“That’s a baby show!” my 7-year-old protests as I’m surfing through the kids’ channels and land on something she feels is beneath her.
But studies show you can learn a lot from a “baby show,” especially if you’re a preschooler or kindergartener and a regular viewer of the PBS KIDS series Martha Speaks.
Say what you will about Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton (and we know you talk about him all the time) the man could turn a phrase.
Among the bon mots coined by the 19th century English aristocrat:
The pen is mightier than the sword….
Pursuit of the almighty dollar
The great unwashed
And, most famous of all, (thanks, in part, to a certain cartoon beagle)
It was a dark and stormy night
Why are we talking about Bulwer-Lytton? Because in the fifth installment of a seven-part series in Education Week, Frederick Hess, of the American Enterprise Institute, and co-authors Greg M. Gunn and Olivia M. Meeks, use another well known Bulwer-Lyttonism to begin their commentary on how to improve teacher quality, something about the folly of squeezing square pegs into round holes. However, Hess and Co. asserts, when it comes to searching for good teachers, plucking a few square pegs isn’t such a bad idea. And, yes, it makes more sense when they say it.
(more…)
Living in the Washington, D.C., area can make you feel like a real mover and shaker — even if the only moving and shaking you do is on the dance floor. Case in point, watching my 9-year-old daughter’s soccer game one weekend, I couldn’t help but overhear a parent from the other team talking rather loudly and importantly on his cell phone, saying something about “our position regarding the European Union.”
Which, of course, made me think: “What’s my position regarding the European Union — and do I need to phone that in?” No, actually, it made me think: “What a cool place to live — a place where Big Things are being decided.”
In truth, most of us here spend more time talking about those Big Things than deciding them — or being around the people who decide them. An exception occurred last December, on the deadest of Friday afternoons before the Holidays, when I attended a small seminar in a nondescript building off Dupont Circle in the District.
The subject: common core standards.
(more…)
Much research and most stories on school reform focus on how underperforming schools have made dramatic improvements, typically through partnerships and collaboration between the school board, district employees, and community.
In his latest installment, ASBJ contributing editor Douglas Reeves argues the same approach and attention should be placed on high performing schools that challenge themselves to be even greater.
Reeves take’s a look at Wisconsin’s Hudson High School, where remarkable gains have been achieved without sweeping changes in personnel, a windfall of funds, or watered down student expectations.
Rather, Reeves writes, Hudson focused on the essence of teaching: curriculum, assessment, feedback, and hard work.
To read more about this good to great story, go here. But hurry, it’s available for free viewing only for a limited time.
Shiny new computers can be found in this city school system. But “many are still in boxes, awaiting installation that never comes. Others are not used because teacher training is lacking, or the internet is not connected.”
Sound familiar? Sound like any of a dozen stories you’ve read over the years about mismanaged urban school systems?
There is, though, one twist to this story: I’m not talking about an American urban district.
The story is about the Maceio public school system, which serves a “poverty-stricken, crack-infested” city in Brazil.
So why share this story? Several thoughts came to mind after I stumbled across this two-part series that appeared in the GlobalPost last year. And I thought you might have a few impressions of your own.
One thought arose as I read how Brazil’s “notorious rich-poor gap shrinks and the middle class grows,” yet almost all wealthy and upper-middle class families send their children to private schools, “as do those middle class families that can afford it.”
That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Students in Brazilian private schools are, on average, three years ahead academically over those attending public schools. Who wouldn’t send their kids to these elite schools if they could afford it?
Yet, I’m not sure what to make of this. Although I’ve always recognized the many poor children in America receive a less-than-equitable education, it’s still unsettling to see the parallel with Brazil and its rich-poor divide.
(more…)
Being “data-driven” is generally considered a good thing. The U.S. Department of Education collects data, of course, as do states and local school districts. But whether this information is: a) useful, b) not useful, or c) grossly misleading depends on what data is collected and how it’s interpreted.
It’s a tricky business that’s anything but straightforward, as the Center on Education Policy shows in a recent letter to the two consortia that are developing common core standards for the states.
CEP supports the work of SBAC and PARCC (the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium and the Partnership for Assessment and Readiness for College and Careers), but it says numbers can unwittingly obscure or distort the information they’re supposed to illuminate.
Citing a common example, CEP notes that NCLB, with its single-minded emphasis on the percentage of students achieving proficiency, does “not tell the whole story of what’s happening in student achievement.”
“The percentage proficient places an implied value on bringing students to a minimal level of efficiency,” the letter says, “but does not capture achievement gains above the proficiency cut scores (or below it for students who have not yet reached proficiency).”
(more…)
If you can’t read, you can’t learn. That statement might seem obvious.
Yet in the United States, according to Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash), there are more than 8 million students in grades four though 12 who are reading below grade level. At this time in their schooling that is, beyond third grade they should have moved from a “learning-to-read” mode to one sometimes called “reading to learn.” And the fact that they have not reached this point, or have only partially reached it, means they will have trouble keeping up with their peers, graduating from high school, and succeeding in life.
“The students of today will be the workers of tomorrow,” Murray told a group of literacy coaches recently. “Trying to find jobs, struggling to make their way in a world in which literacy is no longer a luxury. It’s a necessity.”
Murray, who received NSBA’s Special Recognition Award last month, is introducing the Literacy Education for All Results for the Nation or the LEARN Act, which would authorize $2.35 billion in federal support for literacy programs spanning birth through age 12.
(more…)
Far from the American School Board Journal to get all tizzied up over the Royal Wedding. We’ve got more important things to do.
However, seeing as I’ve already mentioned it .. did you see the lady in the church with the big black hat that covered one whole side of her face? What was that about? And what’s it like for the guy sitting next to her facing a veritable “hat wall” on his left?
We’re journalists here; we have to ask these things. And, we must add, in the interests of full disclosure: “Tizzied,” apparently, is not a word. But of course it should be.
Now back to the matter at hand: Yes, Education. Did you know that Princess Kate, if and when she becomes queen, would be the first English queen to get a college education? That revelation comes courtesy of Valerie Strauss’ Answer Sheet, although Strauss notes that the best educated and brainiest queen “was probably the brilliant Queen Elizabeth I, who was leaning Latin at age 5.” (And we thought it was Bush/Obama that pushed academics into kindergarten.)
In other, non-wedding-related, news, Joanne Jacobs highlights a troubling report from the Education Trust, which looked at high-performing schools in Maryland and Indiana and found they still left certain subgroups of students behind.
John Thompson, of This Week in Education, seconds education consultant Andrew Rotherham’s assertion that “intention” is key to schools that succeed despite student poverty. Rotherham made the comment in an interview on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross.
While on Fresh Air’s site, hear Diane Ravitch, who spoke at NSBA’s Federal Relations Conference earlier this year, on the pitfalls of standardized testing.
Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor
Call it “Disneyland Brain,” but when I returned from a two-and-a-half-week trip that included NSBA’s Annual Conference in San Francisco, three days of reporting on the Long Beach schools, and a family vacation to the famous Anaheim theme park, among other places, I was at a loss to identify the Conference Daily story I wrote that our analysis said was getting a lot of hits.
The story was slugged: “Rivers.”
“Rivers?” I thought, trying to place it. Like other ASBJ editors, I covered three or four sessions a day, on everything from dual-emersion elementary schools to the most significant education-related court cases of the past year.
“Rivers,” it turns out, didn’t have anything to do — at least, directly — with the business of running a school system. It was a lunchtime speech by actor Victor Rivas Rivers, who has made highlighting the problem of domestic violence a personal goal. It is a quest born of personal experience.
Rivers said his father was a charming man — in public. In private he was an abuser who terrorized Rivers’ mother, beat him and his brothers, and even harassed the family pets. Rivers eventually escaped his punisher through the help of a series of families who took him in, and a variety of people in the school district, including a teacher who secretly gave him a meal ticket when Rivers’ father was limiting him to one meal a day.
(more…)
It’s an ingenious title, when you think of it. Also a little ambiguous.
The Future of Children — the collaboration between the Brookings Institution and Princeton University’s Wilson School of Public and International Affairs — is it about future generations of children and our commitment (or lack thereof) to them? That’s the way I’ve always read it. Or is it about the future of today’s children and the kind of lives they will lead as adults?
It’s about both, of course, because the future of children — today’s and tomorrow’s — is the most compelling issue facing our society today.
Unfortunately, we often don’t treat children’s futures with the kind of commitment and urgency they deserve. As Laura Moore, of the Brookings-Princeton collaboration, notes in her blog last week on the challenges facing immigrant children, “without purchasing, voting, or lobbying power, the well-being of children can easily get lost in the debates, which is why knowledge and advocacy on the behalf of children is so critical.”
In other words, adults teachers, school board members, school administrators, and others must do the speaking for them. That’s one reason why thousands of them are going to NSBA’s 71st Annual Conference in San Francisco this week: to give voice to the voiceless.
Ironically, those most in need of a voice are also the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population: immigrant children. Thus, by definition, their success and the nation’s are inextricably combined. Appropriately, the latest Future of Children volume is devoted to them.
”Most of the recommendations in these volumes, and other Future of Children volumes, suggest prioritizing and investing in children now — regardless of their circumstances and often ahead of other interests,” Moore writes. “This is simply because investments in child well-being are the smartest ones we can make.”
Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor
