Education

Brian's Education

Chris Correa
Cranky Professor
Critical Mass
Discriminations
Education Gadfly

EducationWeak

Eduwonk
Highered Intelligence
Home School & Stuff
Number 2 Pencil

Reform K12

SCSU Scholars

Tightly Wound

For and by Teachers

Assigned Seat

EduBlog News

Entry Year Teacher

HeadSpaceJ

Is It Recess Yet?

Math Teacher

Mr. Wright's Class

Ms. Frizzle

School Yard

Science Teacher

Teaching High School

Teachers' Lounge Wiki

Weblogg Ed

Good Reads

Amritas

Amygdala
Charles Austin
Betsy's Page
Tim Blair
Moira Breen

Stuart Buck
Cold Spring Shops
Common Sense & Wonder
Dean's World
Easterblogg

Jane Galt

Inkwell
Instapundit
Jeff Jarvis

Mickey Kaus
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
Jim Miller
Milt's File

New Criterion

Oxblog
Pejmanesque
Damian Penny
Virginia Postrel
RightWing News
Rosenblog

Samizdata
Scrappleface

Donald Sensing
Shark Blog
Rand Simberg
Roger Simon
Natalie Solent
Andrew Sullivan
Robert Tagorda

Twisted Spinster

U.S.S. Clueless
Michael J. Totten

Volokh Conspiracy
Dr. Weevil
Matt Welch
Winds of Change
Wonkette

Meryl Yourish

Also Good

Best of the Web
City Journal

The Corner
Day by Day cartoon
Eject! Eject! Eject!
FoxNews.com
Hit & Run

iFeminists.com

Independent Institute

Independent Women's Forum
Jewish World Review
New Republic
Newzilla
The Note

The Onion
Reason
Slate
Mark Steyn
TechCentralStation
Weekly Standard
Washington Post

Good Books

September 02, 2004

'A' is for awful

Self-evaluations by Michigan schools are meaningless, reports the Detroit News. Self-esteem has run amok.

One Detroit elementary, for example, gave itself a perfect score for its facilities despite being closed in October because it started sinking into the ground.

. . . Eighty-three percent of Michigan elementary and middle schools that failed federal achievement standards for at least four years -- including schools in Detroit, Pontiac, Taylor and Utica -- gave themselves A's on self-evaluations worth a third of their overall grades, according to a Detroit News analysis of state report card data released earlier this month. The percentage is up from the previous year, when 70 percent of failing schools gave themselves the highest possible marks.

Eduwonk thinks external accountability might be a good idea.

More minorities try the SATs

More black and Hispanic students are taking the SATs, indicating higher college aspirations. The participation numbers are particularly impressive for blacks, who make up 13 percent of the population and 12 percent of SAT takers. Hispanics, also about 13 percent of the population, make up 10 percent of test-takers.

The performance gap remains large, but Mexican-Americans improved their scores slightly, even as more tried the test.

Overall, 2004 SAT verbal scores rose by one point compared to 2003; math scores dropped by one point. Over the last 10 years, scores have risen by 42 points for Asians, 20 for whites, eight for blacks and three for Mexican-Americans.

What teachers make

Teacher salaries are slipping compared to pay in comparable professions, says a study by the Economic Policy Institute.

. . . A comparison of teachers' wages to those of workers with comparable skill requirements, including accountants, reporters, registered nurses, computer programmers, clergy, personnel officers, and vocational counselors and inspectors, shows that teachers earned $116 less per week in 2002, a wage disadvantage of 12.2%. Because teachers worked more hours per week, the hourly wage disadvantage was an even larger 14.1%.

Comparing weekly pay is supposed to eliminate the fact that teachers work fewer weeks per year than other professionals, but some teachers ask to be paid on a 52-week calendar, so their income doesn't drop to zero in the summer. That may throw off the data.

Nationmaster, which offers all sorts of international comparisons, ranks the U.S. fifth in the world for primary teachers' pay with a 1999 average of $25,707. I have to wonder about some of the reported salaries. Do the Czechs and Hungarians really pay teachers that little? It seems implausible.

September 01, 2004

Pimp kiddies

Pimp and "ho" costumes are the latest thing for the kiddies, says the Washington Post. Brandsonsale.com is offering one ho and four pimp costumes for trick or treaters this year. "Next year, the company plans pimp attire for infants," writes Laura Sessions Stepp. She quotes Johnathon Weeks Jr., the company spokesman:

"We also sell pimp and ho outfits to whole families: Mom, Dad, kids and the dog."

Another company carries "matching adult and child pimp outfits in blue velvet with faux-leopard trim," writes Stepp. Oh, isn't that sweet.

By the way, the story ends with quotes from blogosphere debates about letting children trick or treat while dressed as pimps and whores.

Page for charters

Chicago Trib columnist Clarence Page stands up for charter schools.

A closer look at the NAEP study reveals that 4th-grade students in Arizona, California and Colorado charter schools actually outperform their traditional public school counterparts in their states in reading, the pro-charters Washington-based Center for Education Reform found. Eighth-grade charter students in the District of Columbia outscored all other public schools in the district in reading. California's 8th-grade charter school students also outscored their public school counterparts in their state in reading.

Eighth-graders in Colorado and Delaware charter schools outperformed 8th graders at all public schools nationally in reading and math.

D.C. vouchers

More than 1,000 Washington, D.C. students are using $7,500 vouchers to attend private schools. Most are in parochial elementary schools. About 20 percent of students awarded vouchers are not using them, reports the Washington Post.

After a lengthy application process, 1,359 low-income students were notified in June that they had won grants of as much as $7,500 a year to pay for private school tuition and fees, contingent on their acceptance by a participating school. Since then, the families of 290 students have dropped out or not responded to efforts by program administrators to reach them.

The remaining students include 1,013 who have been placed in private schools and 56 who are still being matched with schools. Of the 1,013 students placed, more than half are attending schools run by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, which had the first day of classes yesterday.

. . . Schools that charge more than $7,500 a year in tuition are making up the difference through private grants.

New advertiser

I've got a new advertiser, Legend Games. Click on the ad on the right-hand side to check it out.

Lying to children

John Stone of the Pacific Research Institute is dead right in this oped: "It is a disappointment when a child performs poorly in school. It becomes a tragedy, however, when the child and his parents are not told the truth." After years of grade inflation, students who've passed all their courses are finding they can't pass basic skills tests; "B" students are stuck in remedial classes in college.

California's universities admit only the top third of high school graduates, but 37 percent are required to take remedial math and 48 percent remedial English.

Recently, researchers took a closer look at the letter grades awarded in a Florida school district. Judged by the scores students earned on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), only 9 percent of the "A"'s assigned to third-, fourth- and fifth-grade students were deserved. Of the students who performed at a "D" or "F" level on the FCAT, 17 percent had earned an "A" from their teacher. Many had been taught by teachers whom the study called "easy graders." On average, these teachers assigned an "A" to those who were in reality "D" or "F" students 32 percent of the time.

High grades are more comfortable for everyone involved — including educators. Teachers, administrators and school districts can bolster constituent satisfaction and their public image — or they can do the opposite — depending on the grades they assign. The incentive is obvious.

New technology, old thinking

School technology hasn't been used to improve teaching or productivity, writes Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute.

The tendency has been to sprinkle computers and Internet connections across classrooms in the pleasant hope that teachers will integrate them into their lessons. The purpose is seldom to make teachers more productive or to rethink the way in which lessons are delivered. Indeed, PCs often serve as little more than high-priced typewriters, sitting in the back of classrooms unused for most of the school day.

In 1998 there were 12.1 students for every computer connected to the Internet; by 2002, the ratio had dropped to 4.8 students per computer, according to the Department of Education. In the past five years alone, the nation has spent more than $20 billion linking schools and classrooms to the Internet through the federal E-rate program with little to show for it in the way of instructional changes or improved outcomes. Meanwhile, despite these huge new investments in technology, massive increases in the workforce of teachers drove the student-teacher ratio from 22 students per teacher to 16 students per teacher between 1970 and 2001.

Indeed, the very words "efficiency" and "cost-effectiveness" can set the teeth of parents and educators on edge. Proposals to use technology to downsize the workforce, alter instructional delivery, or improve managerial efficiency are inevitably attacked by education authorities as part of an effort to, in the words of Henry Giroux, "Transform public education . . . [in order] to expand the profits of investors, educate students as consumers, and train young people for the low-paying jobs of the new global marketplace." The notion that the responsible use of public money is the work of some shadowy global conspiracy evinces a fundamental lack of seriousness about educating children.

When asked if he could pull some data on teacher absenteeism or staff training costs, one veteran principal in a well-regarded district spluttered, "Do you know what I do if I want substitute teacher data? I have [my secretary] go through the files and tally it up. She keeps a running total on a piece of graph paper for me. . . . If I want to check on a supply order, I call the deputy [superintendent] for services because we're old friends, and I know he'll actually have someone pull it for me."

August 31, 2004

Getting better

On Education Weak, Tough Love praises corporate consultants who restructured business practices for St. Louis schools, saving $79 million and balancing the budget.

Last year, the St. Louis Public Schools were on the brink of bankruptcy, facing an astonishing $75 million year-end deficit and a near-term $99 million cash shortfall. The district was spending more than $11,000 every year for each of its approximately 40,000 students - out of a total budget of $450 million. While the district had the highest rate of per-student spending in the state, just over $6,000 per student actually found its way to the classroom.

Tens of thousands of dollars were squandered to insure vehicles the school district no longer owned. Money went toward maintaining buildings and facilities that had long been abandoned. Books and supplies were ordered, but then sat in warehouses, while teachers reported scrounging at yard sales for used books.

The gain rates achieved in Philadelphia are among the highest of any of the nation's largest school districts, according to the Council of Great City Schools.

Moreover, the gains in student achievement occurred in both contracted "partner" schools and in traditional public schools, providing the first substantial evidence that the city's public-private school management experiment -- to turn around the district's lowest performing schools -- is working.

Tantrum

A third grader in Espanola, New Mexico was arrested for disorderly conduct, handcuffed and sent to an adult jail. He'd raised his voice to a teacher after hitting a classmate with a basketball.

(The boy's mother, Angelica) Esquibel, who works next door to the school, said she was called to the office, and that Jerry began crying and saying he wanted to go home.

She said a school counselor wanted him to return to class, and that when the boy ran outside and started crying louder, the counselor told him if he wasn't going to be in school, she was going to call police.

The counselor told him officers would handcuff him and put him in a cell "until he changes his attitude," Esquibel said.

Guillen said he'd been told the mother agreed police should be called. She said she told school officials not to call them.

Two officers tried to tell Jerry to go back to class and told him he had a choice — class or jail, Esquibel said. When the boy got upset and loud, they handcuffed him, she said.

The police report says Jerry was arrested, taken to jail, booked and released to his parents.

Esquibel said that when she arrived at the police station, he was standing against a wall, crying.

He told her he was placed "in a dark room with a window, a metal toilet and a metal sink," and that inmates banged on the window "saying they were going to get him and cussing," she said. He said officers told him to stop crying or they'd let the inmates get him, she said.

The power of blather

Read this oped on Education's future: the power of wonder by Peter W. Cookson Jr., dean of the graduate school of education at Lewis and Clark. Then explain what it means in 25 words or less. Do not win valuable prizes.

August 30, 2004

Blacks choose military charter

A military charter school aimed at urban black students is starting its first year, reports the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Founder My Lai Tenner , formerly an administrator at suburban schools, advertised on a hip-hop radio station, and "quickly filled the 250 open slots for grades 5 through 8." Hundreds more students, nearly all black, are on the waiting list for Charles Young Military Academy.

A tightly run military atmosphere with demerits for unclean uniforms or even untrimmed nails: That's a pledge drawing hundreds of middle-school students to one of the state's most popular new charter schools this fall.

. . . The rules, Tenner says, aim "to make sure they have the tools to function in society. If they have these skills, we feel, they'll be able to do some good things."

. . . Tenner doesn't have military experience but says his mother, an Army sergeant, instilled him with discipline. "I've kind of been in her boot camp for years," he said. It was his mother who gave him the name My Lai, to mark the significance of the 1968 massacre of Vietnamese villagers by American soldiers.

For the military academy, almost half of the staff he's hired has a military background, he said, including a retired drill sergeant.

I think there's great demand in the inner city for schools that provide structure, discipline and high expectations.

Inactivists

The Onion addresses the effect of sunlight on student activism: College Student Does Nothing for Tibet Over Summer."

"Someone should tell Becca that the needs of the disadvantaged do not take a scuba holiday off the coast of Curacao," Coe said, referring to a one-week vacation Davis took with her family in June. "Activism takes time, hard work, and commitment. Posters don't nail themselves to sticks."

On many campuses, protesters dwell on the margins rather than in the mainstream of campus life. Some of their fellow students may admire their convictions - but others confess that they find activism more annoying than persuasive.

At Harvard University - where protests range from noisy antiwar rallies to smaller but equally zealous antiabortion demonstrations - many students say such actions are missing the mark.

"A lot of [the activists], liberals and conservatives alike, are fanatics or hopelessly idealistic," says Michael Soto, a Harvard senior studying Latin American development. "I'm not sure how much they actually accomplish, since it's just a small group. They are mainly annoying to the rest of the campus, and ineffectual."

. . . At many schools today it is the faculty members who tend to be solidly liberal - often far more so than their students.

"The faculty here will no doubt vote 95 to 5 percent in favor of [John] Kerry, while the students may be more in the middle, perhaps as high as 35 percent for [George W.] Bush," says Robert George, professor of political science at Princeton University in New Jersey. "Nowadays, students don't see [the war] as such a black-and-white issue; they are listening to both sides of the argument."

Unhappy carpenter

The Happy Carpenter is unhappy, because he has to spend five hours and 50 minutes online to pass a course for his Florida general contractor's license. Answering the questions is the easy part. The trick is to do it slowly.

1.) You must spend at least 5 hours and 50 minutes of actual time on-line to get 7 hours of credit. Furthermore,
2.) You must be active on the site. If you're inactive for more than 10 or 15 minutes (honestly, who can remember this kind of stuff?) you're timed out.
3.) If you're timed out, then the time you put in up to that point is erased and you have to start over!

August 29, 2004

Vendetta

The New York Times' vendetta against charter schools continues with this misleading story, writes the relentless Eduwonk. In short, the Times thinks the data sampling techniques used by the feds to survey public and private schools are sinister when applied to the growing number of charter schools. And the Times repeatedly implies that No Child Left Behind will turn sanctioned public schools into charters, though that's only one possible remedy and not the most likely.

Politics and education policy

I've got an oped on politics and education policy in today's San Jose Mercury News Perspective section.

August 28, 2004

Perfect pencil

Number 2 Pencil is crowing about this story on the perfection of the number 2 pencil, which has "the perfect amount of reflective quality." It's Kimberly's new tag line.

Ask a slanted question

Opinions on vouchers vary widely depending on how the question is phrased.

According to the annual survey conducted by Gallup for Phi Delta Kappa, an educators' group, 54 percent of the public oppose school vouchers; 42 percent favors "allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense." Yet 43 percent would be more likely to support a pro-voucher candidate, 37 percent less likely. Some 57 percent of public school parents said they'd use a full voucher to send their children to private school; 38 percent would stick with public school and the rest are undecided. If the voucher paid half the tuition cost, 45 percent said they'd choose private school; 50 percent would choose public school.

The very pro-voucher Friedman Foundation (that's Milton and Rose Friedman, after all) hired Wirthlin to do its own voucher opinion survey with slightly different wording.

Half of the sample was asked the more negative PDK question, "do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense?" Only 41 percent supported school vouchers when presented this way.  The other half was asked the more neutral question "do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose any school, public or private, to attend using public funds?" The support was significantly higher with 63 percent supporting school vouchers.

The PDK survey focuses on No Child Left Behind, finding opposition to the testing provisions of the law -- as described by the pollsters -- but strong support for the law as a whole. Here's Gadfly's analysis. And Eduwonk, which says all sides slant the poll questions.

August 27, 2004

Getting serious

High school juniors in California will have to pass the state's graduation exam to get a diploma. This LA Times' story starts with a familiar refrain: A poor girl might not achieve her dream to be a pediatrician if she can't pass the math portion of the exam. The implication is that the exam hurts the prospects of low-income minority students. But the Manual Arts High student won't make it through college, much less medical school, if she doesn't know enough math to get a 55 percent, the minimum passing score, on a four-choice multiple-choice exam covering sixth through eighth grade math skills.

The story goes on to show that the exam is forcing schools to offer tutoring and Saturday classes, so students can pass the graduation test on their second, third, fourth, fifth or sixth try. The test is motivating students to work harder to improve their math and reading skills. Teachers are paying more attention to teaching the state standards, and they're keeping track of students' progress.

Junior Adriana de la Rosa, who grew up in Guatemala and struggles with English, said she would benefit from attention to fundamentals — such as vocabulary development and reading comprehension — rather than from reading "The Odyssey" in her English class.

"That's why I'm taking the classes on Saturday because I think I need more help with my English," she said.

. . . Manual Arts teachers and administrators said they were doing all they could to make sure their students were prepared. Among other things, teachers say they closely follow the state's academic content standards on which the test is based. And school counselors met last month with incoming juniors who failed one or both parts of the test, recruiting the students for the Saturday classes.

. . . Los Angeles schools Supt. Roy Romer said his district's high schools were trying new approaches to better prepare students for the exit exam.

For example, he said that ninth-grade teachers are now using instruction guides that cover the tested standards, and are assessing students regularly to make sure they are learning.

"I think it's important to pass it, to see if you've been learning for the last [four] years," said junior Julio Sosa, who failed the math section and now gets after-school algebra tutoring twice a week. "I think I'll pass it this year."

With her hopes for medical school, (Edith) Nicolas is eager to improve her algebra skills and is signing up for Saturday classes.

Coaching teachers

The kids get a day off while the teachers listen to a professional development consultant they'll never see again. It's usually a waste of time, teachers say. But there's hope for a new idea: Coaches who work with teachers in their school. New teachers are much more likely to stay with the job if they get support from coaches and colleagues. So says the Harvard Education Letter, via Education News.

August 26, 2004

South of New Hamster

In Opinion Journal, Philip Terzian reviews Patrick Allitt's I'm the Teacher, You're the Student, which describes a semester teaching American history to cheerfully uninformed Emory students.

. . . the ignorance, laziness, sense of entitlement and lack of basic rhetorical skills are stunning. One student thinks that "books" and "novels" are the same. Another identifies the Granite State as "New Hamster." Few are familiar with the rules of language, many spell poorly and all are confused by tenses and apostrophes and complain bitterly when Prof. Allitt marks them down for grammatical errors.

Deconstructed science

"Science and Society" classes mislead students who haven't learned about the complexity of the scientific method in high school or college, writes Phil Mole (great name!) in Skeptical Inquirer. He took a graduate class called "Behavioral Sciences and Public Health" that promised to help students "become sufficiently confused about the complexities of professional life." And it did!

The course was not a balanced, critically informed discussion of the merits and limitations of science. It was a lopsided diatribe against the arrogance of science and its suppression of other, allegedly valid "ways of knowing."

We read articles claiming the language, assumptions, and methodologies of science to be inherently sexist and imperialistic, and fundamentally opposed to the role of intuition and the expression of femininity. An article by Ruth Hubbard maintained that scientists construct fact claims in order to justify their own economic positions and prevent the social mobility of women and ethnic minorities (Hubbard 1990). We perused the writings of Sandra Harding and Luce Irigaray and read more testimony that science represents the ideologies of white males seeking to disenfranchise, deflower, and discredit femininity at every opportunity. These authors discussed "alternate epistemologies," suppressed by chauvinist scientists, and considered conventional science inherently inauthentic.

Not surprisingly, students are most appreciative of those descriptions of science that best satisfy their own longings for justice and equality. After learning that science is much more contentious than their high- school and college courses led them to believe, these students crave emotional solace. They want the kind of certainty that only relativism can provide, in which indifference to the very idea of authority erases all real doubts. "Science and society" classes address this need and fill the intellectual void partially created by the incompleteness of the students' earlier science courses. As a result, postmodernism erases the helpful doubt that stimulates real thinkers to rigorously challenge their own preconceived notions and pursue the difficult pleasure of objective truth.

Discovering an illusion

"Discovery learning" advocates claim Japan's high-scoring math students come up with original answers without being guided by the teacher. That's not so, says Alan Siegel, a computer science professor at NYU who's studied the videotapes of Japanese math lessons. Columnist Linda Seebach explains:

The eighth-grade geometry lesson Siegel discusses is based on the theorem that two triangles with the same base and the same altitude have the same area, and it is framed in nominally "real world" terms as a problem in figuring out how to straighten the boundary fence between two farmers' fields so that neither farmer loses any land.

. . . The teacher first primes the class by reminding them of the theorem, which they had studied the previous day. Then he playfully suggests with a pointer some ways to draw a new boundary, most of them amusingly wrong but a couple that are in fact the lines students will have to draw to solve the problem (though they aren't identified as such).

Then he gives the students a brief time, three minutes, to wrestle with the problem by themselves, and another few minutes for those who have figured out a solution based on his broad hints to present it. Then he explains the solution, and then he extends the explanation to a slightly more complex problem, and finally assigns yet another extension for homework.

As Siegel describes it, "The teacher-led study of all possible solutions masked direct instruction and repetitive practice in an interesting and enlightening problem space.

"Evidently, no student ever developed a new mathematical method or principle that differed from the technique introduced at the beginning of the lesson. In all, the teacher showed 10 times how to apply the method."

Discovery learning is fashionable in math reform circles, writes Seebach. The Japanese are supposed to be the models. But the Japanese teach traditionally -- with "beautifully designed and superbly executed" lessons.

The videotape shows, Siegel says, that "a master teacher can present every step of a solution without divulging the answer, and can, by so doing, help students learn to think deeply. In such circumstances, the notion that students might have discovered the ideas on their own becomes an enticing mix of illusion intertwined with threads of truth."

Update: According to Chris Correa, Japanese teachers believe that students are less serious about learning math.

Overall, students had become weaker in nine of the 11 areas that the survey asked about. The most striking declines in students’ scholastic aptitude were in the ability to calculate, which did not feature in the society’s survey in the mid-1990s, and in logical expression. The most alarming deterioration was among students at teacher-training universities.

Once a San Jose Mercury News columnist, I'm now writing School Work: How Two Grumpy Optimists Built a Successful Charter School.   Support this site by donating through PayPal or Amazon or by using my book links to buy Amazon stuff; it also helps if you patronize advertisers. E-mail me at joanne@nameofmyblog.

Ads

Sponsored Links

Auto Loans
Credit Card Debt
Instant Online Credit Report
Bad Credit Loan
Debt Management
Insurance Quotes

Archives

September 2004
August 2004
July 2004
June 2004
May 2004
April 2004
March 2004
February 2004
January 2004
December 2003
November 2003
October 2003
September 2003
August 2003
July 2003
June 2003
May 2003

All Things Considered

College Prep for All

Christian Science Monitor

Online Lesson Plans

Starting from Scratch

A Doll Comes Alive

Philadelphia Daily News

Hard! Work!

Tell Students the Truth

Reason

Threatened by Success

Watching the Numbers

SJ Mercury News

Politics and Education

No Excuses

Job Hunting 101

Frugal Choices
Hypocrisy Quotient

TechCentralStation

How Much is Enough?

Universal Pre-school

Whose Personal Essay?

School Disconnect

All Play, No Work

Start-up Success

Acting Bright

Size Matters
Smart Tests
TechNo School

Teach the Children Well
Teaching Anti-Economics
Vanishing Valedictorians
GI Joe College
Dumb but Pretty

Support JJ.com