Closing the Achievement Gap: Teaching Content
Public school parents in New York City fear the financial meltdown will trigger an exodus from Manhattan’s pricey private schools into their already overcrowded public schools. Tuition at the City’s private schools averages $21,000 and routinely soars well into the $30s. The Daily News notes there are 35,000 private school students in New York. A healthy percentage of their parents depend (depended?) on the financial services industry for their daily bread. And the tuition money.
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No plans this weekend? Plan to spend some time on You Tube checking out the dozens of videos posted by students demonstrating innovative methods for cheating on tests. For example, there’s not a teacher alive who won’t closely examine a Coke bottle on a student’s desk after seeing this:
A similar video has been viewed over 2 million times. Enterprising cheaters show how to cheat with ballpoint pens, rubber bands, a hoodie, a three-ring binder, and a cough drop, among other common items. Hopefully, your students are as brilliant as this would-be cheater.
“I know it’s not a good thing to cheat,” explains Kiki in one video. “It’s, like, academic dishonesty and blah, blah, blah. But I think everyone has at least done it once.” She then demonstrates a low-tech way of inserting information inside the clear tube a ballpoint pen. “Hopefully, none of my teachers will see this video,” she adds.
Sorry, Kiki.
Some baseball fans wear their hearts on their sleeves. Zachary Sharples, a Florida 7th-grader chose to wear his on his head, and that got him suspended from school. Zachary got a “Ray-Hawk,” a kind of Mohawk favored by some players on the Tampa Bay Rays, sprayed it blue and cheered on his team in the AL division series win over Chicago.
Before Zachary went to bed, the Bradenton Herald reports, he made sure to wash off the dye so he wouldn’t get in trouble at school the next day. Didn’t work. Zachary’s mohawk still earned him an in-school suspension for violating the school dress code. “I did nothing but sat there,” Zachary said Tuesday. “We couldn’t talk, it was stupid.”
His dad says school officials told Zachary he can either shave his head to be allowed back into his classes, or let his hair grow out - in in-school suspension. His family is moving to St. Petersburg instead, where the kid can presumably wear his hair however he wants.
[Hat Tip: The Gradebook]
The days of children reading traditional books are numbered, says the man in charge of a campaign to improve literacy in Britain’s schools. Jonathan Douglas, the director of the National Literacy Trust says publishers must adapt titles for readers who spend more time on the internet if they want future generations to read.
Britain’s Independent points to new research that shows reading drops dramatically as children get older. “The typical eight-year-old reads nearly 16 books a year but, by the time they reach 15 or 16, this has dwindled to just over three books per year,” the paper notes. “The study, based on interviews with nearly 30,000 pupils aged seven to 16, also shows a growing trend towards reading comics, magazines, newspapers and online articles, and playing computer games, after the first year at secondary school.”
What this means, says Douglas, is that publishers must “reinvent the book.”
Rutgers University in New Jersey is no longer asking applicants to submit high school transcripts starting this fall. Instead, high school students will enter their own grades in an online application form, Inside Higher Ed reports. An official transcript will be required for every student who is admitted and plans to enroll, however.
As New Jersey high schools learned of the change, the question everyone has been asking is: Will this lead to a new variety of grade inflation, as applicants (accidentally of course…) somehow transcribe themselves into honors students? Rutgers officials say that won’t happen because the transcript checks of accepted applicants who plan to enroll will cover every single student. If you inflate your grades, your admission offer will be revoked — period.
Education continues its run as the Chicago Cubs of the Presidential elections — failing to show up when it counts.
Kids who are aggressive early on in life are more likely to be victimized by bullies than non-aggressive kids. That’s one of the key findings of a new study this week in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Newsweek notes experts have previously documented a link between being aggressive and being tormented.
When volatile and angry children act out on their frustrations—smashing a toy after someone takes their ball away—they aren’t exactly beloved by their peers….Kids who take their wrath out on other kids, as the children did in the study, are also at risk. Their classmates don’t like them—and some will eventually make their displeasure known. Prior research has focused largely on school-age kids, around age 4 or 5, and the studies have been relatively small. The new study, which followed 1,970 children in Canada, traces behavior all the way back to toddlerhood.
The researchers found two other risk factors for “peer victimization” as well, Newsweek reports: harsh or reactive parenting—anger, shouting and spanking when the kids were fussy—and lower income families.
A teacher at a Kansas City charter school has been suspended for posting a video of his students marching and chanting in praise of Barack Obama on YouTube. At one level, the video can be seen as uplifting, with the students, all African-American middle school boys, chanting how Obama has inspired them to want to become lawyers, architects and entrepreneurs. At another level, the chants about Obama’s policies feel forced, scripted and more than a little inappropriate. Utterly unsurprising are the complaints about the overtly partisan nature and appropriateness of the video, which was recorded last May and only recently posted online.
The teacher in question has not been identified in media reports. The school’s director, Joyce McGautha, says she has been “advised by legal counsel to make no more comments about the video while the school investigates.”
Meanwhile, another Obama-related school controversy has been rattling around the edusphere. A Florida teacher has been widely branded an idiot and a racist for writing an inflammatory acronym on his blackboard for the word “CHANGE.” What was he thinking? wonders Joanne Jacobs. I don’t know, responds Matthew Tabor, and that’s the point.
Three out of four teenagers report they were bullied online at least once in the last year, according to a new study by UCLA psychologists. Not yours? Only one in 10 reported cyberbullying to parents or other adults.
At Ars Technica, blogger John Timmer has a smart take on this. Parents and teachers are concerned that the anonymity of online bullying exacerbates the problem. But the study suggests it’s less of a new phenomenon than the playground gone digital.
The authors feel strongly that the fact that real-world bullying strongly predicts cyberbullying and the parallels in behavior both suggest that cyberbullying may not actually be a distinct phenomenon. “These findings further underscore the continuity between adolescents’ social worlds in school and online,” they conclude.
Iowa teachers can no longer ask students to pay for field trips or other activities during the school day. The Iowa Department of Education has ruled the practice is not allowed under Iowa law.
“In February, the Ames School District asked the state for clarification regarding the legality of 17 various fees charged by the district, such as student parking stickers, yearbooks, museum admission during field trips and musical instrument rental,” the Iowa Hawk Eye reports. When field trips are part of a class or instruction, the fees fall under tuition and thus are not an allowable fee. Furthermore, the law says if the field trip is not related to what’s going on in the classroom, it should not take place during one of the school’s 180 days of instruction.
PTOs can still raise money for trips. Still, this does present a small quandary. As a teacher, I tended to observe higher levels of engagement and behavior when my 5th graders had to contribute a token sum toward a field trip. Freebies were often free-for-alls.
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