Banned from homeschooling their five children in Germany, Uwe and Hannelore Romeike are seeking political asylum in the U.S., claiming persecution for their evangelical Christian beliefs. The family, which includes five children ranging in age from 11 to 3, now lives near Knoxville, Tennessee.
Romeike, like many conservative parents in the U.S., said he wanted to teach his own children because his children’s German school textbooks contained language and ideas that conflicted with his family’s values.
Homeschooling is banned in Germany. The parents faced fines and the possible loss of custody if they continued to defy orders to send their children to school.
Via Instapundit.
Jimi Hendrix is the role model in San Francisco public schools, report Chronicle columnists Philip Matier and Andrew Ross.
“Remember the first time you heard Jimi Hendrix?” reads the cover of the district’s new 51-page education guide. “Our plan is as transformational now as his music was then!”
. . . a portrait of the ’60s rocker – looking somewhat pensive, somber and perhaps stoned – graces the cover and every page of the manual.
The book also comes with a Hendrix poster and Hendrix-emblazoned canvas bag, which were handed out to a couple hundred administrators at Superintendent Carlos Garcia’s back-to-school confab in September.
Not everyone, however, is in tune with the campaign, given that the songwriter-guitarist died after overdosing on prescription drugs and alcohol at the age of 27.
Perhaps the superintendent was in a Purple Haze when he decided to spend the district’s limited funds on the just-like-Jimi campaign.
Flexibility is helping Los Angeles charter schools deal with funding cuts without pink-slipping young teachers, reports the LA Daily News. Principals can negotiate with their staffs to save jobs.
. . . after laying off three teacher assistants and canceling a popular dance program at the charter school, (Our Community School) Principal Chris Ferris decided to approach her staff with a question:
Do you want to keep free health-care benefits or keep more teachers?
. . . Free from rigid union contracts, able to make spending decisions at the school-site level and continuing to see enrollment growth, charter schools can run their campuses like small businesses. At a time when the Los Angeles Unified School District faces layoffs of some 8,500 people and is dismantling popular programs to cut costs, some charter schools are actually hiring teachers.
Most charter schools don’t have top-scale teachers who earn twice as much as novice teachers.
Via Mickey Kaus.
Fur is flying over a Partnership for 21st Century Skills’ talk to the National Education Association. Though reporters were not invited, Lynne Munson wrote on Common Core that P21’s “Paige Kuni explained that in the ’search cut and paste environment’ students . . . only need to know ‘enough of the most crucial information’.”
She didn’t say who decides when enough is enough or what P21 considers crucial. Is it enough earth science to know that the earth is round? Enough literature to have heard of Shakespeare? Enough history to know that we once fought a civil war because the North and South disagreed about something?
. . . In their remarks, none of the panelists mentioned science, geography, foreign languages, history, literature, art, civics — the list goes on and on.
Kuni responded in a Flypaper comment.
. . . I believe that students absolutely need to be taught content in combination with instruction that leads to 21st century skills like critical thinking, innovation, and collaboration. I believe that by creating schools that adopt the approaches P21 supports, students will be able to make connections of how a changing form makes butterflies more successful in the ecosystem. That they can think critically about how life cycles connect to evolution. And that they could extrapolate to other topics such as how product lifecycles in business are the same or different from butterfly lifecycles in making companies successful. When they are 25 if they cannot recall the name of one-step in the lifecycle, it isn’t important as long as they possess the learning skills that allow them to access that information when they need it (search- cut- paste).
Eduwonk sees common ground — if P21 adherents get a lot more specific about how students are going to learn the content that’s essential to thinking critically or creatively.
Robert Pondiscio, who’s back and blogging, muses about resistance to “content.” Personally, I prefer “knowledge.”
University of California’s new admissions policy will increase the number of whites, reduce Asian enrollment and give a very small boost to Hispanics and blacks. The university no longer will require applicants to take three SAT II subject tests. From the San Jose Mercury News:
“It’s affirmative action for whites,” said UC-Berkeley professor Ling-chi Wang.
. . . Under the new policy, according to UC’s own estimate, the proportion of Asian admissions would drop as much as 7 percent, while admissions of whites could rise by up to 10 percent.
California’s Asian-American students are much more likely to take college-prep classes, earn high grades, do well on subject-matter and math tests and apply to public universities. However, they don’t do quite as well as whites on the SAT I “reasoning” test, which relies on verbal skills, because so many speak English as a second language.
Asian-Americans make up 37 percent of UC students, though they’re only 12 percent of California’s population. At UC-Berkeley, 46 percent of the freshman class is Asian. Giving preferences to students from low-income families qualifies more Asian-Americans for UC.
The only policy change that’s boosted admit numbers for Hispanic and black students is relying more heavily on class rank: Students with good grades at heavily minority high schools may qualify for UC despite weak test scores.
It’s possible to create a good school for low-income students without parent involvement, argues Jay Mathews in the Washington Post. Parents will support the school when it proves itself, not before.
Low-income parents may often be distracted just trying to make a living, but they know what works. Once they see a school keeping its promises, they provide the kind of support found in suburban schools. But it’s important to remember that good schooling must come before parental support, not the other way around.
Poorly educated parents may not know how to support their children’s learning. It’s a role they need to learn from their kids’ teachers and school leaders.
Flypaper’s Andy Smarick agrees with Mathews and points to the Education Next article on paternalistic schools.
In the short run, children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder benefit from drug therapy, researchers say. They do much better than kids treated with talk therapy alone or routine medical care. In the long run — more than two years – ADHD drugs lose effectiveness. And kids who take the drugs for three years or more end up shorter than those who quit earlier. Some scientists accuse others of downplaying the long-term trend, reports the Washington Post:
One principal scientist in the study, psychologist William Pelham, said that the most obvious interpretation of the data is that the medications are useful in the short term but ineffective over longer periods but added that his colleagues had repeatedly sought to explain away evidence that challenged the long-term usefulness of medication. When their explanations failed to hold up, they reached for new ones, Pelham said.
. . . Pelham, who has conducted many drug therapy studies, said the drugs have a valuable role: They buy parents and clinicians time to teach youngsters behavioral strategies to combat inattention and hyperactivity. Over the long term, he said, parents need to rely on those skills.
Nearly all parents will try behavioral strategies — if they’re offered before the family doctor suggests drugs, Pelham said. If drugs are offered first, most parents won’t go on to try behavioral approaches.
British police have identified 200 children, some as young as 13, as potential terrorists, reports the Independent.
The programme, run by the Association of Chief Police Officers, asks teachers, parents and other community figures to be vigilant for signs that may indicate an attraction to extreme views or susceptibility to being “groomed” by radicalisers. Sir Norman (Bettison), whose force covers the area in which all four 7 July 2005 bombers grew up, said: “What will often manifest itself is what might be regarded as racism and the adoption of bad attitudes towards ‘the West’.
“One of the four bombers of 7 July was, on the face of it, a model student. He had never been in trouble with the police, was the son of a well-established family and was employed and integrated into society.
“But when we went back to his teachers they remarked on the things he used to write. In his exercise books he had written comments praising al-Qa’ida. That was not seen at the time as being substantive. Now we would hope that teachers might intervene, speak to the child’s family or perhaps the local imam who could then speak to the young man.”
Via BoingBoing.
Despite rumors, Boston Latin School has no vampires among its elite students, says headmaster Lynne Moone Teta.
“Supposedly 3 students believe that they are vampires and today when a student was bitten the police were informed,” wrote one student in a message to TheBostonChannel.com. “I heard that one girl was arrested another suspended.”
Police, however, denied reports that anyone at the school was bitten.
If your school has to issue a press release denying your vampire problem, you’ve got a problem, writes Moe Lane (via Instapundit). We’ve all seen the movie, so we know what happens next:
… there’s going to be a few more people gone, and then there’s going to be a couple more, and there’s going to be some conveniently-upcoming big shindig and the bloodsucking fiends are going to be converging en masse on the conveniently-stake-free walking smorgasbord. Just like clockwork.
Lane has practical advice on “what to do when one of the gore-lusting leeches comes smashing through the walls looking for your precious bodily fluids.” Read the comments too.
In a column dissing experts, NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof describes the “Dr. Fox effect,” named for experiments in which “an actor was paid to give a meaningless presentation to professional educators,” psychiatrists, psychologists and graduate students.
The actor was introduced as “Dr. Myron L. Fox” (no such real person existed) and was described as an eminent authority on the application of mathematics to human behavior. He then delivered a lecture on “mathematical game theory as applied to physician education” — except that by design it had no point and was completely devoid of substance. However, it was warmly delivered and full of jokes and interesting neologisms.
Afterward, those in attendance were given questionnaires and asked to rate “Dr. Fox.” They were mostly impressed. “Excellent presentation, enjoyed listening,” wrote one. Another protested: “Too intellectual a presentation.”
Students learn more from high-content lectures, researchers concluded, but give the same high ratings to “expressive” Fox-style lectures with no content as they do to “expressive” lectures with content.
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