The Politics of History

by Robert Pondiscio
July 31st, 2008

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Posted in Curriculum | 2 Comments »

Lawmakers in California have had a busy summer deciding what students in the Golden State should be taught in school.  A bill requiring that a 1946 court ruling on desegregation be added to the curriculum won strong support, as did a measure that adds the contribution of Filipino-American soldiers.  Legislation requiring lessons on the contributions of Italian Americans, Native Americans and the deportation of Mexican citizens during the Depression are pending. 

An editorial in one local paper makes sport of the whole miasma:

OK, boys and girls, please turn to page 151 of your state history book and skip down to the section on the contributions of Filipino-American soldiers in World War II. We were going to talk about the contributions of the Chinese, but seeing as how that isn’t mandatory, we’re going to take a pass.

Please be prepared immediately after recess to discuss Myanmar’s failure to adopt U.S. concepts of Democracy.  Yes, Jimmy, I know you’re only in fourth grade, but a bipartisan state Senate majority felt California students were getting way behind in their comparative political theory. And we wouldn’t want to argue with bipartisan state Senate majorities, now would we?

Fortunately, we will have time to go over our spelling words a couple of more times this week because the governor vetoed Senate Bill 908, which would have encouraged each California grade level to include a section on global warming.

“They all have merit,” concludes an editorial in the Contra Costa Times, “but it is not the job of individual legislators to alter the public school curriculum on a piecemeal basis. This is the purview of the state Board of Education.”

Blaming Parents

by Robert Pondiscio
July 30th, 2008

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Posted in Educational Policy, Teaching | 5 Comments »

Parents’ failure to impose moral values in the home has left many children out of control, with teachers now expected to effectively raise young people themselves.  So says the head of Voice, Britain’s teachers’ union. Philip Parkin says the standard of parenting skills in the UK had suffered from a downward spiral in the last 15 years as generations of poor parents succeed each other.  In a speech to the union’s annual conference, Parkin said long working hours and the decline in old-fashioned family structures has contributed to the problem. 

“Schools are being required to take on more and more of the responsibilities that rightly belong to parents; and to provide more of the stability in children’s lives which should be provided by families. There is also the perception that, in general, the skills of parents are declining as one generation succeeds another.”

“In my last 10 or 15 years in school I saw a significant decline in parenting standards.” Parkin added. ”The shortening of many relationships, the creation of more step-families, the emphasis on parents going out to work and the consequent perception of the reduced worth of the full-time parent have all changed the way we behave and the character of childhood.”

I could be very wrong, but it’s hard to imagine such a naked critique of “parenting standards” issuing from a responsible U.S. union leader.  For all the sturm und drang in the U.S. about accountability and overcoming societal ills, it says something about the overarching consensus on what schools ought to be able to do that these comments sound so, well, foreign.

Cell Phones Linked to Behavior Problems in Children

by Robert Pondiscio
July 30th, 2008

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Posted in Research and Reports | 1 Comment »

Children whose mothers use cell phones frequently during pregnancy and who are themselves cell phone users are 80% more likely to have behavior problems.

“It’s a wonderful technology and people are certainly going to be using it more and more,” Dr. Leeka Kheifets of the UCLA School of Public Health, who helped conduct the study, tells Reuters.  “We need to be looking into what are the potential health effects and what are ways to reduce risks should there be any.”

Budget Woes: How Bad?

by Robert Pondiscio
July 30th, 2008

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Posted in Education News | 2 Comments »

How big is the impact of rising fuel and energy costs on schools?  USA Today puts it in sharp relief:  one in seven school districts is considering cutting back to four-day weeks this fall. One in four is considering limits on athletics and other extracurricular activities.  One in three is eliminating teaching jobs.

“In the first detailed look at how fuel costs are affecting schools, a survey by the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) finds 99% of superintendents contacted say they’re feeling the pinch — and 77% say they’re not getting any help from their state,” reports USAT’s Greg Toppo.

Scary. 

Update:  See that little link up top for comments?  Click it to read John Thompson’s view of the tensions budget troubles create between policy types and those who go to work in schools every day.  “In the real world vs. the theory of policy reform, administrators in most of the country spend a lot more time dealing with sports than student achievement,” he writes. ”And no national mandate is going to change that in the short run. Paying for gas for field trips will not only divert money but attention.”  Good, clear-eyed stuff. 

Tracking the Bullies

by Robert Pondiscio
July 30th, 2008

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Posted in Education Practice | No Comments »

Florida’s Broward County has become the first school district in the state to put an “anti-bullying policy” in place, per newly required state law.  The Miami Herald reports Broward schools are rolling out a new computerized system for reporting and tracking bullying.  “The Florida Department of Education will use Broward’s policy as a model for the state’s 66 other school districts,” the paper notes.  The Broward school district now defines bullying as “systematically and chronically inflicting physical hurt or psychological distress….The policy includes more than traditional schoolyard name-calling, teasing and shoving. Now, even behavior over the Internet — or social networking — can count if it affects students in school.

More Fuel for the Fire

by Robert Pondiscio
July 30th, 2008

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Posted in Education Practice, Research and Reports | No Comments »

Poor Mexican children who participate in a government program with extensive family services are further ahead in kindergarten than the average Canadian kid, according to new research.

Mexican authorities in 1990 implemented a system of programs called CENDI (the Spanish acronym for Centres for Early Childhood Development) in Monterrey, an industrial city roughly the size of Greater Toronto, that provides community supports to low-income households from the time of pregnancy through to preschool. The programs are similar to what Canadian early childhood researcher Dr. Fraser Mustard has long been advocating in Canada, the Toronto Star reports. 

“You can’t dump the whole responsibility (for childhood development) on families,” says Mustard, who advocates creating community “hubs” – ideally in local schools – where they can obtain nutrition and health advice from professionals, take part in parenting programs and involve their tots in programs. “Mustard says that way, parents get the support they need to do a better job, and problems can be caught and treated early on,” notes the paper.

The research will undoubtedly be used to bolster the argument of those who favor a broader social services role for schools.  It’s hard to imagine broad comments about dumping the whole responsibility for raising children on families, however, playing well in the U.S.

Detroit Closes Achievement Gap!

by Robert Pondiscio
July 29th, 2008

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Posted in Research and Reports | 1 Comment »

Michigan has the nation’s lowest graduation rate for black male students, while Detroit has the second-lowest rate for big-city school districts, according to a report from the Schott Foundation for Public Education.  Other findings:

  • The state of New York has 3 of the 10 districts (NYC, Rochester and Buffalo) with the lowest graduation rates for Black males.
  • Indianapolis ranks dead last, graduating only 19% of its black male students.
  • The one million black male students enrolled in the New York, Florida, and Georgia public schools are twice as likely not to graduate with their class.
  • Illinois and Wisconsin have nearly 40-point gaps between “how effectively they educate their Black and White non-Hispanic male students.”

While Detroit graduates a mere 20% of its black male students, that’s actually higher than the 17% of white male students who graduate.

Overweight and Underperforming

by Robert Pondiscio
July 29th, 2008

Posted in No category | 1 Comment »

Not only are overweight kids at risk for a host of health problems, but a study of middle school students in suburban Philadelphia indicates they get lower grades, too.   The Los Angeles Times summarizes:

The study, published in the July issue of the journal Obesity, also found that overweight students had lower reading comprehension scores on a nationally standardized test, ranking in the 66th percentile; normal-weight kids ranked in the 75th percentile. Heavier kids were also five times more likely to have six or more detentions than their normal-weight peers, had more school absences and lower physical fitness test scores, and were less inclined to participate on athletic teams — 37% compared with 75% of normal-weight students.

The lead author suspects the poor self-esteem of overweight kids may be a factor. 

Text, Yes, But Is It Reading?

by Robert Pondiscio
July 28th, 2008

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Literacy | 3 Comments »

Are the hours kids and teenagers spend prowling the Web a threat to literacy?  Or is it simply a new form of reading and writing?  A sprawling New York Times thumbsucker notes that “as teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.”

Clearly when kids go online instead of turning on the TV, they read and write instead of passively consuming video.  But critics of reading on the Internet say they see no evidence that increased Web activity improves reading achievement. “What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading,”  Dana Gioia, the chairman of the N.E.A., tells the Times.  “I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”

“Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you’re into the 30-second digital mode,” adds Ken Pugh, a cognitive neuroscientist at Yale who has studied brain scans of children reading.

According to the paper, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers reading, math and science tests to a sample of 15-year-old students in more than 50 countries, will add an electronic reading component to next year’s tests. The United States, among other countries, will not participate. “A spokeswoman for the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of Education, said an additional test would overburden schools,” the Times notes.

Damaged By An Ivy League Education

by Robert Pondiscio
July 27th, 2008

Posted in Higher Education | 1 Comment »

What is “Ivy Retardation?”  As described by former Yale English professor William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar, it’s an affliction, common to products of elite schools, that renders its victims capable of carrying on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but unable to talk to a plumber in their own houses.  And that’s merely a minor symptom.

“My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class,”  Deresiewicz writes.  “I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were ‘the best and the brightest,’ as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright….At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it.”

An elite education confers a false sense of self-worth on its recipients, Deresiewicz says, and worse yet, creates risk-averse students.  “If you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual,” he writes. 

If so few kids come to college understanding this, it is no wonder. They are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about something bigger than the next assignment. The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.

Meet your new leaders:  “The kid who’s loading up on AP courses junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring, the kid whom everyone wants at their college or law school but no one wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe, let alone think, will soon be running a corporation or an institution or a government, Deresiewicz concludes. “She will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.”

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