Web Watch

Money is tight everywhere (look no further than your school district), but the teaching profession recently got a financial boost from billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, according to eSchoolNews. His foundation is funding $10 million in grants to study teacher effectiveness and its bearing on student achievement. The grant recipients include Educational Testing Service ($7.3 million); ACT, Inc. ($579,000); and Teach for America ($1.9 million).

Gates also hopes to post videos online of the "best" teachers at work to provide a model for other educators. One of the new focus areas for his foundation, explained Gates in a letter, is to identify what makes a great teacher great. To that end, writes Gates, “Whenever I talk to teachers, it is clear that they want to be great, but that they need better tools so they can measure progress and keep improving.”

When it comes to children getting a good education, Gates writes, the teacher is king. "If you want your child to have the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school."

Posted by Elizabeth Rich at 5:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

According to a new study published in the February 2009 Pediatrics journal, there is a strong connection between recess time and elementary students’ good classroom behavior, the Washington Post reports. Many students aren’t getting recess time due in part to No Child Left Behind consuming more classroom hours.

This, says Romina M. Barros, who published the study, needs to change. “When we restructure our education system, we have to think that recess should be a part of the education system…if they could have 15 minutes indoors. Unstructured time, that’s all they need.”

Barros and her colleagues looked at a database of nearly 11,000 8- and 9-year-olds. The children were divided by the amount of recess they had each day ranging from some to none or minimal (0-15 minutes per day).

Students with more recess time behaved better in the classroom.

According to Jane Ripperger-Suhler, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral science and pediatrics at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine, students build social skills during recess time. “Conflict resolution is solved on the playground, not in the classroom”

Students from disadvantaged communities often have less recess time. Barros’ study found that the “30 percent of children who had no or only minimal breaks were more likely to be black, from households with lower incomes and lower education levels, to be living in the Northeast or South, and to be attending urban public school.”

Posted by Josh Cohen at 4:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

When Frank Wilson found out that he would need six weeks to recover from his knee-replacement surgery, the 47-year veteran teacher decided to get tech-wise, according to the Columbus Local News.

Rather than canceling his Advanced Placement government classes at Bishop Watterson High School in Columbus, Ohio, Wilson sought his administration’s approval to conduct classes from his home via Web cam.

"My students all have Tablet PCs, and our government classes are almost paperless," Wilson said. "We have the technology to pull this off and my students were receptive to the idea."

Wilson set up the camera in his basement and held live sessions in which he and his class could see each other and hold discussions. For liability reasons, another teacher was present in the room with the students.

"The Web cam allowed us to conduct a near normal class period," he said. "Most teachers who are off for an extended period of time are too sick to do what I did."

Wilson’s students, whom he describes as well-disciplined, were enthusiastic about the Web cam arrangement. "It makes you more excited for class, to get to be a part of something like this," said Watterson senior Nick Gilloti.

Posted by Liana Heitin at 3:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

A high school English teacher in Ridgefield, Wash., has created a literary firestorm by writing recently that, now that we have an African-American president, it’s time to drop The Adventures of the Huckleberry Finn from the curriculum. In an op-ed piece in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer earlier this month, John Foley said that it was increasingly difficult to downplay or contextualize the novel’s often demeaning racial content. “And,” he added, with what sounds like the voice of experience, “I never want to rationalize Huck Finn to an angry African-American mom again as long as I breathe.”

Foley also said that, because of their dated racial views, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men “don't belong on the curriculum, either.”

Foley’s editorial was heavily criticized both in his own school and in a stream of letters-to-the-editor and e-mails to the Post-Intelligencer, according to a follow-up story in the Los Angeles Times. “There’s nothing in American literature that more succinctly and directly attacks racial prejudice than Mark Twain’s The Adventures of the Huckleberry Finn,” wrote one reader. “This is another teacher anxious to pursue political correctness more than seek to understand what is involved in truly ‘reading’ a book.”

But Foley maintains that the classics he wants to drop no longer make sense in contemporary America. “Our new president is this very intelligent, highly articulate guy,” he told the L.A. Times, “and the literature we’re foisting on our children typically depicts black men as ignorant, inarticulate, uneducated. And the contrast just jumped out at me.”

Posted by Anthony Rebora, teachermagazine.org at 5:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (24)

At least some students in the Keller Independent School District, near Ft. Worth, Texas, will be tuning in to Tuesday’s inaugural festivities, as officials reversed an earlier announcement saying students and teachers would be barred from watching during instructional time. Dallas / Fort Worth’s CBS 11 reports that the district will now allow students to watch the swearing-in ceremony after widespread outcry from parents—but only if the ceremony occurs during students’ social studies or U.S. history classes.

District officials said they never intended to imply the inauguration wasn’t a historic event, saying the previous decision to ban viewing was to keep students focused on the curriculum. After a flood of criticism from parents and community members, the district clarified the announcement saying that social studies classes could watch. For some, that’s not enough.

"Watching a historic moment — like a man landing on the moon — has educational value that is greater than an hour-and-a-half worth of curriculum,” Larry West, associate director for the teachers group United Educators Association, told the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram. “When it happens, it is a common sense of history for everyone. Many of our teachers feel that sacrificing history for the sake of a few hours of curriculum is not acceptable."

Posted by Jeff Lambert at 2:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The 95-member Blue Eagles marching band, from South Cobb High School in Austell, Ga., is getting the opportunity to do what very few people do: represent their state and march in the 2009 Presidential Inauguration parade, according to the New York Times. But the band wasn’t sure they could even make it to Washington. The $85,000 in transportation costs for the band, chaperones, and equipment was a daunting hurdle for the school, where more than half the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

“Tears started running down my face,” said Megan Lightcap, captain of the band’s color guard, of the night the band got the news that they were chosen to march. “I turned to my best friend and said, ‘Marissa, how are we going to get the money?’”

Despite their initial financial anxieties, the Blue Eagles had enough money within 48 hours to cover the cost of the trip. Community members and strangers from as far away as Arizona and California contributed more than 16,000 donations totaling over $71,000 to the school’s website.

According to the Times, other donations included an envelope filled with $500 left on the schools doorstep, a $15,000 trailer from an Atlanta Peach Moving company, free fuel and 1,800 meals from gas company RaceTrac Petroleum, and $20,000 from Lockhead Martin, which has a facility in Cobb County.

Posted by Josh Cohen at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One cash-strapped school district in Georgia is considering an unorthodox way to avoid budget cuts—asking teachers to donate their raises.

Officials in Fayette County, Ga., might ask teachers to voluntarily donate a pay raise to aid their cash-strapped district, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The local school board decided they had nothing to lose when writing the letter asking for the donation this week.

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” board member Dr. Bob Todd told the newspaper. Board Member Janet Smola added, “I think it’d be silly if we didn’t ask the question.”

The proposal asks teachers to donate the future earnings of a 2.5 percent pay raise given last spring. If accepted by all county employees, the district could find an extra $4 million in their budget. With diminished property tax revenues and a slashed state education budget, the bonus would be a big help.

“We feel like we owe it to our employees to let them tell us,” said school spokeswoman Melinda Berry-Dreisbach in a follow-up report. “If we don’t get 100 percent, it wouldn’t be fair to look at it.”

Posted by Jeff Lambert at 4:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

California public school teachers have at least one piece of job security in these turbulent economic times. A new state law took effect on January 1 protecting teachers from “being dismissed, suspended, disciplined, reassigned, transferred or otherwise retaliated against for acting to protect a student's speech,” according to The Sacramento Bee.

The Journalism Teacher Protection Act comes after First Amendment advocates documented 16 instances in two years in California of newspaper advisers being disciplined for student content. The law closes a loophole to a 2006 bill that protected students from censorship and punitive measures by administrators, but provided no protection to employees. Sponsors of the bill say administrators used the loophole to exercise de facto campus censorship by clamping down on journalism advisers instead of the students.

Faculty advisers are grateful for the bill, the most stringent of its kind in the country.

"My job is to defend the right of self-expression by my students," Janice White, a newspaper adviser in Oak Ridge, told the newspaper. "This piece of legislation allows me to do that."

Posted by Jeff Lambert at 5:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)