Monthly Archive for June, 2008

What’s wrong with Baltimore’s Douglass High? Baltimore Sun columnist Gregory Kane says it’s all summed up by Audie, who’s interviewed 25 minutes into the HBO documentary Hard Times at Douglass High.

“This what we do,” Audie said about a bunch of students roaming the halls and standing around aimlessly. “Just walking the halls all day, baby. [Bleep] class. That [bleep's] for clowns, man. Don’t nobody go to class around here, man. Man, [bleep] academics. Academics? We gon’ leave that to them nerd-[bleep] [bleeps]. We gon’ keep [bleep] straight ‘hood. All my [bleeps] out here, we gon’ keep it gutter.”

Kane quotes the English department chairman, Mr. Connally, who says that only three incoming ninth graders tested at grade level in reading out of 300 to 400 students. Most enter high school reading at the fourth- or fifth-grade level.

It’s almost as if no one wanted to admit that the students were passed to high schools with third- and fourth-grade reading levels. And I’m not talking about special-education students, either. I’m talking about regular students in regular classes. It’s a crime — been one for years.”

Kane agrees:

This is a crime, perpetrated and aided and abetted by those who don’t want to “demonize” poor black folks. As a former poor black person myself — who grew up in an era when all black folks were demonized, regardless of class — I’m left to ponder whether it’s better to be demonized and well-educated, or patronized and miseducated.

The problems predate No Child Left Behind by many years, writes Chris Cross, who chaired the Maryland Board of Education, in an e-mail to Eduwonk.

The State Board stopped short of reconstituting Douglass in the 90’s when it became clear that the problems were systemic; Douglass was the recipient of many students who had been simply passed down the line from grade to grade, school to school, all too often never mastering the basics.

An attempt to bring in outside management was blocked by the legislature in 2006. Cross hopes Baltimore’s new superintendent will shake things up. He’ll have to start in elementary school, where Audie failed to learn the skills and values that provide an alternative to the gutter.

Update: If you want to hurl insults at Liam Julian, be literate about it. And know the difference between The Old Man and the Sea and Moby Dick. Ahab wasn’t hunting the Great White Marlin.

We can expect all students to go to college, said Melinda Gates of the Gates Foundation in an NPR interview.

And maybe they are not coming in with the right reading or math skills, but we are going to bring them up, and we are going to have high expectations of them.

NPR also asked why the Gates-funded group, Strong American Schools, “has no official stand on vouchers, on charter schools, on No Child Left Behind, or on any other bill in Congress.”

Because I think it’s more important to get the American people demanding of the presidential candidates that they address these issues. The thing that we are talking about is bigger than any specific one piece of bill or one legislation; it’s having Americans rise up and say, ‘Let’s collectively do something about it; let’s debate the issues; let’s come up with the right solutions.’ We’re not trying to dictate a solution. We don’t think we have all of the answers, but we think the American people should make sure that their candidates lead on this issue and come up with the right answers.

How can people evaluate which are the right answers if education reformers won’t discuss policy trade-offs. Talking about education — it’s good! we need more of it! — isn’t enough.

Career academies combining vocational and academic classes show long-term success in improving students’ earnings, especially for males, reports an MDRC study.

Eight years after graduation, career academy participants are more likely to be employed than those who applied for academies but didn’t get in; they also earn more.

The participants were mainly Hispanic and black, and the schools had emphases including business, tourism, health care and electronics, with students enrolled for three or four years.

Eight years after high school, when most participants were about 26, the academy group had average earnings 11 percent — or $2,088 a year — higher than the control group.

“The findings show that you can make an investment in high school that has a measurable payoff in earnings well after,” said James J. Kemple, the author of the study and an education specialist at Manpower, a New York-based group that evaluates poverty programs.

“They also show that you can provide a solid foothold in the labor market without compromising a student’s capacity to go on to college,” Mr. Kemple said.

Males earned 17 percent more than the control group.

Career academy participants and those who applied but ended up in the control grup had similar rates of high school and college completion, much higher than their classmates who had no interest in career prep.

Elementary math teachers need to understand math better in order to teach effectively, concludes a new study by the National Council on Teacher Quality.

With some exceptions, elementary education programs spend too little time on elementary math topics, the report concluded. Teacher candidates don’t really understand why arithmetic and multiplication work.

In addition, ed schools take candidates with very weak reading, writing and math skills.

“Almost anyone can get in. Compared to the admissions standards found in other countries, American education schools set exceedingly low expectations for the mathematics knowledge that aspiring teachers must demonstrate,” said the report.

State certification tests typically produce an average score: A prospective teacher who flunks math but does well in other areas can earn a passing score.

Kate Walsh, president of NCTQ stated, “As a nation, our dislike and discomfort with math is so endemic that we do not even find it troubling when elementary teachers admit to their own weaknesses in basic mathematics. Not only are our education schools not tackling these weaknesses, they accommodate them with low expectations and insufficient content.

I’ve met many elementary teachers who say quite cheerfully that they don’t like math. They believe that a second-grade teacher who knows second-grade math can teach the subject well enough. A few elementary schools hire math-science specialists to avoid this.