A stunning 60% of parents in Palo Alto, California supplement their children’s math education through private tutors, extra workbooks and other means, “mostly because they feel Palo Alto classes aren’t challenging enough,” according to results of a district survey cited in the San Jose Mercury News.
The district conducted an online survey of about 1,200 elementary school parents, and will compare its results with another survey taken next spring, after students have spent a year learning the district’s new Everyday Mathematics curriculum. During the debates over the controversial Everyday Math program, adopted as the district’s new curriculum in April, many parents said Everyday Math is confusing and doesn’t teach basic math skills. Parents frequently said they would have to supplement their children’s math education.
Nearly 63 percent of parents surveyed said their children don’t need extra help in math. However nearly six in ten said they provide extra math work anyway to challenge their kids. Palo Alto is the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, where engineers and scientists are legion. “They have a low-expectation math program in a community where there are high expectations for math,” one former school board member tells the paper.
I can’t help but view this through the lens of the spirited, ongoing tracking discussion prompted by Will Fitzhugh’s piece on “athletic tracking.” Granted, what’s happening in Palo Alto is about a poorly received curriculum, but it’s driven by the perception kids aren’t being challenged enough. It’s useful to be reminded that parents of more advantaged children will go to great lengths to make sure their kids excel. One has to wonder how poorer potential high achievers without access to tutors or even advanced classes (if we insist on mixed ability classrooms) will possibly compete with the likes of these Palo Alto whiz kids.
Or maybe we’re OK with that?
The NY Times plays up Secretary Duncan’s coming warning to charter school operators that “low-quality institutions are giving their movement a black eye.” Writes the Times’ Sam Dillon:
The charter movement is putting itself at risk by allowing too many second-rate and third-rate schools to exist,” Mr. Duncan says in prepared remarks that he is scheduled to deliver in Washington at the annual gathering of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. In an interview, Mr. Duncan said he would use the address to praise innovations made by high-quality charter schools, urge charter leaders to become more active in weeding out bad apples in their movement and invite the leaders to help out in the administration’s broad effort to remake several thousand of the nation’s worst public schools.
The Times makes much of last week’s Stanford study indicating that nearly half of all charter schools nationwide “have results that are no different from the local public school options, and over a third, 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their students would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools.”
It will be interesting to see how charter advocates react to Duncan’s call. At worst, it seems like a reminder of the accountability principles undergirding the movement. Indeed, if the movement practices what it preaches, closing bad charter schools should be considered a victory– for the charter movement.
Much sturm und drang over this week’s Stanford University study, which indicates charter schools nationwide are not performing as well as traditional public-schools. Among the bright spots, however, were charters in Colorado, which the study says ”demonstrated significantly higher learning gains for charter school students than would have occurred in traditional schools.”
What’s in Colorado’s special sauce?
The Colorado Charter School Blog considers several factors including this one: “Compared nationally, Colorado is atypical by having almost half of its charter schools using the Core Knowledge curriculum. Most states have more ‘home grown’ or experiential charter schools.”
You can never be too safe….or can you? Nearly half of teachers in the U.K. say school health and safety regulations have gone too far. Among the complaints: a five-page briefing on the safe handling of glue sticks and being told to wear goggles to put up posters.
In addition to reading and math testing, schools in Georgia may soon require all students to step on a scale twice a year–a move designed to combat childhood obesity. A bill introduced Thursday in the Georgia Senate would require schools to check and report students’ body mass index, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “If school districts don’t comply with the new rules, they’d be labeled as ‘unhealthy school zones’ on a state Web site that measures school performance,” the paper says.
Hey….wait a second….isn’t MeMe from Georgia?
American teenagers pound out an extraordinary number of text messages. We knew this. But a poll reported by USA Today indicates that one-fourth of their texts are sent during class, despite widespread cellphone bans.
The survey of 1,013 teens — 84% of whom have cellphones — also shows that a significant number have stored information on a cellphone to look at during a test or have texted friends about answers. More than half of all students say people at their school have done the same. Only about half of teens say either of the practices is a “serious offense,” suggesting that students may have developed different personal standards about handwritten information vs. material stored on cellphones, says pollster Joel Benenson.
Serious offense? Haven’t you heard? Using technology to get answers isn’t cheating. Dude, it’s a 21st-freakin’-century skill!
USA Today’s Greg Toppo notes the poll’s reported average of 440 text messages a week on average — 110 of them during class–works out to more than three texts per class period. “The findings also reveal a split in perception between teens and parents: Only 23% of parents whose children have cellphones think they are using them at school; 65% of students say they do,” he reports.
Well, that was fun while it lasted. It looks like the economy has killed what moral umbrage couldn’t.
A study by the Center on Education Policy casts doubt on the conventional wisdom that No Child Left Behind causes teachers to shortchange high and low-performers, given the law’s incentives to get students to the proficient level.
“If accountability policies were indeed shortchanging high- and low-achieving students, we would expect to see stagnation or decline at the basic and advanced levels,” says Jack Jennings, CEP’s President. “Instead, the percentages of students scoring at the basic-and-above and advanced levels have increased much more often than they have decreased, especially in the lower grades.”
Hear, hear for higher test scores at all chievement levels. But how does that show high achieving students aren’t suffering under NCLB? Testing is a measure of where students are, not where they could or even should be. If there’s anything I learned teaching at a struggling school, it’s that the stronger students are largely assumed to be doing fine despite being neglected–a point nailed precisely in the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation’s “Achievement Trap” report a few years back.
Such children are dandelions. They will find a way to grow even in the harshest conditions. I can walk out onto the sidewalk and gather a bouquet of dandelions growing up through the pavement cracks. That doesn’t prove I’m a good gardener.
“Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.”
Barry Goldwater never met MeMe Roth. The New York Times (HT: Joanne Jacobs) has a piece about the Upper West Side Manhattan mother who is waging war on junk food in her child’s school. But it’s not the school lunches that have MeMe’s knickers in a knot.
What sets her off is the junk food served on special occasions: the cupcakes that come out for every birthday, the doughnuts her children were once given in gym, the sugary “Fun-Dip” packets that some parent provided the whole class on Valentine’s Day…When offered any food at school other than the school lunch, Ms. Roth’s children — who shall go nameless since it seems they have enough on, or off, their plates — are instructed to deposit the item into a piece of Tupperware their mother calls a “junk food collector.”
Ms. Roth, who runs a group called National Action Against Obesity, has something of a record on this issue. “The police were called to a Y.M.C.A. in 2007 when she absconded with the sprinkles and syrups on a table where members were being served ice cream,” notes the Times’ Susan Dominus. ”That was Ms. Roth who called Santa Claus fat on television that Christmas, and she has a continuing campaign against the humble Girl Scout cookies, on the premise that no community activity should promote unhealthy eating.”
When the Roths lived in Millburn, New Jersey, MeMe (Me! Me!) waged a similar campaign against bagels and Pringles in school lunches leading to an e-mail from a PTA member that counseled “Please, consider moving.” Sounds like P.S. 9 is thinking the same thing. School safety officials have reportedly suggested the Roths request a health and safety transfer.
A commenter on the Times’ message board sums up the issue neatly and economically: “Obesity is unhealthy. And so is belligerence.”
The 15,000 pupil Stamford, Connecticut school system, ”among the last bastions of rigid educational tracking,” is abandoning the practice, which the New York Times describes as ”an uncomfortable caste system.” But if the Times is so concerned about tracking, asks Will Fitzhugh, why are they silent on “the complete dominance of athletic tracking in schools all over the country?” As unbelieveable as it seems, deadpans the editor of The Concord Review, there is no real movement to eliminate it.
Athletes in our school sports programs are routinely tracked into groups of students with similar ability, presumably to make their success in various sports matches, games, and contests more likely. But so far no attention is paid to the damage to the self-esteem of those student athletes whose lack of ability and coordination doom them to the lower athletic tracks, and even, in many cases, may deprive them of membership on school teams altogether.
Fitzhugh observes that the elimination of tracking is a product of educators who are ”more committed to diversity and equality of outcomes in classrooms than they are in academic achievement.” I would also add that mixed ability grouping on sports teams is not unheard of. The New York Mets have been doing it for years.
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