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‘Click-click’ credits raise graduation rates

April 7, 2011 By

K-12 schools are adding — and sometimes requiring — online classes, reports the New York Times.  Failing students try to “recover” credits online; successful students take electives and Advanced Placement classes that don’t generate enough interest to justify a class. But the quality of online learning is suspect, especially for weak students.

Memphis City Schools now requires all students to take at least one course to graduate, starting with this year’s sophomores. School officials say “they want to give students skills they will need in college, where online courses are increasingly common, and in the 21st-century workplace,” the Times reports.

But it is also true that Memphis is spending only $164 for each student in an online course.

. . . “It’s a cheap education, not because it benefits the students,” said Karen Aronowitz, president of the teachers’ union in Miami, where 7,000 high school students were assigned to study online in computer labs this year because there were not enough teachers to comply with state class-size caps.

Idaho will give a laptop to every high school student and require four or more online courses. Critics complain the state will replace teachers with technology.

Chicago and New York City are piloting online learning programs, which include both credit recovery and advanced classes for high school students, as well as “personalized after-school computer drills in math and English for elementary students.”

Nationwide, an estimated 1.03 million students at the K-12 level took an online course in 2007-8, up 47 percent from two years earlier, according to the Sloan Consortium, an advocacy group for online education. About 200,000 students attend online schools full time, often charter schools that appeal to home-schooling families, according to another report.

There’s little research on the effectiveness of online courses for K-12 students, reports the U.S. Education Department.

Even online advocates are “dubious” about online courses that let students who’ve failed a regular class “recover” the credits, the Times reports. These “click-click credits” are used to boost graduation rates.

Sheffield High in Memphis, once a “dropout factory” with a graduation rate below 60 percent, now hopes to graduate 86 percent of the class of 2011. Online classes have helped. The district buys software for the Florida Virtual School, then pays its own teachers extra to work 10 hours a week with 150 online students.

The Times watches Daterrius Hamilton’s online English 3 course.

. . . he read a brief biography of London with single-paragraph excerpts from the author’s works. But the curriculum did not require him, as it had generations of English students, to wade through a tattered copy of “Call of the Wild” or “To Build a Fire.”

Asked about social Darwinism, the 18-year-old student did a Google search, copied a Wikipedia entry and e-mailed it to the teacher.

Online classes aren’t always money savers, writes Sarah Butrymowicz on HechingerEd. In particular, online credit-recovery classes don’t work without “some sort of teacher presence, whether virtual or physical.”

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The can’t-fail school

January 22, 2011 By

New York City’s top-ranked school is under investigation for cooking the books, reports the New York Times. Theater Arts Production Company School, a middle and high school located in a low-income Bronx neighborhood,  graduated 94 percent of seniors, more than 30 points above the citywide average. The school earned a near-perfect score in “student progress,” based partly on course credits earned by students.  The school’s no-failure policy requires teachers to pass all students who attend class, regardless of their performance; no more than 5 percent of students can get D’s.

In practice, some teachers said, even students who missed most of the school days earned credits. They also said students were promoted with over 100 absences a year; the principal, rather than a teacher, granted class credits needed for graduation; and credit was awarded for classes the school does not even offer.

The school’s former Advanced Placement calculus teacher said he was pressured to pass students who didn’t deserve it.

Last year, every student passed the class even though each received a 1 — the lowest score — on the Advanced Placement test, in part because they had not taken precalculus, he said. Only one had passed the Math B Regents, a minimal standard.

Even some students complained to the Times about the no-failure policy.

Some said that it sometimes hurt their motivation to know that a classmate would pass even if he did not come to class. One said that his current average was a 30 — but that he could bring it up to a 95 with a few days of work — and that teachers sometimes handed out examples of student work that he copied from.

“You would have to be an epic failure to fail at this school,” said Deja Sawyers, a 10th grader. When students do not do their work, “there’s no consequences,” she said, adding that she did not get homework.

Another student, Luisa Cruz, said, “Everybody always passes; it’s really rare to fail.”

“It makes no sense,” she said. “You’ve got to learn from your mistakes.”

The college acceptance rate for graduates is 100 percent, but students’ SAT scores are low and many end up in remedial classes in college.

College acceptance is meaningless: It includes students who go to open-admissions or not-very-selective colleges, take a few remedial classes and drop out.  Sending graduates to college to retake eighth-grade English and math is nothing to brag about.

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Rethinking AP

January 14, 2011 By

Advanced Placement is being redesigned to focus less on factual knowledge and more on teaching students how to apply knowledge and analyze ideas, reports the New York Times. For the first time, College Board is developing curriculum frameworks, not just writing the exams.

AP science and history courses have been “criticized for overwhelming students with facts to memorize and then rushing through important topics,” reports the Times.

A.P. teachers have long complained that lingering for an extra 10 or 15 minutes on a topic can be a zero-sum game, squeezing out something else that needs to be covered for the exam. PowerPoint lectures are the rule. The homework wears down many students. And studies show that most schools do the same canned laboratory exercises, providing little sense of the thrill of scientific discovery.

Next month, the College Board will release AP biology and U.S. history curriculum frameworks that will try to focus students on concepts and analysis.  “In biology, a host of more creative, hands-on experiments are intended to help students think more like scientists.”

The “new AP” started with German and French language courses this year;  revised physics, chemistry, European history, world history and art history frameworks will be ready for exams in 2014 or 2015. English and math courses, which have drawn fewer complaints, will not be revised until later.

“We really believe that the New A.P. needs to be anchored in a curriculum that focuses on what students need to be able to do with their knowledge,” says Trevor Packer, College Board’s vice president for AP.

For biology, the change means paring down the entire field to four big ideas. The first is a simple statement that evolution “drives the diversity and unity of life.” The others emphasize the systematic nature of all living things: that they use energy and molecular building blocks to grow; respond to information essential to life processes; and interact in complex ways. Under each of these thoughts, a 61-page course framework lays out the most crucial knowledge students need to absorb.

And to the delight of teachers who have gotten an early peek at the plans, the board also makes clear what will not be on the exam. Part or all of at least 20 of the 56 chapters in the A.P. biology book that Mrs. Carlson’s class uses will no longer need to be covered. (One PowerPoint slide explaining the changes notes sardonically that teachers can retire their swift marches through the “Organ of the Day.”)

My daughter’s AP U.S. history teacher knew to the minute how much pre-exam time she had to cover each item in the curriculum, students believed.  It was a forced march, but everyone who kept up was well prepared to pass the exam.  The next year, the teacher missed six weeks due to a  health problem. To her horror, the sub fell behind the pace. My daughter volunteered as a teacher’s aide to help Mrs. W double-march her students to the exam.

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AP goes online

January 4, 2011 By

Advanced Placement courses are going online, reports Ed Week. 

High schools that were once limited in the number of AP courses they could offer—whether from a lack of money, isolated locations, or student numbers too low to justify them—now have a plethora of online providers to choose from and free material to access. At the same time, course creators are learning new lessons about how to organize such information, and online-course requirements from the New York City-based College Board, which sponsors the AP program, are also evolving.

Offering lab sciences online has been a challenge, Ed Week reports. Apex Learning offers a mix of hands-on and virtual labs for physics and biology, but not chemistry.

Because of the element of danger related to mixing potentially hazardous chemicals, (Cheryl) Vedoe said, Apex has restricted chemistry experiments to the virtual kind and has settled for a conditional endorsement from the College Board for the course. The endorsement means the course contains the appropriate AP content, but without the hands-on experiences.

That’s not as good as a real lab, but it extends the AP chemistry option to students whose schools can’t offer the course.

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Best (most AP-centric) high schools

June 15, 2010 By

Newsweek’s list of America’s Best High Schools — that is, public schools where the highest percentage of students take college-level courses — is out.

Once again the School for the Talented and Gifted in Dallas leads the list, which is dominated by magnet schools. (Charter schools make up 15 percent of the list, including #16 ranked Preuss UCSD, which claims all students qualify for a subsidized lunch.) However, super-elite schools are excluded, which seems a bit odd.

Jay Mathews, who created the Challenge Index, argues for the importance of AP testing, even at schools where few AP students pass the exam. (If fewer than 10 percent pass, the school is kicked off the “best” list.)

The average U.S. high schooler does less than an hour of homework a night and spends twice as much time watching television. And it shows in their academic achievements. There has been no significant increase in average reading or math achievement for American 17-year-olds in the last three decades. If AP, IB, and other college-level classes can get more of this age group off the sofa and back to their books, it would be a step forward for the country and a good measure of which schools are really serious about academics.

Here’s the methodology and a photo gallery of the 20 top-ranked schools.

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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.

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AP failure rate rises

February 8, 2010 By

More students are taking Advanced Placement tests — and the failure rate is climbing, reports USA Today.

The findings about the failure rates raise questions about whether schools are pushing millions of students into AP courses without adequate preparation — and whether a race for higher standards means schools are not training enough teachers to deliver the high-level material.

According to USA Today, 41.5 percent of AP test takers earned a failing score of 1 or 2, up from 36.5 percent in 1999. In the South, nearly half failed.

Even with the higher failure rate, the higher number of test takers means that more students are passing.

The WashPost’s Jay Mathews, a big AP booster, argues that students benefit from the challenge of AP courses, even if they don’t do well enough on the exam to earn college credit.

Grades of 1 or 2 are said to be failing, as the USA Today stories note, but research shows a grade of 2 may have unexpected benefits. A study of a very large sample of students in Texas shows that even students with relatively low achievement levels on other standardized tests did better in college if they had a 2 on an AP exam than similar students did who did not take AP.

Are too many students taking AP courses without the skills to pass? I worry that AP classes will be simplified for weaker students, cheating students who are prepared to do the work. If teachers can hold the line, then I don’t worry that more students are trying something that’s a bit too hard and falling short.

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The AP juggernaut

December 21, 2009 By

Advanced Placement enrollment is surging. The New York Time’ Room for Debate blog asks its panel:

Does the growth in Advanced Placement courses serve students or schools well? Are there downsides to pushing many more students into taking these rigorous courses?

In a recent survey, a majority of AP teachers said “too many students overestimate their abilities and are in over their heads.” Some 60 percent said that “parents push their children into A.P. classes when they really don’t belong there.”

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Union kills bonuses for Boston teachers

December 17, 2009 By

Boston’s teachers’ union has killed  a plan to pay bonuses to teachers whose students do well on the AP exam, reports the Boston Globe. An arbitrator has ruled the extra pay violates the union contract.

The district wanted to give math teachers at a Roxbury school $100 for each student with a his score on the AP test, funded by a grant.  The union complained bonuses undercut faculty teamwork.

The Boston union, for instance, says that many teachers contribute to a child’s success, and all of them should be eligible for any potential bonuses, not just the ones who teach AP courses.

So, they support merit pay for all teachers? Well, no.

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Cash offer boosts AP pass rate

August 7, 2009 By

New York City students offered cash for passing AP exams took and passed more tests this year. This was a change from the first year of Reach, when more students took an AP test but fewer passed.  This year, Reach offered a larger reward to students who attended Saturday tutoring sessions and passed the exam.

Students who attended the weekend classes and ultimately received a 5, the highest score, would receive $1,000, while students who did not attend the tutorials and received a score of 5 were awarded $500. Students who earned 4’s received $750 if they attended the sessions and $400 if they did not.

A Queens student earned $3,250 for passing four tests.

Reach, which is privately funded, offers the incentive at 31 public and Catholic schools with high minority enrollments.

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