Newly-elected Chicago mayor and former White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, has promised to fix the city’s broken school system. But as this video illustrates, plenty of school successes already exist in the Windy City.
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School Board News Today, an online publication of NSBA, provides timely and relevant stories and analysis from NSBA and other news outlets to school board members, administrators, and all others interested in K-12 education.
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The week in blogs
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.
Anyway, to mix metaphors even further, blogger John Thompson, in citing the column, says Hess “hits home runs (when not striking out),” which I guess is sort of a compliment, maybe.
Speaking of Bulwer-Lytton. You’re right! – In less than three months, the results of the 2011 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Writing Contest – “where WWW means Wretched Writers Welcome”—will be a released to a grateful public. (We’ll put last year’s winner at the end, so you’ll have to read all this first.)
So, very quickly: read Maureen Downey’s fascinating“Dropping out of School to Prove You’re a Genius and Getting Paid, the Quick and the Ed about a New York Times story on alleged “affirmative action for the rich,” and Joanne Jacobs’ completely different take on the same article.
And now, last year’s winning Bulwer-Lytton entry, which, I believe, comes from the “Romance” – really, really intentionally bad Romance – category, we have this offering from Molly Ringle of Seattle, Wash.:
For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss–a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.
May that lovely image stay with you this Memorial Day holiday, or maybe not.
The week in blogs
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.
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How ambitious is too ambitious?
It sounds great in theory: Raise standards—and students will rise to the occasion.
But is that always the case?
That question currently is under debate in Fairfax County, Va., where some parents are challenging the plans of county school officials to phase out many honors courses.
School officials say the move makes sense. They want more students—particularly minority students—to test themselves to the fullest by enrolling in Advanced Placement (AP) classes.
“We’ve found that traditionally underrepresented minorities do not access the most-rigorous track when three tracks are offered,” Peter Noonan, Fairfax County’s assistant superintendent for instructional services, told the Washington Post. “But when two tracks are offered, they do.”
So, in schools where an AP class is offered in a subject, officials plan to discontinue any parallel honors courses.
Not all parents see the decision as that simple. Without that middle ground course offering, opponents say, some students will decide that AP courses are too challenging academically or will demand more work than they’re willing to take on.
For those students, the only alternative remaining will be standard track courses. And some will choose to “dumb down” their education with less-academically challenging classes.
Enough parents are raising concerns that the school board has agreed to review its decision, but it’s unclear whether supporters of honors courses can resist what the Post describes as “a national trend to reduce the number of ‘tracks’ for students.”
Del Stover, Senior Editor
The week in blogs
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.
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When drive to send students to college goes off course
Setting high expectations for students is a good thing. But sometimes you can go overboard.
Take the case of Baltimore’s Western High School, the nation’s oldest all-girls public school. It told 17-year-old senior Gaetana Vitale that she could not participate in her graduation ceremony because she had not been accepted to a four-year university.
Thing is, she had been accepted at a nearby community college where she planned to study pre-veterinarian science.
But community college wasn’t good enough according to Western, which the Baltimore Sun reports has had a “longstanding practice of preventing students who have been accepted to two-year colleges from participating in the school’s graduation ceremony.”
Doesn’t make a lot of sense does it?
I could make sport of Western school officials for their nonsensical policy. But it would be a cheap shot. Officials did have a logicalif flawedreason for their policy. And they made students aware of the rules when they enrolled.
Besides, the Sun reports that school officials decided to waive the requirement this year and rethink the logic behind their practice.
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New on ASBJ.com
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.
This week in education blogs
Have you heard the news? Well, it’s all over the Internet, so it must be true.
Here’s the headline:
Budget Mix-Up Provides Nation’s Schools With Enough Money to Properly Educate Students
The story “quotes” prominent Washington politicians, falling over one another to apologize for the error.
“Obviously, we did not intend for this to happen, and we are doing everything in our power to right the situation and discipline whoever is responsible,” said a House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, (R-Wis.) but not really. His “quote” and the headline along with statements from chagrinned Democrats as well appears in The Onion, the satirical daily that seems to get all its facts wrong but still manages to come up with the truth.
Would that a little budget “slip up” could fix everything regarding school funding, but in the real world of public education it was not the case last week, as battles raged on over just how to define equity in education and in society.
In the Fordham Institute’s “Flypaper” blog, Peter Meyer charges that protesting New York teachers and their sympathizes, who marched this week on Wall Street to protest Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to cut more than 6,000 teaching positions, were fomenting “a class war.” (Yes, we’re horrified too.)
”Even if one sympathized with these folks’ sentiments about the financial inequality crisis’ or believed for a second or two that it was the big banks that crashed our economy,’” the question is where the big unions and their contrail of sympathizers have been during the inequality crisis in education the last thirty years,” Meyer writes. “Their silence in the face of crushing inner city educational failures has been deafening.”
To which teacher and blogger David B. Cohen replies that “they were busy working.” In his own blog, Cohen talks about California teachers protesting in Sacramento over that state’s horrendous budget mess. And his colleague at Accomplished California Teachers, “Mizz Murphy,” writes about a surreal one could say Orwellian court hearing during which Los Angeles teachers were protesting their layoffs.
In this excerpt, a district lawyer questions a high school teacher librarian with “multiple teaching credentials” and more than three decades of experience:
Attorney: I see that you’ve submitted a lesson plan into evidence for a research project on various countries.
TL: That’s correct. The students were assigned a country and then did research on the history, culture, politics, etc., of that country.
LAUSD Attorney: So, you taught them research skills?
TL: Yes, and I also taught them about the countries they’d been assigned.
Attorney: So, you taught them about the history of those countries?
TL: Briefly, yes. As you can see, there are about twenty countries on the list.
Attorney: So, you taught them about the history of Armenia?
TL: Yes, briefly, I did.
Attorney: Could you please tell the court what you told the class about the history of Armenia?
TL: You want me to give a lecture on Armenian history? Now?
Attorney: Please, if you wouldn’t mind.
“The TL then proceeded to give a 3-4 minute lecture on the history of Armenia,” Murphy writes. “He was spot on ”
I don’t know enough about L.A. Unified’s considerable budget woes to know who’s right in this conflict. But, to me, the larger issue is: Why should the schools and the teachers be put in this untenable position to begin with?
Makes one long for a federal (or state) budget slipup one of Onionian proportions.
The week in blogs
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.
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The week in blogs
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
