Monthly Archive for May, 2007

E-v-a-n!

Published on May 31, 2007 in Culture. 21 Comments By Joanne

Evan O’Dorney, a home-schooled California boy, won the National Spelling Bee with “serrefine.” Evan is a music-math prodigy who’s not that excited about spelling. Too much memorization.

Evan studies spelling for about an hour a day, the San Franciso Chronicle reports.

His mom, Jennifer O’Dorney, quizzes him daily on words out of Merriam-Webster’s dictionary as he juggles as many as four balls while walking around his home.

He said he sees mathematical patterns while he’s juggling and spelling words aloud.

In the final rounds, he spelled “rascacio” (scorpion fish), “schuhplattler” (a Bavarian courtship dance), “laquear” (recessed panels in a vaulted ceiling), “pappardelle” (pasta), “yosenabe” (a Japanese soup) before winning on “serrefine,” (small forceps for clamping a blood vessel).

Go to Throwing Things for a run-down on the final rounds and a plea for less cutesiness in the TV coverage.

Freshmores on the five-year plan

Published on May 31, 2007 in Education. 13 Comments By Joanne

Boston students who flunk ninth-grade English or math become “freshmores” or “sophmen.” They repeat the classes they failed while going on in other classes. Most will need five years to complete high school.

Clustered in tiny English classes, students who struggled with reading during their freshman year thoughtfully dissect Shakespeare and the autobiography of Frederick Douglass.

These 15- and 16-year-olds, students of Another Course to College, a Boston public high school, are a new breed of students in the city. They have been placed in a special transitional year between ninth and tenth grade because they flunked freshman math or English.

At some schools, half the students who should be sophomores are freshmores.

Mind the gap

Published on May 31, 2007 in College. 12 Comments By Joanne

Black and Hispanic college students earn significantly lower grades than their white and Asian-American classmates, according to an Education Department study. in 2003-04, 19.3 percent of whites, 12.7 percent of Hispanics and 9.6 percent of blacks earned mostly A’s; 24 percent of whites, 34.6 percent of Hispanics and 40.7 percent of blacks earned mostly C’s or lower. The performance gaps are even wider at selective colleges, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education, “especially at the highest achievement levels and among students majoring in mathematics, engineering, the sciences, and technology-related fields.”

Until recently, most college leaders have been reluctant to talk about the performance gap, but some are now sharing data and looking for solutions.

Many college officials who are working to close the performance gap say the initial impetus for their efforts was the 1998 publication of William G. Bowen and Derek Bok’s The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton University Press). Based on their analyses of data from 28 selective colleges, Mr. Bowen, a former president of Princeton University, and Mr. Bok, a former president of Harvard University, extensively documented race- and ethnicity-linked differences in achievement . . . They also found a strong correlation between undergraduate grades and future earnings, with black students who earn low grades suffering more, in terms of their future earnings, than white students with comparable academic records.

Skidmore College is one of the few to develop a program that helps minority students earn higher grades. Disadvantaged students with marginal SAT scores take intensive writing, intensive math and philosophy in a summer boot camp. Students are shocked that work that earned A’s in high school gets D’s in college. “It was like I had been living a lie most of my life,” a Mexican-American student says.

Vaughn Greene, a black junior who enrolled through the Higher Education Opportunity Program and has served as a head resident in the dormitories during the past two summer institutes, says many students at first fail to take the summer program seriously. After getting slammed with D’s and F’s on their first papers, however, “they realize it is time to switch gears and actually do something because these people aren’t playing.”

At Minding the Campus, Anthony Paletta marvels at college administrators’ reluctance to admit they’ve been admitting underqualified minority students.

Blogging the Bee

Published on May 30, 2007 in Culture. Closed By Joanne

Throwing Things is blogging the National Spelling Bee, which is now on Round 3.

Time profiles past bee winners, who tend to be — surprise — well-educated, successful and happy they participated.

What’s the mission?

Published on May 30, 2007 in Blogging and Education. 6 Comments By Joanne

This week’s Carnival of Education, hosted by The Education Wonks, includes Ms. Cornelius’ provocative post on creating a school community that encourages learning. In trying to be all things to all students — surrogate family, social club, sports center, health center, etc. — schools lose track of their academic mission, she writes.

For example, in an effort to prevent drop-outs, we abandon our expectation of educational behavior and lower academic standards until they are functionally meaningless. We divorce the expectation of allegiance to academic achievement and academic behaviors from the expectation for membership in the school community, and therefore undercut the very mission of the school.

If education isn’t the priority, “why not just call schools ‘community centers’ and be done with the hypocrisy?” Ms. Cornelius asks.

If schools were more dedicated to learning, parents and students might be more likely to consider it a priority too, she suggests.

Read the post below about Abdul Kargbo’s experiences in Sierra Leone, where education is a source of pride and prestige, and in a U.S. high school, where many classmates didn’t see education as valuable.

Downtown College Prep, the charter school in Our School, is organized around a clear mission: Preparing all graduates to “thrive” at four-year colleges. Most incoming ninth graders are disengaged from school. Most of their parents are not educated, fluent in English or able to help their children succeed in school. Yet the relentless focus on working hard to prepare for college has created a community that’s all about working hard to prepare for college. Ex-slackers cheer students who raise their grades or make the honor roll. Students talk in the halls about getting “on the matrix” for admission to San Jose State or Cal State Monterey Bay. Their parents show up for evening classes — in Spanish or English — on planning for college.

It’s easier to create a cohesive learning community at a school of choice, but I don’t think it’s impossible to do so at any school with a strong leader.

Update: RedKudu wants her school’s English Department to develop an academic vision for teaching average students, not just those in Advanced Placement classes.

From Africa to a U.S. high school

Published on May 30, 2007 in Culture and Education. 9 Comments By Joanne

In desperately poor Sierra Leone, Abdul Kargbo studied in a school that lacked books, electricity and running water. He competed with classmates for the prestige of ranking first in the class. Then, at the age of 16, he moved to the U.S. He writes on Education Sector:

With the exception of the American authors, my English literature classes covered material that I had already studied. And, although U.S. history was a new subject for me — I had studied only African and European history in Sierra Leone — I had already studied the World Wars and the Four Revolutions in my first year of secondary school. My Advanced Placement French classes covered grammar and vocabulary that I had learned in primary school, and my microbiology class was less advanced than the biology classes I had taken in my first and second years of secondary school, when I was between 12 and 13 years old.

What I found most frustrating was that, while teachers might have genuinely wanted everyone to get an equal grasp of the material, they erred too much in favor of ensuring that everyone passed tests and exams. These were so simple that even students who had not even bothered to show up for class could still get a passing score.

Many of his U.S. classmates didn’t work hard enough to go on to college. They didn’t seem to believe that success in school would lead to success in life. The opportunity to get an education — so cherished in Sierra Leone — was taken for granted.

In the Washington Post, Jay Mathews observes that students can graduate with good grades in college-prep classes without being prepared for college success.

Carnival of Homeschooling

Published on May 29, 2007 in Blogging. Closed By Joanne

Beverly Hernandez hosts this week’s Carnival of Homeschooling.

Promising miracles

Published on May 29, 2007 in Education. 7 Comments By Joanne

The Confidence Men are consultants who claim they know how to raise student achievement dramatically, writes Eric Hanushek in the summer issue of Education Next.

(Lawrence) Picus and (Allen) Odden . . . claim that a specific set of policies can shift average student performance upward by three to six standard deviations, an extraordinary gain. The policies they identify include providing a year of full-day kindergarten, reducing class size to 15 students through grade 3, using multi-age classrooms, hiring classroom coaches, employing one-to-one tutoring for disadvantaged students, getting half of the students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch to attend summer school, embedding technology within the classroom, creating a gifted and talented program for the top 5 percent of all students, and accelerating instruction for the 2 percent of students capable of benefiting from it.

Raising achievement by a standard deviation — the difference in scores between the average fourth and eighth grader — would wipe out the racial achievement gap and send U.S. students soaring ahead of Korean and Japanese students.

After their policies are fully implemented in Washington (state), Albert Einstein, were he not participating in these programs, would find himself achieving at or below the state average.

And it will happen in one year, the consultants predict.

Not going to happen, writes Hanushek.

Also in Education Next, writer Barbara Feinberg analyzes the influence of Lucy Calkins on how schools teach writing. Once an advocate of teaching children to discover their own writing style, Calkins has suffered “hardening of the ideologies,” writes Feinberg.

Students are supposed to be write about their own experiences, so fantasy is taboo. Only “realistic fiction” is exempt from the ban.

Recently, New York City teachers were asked to describe how top-down mandates affect their teaching. Many complained the Calkins’ writing workship method was far too rigid, prescriptive and sometimes irrelevant.

A kindergarten teacher reported how she was instructed to ask her students, on the third day of class, “to reflect on how they’d grown as writers.”

“Ridiculous,” the teacher said.

Kindergarten readers

Published on May 28, 2007 in Education. 12 Comments By Joanne

Kindergarten is the new first grade, reports the Washington Post.

Kindergarten used to be mostly about play: singing songs, “housekeeping” in a Little Tikes kitchen and being read to. That is changing largely because of full-day kindergarten, which has swept the nation’s public schools in the past 20 years, stretching the instructional day from 2 1/2 hours to six.

Full-day kindergarten teachers are expected to teach beginning reading skills. Most students are able to learn the basics.

Last spring, nearly 90 percent of kindergarteners in Montgomery (County) passed a simple test that required them to read a short storybook, which would have been unthinkable in the county a decade ago. The percentage of kindergarten readers has more than doubled in five years.

There is virtually no racial achievement gap on the kindergarten reading test, but the gap appears in first and second grade as the reading tests get harder.

Algerian women choose education

Published on May 28, 2007 in Culture and Education. 2 Comments By Joanne

In Algeria, women are becoming better educated than men, and flooding into the professions, reports the New York Times.

Women make up 70 percent of Algeria’s lawyers and 60 percent of its judges. Women dominate medicine. Increasingly, women contribute more to household income than men. Sixty percent of university students are women, university researchers say.

Though, officially, men hold all the power, women also are taking administrative jobs in government.

Algeria’s young men reject school and try to earn money as traders in the informal sector, selling goods on the street, or they focus their efforts on leaving the country or just hanging out. There is a whole class of young men referred to as hittistes — the word is a combination of French and Arabic for people who hold up walls.

I was surprised when U.S. women passed men by in university enrollment. I never dreamed it would happen in a conservative male-dominated society like Algeria. What’s with men and school?