I hate arts and crafts. Fortunately, my daughter likes arts and crafts so she did all her own crafty homework assignments with no help from me, except for purchase of innumerable posters. So I sympathized with the parent who
complained in the Christian Science Monitor about endless crafts projects (via D-Ed Reckoning) that send Mom on late night runs to the 24-hour Walgreens in search of construction paper, glue sticks and pipe cleaners.

Please, oh please, dear curriculum developers, give us parents a break: Ban all make-work projects. Parents have jobs, too, you know. We do our children’s homework. We serve on school boards, coach basketball, and volunteer with the Boy Scouts. Now you want us to be creative?!

. . . Recently, while rummaging through my son’s 20-pound backpack, I found a note from the literature teacher: “Class, please sew together a stuffed animal representing a character from the Dr. Dolittle novel we read in class. It doesn’t have to be elaborate, simply use any old scraps you have around the house. And, please, whatever you do, DON’T INVOLVE YOUR PARENTS!”

Oh yeah, sure. They always say that. Who, may I ask, is going to drive to the fabric store and run the sewing machine? Who will buy the stuffing, find buttons for the eyes, and sew on the cute whiskers? Certainly not the 9-year-old boy who is busy playing a Star Wars game on the computer.

. . . And it doesn’t end in grammar school. When my high school daughter got the assignment to create a quilt representing the stages of her life, I finally lost control and ran around the house screaming, “What ever happened to the written word? Where are the book report assignments? When will you guys ever learn how to write?”

But I think RedKudu has a good point too: Stop doing your child’s homework . Make him turn off the video game and tackle it himself. Teach organization and time-management skills so you’re not running to the store late at night to get your kids’ materials. And, teachers, don’t expect every family to own a hot-glue gun.

I do remember late-night trips to the 24-hour Rite Aid to buy poster board. My daughter was making posters right through 12th-grade AP English. And I’ll never forget my attempt to make a wig out of cotton balls and Elmer’s Glue so she could go to school as George Washington, for dress-as-your-hero day. Did I mention that I hate arts and crafts? Her stepmother took over the project. I think she went to a costume shop and bought a wig.

Thanksgiving was no picnic for the Indians, some teachers stress.

Teacher Bill Morgan walks into his third-grade class wearing a black Pilgrim hat made of construction paper and begins snatching up pencils, backpacks and glue sticks from his pupils. He tells them the items now belong to him because he “discovered” them. The reaction is exactly what Morgan expects: The kids get angry and want their things back.

Morgan is among elementary school teachers who have ditched the traditional Thanksgiving lesson, in which children dress up like Indians and Pilgrims and act out a romanticized version of their first meetings.

He has replaced it with a more realistic look at the complex relationship between Indians and white settlers.

Where does he teach? San Francisco.

At other schools, children aren’t allowed to dress up like Indians any more, or told they can wear a headband but not a feather.

The new Education Next features Joe Williams on how school boards and their allies block charter competition and Nelson Smith writes that superintendents aren’t letting charter operators have a shot at restructuring persistently low-performing schools, even though it would be an easy way to evade responsibility for problem schools.

Some preschool teachers can close the learning gap for disadvantaged children or those with social, behavioral or academic problems, concludes Robert Pianta.

To be effective, teachers of young children must strategically weave instruction into activities that give children choices to explore and play. Several aspects of teachers� interactive behaviors appear to uniquely predict gains in young children�s achievement:

– explicit instruction in certain key skills
– sensitive and emotionally warm interactions
– responsive feedback
– verbal engagement/stimulation
– a classroom environment that is not overly structured or regimented.

However, there’s tremendous variety in quality from classroom to classroom, even when teachers have the same credentials and are supposed to be using the same program.

A New York City study finds teacher certification doesn’t affect classroom performance. Newly hired uncertified and alternatively certified teachers did just as well as traditionally certified teachers. Teachers improved significantly with experience, and some teachers were much more effective than others.

The greatest potential for school districts to improve student achievement seems to rest not in regulating minimum qualifications for new teachers but in selectively retaining those teachers who are most effective during their first years of teaching.

Also check out Julie Landry Peterson writes on data-informed instruction. And there’s lots more.

Maryland and Virginia students who pass their classes with B’s and C’s are failing state tests, reports the Washington Post. At one high school, “a quarter of students in beginning algebra passed the course but failed the state test.”

Students and teachers offer an array of explanations for why test scores sometimes fail to match up with grades. Some students don’t take the exams seriously. Some freeze up. Still others trip over unfamiliar language. And teachers sometimes are not prepped in what the exams cover, especially when the tests are new. Occasionally, some school officials suspect, classes aren’t rigorous enough to prepare students adequately.

Occasionally?

Update: Eduwonk cites a 1991 study that looked at grades vs. test scores at high-poverty and low-poverty schools: “A” students in seventh-grade math and reading tested at the 35th and 36th percentile in high-poverty schools; in low-poverty schools, “A” students tested up in the 80s.