March 2010 Archives

Take one-part national health statistic, one-part school lunch program, add a portion of resistance, and top it off with a British celebrity chef, and you have a new reality TV show: Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution. The show, which started airing on ABC on March 21, follows Oliver's efforts to healthy up an elementary school lunch program in America's unhealthiest city, Huntington, West Virginia, where half of all adults are obese and the children's life expectancy is shorter than their parents.

The media is abuzz with reports of a recent survey of the Huntington elementary students that seems to point to Oliver's failed attempts to win students over to a healthier lifestyle. NPR reports that the survey found that the students preferred their junk food over Oliver's healthier fare. "And when denied the food they were used to, many stopped buying lunch." The survey also found that children drank less milk once Oliver eliminated the sweeter chocolate and strawberry varietals.

Oliver isn't only fighting the kids in the show; he's also got resistance from outside the school, including one disgruntled radio DJ, who's quoted in the first episode saying, "We don't want to sit around and eat lettuce all day long." And he adds, "I don't think Jamie's got anything that can change this town, he can try all he wants, but I don't think he's got it."

A shot of a school staff member declaring French fries a vegetable might stir up reminders of a former president referring to ketchup as a vegetable. What might rattle your cage even more are images of children misidentifying produce (ie, tomatoes as potatoes) and the truck that dumps loads of fat into a pick-up to the horrifying screams of children and adults.

So, it's conceivable that the jury's not out—the kids could still get with the program. The show runs through April. And the UK's Guardian reports that since Oliver cleaned up the menu at a school in Greenwich, south London, not only did the students' official scores jump, but the number of excused absences attributed to illness fell by 15 percent.

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Students at Blackminster Middle School in the U.K. had the experience of watching a science teacher appear to be gunned down in the middle of their school playground; little did they know, they were all taking place in a "role-play" science project, according to Sky News.

Richard Kent, the science teacher in question, faked his own death on the school's playground by using a clapper board, traditionally used in filmmaking to announce the start of a scene, to simulate gunfire. As colleagues rushed to pretend to resuscitate Kent, students in the surrounding area were ushered away.

Ten minutes later, Kent was walking through the school hallways completely unharmed, much to the students' surprise.

Students of the school posted comments on Facebook about the experiment. One student called it "sick"; another student wrote, "Most of us were so scared we were crying."

Kent has since admitted that the experiment was a "step too far" after parents complained, and the school has sworn off all future violent role-play.

"On reflection the time lag between the clapper board and the hall was too long," head teacher Terry Hollands said. "It should have been seconds rather than minutes so it was made instantly clear what had happened."

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While the likes of Ohio University, Northern Iowa, and St. Mary's probably sent your NCAA tournament bracket up in flames, you might find some solace in the news that an autistic 17-year-old from Chicago saw it all coming and picked every single game of March Madness' first weekend correctly.

Yes, Alex Hermann defeated the 1:13,460,000 odds this past weekend by correctly picking the winners of all 48 games in the NCAA tournament's first weekend, according to NBCChicago.com.

Hermann, with the help of his older brother Andrew, entered his bracket on CBSSports.com's Bracket Manager before the start of the tournament; after a first weekend chock full of upsets, Hermann's bracket remained unscathed.

"I checked his bracket and it was off the chart," Andrew said. "I thought it was a big deal."

At ESPN.com, approximately 4.78 million people participated in their NCAA tournament challenge, but there's not a single perfect bracket left.

How can Alex explain his absurdly great decision-making?

"I'm good at math," Alex said. "I'm kind of good at math and at stats I see on TV during the game."

If only it were that easy for the rest of us, Alex.

Check out his bracket here.

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A recent study led a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics professor reveals troubling statistics for students who copy a large percentage of their homework from their peers, according to the Washington Post's Answer Sheet blog.

The study, called "Patterns, Correlates and Reduction of Homework Copying," examined the homework habits of four physics classes at MIT. The researchers tracked students' homework submissions through an online homework program called MasteringPhysics, which analyzed how much time it took students to complete each problem and the number of errors students typically made on each assignment. They used that data to determine a profile for a rampant homework copier, and had students fill out an anonymous survey asking about copying at the end of the study.

They found some alarming news for chronic homework copiers: students who copied more than 30 percent of their assignments were four times more likely to drop out of classes in the course of a two-semester sequence than their peers who completed homework legitimately.

What was mostly to blame for the chronic homework copying? Interestingly, the data revealed that a lack of skill was a weak correlate to copying. The most important factor is "delaying the start of effort on the homework until close to the due date." (That's MIT's fancy way of saying "procrastination.")

And what can teachers do to dissuade students from copying?

"Providing more instructor contact, giving shorter and more frequent assignments, switching from pass-no record to grades, and discussing the correlation of copying and course performance with students" were all suggestions in the MIT report. During the study, the researchers found that these changes to a course's format reduced homework copying by a factor of four.

"We came upon homework copying through our research on learning in an online environment, rather than through moral concern," said Pritchard. "But our results are so compelling that they place a moral imperative on teachers to confront homework copying and to reduce it."

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The debate over the Texas Board of Education's adoption of new social studies guidelines has kicked up a flurry of coverage in the national media this week—most of it not very positive. Here's a sampling:

The New York Times kicked things off this week with an opinion piece on Monday, calling the revisions "a disturbing intervention by the board's Republican majority into educational decisions best left to the teachers and scholars who have toiled for almost a year to produce the new curriculum standards."

On Thursday, the Washington Post found historians to be upset with some of the proposed changes. A professor who has authored some of the most popular history textbooks in the country said that potential changes to his books may leave him uncomfortable promoting his own work.

On The Daily Beast, education historian Diane Ravitch, who seems to be everywhere lately, condemned the politics (both rightward and leftward) of statewide textbook approval processes and argued that "teachers and districts should be free to choose whatever books or textbooks or other learning materials they thought best to reach the state's academic standards."

On the blog of the conservative arts journal The New Criterion, writer James Bowman highlighted what characterized as the hypocrisy of criticizing a conservative-leaning curriculum if the current social studies standards have a liberal slant. "Why is the conservative view a political one but the unconservative view not a political one? How does that work, logically?," Bowman asked.

Finally, in a true sign of national prominence, the controversy received some wry criticism from Jon Stewart on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show." (Note: Contains suggestive language.)

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While 48 states and President Obama's administration are backing a recent draft of common standards for public schools, the Texas Board of Education has opted for a more conservative-leaning route in its standards discussions, according to the New York Times.

Texas was one of two states (along with Alaska) to not back the draft standards released by the Common Core State Standard Initiative. Instead, they've already been embroiled in their own social studies standards debates for months.

The state's 15-member Board of Education has been largely dominated by seven hard-core conservatives in recent years, but voters in recent Republican primaries elected to oust the leader of the conservative faction, Don McElroy. Before McElroy's term expires in 10 months, he and the other conservatives have sworn that they'll play a large part in shaping the state's social studies standards.

The conservatives' proposed changes to the draft curriculum (which was written by a panel of teachers) include a demand to incorporate "the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association," according to the Times.

Some of the other potential changes include renaming American "imperialism" to "expansionism," including country and western music as a cultural movement to be studied, and listing Confederate army general Stonewall Jackson as a role model for effective leadership.

During education board meetings this week, the conservatives made clear that they'd also continue trying to highlight what they consider to be the Christian roots of the Constitution and some of the nation's other founding documents.

"To deny the Judeo-Christian values of our founding fathers is just a lie to our kids," said Ken Mercer, a San Antonio Republican.

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Note to readers: We were blogging from WNET's Celebration of Teaching and Learning conference in New York this weekend. Among the highlights: U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan talked teacher job security and vowed to "fix" NCLB; Yale University professor Mark Brackett highlighted the role of emotional literacy in effective classroom instruction; Nancie Atwell extolled the power of independent reading and self-expression for middle school students; Bobby McFerrin revealed his reservations about some of the music kids listen to today and provided some CD picks; Jim Simons, founder of Math for America, said we are in the midst of a potentially devastating math-teaching crisis; and some New York City high school students opened up to Queen Latifah.

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More on the Celebration of Teaching and Learning conference in New York this weekend

There were some rumblings in the conference press room that Queen Latifah might not show after all. But rest assured, she appeared as scheduled for the final event on Saturday, donning a conference t-shirt and exhibiting an ease on the ballroom stage matched only by McFerrin. Alas, she didn't sing. Her role was to moderate a "Youth Voices" discussion with six distinguished inner-city high school students.

I can't do justice to the range and nuance of the students' observations, some of which were quite shrewd. But I can give you some general take-aways that I scribbled down in my notes. Here goes: These kids value teachers who trust them and set high standards for them, and they know when expectations are being "dumbed down." They know the difference between teachers who are deeply versed in their subjects and those who merely apply a "cookie-cutter curriculum" (as one of the participants stated it). They are strongly affected by negative perceptions of their schools and believe such perceptions contribute to poor academic performance. They value the safe places in their lives, including community centers and after-school extracurricular programs, and could probably could use more of them. And they are keenly aware of the opportunities that great teachers give them. "Your job is a matter of life and death," one young man told the audience, without a shred of irony. "It doesn't get any more serious than than that."

And, by the way, who knew that "dancing gangs" are apparently a problem in some inner-city neighorhood today? That one caught even Queen Latifah by surprise.

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Live from the Celebration of Teaching and Learning conference, New York

By far the most sobering session I attended at this conference was a conversation between PBS journalist David Brancaccio and Jim Simons, the founder of a teacher-recruitment program called Math for America. Simons is a mathematician who made a fortune as the CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a private investment firm. In his retirement, he told Brancaccio, he has dedicated himself to wrestling with the "issue of why we do so poorly as a nation in high school math."

Simons actually thinks the answer to that question is pretty straightforward: "We don't have enough teachers of math and science who actually know math and science," he said bluntly. "It's the elephant in the room." He then explained that at least part of the reason for this situation is that there are so many better professional opportunities available to individuals who are highly skilled in math. There's an enormous "gap" in terms of compensation and professional respect, he said, and as a nation we've done very little close that gap.

Math for America is intended to rectify that situation to at least some degree. The program, which receives both federal and foundation funding, essentially aims to supplement the salaries of math-proficient individuals who commit to go into teaching for four years--in addition to bankrolling them through a one-year intensive certification program. (A separate "master teacher" track is available to standout existing teachers.) Simons emphasized that MfA fellows are also given a range of professional development opportunities, including lunches, seminars, and one-on-one support. This "comraderie," he suggested, creates a sense of professional identity that teachers often lack. The program now has fellows in New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Washington, and Boston.

While he's clearly proud of the in-roads MfA has made, however, it was Simons' distress over America's generally low proficiency in math that was most palpable. He believes we are reaching a crisis point in terms of our economic future. "As this century unfolds," he said, "the economic competition from Asia is going to be very intense, and we're going to have to face these issues. I'd like to see us face them before we lose the game."

He also expressed alarm and puzzlement at our seeming "cultural acceptance of poor math" (Brancaccio's words). He wondered why it is, for example, that many elementary-level teachers can casually admit to not liking or not being good in math. How would we react, he asked, if they said that about reading?

Ultimately, Simons said he would like to see MfA grow into a large-scale national program that supplies at least 20 percent of the nation's 350,000 math teachers. "You could completely transform math education," he said.

He estimated that it would cost roughly $2 billion a year to each that kind of scale, and he recalled mentioning the idea recently to Sen. Harry Reid of Nev. On hearing the figure, he said Reid responded, "That's the cost of one bomber."

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Live from the Celebration of Teaching and Learning conference, New York.

Nancy Flanagan will probably be disappointed in me but I was only able to catch the tail end of Bobby McFerrin's session here, though I did get to see him do a brilliant 3-minute rendition of all of the Wizard of Oz. Let's see Arne Duncan or Linda Darling Hammond top that. ...

Before that, during the Q&A session, someone asked McFerrin what he thinks the music that today's young people listen to tells us about our time. His response was surprisingly pessimistic, I thought, given his typically upbeat personality. "I have a problem with music that isn't redeeming," he said, adding that he dislikes lyrics that are "misogynist, violent, negative, pushy, or bossy." That brought a round of applause from the educator-filled ballroom.

And in case you're looking for things to download, someone else asked McFerrin to name his five favorite musical artists. He said the question was unfair because there were so many but he did go ahead and name Mozart, Gershwin, Paul Robeson (particularly on an album of spirituals called "Deep River"), Weather Report, and Miles Davis (with special mention of "Sketches of Spain").

He also made a little girl in the audience laugh very, very hard by honking his nose like a trumpet. Pretty "redeeming" stuff there ...

I'll have more shortly, or tomorrow at latest, on America's math-teaching crisis. I'll also see if I can figure out what Queen Latifah is up to.

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Live from the Celebration of Teaching and Learning, New York

I just got back from a talk by Nancie Atwell, a 7th and 8th grade English teacher at nonprofit demonstration school in Maine and author of The Reading Zone, among other books. Atwell told the story of a former student of hers named Mike, an 8th grader who'd been transplanted to her school from California (apparently after a divorce) and who had severe ADHD. When Mike arrived in Atwell's class, he had very little interest in reading and writing--indeed had indicated on a start-of-the year survey that he was a "bad" reader and hadn't read a single book in the previous year. But over the course of the year, while he continued to struggle as a student, he become an adept and engaged writer and reader. He read 26 books, and completed dozens of writing projects--some of which (as presented by Atwell) were extremely clever and well-done. She saw his growth as one of her "small victories" as an teacher.

So what was Atwell's secret? She claims it was simply--or maybe not so simply--a matter of putting the power of independent reading and creative expression at Mike's disposal. She encouraged him to write in a variety of forms--poems, memoirs, movie reviews, parodies--about topics that interested him. (Along the way, she says, "He discovered he could be funny in print"--which she calls a major turning point for many middle school writers.) Meanwhile, she led him to young adult novels that might interest him (staring with one about baseball) and gave him "time to get lost in good stories" in a community of other student readers. This approach, she contends, was more important than plying him with comprehension, decoding, and meta-cognition strategies. As standardized tests show, she said, "the best student readers are the students who read the most." You don't want to discourage the practice, in other words.

With reference to a poem by William Stafford, Atwell described the power of reading and self-expression as a "thread" that language arts teachers must hang on to, despite the doubts of administrators and policymakers. "If we trust in the power in the reading, writing, and our students humanity," she said, "we can never be lost."

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Live from the Celebration of Teaching and Learning conference, New York.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the Celebration of Teaching and Learning, I want to give some quick background. It's a really very impressive conference put on every year by WNET, the PBS affiliate in New York. There are some 8500 people in attendance, about 65 percent of whom are teachers. Most of the attendees are from the New York area, but I'm told there are folks here from all over the country and beyond. The conference organizers take great pride in the electicism and breadth of the offerings. The idea is to combine classroom-oriented workshops with high-level policy discussions and presentations by luminaries whose work has bearing on education (and whose doesn't?) So in one weekend, for example, you can catch not only the likes of Arne Duncan and Randi Weingarten but also both Queen Noor of Jordan and (not to be outdone) Queen Latifah of New Jersey. Plus, you can get some tips on, say, using video in the social studies classroom. In any case, the teachers in attendance seem enjoy it: I'd say there's a pretty high enthusiasm level.

I spent most of yesterday in the big policy-oriented sessions, so it was with some relief that I caught a really entertaining and thoughtful presentation this morning by Mark Brackett, a youngish and very funny Yale professor who studies the role of emotions in learning. Simply put, Brackett's contention is that emotional literacy is a hugely overlooked factor in the way schools go about their business (and in the way most of us go about our lives). He pointed to a recent study he conducted of 60 schools in the New York area showing that the "emotional climate" of classrooms was closely linked to academic engagement and improvement--indeed, it was more important that any other factor (including race and income). He also presented an array of slides on how emotions affect our ability to process new information, make decisions, and pay attention.

And yet, as the educators in attendance attested, teachers are given little or no training in E.L., which for Brackett would mean being able to thoughtfully recognize and manage both their own and students mood states. (Do you think any of the Race to the Top applications proposed to evaluate teachers in that area?) Learning to become facile in understanding and effectively responding to emotions is something that requires training and practice, Brackett emphasized--"emotional literacy is an achievement"--but he also offered some practical tips for getting started: For example, he suggested using a mood chart on which students can plot there energy and emotional states at various points during the day and drawing up (with the help of students) a classroom emotional literacy charter spelling out needs and expectations.

Brackett also suggested that one of the most important steps teachers could take was simply to recognize and think closely about the linkages between emotions, student learning, and their own instructional practice. It's something too many educators and school leaders neglect, he said, perhaps because they're often in no mood to do so.

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Live from WNET's Celebration of Teaching and Learning conference, New York

Speaking before hundreds of K-12 educators gathered this afternoon at the Celebration of Teaching and Learning conference in New York, U.S. Secretary of Arne Duncan addressed a range of hot-button school issues, including teacher job security and possible changes to NCLB.

Duncan said with some pride that federal stimulus money saved as many as 300,000 teaching jobs in the past year, but he acknowledged that cutbacks still loom in many school districts. "I worry a lot about this next school year," he said. "Layoffs are no good for any of us." He pledged to "remain vigilant" to protect education jobs, but gave no details on how the Obama administration plans to do that.

Another thing he worries about, Duncan said, is the trend of talented younger teachers leaving the profession after only a few years. He stressed the need to improve schools' mentoring and induction programs and especially to develop evaluation systems that give educators more meaningful feedback. Current evaluation systems, he said, are "mostly broken."

He also mentioned the idea of adding a "master teacher rung" to the teaching career ladder to give standout educators a new advancement opportunity.

Improving efforts to keep talented younger teachers is especially crucial now, the Secretary said, since as many as one million baby-boomer-aged teachers, or nearly a third of the profession, are expected to retire within the next five to eight years. "Our efforts to attract and retain teachers in the next few years will shape education for the next 30," he said.

Duncan said that "fixing NCLB" is among the Obama administration's top priorities for this year. He explained that in his travels to schools around the country, the complaint he hears most often is about the "narrowing of the curriculum under NCLB." To encourage schools to provide more time for science, social studies, the arts, and recess (which he singled as particularly important), the administration is proposing to spend $1 billion on a "well-rounded education" initiative. "We need to give every kid a chance to find their passion," he said.

How exactly testing programs would be altered to allow more focus on areas other than math and reading wasn't made clear, but Duncan did say he would push for changes in NCLB's accountability regime so that growth in student progress would be emphasized over all-purpose benchmark targets. "So many schools got mislabled" under NCLB, he said.

He also suggested that states need to "raise the bar" on standards for students but that federal law needed be less prescriptive about how schools reach those students.

On the subject of standards, Duncan praised the work being done around the development of common core standards, which he called "an idea whose time has come."

Among other administration education priorities, Duncan singled out increasing access to higher education for all student and, relatedly, reducing high school dropout rates--which he called the "civil rights issue of our generation."

Duncan also praised the work done in many states in developing applications for the federal Race to the Top competition, saying it had the effect of getting people "out of silos." Sixteen finalists in the competition were named yesterday but Duncan noted that round two--and "hopefully a round three"--would be forthcoming.

He also suggested that RTT initiatives that proved effective in winning states could be the basis for "scaled-up," broader initiatives.

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It's not every day that you see a man and 100 books riding for hours on a donkey. For children in rural Colombia, South America, it happens twice a week.

Luis Soriano, a primary school teacher in Colombia, has been spending his free time on his "biblioburro"—a mobile library of 120 books on a donkey—to help fight illiteracy in rural areas of Colombia since 1990.

"In [rural] regions, a child must walk or ride a donkey for up to 40 minutes to reach the closest schools," Soriano said. "The children have very few opportunities to go to secondary school. ...There are [few] teachers that would like to teach in the countryside."

At the beginning of his teaching career, Soriano noticed that children from rural areas seemed to be having more difficulties than the other students, largely due to illiterate parents and an inability to access books. Soriano took matters into his own hands, saddling up two unused donkeys at his house with books, "because they can carry a heavy load."

Every Wednesday at dusk and Saturday at dawn, Soriano hops on the back of a donkey named Alfa, followed by second donkey Beto, who's carrying additional books and a sitting blanket, and the biblioburro caravan heads off to select villages.

"You can just see that the kids are excited when they see the biblioburro coming this way. It makes them happy that he continues to come," said Dairo Holguin, 34, who has two children that participate in the program. "For us, his program complements what the children learn in school. The books they do not have access to ... they get from the biblioburro."

Soriano visits 15 villages on a rotating basis, and has logged nearly 4,000 hours riding his donkeys to the villages. While the biblioburro has its drawbacks—Soriano fractured his leg in 2008 after falling off one of the donkeys—he's helped over 4,000 kids in the past 20 years and doesn't plan on stopping.

"For us teachers, it's an educational triumph, and for the parents [it's] a great satisfaction when a child learns how to read. That's how a community changes and the child becomes a good citizen and a useful person," Soriano said. "Literature is how we connect them with the world."

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