Archive for April 6th, 2009

P21’s Incentive Fund?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 6, 2009 in Education News. 5 Comments

Common Core’s Lynne Munson has an eyebrow-raising post today on a piece of federal legislation that would give extraordinary quasi-governmental power to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.  Munson reports that Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) will put forth a “21st Century Skills Incentive Fund Act.”  The bill would create “an incentive fund for states to sign on to P21 and give tax breaks to corporations who support P21 at the state level.”  As Munson notes the bill would make P21 the gatekeeper of hundreds of millions in federal taxdollars. 

That’s because the legislation would require any state that applies for these incentive funds first to be ‘approved as a 21st Century Partner State by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Partnership for 21st Century Skills.’  So if P21 doesn’t sign off on a particular state’s approach to integrating 21st century skills into its standards, tests, etc., that state would be ineligible to apply for federal incentive funds….If passed, this legislation would make P21’s approach to teaching 21st century skills the only federally sanctioned approach.

Is there any precedent for this in K-12 education?  “Higher ed accreditors are independent non-profits,” Munson notes in an email to me. ”If a college or university  cannot gain the approval of their accreditor (they’ve divided the country up by region, so each accreditor has a monopoly in their region) they cannot receive  federal student loan funds.  So they are non-government institutions that hold incredible power over a federal purse.  This is the only parallel I’m aware of.”

A bad idea backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives.  It just keeps getting better.

Alfie Kohn on 21st Century Skills

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 6, 2009 in Education News. 4 Comments

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Poverty, Stress and Cognitive Development

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 6, 2009 in Research and Reports. 7 Comments

New research suggests that chronic stress may have a direct impact on the brain’s working memory–an insight with big implications for education and efforts to close the achievement gap.

“There’s been lots of evidence that low-income families are under tremendous amounts of stress, and we know that stress has many implications,” Gary W. Evans of Cornell University tells the Washington Post. “What this data raises is the possibility that it’s also related to cognitive development.”   Evans and Michelle Schamberg of Cornell published a study on the phenomenon in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last week.  Says the Post:

Previous research into the possible causes of the achievement gap between poor and well-off children has focused on genetic factors that influence intelligence, on environmental exposure to toxins such as lead, and on the idea that disadvantaged children tend to grow up with less intellectual stimulation. But Evans, who has been gathering detailed data about 195 children from households above and below the poverty line for 14 years, decided to examine whether chronic stress might also be playing a role.

The Economist, which picked up on the story last week, summarizes how Evans and Schamberg measured the level of stress experienced by 9 to 13-year-old children:

The two researchers used an index known as allostatic load. This is a combination of the values of six variables: diastolic and systolic blood pressure; the concentrations of three stress-related hormones; and the body-mass index, a measure of obesity. For all six, a higher value indicates a more stressful life; and for all six, the values were higher, on average, in poor children than in those who were middle class. Moreover, because Dr Evans’s wider study had followed the participants from birth, the two researchers were able to estimate what proportion of each child’s life had been spent in poverty. That more precise figure, too, was correlated with the allostatic load. 

“When the researchers analyzed the relationships among how long the children lived in poverty, their allostatic load and their later working memory, they found a clear relationship,” the Post notes.  “The longer they lived in poverty, the higher their allostatic load and the lower they tended to score on working-memory tests. Those who spent their entire childhood in poverty scored about 20 percent lower on working memory than those who were never poor.

The Economist concludes the research offers a potential explanation for why the cycle of poverty is so difficult to break:  ”The Bible says, ‘the poor you will always have with you.’ Dr Evans and Dr Schamberg may have provided an important part of the explanation why.”