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Pastafarians seek equal time

November 26, 2009 By

Darwinian evolution? Intelligent design? In a letter to a Kansas school board,  Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster devotees demand that Pastafarian beliefs be taught in public schools along with other theories of creation.

Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.

Pastafarians also want teachers to wear the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s chosen outfit, pirate regalia. (“He becomes angry if we don’t.”)

You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.

The Church of the FSM is “today’s fastest growing carbohydrate-based religion,” claims founder Bobby Henderson. And no wonder.  The Pastafarian heaven features strippers and a beer volcano. My husband, a devour Frequent Flyertarian is considering conversion.

Wikipedia has more.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

Teacher ed: Dump the American dream

November 25, 2009 By

Future teachers will be required to repudiate the American dream — “the idea that in this country, hardworking people of every race, color and creed can get ahead on their own merits” == at University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus, writes Katherine Kersten in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

According to a task force’s proposal, American dreamers will not be recommended for licensure on the grounds they lack “cultural competence” to teach non-white students.

The report advocates making race, class and gender politics the “overarching framework” for all teaching courses at the U.

. . . The first step toward “cultural competence,” says the task group, is for future teachers to recognize — and confess — their own bigotry.

The task group recommends requiring prospective teachers to prepare a report on their prejudices and stereotypes with points for admitting to bias.

The goal of these exercises, in the task group’s words, is to ensure that “future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression.”

. . . In particular, aspiring teachers must be able “to explain how institutional racism works in schools.”

Finally, future teachers would be required to analyze the “myth of meritocracy in the United States,” the “history of demands for assimilation to white, middle-class, Christian meanings and values, [and] history of white racism, with special focus on current colorblind ideology.”

Those who resist would be subject to a “remediation plan.”

I envision prospective teachers who think students of all colors, creeds, classes and sexual orientations are capable of learning, if they’re taught well and do the work. But the time they might have spent learning how to teach reading, writing, math, science or history has been devoted to faddish drivel.

In a letter to the university president, FIRE argues the plan — which includes denying admission to applicants with the wrong beliefs — is unconstitutional, “a severe affront to liberty and a disservice to the very ideal of a liberating education.” Here’s FIRE’s analysis.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

Carnival of Educators

November 25, 2009 By

Notes From A Homeschooling Mom is hosting the Carnival of Educators.  (Email Andrea if you want to be a future carnival host.)

Siobhan Curious, a Canadian literature teacher, writes about an 18-year-old student who’s desperate to pass her course after seven weeks out of school trying to help his father save a failing business.

. . . I think – although I’m not sure – that the most compassionate thing I can do for Yannick will be to make him face the consequences of his choices, and recognize that they WERE choices.

. . . if there is one thing teaching has brought me to believe with all my heart, it’s that we all – students, teachers, parents, children, politicians, criminals, cats and dogs – need to learn the principal of cause and effect.  If you spend more than you earn, you will go into debt.  If you don’t go to class, you will fail your courses.  And if your family business is going to hell in a handbasket and you can’t go to school because you’re working 12 hours a day at the shop, then maybe a year away from school is exactly what you need.

. . . I don’t think that any more allowances or exceptions will do him any favours.

Already on academic probation, Yannick has a very slim chance of passing enough courses to stay in school.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With:

Portfolio assessment inflates scores

November 25, 2009 By

Alternatives to Virginia’s state exam, such as assessing portfolios of students’ work, are proliferating, reports the Washington Post. The pass rate is soaring. Are the alternative assessments too easy?

The Virginia Grade Level Alternative, like the multiple-choice test, assesses students’ understanding of the state academic standards. Teachers document learning throughout the year in a binder of class work, including worksheets, quizzes and writing samples. Some special education students and non-native speakers in early stages of learning English are eligible for the portfolio, but final decisions are made by committees of educators and often parents.

Lynbrook Elementary was a low-performing school when all students took Virginia’s challenging Standards of Learning exam. No more.

Since 2007, Lynbrook’s reading passing rate for students learning English shot from 52 to 94 percent. Among special education students, the rate went from 34 to 100 percent. At the same time, the number of portfolios increased from a handful to more than 100, including nearly half of the English learners and 78 percent of students with disabilities. All passed. The school had more than 460 students last year.

In Fairfax County last year, “students tested with portfolios outperformed classmates who took multiple-choice tests.” In more than a dozen schools, students with disabilities outscored non-disabled students. Students with poor English fluency outscored native-language speakers in reading.

Last year, 100 percent of the portfolios at Weyanoke received passing scores. That does not mean the students who took them are the school’s top performers, (teacher Candy) Kwiecinski said; it means they all learned the curriculum.

Apparently, the weaker students learned more than the strong students. So much for accountability.

Filed Under: Testing Tagged With: , ,

Non-fathers get child-support bills

November 25, 2009 By

As paternity testing has soared, more men have learned they’re not the fathers of the kids they’ve been raising. But non-dads may be stuck paying child support for other men’s children, reports the New York Times Magazine.

In most states, judges put the interest of the child above that of the genetic stranger who unwittingly became her father — and that means requiring him to pay child support. Some judges have even rebuked nonbiological fathers for trying to weasel out of their financial obligations. “The laws should discourage adults from treating children they have parented as expendable when their adult relationships fall apart,” Florida’s top court held in a 2007 paternity decision, quoting a law professor. “It is the adults who can and should absorb the pain of betrayal rather than inflict additional betrayal on the involved children.”

That seems unfair to me.

Filed Under: Parenting Tagged With: ,

Carnival of Homeschooling

November 24, 2009 By

The Carnival of Homeschooling is open at Norfolk Homeschooling Examiner.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With:

'Cool' science (and math)

November 24, 2009 By

President Obama promised a national science fair to spotlight young inventors and show young students how “cool science can be.” It’s part of his Educate To Innovate campaign:  Sesame Street’s Elmo and Big Bird, corporations, companies, video game programmers and scientists have pledged to promote science, technology, engineering and math learning.

Most activities will be outside the classroom, notes the New York Times. Science Channel has pledged to devote two hours of afternoon programming to commercial-free science shows aimed at middle schoolers. The MacArthur Foundation and partners will offer prizes for new video games that teach science and math.

Sounds like fun. But will it help students master difficult subjects, such as math?

Critics said the effort will flop if there’s no plan to improve the curriculum and the ability of teachers to teach it. “It has nothing to do with the day-to-day teaching,” Mark Schneider of the American Institutes for Research told the Times.

I fear the gee-whiz emphasis will undercut the need to teach students the basics so they can go on higher-level studies that will enable them to be innovators.

In Curriculum Matters’ STEM initiative story, Sean Cavanagh challenges Obama’s claim that the U.S. is behind other countries in math and science. It depends on what test you look at.

By the way, a new study has found No Child Left Behind increased math scores, especially for low-scoring groups, but had no effect on reading scores.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

Charging parents for detention

November 24, 2009 By

Parents would pay a detention fee for their misbehaving children if two board members in Nutley, New Jersey get their way. Detention costs the district about $10,000 a year in overtime and maintenance. The board members want to fine parents of “habitual” detainees.

However, the policy may not be legal, says Frank Belluscio, spokesman for the New Jersey School Board Association. Detention isn’t an extracurricular activity.

“Discipline is part of a public education,” he said. “Since detention would have to be used to enforce discipline, it is doubtful that you could charge for that, the same way you can’t charge for someone taking a history class or math class.”

In some areas, parents can be fined for their children’s truancy.

Via Core Knowledge Blog.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

Not so standardized tests

November 24, 2009 By

Todd Farley’s Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry gets a review in the Washington Post.  After rising from scorer to trainer to test writer, Farley concluded that standardized tests are “less a precise tool to assess students’ exact abilities than just a lucrative means to make indefinite and indistinct generalizations about them.”

Throughout his career, grade manipulation was the norm. He and other leaders would change scores or toss some out in order to achieve “reliability,” a measure of how frequently different readers scored a question the same way. Among scorers, he writes, “the questions were never about what a student response might have deserved; the questions were only about what score to give to ensure statistical agreement.”

In a Christian Science Monitor column, Standardized tests are not the answer, Farley writes:

On one scoring project I managed, for instance, the government agency in charge passed down an edict stating that all scorers had to go through a remedial retraining (group discussions with their peers about scoring rubrics and training papers) after any work stoppage of 30 minutes or more, including their scheduled half-hour lunch break. The government agency in charge said such retrainings would help ensure the student responses were scored within the proper context of “psychometric rigor.”

The company avoided the time-consuming retraining sessions by cutting the lunch break to 29 minutes.

Farley’s entertaining book highlights the difficulties of evaluating thousands of student answers to questions that invariably turn out to be more ambiguous than the test writers thought.

In one test, elementary students read a passage about taste and answered a few questions, including naming their favorite food and identifying it as salty, sweet, bitter or sour. Scorers argued about what’s a food: water? dirt? grass? And is the kid who thinks pizza is sweet or bitter or sour necessarily wrong? Who knows what toppings are on that pizza?

Farley wants to leave grading to the teachers, who know their own students. That’s fine only if we want to give up on accountability measures. If Mrs. Chips says all her kids are proficient readers, we don’t know if that’s true or if Mrs. C has very low standards. It takes an independent test of some sort to analyze whether children have learned what the state has decided they should learn.  It won’t be precise, but it doesn’t have to be unless if enough scores are aggregated. (If an open-ended test is used to decide whether an individual student passes to the next grade, then there has to be a second look to make sure it’s an accurate reflection of the student’s performance.)

My reaction to the book was to wonder if open-ended questions that need to be scored by fallible humans are worth the cost. Farley describes scorers who don’t understand English idioms or just plain aren’t very bright. If that’s the way it is, why bother? Multiple-choice items can be scored quickly and very cheaply.

Filed Under: Testing Tagged With:

Ahead of steam

November 23, 2009 By

How to Lose Your Self of Steam & Other Teaching Lessons I Never Learned From Professional Development is Bellringers blogger Carol Richtsmeier’s light-hearted look at her years as a journalism teacher.

Her response to students who don’t turn in an assigned story, but claim they “tried” resonates with me as a former high school newspaper editor and mother of a former high school newspaper editor.

“Maybe you hadn’t noticed, but this isn’t the YMCA. We are not in the business of building your self of steam or making sure everyone feels good about themselves. We are a publication. Our goal is to put out the best publication we can. We can’t do that if we only try. We have to do. We have to publish. When you don’t do your story, are we supposed to run ‘ at least she tried to write her story’?”

While you’re buying books for holiday giving, don’t your friends and relations need a hardcover or paperback copy of Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the Charter School That Beat the Odds? Yes. They do.

Filed Under: "Our School", Education Tagged With: , , ,
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