Despite attending an LA high school known as a “dropout factory,” Luz Elena Gutierrez graduated as valedictorian and is going on to Berkeley.
From her older sister, Luz Elena learned not to wait — to push her way into the toughest classes, to demand the most engaging teachers, to compete for every academic honor. And not to leave her classmates behind.
. . . She chose her friends as carefully as she picked her courses: like-minded girls who met under the big tree on the quad for lunch and to discuss calculus, college applications and leads on financial aid.
It is no coincidence, she says, that all 10 of Fremont’s top seniors are girls. “At a school like this, guys get pressured to do a lot of things … gangs, drugs. Boys make fun of you if you do your work. Girls don’t have that kind of pressure.”
Both parents, immigrants from Mexico, work split shifts at a hospital laundry so one parent always is home. Neither speaks English. But they pushed their children to study. Luz’s older brother graduated from Cal State-Long Beach, her older sister, also a valedictorian, from UCLA.
To look as though they’re meeting No Child Left Behind goals, states are lowering standards, concludes a study of 12 states by Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE). Instead of educating more students to proficiency, states define proficiency down.
In California, for example, state officials in 2005 estimated 50 percent of fourth-graders were proficient or better in math on the California Standards Tests, compared with 29 percent on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP.
California officials say NAEP isn’t aligned to California’s standards.
But U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, who helped champion the bipartisan No Child Left Behind legislation, considers the PACE study comparison valid and likened the discrepancies to law school graduates boasting they passed all their tests even though they failed the state bar examination.
. . . “There are a lot of people who can’t break the habit of gaming the system,” he said of states in general. “They want to appear they are doing right by the children, and the fact is, they’re not. NCLB shines the light, and that’s why there’s so much resistance. It shines the light on a lot of practices where districts and states were conning the parents about the quality of education the children were getting.”
Meanwhile Jonathan Kozol is trying to mobilize a 1960s-style movement to trash No Child Left Behind, reports Education Gadfly. I guess they’re defending the right to be conned about how poorly low-income and minority students are doing in school. Checker Finn writes:
(Kozol is) joining–even seeking to lead–the anti-NCLB backlash among educators, all the while waving his familiar flag of racism and injustice, yet refusing to offer any plausible alternatives for fixing our failing urban schools.
If he has his way, those inner city kids will stay ignorant forever–and he can keep penning outraged (but best-selling) books about their mistreatment at society’s hands. Where’s the real injustice in this picture?
What he said.
In the spirit of scientific inquiry and in honor of every one who ever built an erupting volcano for the science fair, here’s a video showing what happens when two guys combine Diet Coke and Mentos. Lots of Diet Coke and lots of Mentos.
It’s not your children’s job to make you happy, writes Betsy Hart.
Look, I’m crazy about my kids. I’m happy to see them get up in the morning and happy to see them go to bed at night. Often there are times of happiness and laughter with them — along with sheer exasperation in-between. But what makes me really, really happy in the moment is a weekend night when they are asleep and I can sit up late with my jazz music, a cup of hot tea and my favorite newspaper. I mean, that’s transcendent happiness!
Children call us away from our obsession with self, Hart writes.
And, I would argue, only when we connect to something bigger than “it’s all about me” are we stretched to experience real joy and satisfaction — in a way no animal can and even when our children are behaving like animals!
Hart thinks the rising number of couples deciding to remain “childfree” is a sign of our cultural narcissism. I worry about parents who treat their children like the ultimate status symbol.
Tag is banned at recess at some elementary schools because it’s too dangerous, reports USA Today. The bellis tolling for “contact” sports such as soccer and touch football. According to Donna Thompson of the National Program for Playground Safety, educators worry about “kids running into one another” and getting hurt.
In January, Freedom Elementary School in Cheyenne prohibited tag at recess because it “progresses easily into slapping and hitting and pushing instead of just touching,” Principal Cindy Farwell says.
Contact sports were banned from recess at Charles Pinckney Elementary early this year, says Charleston County schools spokeswoman Mary Girault, because children suffered broken arms and dislocated fingers playing touch football and soccer.
What’s forbidden at recess may be authorized in gym class, when kids can be supervised by adults. The real taboo is unsupervised play.
Schools of education will be obsolete by 2036, predicts Peter Wood, provost of The Kings College in New York City.
In 2036, we will still need teachers. Educating and civilising children will always require real adults who enter into sustained relationships with students. But the kind of teachers we will need will be people who know their subjects deeply and who can inspire a love of learning in young people. We simply won’t be able to sustain a system in which teaching is hack work for the untalented and the ideological.
Global competition will force change, Wood argues.
. . . teachers will be recruited from the ranks of the liberally educated and will learn, as good teachers have always learned, by devotion to the task itself.
. . . People who aspire to become real teachers don’t need training in theory and methodology. They need to learn their subjects and kindle to the task of helping young people become owners of their own minds.
I’m not sure how the kindling part will be done. People who’ve mastered history, math or science still need to learn how to help young people learn. Take a look at Dan Greene’s Exponential Curve. He’s a math teacher working with high school students who’ve failed to learn the math fundamentals until now. How does he get them to understand what was easy for him to learn but is difficult for them?
California abolished the education degree decades ago. Would-be elementary teachers major in something called “liberal studies” (as in “liberally educated” not liberal politics). Secondary teachers, who do not have low SAT scores, on average, are supposed to major in the subject they’re going to teach or pass a test on subject-matter knowledge. It hasn’t proven to be a silver bullet through the heart of mediocre teaching.
HomeSchool Cafe hosts the Carnival of Homeschooling while Melissa Wiley of The Lilting House, also a homeschooler, hosts the Carnival of Education.
Melissa’s oldest child survived leukemia as a toddler; her son, WonderBoy, is partially deaf and is dealing other problems with the help of a lot of early intervention. There are five children in all. Melissa is the author of a series of books about the Scottish great-grandmother and mother of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote the Little House on the Prairie series.
On the Carnival, Portable Princess writes about expectations, telling the story of Parker, a poor, black, below-grade-level, fifth-grader with an “emotionally disabled” label and a dysfunctional family. A second-year teacher, the Princess didn’t know he was hopeless. She taught him English and social studies.
Did I mention he was a mess? His parents were in and out of jail, his older brothers were often suspended or expelled from other schools in the district. He had this horribly annoying habit of humming when he became stressed.
She liked him.
His school counselor emailed me one day in the middle of the third grading period. Apparently Parker had NO idea why he was failing, could I explain it to her so she could explain it to him. If only she could have heard me scream. I told him weekly why he was failing (to his credit, he asked) and what steps needed to be taken to reverse the trend. I offered to help him in every possible way I could think of, but he never seemed to hear me. I sat down and answered the email. I went through his grades for the grading period. I outlined every thing I could think of, I made the connection (again) between his preparation for class and his level of comfort and confidence in class. I explained (again) what would be needed to reverse the trend and bring his grades back up. I reiterated (again) how confident I was that he was completely and totally capable of being an honor roll student.
This time, for some mysterious reason, Parker got it. At the end of the grading period, he’d made honor roll. He went on to middle school, where Princess had friends who checked in on him and relayed her messages of encouragement.
By the time he left the middle school, he’d been removed from his home and was thriving in a foster home. He’d been dismissed from special ed and was placed in advanced and honors level classes at the high school.
When he comes by her class to visit, Parker tells her students to listen to her advice.
It’s all at the Carnival.
Eighth graders asked to write about their lives get hooked on writing, says a Philadelphia Inquirer story on a program called “freedom writers.”
Here’s a 15-year-old named David:
“I’m from Philly, the city people call Brotherly Love, where brothers have enough hate in them to pick up a 7 millimeter and murder their own blood. And as for love – it doesn’t exist.”
“… I’m from where you can’t walk to the street, let alone from the house to the car, knowing it could be the last breath you take… .
“I’m from where the style of losing virginity at the age of 13 is in, and where the boy’s too stupid to wear a condom… . So there goes a child raising another child. I’m from the night where the bedtime stories are the bullets and the good sounds are the sirens.”
A movie is in the works about “Erin Gruwell, the Long Beach, Calif. teacher who pioneered the idea and watched many of her struggling high school students blossom into college-bound youngsters, eager to write and succeed.”
The technique is straightforward: Get kids to write by writing about their own lives.
Over four years in the 1990s, Gruwell, then in her 20s, had her students write on such things as alcoholism, gang initiation, racism, homelessness and abuse. They also read Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, to give their experiences context.
Gruwell put together a book of student essays, The Freedom Writers Diary.
Telling students to write about their lives doesn’t seem all that novel. Is it the teaching strategy that makes a difference or the talent of teachers who try it?
Still it was heartening to hear David say that “me not writing is just not me no more.”
Rod Paige, the former Education Secretary, blasts the “65 percent solution” (requiring 65 percent of education funds to be spent “in the classroom”) and argues for a Fordham-backed “100 percent solution” that would provide more funding for hard-to-educate students and let the money follow students. Some students need more from their schools, Paige writes. “Most children living in poverty, for example, need longer school days and years, better teachers and materials, and extra services like tutoring.”
One good idea now picking up support is “weighted student funding.” Under this approach, each child receives a “backpack” of financing that travels with him to the public school of his family’s choice. The more disadvantaged the child, the bigger the backpack.
When that money arrives at a school, principals have freedom to spend them as they see fit. Does the school need to pay more to snag a top-notch math teacher? Are extra hours needed to allow for intensive tutoring? Principals would be able to allocate resources accordingly; accountability systems like No Child Left Behind give them strong incentives to make good decisions.
What about reducing administrative waste, the primary aim of the 65 percent solution? Weighted financing handles this better, too: because principals are given full control over their budgets, they can choose whether to forgo a new coat of paint — or, better, consultants and travel expenses — in favor of an additional classroom aide.
The idea has worked in Edmonton, Alberta, Paige writes. San Francisco, Seattle and Houston are now giving it a try.
This really is a nonpartisan idea that has support across the political spectrum.
I’m dubious about the 65 percent idea. As Paige writes, it would lead to creative accounting. The funding backpack makes sense to me. If the weighting is done right, schools will have an incentive to compete for disadvantaged students.
Andrew Pass has started a blog on Current Events in Education.
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