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California School for the Deaf's cheerleading team made the USA High School Spirit Nationals. They didn't win. But that was OK. They took their loss as a sign that they'd been judged like everyone else. Here's the San Jose Mercury News story:

They danced. They twirled. They leaped. They counted the beats in their heads and relied on visual cues to stay in sync with the music. They held up three posters: C-S-D! instead of shouting the name of their school.

That's when the audience rose from their seats, rooting along with the squad -- a cheerleader's ultimate raison d'etre. The teens couldn't hear the shouts. But they saw from the audience's throats and open mouths that they were making sounds. Everyone noticed the standing ovation.

The judges admired their enthusiasm and energy but said the deaf cheerleaders needed to improve their execution and choreography.

Shock was the first reaction when the judge announced that the Fremont school didn't make the finals. The cheerleaders looked at each other in disbelief, stunned. They asked their coaches, who were interpreting the results, to repeat in sign language what the judge said.

But after a few moments relief set in.

(Erin) Ross put it this way: "I felt OK. I felt this was true. That no one pitied us.''

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March 31, 2004

Universal means low-quality

Universal pre-school is the coming fad. High-cost, high-quality pre-schools help poor children do better in school and in life. But when it comes to subsidized pre-schools for all children, the record of success is murkier, reports the Boston Globe.

For example, a recent study of Oklahoma's statewide program to provide preschool for 4-year-olds found large benefits for children poor enough to qualify for a subsidized or free school lunch, and almost none for children who could afford to pay full price.

Hispanic children boosted their test scores by 54 percent in one year, probably because they learned English. Black children improved by 17 percent. There was no detectable difference for white children.

The problem with the research, said David Blau, a professor of economics at the University of North Carolina and author of "The Child Care Problem," is that it focuses on very high-cost, high-quality programs unlikely to be duplicated in a broad public system. "What we don't know," he said, "is whether, if you scale it down, you get proportionally smaller but similar kinds of benefits. If you cut the costs in half, do you get half the benefits? Or is there some threshold before you get benefits?"

Blau is right on target. Head Start and state-funded pre-schools for the poor rarely provide a high-quality program; it costs too much, even for a small group. "Universal" pre-school inevitably would be the sort of program that duplicates what happens in middle-class homes and isn't intensive enough to help truly disadvantaged children.

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The talking cure

Talking is "the anti-drug," says a new study. But warnings about drugs and alcohol won't have any effect unless parents have a long history of talking to their children, and listening to their mundane problems.

Teenagers who thought their parent wasn't listening, or taking his or her concerns seriously, were far more likely to turn to dangerous substances. The parental plea that they not do so was not taken seriously by the teen.

"I think what happens is if the parents show the teenagers that when an issue comes up, it's OK to withdraw and not really talk about it, teenagers pick up on that and they see that as a legitimate way to deal with an issue," (University of Illinois Professor John Caughlin says. "They will turn around and do the same thing to the parents."

Ignore your kids, and they'll ignore you.

I also suggest teaching kids to think about the consequences of their actions when they're toddlers.

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March 30, 2004

Nothing succeeds like failure

On the New York Times op-ed page, teacher Marlene Heath eloquently defends Chicago's policy of holding back students who can't read. Heath, now a reading specialist at an all-poverty school on the South Side, was skeptical when Mayor Richard Daley ended social promotion in 1995. Now she says it's been a boon to students and teachers.

Only 26 percent of our elementary students were able to meet national norms on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills in reading in 1995. That number is now 41 percent. At Beethoven (School) alone, reading comprehension jumped to 46 percent last year from 22 percent in 1997.

About 48 percent of Chicago public school students tested in the lowest quarter nationally before social promotion ended. Now that number is half of what it was. The high school drop-out rate, which was nearly 17 percent in 1995, is now at 13 percent, while the graduation rate has steadily climbed.

But the students who have come through my classrooms over the last 14 years offer the most convincing evidence that retention is one of the best things we can do for a child who needs that extra year to develop literacy skills. I began teaching sixth graders in 1992, and shortly after social promotion ended, I began to see students who were much better prepared. This new caliber of students allowed me to do what I should have been able to do all along — teach sixth-grade-level work to all my students. That hadn't been possible with the two or three nonreaders who had passed each year through my class before.

Students who can't read fluently become deeply frustrated. Not only do they drop out, they can ruin the learning environment for other students.

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Uncomfortable

University of North Carolina-Wilmington Professor Mike Adams made a colleague "uncomfortable" by discussing his columns. He was told not to discuss his writing in the office in front of those who might be offended by his opinions.

Now he's writing a list of all the ways his colleagues have made him uncomfortable over the years.

*My first year at UNCW, a faculty member in our department objected to a job candidate because he was "a little too white male." Such comments make me feel really uncomfortable, being a white guy and all that.

*My second year at UNCW we removed a white woman from our interview pool in order to make room for a black woman. When the university forced me to discriminate on the basis of race, I felt really uncomfortable.

*My third year at UNCW someone suggested that we should reject a job candidate because he was "too religious." It sure makes me feel uncomfortable when people say things like that.

*My fourth year at UNCW someone objected to a job candidate because she felt that the husband played too dominant a role in the candidate's marriage. It also makes me feel uncomfortable when people say things like that.

*Then there are all the times that the name Jesus Christ has been used as a form of profanity in the office. That makes me feel uncomfortable. By the way, I am especially offended by the phrase "Jesus F***ing Christ!" I mean, no one ever says "Mo-F***ing-Hammed!" or "F***ing Buddha!," do they?

*Then there was the time that a gay activist in our department suggested that I switch to bi-sexuality in order to double my chances of finding a suitable "partner." That made me feel uncomfortable and she knew it. After I started to blush, she asked, "Whatís the matter, are you a little homophobic?" . . .

*And how about the time that a faculty member called another faculty member a "mother f***er" in one of our meetings? That was before he said that he should have climbed over the desk and "slapped the s*** out" of him. These sociologists need to start getting along with one another if they plan to build a Utopian society. Plus, it makes me feel really uncomfortable to hear about these threats of violence in the workplace.

Since his columns can't be discussed at work, Adams has offered to meet critics for coffee outside the university, where free speech is protected.

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Smart weapons require smart soldiers

No education qualifications are required to enlist in the British Army. Which is why so many recruits can't read and write very well. The Telegraph reports:

A confidential study into the educational standards of soldiers has revealed that half of all new infantry recruits only have the reading and writing skills of 11-year-olds.

The study commissioned by the Ministry of Defence, which the Telegraph has seen, also discloses that a fifth of recruits have the literacy and numeracy levels of seven-year-olds. Four per cent are at the standard of the average five-year-old.

. . . Within the next 10 years, the Army will be issued with equipment that will require all frontline soldiers to be computer literate and numerically literate if they are to fight and survive on the battlefield. They will also need to be able to read and understand ever-more complicated training manuals.

Smart weapons require smart soldiers.

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March 29, 2004

Googlesense

I've just added Googlesense ads in the right-hand column. If you click on an ad, I make a very small amount of money. So click away!

Recently, I got a check for $5 from a bank I'd never heard of. I had no idea why they were sending me this money, but I deposited it. Then I received another check for $0.22 from the same mystery bank. Apparently, it's a refund for something I've never heard of that appeared on a credit card bill. What bill? I don't know. But I'm going to deposit it, along with a somewhat larger check that came in. You know what they say: 22 cents here, 22 cents there. It adds up. To 44 cents.

The spam filter also is updated, so I'm hoping that will block the drug and mortgage ads that have been spamming old comments. If anyone spots spam, please let me know.

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The language of dance

Learning to dance teaches fourth- and fifth-grade children how to learn other things, writes George Will, after a visit to a Los Angeles school.

(Teacher Ethel) Bojorquez, whose experience has immunized her against educational fads, admiringly watches her pupils perform under (dancer Carole) Valleskey's exacting tutelage and exclaims, "They are learning about reading right now."

They are, she marvels, learning about -- experiencing, actually -- "sequencing, patterns, inferences." She explains: "You don't only listen to language, you do it."

. . . Bojorquez's raven-haired students, their dark eyes riveted on Valleskey, mimic her motions. These beautiful children have a beautiful hunger for the satisfaction of structured, collaborative achievement.

That begins when Valleskey, a one-woman swarm, bounces into the room and immediately, without a word of command, reduces the turbulent students to silent, rapt attention. They concentrate to emulate Valleskey's complex syncopation of claps, finger snaps and thigh-slaps by which she sets the tone of the coming hour: This will be fun because things will be done precisely right.

Will is right: Children crave excellence.

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New blog

Douglas Bass, a computer science professor in Minnesota, has started a higher education blog called Academistics, which will focus on academic freedom. Check it out.

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March 28, 2004

Naturally

Magister Mundi sum!
"I am the Master of the Universe!"
You are full of yourself, but you're so cool you
probably deserve to be. Rock on.

Which Weird Latin Phrase Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla.

Via Uncle Sam's Cabin ("May barbarians invade your personal space!").

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Teaching the Holocaust in France

Alarmed by rising anti-semitism, France's education minister, Luc Ferry, has issued a guide for "civil education" classes urging teachers to show Holocaust movies such as Schindler's List, Sophie's Choice and The Pianist. The Telegraph reports:

The guide also recommends visits to former Nazi concentration camps, books such as The Diary of Anne Frank and documentaries depicting the Holocaust.

. . . Mr Ferry said teachers had reported being abused by young Muslims while trying to teach about the Holocaust. He described how one teacher asked a class of 13-year-old pupils about their likes and dislikes. One child wrote: "I like football, I don't like Jews."

One prominent rabbi has advised Jewish schoolchildren in Paris who received abuse and threats from Muslim youths to wear baseball hats to cover their skullcaps.

Mr Ferry said that young people used racist insults such as "dirty Jew" or "dirty wog" as frequently as other people said "idiot" or "fool".

He added: "It's extremely serious. These words have become banal, light as feathers, when in fact they have a very serious history. The sole purpose of this guide is to give weight back to these words; to make pupils understand that these insults have killed."

. . . The guide also includes details of the laws that teachers can refer to when confronted with racist acts. "It is necessary to intervene in the slightest incident - even a verbal attack - and not let any of these things pass without punishment or explanation," said Mr Ferry.

There's been a 10-fold increase in attacks on Jews in the last 10 years.

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March 27, 2004

Passing the blame

According to a report by the American Electronics Association, high-tech companies blame second-rate math and science education in the U.S. for the offshoring of high-tech jobs. From Wired:

The American school system, which AeA researchers charge is failing to provide strong science and math education to students, is largely to blame for lost jobs, according to the AeA's report, "Offshore Outsourcing in an Increasingly Competitive and Rapidly Changing World."

"Companies aren't outsourcing only in order to obtain cheap labor; they are also looking for skilled technology workers that they increasingly can't find in the U.S.," said Matthew Kazmierczak, senior manager of research at AeA, and one of the authors of the report.

On Assorted Stuff, Tim writes:

While this report sounds like another industry lobbying group trying to scare Congress into giving their companies lots of money, they do make one good point. We don't do a good job of math and science instruction in this country. Part of the blame for that goes to society in general which gives lots of lip service to learning those subjects but then has an adult population which is largely (and often proudly) ignorant of even the most basic math and science concepts. How many people actually understand the odds behind the lottery or what the theory of evolution actually says?

I'll probably get blasted for this, but I also blame the tsunami of standardized tests we spend a large part of the year preparing for. The math on these exams hardly gets up to the "high tech" level that the AEA report is referring to and most exams barely touch science at all since it's not one of the indicators that NCLB requires. When the test becomes the target of instruction, learning settles for the lowest common denominator of the test.

Reform K12 -- which is celebrating its 10,000th visitor -- responds

The argument seems to be this: first standardized tests are criticized because schools must spend "most of the year" on test prep, which leads us to believe that they're really, really hard. Then the tests are criticized because apparently the math and science on the test is not high tech (which we read as "easy").

I'm not convinced by the AeA's argument: If Indian programmers and engineers demanded U.S. wages, they'd be out of work. They're highly educated and relatively cheap.

I also think testing has nothing to do with the problems of math and science education in the U.S. Many students flunk those very easy tests because they don't know the basics. They're not prevented from learning higher math because too much time is spent on test prep. The problem is they don't know the basics.

I sat in on a charter school faculty meeting a few days ago that focused on test prep. The English, math, science and history teachers are making sure they teach the relevant state standards before students take the state test; they're also discussing how to measure whether students know what they've been taught. This is not a waste of time, it seems to me.

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Discredited accrediter

A college president with a "life experience" doctorate sits on a committee that accredits colleges.

LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. (AP) - A college president who serves on a national accreditation board is among several Georgia educators who received questionable degrees from an online school in Liberia.

Michael Davis, president of Gwinnett College of Business in Lilburn, received a doctorate from St. Regis University, which grants master's degrees and doctorates largely based on "life experience."

Davis is a commissioner for the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools.

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March 26, 2004

Suspending everyone

At F.D. Moon Academy in Oklahoma City, there are 147 sixth graders. Wednesday, 136 were suspended for slamming tables in the cafeteria, talking back to teachers and disrupting classrooms.

(Elaine) Ford, in her first year as the school's principal, said teachers can't improve test scores until disciplinary issues are resolved. She estimated teachers spend 85 percent of their time reprimanding students.

A majority of suspended students' parents showed up for a meeting to discuss the problem. But some came to yell at the principal.

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Physics for cheaters

Inspired by Brian's post on plagiarized essays, Natalie Solent describes faking physics experiments, using reports from the previous year's students.

My practical partner and I would work quite hard until the bloody thing started to go wrong. Even then we'd pummel the apparatus about for a while, hoping to convince it to yield the result in the book. But usually in the end we'd give up and go back to college to get to work producing a convincing fake.

A forgery is often true art. Sometimes I almost thought I learned more about physics in the process of constructing a plausible account of an experiment I had not completed than I would have learned in doing it. You had to ensure that the answer was off, but not too much off. You had to be ready to answer questions.

There was one particular experiment designed to teach us about statistics where you had to let a small ball drop out of a funnel and mark where it hit or something like that about a thousand times over. Then all the results for everyone were collected together and would, it was hoped, combine to display a nice bell curve. A rumour I heard said that one year the bell curve had a little subsidiary peak to one side of it. The authorities were very shocked. They thought the subsidiary peak represented all those who'd copied results from earlier years.

Wrong-o. The big peak showed that. The little peak belonged to the honest students.

One day, they carelessly turned in the exact results of the previous year's students.

The demonstrator talked amiably about the experiment for a while then got out a big lined record book and wrote down our names and result at the foot a column of earlier results.

I forget which of us spotted our peril first, or by what desperate telepathy she communicated it to the other -- but within half a second we were wordlessly conveying to each other that we were finished. Doomed. Dead meat. The only question was when the axe would fall.

Our result was only two lines below the one we'd copied it from. The two were identical to three decimal places, a physical impossiblity or damn nearly so.

Our demonstrator hadn't spotted it yet but eventually somebody would. There would be only one possible explanation.

So they waited for the demonstrator to go to lunch, stole the book and changed the previous results, which had been written in pencil. They got away with it.

Anyway, I started really doing the experiments right through to the end. Most of the time I still couldn't make them work but the long post-mortems no longer seemed so bad.

One experiment I remember well (perhaps because it actually worked eventually) was intended to demonstrate the Hanle Effect. When I got past the initial stages of this one I found some crucial components were missing. I had to go to a lot of trouble to get what I needed and re-fit them in the bowels of apparatus. The interior was very dusty. It was clear to me that no one had done the latter part of the experiment for years -- yet people were on the books as having done it.

David Gillies caught students copying physics reports. Nothing much happened to the cheaters.

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Infinite tolerance

When Pedro Tepoz-Leon applied to be a teacher's aide in Long Beach, California, he admitted a conviction for beating up a former girlfriend. He was hired. After all, it was only a misdemeanor, though he'd broken his girlfriend's jaw and eye socket and detached her retina. When he was graduated from college and applied to be a teacher, he admitted the conviction again. He was hired as a Spanish teacher and coach. One of his students, Mayra Mora-Lopez, became his new girlfriend and moved in with him as a 19-year-old senior. Then he beat her up.

(Principal Sandy) Blazer called Mora-Lopez out of summer classes, saw the injuries for herself and coaxed the truth out of her: She and Tepoz-Leon were a couple, and during a fight at their apartment, he had slammed her head into a wall and left her limbs marbled with bruises and her forehead visibly injured, according to Patterson. Mora-Lopez could not be persuaded to turn him in.

Like most states, with the exception of Nevada and a few others, it is not against the law in California for a teacher to have sex with a student. It is against the law for an adult to have sex with a minor. Mora-Lopez was not under 18.

There seems wide agreement that Blazer knew nothing of the teacher's criminal record. She testified in a deposition that she formally urged the district to fire Tepoz-Leon, Patterson said, but that someone at the district opted against it.

Instead, Patterson said, Blazer wrote a letter instructing the teacher to never be alone with a student, and Tepoz-Leon signed it on July 26, 2002.

A few months later, Tepoz-Leon murdered Mora-Lopez. After his conviction, he committed suicide in prison.

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Easier promotion

Chicago schools are easing their ban on social promotion of students in key grades. But a study shows generally positive effects, says Education Gadfly.

In brief, they found that the advent of high-stakes testing led to low-performing students receiving more support from teachers and parents and to teachers focusing their instruction more on reading and math. However, they also found that a key concern of testing opponents has merit: teachers spent more time teaching test prep skills — simply explaining techniques for successfully taking a test. (One teacher claimed to have devoted 240 hours to such tasks in 1999.) In addition, the researchers worry that added training may be needed for teachers to actually improve their instruction (rather than just refocusing it), and they note that the long-term effects of grade retention are unclear. Still, most teachers supported the policy . . .

Chicago schools will focus on teaching reading; students won't be held back if they fall far behind in math and other subjects.

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Average pay gets average teachers

Smart women now have lots of career opportunities, which has lowered the quality of the teaching force. That's the conventional wisdom, but is it true? Writing in the New York Times, Virginia Postrel analyzes a study of teachers' aptitude scores (used as a measure of teacher quality). From 1964 to 2000, there was little change in teachers' scores.

But averages hide the real story. The best female students -- those whose test scores put them in the top 10 percent of their high school classes -- are much less likely to become teachers today.

"Whereas close to 20 percent of females in the top decile in 1964 chose teaching as a profession," making it their top choice, the economists write, "only 3.7 percent of top decile females were teaching in 1992," making teachers about as common as lawyers in this group.

So the chances of getting a really smart teacher have gone down substantially. In 1964, more than one out of five young female teachers came from the top 10 percent of their high school classes. By 2000, that number had dropped to just over one in 10.

The average has stayed about the same because schools aren't hiring as many teachers whose scores ranked at the very bottom of their high school classes. Teachers aren't exactly getting worse. They're getting more consistently mediocre.

Another study looks at the effect of unionization on compressing the range of teacher pay: All teachers earn about the same, regardless of their abilities.

Are women from top colleges leaving teaching because of the "pull" of better pay elsewhere or the "push" of reduced earnings at the top of teaching?

To their surprise, they find that wage compression explains a huge 80 percent of the change. If women from top colleges still earned a premium as teachers, a lot more would go into teaching.

"Women who went to a top 5 percent college earned about a 50 percent pay premium in the 1960's and earn about the same as other teachers today," Mr. Leigh said. "By comparison, somebody who went to a bottom 25 percent college earned about 28 percent below the average teacher in the 1960's, and they have the earnings of about the average teacher today."

In hiring teachers, we get what we pay for: average quality at average wages.

Interesting.

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Once an SJ Mercury News columnist, I'm now writing Ride the Carrot Salad: How Two Grumpy Optimists Built a Charter School. Read the blog, click the links below for my free-lance writing and support this site by donating through PayPal or Amazon or by using my book links to buy Amazon stuff.

Joanne Jacobs

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