Free-linking and thinking on education by Joanne Jacobs
Hamas’ version of Mickey Mouse, who taught Palestinian children to dream of killing Jews, is dead. In the final episode of the TV show, the animated rodent known as Farfour was beaten to death by an Israeli official who wanted to buy his land.
“Farfour was martyred while defending his land,†said Sara, the teen presenter.
Via Tim Blair.
Boston’s new school superintendent, Carol Johnson, raised test scores in Memphis by firing principals of persistently low-performing schools and forcing teachers to reapply for their jobs, reports the Boston Globe. But the teachers’ union vows to block similar moves in Boston.
Johnson will inherit Boston’s strategy for failing schools that Michael G. Contompasis, outgoing superintendent, negotiated with the teachers union this year. Called “superintendent’s schools,” up to 20 struggling schools will have smaller class sizes, cash incentives for teachers, and other extras. But they will also face more demands, such as a longer school day and more teacher training.
Giving more money to unsuccessful schools rarely works unless the schools get new leadership at the same time.
Via Education Gadfly.
Wake County, North Carolina stopped assigning students by race and started using socioeconomic status instead. Bety explains why the district changed and how it’s worked.
Excess video gaming is a bad habit, not an addiction, the American Medical Association has decided. But the AMA called for more research.
The AMA’s report says up to 90 percent of American youngsters play video games and that up to 15 percent of them — more than 5 million kids — might be addicted.
. . . Internet role-playing games involving multiple players, which can suck kids into an online fantasy world, are the most problematic, the report says.
An obsession with video games “may be a symptom of social anxiety, depression or another psychiatric problem,” one doctor said.
Federally funded tutoring improved reading and math scores for students in some large cities, according to an independent study for the Department of Education.
Under No Child Left Behind, students in schools that miss progress goals for three years in a row are eligible for tutoring.
The tutoring provisions in the law have been criticized by teachers’ unions, which complain that tutors don’t have to meet the same licensing requirements as regular teachers. In addition, some school district officials object to the law’s requirement that they use up to 20 percent of their federal aid funds for poor students to pay for tutoring, or for transporting the children out of failing schools.
Tutoring costs from $800 to $2,000 per student.
On a 5-4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the use of race in school assignments for the purpose of increasing racial diversity. The cases involved Seattle and Louisville but could affect many other school districts.
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” (Chief Justice John) Roberts wrote for four of the court’s nine justices. The ruling applies to school districts that aren’t under a court order to remove the vestiges of past discrimination.
Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a dissent that was joined by the court’s other three liberals. Breyer said the ruling would “threaten the promise” of the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision, and warned, “this is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret.”
In a concurring opinion, Justice Kennedy argued that districts can use “race-conscious measures” such as “strategic site selection of new schools; drawing attendance zones with general recognition of neighborhood demographics; allocating resources for special programs; recruiting students and faculty in a targeted fashion; and tracking enrollments, performance, and other statistics by race.”
Balancing enrollments by students’ poverty status would not be banned by the court ruling and would provide de facto racial diversity in many cities.
Go to SCOTUS Blog for more, including a link to the opinions (on pdf). NAACP’s integration site has some quick reactions.
Discriminations links to an argument that racial assignment is “upside down Brown.”
Katherine Phillips, assistant principal of an elite private middle school in Kuwait, is trapped in the country. Her problems started more than a year ago, when she put several boys on in-school detention for a day for fighting. The well-connected father of one boy threatened to “destroy” her.
First, the school’s discipline policies were investigated by the Ministry of Education, which ruled that the school could not use in-school suspensions. Then the father filed a case against Phillips for “illegal detainment†of his son. On June 13, she was stopped from boarding a plane at the airport because of the “pending investigation.”
The U.S. Embassy has not helped lift the travel ban. Kuwaiti officials seem to be stalling her. The school is closed and her colleagues soon will be gone for the summer. She writes:
I do not feel safe. I am not safe. I need someone from the US to acknowledge the urgency of my situation and coordinate my release. I committed no crime. I am simply the victim of “wasta†which roughly translates into “influence/pressure†at a high level.
International Schools Review advises teachers and administrators not to take jobs or return to jobs in Kuwait until the situation is resolved.
On this week’s road trip edition of the Carnival of Education, hosted by Education in Texas, Mister Teacher praises a Canadian scheme to sell school naming rights to corporations.
I can already see sophomores walking around proudly displaying T-shirts that read, “Yo Quiero Taco Bell High School.”
In the graduation programs, the tired old classifications of cum laude and summa cum laude will be replaced with Grande and Chalupa. And let me tell you, Chalupa status will most definitely help in students’ attempts to get into fine universities such as Best Buy University or College of Kohls.
And there’s more at the carnival.
Boys are different from girls, writes Conn Iggulden, co-author of The Dangerous Book for Boys, in the Washington Post. A former teacher, Iggulden thinks boys fail in school when they’re taught like girls.
Boys don’t like group work. They do better on exams than they do in coursework, and they don’t like class discussion. In history lessons, they prefer stories of Rome and of courage to projects on the suffragettes.
It’s all a matter of balance. When I was a teacher, I asked my head of department why every textbook seemed to have a girl achieving her dream of being a carpenter while the boys were morons. She replied that boys had had it their own way for too long, and now it was the girls’ turn. Ouch.
. . . The dark side of masculinity may involve gangs and aggression, but there’s another side — self-discipline, wry humor and quiet determination.
Looking back, the belief that girls need more support to succeed in school seems odd. It’s the boys who are struggling.
Women, what are the books that changed your life as a girl? A Metafilter writer is working on a book for girls that will include “a chapter on books that every girl should read — books that changed your life, so to speak, and that you’d want your daughter to read before she’s grown up.” She’s aiming at middle-school readers and needs more science fiction and fantasy.
I can name lots of kids’ books I enjoyed, but I don’t think any were life changing. Well, except for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which introduced me to the possibility that there are many doors to magic lands. The Secret Garden had that element too.
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