Monthly Archive for January, 2006

PalmTree Pundit hosts the Carnival of Homeschooling, which features several posts on teaching boys.

DePaul is investigating the student organizer of an affirmative action protest for “discriminatory harassment”, reports FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education). Conservative students had offered cake and cookies for $1 for white and Asian males, 75 cents for white and Asian females, down to 25 cents for black, Hispanic and Native American females. A heated discussion ensued, until the administration shut down the protest.

The DePaulia reports on the reaction by a black student leader who’s worthy of his first name.

Voltaire Davis, a junior sociology student and president of the Black Student Union, said, “Silencing [DePaul Conservative Alliance] can be negative. When you silence someone you close off resolution.” Davis recently invited (DCA leader Michael) O’Shea to take part in his weekly radio show on WRDP, and an interview with the paper run by members of the Black Student Union, Black Voices.

On the other hand, a women’s studies students seems oblivious to the idea that a university should tolerate dissent and encourage discussion of a range of ideas.

Megan Wiskiewicz, a junior history student, is currently working on an e-mail along with other members in her class, Women’s and Gender’s Studies 200: Women in Transitional Context, that will call for a few changes within the DCA organization. “We are expressing concern and seriously requesting that the organization put out a public written apology, be placed on probation and agree to take part in a forum on affirmative action,” said Wiskiewicz.

FIRE intervened last year when DePaul dismissed a professor for arguing with pro-Palestinian students and again when it censored “students’ peaceful protest of controversial professor Ward Churchill.”

California students will learn a little bit about India’s history. But whose version? The Christian Science Monitor reports:

In the halls of Sacramento, a special commission is rewriting Indian history: debating whether Aryan invaders conquered the subcontinent, whether Brahman priests had more rights than untouchables, and even whether ancient Indians ate beef.

In India, Hindu nationalists are trying to rewrite the accepted version of history. The revisionists now are lobbying in the U.S.

In another edit, the HEF (Hindu Education Foundation) objected to a sentence that said that Aryan rulers had “created a caste system” in India that kept groups separated according to their jobs. The HEF asked this to be changed to the following: “During Vedic times, people were divided into different social groups (varnas) based on their capacity to undertake a particular profession.”

Historians say the revisions turn mediocre textbooks into textbooks that are just plain wrong.

A London school has banned students from raising their hands in class, reports The Telegraph.

“No hands up” notices have been posted in every room at the Jo Richardson comprehensive in Dagenham, east London, as a reminder that the teachers will decide who should answer.

The head, Andrew Buck, says it is always the same children who wave their arms in the air, while the rest of the class sits back. When teachers try to involve less adventurous pupils by choosing them instead, that leads to feelings of victimisation.

By hand wavers? By non-wavers?

Mr Buck believes that it can also cause panic in children who are picked but do not know the answer while others around them are straining to give it. To spare the embarrassment of those who do not know the answer, the school uses a “phone a friend” system, allowing one child to nominate another to take the question instead.

Doesn’t that lead to feelings of victimization?

Mr Buck says the ban on putting hands up has improved attention levels because pupils never know when they will be called on.

But it doesn’t matter because they can “phone a friend.” Or, more likely, phone an enemy.

In my day, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, students never knew who’d be called on because teachers felt free to ignore waving hands and pick the kids who were trying to hide out. You answered as best you could or you said, “I don’t know.” It was a simple system, but it worked fairly well.

In other news, the Times reports on a study concluding that English children are less intelligent at age 11 than they were 30 years ago.

In the easiest question, children are asked to watch as water is poured up to the brim of a tall, thin container. From there the water is tipped into a small fat glass. The tall vessel is refilled. Do both beakers now hold the same amount of water?

Many students get this wrong.

Another question involves two blocks of a similar size — one of brass, the other of plasticine. Which would displace the most water when dropped into a beaker? children are asked.

Tested in 2004, fewer than a fifth of 11-year-olds came up with the answer.

Ah, but they had no chance to “phone a friend.”

In Reporters go back to school in the New York Post, Andrew Rotherham reviews my book, Our School, about a charter high school educating left-behind students and The Emergency Teacher by Christina Asquith, who left the Philadelphia Inquirer to spend a year teaching in a chaotic urban school.

Rotherham, better known to blog readers as Eduwonk, is co-director of Education Sector and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. He says very nice things about Our School, calling it “a terrific study in the actualization of an idea — that urban youngsters deserve the kind of schools suburban kids take for granted.”

Jacobs shows the demanding work and relentless focus that are key to the success of high-poverty schools. Throughout the school’s staff and its students, the ethic of ganas, roughly translated as desire, permeates. Ganas is a mutually reinforcing ethic that everyone at the school will work hard.

“Our School” at once illustrates the possibilities and the challenges of urban education. But it’s the former that makes it an exciting and important book. At its core, Downtown College Prep is an idea and an ideal that is realized.

Social entrepreneurs offer more hope than people who try to work within a failed system, Rotherham believes.

Asquith’s book tells an appalling truth about “her disastrous school — where beaten down veterans, fraudulent and nonexistent bilingual and special-education programs and hard-edged neighborhoods conspire to doom the lives of our most vulnerable youngsters,” he writes.

Through vivid and personal anecdotes, she captures the exhausting intensity of teaching in a chaotic environment where, for students, major breakthroughs and horrendous episodes often occur within hours of one another. She also makes clear an all-too-often overlooked aspect of urban school reform: While the system is built to serve the adults and not the children, there are many adults trapped inside it who also desperately want change, too.

In a chaotic school, individual teachers who are dedicated and intelligent can make very little difference. Asquith quit teaching after one exhausting year.

Charter schools are more likely to create the conditions that enable teachers to be effective: A small school focused around an educational mission, with buy-in from teachers, parents and students who’ve chosen the school.