The Carnival of Homeschooling is in session at The HomeSpun Life.
For top pay, major in engineering
March 31, 2010 By
Why aren’t more students pursuing engineering degrees, wonders Mark Bauerlein on Brainstorm. He links to a survey on the bachelor’s degrees that earn the top 10 starting salaries: Petroleum engineering starts at $86,220, followed by six other engineering specialties, computer science and information systems.
Jaime Escalante dies
March 30, 2010 By
Jaime Escalante, the “Stand and Deliver” calculus teacher, died March 30 of cancer at the age of 79. A Bolivian immigrant, Escalante began teaching calculus at Garfield High in 1978: Most of his students came from low-income Mexican families. By 1987, Garfield students took more AP calculus exams than all but four high schools, public or private, in the country. People started to think that low-income, minority kids could learn calculus, if properly taught.
Often in conflict with other teachers and administrators, Escalante left Garfield High in 1991 to teach at a Sacramento High School, Reason reports. He’d created a math enrichment program to get students from basic algebra to calculus. The other math enrichment teachers left too. Garfield’s calculus program collapsed.
Getting in without SATs
March 30, 2010 By
Sarah Lawrence, a small liberal-arts college, picks admits without considering SAT scores. With grades varying so much from school to school, the admissions committee uses “a sample essay graded by a high-school teacher to determine the curriculum’s rigor,” New York Magazine explains.
But the samples also tell something about the readers. “I had one essay that said how awful Twilight was”—the essay was about damaging themes of female submissiveness in the series—“and I was like, ‘Admit her!’?” says Melissa Faulner, a 2006 grad on the committee. Whereas what the readers wryly call TCML essays—“theater changed my life”—are looked at more skeptically.
A girl from Texas scored a three (out of five) in academics while getting top marks in the other two categories. “Her grades really are bad,” Will Floyd allowed. She hadn’t gotten one A in high school. “But her writing was gorgeous,” he noted. The girl explained in her application that she has test anxiety and problems with rote memorization. But she had good recommendation letters. Besides, Sarah Lawrence’s curriculum emphasizes writing over test-taking. She got in.
More than half of applicants are offered a place at Sarah Lawrence. Tuition and room and board cost more than $55,000 a year: 61 percent of undergrads receive financial aid.
Move learning online
March 30, 2010 By
Traditional schools aren’t working, so it’s time to move learning online, writes Reason Magazine editor Katherine Mangu-Ward in a Washington Post op-ed.
Thousands of ninth-grade English teachers are cobbling together yet another lecture on the Globe Theatre in Shakespeare’s day, when YouTube is overflowing with accessible, multimedia presentations from experts on Elizabethan theater construction, not to mention a very nice illustrated series on the Kennedy Center’s ArtsEdge site.
Virtual charter schools are showing how it can work, she writes. For example, the Florida Virtual School offers for-credit online classes to any child enrolled in the state system.
Teachers are available by phone or e-mail from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week. The state cuts a funding check to the school only when students demonstrate that they have mastered the material, whether it takes them two months or two years.
If lesson planning and delivery move online, teachers will have time to provide personalized support and mentoring, Mangu-Ward writes.
“Most teachers and most students who are taking classes online say that they have more interaction with their teachers and students than they do in a traditional setting,” claims Julie Young, Florida Virtual’s CEO.
Learning online won’t turn America into a nation of home-schooled nerds, sitting in their basements, keyboards clacking. And it doesn’t mean handing your kids over to Rosie the Robot from “The Jetsons” for the day.
There are many online learning models. I predict full-time virtual schooling will not work for the typical K-12 student unless there’s a parent coach at home. We should see more use of online education to provide challenge for bright students, extra help for lagging students and alternatives for those who don’t function well in a classroom.
And you think U.S. rules are crazy . . .
March 30, 2010 By
In Wiltshire, England, school staff left a five-year-old boy stranded in a tree for 45 minutes because the school’s “health and safety policy” barred them from helping him down. When a woman passing by rescued the boy and returned him to class, she was reported to the police for trespassing.
The head teacher said the staff followed the policy to “observe from a distance” so the child would not get “distracted and fall.”
Kim Barrett, 38, said the boy couldn’t have been seen from the school building. When she returned him, nobody seemed to know he’d never come in from recess. She spotted the boy sitting on a branch more than six feet high overhanging the sidewalk.
The head teacher says Barrett was “verbally aggressive” to a school staffer when she charged the boy had been abandoned. Perhaps she was.
During a fire drill at an English middle school in Worcester, students watched a gunman kill a teacher. The mock shooting was supposed to be a science lesson “to teach Year 8 pupils how to investigate, collect facts and analyse evidence.” The headmaster apologized, suggesting that students wouldn’t have been so upset if the fake victim had been a less popular teacher.
New York Magazine asks: “They couldn’t have just pretended to lose the class rabbit or something?”
Delaware, Tennessee win Race to Top
March 29, 2010 By
Delaware and Tennessee have won Race To The Top funding in the first round.
Both had stakeholder buy-in (from the unions and school boards), the Education Department says. Politics K-12 points out another factor:
. . . Tennessee and Delaware just happen to be the home states of two powerful, Republican lawmakers the Obama administration is trying to court in its bipartisan push to renew the Elementary and Secondary Education Act: Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Rep. Mike Castle, R-Del. Both chair the subcommittees in their respective chambers dealing with K-12 policy, and both are considered leading moderate voices on education who have worked well with Democrats in the past.
Also noticing the Alexander and Castle factor, Flypaper’s Andy Smarick credits the Department for choosing only two winners, but says Delaware and Tennessee had plans that were good but not great.
The story here is just how important “stakeholder support” turned out to be. Florida, Louisiana, and Rhode Island had very good plans, but their unions didn’t buy in, especially in RI and FL. So those states lost.
Two other finalists, North Carolina and Kentucky, had weak plans but high stakeholder support. They lost too.
. . . Florida, Louisiana, and Rhode Island now have to wonder, “What reforms do we give up in order to get our stakeholders to support the plan? Do we lighten up on teacher evaluations? Do we give up performance pay? Do we take it easier on failing schools.”
The need for stakeholder support could give unions and local school districts a “veto” over their state’s proposals, Smarick writes.
Giving a veto to the status quo’s defenders will make RTTT “meaningless,” writes Jay Greene. “If people know that union opposition scuttles a state’s chances, then no state will apply in the future unless they have union support. This means that the unions will dictate what reforms will be pursued, which means that there will be virtually no reform.”
Rick Hess calls the results the Race To Consensus.
Looking at Delaware and Tennessee leaves me thinking that all the talk about bold reform was window dressing. The states that explicitly set out to blow past conventions, and devil take the hindmost, fell by the wayside. Florida and Louisiana’s bold, action-backed plans — which reflected a belief that they could push forward if they did so only with the eager and willing — lost out to states that obtained laughable levels of buy-in from school districts, school boards, and local teachers’ unions.
Tennessee’s plan is bold, writes J.E. Stone.
Mike Petrilli is better at handicapping RTTT winners than college basketball teams. His short list included: Delaware, Tennessee, Florida, Louisiana and Massachusetts. Union support made a big difference, he writes.
Lifted from Russo, a cartoon by my old friend Signe Wilkinson, the mother of two blogging teachers, one in Philadelphia and one in Taiwan.
The recess coach
March 29, 2010 By
Today’s kids don’t know how to play, so schools are hiring “recess coaches” to show students how to socialize, writes David Elkind, emeritus professor of child development at Tufts University.
For children in past eras, participating in the culture of childhood was a socializing process. They learned to settle their own quarrels, to make and break their own rules, and to respect the rights of others. They learned that friends could be mean as well as kind, and that life was not always fair.
Now that most children no longer participate in this free-form experience — play dates arranged by parents are no substitute — their peer socialization has suffered. One tangible result of this lack of socialization is the increase in bullying, teasing and discrimination that we see in all too many of our schools.
Elkind blames the rise of TV and computer games for children’s inability to get along with others.
Do kids really need to a “coach” to teach them how to play with each other? Really?
College kids on food stamps
March 28, 2010 By
Universities are encouraging students to sign up for food stamps, reports The Daily Caller. The stimulus bill changed the rules, making it easier for healthy young adults without children to qualify.
About 13 percent of Americans use food stamps. Most are low-income working people with young children, but increasingly students are discovering that’s it’s easy to qualify — and hard for anyone to tell they’re shopping on the taxpayers’ dime.
Salon featured educated “hipsters” using food stamps to buy high-priced gourmet food at trendy organic stores.
“I’m sort of a foodie, and I’m not going to do the ‘living off ramen’ thing,” one young man said, fondly remembering a recent meal he’d prepared of roasted rabbit with butter, tarragon and sweet potatoes. “I used to think that you could only get processed food and government cheese on food stamps, but it’s great that you can get anything.”
Food stamps — really a tax-funded credit card — “can be used for just about anything edible, including wild-caught fish, organic asparagus and triple-crème cheese,” Salon reports.
Via Instapundit, who also links to a story on college costs rising in the recession: More Boston-area colleges have broken the $50,000-a-year barrier.
Among the latest members of the $50K Club: Harvard, MIT, Wellesley, Brandeis, Brown, Dartmouth, and Holy Cross. They join Tufts, Boston University, Boston College, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Babson, which all broke the barrier this year.
Financial aid — some of it subsidized by the taxpayers — cushions the sticker shock.
Recent Comments