No Child Left Inside is the theme of this week’s Carnival of Homeschooling, which is hosted by Corn and Oil.
Submit here to be included in tomorrow’s Carnival of Education.
Better at 9 and 13 but not at 17
April 28, 2009 By
Nine- and 13-year-olds are doing better in reading and math since the early 1970s, according to the new Nation’s Report Card analysis of long-term trends by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Seventeen-year-olds are doing about the same.
The racial achievement gap has narrowed since the ’70s, but there’s been little progress from 2004 to 2008. Nine-year-old boys narrowed the reaidng gap with girls.
What counts is what kids know when they finish high school and go into the world, writes Cato’s Andrew Coulson. The failure to show progress for 17-year-olds represents a “productivity collapse unparalleled in any other sector of the economy.”
At the end of high school, students perform no better today than they did nearly 40 years ago, and yet we spend more than twice as much per pupil in real, inflation-adjusted terms.
Students are taking more challenging math courses than they did a generation ago. You’d think that would pay off in math scores, but it hasn’t yet made a difference at the high school level.
Update: The lowest-achieving students have improved more than the highest achievers in the last four years, narrowing the gap, points out USA Today.
$3 million for not-very-matic pizza
April 27, 2009 By
Let’s make our own low-cost, healthy pizza, San Jose Unified officials thought in 2003. We’ll buy a $720,000 Pizzamatic, spend $2.2 million to build space for it in the central kitchen and then call Domino’s for pizza. It turns out that $3 million doesn’t buy a lot of pizza, reports ABC News.
It’s called the Pizzamatic — an automated, industrial, all-in-one, pizza-making workhorse.
“It has a dough stamper, followed by a sauce machine,” said student nutrition consultant John Sixt.
It has a mammoth stainless-steel production line, like those the big pizza companies use. No other school district in the country has one.
It can produce up to 1,000 pizzas an hour. In the last two years, the Pizzamatic has produced 2,000 pizzas. Total.
“Sounds like the Pizzamatic isn’t very matic,” said parent Lisa Stapleton.
The pizza business is a lot harder than district officials had anticipated. In 2007, San Jose Unified hired a consultant to get the machine to work. Sort of.
Sixt realized the Pizzamatic needed a full-time technician to keep it running and to keep all those electric eyes lined up. He also needed a crew to clean the machine each day. So he abandoned most of the Pizzamatic — all those gadgets — except for the oven and a couple conveyor belts.
Pizza production is now down to just one day a week. Kitchen workers assemble the pizzas by hand, starting with frozen crusts. The Pizzamatic sits polished and empty. It’s too complicated and temperamental for the staff to manage. They wait at the end of the assembly line to feed pizzas into the oven, one by one.
. . . The district also never figured out how to get the pizzas to schools all over the city before they got cold. They didn’t have enough trucks and drivers.
Over the past five years, San Jose Unified has spent $1.4 million to order out for pizza; the central kitchen — using staff and the not-very-matic Pizzamatic — produces 100 pizzas each Friday for elementary school pizza parties.
However, Superintendent Don Iglesias dreams of the day when San Jose Unified will make a profit as the pizza supplier for all 33 school districts in the county. Perhaps flying pigs can deliver the pies.
No longer bookless
April 27, 2009 By
I donated to “Bookless in Miami,” a second-grade teacher, through Donors Choose. She’d written:
When I first walked into my new classroom, I thought there must have been a mistake. “Where are all the books?” I asked the Assistant Principal. She pointed to a table of scattered books. I was in shock to find that there was no “classroom library” where students could find rich literature, and books from a variety of genres they could read from.
. . . My students need an abundance of interesting books that can be matched to their independent reading level in order for them to be kept motivated and entertained during their reading time.
Her students have the books. She sent photos.
Second-guessing Disney’s black princess
April 27, 2009 By
Disney’s first black princess, Tiana, is not PC enough for some critics. Princess Tiana, the star of an upcoming Disney movie, turns into a frog when she kisses the wrong frog and has to seek a voodoo queen to get the curse lifted.
Disney has already changed the profession of the princess (an aspiring restaurant entrepreneur instead of a chambermaid) and name (Tiana instead of Maddy, which critics thought was too similar to “Mammy”, a once-common term for black female slaves in white households). Tiana will be played by Anika Noni Rose, who starred in Dreamgirls, while Tiana’s mother will be played by the talk-show host Oprah Winfrey.
The controversy has intensified after it was revealed that the film would be set in New Orleans and that Tiana would find love with a white prince — well, almost. His skin has been described as olive-toned and he will be voiced by Bruno Campos, a Brazilian actor.
When you think about it, the classic princesses — Cinderella and Snow White — worked as maids.
Kids sing for the earth — or mourn
April 26, 2009 By
Sixth grader writes environmental song — and gets children around the world sing it. Cool.
Aitan (Grossman) wrote “100 Generations,” a ballad he says is about “the integrity of nature we’re taking for granted,” and sent it to schools on six continents in search of children like him who wanted, through the power of music, to fight global warming.
Children from Botswana, France, Taiwan, Venezuela, Ethiopia, and the United States are singing the chorus and adding words in their own languages. Aitan hopes to sell copies of the song on KidEarth to raise money for the World Wildlife Fund, the Alliance for Climate Protection and other environmental groups.
The lyrics are here. In the English version, the chorus speaks to a hawk:
You and I, we share the same elation.
River run down from heaven’s hill,
Ever flow, I know you will,
Lasting for 100 generations.
Activists have persuaded children the earth is doomed, writes Ashley Thorne of National Association of Scholars.
According to a poll commissioned by Habitat Heroes (a.k.a. “the first social-networking site for young eco-warriors”), “One out of three children aged 6 to 11 fears that Ma Earth won’t exist when they grow up.” And “more than half—56 percent—worry that the planet will be a blasted heath” by then.
. . . Children are environmentally aware — so aware that they are cringing in fear that the end of the world is nigh.
Kids talk about eco-apocalypse. But do they really believe they have no future?
Better brains through chemistry
April 25, 2009 By
Neuroenhancing drugs, such as Adderall and Ritalin, are popular with college students who want to study and party, but not necessarily sleep or eat, writes Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker. Research in 2005 estimated 4.1 percent of undergrads “had taken prescription stimulants for off-label use; at one school, the figure was twenty-five per cent. ”
. . . white male undergraduates at highly competitive schools—especially in the Northeast—are the most frequent collegiate users of neuroenhancers. Users are also more likely to belong to a fraternity or a sorority, and to have a G.P.A. of 3.0 or lower. . . . they are decent students at schools where, to be a great student, you have to give up a lot more partying than they’re willing to give up.
Most students who use stimulants get them from an acquaintance diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder who has prescription. Since students have grown up with classmates on ADHD meds, they assume they’re safe.
For us elders, “smart pills” may prevent cognitive decline — or make it possible to work harder for longer. The undrugged may not be able to compete.
Dropouts drop back in
April 25, 2009 By
Some cities are persuading more students to stay in school, according to the America’s Promise Alliance survey on dropouts. On average, only half of students in big cities graduate. However, Philadelphia, Tucson and Kansas City boosted their graduation rates by 20 percentage points or more over a decade; 10 more cities saw double-digit improvements.
Graduation rates fell dramatically in Las Vegas, Wichita and Omaha.
When there are few jobs, education looks good, reports MSNBC.
. . . long waiting lists for adult education and GED — General Education Development — classes, spiking enrollments at community colleges and, perhaps, a surge in returns by high-school dropouts and a decline in those who leave in the first place, may all point to a renewed focus on education, experts say.
For every 1 percentage point rise in the unemployment rate, the dropout rate falls by 5 percent, one study found.
Algebra = ‘most failed’ college class
April 24, 2009 By
Math 111 – intermediate algebra — is the “most failed” class at Oregon State. Students aren’t prepared, says an instructor.
“If you never had to memorize your times tables, how do you factor a number with a calculator?” (Peter) Argyres said. “I see people fail Math 111 for arithmetic issues all the time.”
When students never learned the basic information appropriately in high school, or earlier, it is significantly more difficult for them to succeed when they get to college algebra.
Only half of incoming students place into college math.
OSU Frosh Gettin’ Suspicious They Ain’t Learnin’ Much in High School, summarizes the Two Million Minutes Blog.
Textbooks push the softer side of Islam
April 24, 2009 By
Textbooks are pushing a PC version of Islam, reports the American Textbook Council in a study of the most commonly used junior high and high school texts. “Jihad,” commonly defined in the ’90s as “sacred” or “holy” struggle or “holy war,” was a struggle “to do one’s best to resist temptation and overcome evil” in Houghton Mifflin’s junior high textbook. That wasn’t soft enough. By 2005, the company “apparently had removed jihad from its entire series of social studies textbooks,” the report finds.
Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Gary Bauer complains that textbooks are “intentionally vague” about sharia law, “the Islamic code that can be used to subjugate women and deal death to wayward believers.”
Holt Rinehart Winston’s 2006 “Medieval to Early Modern Times” junior high textbook states simply, “[Sharia] sets rewards for good behavior and punishments for crimes.” Another popular history textbook states, “Muslim law requires that Muslim leaders offer religious toleration.”
Descriptions of Islam since 9/11 are particularly disturbing. Though Islamic extremism has become a fact of life throughout much of the world, most of the reviewed textbooks suggest instead that poverty, ignorance, and the existence of Israel are at the root of terrorism.
Christianity doesn’t get such sensitive treatment, Bauer writes.
One book describes the Crusades as “religious wars launched against Muslims by European Christians.” But when Muslims attacked Christians and took their land, the process is referred to as “building” an empire.
Via Contentions.
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