Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
A North Carolina community college recruits, screens and trains new manufacturing workers for Caterpillar, all part of a state incentives package that lured a new factory to an area with high unemployment.
Minnesota has cut career-tech programs for high school students, despite soaring demand.
Ohio is cutting funds for remedial classes at state universities.
North Carolina community colleges are backing out of participation in federal student loans, fearing a high default rate will risk future students’ access to Pell Grants.
North Carolina’s no-frills community colleges show how to keep costs down in hard times.
Also on Community College Spotlight: A Nevada college draws students from half the state — the empty half — but struggles to survive funding cuts.
Low-income children taught with “gifted” techniques were more likely to be identified as gifted a few years later in a pilot experiment in high-poverty North Carolina elementary schools. Project Bright IDEA trained K-2 teachers in techniques used for gifted students.
The study found that within three years, the number of children identified by their school districts as being academically and intellectually gifted ranged from 15 percent to 20 percent, compared to just 10 percent of children in a control group. The year the project began, no third-graders from the schools in the study had been identified as gifted.
Black and Latino students are more likely to get “dumbed-down instruction,” said William “Sandy” Darity, professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. “So one of the exciting things about Project Bright IDEA is the premise that you provide this high-level curriculum and instruction to all the kids.”
States made big promises to win Race to the Top money. Most can’t meet their targets, reports Education Week.
North Carolina says it needs more time and to devote more money—about $2.9 million more—to plan and implement a new “instructional improvement system” that aims to use technology and data to drive continuous academic improvement in the classroom. And the state wants to scale back a plan to make “every new teacher” in its low-performing schools eligible for retention bonuses, as its application originally said, turning it instead into a pilot program in which 181 teachers are eligible each year.
Overwhelmed with students who need years of remediation, some Texas community colleges are sending very low-skilled students to adult education or vocational programs.
Also on Community College Spotlight: North Carolina will let community colleges bar “threatening” students, but identifying who’s dangerous and figuring out what to about it are huge challenges for college staffers.
Closing the “digital divide” doesn’t boost test scores, concludes a new study reported in Ed Week’s Inside School Research. Jacob L. Vigdor and Helen F. Ladd looked at North Carolina students in fifth through eighth grades who got home computers from 2000 to 2005; they also studied Internet access.
The news was not good, though: The researchers found that students who gain access to a home computer between 5th and 8th grade tend to experience a slight — yet persistent — decline in reading and math scores. With regard to the introduction of Internet access, the researchers found that the technology had a more negative impact on some students than others — possibly because parents of those students exercised less control of their activities on the Internet.
Apparently, computers are more likely to serve as a distraction than an educational tool for middle schoolers.
High school students should learn Revolutionary and Civil War history, writes North Carolina State Sen. Marc Basnight in a letter to the state education department. The department plans to teach early U.S. history in elementary and middle school, while teaching only the period after 1877 in 11th grade. That’s a terrible idea, writes Basnight, who is president pro tem of the state Senate.
As a reader of history myself, I think that no one should graduate from high school without a thorough understanding of the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers, the writing of the Constitution, and the personalities involved. Furthermore, it is my belief that only high school students have the capacity to understand complex and awful parts of our nation’s history such as slavery and the Civil War.
. . . Sadly, students know very little about history as it is.
North Carolina history standards earned an F from Fordham in 2006, points out James Elias of Common Core. “Now they’re trying to make them even worse!”
Update: Nominate an outstanding American history teacher for the Teacher of the Year award given by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The national winner gets a $10,000 prize; state winners get $1,000.
Update II: North Carolina has scrapped its proposed history standards and will come up with a new plan by April.
“Too Late to Apologize: A Declaration,” a history lesson as YouTube music video, features the Founding Fathers as drafters and singers.
It’s a “must view,” writes Sissy Willis.
Rousing music, sublime production values and compelling performances blend 18th- and 21st-century perspectives into the perfect historically-aware antidote to the “ideas” of clueless North Carolina education “leaders” who are proposing to revamp the state’s 11th-grade curriculum by skipping the Revolution and Civil War and covering U.S. history “only from 1877 onward”:
The video was created by soomopublishing “to humanize the sentiment of the founders in writing the declaration.”
This parody is a bit of a departure from our regular gig: creating ready-to-use collections of rich web assignments that work as e-textbooks, online courses or textbook supplements.
Via Instapundit.
In Dumbing Down the Tar Heel State, Common Core rips North Carolina’s plans to cut “the Revolutionary War, Andrew Jackson, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War and most of Reconstruction from its high school American history classes.”
Newly proposed standards would mean that, over their high school career, North Carolina ninth-graders would take an ambiguous course called global studies, 10th graders would study civics and economics, and 11th graders would take U.S. history from 1877 to the present.
I think the early history is the most fun. Of course, we had less history when I was in school.
Iowa’s charter schools are run by school districts. It turns out they’re not very innovative, reports the Des Moines Register. In essence, the state collected federal charter funding for a handful of magnet schools with no autonomy or ability to challenge the status quo.
Iowa schools, once rated the best in the nation, are slipping in national rankings.
In North Carolina, a top-scoring charter school that uses Direct Instruction wonders why the state seems uninterested in learning about their methods.
(Founder Baker) Mitchell said he feels the state is not really looking at the good things his school is doing, and he doesn’t know whether regular public schools are learning anything from the charter school.
Indeed, the state doesn’t keep track of innovations at charter schools and how they influence the public school system, said Jean Kruft , a consultant with the N.C. Office of Charter Schools.
Illinois will double the number of charter schools, including charters for five schools specializing in drop-outs.
Update: Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, spoke at the House Education and Labor Committee hearing on charter schools, reports Edspresso:
“I’m from the state of Ohio, so I think I look at things a little differently because most of our charter schools are not public charter schools. So, you may hear me coming from a very different vantage point.”
Of course, charters are public schools by definition. Fudge’s flub wasn’t the only one at the charter hearings.
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