Archive for the 'Weekly Roundup' Category

Vox Populi

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 22, 2009 in Weekly Roundup. 0 Comments

One problem with the mastery assessment argument is that all too often students who choose not to do homework, attend, etc., then fail traditional assessments but are granted “alternative” evaluations. It has been my experience that few of these alternative methods measure mastery but are simply social promotion poorly disguised as legitimate accomplishment.”   Peter on “standards-based grading“

This may explain why parent education is such a powerful predictor of student success. It’s a lot easier for a kid whose parents are doctors, lawyers, or teachers to see the connection between education and jobs, than it is for the child of someone struggling in a low-wage job to understand that education could make a difference for them.”   Rachel on What’s My Motivation?

Wallace is essentially mounting the “transferable skills” defense of the humanities. While she may not have used any “21st-century skills” language, her arguments bring her into the same terrain. Skills developed through intense engagement with specific academic content become useful in very different areas. Might some of those skills even outlive some of the content knowledge that helped incubate them?”  Claus von Zastrow on In Defense of the Liberal Arts

I don’t mind schools promoting the idea of volunteerism, even expecting it as prerequisite for some honors, but requiring it? That seems the sort of thinking we would expect from people who have no logical problem with “mandatory volunteerism.”  Brian Rude on Service Learning

Barbaric Yawp

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 15, 2009 in No category and Weekly Roundup. 1 Comment

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

Required Reading

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 14, 2009 in 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

P21 Still Doesn’t Get It
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills continues to insist that choosing between teaching content and skills is a “false choice.” No one disagrees. Children need skills and solid academic content. The problem is that the P21 plan is all treats academic curriculum as merely something to plug in to lesson plans driven by tech toys and “thinking tools.”

A Sobering Assessment of National Standards
The Fordham Foundation’s Checker Finn, a longtime proponent of national standards, sounds a strong cautionary note.”Evidence is mounting that those who take curricular content seriously may not like what we find at the end of this road,” Finn writes, “and I worry that America could be headed toward another painful bout of curriculum warfare.”

Reading Between the Lies
An anonymous questionnaire in Britainshows two-thirds of people admit to lying about having read a book. George Orwell’s 1984 is the most lied about boo, followed by War and Peace, and Ulysses. Also gathering dust on the shelf: The Bible, Madame Bovary, and Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.

Best of the Education Blogs

21st Century Skills and Teaching at Teacher Beat
The argument from critics of 21st Century Skills with respect to teachers isn’t really so much one of content versus skills, it’s that the need to be really prepared to be able to do “project-based” instruction is an incredibly difficult kind of teaching to do without losing sight of content.

21st-Century Skills, Accountability, and Curriculum at Bridging Differences
Diane Ravitch is perturbed that discussions of assessment and federal legislation can go on for hours without any reference to education at all. “It seems that the crucial decisions about accountability will now be in the hands of psychometricians, economists, and actuaries,” she writes, “and let’s not forget the ideologues, whose idea of accountability is to fire teachers and close schools.”

The Future of Teacher Ed? at Eduflack
Patrick Riccards suggests teacher training needs its own version of the Flexner Report – a 1910 report on the wildly uneven quality of medical education in the U.S. that changed the face of the medical profession and led to the closing of half of all the medical schools in the U.S. “Those that remained bolstered their quality,” Riccards writes, “turning out a better doctor to meet the growing medical needs of our industrialized nation.”

The Origins of Summer Vacation at The Quick and the Ed
The agricultural origins of summer vacation is one of those factual tidbits that everyone knows, a useful shorthand piece of evidence to use in emphasizing how our education system hasn’t changed with the times. But Kevin Carey notes our irrational school calendar is more a function of what was convenient for rich people than is commonly understood.

Curriculum and Teaching

Great Depression a Timely Class Topic
Education Week
Because of the parallels social studies teachers are able to draw between the current economic crisis and the Great Depression, students are seeing that history is relevant. “Teachers are comparing and contrasting the causes of the Great Depression and the current recession, as well as the New Deal and the recent stimulus package and other government responses to today’s crisis,” reports Ed Week’s Mary Ann Zehr.

New Curriculum Becomes A SpringBoard For Teacher Criticism
A classic education it’s not. Hillsborough County (Florida) schools’ yearlong studies of world, American and British literature in high schools are history. “The American Dream” replaces 11th-grade American literature, with a span of subjects from Arthur Miller’s play about witchcraft, “The Crucible,” to clips from the movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

After FCAT “F” School Embraces Solution
St. Petersburg Times
It’s commonly assumed there is an iron-clad correlation between poverty and academics. Poor school? Bad school. But in Florida, a growing number of high-poverty schools are defying public perception. Nearly 1 in 4 elementary schools across Florida with poverty levels above 70 percent have improved in the past five years, a St. Petersburg Times review of FCAT scores shows.

Substitute teaching applications surge
USA Today
As unemployment continues to rise, school districts nationwide are being flooded with applications for substitute teaching jobs. Those applying range from a laid-off finance manager for Harley-Davidson to a vice president of a collapsed financial institution, all for work that pays $45 to $160 a day.

35,000 College Seniors Apply to Teach in Low-achieving Schools
San Jose Mercury News
Facing the tightest job market in a generation, thousands of elite members of the class of 2009 are competing for a chance to head off to the nation’s most troubled schools. Applications to Teach For America have surged an astounding 42 percent for the coming school year.

Education Policy

Obama Thinks Big on Education
Washington Post
President Obama’s education speech was, in my memory, the largest assemblage of smart ideas about schools ever issued by one president at one time, writes Jay Matthews. “The speech puts Obama without any further doubt in the long line of Democratic party leaders who have embraced accountability in schools through testing, even at the risk of seeming to be in league with the Republican Party,” he notes.

The Teacher-in-Chief Speaks
The Economist
For those who listened carefully, the underlying theme of Barack Obama’s big schools speech on March 10th was how little influence the federal government ha on education. He promised that “America’s entire education system [will] once more be the envy of the world.” But the plans he laid out for achieving this goal consisted largely of pleading with states and school districts-which actually run the show-to do a better job.

Effect of Stimulus on NCLB Renewal Mulled
Education Week
Even as states and school districts prepare to absorb billions of dollars in economic-stimulus aid for education, policymakers and analysts are quietly discussing whether the infusion of federal cash may reshape the landscape around reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Homeschooling and Parenting

“No Picnic for Me Either”
New York Times
In his education speech this week, Barack Obama told how his mother would waking him up at 4:30 to tutor him before he went off to school. When young Barry complained about getting up so early, his mother responded: “This is no picnic for me either, Buster.” The anecdote, notes David Brooks, underlines the two traits necessary for academic success: relationships and rigor.

Distractions May Shift, but Sleep Needs Don’t
New York Times
Even as we’ve come to understand more and more about the importance of sleep, for brain function and learning, for mental and physical health, the world has gotten to be a harder and harder place for a child to go to sleep.

Out-of-School Factors Seen as Key
Education Week
A new report makes a case for paying more attention to the critical role that out-of-school factors-such as inadequate health care, food insecurity, or environmental pollutants-have on children’s school success.

Mom will fight order against home schooling
The News and Observer
Home-school groups and conservatives across the country are infuriated by a North Carolina judge’s declaration that he will make a mother stop teaching her children at home and send them to public schools. The judge said at the hearing that while the children are “thriving,” they need to be exposed to the “real world.”

Et Alia

To Fight Truancy, Wise County Judge Trades Hall Monitors for Ankle Monitors
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
To keep tabs on students who are habitually absent, a Texas Justice of the Peace can now place a GPS ankle monitor on them for 30 days. The monitors, which are more commonly used to keep track of convicted felons on probation, are the latest move in stepped-up efforts across North Texas to curb truancy and help turn around climbing dropout rates.

Carnival of Education

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 5, 2009 in Weekly Roundup. 2 Comments

We’re happy to host (a day late) this week’s Carnival of Education, a weekly round up of the most interesting selections from ed bloggers from far and wide.  A particularly robust selection this week, so let’s get started:

On Teaching

“Being a first grade teacher is kind of like playing defensive tackle. Everybody says you’re important, but there’s no glamour in it,” Nancy Flanagan, observes ruefully in You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice at Teacher in a Strange Land. ”Worse, as you’re being underappreciated, folks are silently looking at what you do and thinking ‘that’s not so hard.’”

“Perhaps you have seen the hamburger model of writing?” asks Mathew Needleman in Teaching Writing Tip #2: Where’s the Beef? at Open Court Resources.com Blog.  ”Try to imagine Dostoyevsky using a hamburger drawing to write Crime and Punishment.”

“Of all the difficulties a teacher has to face, cheating enrages and exhausts me the most,” writes Siobhan Curious who says I’m watching you.

Michaele Sommerville helpfully suggests teachers Regularly “Spring Clean” Manipulatives, posted at Kindergarten’s 3 R’s: Respect, Resources, & Rants. Complete with illustrations!

Darren presents Teenage Prostitutes at Right on the Left Coast: Views From a Conservative Teacher.  It’s a few anecdotes about his first year of teaching, several years ago–including the students who were picked up for prostitution.

Andrea presents Down a hall, noisily posted at Andrea’s Buzzing About:. “Hallways can be tiring, even when the journey is only 50 feet,” she writes. ”Sometimes I can distract myself from the fatigue by marvelling at the sheer outrageousness of the arguments from oppositional students.”

“How do you define engagement in your classroom?”  A provocative question and post courtesy of Educatorblog who asks Is handraising a race to the bottom?

How Important is My Toolbelt? asks Pat of Successful Teaching.  “As a teacher, I am constantly on the lookout for new tools and how they can make a difference in my life and others,” she writes.

“As educators it is important we understand how ALL children come to learn about color, race and culture in a way that is developmentally appropriate,” writes Kakie. Her post How do children see & learn about race, color and culture? is at Bur Bur & Friends: Community Park.

Denise presents Math Warm-Up: Today is February 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 posted at Let’s play math!, saying, “One of my favorite warm-up exercises for Math Club is “Today is ______.” Each student invents one or more mathematical expressions for today’s date and writes his or her favorite on the board for all to admire.”

The first and most important thing to learning effectively is to have an appropriate learning environment, observes Meaghan Montrose who submits Effective Learning Strategies and Study Skills- Part 1 | posted at Colleen Palat. “The setting in which you are studying can make or break your success.”

Classroom Management

“If it is normal for difficult children to be spoilt, sent on trips, and allowed to dominate classrooms,”asks oldandrew in Students and Detentions, “why would any child connect their own lapses in behaviour to a deserved punishment?”  Scenes From The Battleground is a British blog about teaching in tough schools.

“Have You Ever Taught A Class That Got “Out Of Control”? Larry Ferlazzo asks rhetorically.  Larry has, he’s lived to tell, and brought back survival strategies. 

Testing, Testing

How students score in reading and writing on an English-language-proficiency test is a good indicator of how they will score on their state’s tests for reading, writing, and mathematics that are given to all students, reports EdWeek’s Mary Ann Zehr in What’s an English-Proficiency Score Good For? posted at Learning the Language.

Mister Teacher presents The Million Dollar Test.  It’s an original story of a group of kids who are offered the chance to make a million dollars–but only if they get a perfect score on the state test, at Learn Me Good.

A computer program is an option to assess student writing for Washington state assessments, but Travis A. Wittwer is dubious.  “Can a computer program provide an accurate assessment of student writing?” he asks in WCAP, Part 2 at Stories from School: Practice meets Policy. “Will subtle writing choices like figurative language, sentence structure, and word choice be registered with a program?”

Higher Ed

How to provide a welcoming and safe environment for atheist students without alienating the Christians who are equally deserving of a positive learning environment, is the issue tackled by vjack, who offers Reaching Out to Atheist College Students at Atheist Revolution.

Nate Desmond has Five Reasons to Take the SAT at Debt-free College.

Technology

Bill Ferriter wrestles with an issue critical for the 21st Century in Ensuring Mediocrity While Preventing Disaster. . . at The Tempered Radical. “What level of digital communication—if any—should be allowed between teachers and students after school hours.”

In addition to the necessary instructional changes, if you were building or designing a new secondary school to support powerful 21st century learning, what would you be sure to include on the technology, facilities, and infrastructure fronts? wonders Scott McLeod, who presents Help wanted – Building a new secondary school at Dangerously Irrelevant.

Interactive white boards, combined with online tools can be an amazing way for kids to have fun and not even realize they’re learning, writes Jerry Swiatek, who presents Make graphing fun with an interactive white board posted at Instructify.

“Distance learning programs have become an approach for many working American citizens to better themselves without losing their jobs,” notes Sigrid Landau, who presents Overwhelming Advantages Of Distance Learning Programs at A1 How To. ”It has also become an alternative for folks who have little or no time to go back to school to get another degree.”

“Teenagers are finding that there are some pretty large unintended consequences of sending naked pictures to each other with their phones,” reports Strausser in sexting…unitended consequences. posted at a voice from the middle… ”They have no idea that this ’sexting’ could lead them to being charged as sex offenders. Stats are showing 1 in 5 teens are doing it.”

Issues and Policy

Better teachers or smaller class size?  Joanne Jacobs launches the discussion with Good teachers trump class size posted at Joanne Jacobs.

At Stories from School: Practice meets Policy, Kelly comes down In Defense of the Master’s Degree.  “I contend that the best, most efficient place to get the knowledge and dispositions to go with strong teaching skills is in a master’s program,” she contends. 

“Many respected bright minds of our distant past as well as currently have been homeschooled without credentialed support,” writes Cindy in The Myth of Credentialism  ”Thus, teaching without credentials came first; certification followed.” Posted at The Life Without School Community Blog.

Elementaryhistoryteacher presents The Chicken or the Egg posted at History Is Elementary. “In education we have our own chicken or the egg dilemma. Which came first,” she asks.  “The student or the teacher?

“Our inability to combat promiscuous teleology with a more thorough use of logic and reasoning is disconcerting,” observes Vihar Sheth in Promiscuous Teleology. Say What? posted at Vihar Sheth.  I assume he’s right about that. 

Rants and Raves

They’re considered classics for a reason. “If they weren’t good, they wouldn’t have survived the erosion of history,” observes Learned Genius‘ Why You Should Read the Classics: A Bibliophile’s Diatribe. ”Of course there will be some that you don’t like, but they all have something of value hidden within their pages.”

“Clearly, age is a completely arbitrary factor in establishing competency for a myriad of rights and responsibilities,” writes Michael Mazenko in Ending Adolescence posted at A Teacher’s View.

“Is there really not enough edu-speak out there that we need to co-op the crap they’re spewing in the business world as well?” fumes Assistant Principal Q6 in One for My Profession’s “Action Item List” posted at Assistive Principles. “Bring me some REAL ed books!!”

Bellringers (Carol Richtsmeier) presents My Birthday, Crying Over Spilled Coffee & Rocky Mountain Angst posted at Bellringers.  She turned 52.  It wasn’t pretty. 

“Times are tough for families right now,” notes Hall Monitor with Cheese sandwiches for students whose parents are poor posted at DetentionSlip.org. “Do we have the right to complain about a free meal?”

“It really bothers me,” complains Mamacita.  “It bothers me way out of proportion; it bothers me TERRIBLY, that so many elementary teachers refuse to teach cursive handwriting now.”  Mamacita Says: Cursing Over Cursive, Or, Rather, The Lack of It is posted at Scheiss Weekly.

Why do we have to disrupt two or three school days by late arrival or early dismissal when a whole day can be set aside for conferences and not disrupt multiple days for students and their parents?  Matt Johnston presents Parent Teacher Conference Days posted at Going to the Mat.

“Too fast, too superficial, with whole swaths glossed over before true mastery has been achieved,” that’s her district’s math curriculum in a nutshell says SwitchedOnMom in Montgomery’s Math Miscalculation? posted at The “More” Child.

 

Next week’s Carnival of Education will be hosted at Right Wing Nation.  Hopefully on schedule!

Required Reading

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 15, 2009 in 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

“How All Our Schools Should Be”?
President Obama visited Washington’s Capital City Public Charter School and praised “this kind of innovative school” as “an example of how all our schools should be.” Does he mean that all schools should have project-based learning and “authentic assessment based on multiple measures,” just like Capital City does?

A Measure of Privacy
Contemporary classrooms seem set up to prevent students from having any time for private thought, observes teacher Diana Senechal. “If privacy of mind brings some risk of failure, we need that risk. Otherwise we give up the sanctuary of thought: the slow struggle with a problem, the frustrations and breakthroughs, the questions and insights, the romance with the subject. This is too great a loss,” she concludes.

Ignoring Parents Gives Voucher Proponents Traction
Georgia’s voucher bill “is counterproductive legislation that will only help its sponsor’s political career,” writes AJC columnist Maureen Downey.  “However, I also think the bill represents an overdue wake-up call for public schools that they must be more responsive to parents.”

Visual Media Hampers Critical Thinking Skills
Our visual skills are improving, while our critical thinking abilities are in decline, according to a review of 50 studies on learning and technology conducted by UCLA psychology professor Patricia Greenfield and published in the journal Science. 

Best of the Blogs

Why Are People So Gullible About Miracle Cures in Education?
Bridging Differences
“As long as we expect schools to perform miracles, we will continue to be bitterly disappointed,” writes Diane Ravitch. “Perhaps it is this phony expectation that has created so much anger and frustration among the public. Surely they wonder why all teachers can’t be like Jaime Escalante or any of a dozen other miracle-workers.”

Unfit for a College Education
Joanne Jacobs
Today’s students are uneducated and unfit for a college education, writes a Penn State accounting professor who’s taught for 35 years.  There’s no different in native intelligence, writes J. Edward Ketz.  The difference lies in their “educational backgrounds, analytical thinking, quantitative skills, reading abilities, willingness to work, and their attitudes concerning the educational process.”

Running Schools as Businesses?
Eduflack
Our public schools cannot refuse service to customers (students) they don’t wish to serve.  We can’t choose not to locate our schools in certain communities because of low incomes or low return on investment.  Running schools as businesses is one of those great straw men issues that we often throw out there as a substitute for talking about reforms or targeted improvement.  

Duncan Puts Up a Three-Pointer
The Quick and the Ed
There’s a clear message emerging from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s early public pronouncements: He’s going to push for higher standards than most states have adopted under NCLB, and that may include national standards (and tests).  

Teaching and Curriculum

Texas School Reformers Try to Learn Lessons From Finland
Dallas Morning News
Educators from across the world have looked to Finland for ideas on improving public education. Dallas reformers are especially intrigued with how Finland gets positive results from all of its schools and nearly all of its students – an equality that has been a chronic problem in Texas since the days of racial segregation.

Third-grade Math: A Teacher’s Calculus
Christian Science Monitor
A three-part series looks at how a veteran teacher handles a single day’s math class, leaving no child behind while holding none back; what “failure” can mean under “No Child”; and how hard it is to gauge academic progress in English learners.

A Colorado school district does away with grade levels
Christian Science Monitor
A Westminster, Colorado school district is doing away with traditional grade levels. Ultimately, there will be 10 multiage levels, rather than 12 grades, and students might be in different levels depending on the subject. They’ll move up only as they demonstrate mastery of the material.

Education Policy

Big cuts loom for education: 574,000 jobs at risk
USA Today
The first look ever at how the economic downturn could affect education finds that states probably will cut an estimated 18.5% of spending over the next three years, an $80 billion drop that could eliminate 574,000 publicly funded jobs.

Nation’s Schools Would Get $106 Billion From Stimulus Package
Los Angeles Times
The massive federal economic stimulus package hammered out by Congress this week contains about $106 billion earmarked for education, an unprecedented expansion of federal spending into the nation’s schools. The money would pay for, among other things, special education, school repair and retaining teachers who might otherwise be laid off.

The Toughest Job
Washington Post
Michelle Rhee says her thoughts about teachers have not always come through accurately.  “I do not blame teachers for low achievement levels,” she writes in an op-ed in the Washington Post.  “I have talked with too many teachers to believe this is their fault.”

Arizona No. 1 in Voucher Programs
East Valley (AZ) Tribune
In the annual report released Tuesday by the Alliance for School Choice, Arizona ranked No. 1 in the number of programs available to students that allow them to receive funds to attend a private school.

Scholastic Accused of Misusing Book Clubs
New York Times
The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood said that it had reviewed monthly fliers distributed by Scholastic last year and found that one-third of the items sold in the brochures were either not books or books packaged with other items.

Homeschooling and Parenting

Home-schooling popularity grows
Washington Times
Because the modern home-schooling movement has been around for more than 25 years, it is becoming a more diverse education movement. Almost everyone knows at least one home-schooling family. It’s also much easier to home-school now than even five years ago.

Bill would require parent-teacher meetings
Cincinnati Enquirer
A Kentucky lawmaker has proposed a law to require all parents to meet with their children’s teachers within the first 60 days of the school year–or risk fines of up to $200.
 
The Cough-and-Sniffle Question: When to Keep a Child Home?
New York Times
The bottom line is this: Keep your child home from school if there’s fever, or if the child feels too crummy to participate – but don’t worry so much about the runny nose in the row behind.

No, You Shut Up!
Slate
What to do when your kid provokes you into an inhuman rage.

Et Alia

Growth of gaming, TV hurting kids’ critical reasoning skills
ARS Technica
A review of the literature suggests that the growth of visual media, such as games and television, is producing a generation that has greater visual reasoning skills, but a reduced ability to stop and engage in critical reasoning. 

The New Book Banning
City Journal
It’s hard to believe, but true: under a law Congress passed last year aimed at regulating hazards in children’s products, the federal government has now advised that children’s books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute.

Required Reading

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 8, 2009 in Weekly Roundup. 1 Comment

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

21st Century Skills and the Tree Octopus Problem
Sometimes a little knowledge can solve a problem that can’t be helped by all of the innovation, creativity and information literacy lessons under the sun. The tree octopus, a clever Internet hoax, regularly fools “information literacy” students who think it’s real.  With a little background knowledge, however, you get the joke. 

21st Century Snake Oil
“It’s hard to get people to think critically about people who push a focus on critical thinking,” observes Jay Greene. ”To be for critical thinking is like being for goodness and light.  The tricky part is in how you get there.”

Best of the Blogs

Alfie Kohn Is Bad For You and Dangerous For Your Children at Britannica Blog
Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham doesn’t really  believe reading what Kohn has to say about homework, testing and praising children is bad for you.  “But if Kohn were writing about his own work, that would probably be his takeaway message,” says Willingham. ”Kohn has made a virtual industry out of finding interesting and provocative insights in the psychological literature and following them off the edge of a cliff.”

Unions Are Not the Problem at Bridging Differences
“If getting rid of the unions was the solution to the problem of low performance, then why,” ask education historian Diane Ravitchm ”do the southern states—where unions are weak or non-existent—continue to perform worse than states with strong unions? And how can we explain the strong union presence in Massachusetts, which is the nation’s highest performing state on NAEP?”

The Club, the Stiletto, and Evolution in Texas at Curriculum Matters
Texas state senator Rodney Ellis, having witnessed the latest hubbub over the teaching of evolution on his state’s board of education, has filed a bill to strip the board of the bulk of its authority over textbooks and curriculum.

Teaching and Curriculum

Teachers’ Staff Training Deemed Fragmented
Education Week
A new report finds American teachers are not given as many opportunities for on-the-job training as their international peers, and their effectiveness appears to suffer as a result.  The time U.S. teachers actually spend in professional training largely continues to take place in isolation, rather than in school-based settings that draw on teachers’ collective knowledge and skills.

Curriculum and Quality in Pre-k Programs
Early Ed Watch
Most policymakers who don’t primarily work with young children in their day to day lives don’t intuitively have a sense of what types of content and skills are appropriate for young children to learn. This confusion about and discomfort with the notion of quality pre-k curriculum is apparent when we look at how states and advocacy groups define quality pre-k programs.

Is Black History Month Still Needed?
Chicago Tribune
Founded by historian Carter G. Woodson as Negro History Week, Black History Month was a way to highlight to non-blacks the myriad contributions that blacks have made to this country.  “Over the years, so much has changed,” notes the paper’s Exploring Race blog, “not the least of which was the recent inauguration of a man of color as the 44th President of the United States.”

Rhee seeks to stop off-site suspensions
Washington Times
Washington D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee wants to reduce the number of off-site suspensions and safely keep unruly students at school.  Officials say the current policy is too focused on removing students from the classroom and not focused enough on guidance.

Education Policy

A Vital Boost for Education
New York Times
The stimulus measure being debated in Congress would more than double the Education Department’s discretionary budget and give the federal government unprecedented leverage over a school-reform effort that has been controlled primarily by the states. Congress has to make sure, however, that the spending does not actually undermine reform.

To Duncan, Incentives a Priority
Education Week
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is eager to use a proposed $15 billion federal incentive-grant fund in part to reward states, districts, and even nonprofit organizations that have set high standards for the students they serve.  “With this fund, we really have a chance to drive dramatic changes, to take to scale what works, invest in what works,” Mr. Duncan said in an interview last week.

In stimulus bill, US funds for schools double 
Christian Science Monitor
The economic stimulus bills before Congress contain a $140 billion boost for education. The legislation is part short-term stimulus, intended to create jobs via school renovation projects and to prevent massive teacher layoffs in the face of state and local budget deficits. But it is also part social policy, channeling federal dollars to programs designed to improve the academic achievement of low-income and other struggling pupils.

School vouchers for all under GOP bill
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgia would be the first state to offer vouchers to all public school students under a Republican plan introduced in the state Senate on Monday. The bill would allot parents about $5,000 in taxpayer money to use toward private school tuition.  It would also allow parents to switch their children from one public school to another.

Palo Alto Superintendent: Achievement Gap Can’t Be Eliminated
San Jose Mercury News
When it comes to closing the achievement gap, Palo Alto, California schools Superintendent Kevin Skelly says educators are deluding themselves.  Totally eliminating the gap would be “the triumph of hope over experience,” said Skelly.  When educators set that lofty goal, “we’re not being honest, and it’s to our detriment.”

Homeschooling and Parenting

Click and Jane
New York Times Magazine
In a hundred ways, we pretend that screen experiences are books — PowerBooks, notebooks, e-books — but even a child knows the difference. Reading books is an operation with paper. “I need to admit this to myself, too, writes mother Virginia Heffernan. ”I try to believe that reading online is reading-plus, with the text searchable, hyperlinked and accompanied by video, audio, photography and graphics. But maybe it’s just not reading at all.”

Dallas Parents With Truant Kids Taught a Lesson
Dallas Morning News
Dallas parents are being hauled into court in record numbers to account for their children’s truancy.  In 2008, 750 cases filed by the Dallas Independent School District involved parents being fined for “contributing to truancy”– up from 79 in 2005. 

Et Alia

In Cutting Sports Funding, Everyone Loses
Washington Post
Times are tough, particularly in our schools. We don’t have the money, beleaguered education officials say, for every student who wants to play games after class. ”Many of us remember some competitive activity, usually in high school,” writes Jay Mathews, “that became a vital force in our adolescence. It gave us a self-awareness and self-confidence that changed us forever.” 

 

Required Reading

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 1, 2009 in 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

Handwriting Is Still Alive!
Guest blogger Kitty Burns Florey, author of the new book Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting, observes that hardly a day goes by when the average person doesn’t have to write something on paper. “Penmanship isn’t dead,” Florey argues. ”It’s not feeling great, it’s struggling to breathe, it’s limping along. But we can keep it alive. And we should.”

Who’s To Blame for Bad Schools? Look in the Mirror
The Chancellor of Nevada’s state university system delivers a blistering address in which he defends teachers and administrators and blames the public and parents for the state’s poor education system.  “The state of K-16 education in Nevada is where the public has allowed it to sink,” said James Rogers.

No More Parent Teacher Conferences?
A Maryland school district is considering scaling back or eliminating parent teacher conferences, believing they ”eat up instructional time and create a scheduling nightmare for families.”  Meanwhile a proposed law in Colorado would give workers up to 40 hours of unpaid leave each school year to attend parent-teacher conferences and other school activities.

Best of the Blogs

Where in the World Have Geography Classes Gone? at Florida Today
Where is Sudan? What is the capital of Afghanistan? How many people live in China? Could today’s high school students tell you? Probably not.  Geography classes are disappearing from many high school course lists, and students say it shows. That has many concerned, especially as students prepare for college and the work force in an increasingly global society.

Snow Days, Recess and ‘Flinty Chicago Toughness’ at Early Ed Watch
Given what we know so far about the importance of recess, hurdles to letting kids go out and play should be overcome on days that are not dangerously cold.  “Most should agree, especially given the obesity epidemic, that children need time and space for climbing, leaping and running around,” writes Lisa Guernsey. “We should be doing everything we can to make that happen.”

Kids Say the Darndest Things at NYC Educator
Teacher-blogger NYC Educator says he ought to be happy with his literature class.  “They read the books, they pass the tests, and I must be doing a fantastic job,” he writes. ”But he’s not reaching them the way he wants to. “I’ve got another few months to fool them into thinking reading is worthwhile,” he writes.  “It’s getting tougher to compete with the new toys, though, which seem to get better each year.”

Texas’ Big Education Gamble at Dallas Morning News Opinion Blog
Will Texas legislators end up watering down the way the state measures and rank schools? “We really risk our students’ future in a very complex economy if we go wobbly here,” writes William McKenzie.

Teaching and Curriculum

Getting Accountability Right
Education Week
“The federal No Child Left Behind Act has succeeded in highlighting the poor math and reading skills of disadvantaged children,” writes Richard Rothstein. ”But on balance, the law has done more harm than good because it has terribly distorted the school curriculum. Modest modifications cannot correct this distortion. Designing a better accountability policy will take time.”

L.A. Teachers’ Union Calls For Boycott of Testing
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles teachers union and the city’s school district are battling over “periodic assessments.” The goal is to give teachers insight into what students need to learn while there remains time in the current school year to adjust instruction. The union Tuesday directed teachers to refuse to give them to students on the grounds that the tests are costly and counterproductive.

States get D-plus On Teacher Reviews
Associated Press
States are not doing what it takes to keep good teachers and remove bad ones, a national study finds.Only Iowa and New Mexico require any evidence that public school teachers are effective before granting them tenure, according to the review released Thursday by the National Council on Teacher Quality.

Recess Makes for Better Students
U.S. News and World Report
A study in the February issue of Pediatrics documents the value of recess: Children who have it during the day behave better in class. Although it’s unclear how much recess children in the United States are getting, some studies have documented a dramatic decrease, and this study reported that the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 has resulted in less recess for many children.

Education Policy

An Education Stimulus?
Washington Post
Education is the big winner in the proposed economic stimulus plan.  But it remains to be seen whether America’s schoolchildren really will be helped by the huge investment of public funds.  After all, it seems that much of the billions of dollars of new federal spending is aimed at continuing programs and policies that largely have failed to improve student achievement.

2009 Annual Letter from Bill Gates: U.S. Education
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
“Based on what the foundation has learned so far, we have refined our strategy,” writes Bill Gates. ”We will continue to invest in replicating the school models that worked the best.”  Almost all of these schools are charter schools, notes Gates, who adds that improving teacher quality will be another major initiative of the Foundation.  “Our new strategy focuses on learning why some teachers are so much more effective than others and how best practices can be spread throughout the education system so that the average quality goes up.”

Will The Recession Kill School Reform?
Forbes.com
This time of economic hardship may represent the beginning of the end of the modern school reform movement, write Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Michael J. Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation. “That’s because of what turns out, in retrospect, to be a tragic flaw in the strategy of many reformers in recent decades: to offer the education establishment a lot more money in return for a little reform.”

Homeschooling and Parenting

Showing Up For the Kids
Denver Post
A proposed law in Colorado would allow workers to take up to 40 hours of unpaid leave each school year to attend parent-teacher conferences or other school activities.  Why the need for a law? “Because of the parents whose kids are failing, most can’t rely on flexibility at work,” writes columnist Susan Greene.

Web-Savvy Activists Push For Educational Change
Washington Post
For a new generation of well-wired activists, it’s not enough to speak at Parent-Teacher Association or late-night school board meetings. They are going head-to-head with superintendents through e-mail blitzes, social networking Web sites, online petitions, partnerships with business and student groups, and research that mines a mountain of electronic data on school performance. These parent insurgents are gaining influence — and getting things changed.

Virginia Parents Fight for Easier Grading Standards
TIME
Residents of Virginia’s Fairfax County, the high-powered Washington suburb, have been battling the school district’s tough grading practices. Chief among their complaints is that a score of 93% gets recorded as a lowly B+.  Parents formed an official protest group and goaded the school board into voting on whether to ease the standards, a move critics consider a defeat in the war on grade inflation.

Et Alia

How Caroline Kennedy Can Best Serve the People of New York
New York Daily News
She won’t have the chance to be New York’s senator, but Diane Ravitch has another job in mind for Caroline Kennedy. “She can save New York City’s Catholic schools, which are in the throes of a fiscal meltdown.” The research on Catholic education is overwhelmingly positive and few people are better suited to ride to the rescue than Kennedy, who helped raise almost $240 million for NYC’s public schools.  “If the same amount had been raised for the city’s Catholic schools,” Ravitch notes, “not a single one of them would have to close.”

Required Reading

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 25, 2009 in 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

Obama’s Inauguration and the Limits of Symbolism
It’s bittersweet to think that many students–indeed, many Americans–couldn’t fully appreciate Barack Obama’s inaugural address and the watershed moment in history it represents.  The speech was rich in historical, literary, and biblical references, lending meaning, resonance and emotional weight to his words.  Yet these allusions were unfamiliar to many of those watching. 

Reading War II: Content Knowledge vs. Reading Strategies
If phonics vs. whole language was Round One of the reading wars, the new battle is shaping up to be reading strategies vs. content knowledge, says Dan Willingham. “Most of us think about reading in a way that is fundamentally incorrect. We think of it as transferable, meaning that once you acquire the ability to read, you can read anything,” says Willingham on Britannica Blog. ”But in order to understand what you’re reading, you need to know something about the subject matter.”

Best of the Blogs

Analysis of Education Provisions in the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan” at Swift and Change Able
The good news is that the House is set to approve an unprecedented sum of money for federal education programs. If the basic numbers in the deal hold, this will be the largest increase in federal education funds in history. As giddy as some of us may be about the numbers, however, there are some policy issues that should be examined closely as this deal moves forward.

Let’s Put an End to Tappa Tappa Tappa at D-Ed Reckoning 
“Much of what goes on in elementary education is just a bunch of tappa tappa tappa,” writes Ken DeRosa, a reference to an inscrutable dance method taught in an episode of The Simpsons. ”Try reading this non-decodable children’s book. Can’t do it, then try looking at the pictures or the first letter of each word for cues. Still can’t do it, then its time to call in the reading specialist.”

Avoiding The Education Reform Trap at Taking Note (The Century Foundation)
“The marketplace model offers an easy and familiar road map for change,” writes Anthony Shorris, who notes that until there is a comparably simple alternative reform model, the worshipers of the invisible hand will be the loudest and easiest to hear. “It is incumbent on educators across the nation to develop research-based instructional strategies that can credibly offer to address these gaps in what we give our kids.”

Teaching and Curriculum

In Texas, a Line in the Curriculum Revives Evolution Debate
New York Times
The latest round in a long-running battle over how evolution should be taught in Texas schools began in earnest Wednesday as the State Board of Education heard impassioned testimony from scientists and social conservatives on revising the science curriculum.

Stemming the Tide: Let’s pay science and math teachers more.
City Journal
The troubles in STEM education mirror the broader problems of American K–12 education, says the Manhattan Institute’s Marcus Winters. The primary issue concerns teacher quality. STEM subjects require instructors not only to be knowledgeable but also to be able to convey difficult technical information in a graspable way.  “Attracting such people to STEM teaching requires a compensation system that recognizes their talents,” writes Winters. 
 
Sorting Children Into ‘Cannots’ and ‘Cans’ Is Just Racism in Disguise
Washington Post
These days, those of us interested in schools — parents, students, educators, researchers, journalists — are not sure if we believe in teaching or sorting, writes Jay Mathews.  “Is it best to strain ourselves and our children trying to raise everyone to a higher academic level, or does it make more sense to prepare each child for a life in which he or she will be comfortable?”

Cursive, Foiled Again
Boston Globe
Is the handwriting on the wall for cursive writing?  If you predate the computer age, you might remember a school subject called penmanship, which trained your cursive handwriting. It’s still taught, to be sure, but it’s no longer emphasized.

Education Policy

Stimulus gives schools $142B — with strings
USA Today
Public schools stand to be the biggest winners in Congress’ $825 billion economic stimulus plan unveiled last week. Schools are scheduled to receive nearly $142 billion over the next two years.  But tucked into the text of the proposal’s 328 pages are a few surprises.

For Catholic Schools, Crisis and Catharsis
New York Times
Enrollment in the nation’s Catholic schools has steadily dropped by more than half from its peak of five million 40 years ago. But recently, a sense of urgency seems to be gripping many Catholics who suddenly see in the shrinking enrollment a once unimaginable prospect: a country without Catholic schools.

Homeschooling and Parenting

Outrage Over U.K. Homeschool Review
Daily Mail (U.K.)
Parents who educate their children at home could be using it to cover up abuse, neglect and forced marriage, the U.K.’s Children’s Minister claimed, as she ordered a review of how the estimated 55,000 children who are taught at home or have dropped out from school are treated. Her controversial comments immediately provoked fury from home schooling groups who branded them ‘offensive’.

Homeschoolers May Be Ahead of the Technological Curve
EdNews.org
According to a recent poll, 64% of homeschoolers use technology every day in their homeschool.  That same percentage also rated their expertise with technology as “intermediate.”  “One reason that homeschoolers may be so technologically adept,” observes EdNews.org, ”is that many times, home-taught students have individual access to computers, cell phones and  MP3 players for the entire school day.”

Wordplay’s the name of game on new ‘Electric Company’
Boston Globe
Appealing to a super-sophisticated generation of kids is likely to be the biggest challenge for Sesame Workshop, which is producing a new version of the familiar 70s educational program ”The Electric Company” for PBS.  While the message remains the same – language is power – the sounds, visuals, and reference points have been updated for today’s youth, who have already been shaped by pop culture at the tender ages of 7, 8, and 9, the show’s target demographic.

Et Alia

At First, Funny Videos. Now, a Reference Tool
New York Times
The explosion of all types of video content on YouTube and other sites is quickly transforming online video from a medium strictly for entertainment and news into one that is also a reference tool. As a result, video search, on YouTube and across other sites, is rapidly morphing into a new entry point into the Web, one that could rival mainstream search for many types of queries.

Required Reading

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 18, 2009 in Education News 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

Teaching Content IS Teaching Reading
A remarkable YouTube video by cognitive scientist Dan Willingham demonstrates convincingly why background knowledge is essential to reading comprehension, and why a broad, content-rich education is the best way to ensure kids can understand what they read. 

We Need to Be A ‘Water Cooler Nation’ Again
America desperately needs to become a “water cooler nation” again, with a common set of cultural references, says historian Richard Norton Smith.  “It shouldn’t be Britney Spears or the latest celebrity divorce,” he notes in an interview on the Public School Insights blog, but rather ”Gettysburg and Rosa Parks–and an endless source of possibilities.”

Best of the Blogs

Early Education in the Stimulus at Early Ed Watch Blog
The House Appropriations Committee released an outline of spending priorities for an economic stimulus package. The plan would provide $550 billion in new spending to stimulate the economy, including over $52 billion in funding for PreK-12 education programs, including early education. Sara Mead provides an analysis

A Good Word or Two About Schools at Bridging Differences
“In my research, I have occasionally come across progressivist thinkers who dream of a day when work, play, and learning all wondrously merge, and “education” takes place in the fields and the activities of daily life,” writes Diane Ravitch. ”I have never succumbed to the lure of abolishing institutions, especially the institutions of schooling that we have.”

Risen Rising at DFER Blog
Fix schools or fix communities?  “From an outsider’s perspective, one of the most frustrating aspects of the education policy debate is that both sides are right,” notes The Atlantic Monthly’s Clay Risen.  “It seems bafflingly obvious that change must come both inside and outside the classroom.”

Teaching and Curriculum

Experts Eschew Narrow Reading of Early-Literacy Study
Education Week
Teaching the alphabet and letter sounds in preschool strengthens children’s chances of success in learning to read later on, according to the report of the National Early Literacy Panel.  But Kathleen Kennedy Manzo reports some experts worry that skills-driven instruction could become a dominant focus for 3- and 4-year-olds, much as it has for the early-elementary grades.

A Wake-Up Call for Science Education
Boston Globe
The latest alarm bell just rang and it’s official. The United States is once again missing from the list of top-10 science and math education countries. Long-term economic growth depends on a fully competent talent pool, including workers who can excel in a technology-based economy, writes Alan I. Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But young people in many less-developed countries now outperform their American counterparts in both science and math.

Teachers at 2 Charter Schools Plan to Join Union, Despite Notion of Incompatibility
New York Times
The United Federation of Teachers announced it had organized teachers at two respected New York City charter schools, making inroads in a movement that has long sold itself as an alternative that is not hamstrung by union contracts and work rules.

Report: Divide Teaching Profession Into Levels
Associated Press
Alabama is considering a system that allows teachers to advance in their careers without having to leave the classroom for an administrative post. The Governor’s Commission on Quality Teaching recommends that the teaching profession be divided into apprentice teacher, classroom teacher, professional teacher, master teacher and learning designer.

Unexpected Twist: Fiction Reading Is Up
Washington Post
For the first time since the National Endowment for the Arts began surveying American reading habits in 1982 the percentage of American adults who report reading “novels, short stories, poems or plays” has risen instead of declining: from 46.7 percent in 2002 to 50.2 percent in 2008.

Education Policy

Leaving My Lapel Pin Behind
National Review Online
Is No Child Left Behind’s birthday worth celebrating? Saying you “support” NCLB is shorthand for affirming a set of ideas, values, and hopes for the country as much as an expression about a particular statute, writes Mike Petrilli. ”Speaking personally, I’ve gradually and reluctantly come to the conclusion that NCLB as enacted is fundamentally flawed and probably beyond repair.”

Duncan hearing spotlights school reform
Associated Press
Barack Obama’s choice for education secretary, Arne Duncan, said at his confirmation hearing that the No Child Left Behind law should stop punishing schools where only a handful of kids are struggling.

Bush leaves gift of education reform behind
Politico
School accountability driven by disaggregated data is George W. Bush’s education legacy. “The notion that Obama would gut a law exposing the maleducation of millions of black children is a fantasy,” writes Richard Whitmire. ”The last laugh belongs to Bush, because his Texas-style accountability will survive.”

Homeschooling and Parenting

Educators Resist Even Good Ideas From Outsiders
Washington Post
“It is time to disclose a great truth about even the best educators I know,” writes Jay Mathews. “As much as they deny it, they really don’t like outsiders messing with the way they do their jobs.”  Too often, says Mathews smart educators “write off parents as interfering idiots, even if they actually have a good idea and data to prove it.”

Too Much Homework? Schools Look at the Load
Miami Herald
Parents complained that forcing a student to toil for hours a night takes away meaningful family time and opportunities for other educational and healthy activities.  But school districts say homework is important because it helps kids learn independence and responsibility, serves as a link between school and home and reinforces skills that students have learned in class.

Does handwriting really matter anymore?
Christian Science Monitor
In the great scheme of things, I refuse to get upset over my son’s lousy handwriting, writes Nell Musolf “Handwriting, like so many other things that were once deemed vital – such as ballroom dancing and learning Latin – doesn’t seem all that important anymore.” 

Et Alia

U.S. school segregation on the rise
Reuters
Blacks and Hispanics are more separate from white students than at any time since the civil rights movement and many of the schools they attend are struggling, according to a report from the Civil Rights Project at the University of California.

Required Reading

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 11, 2009 in Education News, Educational Policy, Homeschooling, Literacy, No category, Research and Reports and Weekly Roundup. 4 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

The Unbearable Whiteness of Newbery?
The last time a Newbery Medal winner featured a black protagonist was Christopher Paul Curtis’ depression-era historical novel Bud, Not Buddy in 2000.  The last Hispanic protagonist?  Maia Wojciechowska’s Shadow of a Bull in 1965.  A new study shows precious few nonwhite protagonists—or even secondary characters in Newbery winners

Why Nature (and Recess) Might Help Kids Learn
New research finds that interaction with nature is “restorative” — it provides a rest from the kind of directed that many people believe is important to schooling.  Dan Willingham notes this finding fits well with other data showing that recess provides a cognitive boost for students. ”

Class Discussion For Sale
You attended school in the bad old traditional days. Don’t deny it. Back then, the teacher lectured while you took notes, read dead authors, and regurgitated dry facts. There was no class discussion. Today, you would not have to suffer, writes teacher Diana Senechal Schools across the country have purchased and mandated an exciting new type of classroom conversation called Accountable Talk®.

Reclaiming the Value of Knowledge in Public Life
It’s time to reclaim the value of knowledge in our political and civic life, argues UCLA professor Mike Rose.  Not merely academic knowledge, but broad, practical know-how that enables people to solve problems.

Best of the Blogs

The conceit of “21st Century Skills” at Flypaper
21st Century Skills is “the latest incarnation of the ‘all kids need to learn is how to learn’ argument,” writes Mike Petrilli.  Call it the “life adjustment” movement, call it “outcomes-based education,” call it “21st Century Skills” or call it a “doomed pedagogical fad.” Or simply call it bunk, because that’s what it is.

The Boston Pilot/Charter School Study: Some Good News, and Some Cautions at Eduwonkette
“A study on the efficacy of charter and pilot schools is a well-done, careful study that provides us with a range of estimates of charter and pilot school performance. There is certainly enough positive evidence here to support the creation of more charter schools in Boston,” notes Eduwonkette, ”but I want to offer two cautions.”

Blaming Special Ed at Jay P. Greene’s Blog
“It’s all too common but also completely mistaken to blame special education for the shortcomings of the public k-12 system,” Jay Greene writes.  ”Most attempts to blame special ed don’t even bother presenting data or make the most crude use of data to support their claims.”

Curriculum and Teaching

Spelling Is an Integral Part of Learning the Language, Not a Matter of Memorization
American Educator
A common perception is that visual memory–taking a mental picture of the word–is the basis of spelling  skill. Teachers often teach spelling by encouraging whole-word memorization. More recent studies, however, do not support the notion that visual memory is the key to good spelling.

The Rush for ’21st-Century Skills’
Washington Post 
The phrase has inspired a flood of programs, notes Jay Mathews, including Lego engineering clubs for elementary schools, and the National Geographic’s science adventure Jason Project for middle schools.  But many teachers say it is just good teaching with a jazzy name.

Maryland schools rank 1st in nation in analysis by ‘Education Week’
Baltimore Sun
Maryland’s schools rank first in the nation in an analysis of factors such as high school graduation rates, student achievement, academic standards and accountability by Education Week.

Education Policy

Schwarzenegger proposes 5 fewer school days
Los Angeles Times
A proposal by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to shorten the school year by five days is creating panic among educators across California, who say they barely have enough time to fit the state’s academic standards into the existing 180-day calendar.

Rhee Plans Shake-Up of Teaching Staff, Training
Washington Post
At the heart of Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee’s vision for transforming D.C. schools is a dramatic overhaul of its 4,000-member teacher corps that would remove a “significant share” of instructors and launch an ambitious plan to foster professional growth for those who remain.

Are we testing kids too much?
Mlive.com (Michigan(
An increased reliance on assessment tests is a trend that some find unsettling but others see as one of the most positive recent developments in education. Advocates say assessment tests help school districts measure the quality of their curricula and instruction.  Still, for some, subjecting students to so many tests sums up what’s wrong with American education.

Homeschooling and Parenting

Homeschooling Grows
USA Today
The number of home-schooled kids hit 1.5 million in 2007, up 74% from when the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics started keeping track in 1999, and up 36% since 2003. The percentage of the school-age population that was home-schooled increased from 2.2% in 2003 to 2.9% in 2007.

On the table
Boston Globe
Even as families feel the economic pinch, many eligible students don’t take advantage of free or low-cost breakfasts served at schools. Why?

Rhodes Scholar says parents rewarded achievements in the classroom over football field
Diverse Issues in Higher Education
FSU junior safety Myron Rolle has played his final college football game. But he’s not leaving to join the National Football League; Rolle is one of 32 U.S. students who have been awarded an all-expense paid scholarship for up to three years of study at Oxford University in England.

Politically correct parents ditch ‘offensive’ traditional fairy tales
Daily Mail (U.K.)
Two-thirds of British parents believe traditional fairytales have “stronger morality messages” than modern equivalents.  But some are ditching Cinderella and Rapunzel in favor of The Gruffalo or The Very Hungry Caterpillar, believing the older stories are politically incorrect or “too dark” to read to children.

Et Alia

Playing outside can prevent children becoming short-sighted
Daily Mail (U.K.)
Playing outdoors dramatically cuts a child’s risk of becoming short-sighted. Spending two or three hours outside each day halves the chance of developing the condition.  The finding by researchers in Australia challenges the belief that short-sightedness is caused by computer use, TV watching or reading in dim light.