Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
An Arizona community college that pioneered online courses has expanded access and success while cutting costs substantially.
Massachusetts community college leaders don’t like a report calling for more state control of the system to facilitate job training. Connecticut is creating a state board to run both the community colleges and state universities.
Campus police officers — not principals — are enforcing discipline these days, reports the Washington Post.
Texas police issue thousands of misdemeanor tickets for offensive language, class disruption, schoolyard fights and misbehavior on the school bus. A parent must appear with the child in court. Students may be ordered to perform community service or take a behavior-management class. Fines can total $500.
Six in 10 Texas students were suspended or expelled at least once from seventh grade on, according to a new study. Federal officials say suspensions, expulsions and arrests create a “school-to-prison pipeline.”
“That is something that clearly has to stop,” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in Washington alongside Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
It’s not just Texas. In many states, principals are turning to the police to enforce order.
Connecticut is rethinking discipline after students faced court charges for drinking soda, running in the hall and dressing improperly.
A Colorado task force is analyzing school ticketing and law enforcement referrals.
Texas schools adopted ticketing in the 1990′s, the Post reports. As more police officers have been assigned to schools, the number of tickets has soared.
In one highly publicized case a middle school student in Austin was ticketed for class disruption after she sprayed herself with perfume when classmates said she smelled.
In Houston one recent day, a 17-year-old was in court after he and his girlfriend poured milk on each other. “She was mad at me because I broke up with her,” he said.
Ticketing rates vary from 1 percent of students in Pasadena to 11 percent in Galveston, concluded a report by Texas Appleseed, a public interest law center. Children as young as five have been ticketed.
Not surprisingly, students who’ve been suspended, expelled or ticketed are more likely to drop out of high school and get into trouble as adults. But that raises a chicken-and-egg question: Was it the punishment or the crime?
Connecticut minority groups pushed for a parent trigger bill, which would let a majority of parents force a management change at chronically low-performing schools. Unable to kill the bill, the state affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers negotiated a much weaker version — and bragged about the strategy in a presentation at the union’s annual convention. RiShawn Biddle at Dropout Nation discovered the presentation online and kept a copy of the pdf, correctly anticipating the AFT would take down the document once it was publicized.
“How Connecticut Diffused [sic] The Parent Trigger” is an ”illuminating look into union cynicism and power,” editorializes the Wall Street Journal.
“Not at the table,” notes the AFT document, were “parent groups” who supported the reform. Engagement meant pressuring legislators vulnerable to union muscle. That’s most of them—and the AFT’s muscle worked.
The result was a reform in name only. Out were simple parent petition drives, in were complex “school governance councils” of parents, teachers and community leaders. Most significantly, as the AFT’s PowerPoint brags, the councils’ “name is a misnomer: they are advisory and do not have true governing authority.”
The new governance councils are “glorified PTAs,” Hannya Boulous, director of Buffalo ReformED, tells Education News. Boulous is working for parent trigger legislation in New York.
On Community College Spotlight: Florida’s graduation rate is up, but many graduates aren’t prepared for college-level classes.
Two-year degrees are much cheaper than four-year degrees and raise earnings nearly as much, concludes a Connecticut study. But the state invests most of its higher education dollars in the state university system, which educates half as many students as the community colleges.
One third of would-be elementary and preschool teachers in Connecticut flunk an exam on how to teach reading reports the Connecticut Mirror.
Teach for America teachers had the highest pass rate, 93 percent, despite their abbreviated training. University of Connecticut was next at 91 percent. At some Connecticut State University campuses, more than 40 percent of student teachers flunked the Foundations of Reading exam. (I got 100 percent on the test questions here.)
The certification exam, consisting of 100 multiple-choice questions and two essay questions, has been used in Massachusetts since 2002. It is designed to test knowledge of teaching methods that reflect a rigorous, systematic approach to reading instruction, including phonics.
Many of those methods, backed by various research studies, were recommended a decade ago by a National Reading Panel report and in Connecticut’s Blueprint for Reading Achievement, but some educators and children’s advocates contend that college and university teacher training programs have been slow to respond.
Prospective teachers are complaining their education classes didn’t prepare them for the exam. And some education professors say the exam doesn’t measure what it takes to be a good teacher.
Via NCTQ Bulletin.
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