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'Have it your way,' would-be dropouts

October 25, 2009 By

Worried about a high dropout rate, Pinellas, Florida schools are emulating Burger King. If traditional school doesn’t work for you, “have it your way.” School leaders haven’t figured out what the options will look like, but they’re very aware of charter school competition, reports the St. Petersburg Times:

Pinellas has three charter schools geared toward at-risk high school students, with two more on the way.

. . . At the new Mavericks High in Largo, students who boost their academic performance and attendance will eventually get to spend more time in a game room playing John Madden football and Tiger Woods golf.

Another charter school, the Florida High School for Accelerated Learning, is scheduled to open next fall in Kenneth City. Its approach is big on flexible scheduling, a self-set pace and technology.

“We think we can do some of the things that they’re doing, and just as well or better,” Chief Academic Officer Cathy Fleeger told the Times.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

Standing up for school reform

October 25, 2009 By

President Obama gives a great education speech, writes David Brooks in the New York Times.  And it’s not just words. He’s “standing up to the teachers’ unions and the other groups that have undermined nearly every other reform effort.”

Obama’s team failed to defend D.C.’s successful voucher program from congressional Democrats, Brooks concedes. (There’s so much pressure that vouchers may survive, after all.) But, over all, “the news is good.”

Over the past few days I’ve spoken to people ranging from Bill Gates to Jeb Bush and various education reformers. They are all impressed by how gritty and effective the Obama administration has been in holding the line and inciting real education reform.

Over the summer, the Department of Education indicated that most states would not qualify for Race to the Top money. Now states across the country are changing their laws: California, Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin and Tennessee, among others.

States are raising their caps on charter schools and moving to link teacher pay and retention to student performance.

The American Federation of Teachers recently announced innovation grants for performance pay ideas. The New Haven school district has just completed a new teacher contract, with union support, that includes many of the best reform ideas.

Education reform has many enemies, Brooks writes. But, so far, Obama hasn’t wavered.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

The three-year degree

October 24, 2009 By

College shouldn’t take four years, writes Lamar Alexander on Newsweek.

Hartwick college, a small liberal-arts school in upstate New York, makes this offer to well-prepared students: earn your undergraduate degree in three years (six semesters) instead of four, and save about $43,000—the amount of one year’s tuition and fees. A number of innovative colleges are making the same offer to students anxious about saving time and money.

Here’s a discussion of the three-year degree.

There’s no question that well-prepared students who know what they want to study can complete a degree in three years. That’s a huge cost savings for students — and colleges save when their facilities are in full use over the summer. But many students lack the academic skills and the direction to finish in three years — or four, for that matter. Perhaps colleges should use off-campus, online learning for students who need real-world time to clarify their goals.

It’s my college reunion this weekend. Many of my  ’74 classmates are winding down their first career and thinking about what to do next. Or they’ve lost their jobs and moved to Plan B. I’m glad I had four years of college — and glad I didn’t linger there too long.

Filed Under: College

Send more kids to college

October 23, 2009 By

We need to send more students to college, writes Marcus A. Winters on National Review Online. The U.S. has “too few college-educated workers to meet the challenges of our increasingly complicated society,” he argues.

The case that too many students are going to college comes through two arguments: that we have reached the zenith of our ability to produce students with the skills necessary to succeed in college, and that for marginal students, the economic returns from college are not as good as advertised. Neither of these critiques stand up to scrutiny.

Low-income students may fail in the typical low-income school, but there are many well-organized schools with good teachers that enable these students to suceed, Winters writes.

. . . if we could improve the quality of our ineffective teachers or replace them with effective ones, we would dramatically improve educational outcomes. There is plenty of room for schools to get better, particularly those where low achievement is the norm.

Furthermore, “the wage premium a year of college coursework yields has been increasing at a rapid clip since about 1979,” Winters writes.

. . . in the middle-to-late 1970s, educational attainment stalled, though technology continued progressing. Since 1977, high-school-graduation rates, college-attendance rates, and standardized-test scores have all plateaued. Now too few educated workers chase after a growing number of skilled jobs, allowing them to command ever-higher wage premiums.

Not every student can benefit from college, Winters concedes. But if we did a better job in K-12, many more could learn the skills for 21st-century success.

Filed Under: Careers, College Tagged With: , ,

From 1969: Education's high-tech future

October 23, 2009 By

Computopia offers a Japanese view from 1969 about the high-tech world of 1989, including the classroom of the future. The teacher appears on a giant screen presenting a math problem while students work on their desktop computers. Students revise incorrect answers with a light pen until the computer says they’ve got it right.

For the purpose of maintaining order, the future classroom will come equipped with watchful robots that rap students on the head if they lose focus or act up.

Dream on, teachers of 2009.

Filed Under: Education, technology Tagged With: , ,

Shouting is the new spanking

October 22, 2009 By

For would-be perfect parents, shouting is the new spanking, reports the New York Times.

Many in today’s pregnancy-flaunting, soccer-cheering, organic-snack-proffering generation of parents would never spank their children. We congratulate our toddlers for blowing their nose (“Good job!”), we friend our teenagers (literally and virtually), we spend hours teaching our elementary-school offspring how to understand their feelings. But, incongruously and with regularity, this is a generation that yells.

I once had to fill out a long form to sign up my daughter for one lousy week of summer child care. I was asked what I did when my child misbehaved. I knew “give a time out” was the correct answer, but in a fit of honesty I wrote: “I yell.”

Let’s get real, folks. Parents yell sometimes. And kids are warped for life, but you’ve got to warp them one  way or another.

Filed Under: Children, Parenting Tagged With: , ,

A carnival of carnivals

October 22, 2009 By

EduCarnival v. 2 was dark this week, so Andrea Hermitt of Notes from a Homeschooling Mom is trying to start a Carnival of Educators to replace the late Carnival of Education, which was supposed to return in September and didn’t.

She says the carnival is for true bloggers writing about education — not commercial sites. Amen to that.

Submit here by Sunday at midnight (Eastern); the carnival will be up by noon Tuesday.

I think all would-be education carnival organizers should get together to share the work, which is considerable. I will publicize, but not organize.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: ,

Is PISA the best test?

October 22, 2009 By

U.S. students don’t excel on PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), but it may not be the best test, writes Jay Mathews on Class Struggle.  He cites a math question for 15-year-olds highlighted by Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, a member of the U.S. advisory board to PISA:

For a rock concert a rectangular field of size 100 m by 50 m was reserved for the audience. The concert was completely sold out and the field was full with all the fans standing. Which one of the following is likely to be the best estimate of the total number of people attending the concert?

A. 2000

B. 5000

C. 20000

D. 50000

E. 100000

Like Mathews, I answered 5,000; PISA says the answer is 20,000. Loveless agrees that the question involves trivial math and would “throw kids off.” Not every kid goes to rock concerts and not every culture is willing to cram four people in a square meter of space.

“PISA exams are written by the losing side in a century-old debate over how to teach math,” Mathews writes. The pro-PISA progressives “want to make math instruction more relevant to the real world, and emphasize mathematical reasoning more than calculation,” while the anti-PISA and pro-TIMSS  “traditionalists say you can’t reason well without mastering the fundamentals.”

Unlike TIMSS, PISA’s approach to science leans left, Mathews writes.

On PISA’s student questionnaire, those who support statements such as “I am in favor of having laws that regulate factory emissions even if this would increase the price of products” are deemed to be environmentally responsible. Those who disagree are not.

Despite the differences between PISA and TIMSS, however, some of the same countries —Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan — do very well on both.

The feds are spending $350 million to help states develop common tests to go with common standards.

Filed Under: Testing Tagged With: , , , ,

What teacher research doesn't say

October 22, 2009 By

Teachers are the “most important factor” in students’ success, President Obama told the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. He’s wrong, writes Linda Pearlstein, now blogging at The Educated Reporter. Researchers don’t say teacher quality is more important than what parents are doing at home.

Of the various factors inside school, teacher quality has had more effect on student scores than any other that has been measured. (Principal quality: Nobody’s effectively isolated this yet, that I know of, but I’d venture to guess it makes as much if not more of a difference.) And that an effective teacher can move students of all backgrounds forward. Certainly nobody has ever proven that good teaching matters more than, say, genetic endowment, or home environment.

I’d like to see more foundation money go into looking for ways to help “at risk parents” do better with their kids. In my years of reporting on poverty and my work on Our School, I met many parents who didn’t understand what they could do to help their kids succeed in school and stay away from gangs.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

Unsafe for learning

October 21, 2009 By

I’ve got a column up at Pajamas Media on bringing order and safety to chaotic, dangerous schools.

Pacific Research’s Not As Safe As You Think finds it’s very easy to avoid reporting any school as “persistently dangerous.”  The legal requirement is useless.

Filed Under: Education, Violence Tagged With: , , , ,
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