Early college draws at-risk students

Published on February 9, 2010 in College and Education. 3 Comments Tags: , , . By Joanne

“Early-college high schools” are helping high-risk students combine high school with community college, reports the New York Times. Students can earn a high school diploma and up to two years of college credit in five years.

“Last year, half our early-college high schools had zero dropouts, and that’s just unprecedented for North Carolina, where only 62 percent of our high school students graduate after four years,” said Tony Habit, president of the North Carolina New Schools Project, the nonprofit group spearheading the state’s high school reform.

In addition, North Carolina’s early-college high school students are getting slightly better grades in their college courses than their older classmates.

The Gates Foundation is funding more than 200 early-college programs.

“As a nation, we just can’t afford to have students spending four years or more getting through high school, when we all know senior year is a waste,” said Hilary Pennington of the Gates Foundation, “then having this swirl between high school and college, when a lot more students get lost, then a two-year degree that takes three or four years, if the student ever completes it at all.”

According to Gates’ research, “early-college schools that had been open for more than four years had a high school graduation rate of 92 percent — and 4 out of 10 graduates had earned at least a year of college credit.”

“Middle college” programs that let high school students take all their courses at community colleges are old hat. There’s no evidence participants are more likely to stay in school, concludes the What Works Clearinghouse. The early-college model is more structured, with students spending more time in a high school environment preparing to meet college demands.

Punishing the victim

Published on February 9, 2010 in Violence. 5 Comments Tags: , . By Joanne

When three girls beat up another girl in a New York City school, the victim is transferred, complains Ms. Rubin. The bullies “get to stay and continue terrorizing weaker kids.”

. . . the girl who got jumped has been in our school since kindergarten and has never been a problem. The three bullies have all transferred to our school in the past couple years, and have all been suspended multiple times for bullying and fighting.

New York City is into small schools: Why not create specialty schools where bullies can pick on each other?

AP failure rate rises

Published on February 8, 2010 in Education and Testing. 16 Comments Tags: . By Joanne

More students are taking Advanced Placement tests — and the failure rate is climbing, reports USA Today.

The findings about the failure rates raise questions about whether schools are pushing millions of students into AP courses without adequate preparation — and whether a race for higher standards means schools are not training enough teachers to deliver the high-level material.

According to USA Today, 41.5 percent of AP test takers earned a failing score of 1 or 2, up from 36.5 percent in 1999. In the South, nearly half failed.

Even with the higher failure rate, the higher number of test takers means that more students are passing.

The WashPost’s Jay Mathews, a big AP booster, argues that students benefit from the challenge of AP courses, even if they don’t do well enough on the exam to earn college credit.

Grades of 1 or 2 are said to be failing, as the USA Today stories note, but research shows a grade of 2 may have unexpected benefits. A study of a very large sample of students in Texas shows that even students with relatively low achievement levels on other standardized tests did better in college if they had a 2 on an AP exam than similar students did who did not take AP.

Are too many students taking AP courses without the skills to pass? I worry that AP classes will be simplified for weaker students, cheating students who are prepared to do the work. If teachers can hold the line, then I don’t worry that more students are trying something that’s a bit too hard and falling short.

Are charter schools a civil rights failure?

Published on February 8, 2010 in Education. 7 Comments Tags: , , , . By Joanne

Are charter schools a civil rights failure? No way, say National Journal’s Education Experts in response to the UCLA Civil Rights Project report, which complained that charters are more likely to be nearly all black than district-run public schools. The report also said Western charters are disproportionately white.

“Equity” is not the same as “integration,” says Ross Wiener, executive director of the Education and Society Program at the Aspen Institute.

The report’s blithe embrace of integration as the paramount concern is oblivious to serious inequities often found in integrated schools. And it’s dismissive of the priorities of black parents – 80% of whom told Public Agenda that raising academic achievement is their top priority for schools, compared with 8% of whom list integration and 11% who want to prioritize both.

You can’t win for trying, says Education Sector’s Kevin Carey.

“This report is almost too ridiculous to comment on,” says Tom Vander Ark, former Gates Foundation education director and now an education consultant.

From Democrats for Education Reform: “The UCLA Civil Rights Project seemingly wants to block minority parents from choosing to enroll their children in better schools simply because it feels those schools aren’t white enough. What’s up with that?”

Britain: Poor kids take ’soft subjects’

Published on February 8, 2010 in Education. 8 Comments Tags: , . By Joanne

Worthless qualifications in “soft subjects” such as media studies are fooling low-income British students into thinking they’re prepared for higher education and good careers, a Harrow headmaster tells The Guardian.

State schools risk producing students like “those girls in the first round of the X Factor” who tell the judges they want to be the next Britney Spears but cannot sing a note, Barnaby Lenon said.

Bright children from poor backgrounds are being short-changed by those who lead them to believe that “high grades in soft subjects” and going to “any old university to read any subject” were the route to prosperity, he told a conference of leading private and state school headteachers.

Michael Gove, the shadow (Tory) education secretary, said state schools encourage students to take media studies because it inflates the pass rate, making the school look better.

“More children who were eligible for free school meals sat GCSEs in media ­studies than in physics, chemistry and biology combined,” Gove said.

“The Tories are planning a return to more academically driven schooling, including setting by ability and traditional subject-based classes, if elected this year,” reports The Guardian.

Colts jersey wearer suspended in Louisiana

Published on February 7, 2010 in Culture. 9 Comments Tags: , . By Joanne

A Louisiana boy was sent home from Maurepas High School on Friday for wearing a Colts football jersey, reports The Advocate in Baton Rouge. Other students wore Saints jerseys for Black-and-Gold Day, celebrating the New Orleans Saints playing in Super Bowl XLIV.

In response, Marjorie Esman, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, sent a letter to (Principal Steven) Vampran on Friday afternoon warning that his actions violated Frost’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech.

“Schools may not discriminate based on the content of messages,” she wrote. If it’s OK to wear a Saints jersey to school, it’s OK to wear a Colts jersey.

Searching for equity in all the wrong places

Published on February 7, 2010 in Education. 3 Comments Tags: , , . By Joanne

In response to the story about Berkeley High cutting extra science labs in the name of equity, Linda Seebach points out that the high school houses six component schools that let students “make different academic choices.”

Overall, more than 3,300 students are enrolled, ranging from the children of Berkeley faculty to low-income, minority students.

Enrollment this school year is 14 percent Latino, 26 percent African-American, 34 percent white, 16 percent in a category the district calls multi-ethnic, and approximately 8 percent in a variety of Asian groups.

A majority of students — and most whites — enroll in the academic program; the international school also is popular with whites. By contrast, “the Community Partnerships Academy, has 51 percent African-Americans and only 7 percent whites. Another, the School for Social Justice and Ecology, is 44 percent African-American and 20 percent white.”

These choices play out in the science classes as well. The AP science classes are only 10 percent African-American and 53 percent white, while the science classes without additional lab time almost exactly reverse the proportions, with 51 percent African-American and 9 percent white.

The small schools are separate and unequal in academic preparation. I wonder if the Social Justice and Community students understand that.

Expanding choice

Published on February 7, 2010 in Education. 5 Comments Tags: , . By Joanne

Expanding Choice in Elementary and Secondary Education, a Brookings Institution report, concludes that we can’t rely on charters and vouchers to create sufficient parental choice. It’s got to happen within school districts. The report calls for:

a) a system that affords parents as much choice as possible within the universe of taxpayer supported students and schools, b) portals by which parents can readily access rich information on the performance of schools that is framed to be useful in exercising choice, and c) a funding system that supports the growth of parentally preferred schools and school systems, including virtual education programs.

Popular schools should receive more funding to meet enrollment demand, the report recommends, while schools that draw few students should be restructured or closed.

Playing to learn what?

Published on February 6, 2010 in Education. 8 Comments Tags: , , , . By Joanne

In Old Whine, New Bottle, Robert Pondiscio rips a New York Times op-ed, Playing to Learn by Susan Engel, a lecturer in psychology and director of the teaching program at Williams College.  Engel imagines a third-grade classroom where children

“…spend two hours each day hearing stories read aloud, reading aloud themselves, telling stories to one another and reading on their own. After all, the first step to literacy is simply being immersed, through conversation and storytelling, in a reading environment; the second is to read a lot and often.”

Pondiscio wonders why “phonics and decoding is neither the first or even the second ’step to literacy’.”  And what about curriculum and content?

Engel wants children to spend “an hour a day writing things that have actual meaning to them — stories, newspaper articles, captions for cartoons, letters to one another.”

That’s three hours on reading and writing. But only “a short period” would be spent practicing computation.

Once children are proficient in those basics they would be free to turn to other activities that are equally essential for math and science: devising original experiments, observing the natural world and counting things, whether they be words, events or people.

Students wouldn’t learn “isolated mathematical formulas” or memorize “sheets of science facts that are unlikely to matter much in the long run.” (Do third graders learn math formulas — isolated or not — or memorize sheets of science facts?)

Scientists know that children learn best by putting experiences together in new ways. They construct knowledge; they don’t swallow it.

Teachers would have conversations with small groups of children so they could have “a chance to support their views with evidence, change their minds and use questions as a way to learn more.”

And there would be lots of time for play and collaboration.

Pondiscio writes:

In short, Professor Engel is offering not one new idea here, but rather a steaming gumbo of fads, failed ed school homilies and constructivist ideology.

It does seem like the kiddies are going to teach themselves reading, writing, math and science with the teacher needed only to engage in conversations.  They’re going to construct knowledge from the sort of experiences available to third graders. It sounds . . . confusing. I don’t think I could or would have come up with meaningful science experiments in third grade or devised instructional math games. I certainly didn’t spend my play time counting things, though I was one of the few third graders who wrote newspaper articles in my free time for The Wednesday Report, which I founded with my best friend, Janice. (Janice went on to become a botanist and I don’t remember her doing freelance science experiments either.)

Contest time

Published on February 6, 2010 in Education. 0 Comments Tags: , , . By Joanne

The Profile in Courage essay contest, sponsored by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum, invites high school students to write an original essay about an elected official who has demonstrated political courage. Awards total $13,500 for winning essayists; the teacher who nominates the first-place winner will receive a $500 grant.

In other contest news, students can sign up now to compete in World Math Day on March 3.