The National School Boards Association hosts a number of training and networking opportunities throughout the year and among the biggest is the winter conference in the heart of Washington D.C., which kicks off today and runs through Tuesday. The editors of ASBJ will be on hand, reporting on the most pressing issues in education and federal policy. To follow our coverage visit School Board News Today.
Nearly eight years ago, I wrote a story about the increasing stress on public school students. It was largely anecdotal; while I was able to find studies showing that college students were under more stress including one that noted a doubling of the number of students being treated for depression between 1989 and 2001 at one Midwestern university there was nothing quantitative about K-12 students.
But maybe this qualifies: On exam days at the Rockingham County (N.C.) Schools, a largely rural district of 7,500 students near Greensboro, school staff had to throw out as many as 20 exam booklets because students vomited on them.
Twenty booklets in a district of less than 8,000 students — is that significant? I don’t know, but it sounded like a lot to me.
Now comes an article in the New York Times, also about college students, that again suggests student stress is rising. For example, the percentage of students who described their emotional health as “above average” in a comprehensive 2010 survey was 52 percent, down from 64 percent in 1985. The survey, titled The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010, also found that the percentage of freshmen who had felt “frequently overwhelmed” their senior year of high school increased to 29 percent from 27 percent the previous year.
This trend is surely related to the struggling economy and the lack of available jobs. But might the increasing stress also be due, in part, to our relentless drive for higher student achievement? High academic achievement is great, of course, but are we pushing this objective to the detriment of other, “softer” goals we have for our students, such as growing up emotionally stabile, learning how to be good citizens, and developing a love of learning?
In a few months, ASBJ readers will receive one very pointed answer from education researcher and critic Alfie Kohn. The title of Kohn’s April story? “Feel Bad Education.”
Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor
High School Soup had great things to say today about NCES’s new Education Dashboard, a database that looks at how students in the states and nation rank against a number of key academic benchmarks. In fact, the blog says, the new resource shows ”the Obama Administration gets it ”
All the indicators on the dashboard are connected in some way to the Administration’s signature goal of making the U.S. once again the leader in college degree attainment.
Now, a critique: National stats are great – and a tremendous help to reporters like me – but sometimes these relentless counts and comparisons seem to focus on ends (some of them of dubious value, such as the number of states using student achievement data in teacher performance evaluations) at the expense of substance.
To which, none other than Ronald Reagan might have replied as he did in one of his famous presidential debates _– “There you go again!” Only this time, the one saying that is Alexander Russo, taking so-called education “progressives” to task for being much better at knocking popular school reforms (the Harlem Children Zone, the educational changes in places like New York and Chicago or, I might add, the new Education Dashboard) without coming up with better ideas of their own.
So, yes, we’ve still got a long way to go in the way of developing 21st-century skills. As one national daily put it, “Educators are hardly triumphant and say different skills are needed to compete in a global knowledge economy.”
So true. Except the above quote comes not from a U.S. newspaper but from the state-controlled China Daily, which, according to Atlantic blogger James Fallows, isn’t overwhelmed by the fact that Shanghai teenagers are outscoring the rest of the world in reading and math, and says they need to do more critical thinking and less rote learning.
Finally, let me recommend Joanne Jacobs’ blog on the rise in “blended learning” at the K12 level, a combination of traditional and online classes that looks like a wave of the future.
Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor
I understand the frustration among California parents at having to ante up more and more for items and activities that used to be free. I can’t believe some of the ridiculous charges that the airline industry has tried (sometimes unsuccesfully) to employ. A fee for using the lieu? C’mon. Similarly, school districts that make students pay for standard textbooks and tests also fall into my “gimme-a-break” category.
But unlike the airline industry, public schools in California aren’t passing on the costs of doing business to maintain or widen their profit margin but merely as a means of survival.
Which is why I’m a little befuddled by recent legislative activity in the state that to me, serve only to kick a system that’s already down. The latest incarnation of this is Assembly Bill 165, which would prohibit school districts from charging students for classroom(OK) and extracurricular activities (huh?).
As someone who played sports and participated in many extracurricular activities throughout my K-12 career, I can vouch they were an instrumental part of a well-rounded education. But I can also tell you, when my grades started to slip during senioritis, those extracurricular activities were one of the first targets for my parents. Lesson: it was the classes and the learning that occurred there that should be my primary focus.
So, what should be a school’s primary focus? I think it’s been pretty clear that policy and lawmakers, businesses and industries want students leaving schools with a mix of skills, competencies and subject matter knowledge. While valuable lessons are learned outside of the classroom, I think it’s also pretty clear that in today’s economy it’s getting more and more difficult to provide even the basics let alone the extras.
And in a state like California, whose budget has suffered from double-digit deficits for the last several years, I really don’t think lawmakers who’ve gutted education funding to fill those gaps have any right to tell school districts that cheerleading or water polo should be part of a free education.
Most schools, particularly those in California, have passed the point of doing more with less and must simply do less with less. Rather than penalize them for this harsh reality, the Statehouse should support the tough decisions schools are forced to make.
Naomi Dillon, Senior Editor
Education will not be the biggest issue in tonight’s State of the Union Address. That distinction will go to the economy. But if President Obama is looking to elicit some bipartisan support, he might want to reiterate a comment he made in a speech last August about the need to increase the rate of college attendance and graduation.
“We know that in the coming decades, a person’s success in life will depend more and more on a higher education,” Obama said.
With members of Congress scattered about the chamber so there’s camaraderie in seating, if not necessarily politics everyone’s going to be looking for that feel-good moment when they can all stand up and applaud. And what better way than for Obama to restate his pledge that the United States will once again be Number 1 in college graduation percentage by 2020?
But just how good is that college education he’s promoting? Two recent New York Times forums “Too Much Free Time on Campus?” and “Does College Make You Smarter?” address those issues and reveal some disturbing research and commentary. For example, Philip Babcock, of the University of California, Riverside, says his research shows “a whopping 10-hour decline” in studying among full-time, four-year college students between 1961 and 2000.
Babcock says this phenomenon is partly the result of colleges’ need to market themselves to prospective students.
“One college even sent out Frisbees and chocolate chip cookies in its recruitment package,” he wrote. “The message couldn’t be clearer: Come to our college. It’s a vacation spa. It’s Club Med.
Having not been to Club Med, I cannot offer an informed analysis of that statement. However, colleges aren’t the only one’s being criticized. Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, takes high schools to task as well. Having interviewed Botstein a few times, I’ve found his comments to be sometimes, well, a little over the top; but he makes some good points and his critiques still need to be taken seriously. This is what he had to say:
“Why is anyone surprised to find that standards and expectations in our college are too low? High school graduates — rapidly dwindling elite — come to college entirely unaccustomed to close reading, habits of disciplined analysis, skills in writing reasoned arguments and a basic grasp of the conduct, method and purposes of science.”
Don’t think we’ll be hearing that at the State of the Union speech tonight.
Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor
Photo courtesy of Stockvault.net
Stereotypes are dangerous things, but they can sometimes be useful. They’re blunt instruments that can just as easily reveal truth as prejudice, but more likely point to some uncomfortable mixture of the two. Which is why we try to leave them alone.
Today, however, I’m not taking my own advice. And that’s because the authors of the two essays I want to tell you about have tossed out some broad stereotypes of their own.
If you’re tired of reading about the self-described Chinese American “Tiger Mother,” I understand. But if, somehow, you missed her recent essay in the Wall Street Journal, you must know that Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua created an Internet sensation with her account of her strict (or is that draconian?) child-rearing practices:
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Many years ago, when I was a college senior in Southern California, I took a child development class connected with a wonderful campus preschool that was all the things you would expect a 70s-era preschool to be discovery oriented, child centered, creative, and fun. It guess you could call it “open classroom” as well, seeing as the kids had the run of a multi-room former home; of course it helped, in terms of classroom control, that in addition to having a wonderful director there was a ratio of roughly one college student helper for every two children.
Flip ahead two years, and I was one of the teachers in a Head Start program for minority students in Boston’s South End. This was also “open classroom,” but by necessity: There was some structural problem in one classroom that forced us to combined two classrooms of 20-some students each into a mega-class of four teachers and more than 40-something children.
Yes, it was bedlam. There were just too many students and too much noise for much real learning to occur.
I thought about those two schools this week after reading about an experimental elementary school in Brooklyn founded by a former principal and Harvard graduate student who was trying to replicate the small discussion groups at Phillips Exeter Academy. This is analogous to my California school. But, according to a New York Times story on the project and Joanne Jacobs’ subsequent blog, instead of organizing several small groups (which may not have been possible) the founder put 60 first graders in a class with four teachers, and the results were
. yes, as the Times strongly implies, bedlam. The same thing I experienced in Boston.
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A widely cited 1998 study linking childhood vaccines with autism wasn’t just bad science, a British scientific journal says: It was fraud.
That bombshell was released last week as investigative reporter Brian Deer revealed the results of seven years of work into the research behind the notorious Lancet article written by Dr. Andrew Wakefield (and several other authors who later took their names off the piece).
Read about the report in the British Medical Journal and at National Public Radio’s website. Then look at the March 2008 article by ASBJ Associate Editor Joetta Sack-Min about the enormous expense that educating children with autism is placing on some school districts.
Our next item isn’t about K-12 schooling per se, but with college football so prominent this time of year, we thought it appropriate to include a piece by Maureen Downy of “Get Schooled” about those amazing Auburn Tigers, which, are playing Oregon for the BSC National Championship at the Fiesta Bowl Monday night.
Well, maybe not so amazing when it comes to their academic prowess. According to a recent New York Times report, Auburn dropped from No. 4 in the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate, a four-year analysis of team member’s progress toward graduation, to No. 85. That was four years after a Times investigation found an unusual number of football players taking what the university calls “directed-reading courses” that is, independent study. In fact, one sociology professor was reported to have “taught” 252 independent studies courses (“10 would be considered ambitious,” the article said) during the team’s undefeated 2004 season.
Another sociology professor who discovered the abuse said Auburn’s precipitous fall in the NCAA academic ranking was actually a good thing. “A genuine consequence to this has been that the people who want to do things right have gotten a bit more grasp of what the university is trying to do,” said the professor, Jim Gundlach.
So high school graduates, want to go to a great university like Auburn and we mean really go? Better load up on those AP classes.
“Load up on AP classes.” Is there something wrong with that line? Critics in a New York Times forum on the tremendous group in Advanced Placement say there is. Just listen to high school English teacher Patrick Walsh:
“In the last 10 years, Advanced Placement has become a game of labels and numbers, a public relations ploy used by school officials who are dumping as many students as they can into A.P. courses to create the illusion that they are raising overall standards and closing the gap between whites and minorities,” Welsh writes.
Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor
Some New Year’s resolutions are harbingers of great change, others merely wishful thinking. Arne Duncan’s commentary on ESEA reauthorization this week in the Washington Post, is not a resolution per se. But the education secretary’s piece is brimming with New Year’s enthusiasm, in this case confidence that key members of Congress — in fresh, bipartisan fashion — “are poised to rewrite the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), currently known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB).”
Duncan call’s his plan for a more workable ESEA a “common-sense agenda [that] also reflects the bipartisan revolution underway at the state and local level” to improve student achievement.
Does the secretary have this right? That’s a tough one to answer — or, in the words of that hoary (but useful) journalistic cliché, “Time will tell.”
This month I have an ASBJ story about where experts think the new Congress will take federal education policy, especially ESEA. And the experts say
well, to tell you the truth, the experts are all over the map, even on whether legislators will even get to ESEA in the coming years.
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Happy Winter Solstice! A time to catch our breath, settle in with a nice cup of hot chocolate, and reflect on the wonders of nature on this, the shortest day of the year.
Yes, of course, I’m kidding. Oh, it really is solstice. It’s just that, well, if your family’s anything like mine, the only ones in your household who have time to reflect on fluffy couches with cups of hot chocolate are those maddeningly blissful models in all those outdoorsy clothing catalogues. (And remember, they’re getting paid to look blissful.)
Me? I just keep telling myself, “Just make it to Dec. 24th ” But the truth is, everyone and everything seems to be moving faster these days. Like Congress, of all things. During this so-called “lame duck session,” it has extended the Bush tax cuts, repealed “Don’t’ Ask, Don’t Tell,” and is poised to take up the new START treaty.
Education news is also happening at a rapid clip — and it’s only going to move faster in the months ahead. Last Friday, for example, I attended an Aspen Institute forum called Assessment 2.0: “Next Generation” Comprehensive Assessment Systems.”
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