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Ahead of steam

November 23, 2009 By

How to Lose Your Self of Steam & Other Teaching Lessons I Never Learned From Professional Development is Bellringers blogger Carol Richtsmeier’s light-hearted look at her years as a journalism teacher.

Her response to students who don’t turn in an assigned story, but claim they “tried” resonates with me as a former high school newspaper editor and mother of a former high school newspaper editor.

“Maybe you hadn’t noticed, but this isn’t the YMCA. We are not in the business of building your self of steam or making sure everyone feels good about themselves. We are a publication. Our goal is to put out the best publication we can. We can’t do that if we only try. We have to do. We have to publish. When you don’t do your story, are we supposed to run ‘ at least she tried to write her story’?”

While you’re buying books for holiday giving, don’t your friends and relations need a hardcover or paperback copy of Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the Charter School That Beat the Odds? Yes. They do.

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Flowers, Sausages, Book

July 21, 2009 By

Mrs. Mimi has turned her blog into a book, which will come out in September.  It’s Not All Flowers and Sausages, subtitled My Adventures in Second Grade, can be ordered on Amazon.

Ms. Mimi is a Harlem schoolteacher who loves kids. And teaching. And stickers. And post-its. And what her kids do every day. . . . Inside we’ll meet characters like Curly, the kid that teachers dream about. All wide eyes and a mind that drinks up knowledge like a sponge, he’s the stereotypical teacher’s pet that reminds Ms. Mimi why she’s teaching. We’ll also meet The Weave, the school administrator that doesn’t seem to remember what teaching is; The Bacon Hunter, a teacher who seems to have partially checked out; Little Crooked Glasses, a child who warms your heart just because he’s so sweet and… clumsy . . .

You can warm my heart by ordering a copy of Our School while you’re online.

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Two students, two schools

June 22, 2009 By

In Two students, two schools, the LA Times looks at 11th grade boys with similar aspirations and very different chances of success. Kyle Gosselin, the son of lawyers, takes advanced classes at high-scoring La  Cañada High in southern California.  Henry Ramirez, son of immigrant health workers, goes to gang-ridden Jefferson High, which graduates only 27 percent of ninth graders in four years; only 16 percent take a college-prep curriculum. (His family moves to Texas in the middle of the school year.) Both earn A’s and B’s — mostly — and aspire to careers in medicine. But Henry, who’s moved from school to school, taken watered-down classes, flunked geometry and skipped taking the PSAT, has no real college plans. Kyle has plans.

Any visitor to your two schools can’t help but notice that the La Cañada students, while hardly perfect, seem more focused, more driven to succeed than the average student at Jefferson. It’s something that deeply frustrates Juan Flecha, the Jefferson principal. “They’re such nice kids,” he said of his pupils, adding: “They’re so unmotivated.”

The “culture that students bring to a school” is a big part of the achievement gap, writes Heather Mac Donald in The Corner.

Without question, children in an inner-city school face obstacles to learning that middle- and upper-income students can little imagine — constant moves from one community to another; lack of privacy at home for studying; less competent, if not outright unqualified, teachers; parents who lack the academic knowledge to supplement their children’s school instruction; and a peer culture that stigmatizes effort. But that last factor — peer attitudes towards learning — is not a question of public or private resources but is part of the culture that students bring to a school.

Kyle is taking community college classes this summer. Henry hopes to return to LA to hang out with friends.

Kids like Henry would achieve more if more was asked of them. He doesn’t know how to prepare to earn a college degree. His parents — dad’s a high school dropout, mom had two college years in El Salvador — don’t know what it takes.  My book, Our School, (available in hardcover or paperback), is about a school called Downtown College Prep that focuses relentlessly on ensuring that kids like Henry take college-prep courses, earn grades based on real achievement and make realistic college plans. The educational philosophy is: Work your butt off. Which kids from poor and working-class immigrant families will do once they’re persuaded it will get them where they want to go.

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Harlem miracle

May 11, 2009 By

The Harlem Miracle, a David Brooks column in the New York Times, praises a charter  school that’s dramatically boosted low-income black and Hispanic students’ test scores.  That shows schools can make big changes for children in poverty, Brooks writes. Of course, Promise Academy is part of the Harlem Children’s Zone, which provides a range of programs to help families, including prenatal care and parenting classes. But children who live in the zone but lost the lottery to attend the charter school didn’t show the same progress. “In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students, Brooks writes.

Promise exemplifies “an emerging model for low-income students,” Brooks writes.

Over the past decade, dozens of charter and independent schools, like Promise Academy, have become no excuses schools. The basic theory is that middle-class kids enter adolescence with certain working models in their heads: what I can achieve; how to control impulses; how to work hard. Many kids from poorer, disorganized homes don’t have these internalized models. The schools create a disciplined, orderly and demanding counterculture to inculcate middle-class values.

It takes time to get left-behind students caught up.

Promise Academy students who are performing below grade level spent twice as much time in school as other students in New York City. Students who are performing at grade level spend 50 percent more time in school.

The middle school struggled in its first few years, writes Paul Tough in Whatever It Takes, the story of the Harlem Children’s Zone. Teacher turnover was high. Too many students were behavior problems. But as students moved from the elementary to the middle school, those problems were solved.

For more on no-excuses, culture-building schools read Sweating the Small Stuff by David Whitman and, of course, Our School by me.

Update: On Gotham Schools, skoolboy calls Brooks gullible.

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The ‘immigrant paradox’

March 17, 2009 By

The first generation comes to America and struggles, but their children do better and the third generation does even better. That’s how it’s supposed to work.  But scholars are trying to understand the “immigrant paradox,” reports Education Week. The Americanized children of immigrants often do worse in school than the foreign-born generation, despite fewer English problems.  American-born children have more health problems and are more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs and act violently.

(Brown Professor Cynthia Garcia Coll) noted that the more acculturated students speak better English but do less homework. In addition, she said, “they are starting to buy in to the notion of minorities here [in the United States], that even if you work hard and play hard, discrimination is going to get at you.”

Reading scores improve for Mexican-American children from the first to the third generation as English skills improve, but math scores decline.

Asian-heritage students tend to excel in school, but some groups show “a slight drop in academic success” between first- and second-generation students. Chinese- and Korean-American students are exceptions.

In (UCLA Professor Min Zhou’s) research, she’s found that the Chinese-immigrant community in Los Angeles has been very effective in using ethnic after-school programs to bolster academic success. She said that in addition to teaching the Chinese language, those programs provide previews and reviews of school lessons.

Chinese parents are reluctant to send their children to public after-school programs, Ms. Zhou said, because they have a stereotype that “bad children” go to them, which she interprets to mean the children are “too Americanized.”

The New York Times wrote about a Maryland high school where immigrant students do well academically, but don’t interact much with native-born students.

I met many students from Mexican immigrant families at Downtown College Prep, when I was reporting for Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the Charter School that Beat the Odds.  The kids expected to work hard to make it in life; once they harnessed that work ethic to school work, they started to catch up academically.

Foreign-born students, some of them here illegally, finished college in four years at a higher rate than American-born students. Those who got no state or federal aid worked harder to get through quickly. The “immigrant paradox” is the result of immigrant hustle.

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Who gets to choose

March 16, 2009 By

Thanks to Matthew Tabor of Education for the Aughts for writing about my book, Our School. He quotes the intro on school choice.

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Should I let kids fail?

February 13, 2009 By

An after-school robotics club advisor asks whether she should let students fail at what’s supposed to be a fun activity. Laura Reasoner Jones, a technology teacher in Virginia, coached fifth and sixth graders, who were supposed to build and program robots for a demonstration to which parents were invited. Two of the five teams didn’t get a robot to work.

Am I going to let them experience the natural consequences of inaction, or am I going to intervene and fix things?

. . . They spent weeks playing with the software but would not use any of the canned programs that are great starting places.

. . . When they finally got a robot built and found they could not get the program to work, they were unwilling to either tinker with it or start over, and the time just dribbled away. So, now it is the last week before the demo, and they have nothing. Nothing!!!

Jones decided she could not let them “watch all of their friends be applauded and praised by staff and parents,” while they had nothing to show.

(The after-school program) is about personal success, whatever form that may take.

I think about my goals for this project. I want each child to build and program a robot, learning that he/she can do new things and stretch his/her brain into new fields without fear of failure. I want each child to see herself/himself as an engineer, a builder, a creator. And above all, I want each child to feel pride in his/her work.

But personally, as a mother and as a teacher, I also want each child to learn from mistakes, to take risks and experience the consequences of risk-taking. I don’t want to rescue kids. I want them to learn to rescue themselves.

Finally, she decided to ask the engineer mentors to rescue the slacker students so they could “experience success.”

Is it really success? Would failure have been more educational?

In my book, Our School, a hard-knock charter school, Downtown College Prep, sends teams of students to compete in a Silicon Valley robotics contest called the Tech Challenge.  The best team takes fourth place; another team’s robot fails the challenge, while the girls’ team is sidelined by a bad battery.

“You’re all champions,” says the presenter. Adam and Rico look dubious. They don’t want anyone saying this was their best effort, because it wasn’t. They can do better.

. . . The Lady Lobos also aren’t satisfied with their performance. They glare at their yellow ribbons, given for participating. Their machine didn’t work, and they’re not going to pretend it did.

After three fourth-place finishes in the Tech Challenge, a DCP team won the grand prize in 2004. One of things those kids learned was how to try, fail, get up off the floor and try harder and smarter next time around.

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The kids can learn

February 2, 2009 By

Jay Mathews’ Work Hard. Be Nice. on KIPP gets a great plug from Hugh Hewitt.

This is the story of Michael Feinberg and Dave Levin, two Ivy league graduates who signed up for Teach for America in 1990, failed miserably in their first months in the classroom, and then began a program of bringing to their desperately poor students discipline and enthusiasm, long school days, Saturday and summer school and rewards based on achievement. Nearly two decades later the KIPP –”Knowledge Is Power Program– charter school effort they began in Houston and the Bronx has spread to 66 schools in 19 states enrolling 14,000 students. . . . With every new success, KIPP proves again that many hundreds of thousands of kids who are warehoused in failing schools are perfectly capable of achieving in middle school, succeeding in high school, and graduating from college.

A perfect companion book:  Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the Charter School That Beat the Odds.

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Gates: 80% college ready

January 27, 2009 By

In a letter on his foundation’s work, Bill Gates advocates a national education goal: “Ensure that 80 percent of our students graduate from high school fully ready to attend college by 2025.”

Note that Gates isn’t shooting for 100 percent and that his foundation is focusing on helping community college students complete a certificate or two-year degree.

The foundation will replicate “the school models that worked the best,” almost all of which are charter schools, Gates writes.

Many states have limits on charter schools, including giving them less funding than other schools. Educational innovation and overall improvement will go a lot faster if the charter school limits and funding rules are changed.

Good schools “help their teachers be more effective in the classroom,” he writes.

. . . our new strategy focuses on learning why some teachers are so much more effective than others and how best practices can be spread throughout the education system so that the average quality goes up. We will work with some of the best teachers to put their lectures online as a model for other teachers and as a resource for students.

Nelson Smith is happy about the plug for charter schools.

Gates also plugs Jay Mathews’ new book on KIPP, Work Hard, Be Nice. (Which makes a good complement to this book.)

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Let parents ‘be the change’

January 22, 2009 By

Barack Obama’s “be the change” idea “could transform the education policy debate,” writes Flypaper.  It’s assumed many parents won’t raise their children responsibly so schools must step in.

Perhaps we’ll never reach “100 percent parental responsibility,” just like we’ll never reach “100 percent proficiency” in reading and math. But maybe, just maybe, we could do dramatically better than we are today in getting parents to show up for their job as their child’s first and most important teacher.

Obama called for a “new era of mutual responsibility in education” during the campaign.

There is no substitute for a parent who will make sure their children are in school on time and help them with their homework after dinner and attend those parent-teacher conferences. . . . Responsibility for our children’s education has to start at home. We have to set high standards for them and spend time with them and love them. We have to hold ourselves accountable.

What can schools do to encourage parental responsibility?

I think schools should tell parents what they school wants them to do, such as limit TV and video time on school nights, set aside time for homework and reading, enforce a sensible bed time, serve a low-sugar breakfast, get them to school on time, whatever else is doable even by poorly educated parents.  Ask them to sign a contract, even if it will be nearly impossible to enforce it.

I’d send home DVDs (or links to YouTube videos) on how to teach manners and self-control to children. How should kids handle conflict at school? Show examples.  Another DVD could show how to read aloud with a child, perhaps how to discuss a TV show with a child. Or how to help your child get organized to do homework, even if you can’t help with the homework.

In reporting for my book, Our School, I met many Mexican immigrant parents who had very little formal education. They don’t know what the school wants of them unless somebody tells them explicitly. So, tell them.

Edspresso is collecting advice for Obama on education.

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