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Submit here for tomorrow’s Carnival of Education, which will be hosted by Steve Spangler’s Blog.
Massachusetts vs. the world
June 23, 2009 By
In some U.S. states, students are world class, reports The Quick and the Ed, using an analysis by Gary Philipps of the American Institutes of Research.
Massachusetts in particular stands out, and four other states–Minnesota, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Kansas–received grades of “B,” up there with the likes of Japan. On the flip side, there were a bunch of C’s and one D in, of course, Washington, DC, where fourth graders learn math at the same level as Ukraine.
This is useful information. International comparisons are often shot down on grounds of fundamental non-comparability. After all, Singapore and Hong Kong are tiny little bits of Asia that just happened to have been sequestered into autonomous political entities by the British because they were advantageously located for international commerce. Countries like Japan and Finland (which tops the PISA test but doesn’t participate in TIMSS) have unusually homogeneous populations and strong cultural ties among citizens as well as other beneficial non-education factors–strong social safety nets, low crime, school-oriented cultures, etc. They’re just not like us, the thinking goes, so it’s unreasonable to compare us to them.
. . . Massachusetts in particular, the highest performing state, is full of people from all manner of racial, ethnic, religious, and economic backgrounds.
If some states can do it, why not more?
The road to rigor
June 23, 2009 By
Aligning Rigorous Coursework With Academic And Social Support, a report from the Institute for Higher Education Policy, looks at ways to enable students learn challenging coursework.
I’ve got my paper copies of Understanding and Reporting on Academic Rigor from the Hechinger Institute at Teachers College of Columbia University. (I’m one of the authors.) You can get the report by emailing hechinger@tc.edu.
Two students, two schools
June 22, 2009 By
In Two students, two schools, the LA Times looks at 11th grade boys with similar aspirations and very different chances of success. Kyle Gosselin, the son of lawyers, takes advanced classes at high-scoring La Cañada High in southern California. Henry Ramirez, son of immigrant health workers, goes to gang-ridden Jefferson High, which graduates only 27 percent of ninth graders in four years; only 16 percent take a college-prep curriculum. (His family moves to Texas in the middle of the school year.) Both earn A’s and B’s — mostly — and aspire to careers in medicine. But Henry, who’s moved from school to school, taken watered-down classes, flunked geometry and skipped taking the PSAT, has no real college plans. Kyle has plans.
Any visitor to your two schools can’t help but notice that the La Cañada students, while hardly perfect, seem more focused, more driven to succeed than the average student at Jefferson. It’s something that deeply frustrates Juan Flecha, the Jefferson principal. “They’re such nice kids,” he said of his pupils, adding: “They’re so unmotivated.”
The “culture that students bring to a school” is a big part of the achievement gap, writes Heather Mac Donald in The Corner.
Without question, children in an inner-city school face obstacles to learning that middle- and upper-income students can little imagine — constant moves from one community to another; lack of privacy at home for studying; less competent, if not outright unqualified, teachers; parents who lack the academic knowledge to supplement their children’s school instruction; and a peer culture that stigmatizes effort. But that last factor — peer attitudes towards learning — is not a question of public or private resources but is part of the culture that students bring to a school.
Kyle is taking community college classes this summer. Henry hopes to return to LA to hang out with friends.
Kids like Henry would achieve more if more was asked of them. He doesn’t know how to prepare to earn a college degree. His parents — dad’s a high school dropout, mom had two college years in El Salvador — don’t know what it takes. My book, Our School, (available in hardcover or paperback), is about a school called Downtown College Prep that focuses relentlessly on ensuring that kids like Henry take college-prep courses, earn grades based on real achievement and make realistic college plans. The educational philosophy is: Work your butt off. Which kids from poor and working-class immigrant families will do once they’re persuaded it will get them where they want to go.
Teachers complain of pressure to promote
June 22, 2009 By
Philadelphia teachers are pushed to promote high school students who cut class or can’t read, reports the Inquirer.
“We have to give fake grades,” said a teacher at Mastbaum High in Kensington. “The pressure is very real.”
A teacher at University City High described getting pressure from the school’s administrators to pass a student who had 89 absences over a half-year.
. . . Schools are now judged on many criteria, including the number of students who pass.
. . . Teachers also blasted a district policy that requires them to give every student at least a 50 even if he or she didn’t attend class or do the work. At some schools, teachers said, the minimum grade is 60. Passing is 65.
I guess that’s what they mean by “failure is not an option.”
Inner-city schools lose young teachers
June 21, 2009 By
LA’s inner-city schools with young teachers are losing most of their staff to layoffs, reports NPR.
For example, at John Liechty Middle School, created not long ago as a shining example of innovative education, more than half of the teachers are being laid off.
The school is located in the heart of downtown L.A.’s rough Pico-Union neighborhood. It opened its doors just two years ago and is heavily staffed with young, nontenured teachers.
“Originally when we hired, new teachers were the ones that opted to our program,” says Principal Jeanette Stevens.
Veteran teachers weren’t interested in the school when it opened, but now they’re transferring in to replace young teachers.
“I’m having to go out and pick up teachers who may not be vested in the program [because] they are displaced and they have a right to the position,” Stevens says.
Even administrators, long out of the classroom, may replace the young teachers. Stevens says she’s devastated.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever see another group of educators that are so passionate and committed to the work that they are doing.” And Stevens says she’ll really miss the young teachers’ innovation.
Seventh-grade teachers wrote a horror movie starring a kidnapper named Pythagoras who leaves ransom notes, such as: “Find all the squares and don’t be late, you need to find eight.” As a result, all the seventh-graders know the Pythagorean Theorem.
Devoted dads, less risky teen sex
June 21, 2009 By
Devoted dads can reduce risky teen sex, concludes a Boston College study published in Child Development. “Risky” means sex without condoms or contraception.
The more attentive the dad — and the more he knows about his teenage child’s friends — the bigger the impact on the teen’s sexual behavior, the researchers found. While an involved mother can also help stave off a teen’s sexual activity, dads have twice the influence.
. . . Parental knowledge of a teen’s friends and activities was rated on a five point scale. When it came to the dads, each point higher in parental knowledge translated into a 7 percent lower rate of sexual activity in the teen. For the moms, one point higher in knowledge translated to a 3 percent lower rate of teen sexual activity.
The impact of family time overall was even more striking. One additional family activity per week predicted a 9 percent drop in sexual activity.
A young father who’d grown up fatherless once told me he took his little girl to McDonald’s every week for a daddy-daughter meal. He wanted her to feel special long before teen-age boys asked her out and expected something in return.
Exit exam under fire
June 20, 2009 By
California’s exit exam could be suspended, if Democrats in the Legislature have their way. The proposal is in a budget-balancing bill.
When the state is making cuts that could lead to a shorter school year, fewer teachers and larger class sizes, it doesn’t seem realistic to expect the same results as before the cuts,” said Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Baldwin Vista (Los Angeles County), in a statement.
Dropping the exit exam doesn’t save much money, reports the Sacramento Bee.
The proposal is expected to save less than $10 million per year statewide, unless schools supplement that sum by reducing or eliminating remedial programs for low-achieving students.
In other words: Instead of giving extra help to students with poor reading and math skills, let’s just give them worthless diplomas.
Gov. Schwarzenegger says he’ll veto the provision.
Young, single and funemployed
June 20, 2009 By
Some twentysomethings aren’t sweating the recession, reports The Phoenix from a Boston club. Those with no children and no mortgage — and with supportive parents — see unemployment as a long vacation.
Nestled in a corner banquette are Senam, 25, and his friend Khushbu, 24. Senam’s dressed in cashmere and khakis, not a pore in sight. Khushbu’s all in black, fondling a BlackBerry. He’s in architecture, she’s a lawyer. Both sip white wine and seem happy to confide in a fleece-clad interloper.
“I was laid off last week,” says Senam, stretching like a happy feline. He grins and drinks. “Looks like it’s time for a vacation to Puerto Rico!” He smiles even more broadly now, revealing a perfect set of exceptionally white teeth. Khushbu giggles, smoothes her long black hair. “I lost my job a month ago,” she says calmly. “Here’s to the economy!” They clink glasses.
. . . Cara, a 25 year old with a background in international relations and journalism — who is also currently unemployed — is equally unfazed. “The economy better pick up soon!” she says, laughing. “But if it doesn’t, well, I’ll just have to try [looking for work] longer.” She shrugs and goes back to her drink. “I think the economy is just making people spend smarter,” adds Beth, who works in the restaurant industry. “Maybe I won’t go out to eat at a mediocre restaurant or spend a lot of money just going out for a beer. If I spend money, I want it to be amazing.”
In New York City’s Williamsburg neighborhood, parents are telling their heavily subsidized children that the money is running out, reports the New York Times.
Luis Illades, an owner of the Urban Rustic Market and Cafe on North 12th Street, said he had seen a steady number of applicants, in their late 20s, who had never held paid jobs: They were interns at a modeling agency, for example, or worked at a college radio station. In some cases, applicants have stormed out of the market after hearing the job requirements.
“They say, ‘You want me to work eight hours?’ ” Mr. Illades said. “There is a bubble bursting.”
Famed for its concentration of heavily subsidized 20-something residents — also nicknamed trust-funders or trustafarians — Williamsburg is showing signs of trouble. Parents whose money helped fuel one of the city’s most radical gentrifications in recent years have stopped buying their children new luxury condos, subsidizing rents and providing cash to spend at Bedford Avenue’s boutiques and coffee houses.
Then there’s the LA Times story on the “funemployed.”
Is marriage obsolete?
June 19, 2009 By
Sandra Tsing Loh is getting divorced after 20 years of marriage and two children, she writes in The Atlantic. In Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off, she suggests that most of us should give up on lifelong marriage too. Keeping romance alive is too much work for the modern woman.
Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I cannot take on yet another arduous home- and self-improvement project, that of rekindling our romance. Sobered by this failure as a mother—which is to say, my failure as a wife—I’ve since begun a journey of reading, thinking, and listening to what’s going on in other 21st-century American families. And along the way, I’ve begun to wonder, what with all the abject and swallowed misery: Why do we still insist on marriage? Sure, it made sense to agrarian families before 1900, when to farm the land, one needed two spouses, grandparents, and a raft of children. But now that we have white-collar work and washing machines, and our life expectancy has shot from 47 to 77, isn’t the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?
Tsing Loh, who wrote two years ago that women prefer food to sex, also shares the details of her friends’ sexless marriages. The hubbies cook, remodel the kitchen and chauffeur the kids but prefer internet porn or cooking magazines to sex with their wives. The wives are inspired by Tsing Loh’s divorce to consider dumping their “male kitchen bitches.”
The kids will do almost as well raised by a single parent as in a two-parent family, Tsing Loh argues, as long as there’s “domestic stability,” i.e., no new boyfriends and girlfriends moving in and out. Divorce is OK if you stay single?
Laura at 11D says Loh lacks credibility on the subject of marriage.
She breaks up her marriage and then writes a magazine article about why people weren’t really meant to be married. Hello! Credibility problems here!
Loh explains that she had an affair, which ended their marriage. However, people weren’t really meant to be married for so long. Her kids wouldn’t really miss having both parents at home anyway. . . . Her husband and her friends’ husbands weren’t so great in the sack. And the husbands are kind of girlie in the way they help out around the house. Why should a marriage be work? She fishes around for any explanation that will save her.
Those of us who enjoy being married never seem to get space in The Atlantic. Perhaps it’s because we don’t wish to share the details with a national audience. Too little information.
Once a performance artist, Tsing Loh has no such scruples. Nonetheless, in a few years, her children will be able to read about her boredom with their father in The Atlantic archives. However disguised, her friends will guess the identities of the pathetic Rachel and Ian and Ellen and Ron. Who may now be her ex-friends.
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