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Dangerous games: Tag? Wiffle Ball?

April 19, 2011 By

Wiffle Ball, tag, kickball and dodgeball are dangerous games with a “significant risk of injury,” according to New York day camp regulations. So are Capture the Flag, Steal the Bacon and Red Rover, reports the New York Daily News. But Frisbee, tug of war and sack races are considered safe.

“It looks like Albany bureaucrats are looking for kids to just sit in a corner in a house all day and not be outside,” said state Sen. Patty Ritchie (R-St. Lawrence County).

Under the new rules, any program that offers two or more recreational activities — with at least one on the risky list — is subject to state regulation as a day camp.  That means paying a $200 registration fee and providing medical staff, Ritchie said.

Deborah Graham, 51, a mother of two from Harlem, said moving around was less harmful than playing video games all summer.

“You could develop Carpal Tunnel Syndrome,” she said. “And when (kids) eat, eat, and eat, they get diabetes. That’s dangerous.”

Regulators said not every program will need to hire medical staff. Some will get by with a plan to deal with medical emergencies.

Perhaps dodgeball risks “significant injury,” but Wiffle Ball? Tag?

Filed Under: Children, Health Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

NYC: 23% are college or career ready

February 9, 2011 By

Only 23 percent of New York City students are ready for college or careers, according to state data, reports the New York Times. That doesn’t include special education students. Other big cities in the state are doing even worse: Only 5 percent of Rochester students did well enough on state exams to be considered college and career ready. Statewide, 41 percent of students test as college or career ready.

New York’s Board of Regents may require schools and districts to report the college-ready rate as well as the graduation rate, said Chancellor Merryl Tisch.

The move parallels a decision by the Regents last year to make standardized tests for third through eighth graders more difficult to pass, saying that the old passing rates did not correlate to high school success.

“With three through eight, we ripped the Band-Aid off,” Dr. Tisch said in an interview last week. “The thing we said then, in looking at the business world, is that if you sit on this, you become the Enron of test scores, the Enron of graduation rates. We need to indicate exactly what it all means, especially since we’ve already said that college-ready should be the indicator of high school completion.”

I admire her honesty. But is it really possible to make “college-ready” the standard for a high school diploma? Without fudging on what it takes to be college ready?

Statewide, 77 percent of New York students graduate from high school. Students must score a 65 on four of the state’s five required Regents exams to earn a Regents diploma. Starting next year, they’ll need to a 65 on all five.

Using data collected by state and community colleges, testing experts on a state committee determined last year that a 75 on the English Regents and a 80 on the math Regents roughly predicted that students would get at least a C in a college-level course in the same subject. Scores below that meant students had to often take remediation classes before they could do college-level work.

. . . In New York City, roughly 75 percent of public high school students who enroll in community colleges need to take remedial math or English courses before they can begin college-level work.

The Regents may raise graduation requirements to include four years of math and science. Another possibility is raising the passing score on high school exams to 75 in English and 80 in math, the college-ready level.

At the same time, the Regents are considering letting students substitute foreign language, economics or art — or a vocational skills test — for one of the five required Regents exams in math, English, science, global history and American history.

The state also could grant flexibility to districts to give credits to students who demonstrate competency, based on “examination or online course work,” in addition to “seat time.”

Filed Under: Careers, College, Education Tagged With: , , ,

Maryland, oh Maryland

January 12, 2011 By

Maryland ranks first in the nation with a B+ in Education Week’s 2011 Quality Counts report. Massachusetts and New York, each with a B average, come next.  The nation as a whole earned a C, the same grade as last year.  The lowest scoring states, all with a D+ grade, were District of Columbia, Nebraska, and South Dakota.

On the K-12 Achievement Index, the average state earned a D+.

Flypaper’s Liam Julian complains that the Chance for Success Index, one of the rating factors, lists excuses for failure. 

Education Week’s 2011 Chance for Success Index still includes categories (family income, parent education, parental employment) that are not really related to a state’s education policies. But now, to its credit, it also contains several categories (fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores, preschool enrollment) that are closer to the K-12 realm.

This year’s report includes a calculator that lets readers weight (or eliminate) the factors as they wish, notes Emmy Partin.

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

Diversity perversity on NY exam

September 8, 2010 By

New York’s Regents exam on Global History and Geography requires students to praise  Islamic conquerors and criticize Christian friars, writes Andrew Bostom on Pajamas Media.

Students read a textbook extract:

Wherever they went, the Moslems brought with them their love of art, beauty, and learning. From about the eighth to the eleventh century, their culture was superior in many ways to that of western Christendom.

Some of the finest centers of Moslem life were established in Spain. In Cordova, the streets were solidly paved, while at the same time in Paris people waded ankle-deep in mud after a rain. Cordovan public lamps lighted roads for as far as ten miles; yet seven hundred years later there was still not a single public lamp in London!

Guidelines call for awarding one credit, up to a maximum of two credits, “for each different way Islam improved the lives of people in Spain.”

No points are given for describing “massacre, pillage, deportation, and mass enslavement” including turning female captives into harem slaves and males into eunuchs, Bostom complains.

Students also read an extract on how friars converted natives to Christianity in Spanish America.

Award 1 credit (up to a maximum of 2 credits) for each different change the friars introduced in Spanish America. Examples: destroying idols/temples; building permanent monasteries; constructing Christian buildings on sites of destroyed native temples; building temporary/permanent churches; holding services/fiestas in church buildings in a converted community; attempting to destroy paganism.

As a Jew, I have no dog in the fight between the Moors and the Christians in Spain. Nor do I think Spanish missionaries were models of tolerance in the New World. But I do wonder why it’s OK to criticize Christians, but other religions are sacrosanct.

Teachers are complaining about the lack of balance, reports the New York Post.

Filed Under: Education, Testing Tagged With: , , ,

47% of black males graduate on time

August 18, 2010 By

Only 47 percent of black male students earned a high school diploma on schedule in 2008, reports the Schott Foundation.  In New York, 25 percent of black males earned a Regents diploma on time.

New Jersey, with a 69 percent black male graduation rate, is the only state with a significant black population to top 65 percent. Maryland came second at 55 percent with California third at 54 percent and Pennsylvania close behind at 53 percent.

Not known for educational excellence, Newark had the highest black male graduation rate of any major city, notes Jay Mathews.

In Newark, the graduation rate for black males was 76 percent. The other school districts nearest that level were Fort Bend, Tex. (68 percent), Baltimore County, Md. (67 percent) and Montgomery County, Md. (65 percent). The list only included states with more than 100,000 black male students and districts with more than 10,000 black male students.

New Jersey’s data is self-reported by schools and may be inflated, Mathews warns. In addition, the state lets schools graduate some students who haven’t passed the state graduation exam. One way to raise graduation rates is to lower standards.

Black female students, who face different social pressures, do much better than their brothers.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

Now, fix the Regents exams

August 7, 2010 By

Now that New York has raised its definition of proficiency in exams for grades three through eight, it’s time to fix the high school Regents exams, writes Marc Epstein in City Journal. The Regents have been dumbed down, charges Epstein, a high school history teacher in New York City.

The Global History and Geography Regents requires no knowledge or geography, he writes.

One handout shows a man sitting in a pedicab while the driver tries to walk the bicycle pulling the passenger through about three or four feet of water. The question asks: “What was one problem that people in the Varanasi region of India faced once the 1983 summer monsoons arrived, based on this National Geographic photograph and its caption?” If you couldn’t figure it out just by looking at the picture, the caption informs you that there was flooding and sewage, along with floating animal carcasses.

. . . A second part of the test, known as the thematic essay, asks the student to write about change and ideas, selecting two famous people—from a list including Nelson Mandela, Karl Marx, Galileo, and Mikhail Gorbachev—and explaining a specific idea the individuals developed, the historical circumstances surrounding its development, and how it influenced a group, a nation, or a region. After two years of global history, it’s safe to say that even your marginal students can find something to say about Marx and Communism or Mandela and apartheid.

The U.S. History and Government exam asked students to “write about the positive and negative effects of technology on the American society and economy,” a “rehashed question” from an old test designed for special-needs students or those who couldn’t pass the Regents exam, Epstein writes.

The document-based questions on the History exam were just as risible. A cartoon from the National Temperance Almanac depicts a saloonkeeper laying bricks around the entrance to his saloon—with the bricks labeled “wrecked lives,” ruined fortunes,” “lost virtue,” and “ruined characters.” The question then asks the student to state two effects that alcohol had on American society.

Students can pass by answering only one of two essay questions if they do well enough on the multiple-choice and document-based questions.

Proficient should mean college ready, backed up by automatic admission to a state  university, writes Core Knowledge’s Robert Pondiscio on Answer Sheet.

For low-income families with high aspirations but little educational experience, all they know is what the state and public schools tell them. And they’ve been misled. Seeing their children through the K-12 pipeline with a clear picture of readiness and a guaranteed college acceptance would likely be the difference between success and failure.

“’Proficiency’ on our exams has to mean something real,” (New York Education Commissioner David) Steiner wrote recently. “No good purpose is served when we say that a child is proficient when that child simply is not.”

Sol Stern writes about the history of New York’s testing mess in National Review.

Filed Under: Education, Testing Tagged With: , , , , , ,

NY schools get bad news on proficiency

August 2, 2010 By

After years of rising test scores, New York education leaders concluded the state has been defining proficiency down.  It takes a higher score this year for a student to qualify as proficient, which equates to doing grade-level work. This year’s lower pass rates have been a shock to schools, reports the New York Times.

In New York City, the proficiency rate in English fell from 69 percent to 42 percent; math proficiency fell from 82 percent to 54 percent.  Principals have been earning bonuses for raising scores; teacher evaluations are based partially on test scores.  To adjust for the sharp drop in scores, schools will be graded on a curve this year, with 25 percent to receive A’s, 35 percent B’s, 25 percent C’s, 10 percent D’s and 5 percent F’s.

At some schools, the drop was breathtaking. At Public School 85 in the Bronx, known as the Great Expectations School, there was a literal reversal in fortune, with proficiency on the third-grade math test flipping from 81 percent to 18 percent. At the main campus of the Harlem Promise Academy, one of the city’s top-ranked charter schools, proficiency in third-grade math dropped from 100 percent to 56 percent.

. . . The charter school run by the local teachers’ union, the UFT Charter School, showed one of the most severe declines, to 13 percent of eighth graders proficient in math, from 79 percent.

The racial achievement gap widened as many black and Hispanic students, just passing under the old system, now fall below proficient.

Many more third through eighth graders will have to attend summer school in 2011 to be promoted to the next grade.

In schools where children were scoring well above grade level, though, the passing rate did not change much. At Public School 172 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, for example, last year’s 100 percent on the third-grade math test inched down to 99 percent, and the fourth-grade English passing rate slipped to 96 percent, from 99 percent.

Students answered about the same number of questions correctly this year, but the score required for a passing grade went up.

Top-ranked P.S. 155 will try harder,  the principal, Linda Singer, told the Times. “We are ordering a grammar book ASAP; that was a weakness,” she added. “We are going to push in professional development for teaching that is different for each child.”

In short, the bad news could be good news for students who aren’t working at grade level but could be.

Filed Under: Testing Tagged With: , ,

'Proficient' = 52% graduation rate

July 17, 2010 By

Test scores are soaring in New York, reports the Buffalo News. But the scores don’t mean students are doing well, says Education Commissioner David M. Steiner.

Steiner asked a group led by Harvard’s Daniel M. Koretz to determine whether eighth-grade scores correlate to high school Regents exam scores and then to success in college.

The conclusion: Students in New York State are moving through elementary, middle and high school with test scores they believe to be adequate, but once they get to college, they find they are not prepared.

“Proficient” on New York’s test was equivalent to the 45th percentile on national tests in 2006, the study finds. By 2009, students at the 20th percentile on national tests were being labeled proficient in New York.

No wonder scores are up.

Even worse, of all students who test proficient in math and reading in eighth grade, only half graduate from high school, reports the New York Post.

More than 95 percent of those who graduate with the minimum passing score (65) on the Regents math exam end up in remedial math as CUNY freshmen. The study found students who score below 80 have little chance of passing college-level classes.

This is no surprise, writes Core Knowledge’s Robert Pondiscio.

For years, I saw 5th graders come into my Bronx classroom who were ostensibly on grade level yet demonstrated little command of basic arithmetic.

But not everybody wants to take an honest look at how well students are doing, Pondiscio notes.

Buffalo’s school superintendent blasted Steiner and his deputy John King last week for focusing on more rigorous tests. ”I think they’re two people who don’t know what they’re doing,” James A. Williams told the Buffalo News. “A more rigorous test is not going to improve student achievement. It’s not going to improve the graduation rate. I think it’s ridiculous.”

. . . Steiner isn’t talking about testing our way to proficiency. He’s talking about how test scores should be indicative of real-world proficiency.

Pretending that marginal students are “proficient” isn’t going to raise the achievement rate either.

Twice as many New York City students are taking summer school classes this year, the Post reports, because Steiner made this year’s math and reading tests less predictable and wider in scope and raised the passing bar.  That might raise achievement and graduation rates.

Filed Under: Testing Tagged With: , , , , ,

U.S. schools spend $10,259 per student

July 1, 2010 By

U.S. public schools spent $10,259 per student in 2007-08, according to a Census Bureau report. New York, topping the nation at $17,173 per student, spent roughly three times more than Utah, which spent only $5,765 per student.

The national average represented a 6.1 percent increase over the year before.

Other top spenders were New Jersey ($16,491), Alaska ($14,630), the District of Columbia ($14,594), Vermont ($14,300) and Connecticut ($13,848). After Utah, low spenders were Idaho ($6,931), Arizona ($7,608), Oklahoma ($7,685) and Tennessee ($7,739).

Instructional salaries made up 40.2 percent of school spending, the report found.

Louisiana had the highest percentage of public-school funding from the federal government at 16.8%, followed by Mississippi (16%) and South Dakota (15.2%). The lowest percentages were in New Jersey (3.9%), Connecticut (4.2%) and Massachusetts (5.1%).

Nationwide, 8.1 percent of school spending came from federal sources.

With many large Mormon families, Utah and Idaho have more students per taxpayer than other states, notes the Deseret News.

School districts cope through a number of methods, such as hiring uncertified employees to man their libraries, and relying on aides who receive on-the-job training. This year, at least eight districts will be cutting back on their instructional days, and in districts throughout the state, portable classrooms are used as a means of accommodating population surges and staving off building projects until funding is available.

And those large Mormon families don’t produce a lot of problem children. Uncertified library aides and portables are common in California, which spent $9,863 per student, 28th in the nation, according to the Census report.

Update: Charter schools do no better than district-run schools, says American Federation of Teachers leader Randi Weingarten. A reader writes: Five thousand years of Jewish history and we finally find a Jewish woman who boasts of paying retail.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

New York may raise Regents bar

June 19, 2010 By

New York’s Regents diploma “doesn’t mean college-ready,” says Merryl Tisch, Regents chancellor. So the test will get harder, even though that’s likely to depress rising graduation rates.

Seventy-five percent of New York City’s high school graduates who go on to City University require remedial math and/or English classes, Tisch complains. The class of 2011 will face a higher standard.

In 2009,  59 percent of city students passed the Regents and earned a diploma, up from 46.5 percent in 2005. That’s likely to decline.

Tisch also wants to end the practice of letting teachers grade their own students’ Regents exams. By the 2011-12 school year, all exam answer sheets will be scanned and submitted to the state for analysis. That “could include checking for suspicious erasures or unusual answer clusters that may suggest cheating,” reports the Wall Street Journal.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,
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