
Effort creates ability.

Emphasis mine. If you haven't read the report, "No Excuses: Lessons From 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools," go do so. It's an easy read that will leave you with the realization that some educators actually get it. Go visit the Capitol View Elementary School webpage, too. The curriculum (such as this one for the third-grade year) looks delightful.

Desperate in Denver

Hmm, so slashing the pay for substitute teachers results in...a huge dearth of substitute teachers. Who would have thought?

Denver Public Schools is asking parents to fill in as substitute teachers. The school district said it's so short of subs that it's writing to parents in hopes that they'll step in. The shortage comes after daily pay for substitutes was cut from $120 to $81.

School officials say substitutes do not need teaching experience, just a college degree and a special certificate, which can be obtained.

Better yet, why don't those parents just homeschool? I mean, if you knew that your school was willing to let anyone with a degree and a certificate sub your kid, and that they were only going to pay them 81 bucks, and the school is trying to get you to sub your kid to boot - why not just eliminate the middleman altogether? Then you wouldn't have to follow all these guidelines, either.

Good news for Cleveland

Cleveland's miserable high school graduation appears to have improved considerably, and Jay Greene thinks he knows why:

When a Plain Dealer reporter asked me about the increase earlier this month, I said the numbers should be treated "with some healthy skepticism." I hadn't heard of a district making such rapid improvement in graduation rates...But I've updated my estimate for Cleveland's graduation rate, and found, I'm embarrassed to admit, that my skepticism was unwarranted. There does appear to be a large gain in graduation rates in recent years. According to my method of independently estimating graduation rates, Cleveland went from a 28 percent graduation rate for the class of 1998 to a 29 percent rate in 2000 and then jumped to 45 percent in 2002, the most recent year for which I can compute results. The improvement appears to be real.

...Cleveland began at such a low point that rapid improvement might have been somewhat easier. In 1998, Cleveland had the lowest graduation rate by far among large school districts nationwide...Second, Cleveland is home to a significant voucher program that may have placed pressure on the district to improve its quality...Third, the state takeover of Cleveland's schools may have been exactly the shock the district needed to turn itself around.

Cleveland, in essence, had nowhere to go but up, and two serious shakeups seem to have helped immensely. The national high school graduation rate is 71%; Ohio is actually above average, at 78%. So how did Cleveland get so bad to begin with?

One site, Catalyst For Cleveland Schools, claims the city lacks the " 'community pillars' like churches, large businesses and economically diverse schools" that other cities have. News station WCPN notes the following:

Cleveland ranked near the bottom in a number of categories - children who are disabled, who suffer from lead poisoning, and who live in poverty.

FairTest, not surprisingly, puts some of the blame on the Ohio graduation exit exam. What FairTest doesn't address is why students in Cleveland can't be expected to pass the items on this exam by the time they've completed 12 years of public schooling (caveat: this is the current version, not what might have been in place in 1995).

Sample reading item (following an approximately 540-word-count length essay entitle, "How The Turtle Got Her Shell"):

How do the emotions of the turtle change from before she discovers
her jewels are lost to after she realizes this fact?
A. joyful to spiteful
B. distressed to jovial
C. depressed to mirthful
D. cheerful to sorrowful

Sample math item (I've had to spell out mathematical notation):

The table below shows values for x and y.
x y
0 –1
1 0
2 3
3 8
4 15
5 24

A. y = x - 1
B. y = x + 19
C. y = x-squared - 1
D. y = 2(x-squared) - 5

Given that this exam is currently in place, yet Cleveland's graduation rates have nearly doubled, I'd say that, despite testing critics claims, the exam doesn't seem to be where the problem lay.

Where in the world are our geography standards?

American high-schoolers tend to fare poorly when faced with geography questions, and the nation's geography teachers want to do something about it:

A Roper poll commissioned by the National Geographic Society several years ago found that just 13 percent of Americans between the age of 18 and 24, or one in seven, could find Iraq on a map, and 83 percent could not locate Afghanistan...As a result of this survey and similar reports, nonprofit organizations have taken up the cause of trying to improve Americans' awareness of geography and its importance; those people most concerned include some of the country's dedicated teachers... Ms. Bednarz sees an improvement in younger students' awareness but remains concerned, she says, "about general public ignorance." Being able to name, spell and locate places correctly, she says, is only a small part of the field of geography that often gets filed away in school curricula under a social studies label. Context and connections are geography's meat and potatoes. Geographers pride themselves on being connectors whose major task is studying relationships between people and places...

...[Ms. Bednarz] admits it was discouraging to find that only 20 percent of her college geography class last semester could find Thailand on a map or locate the site of the earthquake that triggered the tsunami.

(Via the Gadfly.)

More reason to worry

From the National Center for Education Statistics (a fabulous resource, I should note) comes a profile of the American high school sophomore, circa 2002. The results? Not too wonderful.

Oh, sure, over half of the sample of 15,362 students are playing sports, and the majority had positive views of their schools. Eighty-eight percent feel safe at school. Most felt well-informed about school rules. And they're ambitious - 81.9% felt they would complete at least some college classes in their lifetime; over half thought they would earn at least a four-year degree.

As the Gadfly notes, though, those ambitions don't exactly square with reality:

There is...quite a lot [of information] about their reading and math prowess based on a specially tailored test. That test gauged reading proficiency at three different levels and math skills at five levels. The news is not good. While most tenth graders possess very basic skills, the percentage who can read at the level of "simple inference" is less than half and the fraction that can handle "intermediate level" math concepts (and formulate "multi-step solutions to word problems") is just one in five. Yet when asked about their educational aspirations, 72 percent expect to graduate from a four-year college and half expect to earn a graduate degree. Talk about a major mismatch between hope and reality.

He's not kidding. Quotes from the report:

[In reading] Under half (46 percent) of 10th-graders were at level 2 (ability to make relatively simple inferences beyond the author’s main thought and/or understand and evaluate abstract concepts). Eight percent of sophomores were able to demonstrate mastery at level 3 (ability to make complex inferences or evaluative judgments that require piecing together multiple sources of nformation from the passage). (p 92-93)

Sophomores reported spending approximately 10 hours per week on homework in all subjects, 5 hours in school and 6 hours outside of school (table 18). Of this total, students spent about 5 hours weekly on mathematics homework and about 4 hours on English homework...most differences in the time spent on homework overall were due to differences in the time spent on homework outside of school. (p. 106)

About two-thirds (67 percent) could perform simple operations with decimals, fractions, powers, and roots...At level 4, one-fifth (20 percent) were proficient, that is, could understand intermediate-level mathematical concepts and/or demonstrate ability to formulate multistep solutions to word problems. Level 5 involves solving complex multistep word problems and mastery of material found in advanced mathematics courses...just 1 percent of sophomores were proficient at level 5. (p.125)

...over one-third of sophomores expected that a 4-year college degree would be their highest degree (36 percent), another 20 percent planned to obtain a master’s degree, and about one in six anticipated receiving an advanced
degree, such as a Ph.D. (16 percent). (p. 155)

Results disaggregated by race are even less cheerful:

For example, among sophomores who expected to complete at least a 4-year degree, at reading level 2 (simple inference), 31 percent of Blacks, 35 percent of Hispanics, and 65 percent of Whites were proficient. Among sophomores who expected to complete at least a 4-year degree, at level 4 of mathematics (intermediate concepts), 6 percent of Blacks and 12 percent of Hispanics, contrasted to 33 percent of Whites, were proficient.

You read that right. Some kids who expect to get a four-year degree are no further along in reading - by 10th grade - than "show[ing] mastery of simple reading comprehension, including reproduction of detail and/or the author’s main thought," and no further along in math than "perform[ing] simple problem solving that involved the understanding of low-level mathematical concepts."

Update: I've listed this post on Wizbang's Carnival of the Trackbacks. This is a regular post on Wizbang on which readers can list any posts they want in the trackbacks; go check it out and see what Wizbang's readers think is essential reading for the week.

Teacher unhappiness in the UK

Doesn't sound like things are going too well on the other side of the pond:

Nearly half of the country's secondary school teachers have suffered mental health problems due to worsening pupil behaviour, a survey has revealed. The research, by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, on 300 secondary school teachers, showed that abuse at the hands of pupils had left 46 per cent taking antidepressants or facing long lay-offs from school through stress.

One teacher told researchers he had been assaulted 10 times during 18 years in the profession and had suffered two breakdowns. He said he had been on antidepressants for more than three years as a result.

The survey also revealed that 72 per cent of teachers had considered quitting their jobs because they were worn out by some pupils' persistent disruptive behaviour...One in seven (14 per cent) said they had suffered actually bodily harm from pupils. However, in many of the cases, the school had turned a blind eye to abuse and failed to exclude the pupils involved.

I'm wondering how this sample was chosen. Was it random? Or were inner-city schools more likely to be chosen? Also, the article mentions 300 teachers researched, but does that mean 300 surveys were returned? Out of how many sent out? Certainly, an emotional topic like this could have produced quite a self-selection effect, if only the teachers who are completely fed up with things were the most likely to respond.

Interestingly, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers have voted, at their annual conference, to oppose the idea of 200 private academies being set up to replace inner-city schools. The ATL claims that the public sector could run these new private academies, but at the same time they claim their hands are tied in dealing with their own students. It sounds like they view the suggestion of private academies as a way for the best students to be siphoned off, while the problems with public schools go untreated.

Shining at the bees

Spelling bees are on the rise:

The Lincoln School Committee dropped the bee initially because of concerns that it was damaging to children who lost and it did not meet the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Parents argued that the bee taught good study habits and provided students who might not excel in sports or theater a place to shine in front of their peers.

Many people in education agree, which may be contributing to the bee's sustained growth despite budget woes that have landed many extracurricular activities on the chopping block. "Spelling bees can boost self-esteem and help students reach high standards," said Ed Walsh, deputy press secretary at the U.S. Department of Education. "We want schools to incorporate creative ways to teach students"...

"It makes me feel proud," said Adelaine Arias, 13, of Providence. Arias, who speaks Spanish at home, represented Springfield Middle School in the Rhode Island statewide spelling bee this month. "Even if you don't win, you've learned a lot"...

...Since [1994], spelling bees have been the focus of the Academy Award-nominated documentary "Spellbound" and the current off-Broadway musical hit "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee."

The National Spelling Bee has a cute logo. And does anyone else find it amusing that English is such a crazy language that our spelling bees are the mental equivalents of Ironman competitions?

Take those beads off and sharpen your pencil!

Some Louisiana students will soon be celebrating. While students in other states will be struggling this time next spring with state standardized tests or the SAT, St. Bernard parish plans to give its students an entire week off for Mardi Gras:

At a meeting of the St. Bernard Parish School Board's general committee this week, Associate Superintendent Bev Lawrason said a group of administrators and school employees have recommended three school calendar options for employees to consider but that all three call for an entire week of vacation for Carnival, instead of the traditional three-day holiday...

Lawrason said school officials are concerned about higher absenteeism among students and employees on school days after Mardi Gras and the effect it has on schools' scores under the state accountability program...In the past, she said, students had standardized testing in the week after Mardi Gras. School officials thought it was wiser for students to return to school, even if only for two days, to get them back into a school mood before the tests began.

Now the tests are given later in the year, and next year there will be two full weeks between Mardi Gras week and standardized testing, she said...Another factor is the decrease in attendance on the Thursday and Friday after Mardi Gras, she said. This year, student attendance dropped 4 percent compared with normal attendance for those two days, she said.

Employee absenteeism rates weren't discussed at the meeting.

Heh.

Birds + Bees - Morals = Sex Ed

"The birds and the bees" have become "the vegetables and the non-traditional families."

The Montgomery County [Md.] public sachool system yesterday announced the three high schools and three middle schools that will participate in a pilot program for a sex education curriculum that has riled some parents and activist groups throughout the county. Bethesda Chevy-Chase High School in Bethesda, Seneca Valley High School in Germantown and Springbrook High School in Silver Spring will take part in the high school course in which 10th-graders will be shown how to put condoms on cucumbers.

Martin Luther King Middle School in Germantown, Tilden Middle School in Rockville and White Oak Middle School in Silver Spring will participate in the middle school curriculum in which eighth-graders will learn that homosexual couples are the newest American family. School system officials have noted that some schools were unenthusiastic about testing the new curriculum, which also will teach students to "develop" a sexual identity...

This is interesting enough, but this quote near the end really caught my eye:

"I think it's great. It sounds like a representative sample," said Christine Grewell, a parent and organizer for Teach the Facts.org (TTF), which backs the curriculum...TTF and other curriculum supporters say the new course introduces information about homosexuality that students will find out regardless of whether they are taught about it. They have said morality has no place in the debate.

1. If student will find out about these things, regardless of whether they're taught, why teach them?
2. Why doesn't morality have a place in the debate? Is that because these programs don't consider themselves capable of addressing that, or because they want to present the idea that sex and morality can be completely separated?
3. Why is the procedure of putting a condom on a cucumber considered a "fact?" Is this just an admission that the public school system is producing kids who won't be able to read condom package inserts when they get older?
4. Why do these programs assume that the same parents who are wholly responsible for teaching morality are also incapable of teaching these "facts?"

This particular quote from TeachTheFacts.org is stunning:

Across the nation and in our own back yard, religious extremists are attempting to impose individual religious beliefs on all of our children, and to dictate what our children learn about themselves, their bodies, and about the people around them.

Um, isn't that actually, "religious extremists" are trying to control what their children learn? How did all of their children become TTF's children?

TTF also has a "vigilance" blog, which links to the eighth- and tenth-grade curriculums. I note with interest that TTF, which apparently said morality has no place in this debate, supports an eighth-grade program covering the following:

* Explore how cultural and family values affect relationships and marriage * Explore the effect of family stress and divorce on the family and society * Analyze the influence of peer pressure and other factors on an individual's decisions regarding sexual behavior * Analyze consequences of sexual activity * Discuss how family values, culture, religious views, and other factors influence family planning

Morality-free discussions of the influences and consequences of sexual behavior and family planning? Good luck with that.

Update: This was left in the comments section:

Kimberly,

Most intelligent people recognize that not all of what they read in the media is true. [Which is why I used the word "allegedly," but never mind.] Sometimes, you hear reports about aliens being spotted in supermarkets. The quote about morality attributed to TTF, has about as much factual basis as those alien "sighting". The report, made that up.

I do apologize for undermining your argument. Have a great day.

Maryam Balbed
Co-founder, TeachTheFacts.org

Carnival # 5

The latest edition of the Carnival of Education is up, and there are lots of good links there. The Education Wonks are doing a great job with this feature.

A tale of two schools

This compare-and-contrast discussion of two Indiana schools highlights one of the most obvious disparities in testing attitudes (I'm quoting paragraphs here out of order to make my point):

Indian Creek and Crestview -- the best and worst performing schools in Lawrence Township on the statewide exam -- highlight the difficulties faced by teachers and administrators, said Jan Combs, the district's director of primary education. "The schools with high test scores tend to have a limited amount of diversity," she said.

The standardized test scores are one of many indicators that show students in poverty need more help learning, she said. Test scores, particularly for ISTEP-Plus, have taken on a life of their own, she said...

At Indian Creek, Dennie Brooks tries to ignore standardized tests. "ISTEP is not the major event of our school year," he said. Teachers teach the curriculum, which includes all of the standards tested on the state test, Brooks said. But the school spends little time preparing students for ISTEP-Plus and instead focuses on good teaching, he said.

Many anti-testing advocates take statements like those of Brooks and try to generalize to the population at large, but I don't think you can generalize these statements. A school that's doing great - and doesn't have many special-needs students or high turnover - can afford to be cavalier about testing; in fact, the high test scores result in part from good teaching of the curriculum. Low-performing schools live and die by the test scores, and often focus explicitly on teaching to the test. Sometimes this helps those scores rise, and sometimes it just highlights the fact that teachers aren't teaching much of anything except what's on the test, and may not be teaching that material very well, either.

Long story short - Indian Creek can afford to be cavalier about tests, and Crestview cannot. This seems like common sense to me, yet you'll often see anti-testing types (often in well-funded schools) trying to abolish tests for all schools, when those test scores are essential benchmarks for the low performers.

The chicken or the egg

In the Valley Patriot (whose website hurts my eyes), Sandra Stotsky asks whether it's the math teachers or the math programs that are the problem.

A November 8 editorial in the Boston Globe, for example, noted the “collective groans” of over 100 Boston teachers attending a weekend retreat when the name of their K-5 math program was brought up. Like many school systems using a NSF-supported program, it was introduced into the system by a top-down administrative decision, with little teacher input.

Among other limitations, according to the deputy superintendent of teaching and learning in the Boston schools, it leaves Boston’s students without the strong computational skills needed for higher level mathematics courses (and for which calculators are not a substitute). Not only must their teachers figure out how to supplement the program’s deficiencies, they must also take massive, never-ending professional development and—to rub more salt into the wounds—have coaches...

It does not seem fair to hold teachers accountable for results on tests that are slanted towards the very math programs many of these teachers seem to find so problematic.

Harassment and voluntary segregation

Well, it'll be fascinating to see if any cliques/hierarchies evolve in this school:

Ashley Werner does not mince words when describing her experience as a lesbian at Milwaukee's Pulaski High School. Ashley Werner, 17, a junior at Pulaski High School, talks to friend J. Botsford, a Marquette University student. Werner says she is often teased and ridiculed at school because she is a lesbian "If you are even remotely different, (the students) harass and make fun of you," Werner said. The 17-year-old junior said she is teased, called names and singled out almost every day...

Werner hopes her situation will improve next year. She plans to attend the Alliance School, a charter high school that will focus on students who feel discriminated against or bullied. That might be a Goth student, a painfully shy student or a gay one. All three have enrolled in the school, which plans to open in August. The school will be the first of its kind in the state, and possibly the nation, its founders say.

Fascinating (though it's similar to Harvey Milk in NYC). Thoughts that spring to mind:

(1) Doesn't anyone feel weird that it's the kids who were bullied who are having to change schools? Isn't this a safety valve that keeps the schools with bullies from having to improve their situation?
(2) Isn't it possible that some of the misfits might not approve of the other misfits? For one thing, I can see where a kid who is extremely religious might not approve of a lesbian, but both might feel enough outside the mainstream to attend this school.
(3) Isn't it possible that the small size of the school - only 100 students - in and of itself will create a less harassing atmosphere, rather than the fact that all 100 students consider themselves misfits?
(4) Mightn't this create a slippery slope towards "separate but equal," and a future where anyone who is different can just be told that they'll go to a school "for their kind?"

Bear in mind I'm speaking as someone who was very conscious of being a misfit in school, although the overt harassment had stopped by the time I entered high school. An alternative school might have done me worlds of good, though who's to say that my high-school peers (who were forced to treat me civilly) didn't benefit more from my sticking around?

This seems like a related topic.

And, for the record, "goth" should not be capitalized unless you're referring to the Sicilians during the Middle Ages.

The ethics of choosing schools

Via Joanne Jacobs, a great post at This Week In Education about the ethics of senior teachers refusing to teach at poverty-stricken schools, framed as a debate between a hypothetical union leader and superintendent. I have to admit, I've never thought of teachers as being like firefighters - who don't get to choose what fires to put out - but if that's really the mindset of some school superintendents, that would explain a lot.

Dreaming of literacy

The San Francisco Bay Guardian wonders whether the recent "Dream Schools" are living up to their names. Readers will appreciate the information in this thorough and balanced article - but may also be shocked by the low levels of student proficiency:

JUST OVER A year ago the San Francisco Unified School District launched its Dream Schools Initiative, which is intended to transform floundering inner-city schools into college prep academies on par with the most exclusive private schools. Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, who, sources said, takes the success of the program very personally, announced that the first three Dream Schools would open in the long-neglected Bayview in August 2004. Eventually 15 of the least desirable schools in the city, Ackerman said, would be rejuvenated with longer hours, a highly structured academic program, uniforms, field trips, and even the art classes that are so rare in public schools today...

...staffers and parents are beginning to paint a more nuanced picture that exposes how challenging it can be to reform a neglected school. Almost everyone who's been close to the reform effort acknowledges that it's been exhausting and often confounding. Some voice deep concerns about aspects of the program. Yet for every critic, there is an enthusiastic supporter who believes that in spite of the challenges, the Dream Schools program could truly rehabilitate the educational opportunities in this African American sector and, eventually, throughout the entire southeast part of town.

Sounds good so far, right? But listen to what one critic has to say:

Jayson Matthews was already working at 21st Century Academy when the school was chosen to become a Dream School. When he first heard about the program, he was thrilled...

Matthews's biggest gripe was the fact that most of the extra afternoon class time was devoted to rote, scripted learning exercises he says did little for the sixth graders he was teaching. "It would be like, 'Turn to page five, put your finger on the word the,' " he said. " 'Say the with me: The, the, the.' " Matthews doesn't blame the district or the Dream Schools program entirely for the stifling curriculum, but rather the current nationwide emphasis on preparing students for standardized tests. Still, he said the practice of "teaching to the test" increased once 21st Century became a Dream School.

Okay, if I have this right, this teacher - who's obviously very devoted - is blaming the nationwide obsession with tests on the fact that tutorials had to be developed for sixth-graders to teach them how to read and say the word, "the?" I'm confused. Either the curriculum is set way too low - and should be ramped up - or Matthews is blaming tests for the fact that these kids got to the sixth grade without being able to read three-letter words.

If they need that much help reading the word "the" when they're on the brink of puberty, the tests aren't the problem.

Tinkering with the selection process

An interesting editorial in the Chicago Tribune, mirrored at Civilrights.org:

Chicago Public Schools should set aside up to 20 percent of slots at each of the city's eight selective-enrollment high schools for students with abilities not measured by standardized tests or grades, an outside panel has urged.

Striving for racial and ethnic diversity in the schools should remain a goal, the group said. But other factors such as a student's leadership qualities, athletic ability or community service also should be considered during the application process. Students also could be selected if they show academic potential despite family difficulties, a language barrier or attending an underperforming school.

Twenty percent. That's not a small number. And for what? Leadership ability is all well and good, but if the academic ability is not there, how does the slot benefit that child more than it benefits a more able child? Or are all of these code words for trying to make the school more "diverse"? Community service is very nice, but it's absurd to suggest that community service makes one more prepared for harder coursework.

I have no problem with a selective school using criteria other than standardized tests for admissions. But I do have a problem when a school chooses to use test scores in admissions, and outside forces descend to tinker with that formula simply because it doesn't produce the "diversity" that some consider important.

And tinkering is exactly what is going on here:

Duncan formed the 13-member group in September to examine whether race should still be considered when enrolling students into magnet or selective-enrollment schools....

Ensuring that students who are still learning English and students with disabilities have equal access to selective-enrollment testing

I have no problem with outreach and publicizing of important information. No student should miss their chance to attend this school just because Mom and Dad missed the deadline. These suggested changes are very important. But I'm still leery of those who consider it "segregation" when the "correct" racial breakdowns don't ensue following test-based or grades-based admissions.

Bad ideas in school

Someone at the Washington Times is ticked off about the state of public education:

Any parent with a child in a public school has likely discovered our education system is little more than a means by which liberals indoctrinate children with socialist ideology. If this seems a radical assertion, I assure you it is not. In fact, examples abound indicating its accuracy.

Ever heard of social promotion? This egalitarian concept is standard procedure at most public schools, where students are promoted from one grade to the next regardless of academic aptitude. It practically takes an act of Congress to retain failing students these days, lest we give them the impression they are responsible for their accomplishments.

I think the "community property" charge is the least serious, though it might be the most upsetting to some kids. I agree, though, that the expectations that good students should be expected to mentor others, and failing kids should do well after social promotion, are products of flawed ideology, not reality.

Failing in Florida

Unhappiness in the Sunshine State:

Florida schools rank among the worst in the nation in teacher salaries and college funding, according to a new report aimed at improving the state's education. The Constitutional Accountability Commission report said state schools are above-average only in third-grade reading and in the number of students returning for a second year at community colleges.

The amount Florida spends per student is 45th among the nation. Florida is also behind in teacher salary and funding of colleges, the panel members concluded.

Can't find the report online. Does this report actually criticize educational achievements in a meaningful way - or is it just a "give us more money" effort?

Why the surprise?

Via Joanne Jacobs, we see a light bulb go on above the head of formerly-skeptical educational consultant Tim DeRoche:

As recently as this past year, I would have told you that the standards and accountability movement was a necessary evil. It was necessary that we raise our expectations for poor and minority students. It was necessary that we make student-achievement data public. It was necessary that we use test results to weed out incompetent or unmotivated teachers.

The districts that we visited were the finalists for the 2004 Broad Prize for Urban Education, given annually to a high-performing district that shows overall gains in student achievement while also closing achievement gaps...I was most astounded by what we heard from classroom teachers. Almost unanimously, they told us that standards and testing have made their jobs both more rigorous and more rewarding. Specifically, they mentioned that the new focus on results fosters more collaboration...

On the one hand - good for him. On the other hand, I want to tear my hair out over the fact that in this day and age, an intelligent educator can be so surprised at the idea that objective standards as measured by standardized exams can be so useful. He is astonished that teachers like clear standards and meaningful feedback on student progress. He is amazed that tests of basic skills don't hamper the development of higher-order thinking and creative lesson plans.

I'm happy his eyes are open, but I'm still frustrated by the prevailing knee-jerk anti-testing ideology that closed his eyes in the first place.

The issue of merit pay

Andrea Neal suggests that merit pay should be given a chance in Indiana schools:

Raise the possibility of merit pay for teachers and the gut reaction of many – most members of the teachers union – is negative. As one 30-year educator from Muncie wrote me after last week’s column on this subject, “Basing teacher pay on performance just doesn’t work as long as human beings are involved.”

This fascinates me. Why are teachers expected to be so different from those in most other professions, where salary is tied to some measure of quality of work? There's nothing inherent in education that prevents schools from measuring, somehow, how well teachers do in the classroom. I constantly hear teachers going on about how important it is to "make a difference" in children's lives, yet there's this overwhelming resistance to assessing just how much of a difference teachers can make.

The Teacher Advancement Program developed by the Milken Family Foundation offers a comprehensive assessment of teachers - and doesn't leave out the areas of training:

The Teacher Advancement Program doesn’t merely tie student test scores to teacher salary; it is a comprehensive effort to make teachers better, says its executive director Lewis C. Solmon. Its four main ingredients are:

Performance-based pay. TAP ends the current single salary schedule in which all teachers get the same pay based on degrees and years of experience. Instead, it rewards teachers for roles and responsibilities, performance in the classroom, and gains made by their students (not passage rates) as demonstrated by standardized test scores.

The idea of merit pay is gaining steam, and it looks like California is set to be the next big battleground.

Setting some standards for high school

Stephen at Cold Spring Shops wonders if college students can sue high schools for malpractice:

I'm finishing a stack of blue books. There were sufficiently many spelling errors that I posted the following announcement on the class website.

Editorial comment: can these students sue their high schools for malpractice?

Stephen's not the only one to think that these kids weren't taught enough in high school (via Joanne Jacobs):

Citing the paltry skills of many high school graduates, the nation's governors are calling for more rigorous standards and harder exams than states have already imposed, often with considerable difficulty.

Indeed, more than 4 in 10 public high school students who manage to graduate are unprepared for either college courses or anything beyond an entry-level job, the governors reported, requiring billions of dollars in remedial training to endow them with the skills "they should have attained in high school."

Sadly, part of the problem is the objection to any sort of set of objective standards for high school students:

When Mr. Warner looked at the exit exams of 13 other states in 2003...he said that nine of those "that talked tough about high stakes had retreated and pulled back from their consequences." In that light, getting states to adopt an even stricter curriculum than they already have, and then possibly denying diplomas to those who have failed to master it may not be easy.

"The idea of consequences, and sticking to your guns about it, that is still is very controversial," Mr. Warner said.

Sad, but true.

Starting earlier with G&T education

NYC's DOE wants to make some major changes to the city's gifted and talented program, and the skeptics are coming out of the woodwork:

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced last Wednesday that the Department of Education will make sweeping changes to gifted and talented programs for elementary school students beginning in September. In addition to adding several new programs, the DOE will develop a standardized admissions test for kindergarten and first grade students by September 2007 and improve professional development for teachers...

According to the DOE, the admissions test will be developed with the help of experts outside the education department and will measure verbal, nonverbal and spatial skills. Until the test is ready, programs will continue to use existing criteria, which vary from school to school.

I'll be very interested to see what happens with this. The city's planned exam sounds like it could be very similar to one IQ test for young children, the WPPSI-III, which I don't believe is "an accident waiting to happen." These tests can, however, be confusing; this guide is extremely informative and helpful (it's written for parents with learning-disabled kids, but the same material would be helpful for parents of gifted youngsters).

We see again the old argument about how the kids who pull ahead are disadvantaging those left behind:

While many parents are supportive of the gifted and talented concept and want programs to be expanded, others wonder if the term is applied too freely. Because of such programs, they say, a large number of above-average students have been pulled out of neighborhood schools. “If you take all the children who are on the upper end of the spectrum out of their zoned schools, it just makes the zoned schools worse,” said one Flushing parent, who declined to give her name.

A number of teachers also expressed reservations about expanding the programs, if it means that other students will be left behind. “When classes are heterogeneous, it can bring the lower-level students up,” said Lucy Evans, a music teacher at PS 164 in Flushing. “What about the other children? I don’t think the others should be left behind.”

It depends on whether you think the gifted children should be in school for the express purpose of helping the less-gifted. If you don't think that - and you should be entirely free to think that, even in public education - then it's not fair to the gifted students to keep them in a slower classroom.

Letting parents choose, but only if they make the right choice

Babealicious RightWingSparkle thinks that legislators in Lincoln, Nebraska, are trying to engineer their preferred ethnic makeup for local schools:

Dick Eisenhauer is tired of watching white families take their children out of the schools in his Nebraska district and enroll them in smaller, outlying ones where there are virtually no poor or Hispanic students. Like many of Nebraska's school systems, the Lexington district where Eisenhauer is superintendent has seen an influx of Hispanics, largely because of jobs at the meatpacking plants, and an accompanying exodus of white students to public elementary schools just outside town.

The situation in Lexington and elsewhere in Nebraska has caught the attention of the state Legislature, which is considering a bill to thwart what some say amounts to legal segregation in the schools. The proposal would force the outlying elementary-only schools to merge with larger kindergarten-through-12th-grade districts. That could mean the closing of the smaller schools.

So let me get this straight. In Nebraska, it is completely legal for parents to choose where to send their kids to school. So parents - most white, some not - are exercising that choice and driving their kids further out to suburban elementary schools; schools that, by the way, are completely open to any kids. There's nothing stopping any parent from sending their kids to the suburban schools. In-town schools and suburban schools - all parents have a choice.

But because the results are not politically correct, state legislators want to do away with that choice. There's really no other explanation for it, is there? And what sort of article would this be without inflammatory statements about the parents who are exercising their legal choice?

Cecilia Huerta, director of the state's Mexican-American Commission, said other Nebraska communities with large numbers of Hispanics are likely to have the same situation. "People in Lexington and Schuyler do not want their kids being polluted by Latin Americans and Hispanics," Huerta said. "They think they're not going to get the quality of education if they have a diverse classroom."

Parents are moving their kids because they want them to be in a small school instead of one that is massively overcrowded.

Chris Dvorak, a white parent who has two children who attend a school outside Schuyler, said she sent her children there to avoid overcrowding in town, not to get away from Hispanics. "I would have done the same thing if they were all white kids," Dvorak said.

There are 45 students enrolled at Dvorak's children's school, compared with more than 850 at Schuyler Grade School.

This is the part that galls me the most:

Some senators are afraid the state will face legal challenges if the Legislature does not stop the trend toward separate white and Hispanic schools. "It is unconscionable," said the bill's sponsor, Sen. Ron Raikes.

What? There is nothing official that is keeping the schools segregated. Any parent who wants to drive their kid to an outlying school can do so. What's the legal challenge here? That it should be illegal for parents to choose when they don't make the "right" choice? What's unconscionable is that legislators think it's their place to put a stop to parents exercising legal school choice just because they don't like the ethnic breakdown that res