Closing the Achievement Gap: Teaching Content
I have to confess I didn’t know It’s Academic was still on the air in Washington, DC and six other cities after nearly 50 years. Sophie Altman, the brains behind the brainiac TV quiz show — the longest running quiz show in history, reportedly — died last week. The Washington Post files a lovely obit. Check out the 1965 photo from the show of a Illinois high schooler named Hillary Rodham.
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Penmanship instruction is making a comeback. For a couple of decades, especially in the 1980s, time spent on handwriting in school was replaced by instruction in computer and keyboard skills. Then with greater emphasis on testing, math and reading pushed penmanship of the curriculum. “Schools couldn’t add more time to the day or add more days to the week, so we began to see less emphasis on formal handwriting instruction,” Dennis Williams, of Zaner-Bloser, one of the best-known publishers of handwriting materials for schools, tells the Associated Press.
Nearly 200,000 people (!) competed in the most recent national handwriting grand championship, with the title going to Arizona seventh-grader Emily Rose Neeb.
USA Today, meanwhile reports spelling is gaining importance again with states increasingly testing students on their writing skills. “Rather than relying on word lists, some school districts are taking a different, more holistic method to spelling instruction. A program called “Spelling for Writers” emphasizes word patterns, roots and meanings rather than relying on word lists, the paper notes.
The 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee begins tomorrow in Washington.
A University of New Hampshire study finds “students do much better in school when their parents are actively involved in their education.” The research is reported in “Parental Effort, School Resources, and Student Achievement,” which appears in the spring 2008 issue of the Journal of Human Resources.
“Parental effort is consistently associated with higher levels of achievement, and the magnitude of the effect of parental effort is substantial. We found that schools would need to increase per-pupil spending by more than $1,000 in order to achieve the same results that are gained with parental involvement,” Conway said.
I’ll be very interested in reading the full report to find out precisely what that $1,000 needs to be spent on.
One year into Washington, DC’s mayoral takeover of the schools, the Washington Post editorializes that while there are no instant results when it comes to school reform, “this first year has been spent laying the foundation: restructuring the central office, closing an unprecedented number of schools, reorganizing ones that are failing, getting rid of principals who don’t make the grade. Time is needed before these conditions can produce results such as better student achievement or increased enrollment. Already, there is reason for cautious optimism.”
The Post notes that changes in the culture are evident: “There is a greater sense of urgency, and people know that more is expected of them.”
Want to increase test scores? Stop focusing on the test. At least that’s the lesson from a pair of Core Knowledge charter schools in Florida.
Our kids are harder working than we ever were…and dumber. This paradoxical observation courtesy of Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post:
Without question, Americans, whether wealthy or just upwardly mobile, are nowadays obsessed with preparing their children for a super-competitive, globalized job market. They will therefore go a long way — switching neighborhoods, borrowing money, creating color-coded spreadsheets — to get their children into high schools that force them to study and that test them regularly.
Those who play the game most intensively are often rewarded: The child who takes 15 Advance Placement courses, plays the clarinet in three orchestras, runs a Cambodian refugee camp in the summer and eschews lunch all winter really does have a better chance of getting into college than the child who plays kickball after school in the empty lot next door.
Yet, at the same time, Applebaum notes, many parents retain “a kind of nostalgia for a pre-industrial America, one in which childhood involved breaking horses and building rafts….Today’s children always seem to be working harder than yesterday’s children, having less fun and taking more tests, at least according to everyone I know.”
More strangely, our nostalgia also clashes with the other important American education narrative, the one that focuses on the 46 percent of high school seniors who test below the “basic” level in science (only 2 percent qualify as ” advanced“), the ” Dumbest Generation” of semiliterates glued to their cellphones, and the number of teenagers, a stunning one-third of the total, who drop out of high school. Since 38 percent of these teenagers recently told one survey that they dropped out because “I had too much freedom and not enough rules in my life,” it’s no surprise that solutions to the dropout crisis often involve imposing stricter school regimens, with more organized hours of teaching, more pressure and, yes, more testing.
Thus, Applebaum concludes, our kids are both stupider than we were and harder working.
Last week, I posted a memo to Wendy Kopp, suggesting a new way to deploy Teach for America corps members—and get top veteran teachers in front of our highest need classrooms. The Teach for America founder emailed a thoughtful reply over the weekend:
Many thanks for all the generous sentiments in your blog entry, which I appreciate. As for your recommendation, as you might guess, I don’t think this would be a good thing for urban and rural kids. It is a rare person who has what it takes to excel as a teacher in a low-income community, and it’s not at all a given that teachers who do well in more privileged communities will do well in urban and rural areas. The most important thing for kids in low-income communities is that we recruit as many people as possible — whether new or experienced — who have the personal characteristics that differentiate successful teachers in high-poverty communities, and that we train and support them to be effective in meeting the extra needs of their students. The individuals who come to Teach For America are coming because they want to work with the nation’s most disadvantaged children (and it is unlikely that most of them would decide to channel their energy toward teaching in more privileged contexts), and in fact their motivation to level the playing field for them is one reason for their success. The recent Urban Institute study that looked at the impact of high school teachers in the state of North Carolina over a six-year period provides evidence that our strategy has a positive impact for kids; the study showed that the incremental impact of hiring a Teach For America corps member was three times the impact of having a teacher with three or more years of experience. Moreover, in addition to providing a critical source of excellent teachers for disadvantaged kids, our strategy of channelling the energy of the nation’s future leaders into urban and rural schools is important for the long-term effort to ensure educational excellence and equity. Teach For America is building a pipeline of leaders who are deeply committed to educational equity and deeply understand what it will take to ensure that children in low-income communities have the educational opportunities they deserve. Their initial teaching experience in under-resourced communities is foundational to their lifelong commitment to effecting the systemic changes necessary to ensure educational opportunity for all.
Wendy Kopp
CEO & Founder
Teach For America
Daniel Santillan is a residency enforcer for the Calexico school district. His job is to make sure that students in the California school district actually live in the US, not Mexico. “When he’s not tracking students on weekday mornings at the border crossing, he visits local homes to make sure children live where their parents say they do,” reports the Christian Science Monitor.
“Santillan isn’t thrilled about busting youngsters for living south of the border, but he accepts his job. ‘The bottom line is that these kids are taking up room,’ he says. “Some schools are now doing more to enforce residency requirements under pressure from politicians and activists concerned about wasted taxpayer money, reports the paper, which notes it’s impossible to know how many Mexican students cross the border daily to attend school in the US, sent by parents who think they’ll get a better education. Still, border communities have fretted over their presence for more than a decade. Calexico’s schools, however, have gone further than others by sending Santillan to photograph students at the border and requiring parents to provide proof of residency twice a year.
A Port St. Lucie, Florida parent is threatening to sue after her son’s kindergarten teacher led his classmates to “vote him out of class.”
After each classmate was allowed to say what they didn’t like about Barton’s 5-year-old son, Alex, his Morningside Elementary teacher Wendy Portillo said they were going to take a vote, Melissa Barton. By a 14 to 2 margin, the students voted Alex — who is in the process of being diagnosed with autism — out of the class.
Barton filed a complaint with the school resource officer, who investigated the matter, according to Port St. Lucie Department spokeswoman Michelle Steele, who said the teacher confirmed the incident took place. The state attorney’s office concluded the matter did not meet the criteria for emotional child abuse, so no criminal charges will be filed, Steele said. The district is investigating, not surprisingly.
Our weekly roundup of the week’s most important news, information and blog posts about curriculum, teaching, education policy and other items of interest to the Core Knowledge community.
Learning Essentials
By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo, Education Week
Core Knowledge prizes content across the disciplines, bucking a trend toward a narrower, skills-based approach to learning.
Revisiting AERA, Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground and Public Education at Matthew K. Tabor
Just what the title says. The definitive post.
Redefining intelligence at Joanne Jacobs
Yale psychologists are trying to develop new tests of intelligence that measure “practical, creative, and analytical skills.” One goal is to identify more black and Hispanic children as “gifted.”
Could a Parrot Pass the New York State ELA Exam? at Eduwonkette
What’s worse, the question students are asked to write about? Or the anchor paper?
Beating My Drum: Education, Economics, and Entitlement at The Gonzo Diner
America is not only experiencing an economic crisis, it is experiencing an education crisis, and there are more connections between the two than many think.
Compromised Competitiveness at The BoBo Files
The replacements for America’s retiring work force are less knowledgeable and less educated, less skilled and demotivated, disinclined to learn and prone to shortcuts, weak in science and math, and possess poor reading proficiency.
Teacher Voice From Washington…And, Is The AFT Going All Sherman Over Michelle Rhee at Eduwonk
What’s happening inside the teacher’s union?
No Crisis For Boys In Schools, Study Says
By Valerie Strauss, Washington Post
A new study on gender equity in education concludes that a “boys crisis” in U.S. schools is a myth and that both sexes have stayed the same or improved on standardized tests in the past decade.
Great education debate: Reforming the grade system
By Steve Friess, USA TODAY
A handful of schools nationwide have set off an emotional academic debate by giving minimum scores of 50 to students who fail.
Bill to protect PE, arts classes vetoed
By Matthew Benson, The Arizona Republic
Gov. Janet Napolitano vetoes a measure intended to protect gym classes and the teaching of music and the arts from K-12 budget cuts.
Georgia Throws Out State Test Results
By Laura Diamond, Alan Judd and Heather Vogell, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The state throws out the results of two social studies tests and education advocates question the validity of eighth-graders’ abysmal math scores.
Sent home: The suspension gap
By James Walsh, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Black students are far more likely to be suspended from school than are their white classmates — and Minnesota’s disparity in suspensions is twice the national average. Why? What are the consequences?
States Starting Slowly on NCLB Proficiency Goals to Face Crunch, Report Says
By Christina A. Samuels, Education Week
States that established modest goals for themselves in the early days of the No Child Left Behind Act may need to make nearly impossible improvements in student performance to reach the law’s target of 100 percent proficiency by the 2013-14 school year.
Fixing the Flaw in the ‘Growth Model’ And Helping Schools, States, and NCLB in the Process
By David P. Sokola, Howard M. Weinberg, Robert J. Andrzejewski, & Nancy A. Doorey, Education Week
Why not craft the reauthorized NCLB to foster innovation and improvement in the field of assessment, rather than to prevent it?
Home-schoolers, unite and take over
By Melanie Wilson Daniel, Athens Banner-Herald
Home-schoolers solidarity comes from awareness that they’re rebels, outlaws - and that there are those out there who’d like to make them criminals.
California Attorney General Jerry Brown is urging a state appeals court to reconsider a ruling that parents must hold teaching credentials to homeschool their children.
Education drives democracy
By Diane Cameron, The Albany Times Union
Jefferson and the other founders valued education not so that the United States would someday lead the world’s economy, but to ensure longevity for the form of government they were birthing.
Study probes RFID use in schools
By Dennis Carter, eSchool News
Radio-frequency tracking technology would be ideal for equipment but could violate privacy laws if applied to people, researchers say.
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