Web Watch

Even as educators throughout country strive after innovative new strategies to improve the literacy skills of low-income and minority students, a small middle school in the Bronx is banking on an old one: teaching Latin. The three-year-old Bronx Latin School is premised on the notion that studying the classical language, with its intricate grammatical system and building-block vocabulary, will bolster kids’ knowledge of English. And there’s some evidence to suggest that the plan might be working: On a recent state English exam, Bronx Latin 7th graders outscored their neighborhood peers by nearly 20 percentage points. Skeptics question the long-term practicality of the sometimes-esoteric education initiatives at themed schools like Bronx Latin. But teacher Peter Dodington says that studying Latin is particularly well suited to children who struggle academically. “It’s very organized, very transparent,” he said. “There’s a rule for everything.” Plus, learning a dead language long associated with private schools has a way of making students feel special: “Nobody knows what you’re talking about,” one 14-year-old at the school said.

Posted by Anthony Rebora, teachermagazine.org at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The real meaning of “highly qualified” teacher may just have gotten a little murkier. A new study by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University has concluded that, on the whole, teachers without certification are just as effective as their certified counterparts. Looking at the standardized test scores of students in New York City, the study found that, by their third year on the job, both uncertified and alternatively certified teachers perform just as well as traditionally certified teachers. The moral, according to the researchers, is that school systems should spend less time focusing on teachers’ certification status and more on their actual performance during probationary periods. Susanna Loeb, a Stanford professor who has conducted a similar—but separate—study, suggested that teachers’ past experiences and educational achievements should be paramount in hiring decisions. “I’m not ready to give up on résumés,” she said.

Posted by Anthony Rebora, teachermagazine.org at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

The days of quaint school Thanksgiving assemblies featuring pint-sized Pilgrims and Indians breaking bread together may be on the way out. Increasingly, school and teachers are taking a harder look at the traditional Thanksgiving celebrations and turning a critical eye to what might have been left out. San Francisco Teacher Bill Morgan, for example, walks into his 3rd grade classroom and takes away students' pencils and backpacks, saying he's "discovered" them. When the kids protest, he uses it as a jumping-off point for a lesson on the complexities of Pilgrim/Indian relationships. Some American Indian organizations are embracing such methods, arguing that even young children should get an accurate idea of American history. But other American Indians disagree. Chuck Narcho, a substitute teacher who belongs to the Maricopa and Tohono O'odham tribes, favors keeping Thanksgiving lessons light. "They can learn the truths when they grow up," he said. "Caring, sharing and giving—that is what was originally intended." James Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong, confirms that the first Thanksgiving was actually a high point in Pilgrim/Indian relations. "Relations were strained, but yet the holiday worked...[But] after that, bad things happened," he said, referring to a period of intense fighting in the 17th century.

Posted by at 3:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

The new Democratic-majority Congress will have a lot ponder when it takes up reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act next year. Drawing on a range of different student-performance measures, a number of recent studies have concluded that little progress has been made toward the law’s central goal of closing the achievement gap between minority and white students by 2014. “Poor and minority students are doing very poorly, and in most states are not making significant gains—and this in spite of NCLB and all the other reforms of the past 15 years,” commented Chester Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which recently completed a review of student performance across the states. Among the chief reasons cited for the persistence of the gap is uneven teacher quality, and several of the reports recommend creating compensation programs to ensure that poor and minority schools can attract and retain strong instructors. “If I’m in a bad school and make serious progress, I need a reward,” said Michael Nettles, a senior vice president at the Educational Testing Service. “If you perform on Wall Street, you get a bonus.” Other suggestions include increased funding for early education and tutoring efforts, both of which have shown promise in isolated school success stories around the country.

Posted by at 1:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Getting teenagers to talk about their problems or their worries about classmates is no easy task. But Westfield High School in Houston has come up with a method its officials think may make some inroads with a generation immersed in instant messaging and MySpace. With the help of a communication firm, the school has set up a private Web site to which students can e-mail anonymous tips about their own or their peers’ issues. The system then provides regular reports to help the school’s staff address trouble spots—bullying and self-mutilation being the greatest last year. Students’ identities are revealed only when they have written about harming themselves or others, according to officials. An assistant superintendent for counseling in a neighboring school district voiced skepticism about whether e-mail messages can be as effective as one-on-one discussions with students. But she acknowledged that school counselors today are often too overloaded—in part with administrative tasks related to standardized testing—to meet with every student. Westfield students, meanwhile, appear to be optimistic about the Internet tip line. “I think it will be helpful,” said one senior. “Now people might be afraid to do some stuff at this school.”

Posted by at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This is obviously a big week for political performances, but another drama is being played out on a stage in Greenwich Village: an off-Broadway one-woman show entitled No Child. For more than six months and 170 performances, Nilaja Sun has played all the roles in a show about a teacher trying to stage a play with underprivileged kids in the Bronx. “When I wrote this piece, I thought I’d be doing it for three weeks for the standard theatergoing audience,” says Sun, who spent eight years as a guest artist in New York City schools. Critics, however, weren’t the only ones thrilled with No Child; it’s drawn thousands of teachers who’ve found authenticity, solace, and gallows humor in the work. They laugh, for example, when, as principal, Sun announces, “We need all these kids to pass five Regents [exams] in the next two months.” And they commiserate when, as a teacher, she learns that a student’s sibling has been killed by a gang. Dan Lilienthal, a 25-year-old teacher in Brooklyn, is one of many inspired by No Child, in which the main character eventually mounts the student show. “You get so disillusioned,” he says of the job. “So just to know that Nilaja Sun was able to bring her passion to the students, and that it worked” is instructive, he says. “You have a curriculum to teach, but you need to bring yourself.”

Posted by Rich Shea, Teacher Magazine at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yet another sign that the traditional classroom is undergoing a transformation: School districts in Texas, among other places, are increasingly replacing hardcover textbooks with e-books. In the most extreme case, the Forney district in north-central Texas is in the midst of a plan to use only digital textbooks in grades 5 through 12 within two years. (The initiative depends on the passage of school bond package that includes $11.8 million for student laptops and systems upgrades.) Among the advantages of e-books, school officials say, are that they are easier to update and can be ordered more quickly than traditional textbooks—an important factor for growing school districts. Some teachers avow they are also more dynamic learning tools. No word yet, however, on whether any class has been required to read Great Expectations on a laptop.

Posted by at 4:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When parents in Simsbury, Connecticut, became concerned that their high school’s demanding grading system was jeopardizing students’ chances for admissions into elite colleges, a local nuclear engineer decided to do something about it. Robert M. Hartranft, a self-proclaimed workaholic who was forced into early retirement because of Parkinson’s disease, developed an extensive mathematical model to compare school grading systems across the nation by tracking grade-point averages against SAT scores. The model can thus purportedly show, for example, that a B at Simsbury High School is equivalent to an A at many other schools. Simsbury High now includes the comparison, called the “g.p.a. plot,” in students’ college application materials, and school officials believe it may have helped raised Simsbury students' admission rates in recent years. The reaction of college admissions officers is mixed, however. While at least one praises Hartranft’s method for providing context for student grades, others question its reliance on SAT scores. “I used to be a teacher,” says Robert S. Clagett, dean of admissions at Middlebury College, “and I would hate to have somebody take my standards and arbitrarily correlate it to the SAT. It’s attempting to make a science out of what is very much an art.” Even so, Hartranft—a man who prefers hard data to intuition—argues he’s developed the most effective grade-comparison method available. “I’m giving you a G.P.S. navigation system, as opposed to scraps of maps,” he says.

Posted by at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)