June 2008 Archives

Young people's understanding of government (or lack thereof) has become a prime target of late-night television comics and political parody. That bothers Sandra Day O'Connor, who has spent much of her time since her retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court promoting civic education.

Justice O'Connor, 78, who stepped down from the high court in 2006 after 24 years, has been touring the country to make a pitch for a greater focus on civic education in schools.

According to the online industry news site Silicon Alley, she is heading up a video-game project to help teach middle school students about the judicial system.

The free, interactive Web site is expected to go live next year, including a virtual 3D world, but it already features background and descriptive info about the branches of government and the structure of the court system.

Teachers and curriculum specialists are helping to craft the content.

"The evidence is clear, and should be profoundly disturbing," Justice O'Connor says in a video address to users of the site. "In this country, we are failing to teach today's students some of the information they need to be responsible citizens."

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For years, American policymakers have looked with increasing wonder and envy at high-performing nations that consistently outperform the United States on heavily publicized international tests, such as PISA and TIMSS.

And those assessments don't even provide information about the academic prowess of students in China, a nation of 1.3 billion people. (The People's Republic does not take part in them.)

The truth is that for politicians, researchers, journalists, and others, the school practices in many of those countries remain a mystery. It's difficult to get reliable, firsthand information on those countries' standards, curricula, and teaching practices—not to mention information that is available in English.

Now a new Web site offers the public a way around those cultural and language barriers.

Created by the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, or APEC, and sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, the site offers the public with direct links to curriculum, test items, and examples of classroom teaching in China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore, as well as Pacific Rim nations such as Australia and New Zealand. It also presents a glimpse of the common educational challenges facing those jurisdictions.

And yes, it's all in English.

Visitors can read the translated math standards being used in Chinese schools, along with those of Japan, Korea, and other nations, They can see video demonstrations of teaching. This week, for instance, I watched an online video of a Japanese teacher leading a rather boisterous math class. As the teacher spoke, subtitles appeared onscreen, explaining the content that was being covered and what the teachers and students were saying.

There is also information on the foreign-language requirements of various nations. In addition, an American policy organization, Achieve, offers a comparison of the math and science standards across the APEC countries, examining which topics get covered most often by grade span. (My colleague Kathleen mentioned Achieve's work on this topic in a previous post.)

The site is the work of APEC, a 21-nation organization that promotes economic development, trade, and investment across the Pacific Rim. APEC maintains the site; the U.S. Department of Education sponsors it, though the agency does not endorse or screen its materials.

Anyone can access the site. Material is added to it through a password-protected system, which allows educaton experts in various countries to submit and update information that the organization's members, and the public at large, might find useful, said Alan Ginsburg, the chair of human-resources development at APEC, who has worked on the site. Ginsburg is also the director of policy and program studies at the Education Department.

"It's a way for us to collaboratively build a knowledge base among APEC countries that draws upon the strengths and experiences of different education systems," Ginsburg explained to me. "It's also a way that we can begin to identify what our differences are."

APEC member countries arrange to have their curricular materials and other resources translated into English, typically by a university researcher or another source. The site is rapidly evolving, Ginsburg noted, and it's likely to include much more information in the future than it does now.

Even so, there's already a wealth of information for anybody interested in how other nations (in some cases, higher-performing nations) are doing things.

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A new report strongly criticizes the way in which teacher colleges, and by extension, states, are preparing aspiring educators to teach math. Count on it receiving a good amount of attention, given all the worries these days about American students lacking sound skills in that subject.

Published by the National Council on Teacher Quality, the report says the curricula used by ed schools cover too little of the math content elementary teachers need—and that what's required varies greatly from campus to campus.

Many states don't help the situation, the report found. Eighteen states have no requirements for what teacher-candidates need to know in math. The textbooks they use are out of date, and important content, especially numbers and operations, and algebra, are neglected in ed school courses, it argues.

The report is a follow-up to a 2006 NCTQ study, which said ed schools were doing a poor job of preparing teachers to teach reading skills. A number of experts agreed with that overall conclusion, though they questioned the study's methodology, which relied on an examination of course syllabi, textbooks, and teaching materials from schools. The new study also looks at syllabi and texts. The authors concede that syllabi and texts may not reflect what is actually being taught in the classroom—but they argue that 1) those materials provide an outline of the schedule and goals of ed school courses; and 2) schools are likely to be covering even less math content than what is being presented in syllabi—not more.

The study is based on 77 ed schools (there are roughly 1,200 nationwide), located in every state except Alaska.

Unlike teachers at upper grades, most elementary educators, of course, are generalists. They're expected to skip from topic to topic, one of them being math, often despite having not studied that much math in college. This has led some people to argue in favor of schools using math "specialists" in elementary school, so that students would have a better shot of being taught that subject by somebody who knows it well.

One fact from the NCTQ report that may receive some notice: The colleges studied, on average, require aspiring math teachers to take 2.5 math courses. While the authors note that's only slightly below the 3 math courses they'd recommend for elementary educators, they argue that such coursework needs to be overhauled to better reflect what those future teachers need.

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A Senate appropriations subcommittee has also voted to eliminate funding for Reading First, according to this article by my colleague Alyson Klein. So it looks like these efforts by the Reading First Advisory Committee to send a statement to committee members may be too late.

Meanwhile, there's all kinds of discussions going on via the listservs and bloggers, including a very interesting take on the situation by Tim Shanahan here. Shanahan says that RF could have survived through the scathing inspector general's reports or the disappointing results of the federal impact study, but not both.

"Under the circumstances, Reading First is 'politically toxic,'" he writes.

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As I've written previously, science teachers are eager to find information on how to present sensible and accurate information about climate change, whatever their personal views on the issue. Yet many have found that those resources are hard to come by. State standards generally don't mention the topic, and, probably as a result, a lot of textbooks and curricular materials don't, either.

I will say that the publishing industry seems to be putting some money into developing new materials, judging from the sheer volume of stuff coming into my mailbox. Even so, science teachers appear to be left to cobble together materials on their own.

But summer, of course, is the time for professional development, and next month, a couple federal agencies are joining Sally Ride in sponsoring a conference for educators on how to teach about climate change. The two-day event will be held in Silver Spring, Md., July 23-24. It's sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, among others.

See my previous story for a few online resources for teachers on climate change. Just to name a few: there's NOAA, NASA, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Also, I suppose more of a primary document is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's most recent report.

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 9:51 AM | Permalink | No Comments | TrackBacks (0)

The Center on Education Policy has released a new study on what's happened with student achievement since the inception of No Child Left Behind. It concludes that 1) state achievement has risen in math and reading; and that 2) the achievement gap between white and minority students appears to have closed, at least judging by students' performance on state tests, and to a lesser extent, by their performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

One measure the CEP report uses is the percent of students scoring at the "proficient" level on their state tests.

Last year, I wrote about a federal study that detailed the vastly different standards that states use in determining whether their students meet that proficient mark. If states can label a student as "proficient" by either a very stringent or very lax standard, many observers say, it raises questions about whether that term has any real meaning.

Let me refer you to another good, and as far as I can tell, largely overlooked source of information on the disparities in state testing standards. Don McLaughlin, a former chief scientist at the American Institutes for Research, was the lead author on a pair of studies that compared state math and reading test results against NAEP.

McLaughlin's reports received little attention when they were published by the federal National Center for Education Statistics earlier this year. But they reveal tremendous gaps in how high or low some states set the bar for proficiency. They also include detailed studies of individual states' testing policies and student performance vs. NAEP.

One finding in McLaughlin's study is that in math the achievement gap that states report on their tests between white and minority students tends to be somewhat smaller than it is on their NAEP results. This gap is not as pronounced in reading, Mr. McLaughlin told me.

In my story on the CEP study, Bruce Fuller of the University of California, Berkeley, questions whether the achievement gap has really narrowed as much as states are claiming.

McLaughlin's reports, particularly their profiles of individual states, should be a good source of info for education researchers -- as well as for my fellow ink-stained wretches in the news business.

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 2:01 PM | Permalink | 6 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Looks like a House appropriations subcommittee isn't interested in revising or strengthening Reading First, as many advocates and experts have advised. As my colleague Alyson Klein reports here, the panel, led by David Obey, one of the harshest critics of was a $1 billion-a-year program, would zero out funding in fiscal 2009.

After the 61 percent cut to RF in the fiscal '08 budget, the strength of the program is certainly compromised. Many districts will be forced to eliminate positions, particularly the reading coaches that became a standard resource in participating schools.

But many observers believe the RF principles—the use of sound, proven instructional strategies, teaching essential skills in an organized way, and regularly gauging what students can and can't do—are likely to endure, especially in those places where principals and veteran teachers internalized them. Certainly the number of teachers who think they can just wing it or rely on instinct to teach kids to read is dwindling. Many RF schools, however, have high turnover of both staff and students, requiring repeated and ongoing training (of teachers) and intervention (of struggling readers), both costly endeavors.

Ed. Sec. Margaret Spellings and Ed. Dept. staffers have been explaining the options for tapping other sources of federal funding for RF programs. Some states and districts are formulating plans for sustaining RF, such as Colorado, described here, and a Louisiana district that has promised to commit some $1.6 million in local funding to continue RF, according to this story in the Shreveport Times.

What other efforts are under way, on the state or local levels, to keep the program going?

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The Shasta Volcano was declared dead by the principal of Shasta High School, in Redding, Calif., after the student newspaper featured a photo of the American flag burning. An op-ed in the paper discussed freedom of speech, but that did not convince the principal that students had the right to publish material he deemed offensive.

The superintendent of the Shasta Union High School District, however, reversed the decision after meeting with the incoming editor, according to the Student Press Law Center. The newspaper staff will receive guidance from journalists at the local newspaper.

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The Reading First Impact Study interim report released by IES last month upset a lot of the program's fans, who've seen progress in their own schools/districts or on a statewide basis. It caused a bit of hand-wringing, and then a round of number crunching. Local and state representatives went to their databases and began printing off page after page of test results from Reading First schools, where they say there's been dramatic improvements.

Some of those analyses, including this, were then tapped by bloggers, RF-friendly columnists, and national organizations to argue that the Impact Study—which found that the $1 billion-a-year investment in the program has had no effect on student's reading comprehension—is flawed.

Russ Whitehurst, who heads the IES, said it is quite possible that schools and districts in the program have seen gains in student achievement. But the proponents are not measuring the same thing as the impact study, which used a comprehension measure and compared RF schools with those in the same districts that did not receive the grants.

Much of the data being rolled out to show RF's impact, including a new 7-page paper by researchers at the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory in Portland, Ore., is based on the DIBELS oral-reading-fluency test. (Analyses in Ohio and Idaho, linked above, are based on improvements on the state reading tests.) The DIBELS ORF test counts how many words in a passage students can accurately read in a minute. In many of the states using the test to gauge RF progress, 110 words is benchmark for a 3rd grader. The NWREL study found that in five states that the lab evaluates for RF—Alaska, Arizona, Montana, Washington, and Wyoming—there was "steady improvement" in the percentage of students meeting the benchmark, as well as a decrease in the proportion of 3rd graders falling well below benchmark.

There has been a lot of debate in the field, however, over just how useful the DIBELS is in gauging how students are doing. It does not test comprehension, the end goal of reading instruction, and while we want kids to read accurately, it is not clear that getting them to read quickly aloud is a worthy aim. It also is not intended as an outcome measure.

None of these local- or state-focused reports offers a complete or rigorous assessment of RF. The final impact study promises more: another year of comprehension data, a fluency measure, classroom observations, and study of the effect of certain teaching practices on achievement.

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A major restructuring of the SAT expanded the test to four hours, in part because of the new writing section, which was intended to paint a truer picture of students' readiness for college work.

A new study released by the College Board today has found that the revised SAT is a little more effective at predicting how well students will do in their college courses than the previous version, and that the writing-section results are the best predictor of later college performance. But the best alternative to a crystal ball—no test-prep needed to figure this one out—is a combination of SAT scores and high school grades.

So, just to make sure you were paying attention: A high SAT score and good high school grades are to a respectable college GPA as ??? (Oh, right. I was never very good at analogies. How about you?)

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A year ago, Will Fitzhugh was wondering if the next issue of The Concord Review, the renowned journal he founded in 1988 to recognize high school students' outstanding history research papers, would be the last. On a tattered shoestring budget, Fitzhugh has just published the Summer 2008 edition, and with some support from schools and other fans in the private sector, he has hopes for four more issues over the next year.

But the former high school history teacher is proceeding mostly on a wing and a prayer, and a driving passion for promoting rigorous academic work for teenagers. Last year, the salary for the curmudgeonly 71-year-old was a measly $8,600. This for a scholar who has won widespread praise among the top education thinkers in the country for demanding, and rewarding, excellence and earnestness in the study of history. Thousands of high school students—mostly from private schools, but many from public schools, including diverse and challenged ones—have responded with work that has impressed some prominent historians and many college-admissions officers.

So how is it that such an undertaking is only scraping by, while other worthy programs, such as the National Writing Project and the Teaching American History Grants, manage to garner millions of dollars each year in federal and foundation support?

Right now, the Review is staying afloat on the commitment of Fitzhugh and some 20 secondary institutions that have ponied up $5,000 each to join a consortium that was created a year ago to cover the costs of publishing the journal. The National Writing Board, also founded by Fitzhugh, brings in some money from students who pay for an evaluation of their research papers that can be sent in with their college applications.

Why is it that some extraordinary efforts in education, which seem to have vision and the right end goal, struggle so?

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A new Web site takes a stab at spelling out the essential grade-by-grade math standards that students need from kindergarten through high school.

Not only that, the site provides model course sequences, model classroom activities, and even sample test questions for math-oriented educators who want to put those standards into practice.

It's the product of a partnership between Achieve, a Washington organization that advocates higher academic standards, and the Charles A. Dana Center, an education research hub at the University of Texas at Austin.

The new site builds on math benchmarks Achieve created for the American Diploma Project, aimed at describing the skills students need for college and the workplace. The site back-tracks and sets expectations through early grades, essentially showing what it takes to get to a level of high school preparation.

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It was a week for discussing education around the globe. In Slovenia, President Bush and leaders of the European Union signed a declaration June 10 at the U.S.-E.U. summit that promises support for improving education in developing countries, through a “holistic approach” that addresses “the global shortfall of effective teachers through support for teacher training, recruitment, retention, and capacity development.”

In Lima, Peru, Sec. Margaret Spellings attended the 4th Education Ministerial Meeting at APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation), where leaders from 21 countries agreed on similar goals. The delegates also suggested that learning should go beyond knowledge acquisition to the development of “critical thinking and communication skills.

“Economies that score high in reasoning also score high in facts and procedures and the inverse is also true,” an APEC statement says. “Students need to develop both foundational and higher-order skills.”

Students should be able to use those skills, the statement goes on, to tackle issues beyond math and science and language learning, such as “global warming, historical events, or political issues.”

Math and science were expected to be key topics at the summit.

Last I spoke with the folks at Achieve, they were in the midst of analyzing math and science standards from APEC countries under a grant from the Ed Dept. Matt Gandal told me he was anticipating a discussion of how expectations compare across countries, which could help inform a conversation about standards and practices in U.S. schools and how they might be improved.

Ed Week has delved into these areas recently, here.

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A couple years ago, I took a trip to Canton, Ohio, home to the illustrious Pro Football Hall of Fame, and home to a group of schools that were using classroom technology in an attempt to boost student performance in math.

Teachers in several Canton schools had set up a system called TI-Navigator, in combination with graphing calculators, both designed by Texas Instruments. The system worked like this:

A math teacher would give a problem to students, who would type answers (such as plotting points on a graph) into their calculators. Their calculators were connected by cords to "hubs," which dangled from a few points in the classroom and which sent signals wirelessly back to the teacher's computer. The teacher then received instant information on how many students -- say, two out of 20, or 18 out of 20 -- had the correct answer. Teachers could then adjust their lessons on the fly, focusing on the problems or concepts that gave students the most trouble.

You sometimes hear these programs referred to as "personal response" or "audience response" systems.

This setup might have made the class look a bit like a hospital ward (with IVs hanging everywhere), but for Canton officials, it was just the right medicine. They saw their students math scores' rise, in some cases dramatically, after using the systems.

But the question remained: Would this technology work as effectively in other math classrooms, among different groups of students?

Now, research by Douglas Owens of Ohio State University suggests the answer is a qualified yes.

Owens is the principal investigator on a four-year, federally funded project that examines the impact of TI Navigator and graphing calculators in math classes. The project, using a research method known as a randomized control trial, is looking at the performance of 1,800 students and 127 teachers from 28 states.

He found that students' math performance, after one year, rose by about 2 points on a 37-point test. It's possible that those gains will increase, as students and teachers become more familiar with the technology, Owens told me, after discussing his research at a conference on June 11 in Washington. The was hosted by the federal Institute of Education Sciences, which is supporting his study.

Read more about his research here http://ccms.osu.edu/.

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Ed Sec Margaret Spellings writes this week in the Salt Lake Tribune and the N.J. Herald News in defense of Reading First, a bit late perhaps for some advocates and observers who were waiting for her to make such a case a month ago when scathing headlines followed IES's release of the interim impact study.

Some of those headlines may have unfairly or inaccurately described the results, including these: "Failing to Read," "Billion Dollar Boondoggle," "U.S. Reading Program a Failure, study says." The study's bottom line is that the $1 billion-a-year funding stream has not led to improved reading comprehension, although it is difficult to draw any conclusions from such interim findings.

But the statement by the Ed Dept.'s Amanda Farris in this Education Week article may not have made a strong case either. It touted anecdotal evidence, primarily supportive comments Spellings heard during her visits to schools and events in 20 states. Those schools, no doubt, were carefully selected for their success or satisfaction with the program. It wasn't the kind of evidence that Spellings and other federal officials have demanded.

"In God we trust, all others bring data," has been the oft-repeated demand from Spellings and others. So far, however, the hard data on the effectiveness of Reading First is confusing and limited.

In her opinion piece this week, which may pop up in other papers around the country, she points to several schools and districts that have data to show their progress. Many state RF directors have reported gains in reading achievement among participating schools. The final impact study, expected later this year, may offer a clearer picture.

What evidence have you seen that Reading First is or isn't working?

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Florida’s new state science standards break new ground by including their first-ever reference to a major scientific topic.

And no, in this case I’m not talking about evolution, which got all the attention when the standards were approved back in February.

The 96-page document, in addition to having references to the previously absent e-word, also spells out that Florida’s students should understand the basic science behind climate change.

High school students should “discuss the large-scale environmental impacts resulting from human activity, including waste spills, oil spills, runoff, greenhouse gases, ozone depletion, and surface and groundwater pollution,” it says.

On its own, the place of climate change in any science standard hardly seems unusual, given the growing concern about the issue among scientists and the public. Congress is considering a “cap-and-trade” bill aimed at curbing the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to climate change, sponsored by Sens. John W. Warner, R-Va., and Joe Lieberman, an Independent from Connecticut.

But to date, climate change has been largely ignored in state standards, which shape the content of state tests, textbooks, and instruction.

This void almost certainly isn’t the result of any political controversy over the issue—such as the extent to which pollution from human industrial activities are causing global warming. It has more to do with the slow cycle for revising state academic standards.

States typically overhaul those documents every five to 10 years—or once in 12 years, as was the case in Florida. (Read the new version of Florida's standards here. ) Scientists’ understanding of climate change has increased greatly in that time. So has the public’s grasp of the issue, as a a result of media coverage, the attention paid to Al Gore’s documentary on the topic, and other factors.

Florida officials asked for public comments in drafting their standards last year—and they were flooded with thousands of them, many of them related to evolution. The state board of education ultimately voted to include fairly extensive language on that theory in the document. (See my story on the evolution debate here.)

Public comments on the climate-change language were largely positive, according to Paul Ruscher, an associate professor of meteorology at Florida State University, who served on a committee that drafted the standards. The language related to “human activity” and “greenhouse gases” received the most criticism, he told me.

The objections were mostly, “‘Well, I’m not teaching Al Gore’s movie,’” Ruscher recalled. “Well, we weren’t recommending that.”

Ruscher, who specializes in coastal weather patterns, said the document’s drafters felt strongly about including climate change, given public interest in the topic, as well as scientific consensus about it.

For instance, a report released last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that evidence of climate change is “unequivocal,” and that there is a “very high confidence” among scientists that humans are contributing to it. (Read a summary of the report here. )

Florida officials also viewed the topic as particularly relevant, given concerns in their state about rising sea levels and stronger storms, and their impact on businesses and residents, Ruscher said. Many science teachers, he added, were asking for more guidance in addressing climate change, as well as on broader weather and climate topics.

“We tried to write language in these standards that was politically neutral,” he said, “but scientifically objective.”

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 1:27 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | TrackBacks (0)

We've launched this blog with the hope of cultivating a wide-ranging forum for discussing school curriculum. By "curriculum," we generally mean the meat-and-bones of academic lessons -- what gets taught, in what order, at what grades. This obviously covers a lot of ground--policies, programs and materials, trends, standards and assessments, research, controversies, and best practices.

Over the past few years, the two of us have reported on a bevy of curriculum topics, including how the federal Reading First program has been implemented, the recommendations of the National Math Panel, and the status of social studies, foreign language, the arts, and other subjects that aren't tested under No Child Left Behind. We've also looked at math and science lessons, and their potential to challenge students to excel in those subjects, or turn them off, as well as ongoing debates about how to teach evolution.

From our reporting--whether on site or on the phone--we've stuffed notebooks and word files with a lot of information about the content of schooling. You'll find some of it here, and we hope you'll help us fill out the picture.

All comments, questions, curriculum-related manifestos welcome!

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