Advocacy organizations and policymakers have sought to encourage more students to enroll in Advanced Placement classes, a popular college-prep track, in recent years. Yet teachers are torn about whether all interested students should be allowed into those classes, or only those who meet certain academic pre-qualifications, as my colleague Stephen Sawchuk explains in a new story. He's reporting on a new survey released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
Interesting changes appear to be in the works for the state of Texas' accountability system, according to this story in the Dallas Morning News.
The proposed changes, included in legislation moving through the House and Senate in Austin, would require students to meet new, higher college-readiness standards in English and language arts. But at earlier grades, the bills also would allow schools to promote students on a combination of factors, including test scores, grades, and teacher recommendations, as opposed to simply state test scores, according to the story. And state performance ratings of schools would be changed to consider growth in student scores on state tests, instead of only passing rates on those tests.
What's driving the changes? According to the story, some Texas lawmakers believe the current system is simply not getting results. Specifically, while scores on state tests are increasing, scores on outside measures of students' college preparedness—the ACT and SAT—are not. And there's also a belief that the current system punishes schools and does not reward them for making progress, a point of view that's being voiced at the federal level, amid discussions of reauthorizing No Child Left Behind. "Our goal is to do improvement, not punishment—standards, not excuses," the chair of the state's Senate Education Committee is quoted as saying.
And on an unrelated, and considerably wackier note, the story says that lawmakers debating the legislation took the following action:
"An amendment approved in the House would prohibit school districts from regulating the hair length of honor students who have no disciplinary record or unexcused absences."
Texas, let it grow!
My colleague Alyson Klein reports on yesterday's hearing by the House Education and Labor Committee on common standards in "House Panel Considers Federal Role in Standards."
Former North Carolina Gov. James B. Hunt, Jr., testified that the Congress could help keep states' efforts to create common standards on track by asking for regular reports and for seeing that the states meet the deadlines that they set out for themselves. He said that Congress could also provide funding for the effort.
Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, the top Republican on the Committee, argued that the states are capable of creating common standards all by themselves, if they so desire, and the federal government should stay out of their way.
An objective observer looking at course-taking patterns in middle and high school math in the United States, as shown in national data released this week, could argue that this country's students have made enormous strides. Thirteen-year-olds are more likely to take introductory algebra today than ever before: 30 percent of them reported being enrolled in that class today, as opposed to just 16 percent two decades ago. Thirty-two percent said they're taking prealgebra, compared with 19 percent in 1986.
Precalc or calc? Among 17-year-olds, 19 percent report having taken that class in high school, while just 6 percent could make that claim in 1978. Algebra 2 or trigonometry? The beat goes on: 52 percent said they had taken that class as their highest course, while only 37 percent reported having done so 30 years ago.
Yet as my colleague Mary Ann Zehr aptly noted in her story yesterday, if you look at U.S. high schoolers' actual test scores, that’s where the good news ends. While middle-, and especially early-grades math scores have risen on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, there's been almost no gain among 17-year-olds for the last 35 years. The scores among high school students today is 306 on a 500-point NAEP scale; it was 304 back in 1973.
Across the country, states and districts are requiring students to take more math, with more impressive-sounding titles (Algebra 1, Algebra 2) than ever before. So where's the disconnect?
One possibility, which has been voiced by a lot of math experts: The math courses being taught in schools aren’t living up to their titles. If a school or state requires students to enroll in an Algebra 1 or Algebra 2 course, the temptation among school officials is to water it down. Some teachers I’ve interviewed in the past put it in pretty plain terms: If struggling students were forced to take authentic Algebra 1 or Algebra 2 content, they’d flunk those courses or barely scrape by. As a result, courses with the same descriptors carry very different expectations. (See an entry of mine about data presented earlier this year by federal statistics official Peggy Carr on how students receiving an A in high school math scores often fare quite differently on NAEP.)
Another issue is the quality of the teaching of these courses. If schools are forced to enroll more students in tough courses, like Algebra 1 or 2, earlier in school, it stands to reason that teachers who were leading more basic math classes are going to be pressed into duty in the more demanding classes—whether they're ready or not. One researcher I spoke with recently pointed to another problem. Some teachers who are used to presenting math content, such as Algebra 1, to older students, are flummoxed when asked to work with middle schoolers. Working with younger students requires different math teaching skills, such as the ability to present content across a broad range of ability levels, the researcher told me.
Poor-quality middle and high school math courses, of course, are hardly the only likely culprit. Students who score poorly on NAEP almost certainly stumbled in math at several points along the K-12 math continuum. But you have to think that the discrepancy between students' relatively impressive course transcripts and their weak NAEP performance will prompt some serious reflection among policymakers and researchers in the months and years ahead.
A couple points worth noting in the NAEP data. Despite the overall stagnation among 17-year-olds in math, scores among the lowest-achieving teenagers (those in the bottom 10th and 25th percentiles) have risen, albeit slowly, since the 1970s. Top-tier students’ scores are flat: a 343 score today, compared with a 345 back in 1978. But despite the relative progress of low-performers, the gains among struggling students were much greater among 9- and 13-year olds.
One expert on testing quoted in Mary Ann’s story speculates that the curriculum and teaching reforms implemented in early-grades math in this country haven’t borne fruit on high school test scores yet. Do you agree? What causes do you see in the disconnect between the performance in elementary- and middle-grades math and what’s happening in high schools?
Certainly attending a school that emphasizes green or environmentally friendly habits and processes is going to have an impact on students' awareness of such issues. But preteens at Merrill Middle School in Des Moines, Iowa, who participated in a recent survey about their commitment to conservation seem to be walking the walk in their everyday lives as well.
The 140 students, between 10 and 12, describe in detail how the environment, and the value they give to conservation efforts, influence their day-to-day activities. They may be at that age when many youths are seen as self-absorbed and unfocused, but this school project revealed their deep interest in the three Rs: reduce, reuse, recycle.
The Des Moines district started its own green revolution with efforts to reduce energy consumption, introduce more energy-efficient systems in schools, and develop curriculum materials related to those projects.
At Merrill, students help run a recycling program and help maintain a school garden. Teachers, too, have introduced green practices, including powering down computers on the weekends and securing a grant to have solar panels installed.
The environmental emphasis has led students to change their habits at home as well, according to the report. Most of the students, for example, report reducing their water usage and urging their parents to recycle and reduce consumption.
Are schools in your area taking steps to promote conservation? Are their energy bills falling, or rising, as a result, of these activities? And are teachers attempting to build lessons in science and other subjects around these efforts?
The long-term trend data for the National Assessment of Educational Progress was released today and the news is not good for students in high school. Average scores have remained flat for 17-year-olds both in reading and math since the early 1970s, when the assessments were first given. The scores for 17-year-olds in reading, however, did increase by three points, to 286, from 2004 to 2008, which is considered significant. But the same was not true for 17-year-olds in math. The scores remained stagnant for that age group in math during that same period.
Written statements are starting to flow into my e-mail inbox in response to the NAEP data.
Update: A statement from U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan doesn't mention the stagnant scores among 17-year-olds at all. Here's what he says:
We’re pleased to see some recent progress among all age groups in reading and among younger age groups in math. We’re also pleased to see achievement gaps shrinking in reading, but we still have a lot more work to do. Our focus on raising standards, increasing academic rigor and improving teacher quality are all steps in the right direction.
Here's an excerpt from a statement by U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House and Education Labor Committee:
In light of the staggeringly high dropout rate and growing threats to our nation’s competitiveness, closing the achievement gap and building world-class schools for all students must be a top priority. Overall, this report is further proof that we must do better. While it’s good news that younger students are making meaningful gains in reading and math, it’s deeply troubling that many high school students are not.
A statement from Andrew J. Coulson, the director of the the Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom, is more strongly worded. I post an excerpt here:
The latest NAEP results reveal a productivity collapse unparalleled in any other sector of the economy. At the end of high school, students perform no better today than they did nearly 40 years ago, and yet we spend more than twice as much per pupil in real, inflation-adjusted terms. I can’t think of any other service that has gotten worse during my lifetime.
Update: Peggy G. Carr, the associate commissioner for the assessment division of the National Center for Education Statistics, is answering questions about the long-term trend results today at a "statchat." The chat starts at 2 p.m. Eastern Time. Questions can be submitted beforehand.
Barack Obama sounded a JFK-style motif in a speech before the National Academy of Sciences today. It came through not only in his direct mining of quotations from the 35th president, and his references to Kennedy’s (and President Eisenhower's) scientific initiatives post-Sputnik. Obama, to be sure, indicated he'd put money and political capital into scientific research and K-12 science education. But he called for some shared sacrifice in return. Specifically, he seemed to beseech scientists to step out of their labs and research facilities a lot more often, to help sell young people on the wonder of science, and the benefits of careers in math- and science-related fields.
These remarks caught my eye:
“So I want to persuade you to spend time in the classroom, talking and showing young people what it is that your work can mean, and what it means to you,” Obama said. “I want to encourage you to participate in programs to allow students to get a degree in science fields and a teaching certificate at the same time. I want us all to think about new and creative ways to engage young people in science and engineering, whether it's science festivals, robotics competitions, fairs that encourage young people to create and build and invent—to be makers of things, not just consumers of things.”
Obama’s comments brought to mind the complaints I’ve heard from both K-12 science teachers and college faculty over the years—that scientists don’t always try hard enough to explain the value of their work and why it matters to lay audiences. I heard this criticism a lot during recent controversies over the teaching of evolution in public schools. Science teachers often bemoaned the public’s overall lack of knowledge about evolutionary theory, yet many of them admitted that they weren’t that adept at explaining the theory’s relevance, at least not in easily digestible form. The scientific community seems to have become far more determined on that front in recent years in getting its message out to the public, on evolution and other topics. And many top research institutions invest heavily in outreach to the K-12 community. Obama suggested that he expects scientists to not only be pioneers in their fields, but ambassadors to the next generation.
On a newsier front, the president also pledged to reward state that take innovative approaches to helping students in math and science, with access to federal stimulus money: “[S]tates making strong commitments and progress in math and science education will be eligible to compete later this fall for additional funds under the Secretary of Education's $5 billion Race to the Top program,” Obama said. In addition, he called for them to “dramatically improve achievement in math and science by raising standards, modernizing science labs, upgrading curriculum, and forging partnerships to improve the use of science and technology in our classrooms. I'm challenging states, as well, to enhance teacher preparation and training, and to attract new and qualified math and science teachers to better engage students and reinvigorate those subjects in our schools.”
He also suggested that his administration support measures to draw career-changers and math-and-science related professionals into teaching: “[L]et's create new pathways for experienced professionals to go into the classroom,” the Obama said. “ There are, right now, chemists who could teach chemistry, physicists who could teach physics, statisticians who could teach mathematics. But we need to create a way to bring the expertise and the enthusiasm of these folks –- folks like you –- into the classroom.”
He also pointed to a statewide “STEM” initiative in Pennsylvania as a good model for other states. You can read the full transcript of his remarks here.
Or maybe a meat cleaver ... depends on how you look it at. Florida's governing body for high school athletics approved cutting 20 percent of varsity contests and 40 percent for nonvarsity sports, in response to budget shortfalls. All sports, except the all-mighty—football—will be affected. For those wondering why football was spared, I believe it's because football traditionally brings in revenue, enough to support other sports. At least that's the reasoning that was given to me by Roger Dearing of the Florida High School Athletic Association, when I interviewed him for a story last month on cuts to sports programs around the country. Across-the-board reductions to sports, while painful, at least make it easier for districts to work together to schedule games and save travel costs, he told me.
A number of athletic directors and administrators I interviewed for that story were worried about entire sports being eliminated outright, and about how it would affect students, particularly those from troubled or disadvantaged backgrounds. Sports keeps students engaged in school, they argued. (I would love to see more research on that, by the way, if someone can point me to it.) The Florida association's decision is an alternative to that dire option. I would assume that schools will stage fewer games and more practices and intrasquad matches. Not as much fun for the athletes, to be sure, but more appealing than seeing their seasons canceled.
How do the sports cuts in your districts compare with what's taking place in Florida?
Arne Duncan spoke before the nation’s largest gathering of math teachers this weekend in Washington, D.C. While I wouldn’t say there were any dramatic departures from his earlier scripts, the secretary made a few points worth noting, particularly when it comes to trying to get more math teachers into the classroom, and persuading them to stay.
The secretary, addressing the annual meeting of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics on Saturday, no doubt made some new friends when he spoke highly of differential pay—basically, paying math teachers more than teachers of other subjects, as a way to lure them into the field. (Duncan made the same pitch before the National Science Teachers Association recently).
Advocates for math and science say teachers in those fields are too easily drawn out of the classroom by the promise of higher pay elsewhere. Unions sometimes oppose those measures, saying they’re unfair and lead to discord in schools.
“We have to respond to the market, and the market is telling us we have a critical need,” Duncan told the audience, which appeared to number a couple thousand. They responded enthusiastically, as you might have guessed.
Duncan also touted alternative certification as a promising route to get educators-in-waiting into schools. Early in his speech, he talked about the federal stimulus plan’s ability to stave off a “tidal wave” of job losses, and keep teachers who might otherwise be out on the street, in the classroom. Alternative certification could appeal to those career-changers, he said. “Folks are losing jobs in other fields,” he said, adding: “Why do we lock them out of education?”
While we're on the topic, I'd like to know if anyone has seen any data that shows whether differential pay plans lead to teachers sticking with the profession, or, for that matter, to student improvement. Some people have questioned the effectiveness of monetary incentives, such as grants and scholarships, to lure and keep math and science teachers in the classroom. (And see my colleague, Debbie Viadero's recent story about Richard Ingersoll's research, which suggests that universities are producing sufficient numbers of math and science teachers, but that schools are not doing enough to retain them.)
As he has in other settings, Duncan said the stimulus spending—about $115 billion in all on education—creates an opportunity for federal, state, and local policymakers to support innovations in schools. He called for local school officials, teachers included, to act as watchdogs, and suggested that if the “unprecedented” amount of K-12 money isn’t wisely spent—“if we don’t create, and if we don’t innovate”—the public is less likely to support big school investments in the future.
While stimulus and workforce issues got a lot of attention, the secretary didn’t touch at all on curriculum issues. It’ll be curious to see to what extent federal stimulus spending supports experimentation in math teaching, and what shape those efforts will take.
And how active will the Obama administration be in promoting the work of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, the expert federal group convened by the Bush White House? That panel produced a series of recommendations last year for improving early grades math instruction. In the Bush administration’s waning days in office, Margaret Spellings’ department actively promoted the panel’s findings to parents and the public. Will Duncan do the same?
Martin Doblmeier is the director of a documentary film, "The Power of Forgiveness," and has given talks at about 50 screenings of his film around the country. About half the screenings were sponsored by faith groups and the other half by high schools or universities, he says. More universities than schools have been interested in showing the film, but Doblmeier would like to see the film get more exposure in high schools.
The film, made in 2007, has been shown in at least one community deeply affected by violence: Blacksburg, Va., the home of Virginia Tech. I chose this month, when the 10th anniversary of the killings at Columbine High School is being marked, to feature it as a possible resource for schools.
Children in schools are the subject of the film, which I watched last week, in a few segments. There's footage about how elementary schools in Ireland are using a "forgiveness curriculum" that was developed by Robert Enright, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin, to combat tensions between Protestants and Catholics in that country. (The curriculum is also in use in a private school in Milwaukee.) The Irish children are shown putting on plastic "forgiveness glasses" and talking about how they might see someone differently through the lens of forgiveness than without it.
The movie explores as well how the Amish expressed forgiveness to the family of Charles Roberts, a mentally disturbed milk-truck driver who shot and killed five school girls and wounded five others at an Amish school in 2006.
There's also footage that shows two men—Azim Khamisa and Ples Felix—visiting the Gompers Charter Middle School in San Diego and talking about forgiveness. Azim Khamisa is the father of Tariq Khamisa, who at age 20 was shot and killed in 1995 by Tony Hicks, who was then 14. Ples Felix is the grandfather of Hicks. The two men, one grieving over the death of his son and the other over the actions of his grandson, formed a strong bond and now visit schools to convey that forgiveness can be the best response to horrible events in one's life. "Forgiveness is something you do for yourself," Khamisa tells the students.
Tom Rickards, who teaches at the William Penn Charter School, a private Quaker school (not a public charter school as the name suggests) in Philadelphia, says he showed the segments of the film about the Amish and about the friendship between the grandfather of a murderer and the father of the young man who was murdered in a class about Quaker principals and practices and also an ethics class. Rickards said that film fit in with a discussion about the "morality of emotions" and how much people should or shouldn't try to control their emotions.
Doblmeier visited the ethics class to talk with the students. The school community had a screening of the film in the evening.
Rickards said his students responded to the role of personal narrative in the film. And they were struck, he said, with how the filmmaker acknowledged he included some opinions of people in his film that he didn't personally agree with.
The Pennington School, a private school in Pennington, N.J., also recently hosted Doblmeier during a screening of his film.
The film presents a wide variety of perspectives both from people of faith—including Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese-born Zen Buddhist monk, and Rev. Lyndon Harris, who is an Episcopal priest at a church near Ground Zero of the 9/11 terrorist attacks—and secular researchers who study the impact of forgiveness on human health. It does not wrap the concept of forgiveness into a neat package. It is about the choices, including revenge and forgiveness, people have in responding to violence.
The theme of this year's National Council of Teachers of Mathematics annual meeting—attended by about 12,000 educators—is “equity,” essentially trying to ensure that all students have an opportunity to learn.
It comes as no surprise, then, that one of the big themes of the teachers and academic scholars presenting at various sessions, and among companies trying to peddle commercial products in the exhibit hall, was intervention. As teachers cope with pressure to lift math scores, and attempt to teach difficult courses at earlier grades (see my earlier entry on the question of when calculus should be taught), schools are scrambling to find ways to help students who are lagging behind.
Many of the sessions focused on helping students with a specific math topic—algebra, not surprisingly, was the subject of several sessions. Other speakers explored strategies for building the skills of English-language learners in math, or helping students in informal settings through math nights, games, contests, and after-school activities. And a number of guests focused on helping students master specific, crucial areas of early-grades math, such as fractions.
Educators also flocked to sessions on the potential for technology to make math understandable to students. One big name in the school technology world, Texas Instruments, presented information on a product, TI Math Forward, which seeks to combine interactive technology (such as its Navigator technology, an interactive program) with coaching and common planning time for teachers, and double-block, or 100-minute classes. Administrators from the Richardson Independent School District, outside Dallas, said they have made progress in closing the gap between white and minority students, and improved scores on state tests, through the program. TI Math Forward is geared toward students in grades 7-9. The district had tried double-blocking math courses previously, but it wasn’t until it combined extra time with other strategies that it saw real student improvements, said Kristen San Juan, a math support specialist in the district.
“The middle-school grades are where things fall off for many students,” San Juan told me. “We wanted to address the gap, the decline at that age.”
NCTM’s attendance numbers for its annual meeting dipped a bit from some previous years—perhaps not surprising, given the state of the economy. At its annual event in Anaheim in 2005, where improving the math skills of minority students was a major theme, I reported that 14,000 educators attended.
Many attendees see conferences as a valuable way to learn about the best practices across the nation and the latest thinking among researchers and other experts for raising student achievement. For math teachers who are trying to reduce the gap between high- and low-achieving students, what strategies are showing the most promise in your schools?
Politics K-12 reports that the House Education and Labor Committee will hold a hearing on Wednesday about common standards. You can weigh in over at that blog on my colleague Alyson Klein's question: Is it better for Congress to get involved in this or stay away?
Sean Cavanagh's most recent blog entry, "Rush to Calculus?," about a math professor at Rutgers University who questions the push for students to take calculus in high school struck a chord with me.
I'm someone who took calculus my senior year of high school because I thought that's what college-bound students were supposed to do. I was a transfer student to Oak Ridge High School in Tennessee my senior year; I'd gone to high school in New Wilmington, Pa., before that. My family had followed my dad to Oak Ridge for a sabbatical year. I'd taken all the hard courses back home, so the Oak Ridge High staff assigned me to all the hard courses in my new school. One of those ended up being Advanced Placement Calculus.
I soon realized that the content was way over my head, but it never occurred to me, nor likely to my parents, that I should drop out. The difficulties I faced, I believe, were a combination of not having acquired a strong foundation in math in my previous classes, though my grades had been acceptable, along with the likelihood that I had only average ability to learn math concepts.
My two older siblings had good science and math ability (one had already earned a college math degree) so it's likely my parents thought I'd be able to get up to speed. But instead, I increasingly fell behind my classmates and eventually even stopped doing my homework, which was voluntary, in despair. My B during the first term dropped to a D by the last term of the class; it was the only D I ever received in my school career. I got a C average for the year and didn't bother to take the AP test. I sat in shame while my teacher coached my classmates for the test during the end of the school year.
I did, however, later take a College Level Examination Test in math and scored well enough that my college awarded me credit for one college-level math class. So I never had to take another math class in my life, and I didn't. AP Calculus had killed my desire to do so.
Looking back, I wish that I'd skipped the AP Calculus class and taken some of the strong AP history classes offered at Oak Ridge High School instead, which were more aligned with my interest and abilities. Or I wish that someone had encouraged me to drop out of calculus when it was clear I didn't have the foundation to do well in the class. It would have saved me a lot of tears and feelings of shame.
By the way, I did take AP English that same year, excelled in it, realized my love for language and literature, and majored in English in college. So not all was lost.
But it was interesting to read that Joseph G. Rosenstein argues that pushing students to take advanced math in high school may be hurting some students rather than helping them.
For many high school students who show talent in math, or at least a moderate degree of skill in that subject, their choice of a senior-year math course may not amount to much of a choice at all. They’re expected to take calculus, which they’re told will help them get into college, and succeed once they arrive there.
Joseph G. Rosenstein, a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University, questions the logic of asking students to take that class in high school. He speculated that many of the students who take calculus in high school and struggle through it were losing interest in math upon arriving in college. A few years ago, he decided to probe the high school and college transcripts of students at his university, and what he found confirmed his doubts.
Rosenstein argues that the “acceleration” of students through high school math is not helping students, and in fact may be hurting them. This acceleration begins with the push to have students take 8th grade algebra and continues through senior-year calculus, he says.
In 2004, after examining the transcripts of 400 randomly chosen Rutgers students, he found that only a small percentage of those who had taken calculus in 12th grade, about 6 percent, continued on an "accelerated" pace through math in college—which he defined as taking Calculus 2 and Calculus 3 during their freshman year on campus.
The professor, who has written a book about discrete math and worked on professional- development programs for K-12 teachers, outlined his findings at the annual conference of the National Conference of Teachers of Mathematics, which is meeting in Washington this week. He titled his talk, "A Rush to Calculus."
Rosenstein found that students who took the AP test in that subject fared better in Rutgers math courses than those who simply took the AP course. Those findings echo some previous research on the benefits of students committing to take the AP exam, he said.
The Rutgers scholar was quick to acknowledge to the audience that his research wasn’t scientifically rigorous. But his message seemed to resonate deeply among the teachers and other mathematically minded attendees who packed into a conference room for his presentation.
Many students take calculus in high school because they believe it will satisfy college expectations, Rosenstein said. They also do because everyone else is doing it, or because their parents urge them to take it.
“The calculus fever is very strong,” Rosenstein told the audience. “The question is, is that better, and does the acceleration strategy work?”
Rosenstein suggested that high school officials try to require that students receive a relatively strong grade, such as a B, before they're allowed to move on to the next-toughest class. Of course, imposing those prerequisites is not easy. One teacher in the audience told him that when she and her colleagues recommend that a struggling student not move on to a certain advanced math topic, parents overrule them.
Students might also enroll in calculus because their schools offer few other senior-year options if they’ve already completed Algebra 2. Some researchers and scholars are experimenting with alternative senior-year courses in discrete math, applied math, and other topics, which they say can keep students on pace for college-level material, without delving too much into calculus. I wrote about those alternatives last year.
Of course, those courses can present challenges, too. Schools may not have enough teachers to lead alternative senior-year classes. They also may worry that those course offerings will morph into unchallenging classes.
How can a teacher or school official know when a student is ready for calculus? And is there any harm in waiting until college to take that class?
Everywhere I turn on the education blogs this morning, I'm seeing mention of a report released by McKinsey & Co. yesterday that says the achievement gap between U.S. students and those in other nations is hurting the United States economically. See, "Achievement Gaps Drag Down Economy, Study Finds," by my colleague Alyson Klein here at EdWeek and a post by guest blogger Liana Heitin at Politics K-12. Thomas Freidman mentions the report in a column in the The New York Times (picked up by eduwonk, Gotham Schools, and This Week in Education). Update: Read Eduflack's take here.
It just so happens that the three writers for this blog have been doing some rather heavy-duty reporting looking into what three countries that are performing very well on international tests might be doing right in their curriculum and overall K-12 schooling systems. You can find stories at edweek.org that we wrote about education in Australia, Slovenia, and South Korea.
But as an overview article accompanying the stories suggests, it isn't easy to judge the value of the international tests that compare different schooling systems around the world.
And today at 2 p.m. ET, Kathleen Kennedy Manzo will be hosting a chat about the role of international tests in U.S. education.
Guests for the chat are Gary Phillips, a vice president and chief scientist at the American Institutes for Research, and Hal Salzman, a professor of public policy and a senior faculty fellow at the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.
If you miss the chat, you can read the transcript, which will be posted minutes after the chat is over at 3 p.m.
Earlier this month, we were discussing on this blog if it would be a good idea to have a YouTube Channel with video lessons from K-12 teachers. Well, check out the "classroom footage" section of a new project called Word Generation to get a sense for how nicely sample video lessons can be packaged so that other teachers can learn from them.
The footage is about a hot topic in education: how to teach "academic language" to students. That means the words, abstract phrases, and structures students need to know to understand school subjects. It differs from the kind of language they use talking to their friends at recess or in the cafeteria. To tell you the truth, I knew this topic was much-discussed in the area of educating English-language learners, a group of students that I've specialized in writing about for nearly a decade, but now I find that educators can't just assume that other students have acquired academic language either, without teaching it explicitly.
I dropped in by video to Chris Buttimer's classroom of 8th graders (in a school somewhere in California or Massachusetts that is not named in the footage) where he was introducing the topic of the week, "Should secret wiretapping be legal?" The video doesn't looked canned; it even shows a student walking into class late with a backpack slung over his shoulder. One of the vocabulary words for the week is "notwithstanding" and throughout the video lessons, Buttimer keeps hammering at that word from different angles. "It's not a word I use all that often, but it's a good one to know," he says. At another point, he adds, "Essentially, it means despite."
But the videos are not just of Buttimer talking. In this mini-series, there's one of students at work making "target word posters" while Buttimer circulates and makes sure they stay on task. "Guys, they don't have to be too beautiful, OK?"
There's a whole lot more to Word Generation: Middle School Literacy Development Using Academic Language than video lessons. It's a resource developed by Catherine Snow, a reading expert at Harvard University, in collaboration with Boston public school teachers. You can find out more about it at a Webinar on April 28.
President Barack Obama visited the District of Columbia's SEED School yesterday to sign the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. He described the school as "a place where service is a core component of the curriculum," according to a transcript of his remarks. President Obama added that "just as the SEED School teaches reading and writing, arithmetic and athletics, it also prepares our young Americans to grow into active and engaged citizens."
I report in a story just published at edweek.org on several new programs created by the Serve America Act aimed at engaging middle and high school youths in community service. With these new programs comes authorization for additional funds that schools may tap into. We'll have to wait, though, until the U.S. Congress approves a new budget for fiscal 2010 to see what's appropriated for the new programs.
But if your school has thought about launching a service-learning curriculum or strengthening one that is already in place, now is the time to read the fine print in the Serve America Act (search thomas.gov for H.R. 1388) and see how you might apply for federal funds to do so. And a couple of organizations—Innovations in Civic Participation and the National Youth Leadership Council—are poised to help you. The Corporation for National and Community Service will administer all the money that is appropriated for the Serve America Act.
In the meantime, Michael R. Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City, has announced several initiatives to back volunteerism. Among them is a requirement that all public school principals in the city create a plan to promote volunteerism among students.
NASA, or the National Aeronautic and Space Administration, has been creating curricular resources for science teachers for years. Here's a new resource for educators ready to move beyond traditional paper and pencil lessons, and even beyond traditional computer-based activities.
The space agency has created a site that facilitates "do-it-yourself podcasts" for teachers and their classes. Teachers and students with camcorder or other video-recording equipment can record video and audio clips, then intersperse them with free NASA clips provided at the site. Podcast topics include Newton's laws, science lab safety, and the spacesuits worn by astronauts (you would expect no less from NASA).
More general science materials from the space agency, for grades K-4, 5-8, 9-12, higher ed, and informal ed, can be found here.
Photo courtesy of NASA.
What kinds of classroom lessons and activities can improve the confidence, and ultimately the performance of minority students? A new study suggests that a series of structured writing assignments can play a strong role.
According to a new research article published in the journal Science, African-American middle school students benefited academically and narrowed the achievement gap between them and their white peers, after being asked to produce written essays, which the authors describe as "self-affirmations." The 7th graders studied were asked to reflect on important personal values, such a relationships with family or friends, their musical interests, and other topics.
The new study reports two years of results for those students, and follows up on a series of earlier, preliminary findings. The authors found that African-American students who participated in the study, particularly those who were in the lowest percentile of student performance, made gains in their grades after taking part in the writing exercises, compared to a control group. Overall, all the student groups taking part in the study saw their grades decline, which the authors describe as a common trend in middle school. But with the intervention, the decline became significantly less steep for African-Americans, easing the gap between them and their white peers, not just over one term, but throughout middle school. The study was a randomized field experiment, involving three different cohorts of students, ages 12 to 14.
I recently wrote about federal data on achievement gaps between black and white students in math, even among those who both report earning "A" grades in school. Why did the "self-affirmation" writing exercises appear to have an effect? The authors say that black students were particularly vulnerable to early failures, which sap their confidence, early in school.
"For them, early failure may have confirmed that the stereotype was in play...as an indicator of their ability to thrive in school," they explain in the paper. "By shoring up self-integrity at this time, the affirmation helped maintain their sense of adequacy, and interrupted the cycle in which early poor performance influenced later performance and psychological state."
African American students experience must fight through anxiety over stereotypes that they will be low-performers, which in turn hurts their academic performance, according to the authors, who included Geoffrey L. Cohen of the University of Colorado. A well-timed intervention, even a very subtle one, can have an strong effect on minority students, the authors suggest.
Can readers—teachers, curriculum directors and others—who have tried different strategies to help struggling minority students attest to the truth of the researchers' finding?
When Banned Books Week is commemorated for the 27th time this fall, the annual list of texts slated for possible removal from school libraries will be shorter than previously, if it follows the trend of the last few years. And it's expected that there will be many more books on the list that were "challenged" than those that were "banned" from library shelves, since librarians and library advocates have become very skilled at fending off such demands.
For that they should probably thank Judith F. Krug.
"Censorship dies in the light of day," Krug, who died this week of stomach cancer, used to say.
Krug, who headed the Office for Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association for more than 40 years, was one of the founders and chief promoters of Banned Books Week. The annual event, started in 1982, was intended to bring attention to the hundreds of cases each year when citizens or parents would call for a book to be removed from public collections because they found them offensive or inappropriate.
Krug helped to craft formal policies for handling such demands, which were adopted by many school districts around the country. She also designed and promoted thorough training for librarians to help them carry out school policies on challenged books. Those policies have allowed both a formal outlet for parents and others who have concerns about books on the library shelves and a detailed method for school officials to fairly and thoroughly review the complaints against predetermined standards for schoolbooks.
The ALA says this about the annual event:
Although they were the targets of attempted bannings, most of the books featured during BBW were not banned, thanks to the efforts of librarians to maintain them in their collections. Imagine how many more books might be challenged—and possibly banned or restricted—if librarians, teachers, and booksellers across the country did not use Banned Books Week each year to teach the importance of our First Amendment rights and the power of literature, and to draw attention to the danger that exists when restraints are imposed on the availability of information in a free society."
I wrote about one such challenge in Arkansas, where the district's clearly defined policy helped neutralize a tense situation.
I remember talking with Krug for the story at the time and she recommended I visit Fayetteville because of the painstaking work the district had done to craft its policy on challenged books, and then how that policy helped them through a very aggressive challenge. The superintendent, school board members, librarians, and teachers in the district all pointed to that process, and the help they received from Ms. Krug's office in crafting and carrying out the policy, as incredibly effective and empowering.
When you consider that some 400 books get complaints significant enough to be reported to ALA each year, 70 percent of them in school libraries, and multiply that by all the years that Ms. Krug worked on that issue, it's safe to say her work had a lasting impact on the nation's schools.
Students—even very young students—bring a lot of curiosity about the natural world, and assumptions about how it works, with them to school. How can preschool teachers tap into this enthusiasm, and build students' understanding of science?
Researchers and advocacy organizations have been exploring the connection between early childhood education and science instruction for years. A philanthropy, the PNC Foundation, is announcing a grant to support those science efforts, which is going to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum and the Washington, D.C., public schools. (More details will be available next week on the particulars of the award. It will be announced at an event at the Smithsonian.)
Adults tend to think of science as a distinct subject to be taught and studied. But for students around preschool age, science is simply "finding out about the everyday world around them," as this article in the journal of the National Association for the Education of Young Children points out. (It's the top article on the page.)
Preschool teachers can help develop students' science knowledge through relatively simple activities. Yet many educators are reluctant to do so, partly because they look back on their own experiences in school science lessons as unpleasant ones, the article notes. Preschool teachers, it says, should try to build coherence in science lessons from day to day, using well-planned curricula and lessons, and encouraging students, through hands-on activities and other means, to use some of the same processes that scientists follow.
Ingrid Chalufour, of the Education Development Center, explores many of these topics in an interview in the organization's spring journal (page 10). For preschool teachers who've sought to introduce science topics to young children, what are the challenges you face—and how do you try to overcome them?
Read "NGA, CCSSO Launch Common Standards Drive," by my colleague Michele McNeil, to learn about a meeting in Chicago today in which representatives from 37 states are discussing common national standards. She said that the process is expected to start with voluntary rigorous math and language arts standards aligned with college- and career-ready expectations.
Even a year ago, who'd've thunk it?
Across the country, one of the strategies schools are trying to help struggling students in algebra is essentially doubling the amount of time spent on that course. It's a popular tactic in other areas of math, and in reading, too.
A new study, however, says that double-dose courses produced mixed results in Chicago schools. On the one hand, the 9th graders studied saw their test scores rise. But the policy did not appear to result in fewer students failing the course, as school officials had hoped, the authors report. The grades of some struggling students increased, after the double-dosing, though the weakest students did not see their grades rise.
Should advocates of double-dose math courses be pleased with these results? After all, one could argue that student learning—if test scores accurately reflect that—increased. Or should persistently high failure rates raise red flags?
Chicago is, of course, coping with many of the same challenges in algebra that other districts are. The new study follows another one, released last month, which found that Chicago's failure rates increased when the district mandated that students take algebra in 9th grade. Keep in mind that some states and schools have moved to require students to take introductory algebra in 8th grade.
Chicago school leaders have put forward a number of programs and initiatives, in teaching training and other areas, in an effort to help students in algebra. We hosted a webinar earlier this year, in which a Chicago math administrator, and a former algebra teacher, spoke about those efforts.
A proposal to strip the Texas board of education of its powers to approve curriculum and textbooks is moving forward in the state's legislature. The basic idea of the bill, which is sponsored by Republican lawmaker Kel Seliger, is that the board has become too consumed with political-cultural debates, as evidenced by the recent evolution-in-the-science-standards saga, rather than the nitty-gritty of school policy.
The measure would shift responsibility for textbooks and curriculum to the state's education commissioner (a post currently held by Robert Scott) and to expert committees drafting recommendations on materials. The board would be able to overrule the commissioner's decisions on those materials—but only with a four-fifths supermajority vote, according to this story in the Dallas Morning News. Those vote margins have been hard to come by lately on the deeply divided Texas board. The board's other powers would be left intact.
Needless to say, stripping the Texas board's power would be a major departure from the current way of doing business in the state. Interest groups and other advocates fight hard to influence content and curricula through board decisions, and because of Texas' out-sized share of the market, those decisions affect what is taught in other states. I wrote a story a couple years ago about the work of one behind-the-scenes textbook advocate in Texas.
Whether Texas legislation will gain the necessary support remains to be seen. At least one lawmaker quoted in the story voiced concerns that removing the power of board members, who are elected, on textbooks and curricula would effectively limit the public's influence over the process.
The Texas Freedom Network, which has been critical of the board's actions on evolution, has a transcript of the speech given by Sen. Kip Averitt, a supporter of the bill, at an education committee hearing. He makes some, well, colorful arguments on the bill's behalf, let me put it that way.
Of course, after reading this story about the Texas secession movement, I can't help wondering if all of these decisions would go more smoothly if left to the state's next president, Chuck Norris.
Eduflack contends in an essay-like blog entry, "Arts Education and Quantification," that positive academic outcomes from arts education can be quantified. He implies that educators may have to make use of this kind of data to ensure that the arts keeps a strong presence in U.S. schooling.
I gleaned some new information from the essay. I hadn't known, for example, that the National Assessment of Educational Progress includes data on arts proficiency.
I felt sad reading the essay, however, because I don't want to accept the idea that the arts, which feeds our spiritual and creative sides, needs to be measured in an objective way for people in schools to ensure its survival in the curriculum.
Last evening, I finished reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, for the second time, and she writes about how an after-school theater and dance program was a lifeline for her as a teenager. Why can't such testimonies garner the support that arts education needs?
A post over at Core Knowledge Blog drew my attention to an article published in the New York Times this week about how market researchers at the Walt Disney Company and other media companies try to figure out how to engage boys in entertainment.
Here's an excerpt:
The guys are trickier to pin down for a host of reasons. They hop more quickly than their female counterparts from sporting activities to television to video games during leisure time. They can also be harder to understand: the cliché that girls are more willing to chitchat about their feelings is often true.
I'm thinking there might be some clues in this article for those of you who are trying to figure out how to engage boys in reading, as we've been discussing on this blog.
The New York Times published an article this week that makes a case that the stimulus package contains clues for what kind of revisions the Obama Administration will push for with reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. Among them are toughening requirements for teacher quality and academic standards, according to the Times.
As usual, the topics presented in submissions to the Carnival of Education are so diverse that Joanne Jacobs, the host of this week's edition, threw up her hands and said the theme of the carnival is: "We don't need no stinking theme."
Blog entries include a discussion about whether homework is busywork, a proposal that the school year should be 200 days, and an analysis of a study that says Experience Corps tutors (senior citizens) have helped struggling readers.
A blog entry from Curriculum Matters about the gender gap in reading in Japan is part of the carnival. Check out the comments from readers on suggestions for how to engage boys in reading.
When a principal at a school visits a teacher's classroom, it's easy for those visits to carry an aura of suspicion and anxiety, particularly for the teacher. The principal may be there to gather information for an evaluation of the teacher's work, or simply to check up on what's occurring in the classroom.
In an essay published online this month, Henry Kepner, the president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, calls for principals and teachers to forge a more cooperative relationship, which he predicts will result in better math instruction. Principals can, in a "nonthreatening" way, encourage teachers to come up with more focused, and better math lessons, which adhere to state and local standards and offer smooth transitions in the content covered from grade to grade, Kepner says. It's not an easy task. Many math experts say teachers face pressure to rush through long lists of math topics, without drawing proper connections to them or encouraging students to master them. NCTM has placed a big focus on creating a more orderly math curriculum in recent years. Principals, according to Kepner, can play an important role in this area:
"The hectic daily routine of teaching often overtakes the need to step back and ask, "What are the important concepts for my students this year?" For example, a textbook may have in excess of 180 daily lessons for the year. The challenge is to locate and agree on 15 pivotal lessons."
Principals, of course, play an important role in guiding instruction across subjects. Last year, I wrote about efforts to forge stronger ties between principals and science teachers, who sometimes feel like school administrators don't understand science content and are thus more likely to allow it to be squeezed out of the school day.
The question I would pose to math teachers: What input, advice, or support could a principal provide that you would find most valuable?
Bill Costello, who specializes in teaching parents and teachers strategies for educating boys, has published a column at EducationNews.org about his observation of a reading gap between boys and girls in Japan. Boys are outperforming girls in Japan in math, according to the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA. But at the same time, Japanese girls are outperforming boys in reading, he writes. And the reading gender gap is more than 50 percent greater than the math gender gap, he notes.
Costello is concerned that the reading gender gap, of girls outperforming boys, is a problem all over the world, not just in Japan.
He urges the Japanese education ministry to take action on both the math and reading gaps.
There’s been a lot written about math gender gaps, though researchers still debate the size of those disparities and what might be causing them. But I haven't seen much published about reading gender gaps.
Readers, do you find girls to be more motivated readers than boys in your classes? What strategies have you discovered to draw more boys into reading?
It looks like the Smithsonian Institution doesn't want to be outdone by the Library of Congress in reaching teachers with images of artifacts they can use in their classrooms. The educational arm of the Smithsonian museums has created virtual tours for students and teachers to explore African-American and Latino history.
The tours feature artifacts such as Mohammed Ali's 1974 red boxing gloves and Roberto Clemente's Pittsburgh Pirates uniform.
The African-American tour is available now, and the Latino one will soon be posted (in the meantime, check out the Smithsonian Latino Virtual Museum), according to a press release announcing this new feature. The tours can also be used to plan a visit to the Smithsonian's museums.
The Census in Schools program provides lesson plans that can help teachers to teach math, geography, civics and government, history, economics, and language arts. One of the goals of the program is to promote data literacy.
Hmmm, that's a skill I've had to acquire and use often as a journalist. It seems to me that a lot of jobs require the ability to understand data, charts, and maps. I browsed the Teaching Materials section of the Census in Schools Web site and found a "We Count" map showing the population in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The census provides three different versions of the map; each one is designed for a different cluster of grades.
I can picture teachers using the U.S. Census tools to help students apply what they are learning in math, geography, or other subjects. The materials are based on the 2000 U.S. Census. It won't be long before the bureau will have to revise them for a new census.
South Korea's curriculum and school system draws a lot of scrutiny and praise because of the country's top-notch performance on international tests. The Republic of Korea, as it is officially known, is continually found near the top of the rankings of nations in math and science, on the TIMSS and PISA, two prominent country-by-country comparisons.
Imagine entering South Korea's school systems from a nation where education is de-emphasized to the point of leaving students without the most basic reading and math skills. A Washington Post story from this past week describes just such a scenario.
It's about North Korean defectors who flee to the South to escape the totalitarian country. A common route is to first head north through China and then wind through Southeast Asia nations, typically with the help of a fixer. Many of the refugees described in the story are children, who have all sorts of trouble adjusting to life in a democratic society—one that's also "rich, wired, consuming" as the story puts it. Unfortunately, many of those who arrive say they have been given little formal education (or little that's of use). The South Korean government has created programs to help them adjust, which include remedial education and job placement. Fascinating reading.
Last month I attended an event marking the 20th anniversary of the National Assessment Governing Board, the independent panel that oversees the NAEP. There were a lot of good presentations, but one in particular that I've been meaning to write about was given by Peggy Carr, the deputy commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. Carr was speaking on a panel about achievement gaps between minority and white students. Her talk focused on what the NAEP, the nation's most prominent test of student academic skill, which her agency administers, tells us.
She offered a lot of intriguing information breaking down the performance of whites and African-Americans on the NAEP, which I thought would be of interest to readers of this blog—researchers, policymakers, reporters, the general public.
Carr gave me permission to post the slides from her presentation on my blog, so you can look at them here.
Her explanation of the NAEP scores lays out pretty clearly some of the challenges the nation faces in terms of closing the gaps in performance, course-taking expectations, and, it seems, the rigor of math classes, between minorities and non-minorities.
A few of the highlights:
— Among students of all races at the high school level, there are big differences in NAEP math performance depending on the highest math course students reached in school. The average student score on the exam was 152 on a 300-point scale. Students who reached calculus in school scored an average of 192. But for those who made it only as far as Algebra 2, the average was a 142. Those who got no further than Algebra 1? They scored only a 110. Bottom line: Students who take tougher math courses are doing much better on the NAEP . (Slide 3)
— The percentage of both whites and blacks taking advanced math or calculus in school is increasing. The portion who are stopping at Algebra 1 or below is dropping. Seems like good news. (Slide 4)
— Yet many more white students, 23 percent, are taking Algebra 1 before they reach high school, than are African-Americans, 8 percent. (Slide 5)
— Among those who took Algebra 1 before high school, a high percentage of both white students, 90 percent, and their black peers, 82 percent, moved on to advanced math and calculus. Similarly, a much smaller portion of students from both races moved on to those top courses if they didn't take Algebra 1 early. Take introductory algebra at a relatively young age, and you're more likely to move on to advanced math. (Slide 7)
— A piece of data I found pretty intriguing: Students who reported notching an "A" in their advanced math or calculus course often fared very differently, depending on their backgrounds, on the NAEP. Students from low-minority schools who got an "A" grade scored an 188 average, out of 300. But their peers from high-minority schools averaged only a 167. It appears that a high-grade in a challenging math course can mean very different things in schools serving different populations. (Slide 10)
A lot of policymakers in recent years have pointed to NAEP scores, and course-taking patterns, as evidence that students need to be encouraged to take more demanding classes, particularly algebra, earlier in school, if they're going to pursue the most challenging math. Others, such as Tom Loveless, have urged policymakers to be cautious in reading that data, and not simply set across-the-board course requirements in math that aren't realistic.
After you've had a chance to look at Carr's presentation, give me your read on the data, and what it says about the achievement gap.
Several big organizations, in a letter to President Obama, are calling for more federal support for career and technical education (the subject formerly known as voc-ed). The primary federal vehicle for those efforts right now is the Perkins program, currently funded at more than $1 billion a year. I've seen Perkins, which was reauthorized a few years ago, described as the largest single high school program in the country.
President Bush repeatedly sought to kill the Perkins program, and got nowhere, probably at least partly because of career-and-tech programs' strong popularity in Congress. Critics have said that career-oriented programs do too little to challenge students academically (here's a story I wrote in 2004 on the issue). The education organizations point to research they say indicates career-and-technical education plays an effective role in dropout prevention. I wrote about an approach to integrating math in CTE courses a few years, which was studied by the federal government and found to be effective.
There's been speculation that community colleges, which play a big role in Perkins, could receive special attention from the Obama administration, partly because of the backgrounds of some of the key nominees to fill jobs at the U.S. Department of Education.
Your thoughts: Should the federal government be directing more funding toward Perkins? Or should funds be directed toward other federal efforts?
The president of a major professional organization for science teachers has a new online essay on what seems like a familiar topic: "professional learning communities." Page Keeley, of the National Science Teachers Association, argues that too many learning communities are unfocused, and need to have a much clearer mission in order to improve science teaching and learning.
What is that mission, as Keeley sees it? It may seem obvious, but the focus of PLCs—which can be found in schools everywhere today—needs to be on improving instruction, rather than on management or departmental issues, or on loosely defined topics that are not focused on learning. Here's how she puts it:
"In many schools, administrators now require teachers to participate in PLCs on a regular basis. However, merely meeting during or after school or through an online network does not necessarily translate into a PLC. Many teachers and administrators still need better understanding of what constitutes a PLC. The PLC, like science as inquiry, has been characterized in a myriad of ways, depending on who is defining it. This ambiguity has led to a danger of it being hijacked (much like formative assessment and inquiry) and turned into the latest education fad. Unfortunately these “fads” often succumb to the TTWP (this too will pass) approach if they are not well-defined and supported.
"PLCs are not meetings where science departments come together to focus on management issues. They are not loosely defined discussion groups. They are structures where teachers come together to engage in powerful learning where student success is at the core. The teachers’ learning is continually focused on how to become more effective so student learning is supported. The collective shared goals and participation of the group achieve results. This is a shift for some teachers who have traditionally viewed professional development as going off and doing their “own thing” by attending courses, workshops, conferences, and other such events for their own individual benefit. While this approach does help an individual teacher, it doesn’t necessarily improve the teaching of that educator’s colleagues by building a common knowledge base about effective science teaching and learning."
Professional learning communities come in all forms in schools and districts. Keeley traces their growth to the commission led by former Sen. John Glenn and it's report, Before It's Too Late. We at Ed Week have written a lot about the development of PLCs, including this story about one widely praised model used at Adlai E. Stevenson High School, in Lincolnshire, Ill. That article notes that the origins of PLCs go as far back as the 1960s, when researchers were exploring strategies to encourage collaboration among teachers, rather than educators working in isolation. Here's another story on the PLC approach used by the Long Beach, Calif., district, winner of the Broad Prize.
One could argue that effective PLCs are especially important in science teaching, where educators are expected to cover large amounts of detailed content, much of which may be new to them. At early grades, those teacher may be generalists with relatively little background in science. At upper grades, they may be pressured, because of staff shortages, to take over classes with loads of unfamiliar science. Are the concerns that Keeley raises specific to science teaching, or do they have applications across subjects?
A number of states require schools to teach all students about Native American tribes in their states, but few states support such requirements with a line item in their budgets. So teachers glean resources to teach about Native Americans wherever they can.
One possible resource for the classroom is a PBS series about Native Americans, "We Shall Remain," which is also available on DVD. The series starts Monday, April 13, and continues for five episodes. The titles are "After the Mayflower," "Tecumseh's Vision," "Trail of Tears," "Geronimo," and "Wounded Knee." The promotional text for the series calls it a "provocative multi-media project that establishes Native history as an essential part of American history."
That's the same goal that some states have stated is a reason for requiring students to learn about tribes in their state.
The journal Science has an interesting item about a proposal, included in the $410 million budget measure approved by Congress last month, apparently aimed at identifying and cultivating supreme mathematical talent at the K-12 level.
The article (subscription required) says that a $3 million earmark for the National Science Foundation was included in the spending plan with the potential to create a new institute serving "profoundly gifted" students in math. The spending was supported by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, of Nevada, according to the story.
How would that money create a new institute for gifted children? The story says a proposal has been submitted to create several new research centers within a larger, existing program of mathematical research institutes within NSF. Those institutes are housed within NSF's Division of Mathematical Sciences. Seven current research centers are part of the program, and they focus on exploring "the frontiers of science," as the Science story puts it.
The NSF plans to supplement those existing research centers with six new institutes, which would be awarded grants based on competitive bids, the article says. Those institutes would be funded at $3 million to $5 million a year. One grant applicant, according to the story, was a team of researchers from the University of Iowa, Johns Hopkins University, and the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, in Reno, Nevada. The group's proposal is to create a National Institute for Mathematical Research, which would focus on developing "prospective mathematicians" rather than university-level researchers, the story says.
Advocates for gifted students have long said there are not enough resources in traditional public schools to meet their needs. Many states and districts have supported math and science academies aimed at serving those children, though some say that even those centers may not do enough to challenge students operating at the very highest academic level. The new NSF funding seems to be targeted toward those pupils, in particular.
It's common for science teachers to try to craft classroom lessons out of things that students see every day and can easily understand. I remember a lot of the science teachers I had during my school days talking about the physics of baseball, probably with good reason. It's a sport that's rich with opportunities to discuss science.
I was reminded of this when I read a new interview in Scientific American with Alan Nathan, a physics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign who has studied science's connection to the sport. In the interview, Nathan discusses the topspin on a ground ball, the physics of corking a bat, and the art of pitching (including the mysterious action on the knuckleball) among other topics. Lots of ideas for lessons for teachers here.
Nathan also has his own Web site, a sort of online library on the physics of baseball, with lots of great resources. For science teachers who can't get enough, check out this book The Physics of Baseball, by Robert K. Adair.
A school district needs to have a coherent plan in how to spend extra funds to raise academic performance for low-income, minority students in cities for the money to make a difference. If the district has a good plan, dramatic improvement can occur. If the district doesn't have a good plan, more money can produce confusion and even declining academic performance among students. That's one lesson that New Jersey officials learned in their implementation of increased funding to improve educational outcomes in low-income school districts that resulted from the Abbott v. Burke New Jersey Supreme Court case, according to the book In Plain Sight: Simple, Difficult Lessons from New Jersey's Expensive Effort to Close the Achievement Gap.
The book about lessons learned is written by Gordon MacInnes, a former assistant commissioner for implementation of the Abbott funds in that state. MacInnes will be in the nation's capital tomorrow, where he's being hosted by the Center for American Progress to talk about how increased funding works well to raise achievement only if district officials set priorities right for the use of that money. (For details about the event, which will take place from noon to 1:30 p.m., click here.)
It's a timely topic, given that the federal government has begun to release stimulus funds for education. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that one goal of providing that money is to increase academic rigor across the nation.
Here are a few recommendations that MacInnes offers in his book, which I've lifted word for word from the press release for it:
—Academic achievement trumps other important objectives.
—The state, and the district, must set forth a clear set of ambitious academic goals by grade level and content.
—Priority must go to teaching primary grade students to read and write English well.
—The district must keep track of the progress that each student is making in meeting academic goals.
—When a student falls behind, there must be a system for rescuing him or her, which includes spending whatever additional time is required to bring that student up to par. The expense for such attention must take precedence over other spending demands.
The press release notes that only in Massachusetts did 4th graders do better than New Jersey in reading on the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress. And the release points out that New Jersey is "more diverse" than Massachusetts.
Those who can't get enough international school data may be interested in a newly released study that provides comparisons of academic performance, instruction, teacher training, and school spending in the Group of Eight Nations, including the United States. Released by the Institute of Education Sciences, the report pulls together a lot of previously published information collected through three international exams, PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS, as well as other sources.
Those interested in particular content areas, such as reading, math, and science, could find some of the study's data intriguing. Here's a taste:
In reading, the United States had the highest percentage of 4th grade teachers who reported spending more than six hours per week on instruction, higher than England, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, and Scotland. Sixty-eight percent of teachers reported meeting this threshold in the United States, compared with just 6 percent in Germany. (See Figure 14) Anybody out there who's studied this data who can explain these numbers?
In Russia, which scored higher than the United States on the 4th grade international reading test, PIRLS, only 28 percent of teachers reported spending six or more hours on reading instruction—though a large percentage, 60 percent, said they devoted at least 3-6 hours to the subject.
There are also breakdowns of time spent by teachers in math and science professional development; the academic performance of native-born students and immigrants; teacher salaries; and the frequency of behavior problems, by country, along with many other pieces of data. You can read the full study here.
Chris Comer, a former employee of the Texas Education Agency, resigned from her job in 2007 after she forwarded an e-mail to her colleagues advising them of a public appearance by a critic of creationism and intelligent design. Comer quit her job after she said that agency officials threatened to fire her for the e-mail, warning her that her electronic message had violated the agency's policy of impartiality on such issues.
Comer sued the agency, but last week a federal judge dismissed her lawsuit, according to this story in the Austin American-Statesman.
The ex-employee had argued that the state did not have an obligation to take a neutral stance on creationism and intelligent design, because scientists have rejected those views as unscientific, when compared against the theory of evolution. The case played out against the backdrop of the state school board debating how evolution should be presented in Texas' academic standards.
"We are sorry that this situation resulted in a lawsuit but we were confident we would prevail," Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott said in a statement, according to the paper. "We wish Ms. Comer well."
I'd like to alert any educators involved in the teaching of reading to a chat at edweek.org scheduled for next week with Donalyn Miller, a 6th grade language arts and social studies teacher. She's also the author of The Book Whisperer, which was recently published by Education Week Press and Jossey-Bass.
The chat will take place on Tuesday, April 7, from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern Time.
I'm sure my elementary school teachers helped expand my reading vocabulary and comprehension, but I cannot give them credit for inspiring me to love reading. I remember that in 1st grade, my classmates and I read dry stories from early readers aloud in turns, going around the room in order, and we weren't supposed to read ahead, even if a classmate took FOREVER to stumble and mumble through a few sentences.
It's my mother who nurtured my "inner reader" by regularly taking me to the public library as far back as I can remember and before that. I remember sitting in a chair in our living room when I was about 8 years old, laughing out loud at Ramona in Ramona the Pest, by Beverly Clearly. Ramona asked her father to turn on "the dawnzer," which she thought was a kind of lamp. She'd mistakenly picked up the term by hearing a rendition of The Star Spangled Banner in which someone ran together the words in the phrase, "the dawn's early light." I thought that was hilarious. And apparently, I'm not the only one who remembers that story as an adult.
And though my mother was strict with me in many regards, she never censured my reading, which I'm grateful for. I went through a stage of reading shallow romance novels but soon learned I'd rather spend my time on more creative and unpredictable stories.
I realize not every child has a mother or caretaker who loves to read and knows how to support him or her to blossom as a reader. That's why the job of reading teachers is so important.
Reading First failed to have stellar results not because it favored a systematic use of phonics but because it was implemented by the federal government, argues Andrew J. Coulson over at Cato @ Liberty.
Coulson writes: "If we want schools around the country to continually adopt and refine the best methods available, we must create the freedoms and incentives that will cause that to happen… or get used to disappointment."
Basically Coulson is saying you can't trust the federal government to recommend "best practices" for reading, or education in general, because the government's recommendations will always be subject to political winds.
Meanwhile, though he's not advocating free-market forces, Eduflack is also expressing mistrust of the federal government's handling of Reading First. He writes that the government didn't adequately evaluate and share with the public information about whether Reading First dollars were spent effectively. And Eduflack sounds a warning that the federal government might not adequately monitor how money from the stimulus package is spent. "For many, relying on ED to measure the effectiveness of their own policies and their own spending is much like letting the fox guard the hen house," he says.
Edufack applauds the Education Trust for stepping up to be a watchdog of how states are spending stimulus dollars for education.
Readers, do either of these bloggers' opinions about Reading First strike a chord with you? If so, why?
The Education Commission of the states has unveiled an online resource that provides background, sorted by topic, on some of the education practices used by top-performing countries—and how the United States compares.
The site seeks to offer resources on how policymakers, including those at the school and district level, can create policies in testing, professional development, and other areas, based on what appears to be working well in other nations. Another useful site built around a similar theme was created by the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, or APEC. It offers fully-translated curriculum, testing materials, and lessons from China, Korea, Japan, and other Pacific Rim nations.
Congressman Mike Honda, a Democrat from California, is introducing a bill titled "The Global Warming Education Act." The legislation would create an education program on global warming at the National Science Foundation, an agency based in Arlington, Va., that is heavily involved in sponsoring research on math and science teaching and curriculum. Honda, a former high school science teacher, says the bill aims to provide a range of school materials for students on climate change, including formal and informal learning opportunities about topics such as new technologies, and incentives related to energy conservation, renewable energy, and greenhouse gas reduction. The measure would also create competitive grants for "innovative projects" to expand climate science education and create curriculum and education materials on the topic. Honda said in a statement. He introduced a version of the measure in 2007.
There's a strong and growing interest in schools for lessons on renewable energy. But discussions of climate change have come somewhat more slowly, as I've reported. Teachers are sometimes afraid to touch a topic they believe is politically loaded, even though the science evidence for climate change is quite strong. Another issue is that many state standards are only now being revised to include discussions on global warming, which means that textbooks tend to have only limited discussions of the issue. As a result, teachers end up having to cobble together materials on their own. That may not be a bad thing, as long as they're reliable materials.
We at Ed Week have written about the potential for distance learning technologies to provide improved education to students in rural, remote, and impoverished areas of this country. Internet access, video feeds, and other technologies can provide students with access to courses their schools could otherwise not afford, or to teachers with expertise that isn't available in their local schools.
Move beyond this nation's borders, and the need for those services are much greater. Next month, an effort to improve students' access to education in the developing world will be taking place in Dakar, Senegal. It's a conference run by an organization called eLearning Africa, which supports the use and distribution of basic technologies in schools across the continent. The event seeks to bring together nonprofit leaders, university officials, and IT experts with the expertise and connections to get school technology where it's needed.
There's a lot of good background information on the eLearning Africa web site about the overall mission of the conference, and last year's event. The organization also seeks sponsors, who help pay the costs of school officials and others from across Africa to attend.
For some background on some of the challenges of delivering high-quality education in Africa, see my former colleague Bess Keller's excellent stories, here and here, from a few years ago, plus a Q and A.
When I visited an award-winning middle school a while back, I was impressed with the collaborative spirit among the teachers, the deep relationships the principal and staff had developed with the students, and the payoff in student-achievement results the school was seeing as a result of an intense focus on relevance and rigor in the curriculum.
Just one thing, or one student, marred my impressions of the school. Throughout the day, that student took every opportunity to interrupt teachers, distract classmates, and waste precious class time. There were outbursts, random movements, loud pencil sharpening, and tossed objects. While the student's behavior was disturbing, the teachers' reactions were what concerned me most. Discipline was essentially a plea for better behavior, with the teachers calling the student "Sweetie" each time. They also took numerous opportunities to praise the student for behaving appropriately. Other students did not get similar praise for paying attention, maintaining order in the hallways, and the like.
Apparently, the school's behavior plan called for such effusive and unwarranted praise for particularly unruly students. From what I could tell, it didn't do anything to improve the student's behavior. I wondered if the student secretly delighted in winning teacher praise simply for testing their patience, and essentially acting like a 2-year-old.
I was reminded of that school visit when I came across this article by Harvard child and family psychologist Richard Weissbourd.
The article is geared to parents, who often find it difficult to balance praise and criticism of their children. But it also seems applicable for teachers who are trying to manage student behavior while boosting self-esteem, all the while trying to teach the knowledge and skills children need to succeed academically.
I know from visiting hundreds of schools throughout the country that classroom management is a big struggle for many teachers, and precious instructional time can be lost trying to deal with a single disruptive student. There's also increased pressure on teachers not to offend students, who may be inclined to complain to administrators or parents about being criticized in front of classmates. They might even try to egg the teacher in the hope of capturing it on video for YouTube.
But is praise the answer? Perhaps.
Weissbourd writes:
"Praise can be very helpful, good research shows, when it is sincere and connected to real effort and substantial, specific accomplishment—instead of telling children over and over that they are "smart," better to compliment them on a real, specific act of intelligence, whether it's picking up on a subtle social cue or developing a strong idea for a paper for school. And every child should be told at times that they are 'great' or 'terrific.'
"But children tend to know when they have really accomplished something and when they have not, and too much unconditional praise or frequent praise that isn't connected to real achievements can create self-doubts and cynicism about adults. It's patronizing."
So what's the best way to balance criticism and praise? How do you inhibit this kind of behavior without disenfranchising the student?
The ASCD Express is soliciting essays on the topic of what science education should look like in the 21st Century, or "Science on the Bleeding Edge," as they call it. Here's what they're looking for:
Considering that the space age began with the launch of Sputnik just over 50 years ago, what should a 'post-space age' science curriculum look like? As students hone their 21st century skills of critical thinking, problem solving, and innovation, how are they being prepared to use them in the crucible where science, technology, society, and economics meet in the world beyond school? How are schools exploring the challenges of science and society, and are these spurring innovations in how science is being taught? What role are private and public organizations playing in improving and influencing school science to prepare students to lead and live with science and technology in the years ahead?
Whatever your thoughts, keep them within the 600-1,000 word range. More information can be found here.
The new edition of the Carnival of Education was posted today at Rayray's writing. You can read about everything from the pros and cons of holding a child back for a year from enrolling in kindergarten to how to make social studies "expressive."
I participated this time with an item from Curriculum Matters about the push by the Library of Congress to get teachers and students to use online primary sources.
There's one every week. The hosts change. It's a good way to find out who is blogging about education.
A couple of bills that take very different approaches to science, technology, engineering, and math ("STEM") education topics are in play on Capitol Hill. Here's a synopsis of both:
—Yesterday, a sub-panel of the House Committee on Science and Technology approved a bill that seeks to improve coordination for science and math education programs across the federal government. Sponsored by Rep. Bart Gordon, a Tennessee Democrat who chairs the House science committee, HR 1709 would establish a White House committee with the responsibility of making various STEM programs work together. The committee would be housed in the White House's National Science and Technology Council. The bill resembles legislation sponsored by Rep. Mike Honda, a California Democrat, and somebody named Barack Obama, then a mere senator from Illinois, last year. Here's an item I wrote on their efforts back then.
A report released two years ago found that the federal government spends about $3 billion across agencies on STEM education programs, at agencies ranging from the U.S. Department of Education to the National Science Foundation to the U.S. Department of Energy to NASA. How well these activities are coordinated with each other, and whether they learn from each others' experiences, remain open questions, some say.
The bill would require the White House committee to work with different agencies and ask them to produce detailed plans every five years, in which they set long-term objectives and specify how they are judging their STEM programs' effectiveness.
—Another bill, dubbed the "The GREEN Act," seeks to establish competitive "renewable energy curriculum development grants" to career-and-technical education K-12 and college programs. The legislation, HR 1775, by Rep. Jerry McNerney, a Democrat, calls for $100 million in grant funding for partnerships between school districts and higher education institutions, under the rules specified in the federal Perkins Act, which governs vocational education.
Interest in renewable energy lessons and curricula is booming in K-12 schools, as I discussed in a recent story. McNerney seems pretty keen on renewables, to say the least, and on "STEM" topics generally. He has a PhD in math, worked as an engineering contractor at the Sandia National labs, and founded a start-up company to manufacture wind turbines, according to his congressional bio.
I learned by reading the Core Knowledge Blog this morning that YouTube, which is owned by Google, has started an effort to put lectures by college professors online. It's called YouTube EDU. Robert Pondiscio suggests that Google should create something similar for K-12 teachers.
Update: By the way, when you click on the link for Core Knowledge Blog above, you'll get a scary message saying you've reached an "attack site." You can click on "ignore this warning" and move on to the site. I've done that and my computer hasn't blown up or anything. Pondescio told me in an e-mail that Google has blacklisted the site and he thinks the labeling is a result of computer hacking. They're working on the problem. Update Again: The problem is fixed. This just demonstrates some of the perplexing problems that can arise while one is publishing digital content!
But back to the content of this post ... here's an excerpt of the rationale for the K-12 YouTube idea:
When you think about the enormous waste of teaching capacity that takes place every day—millions of teachers preparing lessons for audiences of two dozen kids—it seems a shame not to have a mechanism to capture great teaching and distribute it broadly for all students.
It seems like the videos would be a great resource for professional development, so that new teachers could learn from experienced teachers about ways to differentiate instruction, get students engaged, etc. But I wonder how many K-12 students would actually want to tune in.
What do you think, teachers: Would a YouTube channel for K-12 teaching get a lot of Web traffic and be useful?
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