Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
Districts hire outside consultants to train teachers, even when teachers already working in the district have been using the “new” techniques successfully, complains Anthony Cody, an Oakland (CA) teacher turned professional development coach. If there are local teachers with expertise, why not make them the trainers?
Call it the CSI Effect: Forensics classes are turning high school students on to science, reports Education Week.
For educators like (Mary) Hanson, who teaches a forensics elective at Arlington High School, in St. Paul, Minn., the appeal to students is clear. The nitty-gritty of forensics, whether it involves studying a shoe print or fibers from a crime scene, she noted, excites students in a way that much of traditional science often does not.
Ms. Hanson fully acknowledges that “CSI” has led students to her class. But once they arrive, she emphasizes that forensic techniques—fingerprinting, handwriting analysis, or photogrammetry (making measurements from photos, such as a suspect’s height in a surveillance video)—are more precise and laborious than they appear on TV.
Ms. Hanson draws from work (as a reserve police officer), and from the academic content in other science classes she teaches, in her forensics class. Students use geometry, for instance, to study one of the grimmer aspects of a crime scene: blood spatter.
I learned about blood spatter analysis from watching Dexter, a forensic scientist who moonlights as a serial killer. Don’t try this at home, kids.
EIA’s Intercepts links to a series of Branford (CT) Eagle stories on the local district’s attempt to fire a 27-year veteran teacher for poor performance. The hearings were open to the public.
A kindergarten teacher for most of her career, Denise Farina switched to fourth grade and then second grade in recent years. For 25 years she received satisfactory ratings. Then a new principal assigned coaches to help her improve her teaching skills, but she made no progress, administrators charged.
Administrators, teachers and former aides testified that Farina was incompetent all along, but the previous principal failed to take action.
Most of them cast their eyes away from Farina as they described her disorganized classroom, her failure to hold a class together, her lack of teaching skills and her bleak attitude. They noted that she did not focus when they gave model lessons. They said she was not engaged. Instead of listening she would sit at her desk writing checks or filing her nails. Several witnesses commented on her nail filing.
(Gail) Riccitilli, a former aide and reading specialist said the principal had told her to stop “enabling” Farina by doing her job for her.
Witnesses said Farina did very little teaching in her kindergarten years.
“In my memory, the student would color or have snacks,” (Betsy Romanelli) said. “She would be at her desk. She would do personal things. Such as banking, writing greeting cards, letting writing.”
Even Farina’s union urged her to resign after she’d failed four Teaching Improvement Plan interventions. Two times is enough, a union rep testified.
Intercepts asks the obvious question: Why did it take 27 years? That’s on the principals who let Farina teach year after year, ignoring complaints from colleagues and parents, and then let her move to an even more challenging grade.
To graduate more students, Des Moines schools may offer a “fast-track” diploma, reports the Des Moines Register. Instead of the 23 credits now required, fast=trackers could earn a diploma with 18 credits. Yet they’d “meet all state and district requirements as well as the entrance criteria at Iowa’s three state universities,” according to Superintendent Nancy Sebring.
Many school districts have increased the number of credits required to graduate from high school, the Register notes. The extra credits typically are in arts, world culture, economics, foreign language and other electives. However, students who don’t have enough credits to graduate usually are lagging in core courses: They’re flunking English or math or history, not P.E. or music or “international foods” (meets Dubuque’s world culture requirement).
If “fast-track” graduates are eligible for college, why not lower the credit requirements for all students? Strong students might prefer to graduate early and work or travel (or play music or cook international foods) before going to college.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan wants to “turn around” 5,000 low-performing schools. Unfortunately, we don’t know how to save failing schools, writes Andy Smarick in Education Next. Millions of dollars have been spent trying with little success.
Despite years of experience and great expenditures of time, money, and energy, we still lack basic information about which tactics will make a struggling school excellent.
What does work? Closing bad schools and starting new ones from scratch, he writes. Operators of high-performing, high-poverty schools prefer to start fresh so they can create a new culture, a NewSchools Venture Fund study found.
Tom Torkelson, CEO of the high-performing IDEA network agrees: “I don’t do turnarounds because a turnaround usually means operating within a school system that couldn’t stomach the radical steps we’d take to get the school back on track. We fix what’s wrong with schools by changing the practices of the adults, and I believe there are few examples where this is currently possible without meddling from teacher unions, the school board, or the central office.”
Chris Barbic, founder and CEO of the stellar YES Prep network, says that “starting new schools and having control over hiring, length of day, student recruitment, and more gives us a pure opportunity to prove that low-income kids can achieve at the same levels as their more affluent peers. If we fail, we have only ourselves to blame, and that motivates us to bring our A-game every single day.”
When Duncan ran Chicago schools, he closed persistently low-performing schools. But elementary students didn’t benefit, because they were transferred to other low-performing schools, reports the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research. The only students who showed progress were the small number who moved to high-performing schools.
Update: New York City wants to close as many as a dozen failed schools and turn them into charter schools, reports the New York Post. But charter operators worry they won’t have flexibility to run the new schools, said Peter Murphy, policy director of the New York State Charter Schools Association. “It makes no sense to try to turn around a school [while keeping] all the impediments that got it into trouble in the first place,” he said.
To meet No Child Left Behind’s call for universal proficiency by 2014, some states have lowered standards, concludes a new report by the National Council for Education Statistics. In fourth-grade reading, 31 states consider students proficient who’d score below basic on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). Fifteen states set the proficiency cut-off below NAEP’s basic level in eighth-grade reading. In eighth-grade math, eight states set proficiency below NAEP’s basic level.
Education Week has more.
A 4th grade student judged to be proficient in math in Colorado or Tennessee, for example, could conceivably test at the “basic” level in Massachusetts or Missouri, where the standards were judged to be most rigorous, according to the study.
States’ very low expectations for fourth-grade reading are especially troubling, says Rob Manwaring at The Quick and the Ed. It’s a gateway skill.
Teach for America teachers in Los Angeles outperformed non-TFA teachers in the same grade levels, subjects and schools, concludes a study funded by the Broad Foundation. From Teacher Beat:
. . . TFA teachers were linked to test scores that were 3 points higher overall than non-TFA teachers, even those who had been in the classroom much longer. And, they were even more effective than other teachers with similar years of teaching experience. (The scores for that comparison were 4 points higher for TFA teachers than for non-TFA teachers.)
Students weren’t randomly assigned, points out Teacher Beat’s Stephen Sawchuk. It’s possible TFA teachers had easier classes. But it’s not likely: Newbies rarely get the easy assignments.
New York City’s charter schools benefit neighborhood public schools, concludes a study by Marcus Winters, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
. . . for every 1 percent of public school students who leave for a charter, reading proficiency among those who remain increases by about 0.02 standard deviations. Math performance is unaffected. However, the lowest-performing students in a school benefit from charter-school competition in both math and reading.
Competition from charter schools pushes the local school to improve instruction for the remaining students, Winters suggests.
In Watford, England, parents can’t watch their own kids in playgrounds, unless they’ve submitted to a criminal records check. It’s all in the name of protecting children from pedophiles. Parents are guilty till proven innocent.
Mums and dads must stay outside the fence at two adventure playgrounds while “play rangers,” public employees cleared by the police, supervise the children.
Concerns were raised last night that other councils around the country are adopting similar policies amid confusion over Government rules and increasing hysteria over child protection.
Via Mark Steyn on The Corner.
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