Most new charter schools in Los Angeles are replicating successful programs. Statewide, half of new charters are opening in LA, San Diego and Oakland, where dissatisfaction with traditional schools is high.
LA school board members are huffy over evidence that charter middle and high schools outperform district-run schools.
“I think it’s basically unfair to compare an entity that is able to take their entire budget and focus it entirely on their own schools,” (board member Jon Lauritzen) said. “They have some real advantages over our schools in the flexibility of actually providing the type of education that a particular community wants, whereas we are trying to provide a curriculum that works for everyone all across the school district.”
Why doesn’t LA Unified try “actually providing the type of education that a particular community wants” in all its schools? It’s not that parents’ desires are all that varied and exotic. They want schools that educate their children so they can have choices in life. The district could replicate successful models too.
New York City’s left-behind students can’t work with online tutors based in India, say the city’s education officials, because Indian tutors haven’t completed background checks. Despite improving students’ test scores, Socratic Learning lost its $2 million contract under No Child Left Behind when the city discovered 250 tutors work from India not company headquarters in Texas.
Socratic sends tutors’ fingerprints — obtained at Indian police stations — to the FBI and monitors tutor-student communications, reports the Times of India.
But there was a catch. Not only did the NYC insist on teachers being physically present to have their fingerprints recorded, but they were also required to furnish social security numbers. “How can foreign tutors produce U.S Social Security numbers? The whole system simply puts a crimp on distance learning,” (Socratic CEO Raj) Sobhani said.
Perhaps it’s not about protecting students from harm.
Boys with traditionally female names are more disruptive in class starting in middle school, concludes a research study. Via NCLBlog and This Week in Education. I always associated Boy Named Sue with Johnny Cash, but Russo says the lyricist was the great Shel Silverstein. What a combination.
Grammar is back in fashion at a Washington area high school where Grammar Greiner teaches students the fundamentals of grammar, punctuation and capitalization. The Washington Post reports:
Grammar lessons vanished from public schools in the 1970s, supplanted by a more holistic view of English instruction. A generation of teachers and students learned grammar through the act of writing, not in isolated drills and diagrams.
Today, Greiner is encouraged, even sought out. Direct grammar instruction, long thought to do more harm than good, is welcome once more.
The SAT exam now includes a writing section and “a series of multiple-choice responses that test how well students can assemble and disassemble sentences.”
The National Council of Teachers of English, whose directives shape curriculum decisions nationwide, has quietly reversed its long opposition to grammar drills, which the group had condemned in 1985 as “a deterrent to the improvement of students’ speaking and writing.”
Now, even the sentence diagram, long the symbol of abandoned methodology, is allowed, if not quite endorsed, in the classrooms of Fairfax and Howard and other high-performing school systems throughout the region. To diagram a sentence is to deconstruct it as if it were a math problem, with the main noun, verb and object written on a horizontal line and their various modifiers attached with diagonals.
The “dirty little secret” is that most English teachers weren’t taught grammar in school and don’t know how to teach it.
When my daughter’s eighth-grade English teacher announced at Back to School Night that she was devoting two weeks to teaching grammar, she got a standing ovation from the parents.
Via Education Gadfly.
Florida spends $400 million annually on universal pre-kindergarten programs that offer no educational benefits and are no better than child-care centers, critics say. Parents are happy, though. They don’t have to pay for care.
I sold quite a few copies of Our School at the Colorado League of Charter Schools convention today, though turnout was diminished by the blizzard. Yes, Denver is covered with picture-postcard snow.
I ran into Joe Williams, author of Cheating Our Kids and Chalkboard edublogger, and had dinner with Linda Seebach, Rocky Mountain News columnist.
In a math education class taught by Mr. NCTM, future teacher “John Dewey” asked classmates to tackle a geometry problem he found on a tape of a Japanese eighth-grade math class.
After about a minute, I saw that people were perplexed, not getting anywhere, and I suddenly realized that in my excitement: I forgot to present the theorem they would need to solve the problem. I apologized and called for their attention and explained the key theorem they would need.
His classmates, all with math and science backgrounds, did well with the problem — but only after he presented the theorem.
I led a discussion about the appropriateness of the problem for eighth graders. The people who solved the problem immediately thought that perhaps I should not give the theorem and let them “discover” it. Others who had a tougher time with the problem said, well, if you did that, maybe you should coach them to come up with the theorem rather than expecting them to do it on their own. Or maybe giving them the theorem wasn’t such a bad thing.
I suspect that the ones who had the easiest time were under the illusion that the theorem was superfluous and easily discovered. They forgot that a few minutes prior they were struggling until I told them what they needed to know.
Those who started as believers in constructivism ended as believers.
Social workers must “demonstrate the ability to … understand the forms and mechanisms of oppression and discrimination and apply strategies of advocacy and social change that advance social and economic justice.” Accredited programs must “integrate social and economic justice content grounded in an understanding of distributive justice, human and civil rights, and the global interconnections of oppression.”
Guidelines for accreditation by the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) constitute an ideological litmus test, complains FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education). FIRE wants the federal Health and Human Services Department to stop requiring social workers to have degrees from programs accredited by CSWE, unless the group changes its guidelines.
Training principals in how to recognize and hire good teachers is paying off in Baltimore with better teachers and higher retetion rates. Now Chicago is giving it a try, reports Teacher Quality Bulletin.
Principals are taught how to pick teachers that best fit their schools, how to create scenario questions that probe instruction and classroom management techniques and are encouraged to require candidates to teach a sample lesson as part of their interview.
Since implementing this same program this year, Baltimore has reported fewer early teaching vacancies in its lowest performing schools.
Principals are trained to keep in touch with new hires over the summer, when 5 to 7 percent change their minds and quit.
Baltimore is hiring many more “highly qualified” teachers. Strategies include: offering two weeks of paid orientation, 100% tuition reimbursement for critical subject areas, higher pay for new teachers who did their student teaching in city schools, laptop computers and $200 gift cards for classroom supplies.
Half of Baltimore’s new teachers come from alternative paths (not education school), the Bulletin observes. That’s true in many big cities.
In Florida, Texas and Ohio, politicians are making high-stakes testing a campaign issue, reports the Washington Post. In Florida, the candidates for governor are arguing over the state test, which affects teacher pay, school budgets and promotion to fourth grade.
Republican Charlie Crist is offering to push forward with the testing regime, but Democrat Jim Davis has condemned what he calls its “punitive” nature, arguing that exam pressures have transformed schools into “dreary test-taking factories.”
But low-performing students have made “real gains” in Florida, Eduwonk notes. And national polls show public support for standards and testing.
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