Archive for December, 2006

Report: U.S. Schools Not Making The Grade

Published by CKF on December 14, 2006 in Curriculum and Educational Policy. 0 Comments

CBS Evening NewsHigh-Powered Panel Warns That American Kids Can’t Compete With Global Peers

A bipartisan panel is warning that America’s students are falling behind those in even some of the poorest countries, CBS News correspondent Thalia Assuras reports.

“I am really worried about where this country is,” says ex-Sen. Bill Brock, a former Secretary of Labor. “We’ve got an information world, we’re networked to the rest of the world, it’s a global economy and we’re not preparing our young people for that world.”

Students from Asia to Europe outperform Americans on tests. Thirty years ago, the U.S. boasted 30 percent of the world’s college students. That figure is now 14 percent. Meanwhile, most other industrialized nations educate their 16-year olds at a college level.

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How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century

Published by CKF on December 10, 2006 in Assessment and Testing, Curriculum, Educational Policy and Research and Reports. 0 Comments

Time By Claudia Wallis, Sonja Steptoe

For the past five years, the national conversation on education has focused on reading scores, math tests and closing the “achievement gap” between social classes. This is not a story about that conversation. This is a story about the big public conversation the nation is not having about education, the one that will ultimately determine not merely whether some fraction of our children get “left behind” but also whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can’t think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad or speak a language other than English.

… Right now we’re aiming too low. Competency in reading and math — the focus of so much No Child Left Behind (NCLB) testing — is the meager minimum. Scientific and technical skills are, likewise, utterly necessary but insufficient.

… Any number of old-school assignments — memorizing the battles of the Civil War or the periodic table of the elements — now seem faintly absurd. That kind of information, which is poorly retained unless you routinely use it, is available at a keystroke. Still, few would argue that an American child shouldn’t learn the causes of the Civil War or understand how the periodic table reflects the atomic structure and properties of the elements. As school critic E.D. Hirsch Jr. points out in his book, The Knowledge Deficit, kids need a substantial fund of information just to make sense of reading materials beyond the grade-school level. Without mastering the fundamental building blocks of math, science or history, complex concepts are impossible.

Many analysts believe that to achieve the right balance between such core knowledge and what educators call “portable skills” — critical thinking, making connections between ideas and knowing how to keep on learning — the U.S. curriculum needs to become more like that of Singapore, Belgium and Sweden, whose students outperform American students on math and science tests. Classes in these countries dwell on key concepts that are taught in depth and in careful sequence, as opposed to a succession of forgettable details so often served in U.S. classrooms.

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Bucking School Reform, a Leader Gets Results

Published by CKF on December 4, 2006 in Curriculum and School News. 0 Comments

The New York TimesBy David M. Herszenhorn

Kathleen M. Cashin is responsible for some of the roughest territory in the New York City school system — vast stretches of poverty and desolation from Ocean Hill-Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn to Far Rockaway in Queens, all part of Region 5, where she is superintendent.

… Yet in the last three years, Dr. Cashin has produced one of the school system’s most unlikely success stories. Since 2003, her elementary and middle schools have consistently posted the best total gains on annual reading and math tests, outpacing other regions with similar legacies of low achievement.

… She runs her schools in Region 5, with more than 85,000 students, the same way she ran her schools under the old Board of Education and under previous mayors.

… In 2003, 33.2 percent of her students in grades three to eight could read on grade level and 34.6 percent were proficient in math. Today, 50.6 percent read on grade and 56.9 percent are proficient in math. No other region starting below 40 percent has crossed the halfway mark in either subject.

“We are relentless,” Dr. Cashin said in a recent interview. “The secret is clear expectations. Everything is spelled out. Nothing is assumed.” She provides her principals, for instance, with a detailed road map of what should be taught in every subject, in every grade, including specific skills of the week in reading and focus on a genre of literature every month.

… Though she uses the citywide math and reading programs in many schools, Dr. Cashin does not believe they are sufficient and customizes them extensively, with an emphasis on writing. She also uses an array of other initiatives of her own choosing or design.

“You need to expand the knowledge base, expand the vocabulary, expand the experience base, and that only comes with good instruction and a rich curriculum,” she said.

… While the city’s reading program focuses on story books, Dr. Cashin layers on lots of nonfiction. And, responding to research showing that impoverished children often lack vocabulary and basic facts, she has adopted a curriculum called Core Knowledge, which teaches basics like the principles of constitutional government, events in world history and well-known literature.

“The question to raise is, why aren’t more schools doing this?” said Pedro Noguera, an education professor at New York University. “Why aren’t more of these approaches that are proven to be effective being adopted more widely in the city?”

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