Unusually good, nuanced and ultimately fair dissection of Jonathan Kozol’s work by The Quick and the Ed’s Kevin Carey today. A stark contrast to what Carey rightly describes as the “standard conservative anti-Kozol piece, which has become a genre unto itself.”
Carey’s main point is a good one. “In in his righteous anger and dark pessimism, [Kozol] has become blind to all evidence of progress and possibility with our public schools.” Having read a lot of Kozol and worked for years in precisely the neighborhood he chronicles, I’m inclined to agree with Carey. That said, there is an undeniable tendency on the part of both teachers and reformers to congratulate themselves for their effort and incremental progress. The needle is moving, but barely. Anger is still the right reaction. There’s a hell of a lot more to be unhappy about than not.
The city of Denver has announced a growth-model accountability system to measure school performance. The inititative is backed by $4.75 million raised from the Dell and Broad Foundations.
According to the Rocky Mountain News, the most innovative piece “compares Denver Public School students with students statewide who have similar performance histories on state exams. With the Colorado Department of Education, the district will track how DPS pupils do compared to those peers and judge their schools based on jumps or drops in performance.”
Non-academic factors such as “whether families are returning to the same schools from one year to the next” will be weighed. “DPS schools will receive an overall rating, based on up to 42 indicators, but [DPS Superintendent Michael] Bennet said those rating names have yet to be determined. It’s also unclear exactly when parents will see the new report cards, though it likely will be before the end of this school year,” the paper reports.
The paper also reports the system could go statewide, potentially great news for Core Knowledge advocates, since the state has more CK schools than any other.
I have been watching the renewed hostilities between Eduwonk and Eduwonkette this week over the issue of No Child Left Behind’s impact on curriculum. I feel honor-bound to weigh in, since I inadvertently started the fight. A few thoughts on their posts:
The issue of whether testing has crowded science and social studies off the curriculum is beyond dispute, and I’m not swayed by the argument that if 44% of schools report a narrowing of the curriculum under NCLB, then the legislation is not the culprit, since 56% report no deleterious impact. If 44% of patients reported an adverse reaction to a medication, it would be off the shelves before the sun set. So it’s a problem.
Eduwonk is absolutely correct, however, in noting that good schools focus on curriculum and instruction. “While low-capacity schools may have spent time on social studies pre-NCLB,” he writes, “it’s a safe bet that many of them were not teaching it very well.” But the opposite is also true: most good schools were good schools without any external accountability measures whatsoever, so that’s not where our focus belongs. If the functional structures are in place — strong leadership, good teachers, active oversight, engaged parents who are informed consumers of education, etc. — there are multiple levels of quality control to assure good outcomes. NCLB is all about making bad schools act more like good ones in the absence of those self-policing mechanisms.
Some people have a way with words. Others not way have. New York City’s Department of Ed will be looking for more of the former, according to the NY Daily News, which reports prospective teachers will have to write an essay to get a job.
The paper doesn’t mention it, but presumably would-be teachers will be required to “turn and talk” with their writing partners, and write seed ideas on Post-it notes before beginning their essays. Screeners will undoubtedly be obliged to hold mini-conferences with prospective teachers and give each applicant a compliment, before discussing strategies for drafting. Presumably, teachers will also have to sit on a rug to write their essays, since we know that it is impossible to write unless one is on a rug.
This blog has enough on its plate with curriculum, teaching, and ed policy issues in our own country, but a story about education reform in the Arab world got our attention this morning. A World Bank study shows the quality of education in the Middle East and North Africa is not keeping up with the needs of the changing and increasingly globalized economy.
“This is a very youthful region where 60 percent of the population is under 30 years of age,” says Marwan Muasher, a senior World Bank official who was responsible for the report’s preparation. “Close to 100 million new jobs need to be created in the next 10 to 15 years in the Arab world. If we are to create such jobs, then we have to start with improving the educational systems.”
This You Tube video of a toddler who can do what few high school students can do—ID nearly every country on a world map—has been viewed over two million times. Thus, I’m probably the last person to have heard about it. At an age when most kids would be happy merely to be put in front of a video of Madagascar, she can actually find it on a map.
Other than David Tyree’s catch, it’s the most amazing thing I’ve seen all week.
The February 3 USA Today reports on a study done by Sam Wineburg of Stanford University that will be appearing in the March issue of the Journal of American History. The study validates what I had to say in my article on “The Training of Idiots” in Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong? published by the Fordham Foundation. The top ten list of “the most famous Americans in US history,” compiled based on a survey of thousands of American high school students (who were told only to exclude presidents) is a sad commentary on the grotesque triumph of the PC (and celeb) culture in our schools and the larger society.
Rosa Parks #2? Harriet Tubman #3? Amelia Earhart? Oprah? Marilyn Monroe? I suppose we should be thankful that Paris Hilton and Britney Spears did not make the list! I am surprised that the Grimke Sisters did not come in at #3 and #4. I can think of no better evidence of how our k-12 social studies educators, thanks to the NCSS and other such organizations, have failed to give kids a sound, accurate, serious KNOWLEDGE of American history as opposed to racial and gender cheerleading.
“Maybe if we start listening, history will stop repeating itself.” — Lily Tomlin
A pair of researchers asked 2000 high school juniors and seniors from across the country to “write down the names of the most famous Americans in history.” The top three most-cited names were Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman. “Three of the top five — and six of the top 10 — are women,” reports USA Today. “It suggests that the ‘cultural curriculum’ that most kids — and by extension, their parents — experience in school,” writes Greg Toppo, “increasingly emphasizes the stories of Americans who are not necessarily dead, white or male.” According to USA Today, the researchers involved in the project believe the prominence of black Americans signals “a profound change” in how students view history. “Over the course of about 44 years, we’ve had a revolution in the people who we come to think about to represent the American story,” says Sam Wineburg of Stanford University, one of the study’s two authors.
A less charitable explanation is that American students have been so deprived of even a rudimentary knowledge of their own history that it doesn’t strike them as odd to name Oprah Winfrey, #7 on the list, as one of the most important people in American history. Other names cited most often by students in the study are Susan B. Anthony, Benjamin Franklin and Amelia Earhart. Marilyn Monroe, not incidentally, beat out both Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein. Read the rest of this entry »
Stressed out over your AP exams, high school seniors? “Forget about cramming until 3 a.m. Order a pizza, have your friends over and just talk, maybe about the course, maybe not. Go to bed when you feel like it. Have a nice sleep. You don’t need to ace the exam. It’s May, for heaven’s sake. You already got into college.” Listen to your Uncle Jay.
Is lengthening the school day the key to student achievement? Or is it just an extra helping of the thing that’s not working in the first place?
In today’s Washington Post, Maria Glod looks at the extended-school push, which counts among its proponents Bill Gate and Eli Broad. Adding hours to the school day—and Saturdays and extended summer sessions—is intended to ensure students get the reading and math lessons they need without sacrificing music, art or even recess. “But experts say there is not yet enough research to prove that stretching out the school day is worthwhile,” Glod notes. “It’s an expensive proposition that can cause conflicts with teachers unions and cut into time traditionally spent on sports and other after-school activities. Most schools with longer days and higher test scores have also made other changes, often to the curriculum or teacher training” making it hard to determine if more equals better or there are other factors at work.
The most insightful quote comes from Elena Silva, a senior policy analyst at Education Sector. “We really don’t know if we need more time,” she tells the Post. “Could we design schools differently? If more time is spent on engaged learning and less on classroom management and other things, then you don’t really need to extend time.” As nearly any teacher in a struggling school can attest, time on-task lost to disruption is a serious impediment to student achievement, especially when it forces teachers to plan lessons around classroom management.
Unusually good, nuanced and ultimately fair dissection of Jonathan Kozol’s work by The Quick and the Ed’s Kevin Carey today. A stark contrast to what Carey rightly describes as the “standard conservative anti-Kozol piece, which has become a genre unto itself.”
