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February 11, 2005

Reaching out to immigrant parents

Hispanic immigrant parents will get involved in their children's school, if the school reaches out to them. The Washington Post looks at a mostly Hispanic, low-income school with strong parent involvement and rising test scores.

In the cafeteria, a band student practices snare-drum rhythms while 18 Barrett parents and grandparents -- all of them Spanish-speaking -- are busy cutting out laminated paper in the shape of giant mittens, with children's writing and coloring on them. Others roll bundles of red and pink pencils that Principal Bratt plans to give to students for Valentine's Day.

Today is Salvadoran immigrant Rosa Guardado's first time at the school's Friday volunteer program. She is a single mother and speaks almost no English. She works two jobs every night, starting at 10 p.m. -- first for a dry cleaner and later cleaning office buildings -- while her sister cares for her 6-year-old daughter.

She wants the world for her daughter: college, everything she never had. She didn't make it past the seventh grade. Cecilia Bonifaz invited her this morning, telling her the school needed her help. Guardado is surprised how easy it is to come to the school, how easy it is to help -- how nice it is to meet other parents, to talk and share tips on how to help her daughter. Now, she doesn't feel so isolated.

"I really like it," she says in Spanish. "I'll be back next week."

Reforming high school

The K-12 committee of the National Association of Scholars has ideas for Reforming the American High School. Among other things:

Wherever possible, and depending on the size of the school district, students and parents are able to have a choice of a discipline-centered or technical career-oriented curriculum, whether housed in independent or adjoining structures. 

Carnival!

Check out the very first Carnival of Education.

Ohio voucher proposal

Ohio Gov. Bob Taft wants to give $3,500 vouchers to students in schools where at least two-thirds of students have failed to meet state math and reading standards for three years in a row. Currently, 71 schools meet that description.

Michael Meckler analyzes the plan.

The vouchers, each valued at up to $3500, could be used only at "chartered, non-public schools" and must be accepted as full compensation for school tuition for the year. The public school district would have its state funding cut by the amount of voucher money used by students in the district.

Not all that many private schools in Ohio are "chartered", primarily because such schools face additional bureaucratic regulations and accountability procedures. In the Cleveland voucher program, most of the "chartered" private schools are Catholic schools whose centralized and experienced administration is able to handle these additional requirements. If expanded statewide, it is anticipated that Catholic schools, along with a few other Christian schools and some start-up non-religious schools, would be the only private schools able to afford to educate students at the state's reimbursement rate.

In the later study, safety and discipline were primary reasons cited by Cleveland parents for using vouchers to send their children to private schools. In other words, according to objective measures such as test scores, private schools did not outperform public schools. Yet parents were more concerned that their children spend their days in an orderly, secure environment than with how much learning was actually taking place.

February 10, 2005

No credit

Founded in 1971 as a school for Native American and Chicano studies, Deganawidah-Quetzalcoatl University finally lost accreditation, writes Lloyd Billingsley of Pacific Research Institute.

Courses were highly politicized, such as Environmental Issues 301, about uranium mining on reservations, and Social Science 242, an Indian interpretation of early U.S. history. The reading list was a politically correct litany of militants. There were plenty of those in the 1970s, including Dennis Banks of AIM, the American Indian Movement. He fled South Dakota after a gun battle in a courthouse and California governor Jerry Brown granted him asylum. Though not known as a scholar or administrator, Dennis Banks duly became chancellor of Deganawidah-Quetzalcoatl University in 1975.

A charter grows in Brooklyn

Achievement First, which runs the high-scoring Amistad Academy, a charter middle school in New Haven, Connecticut, is opening three charter schools in Brooklyn at the request of school officials.

Amistad, which runs from fifth grade to eighth grade, has a student body that is typical of many inner-city schools. The average student enters two grade levels behind where he or she should be. Eighty-four percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches and about 97 percent are black or Hispanic.

So, what's the secret? For one thing, the students work long hours, from 7:30 a.m. to 3:45 p.m., sitting in classes that often last for more than an hour. All stay for after-school activities. In a regular New York City public school, the teachers' contract limits the length of classes, but most charter schools are not subject to the contract.

The curriculum emphasizes basic skills and uses tests every six weeks to determine which students need extra drills. When students are lagging, teachers give them extra help or get their parents involved. If they talk back to a teacher or start a fight, they have to sit at the back of the classroom and are not allowed to speak with other students until their punishment has been served.

The Brooklyn charters eventually will be K-12 schools.

D.C. charter ban

The board of education in Washington, D.C. is considering a moratorium on new charter school while the superintendent develops a master plan for the district.

Members said they would use the master plan to assess whether a proposed charter school would fit the system's overall needs. The plan would determine, for example, whether more vocational, special education or other specialty schools were needed.

Too tough

To teach prospective graduates to write a research paper and motivate senior slackers, many schools are requiring senior projects. Parents and students at Cedarcrest High in Duvall, Washington hated the rigor, a Wall Street Journal story says.

Local parents had been complaining about the projects ever since Cedarcrest made them a graduation requirement in 1993. Some objected to the months of after-school work involved. Others were incensed by grading that sometimes seemed arbitrary and stringent. One year parents wore black armbands to graduation after three seniors were barred from the ceremonies for plagiarizing parts of their papers.

The senior project included an eight-page paper, an oral presentation and the creation of a related "product" . . .

Even three-page papers have become a rarity in English classes and 75% of all seniors say they get no writing assignments at all in history or social studies, according to a 2003 national commission on student writing.

. . . Employers and college professors overwhelmingly rated high-school graduates as "fair" or "poor" in basic math and clear writing in a 2002 study by Public Agenda, a nonpartisan opinion research group.

Cedarcrest, which had an unusually tough grading policy, eased up in response to angry parents. An 'F' on one part of the project no longer guarantees a failing grade. And the paper is much shorter.

After the minimum length for papers was slashed to three pages, from eight, meaty papers about subjects like campaign-finance reform and corporate monopolies gave way to brief essays, such as the history of Barbie dolls and the significance of proms. (Concerned that they might have made the paper too easy, school administrators boosted the minimum length up to four pages for the current school year.) With less to lose by doing badly, students began to take the project less seriously: 43% of the graduating class of 2004 received Fs on their papers, up from 9% for the class of 2003, the year before the changes.

We know where your children are

Students at a California school are wearing radio ID tags that track their location in school. Parents are upset students are required to wear the badges. The system was furnished for free to the school, which is in a small town, by a local company that's hoping to sell the system to other schools.

February 09, 2005

Cyberschools in the sticks

Running online schools for out-of-district students is a lucrative sideline for rural school districts, reports the New York Times, which focuses on tiny Branson, Colorado. Branson Online students don't do well compared to traditional students, but cyberschools disproportionately attract kids who've done poorly in traditional schools, students with health problems and kids who are making work their priority.

"Cyberschools are the 800-pound gorilla of the choice movement, although vouchers and charter schools get a lot more attention," said William Moloney, education commissioner in Colorado, where state financing for online schools has increased almost 20-fold in five years - to $20.2 million for 3,585 students today from $1.1 million for 166 full-time students in 2000.

Motivated, self-disciplined students -- and those with motivated parents -- can make online learning work. Overall, however, attrition is high at Branson Online, and scores are low.

Outsourcing the core

Philadelphia has outsourced a new standardized high school curriculum to Kaplan K12 Learning Services Group, a division of the test-prep company. All college-prep courses follow the Kaplan K12 curriculum, keeping to the same schedule and measuring progress with frequent diagnostic tests. It seems to be working fairly well in its shakedown year, reports Education Week.

(In 2002), only eight in 10 Philadelphia teenagers attended school on any given day. Just over half of 9th graders were promoted to grade 10, with that proportion dropping to 45 percent in the city's neighborhood high schools. Only about one-fourth of incoming freshmen made it to graduation and into their first year of college. And just 18 percent of district students scored at the "proficient" level or higher on the state math tests in 2001; only 24 percent did so in English.

It has produced spiral-bound curriculum resource documents for each course that include a year-at-a-glance overview of how many class periods should be devoted to each topic; a more detailed scope and sequence that details which state and TerraNova standards are addressed by each topic over the course of a day or week; and two-page daily lesson plans that include essential questions, suggested warm-up activities, instructional objectives, ideas about assessment, and homework assignments.

Separate volumes provide standards-aligned resource materials that teachers can often photocopy and use directly, as well as links to other resources. The documents -- which eventually will be available online -- also include suggestions for multicultural education and ways to differentiate instruction for advanced learners, students learning English, and those with disabilities. For the first time, the school system also purchased textbooks districtwide to accompany the new curriculum.

Teachers can no longer linger on content that they're comfortable with and avoid material they don't like, Mr. Vallas said. Nor can they design courses that address their own talents and interests rather than the needs of their students.

English Learners learn English

Forty-seven of students classified as "English Learners" by Caifornia schools demonstrate early advanced or advanced levels of English proficiency, up from 25 percent in 2001, the first year the California English Language Development Test was used. Maybe kids taught in English learn the language more quickly than educators used to think.

Or maybe they're being kept too long in a program they've outgrown. In 2004, when 43 percent tested at the advanced or early advanced level, only 8.3 percent were reclassified as proficient. Superintendent Jack O'Connell wants districts to reclassify more kids, so they can be eligible to take high-level academic classes. The state education board has passed guidelines to tell districts when they've got to admit English Learners have learned English.

Update: Here's the San Jose Mercury News story, with school officials claiming many students aren't ready for mainstream classes, despite testing as proficient in English. At a high school district in East San Jose, two-thirds of English Learners passed the test; only 5 percent were reclassified as proficient. With only a few years of schooling to go, these students are being kept out of mainstream classes. More affluent districts reclassify a much higher percentage of students.

The money angle is buried in the story:

Language proficiency tests are mandated under the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which requires students learning English to be tested each year until they pass. But schools also receive state and federal funds to serve language learners -- so they have educational and financial incentive not to reclassify students too quickly.

"There's probably some magic number where you reclassify enough to meet federal standards, but not so many that you lose money," said Wayne E. Wright, assistant professor of cultural and bilingual studies at the University of Texas-San Antonio.

Uplifting society -- and pants

The "Droopy Drawers Bill," passed 60-34 by Virginia's House of Delegates, would impose a $50 fine on fashionistas who flash their underwear instead of keeping it . . . under. From the Washington Times:

 "It's not an attack on baggy pants," said (Delegate Algie T.) Howell, Norfolk Democrat. "To vote for this bill would be a vote for character, to uplift your community and to do something good not only for the state of Virginia, but for this entire country."

It's not clear if the fine would apply to plumbers, carpenters or other laborers who have problems with low-riding pants. The bill states the fine would apply to those who display their below-the-waist underwear in a "lewd or indecent manner."

Louisiana rejected a similar bill last year, and it's not clear whether Droopy Drawers -- The Education Wonks suggest calling it the Just Say No To Crack Act -- will get past Virginia's Senate.

February 08, 2005

Burning issue

San Francisco will start its school year on Aug. 29, despite protests from parents who want to take their children to Burning Man, a post-hippie art festival -- or be-in, as we used to say -- in the Nevada desert. Burning Man also starts Aug. 29.

The Torch is on

FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) has started a blog, The Torch. First burned is University of California at Santa Barbara, which tried to force a site called Dark Side of UCSB to remove "UCSB" from the name. FIRE intervened. UCSB backed down.

Intelligence test

Kimberly Swygert told you so: It's dumb to rely on IQ scores to judge who's smart enough to be executed for murder.

IQ scores are not absolute, they're not error-free, and they're not invariant within examinees. It certainly would be easy to fake a low score if the alternative is the gas chamber; a judgment of mental retardation based on such data would be fraught with error. What's more, an inmate could genuinely get smarter over time if the prison had a helpful education program - or if his lawyer helped him learn. (For some criminals of deprived backgrounds, prison is the most instructive and structured environment they've ever known.) If that were to happen, which IQ score should be used when assigning punishment? Should an inmate essentially be punished for improving his mind in prison?

"Oddly enough, because of his constant contact with the many lawyers that worked on his case," the psychologist, Dr. Evan S. Nelson, wrote in a report in November, "Mr. Atkins received more intellectual stimulation in prison than he did during his late adolescence and early adulthood. That included practicing his reading and writing skills, learning about abstract legal concepts and communicating with professionals."

February 07, 2005

Dutch flag is unsafe at Dutch school

Two Dutch teen-agers were advised by their school's principal to remove the Dutch flag from their book bags to avoid angering Moroccan students.

Dutch Report goes on:

In a radio interview, one of the boys was asked if he was a racist. He denied and told the reporter that his mother was black. When he was asked about the incident that lead to the prohibition he explained that he had some verbal exchange with a Moroccan boy during competition swimming. As a result a group Moroccan then threatened him on school. At that moment the boy went to the school director.

Violence by Moroccan students, especially at low-tier vocational schools, is an ongoing problem, Dutch Report writes, blaming poor support for teachers by administrators and police. Here Dutch Report links to a Dutch-language blog with a video of a Moroccan student threatening a teacher. In this case, police removed the student from the school.

New ways to pay

Across the country, governors are proposing new ways to pay teachers, Education Week reports.

Democrats and Republicans alike are calling for merit pay, pay for performance, and other ways that deviate from the generally inflexible salary schedules under which teachers are paid. Though many of the proposals are still only rough sketches, they reflect governors' desires to increase teacher salaries.

But because state budgets remain too tight for generous across-the-board raises, and new accountability rules demand significant student-achievement gains, governors want to reward the best teachers, said Michael B. Allen, the program director for teaching quality at the Education Commission of the States.

"By and large, they don't want to raise teacher salaries without accountability," said Mr. Allen, who tracks teacher issues for the Denver-based clearinghouse on state education policies.

Alternative methods of paying teachers have been proposed in states as large as California and as small as Rhode Island.

On beyond film strips

Instruction video games let kids pretend to deliver supplies to children around the world (Unicef), flip virtual rubber bands at cigarettes in the Smokeout Cafe (American Cancer Society), intercept a Japanese whalers' harpoons (Greenpeace) or color and design currency while learning to spot counterfeits (Bureau of Engraving and Printing). Then there's Stop Fluin' Around. The New York Times reports:

Free on the Internet, the animated interactive game rewards players for answering questions like "Where can the flu hide?" (The answer to that one: on hands that have not been washed.)

Few would find it as compelling as video game best sellers like Grand Theft Auto or the alien-fighting Halo 2. But thrills are not the point. Stop Fluin' Around, which arrived in December, is one of dozens of instructional online games that public interest organizations, advocacy groups and government agencies say have become the best way to reach a generation of children and teenagers weaned on video games and the Web.

Voucher proposal in Minnesota

Minneapolis and St. Paul students could get private-school vouchers worth up to $4,601, under legislation introduced last week.

Their voucher plan would be available to families of four making $47,100 or less a year. The $4,601 maximum amount represents the basic funding school districts get per student from the state. The plan would not apply to students outside of those two school districts.

February 06, 2005

Under attack

I'm being hit by another spam attack on my TrackBacks. They're coming every two to three seconds. If the site crashes again, that's why.

Carnival time

Submit edblog posts -- your own or someone else's -- to The Education Wonks' new Carnival Of Education. You may submit up to three posts not more than a month old.

In all cases, the entry submitted should include: The site's name; the title of the post; and the post's "permalink" URL.

Entries should have Education Carnival in the email subject line.

Send entries to: owlshome@earthlink.net

London blog

I stumbled across an entertaining blog, Blackboard Jungle, by Lectrice, an inner-city London teacher. She tells an anecdote from her previous school about teaching students from immigrant families applying for the right to stay in England. Families get special consideration if they have school-age children -- or adults pretending to be children.

One class for 13-year-olds included Hasan, who who was six feet tall and had a full beard and "the physique of a boxer."

He's a reputation for being easily bored, disinclined to do work, and a tendency to tell teachers to f*** off if challenged about this.

And the Head of Science, a dour, brittle, no-nonsense squat lady in her late forties has had enough of Hasan's intractibility and silliness. She tolerates it as long as she can, till she lets rip with the retort "what are you doing here anyway? You're 36 years old with a family of three kids, aren't you?"

Hasan storms out, furious. Science teacher is rather perturbed -- un-PC comments like this are not well received by the borough who employ her.

"Ooh, miss," the other children say, "you shouldn't have said that. You've really upset him now. He's only 32."

February 05, 2005

College fantasies

Eighty percent of 10th graders say they plan to earn a college degree, and 64 percent of high school graduates enroll in college. But there's a huge gap between students' ambitions and reality, USA Today reports.

Only about one in 17 young people from the nation's poorest families, those earning less than $35,377 a year, can expect to earn a bachelor's degree by age 24. For those from the nation's wealthiest families, those who earn about $85,000 or higher, it's better than one in two.

The number of bachelor's degrees earned annually rose by 18% from 1990 to 2002. But while graduation rates rose at elite colleges, they dropped — sometimes sharply — at many others, especially public colleges.

Only one in four degree-seeking students at two-year colleges earn a degree or certificate. Results are mixed at four-year colleges. Though graduation rates at the most selective public colleges rose sharply from 1990 to 2002, from 61% to 74.6%, graduation rates at open-admissions colleges, which admit anyone with a high school diploma, slid from 42% to 25.8%.

A grammar snob at school

Reginleif sent me to this LiveJournal discussion on whether it's snobby to demand correct grammar in school. A Fairbanks, Alaska elementary teacher saw that the "Parents Lounge" sign was missing its apostrophe.

So, I whipped out my handy marker and was inserting an apostrophe when my principal came along. She told me we must not be grammar snobs. Right, at an educational institution, it's never good form to actually try to educate.

Update: Engineer Poet, another TypeKey registration victim, says I should have mentioned Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Under scrutiny

In The New Republic, Martin Peretz defends Harvard President Lawrence Summers' remarks about investigating the possibility of gender differences in science and math.

What led him to wonder whether there might be small genetic variations between men and women in quantitative capacity, I suspect, was his genuine surprise that women have not risen in the fields of physics, engineering, and mathematics as fast as he thinks they could and should. He isn't in the least bit oblivious to the lingering prejudices against women in the academy. (After all, his mother is a retired professor of public policy at the Wharton School of Business and his "significant other," Elisa New, is a professor of English at Harvard and a valued contributor to The New Republic.) 

Summers's "problem" is that he submits every argument with a grain of evidence behind it to serious and scrupulous scrutiny. And this scares our supposedly daring academic culture, which lives in fear of what it refuses to know.

February 04, 2005

Cookie monsters

In Durango, Colorado, a woman successfully sued two teen-age girls for dropping off home-made cookies at 10:30 one night. The girls had decided to give cookies to their neighbors just to be nice. The Denver Post reports:

The July 31 deliveries consisted of half a dozen chocolate-chip and sugar cookies accompanied by big hearts cut out of red or pink construction paper with the message: "Have a great night."

The notes were signed, "Love, The T and L Club," code for Taylor Ostergaard, then 17, and Lindsey Jo Zellitti, 18.

A Durango judge Thursday awarded Young almost $900 to recoup her medical bills. She received nothing for pain and suffering.

"The victory wasn't sweet," Young said Thursday afternoon. "I'm not gloating about it. I just hope the girls learned a lesson."

Taylor and Lindsey declined to comment Thursday, saying only that they didn't want to say anything hurtful.

Young said the girls showed "very poor judgment."

Update: A radio host is soliciting contributions to help the girls pay the judgment. The girls are getting plenty of donations and support, reports the Denver Post. One reader called litigant Young a "cookie batterer."

Go to school, win a car

Forget the joy of learning. A junior or senior who shows up regularly at school in LA might -- but probably won't -- get a Toyota Scion "urban utility vehicle." Woody writes:

Attendance at Los Angeles Unified schools has apparently gotten so bad, they're resorting to bribery to get kids to show up.

Heard this morning on local CBS affilliate KNX newsradio, the Los Angeles Unified School District has decided to award a Toyota to a "deserving student," defined as one who either shows markedly improved or outstanding attendance this year.

Once a San Jose Mercury News columnist, I'm now finishing a book, School Work: How Two Grumpy Optimists Built a Successful Charter School, which will be published in September, 2005 by Palgrave Macmillan.   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.

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