Closing the Achievement Gap: Teaching Content
Tired of struggling to find enough teachers to staff its classrooms on the Friday before the annual Georgia-Florida football game, the Clarke County (Ga.) School District last Friday decided to cancel school altogether. Last year, 137 teachers were absent the day before the big game. Yes, that says teachers not students.
Georgia lost 49-10. At least someone learned a lesson.
(Hat tip: The Gadfly)
Hats off to the Traut Core Knowledge Elementary School in Ft. Collins, Colorado, where 6th graders transformed their school gym into a living “wax museum” to show off what they learned about various historic people. The kids created displays, gave presentations to classmates and with the help of parent volunteers, dressed up as the person for others to see.
The 75 living wax figures in included explorers, presidents, inventors and entertainers including Elvis, Ansel Adams, Marie Antoinette, Jackie Robinson and Sacajawea, and earned the school a write-up in the local paper.
The characters weren’t exactly made of wax like the famous mannequins at Madame Tussauds Wax Museum; Instead, they were sixth graders dressed in ornate costumes who assumed motionless positions when given the command. The silence was more representative of a library than a gym, and the posed students barely blinked as younger classes in single file lines walked by the 75 exhibits.
“When a person you know goes by and stares at you, it’s hard not to laugh,” said sixth-grader Summer Paulson, who was dressed as Elizabeth Blackwell, the world’s first woman doctor.
That Core Knowledge stuff…all that deadly dull rote learning and drills.
School officials in Cleveland are concerned with chronic student tardiness. Just over 24 percent of elementary students were late more than 15 days during the 2006-07 school year. By high school, it’s more than 41 percent, reports Cleveland.com
Tardiness is epidemic in the district, with double-digit percentages of students showing up late at some schools on any given day. School board members want to put an end to what they see as a casual attitude toward education, not only among children but also by parents seen dropping them off well after what are typically 8 a.m. starts.
Some blame not lax attitudes, but children seeing younger siblings off to school for working single parents, long walks and rides on multiple public buses in a district that limits transportation. Metal detectors at the schools also may prevent students from getting to class on time.
At the city’s John Marshall High School, tardiness continues despite detentions, phone calls to parents and other strategies to curb it, says Principal Rhonda Saegert. She reminds the students that they would be fired from their jobs for being late. “A lot of times I will hear, ‘But this is not my job,’” Saegert says “I say, ‘You need to treat it as if it were your job.’
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