Monday, April 20, 2009

The Case for National Standards

Next week's Time Magazine (April 27 issue) carries an article by Walter Isaacson that makes the case for national standards in education. He writes in How to Raise the Standard in America's Schools, "Without national standards for what our students should learn, it will be hard for the U.S. to succeed in the 21st century economy."

The same issue also carries an interview with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan by Richard Stengel. The Apostle of Reform was interesting to me, as it revealed Duncan's mindset about America's schools in general. "Families that didn't come from a lot of money had one option [in school choice] - and usually that option wasn't a good one." I think many of us would disagree with that assessment.

Getting Homeless Kids to School

Rubén Rosario of the St. Paul Pioneer Press follows Margo Hurrle, the shelter office coordinator for Minneapolis Public Schools, for a morning as she performs the federally funded and mandated job of getting homeless kids to school. In By bus, van or taxicab, she gets homeless students to school, Rosario tells how Hurrle handles getting some 2,627 homeless students to school each day. The effort is a result of the little known McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act. Signed into law in 1987 by Ronald Reagan, "it mandates that we as a society must provide education and other services to homeless families and kids who, for whatever reason, lose a 'fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence.'"

NASA Image of the Day

Thanks to the folks at the NASA Image of the Day Gallery, we don't have to have a colorless Monday update! The little kid in me really hates a book or web page without pictures, and since probably half of my readers are Earth and Space Science teachers, the photo from NASA is at least tenuously related to education.

HD Earth Views from Space Station for Earth Day

A NASA press release today announced that NASA will air high definition views of the Earth on NASA Television from the International Space Station on Earth Day. "The special Earth views HD feed can be seen April 22 from 6 to 9 a.m., noon to 2 p.m. and 4 to 7 p.m. EDT."

ACLU to Schools: Stop Blocking Gay Sites

eSchool News reports today in ACLU to schools: Stop blocking gay sites that "the American Civil Liberties Union has asked public school officials in Tennessee to stop blocking students' access to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender web sites on school computers -- or face a possible lawsuit." The ACLU's letter to school officials notes that "80 percent of Tennessee's public school districts...might be restricting access to non-sexual sites that offer educational and political information about issues such as gay marriage or groups such as the Human Rights Campaign."

The Four Most Important Lessons of Columbine

Dave Cullen's The Four Most Important Lessons of Columbine on Slate is an excellent read.

1. The first lesson is really one that we have unlearned, which is that there actually isn't a distinct psychological profile of the school killer.
2. The dramatic change post-Columbine is now we believe the leaks...Kids are bad at secrets. The grander the plot, the more likely to sprout leaks.
3. We need to prepare students and teachers better for an emergency...Most kids and their teachers are now drilled on lockdowns and evacuations.
4. The final practical lesson of Columbine is a revolution in police response tactics. They're trained to move toward the sound of gunfire and neutralize the shooter.

Who Pays to Educate Children with Autism

Amanda Fairbanks had a good feature story in yesterday's New York Times about paying for tuition for children with autism. With the incidence and/or diagnoses of autism on the rise, Tug of War Over Costs to Educate the Autistic is a good read.

Strip Search Case to Supreme Court

David G. Savage writes in Strip-searches at schools go to Supreme Court about an Arizona school strip-search case that the Supreme Court will hear on Tuesday.

Odds 'n' Ends

An article today by Jay Mathews brought me back to the writings of Sarah Fine, a 25-year-old English teacher at Cesar Chavez Public Charter School on Capitol Hill. I'd linked last month to her article, Below the Bar: Why We (Can’t) Forget Students Left Behind, where she laments a side effect of NCLB testing, "We offer ever-more support and incentives for the “bubble kids” who might be able to score proficient on the DC-CAS, while we continue to neglect the students who most desperately need our help."

I ran across an Education Week piece from last month, Consumed by Failure, where she writes about something that has bothered me over the years, the mindset of some that all of our public schools are failing in all areas. She writes:

In the seven years since the No Child Left Behind Act became law, the American public has grown accustomed to hearing about failing schools like mine—mythically dystopian places where administrators, teachers, and students collectively fail to meet state performance expectations.

It is hard to underestimate the effect that such language exerts on the consciousnesses of everyone involved in public education, especially those who work on the front lines.

Fine doesn't excuse failure in her writings, but notes that even in "failing schools," there are successes that go unnoticed and unrewarded under the NCLB testing structure. When I was in the classroom, most of my special education students did not pass Indiana's ISTEP+ test. The were labeled by the law as failing, when in fact, each year most of them made giant strides in reading and math. But they started so far behind that the tests at their grade level were far beyond their growing abilities.

It's time that our educational leaders, many of whom have spent little or no time as classroom teachers, craft their statements about teachers and education more carefully. There is no doubt that America's schools need massive improvement in many areas, but we also need to be cognizant of the excellence in education that goes on every day in many "failing schools."

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Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Teaching as a Second Career

The New York Times takes a look at the promise of teaching as a second career in Teaching: No ‘Fallback’ Career. Five writers give their assessment of the viability of teaching as a second career for private sector professionals who have lost their jobs. It's a very interesting read.

KIPP AMP Update

With the state’s labor board scheduled to vote Wednesday on whether to certify a union at the KIPP AMP charter school in Brooklyn, Jennifer Medina has a timely update in Charter Schools Weigh Freedom Against the Protection of a Union. Medina looks at the situation through the eyes of teacher Kashi Nelson, originally a supporter of the unionization effort who has withdrawn "her support from a unionization drive that she says is proving to be a distraction and more about power than children."

EDTV

ED TV will be rebroadcasting their program on the education end of the economic stimulus package tonight and at other times. The program, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Investing in Innovation, Securing America's Future, was originally broadcast in March and tells about the intended effects in education of the stimulus package.

I watched the program this morning on a webcast and found it informative, but probably not something you'd want to use with your students. It's targeted at adults. Broadcast info for cable and satellite is also available.

Workshop on Attracting More Students to Computer Science

The University of Virginia's Department of Computer Science is again offering its tuition-free, Tapestry Workshop for middle school and high school computer science teachers. The workshop focuses on how to attract "more and diverse students into your middle and high school Computer Science classes," and offers free lodging and meals along with a honorarium to assist attendees with time and travel costs.

Odds 'n' Ends

Tomorrow, of course, is Earth Day here in the United States. There's lots of online info for the day at the Earth Day Network, The Teacher's Corner, Kaboose, and elsewhere.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009 - Earth Day

Helping Kids Over the Weekend

NBC Nightly News did a segment in their Making a Difference series last night about a teacher in Kendallville, Indiana, helping elementary students by sending home nutritious snacks over the weekends in The Boomerang Backpacks are Here. The program hands out backpacks filled with convenience foods every Friday, such as granola bars, cheese and crackers and other child-friendly snack foods, and students return the empty backpacks on Monday. Kendallville is an area hard hit by unemployment, and East Noble High School teacher Mark Cockroft chose the South Side Elementary School for his project due to its high free/reduced lunch numbers. To help out, you may reach Mark at at 260-347-2032 (ext. 12624) or by .

• Backpack snack program helps low-income students
• Segment on schools' food backpacks to air today

Urban-Suburban Graduation Gap

The release today of the America's Promise Alliance's Cities in Crisis 2009: Closing the Graduation Gap report has produced a number of articles on the subject. The report is an update on the graduation report issued a year ago that revealed some shocking numbers about big city graduation rates. It "shows that despite some progress made by several cities from 1995-2005, the average graduation rate of the 50 largest cities is well below the national average of 71%, and there remains an 18 percentage point urban suburban gap."

• The New York Times: Large Urban-Suburban Gap Seen in Graduation Rates by Sam Dillon
• The Associated Press: Some cities make gains in curbing dropouts by Libby Quaid

Stimulus Funds and Teacher Layoffs

Stacy Teicher Khadaroo writes in Stimulus money puts teachers in layoff limbo that "Absent the stimulus, the number of K-12 jobs lost by 2011 would probably total about 574,000 – 9 percent of the field, according to a February analysis by University of Washington professor Marguerite Roza." With stimulus funds on the way, deadlines for layoffs and contracts have come and gone, producing lots of pink slips based on worst-case school budget scenarios. "That's putting tens of thousands of teachers into layoff limbo."

Study: Exit exam doesn't meet expectations

California's high school exit exam is coming under fire due to a Study: Exit exam doesn't meet expectations. "The Stanford study found that girls and students of color - who perform just as well as boys and whites, respectively, on other statewide tests - disproportionately fail the exam."

Odds 'n' Ends

A posting this morning on one of the mailing lists to which I subscribe pointed folks to a printable on Make Beliefs Comix that says, "Imagine you were an environmental hero. What brave deeds would you to to save the Earth, and what would you call yourself." The posting produced a lively discussion and some amusing responses about using a printable (kills how many trees?) and Earth Day, and even a link to an environmentally friendly font (that is full of holes to save toner).

There was also a notice on the DOE RSS feed pointing to the FREE site's Environment Teaching and Learning Resources page. I suspect that both Earth Day activities will come to your attention too late for use today, but both Make Beliefs Comix and especially the federal FREE site are good sources for teaching ideas and resources all year long. I'm not so sure about the font with holes in it!

The possible gotcha for today was a press release from EurekAlert, New study shows chewing gum can lead to better academic performance in teenagers. The study appears to have been funded by Wrigley.

Advertising Note

As of today, I've moved the complete text listing of the Educators' News Affiliate Advertisers from the right sidebar to its own page. This change should help Educators' News to load more quickly. And as always, if you plan to buy something online, why not come back to our advertisers page and click though one of listings. We'll get a small commission on the sale, and you won't end up paying any more than you would have if you went directly to the vendor's site.

Thanks!

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Mac Users Come of Age

If you're a Mac user, you've officially come of age with the detection of two trojan horses written specifically for the Macintosh operating system. Mac users have long felt immune to computer virus attacks. They weren't, but virus writers simply weren't going after the Mac "market," which is much smaller than the community of Windows users. With the detection of a couple of malicious programs "hidden in pirated copies of Apple Computer’s iWork ’09 and Adobe Photoshop CS4 posted on some peer to peer (P2P) networks," Mac users will have to begin taking adequate precautions. Symantec notes, "We do not believe that these threats are widespread or likely to affect the average user...Users of Macintosh computers continue to have little to fear from viruses, trojans and worms so long as they take reasonable precautions."

For Windows users, the admonition to take "reasonable precautions" may sound like a no-brainer. But many Mac users have functioned for years without any antivirus protection and managed to keep their hard drives clean of infections. As virus writers begin to target the Mac OS more and more, the vacation will be over for Mac users. And if you're like me, working and living in a multiple OS environment and frequently moving files back and forth from Mac to PC and vice versa, virus protection is essential I've long used Norton AntiVirus for Mac. It's available for mail order only from Amazon or for physical shipment or download from Symantec for around $50. While a Mac program, it also detects Windows viruses on incoming files and drives, so that you don't bring something in on, say, a thumbnail drive, and then share it with someone else's PC when you insert your thumbnail into their computer. Other options are McAfee's VirusScan for Mac, Intego's Virus Barrier X5, and the open source ClamXav.

Males and Learning Disabilities

A report posted on ScienceDaily, Learning Disabilities In Males: Nine New X Chromosome Genes Linked To Learning Disabilities, relates some interesting new research about X chromosomes and the incidence of learning disabilities in males.

Grant Possibility

I ran across the ING Unsung Heroes® grant program from an eSchool News posting. The deadline for applications this year is April 30, so you don't have much time. I'm not familiar with this grant program, but it looks to be pretty open to teachers with a big project in need of funding.

Odds 'n' Ends

Study: Ed tech leads to significant gains tells about teachers using Promethean's ActivClassroom and the positive results they've experienced. (I wonder if this one is about like the gotcha study I noted yesterday about the positive effects of chewing gum in class...that was apparently funded by Wrigley.) From the article:

The study determined that student achievement can really soar if a teacher has 10 or more years of teaching experience, has been using the technology for two or more years, has high confidence in his or her ability to use the ActivClassroom suite, and uses it 75 to 80 percent of the time in the classroom.

My guess on the study above is that if you have a motivated, confident, experienced teacher who has the time and technology they need to do their job, you're going to see some improvement with whatever brand of products they use.

Dr. Tony Phillips has posted NASA Puts the Right Stuff in the Right Hands to his Science@NASA site. It tells of cooperative efforts between NASA and the National Weather Service.

Friday, April 24, 2009

KIPP AMP Union Certified

I had to hunt quite a bit to find the information, but Elizabeth Green's updated posting on Gotham Schools, With union decision imminent, KIPP is ready to start bargaining, relates that the KIPP AMP union has been certified. Both the KIPP schools and the UFT have issued "play nice" press releases. AFT and UFT president Randi Weingarten "said that her union’s work at KIPP exemplifies its interest in experimenting with new ways of recruiting, paying, and evaluating teachers. 'We can use charter schools to not only be experiments for instructional practice, but charter schools could also be used as experimentation for labor-relations practice.'”

I really hope Weingarten and KIPP's David Levin mean what they've said about bargaining in good faith. I really like what Weingarten said about using this charter contract as a test bed for experimentation in helping teachers and students.

Odds 'n' Ends

I was finishing up the initial Friday posting on Thursday evening and happened to glance out our west window. I could tell a glorious sunset was shaping up after an afternoon of unexpected thunderstorms. Since my Coolpix P60 is in for repair, I grabbed my trusty old Nikon 4300, ran outside and started snapping. After about ten shots, I remembered to switch to the sunset setting and was rewarded with the shot below.

I'll have to decide over the weekend whether this one is good enough to post to my Desktop Photos page. It's already lousy with sunsets.

Have a great weekend!