Every now and then, you read a story that makes you wonder if you’ve been living in a cave. If this piece in Teusday’s Baltimore Sun is any indication, selling devices to parents afraid of getting separated from their children has become a big business.
GPS tracking devices with wander alerts emit beeps or vibrations when a child strays too far. Digital watches and apparel have high-decibel alarms. And there’s the SafetyTat, a waterproof tattoo created by a Baltimore-area mom who wanted to attach her phone number to her child; a half-million have been sold.
Half a million??!? How did I manage to miss all the tatted-up tykes wandering the streets? The takeaway: Sex sells. Paranoia sells more. Two predictions: 1. Somewhere a school or district will pass a rule requiring students get tattoed before they go on field trips. 2. Someone will post a comment telling me it’s already been happening.
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?
Jay Greene has a smart, sobering piece on national standards. “People tend to be in favor of them when they imagine that they are the ones writing the standards,” he notes. “But when everyone gets into the sausage-making that characterizes policy formulation, it generally becomes clear that no one is going to get what they want out of national standards. What’s worse is that the resulting mess would be imposed on everyone.”
Jay also quotes Sandra Stotsky on the sausage-makers:
Instead of choosing nationally known scholars to chair and staff these committees–to assure us of the integrity and quality of the product–the NGA and the CCSSO have, for reasons best known to themselves, treated the initiative as a private game of their own. The NGA and the CCSSO haven’t even bothered to inform the public who is chairing these committees, who is on them, why they were chosen, what their credentials are, and why we should have any confidence whatsoever in what they come up with.
While not writing about national standards, Mark Bauerlein at the Chronicle of Higher Education might as well be in describing the inevitable conflicts and disappointments when it comes time to choose texts in curriculum meetings.
Traditionalists in the room want to identify core texts, events, figures, and ideas, and on various grounds of historical influence, civic inheritance, and aesthetic virtue they stick with a generally Eurocentric tradition. Progressivists want to enlarge the canon and contexts, to give representation to other cultures and identities, and explode the reigning “normativities,” and they resist a core knowledge of any kind being set down as official.
The result is satisfying to neither side, he notes. ”There doesn’t seem to be any way out of the impasse,” which Bauerlein thinks “partly explains the rise of the skills’ movement in education circles.”
An “overwhelming number” of New York City schools participating in Roland Fryer’s pay-for-grades Sparks program saw “huge boosts” in reading and math scores, the New York Post reports.
About two-thirds of the 59 high-poverty schools in the Sparks program — which pays seventh-graders up to $500 and fourth-graders as much as $250 for their performance on a total of 10 assessments — improved their scores since last year’s state tests by margins above the citywide average. The gains at some schools approached 40 percentage points.
The jump in scores comes against a backdrop of this year’s overall increase in NYC math and reading scores, however of sixty-one 4th and 7th grades involved in the program, 16 improved less than the citywide average gain in math since last year, while 21 did so in reading. “Principals at the highest-scoring schools cautioned that the Sparks program was just one of many factors in the test-score jumps,” says the Post. “But many reported seeing indisputable academic benefits — including more motivation, better focus and an increase in healthy competition for good grades among students.”
…reality show stars. Honestly, where are these kids’ parents?
Could a little Hollywood star power help further the cause of teaching history and civics?
Actor Richard Dreyfuss has come up with a program he’s calling “The Dreyfuss Initiative” — a plan to create a civics curriculum and series 
of videos “to engage, enlighten and empower students of all ages in an entertaining way.” In an interview with the AP, Dreyfuss describes his project as “a nonprofit initiative to get K-12 grades back to civics, to give our children real-world knowledge and hopefully wisdom about how to run this complex governance system.”
But Dreyfuss is loathe to use the c-word in describing his plan. “Don’t call it ‘civics’ because ‘civics’ is easily the most boring word in America,” Dreyfuss says. “Call it what it is: political power.”
Channeling E.D. Hirsch, Dreyfuss tells the AP, “I stopped defining myself as an actor and I went to Oxford because I believe that America is a miracle. And I think that there is nothing easier in the world than for us to lose this miracle and to be reduced to words on paper.”
So many interesting, provocative blog posts this week. So little time to discuss them all…
Children of the poor get tougher and more unmannerly slowly. In time, they lose respect for authority. Perhaps because adults are rarely able (or willing) to protect them. Maybe because many public authorities quite openly treat them and their families disrespectfully. Over time, they come to depend on “the streets” and their “peer culture” for safety, and they imitate the public swagger offered on “middle-class” media of wealthy athletes, talk show hosts, et al.” Deborah Meier at Bridging Differences
The Obama administration has announced that it’s going to see if it can get Democrats in Congress to not immediately zero out the D.C. voucher program, but to wind down funding in a manner that allows currently enrolled students to remain in the program through high school. Like a guilty teenager who wrecks the family car and then generously offers to pay for a tank of gas, the administration’s proposal is insulting in its earnestness.” Rick Hess at The Enterprise Blog
Every day I wish I had never gone to college. It has been the biggest mistake of my life. Sometimes I wish I had gone to prison instead of college. At least I would have learned a trade or two and started being independent once I got out.” Hernan Castillo at MSNBC.com. Castillo is over $30,000 in debt and working in a warehouse despite holding a degree in accounting (HT: Joanne Jacobs)
Government, in short, has enormous difficulty fulfilling its current responsibilities, coordinating its various parts, and accomplishing its present objectives. You don’t have to romanticize the private sector’s competence to harbor serious doubts that giving government even more duties is a formula for disappointment. That’s true in education and in much, much else.” Checker Finn on Forbes.com
A friend of mine went to his first day on the job at the United States Department of Education and was chagrined to see a sign on the door warning, “The door be broke.” That sign is emblematic of what’s wrong with education in America: our schools be broke!” Janice Shaw Crouse at townhall.com
The House Education and Labor Committee held a hearing on common national standards earlier this week. EdWeek’s Alyson Klein was there.
Key state officials, congressional leaders, and the president of the one of the national teachers’ unions all agreed [at the hearing] that the United States needs to move toward common academic standards to stay competitive in an increasingly globalized economy—and that states must be the vehicle for the change. What was not as clear is what the federal role should be in adding momentum to the effort already under way in about 40 states to move toward a set of standards that is more uniform and rigorous.
“We’re placing a very big bet on the states,” Klein quotes committee chair George Miller as saying. “My sense is that we’re placing the bet in the right place to get this done.”
NAEP long-term trend numbers are out. Headlines and links:
Improvements seen in reading and mathematics
Black students make greater gains from early 1970s than White students
Most racial/ethnic score gaps narrow compared to first assessment
For students whose parents did not finish high school, mathematics scores increase compared to 1978
Percentages of students taking higher-level mathematics increasing
USA Today’s Greg Toppo highlights sharp increases in math and reading among many of the nation’s lowest-performing students. especially in the past four years, but notes “the stubborn, decades-long achievement gap between white and minority students shrank between the 1970s and the first part of this decade, but has barely budged since 2002, when the federal government compelled public schools to address it through No Child Left Behind (NCLB).”
Over at Curriculum Matters, Mary Ann Zehr notes average scores have remained flat for 17-year-olds both in reading and math since the early 1970s. “The scores for 17-year-olds in reading, however, did increase by three points, to 286, from 2004 to 2008, which is considered significant. But the same was not true for 17-year-olds in math. The scores remained stagnant for that age group in math during that same period,” she notes.
Dan Willingham gets serious national ink today with a glowing review of his book Why Don’t Students Like School in the Wall Street Journal. And if you haven’t read Dan’s book yet, what are you waiting for?
Update: The Journal is stingy in its praise compared to Bill Evers.
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