Monthly Archive for August, 2008

University partnerships can fizzle over time, notes the National Council on Teacher Quality. The faculty may lose interest.

University of South Florida has given up on its charter school, handing control to the district, reports Inside Higher Education.

In recent years, faculty members have virtually been absent from the operations of the school. Even student teachers couldn’t serve there, the spokesman said, because the charter’s teachers were too inexperienced to be their mentors.

. . . “What was happening is that the College of Education, which is the biggest in Florida and one of the big ones in the Southeast, their intellectual energy was really going into the school district,” as opposed to the on-campus charter, (USF Vice President Michael) Hoad explained. “In an unfortunate way, the university will do more with the school as a school district school.”

The charter was supposed to serve a low-income community where families move so often it’s known as Suitcase City. When the school faltered, dropping from a C to an F rating, the faculty threw up its hands.

University of California at San Diego sponsors the high-performing Preuss School, a charter middle and high school for low-income students, Insider Higher Ed adds. Preuss wasn’t started by education professors, explains Cecil Lytle, a music professor.

(Preuss) came out of anthropology, economics, mathematics, and other fields, Lytle explained. “The binding issue was bringing the imprimatur of the university and the standards of the university to K-12,” he said.

Seton Hall, partnered with the Newark teachers’ union, has boosted scores at a low-performing, high-poverty Newark K-8 school, reports the New York Times. Newton Street School was given charter-like powers to set its own academic policies and hire (and fire) its teachers. With union support, it replaced six of 44 teachers and extended the school day by an hour for the middle grades.

Seton Hall’s education professors took over much of the staff development, scheduling workshops on data analysis and coaching newer teachers in their classrooms. They equipped every Newton faculty member with a free I.B.M. laptop, and handed out basketballs and tickets to Seton Hall’s home games as an incentive for students and their parents. About 50 Seton Hall undergraduates came to Newton last fall to tutor students.

Scores went up significantly in 2008.

Karin Chenoweth takes on Charles Murray’s educational determinism on Britannica Blog.

For one thing, people have genetic limitations, but in most cases no one really knows exactly what they are, what they limit, or how to measure those limitations — in part because the human brain has the capacity to compensate for those limitations in surprising ways. Which raises the question: What sorting mechanism would be sufficient for this purpose? How reliable is it? Couldn’t there possibly be children who should go to college despite scoring low on whatever first-grade measure we allow Murray to choose?

Good instruction makes a huge difference, Chenoweth argues.

In his acceptance speech, Sen. Barack Obama called for giving a world-class education to every student. How?

I’ll invest in early childhood education. I’ll recruit an army of new teachers, and pay them higher salaries, and give them more support. And in exchange, I’ll ask for higher standards and more accountability.

I heard that “army of teachers” from another speaker. It must be talking point. I wonder how he’ll judge whether the new recruits will be good teachers (are the old teachers no good?), how they’ll be paid (merit pay? pay for needed skills? more for everyone?) and whether the standards and accountability will resemble No Child Left Behind. Then there’s the whole issue of whether Obama wants to continue the slow federalization of education or let states (and school districts) decide things such as how to hire and pay teachers and what standards to set.

I’ve heard that “world-class education” thing before, starting with the senior President Bush. It doesn’t seem to happen.

Obama got huge cheers when he called for parents to step up and make their kids do homework. But he didn’t say what the federal government should or could do when parents fail.

Only 30 percent of young people 17 to 24 years old are qualified for military service; the rest are ineligible because of health issues (especially obesity), academic problems (low test scores, no diploma) or an arrest record. The Army has started an intensive GED-prep school for recruits who test in the top half of the aptitude test but haven’t completed high school.

Their day begins in uniform at 5 a.m. with physical training. Then they attend about eight hours of academic review classes, followed by homework each evening. An hour of marching drills and military discipline is thrown in for good measure.

. . . The soldiers work in small classrooms outfitted with simple desks, chairs, and dry-erase boards. In-desk computers are used for test-taking. Grouped three to four to a class, the students hunch over special GED preparation books, working on basic math, social studies and reading selections.

They get two tries at passing the GED. After that, they’re released from their service commitment.

Ninth-graders are getting their own schools to ease the transition to high school.

“People just really value having our ninth-graders have a chance to develop intellectually, emotionally and socially outside of the context of a large comprehensive high school setting,” said Kenneth Graham, superintendent of Rush-Henrietta Central School District near Rochester, N.Y. “They don’t have upperclassmen in the halls picking on them and teasing them.”

So far, this is just a trendlet: There were 127 ninth-grade-only public schools in 1999-2000; that jumped to 185 by 2005-06 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.