The national (and California) Charter Schools Conference 2006 opens today in Sacramento. I’ll be at the conference tomorrow. If you’re going to be there, stop by table 11 at 1:45 pm on Wednesday for my “table talk” on . . . Well, as ever, I’m promoting my book, Our School. If you want to get together some other time, e-mail me today (first name-at-firstandlastname.com). I’ll be available for schmoozing purposes.
Monthly Archive for February, 2006
Bernard Chapin’s Escape from Gangsta Island, is for sale on iUniverse. I provided the blurb:
Escape from Gangsta Island is a comic horror story of a troubled school for troubled teen-agers led by a crazy principal who believed that fun and games lead to… Well, even the reality-challenged principal didn’t claim students were being educated. Character! That was it. But students were not building character either.
Chapin was the school psychologist.
The Carnival of Homeschooling is inspired by the muses. I learned something just in the second sentence.
Leaders of New Orleans’ brand-new charter schools are struggling with a host of management issues — with the help of Rex, a leading Mardi Gras “krewe.” As part of its post-Katrina service initiative, Rex established Project Purple “to match its members’ business skills with fledgling educators who need them at the 11 charter schools on Orleans Parish’s east bank,” reports the Times-Picayune. Some 150 members of the krewe have volunteered for Project Purple.
Universal preschool would cost Californians $23 billion over the next 10 years, if Rob Reiner’s Proposition 82 passes. But it won’t close the learning gap for poor kids, warns Bruce Fuller, a Berkeley education and public policy professor. Currently, 64 percent of four-year-olds go to preschool; Reiner’s plan would boost that only to 70 percent. Instead of directing public money at needy families, most of the dollars would go to provide free preschool to middle-class and wealthy parents. Any gains by poor children are likely to be lost when they enter substandard schools.
We are learning empirically that gains experienced by poor children who attend preschool fade by third grade unless youngsters enter quality elementary schools, according to new studies by UC-Santa Barbara and University of Wisconsin economists.
Fuller also questions the requirement that all preschool teachers earn a bachelor’s degree. This would disqualify two-thirds of current preschool teachers.
. . . two decades of research show that children benefit when their teachers have a two-year degree and focused training in child development. After that, more years in college are spent on general education requirements, exerting no additional effects. Only the cost rises dramatically.
When class sizes were cut, raising demand for elementary teachers, affluent suburban districts hired qualified teachers, leaving the less qualified to fill slots in city schools. Under Proposition 82, that will be repeated for preschool teachers, Fuller predicts. Poor kids will lose.
Update: Reiner has stepped down from running the state’s First 5 commission, which has spent $23 million in tax funds in recent months to promote preschool.
Reiner and First 5 staff have said there was nothing improper about the media campaign, which included three television ads on preschool.But after a story in the Los Angeles Times last week that also questioned the propriety of First 5 contracts awarded to people and firms with ties to Reiner, several politicians called for audits of the commission, which was created by the Proposition 10 tobacco tax initiative for early childhood programs that Reiner also spearheaded.
Six percent of the commission’s $550 million in cigarette taxes is spent on public education. In the months before the universal preschool initiative qualified for the ballot, the entire media budget was spent on ads declaring that preschool is essential for children to be successful.
Washington state, about to implement a graduation exam, can learn from Massachusetts, says the Seattle Times. Pass rates in the Bay State soared when passing the test, known as MCAS, became a graduation requirement. Students were motivated.
Brockton (High School) administrators embraced the exam from the start. They worked with teachers to systematically dissect MCAS results. When they discovered that students faltered on questions about poetry, they taught more difficult poetry. When they saw that many students struggled with the hardest, four-point math questions, they taught them how to tackle those.. . . Students who fail the MCAS get support during school and after. In math, for example, students must enroll in a math review class and an MCAS math class, losing out on an elective in the process.
. . . Principal Susan Szachowicz is a strong supporter.
“It’s the only reform I’ve seen in 30 years that has made a difference in academic achievement,” she said.
Even in Cambridge, which resisted MCAS, school officials concede the test has put the focus on achievement.
Dolphins aren’t so smart on land, reports The Onion. Removed from their holding tanks by University of Florida researchers and placed in a dry lab, a group of 25 bottlenose dolphins failed 11 cognitive and reasoning tests.
“The dolphins were incapable of recognizing and repeating simple gestures,” said study co-author Dr. Scott Lindell. “Their non-verbal communications were limited to a rapid constriction and expansion of the blowhole, various incomprehensible fin motions, and heavy tremors while they lay prone on the lab table.”. . . The dolphins were unable to display novel behaviors, use a map to pinpoint their location on campus (spatial reasoning), or complete a simple obstacle course and wall climb.
The Onion is a humor publication.
Darren of Right on the Left Coast told a student that selling burritos at lunch will not help feed the Darfur refugees, much less protect them from rape and murder.
The short conversation left the realm of the rational and entered the twilight zone when she asked me if I’d have done anything to stop the Holocaust. Can you see where this is going? I told her that a bake sale at a high school would have done nothing to stop the Holocaust. You know what did stop the Holocaust? Armed men. Millions of armed men. American, British, Commonwealth, Soviet soldiers–they stopped the Holocaust. Men with firearms cause a lot of problems in the world, but men with firearms also solve a lot of problems in the world. Want to help the people of Darfur? Give them weapons.
The girl’s parents complained the teacher was undermining her project.
In the comments, right-wing prof writes that three of his students “objected to the term ‘normal distribution’ in stats class, and insisted that it was a value judgment.”
From Children of the Future, which publishes writing posted on elementary school web sites, comes Francisco’s letter to Cpl. Leon Howard.
A school board member in Loudoun County, Virginia wants to limit the showing of commercial movies in class after reports that “Lion King” was shown in a science class to illustrate the “circle of life” and “Mulan” was used in an AP world history class.
Perhaps the district should limit the showing of Disney cartoons to high school students — with a special exemption for “Donald Duck in Mathemagic Land.”
Via Number 2 Pencil.
Update: Who knew that Tom and Jerry cartoons are a Jewish plot? A cultural advisor to Iran’s Education Ministry explains:
The mouse is very clever and smart. Everything he does is so cute. He kicks the poor cat’s ass. Yet this cruelty does not make you despise the mouse. He looks so nice, and he is so clever… This is exactly why some say it was meant to erase this image of mice from the minds of European children, and to show that the mouse is not dirty and has these traits.
Dirty mice = Jews, in case you were wondering.
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