Tiffany of Life on the Road hosts the adventure edition of the Carnival of Homeschooling. Earn valuable points!
Submit here for tomorrow’s Carnival of Education, hosted by The Reading Workshop.
Change: Here’s how
January 27, 2009 By
Center for Education Reform’s Mandate for Change prescribes a five-part cure for our education woes. Juan Williams writes on federal accountability, John Engler on transparency, Kevin Chavous on charter schools, Jeanne Allen on school choice and Richard Whitmire on teacher quality.
Eduwonkette hangs up her cape
January 27, 2009 By
Eduwonkette will blog no more. She’s finishing her dissertation and teaching sociology at NYU. I’m sorry to see a well-informed education blogger move on, but I guess a paying job does come first.
Her blogging pal, Skoolboy, will blog occasionally at Gotham Schools.
Gates: 80% college ready
January 27, 2009 By
In a letter on his foundation’s work, Bill Gates advocates a national education goal: “Ensure that 80 percent of our students graduate from high school fully ready to attend college by 2025.”
Note that Gates isn’t shooting for 100 percent and that his foundation is focusing on helping community college students complete a certificate or two-year degree.
The foundation will replicate “the school models that worked the best,” almost all of which are charter schools, Gates writes.
Many states have limits on charter schools, including giving them less funding than other schools. Educational innovation and overall improvement will go a lot faster if the charter school limits and funding rules are changed.
Good schools “help their teachers be more effective in the classroom,” he writes.
. . . our new strategy focuses on learning why some teachers are so much more effective than others and how best practices can be spread throughout the education system so that the average quality goes up. We will work with some of the best teachers to put their lectures online as a model for other teachers and as a resource for students.
Nelson Smith is happy about the plug for charter schools.
Gates also plugs Jay Mathews’ new book on KIPP, Work Hard, Be Nice. (Which makes a good complement to this book.)
Real-world self-esteem
January 27, 2009 By
Pumping up kids’ self-esteem with meaningless praise doesn’t help them learn — or grow up, writes Lenore Skenazy. Why not set kids up to do something praiseworthy and then praise them.
A kid who goes and gets the family’s groceries really has done something significant. Ditto a kid who makes the dinner. Ditto a kid who bikes over and hands grandma her card instead of just scribbling a note and having mom drop it in the mail.
There are a whole lot of “real-world” tasks we used to give kids that garnered them the kind of self-esteem we have taken to instilling artificially with gold stars for not-very-special “specialness.”
I just saw Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino in which retired auto worker Walt Kowalski tries to “man up” a Hmong boy. At the end, Kowalski gives the Silver Star that he won — and won hard – in the Korean War to the kid.
Newbery goes to ‘The Graveyard Book’
January 26, 2009 By
The Graveyard Book, a Jungle Book takeoff about a toddler raised by ghosts and werewolves, has won the Newbery Award for children’s literature.
(Neil) Gaiman’s book opens with a baby boy escaping an assassin who is massacred by his parents and older sister. The boy totters to a decrepit cemetery, where he’s adopted by ghosts, christened Nobody Owens (Bod for short) and given the Freedom of the Graveyard.
On Gaiman’s blog, he writes that “The Graveyard Book” is not a children’s book. It’s “a book for pretty much for all ages, although I’m not sure how far down that actually starts. I think I would have loved it when I was eight, but I don’t think that all eight-year olds were like me.”
The book isn’t meant to be scary, says Gaiman. It’s about growing up.
The award maintains the modern Newbery tradition of honoring books about death and parental absence. But it sounds like more fun than some of the recent honorees, which have been criticized for being inaccessible and dreary. It was a best-seller pre-Newbery.
II Doesn’t Always = II
January 26, 2009 By
Algebra II Doesn’t Always = II, reports the Washington Post. To prepare students for college and for technical careers, 20 states and the District of Columbia now require students to take advanced algebra. But the course content and standards vary significantly from school to school: One school’s Algebra II is another school’s Remedial Math.
“I want to make sure that if a student takes a course, it’s really a significant course, not a watered-down version,” said Ronald A. Peiffer, Maryland deputy state superintendent for academic policy.
Peiffer said that when the state made Algebra I a graduation requirement in the early 1990s, many schools began offering two versions, the traditional course and one some teachers called “baby algebra.” The state tried to rectify the disparity later, mandating an end-of-course graduation test for Algebra I that students are expected to pass to receive a diploma.
Ninety percent of Virginia’s Algebra II students passed the end-of-course Standards of Learning exam. Students need the course for an advanced diploma, but skip it if they’re content with a regular diploma.
Achieve worked with a group of states to design a national end-of-course Algebra II exam with both open-ended and multiple-choice questions. It was tried last year in a dozen states. “In some states, only one in five students passed,” the Post reports.
School fires 100-0 coach
January 26, 2009 By
Covenant School in Dallas has fired the girls’ basketball coach who let his team beat Dallas Academy 100-0. Coach Micah Grimes had posted a message on a youth basketball saying he disagreed with school officials’ apology for the lopsided victory.
Feds target kids’ books as unsafe
January 26, 2009 By
Libraries and bookstores could be forced to take kids’ books off the shelves unless the Consumer Product Safety Commission delays enforcement of a law designed to protect children from toys, clothing or other products tainted with dangerous chemicals. The law takes effect Feb. 10, reports the San Jose Mercury News:
Without a reprieve, San Jose library officials say they could be forced to close their children’s sections and send off all 700,000 volumes in them for safety testing.
Congress passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act in August to protect kids from exposure to lead and plastic. The law followed the discovery of lead paint in imported toy trains and mounting health concerns about baby bottles and toys containing phthalates, used to make some plastics more flexible.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission says the law covers all books aimed at children under 12, including books already in libraries. All must be tested for lead and phthalate or taken off the shelves.
Many children’s books, like the Dorothy Kunhardt touch-and-feel classic “Pat the Bunny,” have pages with plastic, cloth or other material to excite young minds.
And a toddler might chew on a book for a few minutes, picking up the germs of the toddlers who’ve chewed on it before. What are the odds of a kid getting seriously sick from Pat the Bunny? A gazillion to one, I’d guess. What are the odds that libraries will use money set aside for buying new books to pay for useless testing?
Children’s clothing will be more expensive to cover the costs of testing the same materials again and again; retailers and resellers say they’ll stop selling children’s clothing to avoid liability.
Just repeal the law, advises Walter Olson on Forbes.
(Thrift stores and other used-clothing sellers) while not obliged to test, face liability if they inadvertently sell a vintage item with any component (the axle on a skateboard, the zipper on a size 10 jacket, the rhinestone on a doll’s tiara) that flunks the tough new standards.
Since a broad-based testing regime will normally be incompatible with the economics of a thrift store, that will leave store managers with the unpleasant choice of : 1) ceasing to sell children’s goods; or 2) predictably being in noncompliance on a lot of old items (without knowing which ones) and hoping no one ever decides to enforce the law against them.
Legislators who sponsored the bill belatedly asked the CPSC to exempt children’s clothing with no metal or plastic fasteners and children’s books “that have no painted, plastic or metal components.” Use a staple, go to jail. It’s not clear the commission has the power to comply.
Good intentions, bad law, writes Health News Digest.
Parents are trying too hard
January 25, 2009 By
Mom and Dad are spending more time caring for their kids, writes economist Bryan Caplan in Chronicle of Higher Education. But is it worth it?
Time-diary studies show fathers and mothers spend more time caring for their kids than they did 40 years ago.
But the benefits of parental attention wear off as children grow up, Caplan argues. In the long run, nature beats nurture. And parents who do too much may burn out, which isn’t much fun for children or parents.
One notable study by Ellen Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute found that while most parents believe their children want more face time, only a tiny minority of children actually do. In contrast, about a third of children wish their parents were less stressed and tired. What kids seem to want from their parents isn’t more time; it’s a better attitude.
In other words: Take it easy, Mom and Dad. Your kids will be fine.
Hmm. I’m not convinced that parents have so little lasting effect on their children. On the other hand, neglectful parents probably aren’t reading the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Via Division of Labor.
Recent Comments