Archive for October, 2008

No Cupcake For You!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 27, 2008 in Education News. 6 Comments

California schoolkids who want to raise money for field trips and extracurricular activities will have to think of something other than holding a bake sale.  Cookies, cupcakes, pizza and other goodies exceed the fat, sugar and caloric limits set by the state’s legislature for foods sold on campus, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.  Parents and teachers are not too happy about it, especially in these tight budgetary times.

Bake sales are one of the quickest and easiest ways for schools to raise money,” said Wendy Morrison, president of the Montclair Elementary School Parent-Teacher Association in Oakland. “To limit this option has a significant impact on fundraising. And as a parent, it should really be my choice if I want to buy my child a cookie or slice of pizza after school.”

State guidelines passed in 2005 limit the calories, fat and sugar content of snacks sold in California schools.  Each district is responsible for enforcing the new law, and some have hired “wellness coordinators” to ensure that schools are in compliance, the Chronicle reports.  State Department of Education officials make periodic visits to schools and will put schools on notice if illegal treats are discovered. 

Of course, not every school district is upset.  In Berkeley (naturally) candy and baked goods were “banned by the district four years ago. Instead of peppermint candies on a school secretary’s desk, kids can reach for cashews and peanuts,” the paper notes. “A district-issued cookbook of healthy alternatives to brownies and cupcakes, such as vegan cookies and fruit and granola concoctions, is available to parents.”  Yum!

Good to know California has solved all their other problems and can finally turn their attention to those insidious bake sales.

Study: Kids Brainpower Rapidly Diminishing

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 27, 2008 in Assessment and Testing, Education News and Research and Reports. 3 Comments

Despite an increase in achievement on standardized tests, the brainpower of Britain’s brightest teenagers has deteriorated dramatically over the past generation, according to a new study in the British Journal of Educational Psychology.

Researchers at King’s College London compared the performance of 800 bright 13 and 14-year-olds on tests of higher order thinking skills with similar tests carried out three decades ago.  The cognitive abilities of today’s brightest 14-year-olds were found to be the same as 12-year-olds in 1976.  Professor Michael Shayer, who led the study, believes the decline in brainpower is linked to over-testing in school and changes in children’s leisure activities, according to London’s Daily Mail.

The advent of multi-channel TV has encouraged passive viewing while computer games, particularly for boys, are feared to have supplanted time spent playing with tools, gadgets and other mechanisms.  Professor Shayer warned that without the development of higher-order thinking skills, the future supply of scientists will be compromised.

Shayer also ascribes the brainpower slump to over-testing.  “The moment you introduce targets,” Shayer says, ”people will find the most economical strategies to achieve them. In the case of education, I’m sure this has had an effect on driving schools away from developing higher levels of understanding.”

Listen to a BBC interview with Professor Shayer here.

I Could Teach You, But I’d Have to Charge

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 27, 2008 in Humor. 5 Comments

This teacher has an amusing twist on the idea of paying students for attendance and test scores:  Fine students who waste instructional time.

Richard Louv’s Nature Deficit Disorder Research

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 27, 2008 in Research and Reports. 0 Comments

A few weeks ago we wondered about the research behind the claims made by Richard Louv, author of the best-seller The Last Child in the Woods, who links lack of contact with nature to obesity, ADD, depression and diminished “executive function.”  Louv responds in the comments section here.

School 2.0

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 26, 2008 in Education Theory. 2 Comments

There’s a thoughtful and important conversation going on over at Britannica Blog about how — or if — Web 2.0 will transform education, as well as the changing roles of student and teacher in our emerging digital age.  The series of essays from boldface names in academia including Michael Wesch, Mark Bauerlein, Dan Willingham and David Cole is mercifully light on the smugness and pie-eyed utopianism that is typical of most writing on education technology.

“While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find,” writes Kansas State University cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch, ”nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another.” 

We are enveloped in a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where the nature and dynamics of knowledge have shifted. We can acknowledge that most of our students have powerful devices on them that give them instant and constant access to this cloud (including almost any answer to almost any multiple choice question you can imagine). We can welcome laptops, cell phones, and iPods into our classrooms, not as distractions, but as powerful learning technologies. We can use them in ways that empower and engage students in real world problems and activities, leveraging the enormous potentials of the digital media environment that now surrounds us. 

Emory University’s Mark Bauerlein, the author of The Dumbest Generation and a reknowned digital skeptic responds that “no generation has experienced so many techno-enhancements and produced so little intellectual progress. Still, in spite of these underwhelming numbers, pro-tech advocacy continues. The disappointing results come years after the initial launch, and so people forget the promises put forward about how technology would transform learning. But with school budgets tight and student writing in critical condition, we need more accountability in the initiatives and more hard skepticism about learning benefits. And we need a lot less fervor for tools and screens that have only existed for a few years and whose human consequences are yet to be determined.”

The genie has long since left the bottle argues Steve Hargadon, founder of the Classroom 2.0 social network.  “What is abundantly clear is that no matter what our schools are currently doing, most of our students are already actively involved in this content creation and conversation outside of school.”  University of Virginia psychology professor Dan Willingham, with his singular gift for separating the transformational from the merely trendy notes:

At the heart of Hargadon’s vision—and Michael Wesch’s—is the collaborative student project, and this idea has been prominent in American education since 1919, when William Kilpatrick published his classic essay, “The Project Method.” Kilpatrick and his followers would recognize most of Hargadon’s list of advantages for Web 2.0 learning: engagement, authenticity, participation, openness, collaboration, creativity, personal expression, discussion, asynchronous contribution, and critical thinking. Most or all of these advantages accrue not from Web 2.0 in particular, but from its collaborative nature, and from the fact that students have a significant voice in selecting and shaping the project.

“The question is really whether Web 2.0 makes the student project more likely to succeed than project-based learning did before Web 2.0,” Willingham writes. 

The most persuasive point in the series so far arguably comes from Michael Horn, the Executive Director of Innosight Institute and co-author of the recent Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. 

If we hope for computer-based or online learning to have a positive impact and fulfill its transformative promise at scale, we need to implement it in a counterintuitive way by deploying it disruptively — that is, by allowing it to compete against non-consumption, where the alternative is literally nothing at all. Once there, it will predictably improve, and at some point, it will become good enough to handle more complicated problems and supplant the old way of doing things.  This is how all disruptive innovations transform their field.

Horn cites examples of education non-consumption advanced courses that many schools are unable to offer, small, rural, and urban schools that are unable to offer breadth, home-schooled students and those who can’t keep up with the regular schedule of school, and those who need tutoring, among others.

 

Deep in the comments section of one of the essays, Karin Chenoweth of the Education Trust offers a thoughtful coda to the entire conversation: “The last thing we need is a generation of students who are able to synchronize their dance moves with millions of other people on YouTube but still have no idea of their roles as citizens in the most powerful democracy in the world–or, for that matter, what a democracy is and how democracies differ from the other ways humans organize their societies.”

Required Reading

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 25, 2008 in Education News, No category and Weekly Roundup. 0 Comments

A 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.

Core Knowledge

Does “Nature Deficit Disorder” Affect the Brain?
Richard Louv, author of the best-seller The Last Child in the Woods, claims our children are suffering from “nature deficit disorder.” What’s the basis for his claim?

Attendance Is Not On The Test
More than 90,000 of New York City’s elementary school students–20 percent–missed at least a month of classes during the last school year.

The Motivated Will Inherit the Earth
Diane Ravitch on paying students to attend school and get good grades: “Interesting, isn’t it that while students in other countries are paying $1,500 a year for the chance to learn more, many American students will be paid that same amount just to do what they ought to be doing in their own self-interest?”

Grammar Makes a Comeback
The government has released a draft curriculum that unequivocally calls for the explicit teaching of the basic structures of the English language. In Australia.

At the Core
The Longmont Times
Next month, eight teachers from Flagstaff will present units at the Core Knowledge National Conference in Anaheim, Calif. — more teachers from a single school on a national stage than any other school.

In Other Blogs

A Disrespect for Knowledge at Bridging Differences
There’s a connection between the economic crisis we’re now in and our misbegotten effort to “reform” schools.  Maybe it’s got something to do with our disrespect for knowledge.

The Future of Charter Schools? at Eduflack
With both presidential candidates discussing school choice as a plank in their educational platforms, it is only natural to start thinking about the role of charter schools in the coming years.

No campaign education advisor left behind at the Education Gadfly
There are two education camps jockeying for position in a potential Obama administration–a “reform” and an “establishment” camp. This week their infighting spilled out into the public domain.

Two Steps Forward…Two Steps Back… at It’s Not All Flowers and Sausages
During the week that students in Mimi’s school are banned from recess, they have to bring books with them. So they can read. As punishment. Dude. “How do you think my little strugglers are going to take to finding a good book now?”

Teaching and Curriculum

U.S. cities’ math scores split compared to rest of the world
USA Today
Fourth- and eighth-grade students in six U.S. cities — Austin, Boston, Charlotte, Houston, New York City and San Diego — actually hold their own against international competitors.

Delighted — or Deflated — by Dollars
The Washington Post
Washington, DC’s experimental program to pay 3,300 middle school students for good grades and behavior is filled with valuable life lessons about hard work, thrift and showing up on time, its supporters say.

Colleges Continue Irrational Policies On IB Program
The Washington Post
Jay Mathews can’t understand why so many colleges refuse to give credit to students who do well on final exams in IB courses while giving credit to students for similar (but in many cases less-demanding) AP courses.

Schools in Need Employ Teachers From Overseas
USA Today
A growing number of school districts are hiring teachers from foreign countries to fill shortages in math, science and special education.

Judge Says No To Campaign Buttons
The New York Times
A federal judge on Friday upheld New York City’s policy prohibiting public school teachers from wearing political buttons in the classroom.

Education Policy

Report: Counting on Graduation
The Education Trust
Among industrialized nations, the United States is the only country in which today’s young people are less likely than their parents to have earned a high school diploma. A new report from the Education Trust calls on states to ratchet up expectations for high school graduation, substantially and immediately.

Texas Testing Rules Could Change
The Houston Chronicle
Under a proposed plan to overhaul the state’s school accountability system, Texas elementary and middle school students would no longer have to pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test to advance to the next grade level.

Under the ‘No Child’ Microscope
The Washington Post
Like a struggling student in a class of high achievers, Hoffman-Boston Elementary School has fallen into an unenviable position. It is the first school in Northern Virginia under a federal mandate to restructure because of lagging student performance.

The Evolution of Teach for America
U.S. News & World Report
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and her fellow Teach for America alumni could bring a new approach to education reform

Homeschooling and Parenting

Home-Schooling: State groups key to success, growth
The Washington Times
One of the key components of the success and growth of home-schooling in the United States has been state home-school organizations.

Will election affect right to homeschool?
The Appeal-Democrat (Ca.)
Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain have mentioned much about homeschooling. Joe Biden and Sarah Palin seem pretty mum on the concept as well. The best we can do is look at their views on education to try and figure out what that might mean to our families and our way of life.

Oklahomans are OK with homeschooling
The Edmond Sun
Oklahoma’s legal climate with respect to home education is probably the most favorable in the nation. The climate of public opinion in Oklahoma is also friendly. Sixty-nine percent of Oklahomans strongly or somewhat favor the right to homeschool, while 26 percent strongly or somewhat oppose.

Et Alia

Internet, Cellphones May Strengthen Family Unit, Study Finds
The Washington Post
The American family is as tight-knit as in the last generation — or more so — because of the widespread use of cellphones and the Internet, according to a new poll.

Social Skills Pay Off–Literally
USA Today.com
The study from the University of Illinois finds that the good social skills we displayed in high school — being conscientious and cooperative, for instance — are better indicators of future earnings than any academic honors.

B is for Birds and Bees

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 24, 2008 in Curriculum. 0 Comments

With one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in Europe, the British government is bringing sex education to all schools in England, including kindergarten-age children.  ”It’s vital that this information doesn’t come from playground rumor or the mixed messages from the media about sex,” Schools Minister Jim Knight said Thursday.  For the very young, sex ed will mainly be about “self-awareness.”

“We are not talking about 5-year-old kids being taught sex. What we’re talking about for key stage 1 (ages 5-7) is children knowing about themselves, their differences, their friendships and how to manage their feelings.”

Needless to say, not everyone’s enamored of the plan.  Says one mum: “I am not the parent who calls her son’s penis a wee-wee. But I should decide if the word penis enters my child’s vocabulary at 5 or not.”

$7,000 For Blocks and Play-Doh?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 24, 2008 in No category. 3 Comments

Parents pay an average of $7,000 a year for preschool education, a pricetag that leaves some parents reeling in uncertain economic times.  ”This is blocks and Play-Doh, essentially. What are we doing?” Elizabeth Henderson, a mother of three in Tustin, Calif., tells Smart Money.  She pays $500 a month to send her youngest to a nearby preschool for three half-days a week.

Forced to choose between paying for preschool and saving for college, the magazine notes, parents are increasingly looking at three options: Parent co-op preschools, where parents take turns working in the classroom with the kids and teacher; at-home day care with an educational bent; and homeschooling.

You can always try this too.  Play-doh not included.

Dress Code for Teachers

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 24, 2008 in Education Practice. 0 Comments

Teachers in Huntsville, Alabama will soon be subject to a dress code.  Call me old school, but it’s a little sad that this needs to be spelled out for grown-ups.  Huntsville already has a student dress code that forbids overly baggy, tight, or revealing clothes, plus no t-shirt slogans referring to drugs, alcohol or violence.

A few years ago, parents at my daughter’s school were in a lather over a high school girl’s t-shirt, which read “Sex, Drugs, and Nuclear Physics.”  Half the parents thought it was inappropriate, and set a bad example for the lower schoolers.  The other half thought it was great the girl was so into science.

Obama, Reformers and TFA

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 24, 2008 in Educational Policy. 2 Comments

Fordham’s Mike Petrilli, who seems to have turned all his thoughts of late to the machinations of a future Obama administration’s education policy, raises an interesting question about the place of Teach for America and other reform efforts in Obama’s pantheon.

On the one hand, Barack Obama has praised Michelle Rhee, the poster-child for Teach For America’s impact on American education. Several of his advisors are drawn from the group’s alumni and friends….So why on earth is the campaign allowing Linda Darling-Hammond to play surrogate for the Senator and say nasty things about TFA in high-profile events?

Darling-Hammond is TFA’s most notable critic, and has long argued that alternative certification programs ill-serve poor and minority children. 

Someone—probably Barack Obama himself—is going to have to make a decision about whether to embrace reform (and in this case, TFA) or embrace the union-and-ed-school establishment (and in this case, LDH). If he wins the election and appoints Darling-Hammond to a senior position, we’ll know which way he’s decided to go.

Back in 2005, Darling-Hammond said of TFA, “While a band-aid on a bleeding sore is helpful in a crisis, healing wounds of inequality and poverty is also a policy problem worth solving.” Thus it’s likely that the scenario described by Petrilli will be portrayed as a false dichotomy.  Still it’s safe to say there will be people with very different views of the world vying for a place at the table.