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Charter Schools I found a couple of interesting articles today dealing with charter schools. Jennifer Medina's City’s Schools Share Their Space, and Bitterness tells of the challenges of finding and sharing space in New York City's public and charter schools. Nick Anderson takes a look at two recent studies on the effects of charters in Charter schools: Two studies, two conclusions. Jay Mathews commented in his blog posting today, Understand the charter school debate in just 2 minutes, that Anderson's article "is the best 800-word update on charters I have ever seen." Early Intervention for Autism A report on CNN today, Early autism intervention in toddlers is effective, and another that appeared Friday on ScienceDaily, Early Intervention for Toddlers With Autism Highly Effective, Study Finds, report that "Researchers have shown for the first time that if a child is diagnosed with autism as early as 18 months of age, offering the toddler age-appropriate, effective therapy can lead to raised IQ levels and improved language skills and behavior." Looking Ahead Besides the obvious holidays for the month, a peek at the Teachers' Corner's December Calendar may give you an idea for a thematic lesson or two. Their daily writing prompts aren't bad either. Primary teachers looking for a quick gift project to send home might want to look at DLTK's Free Printable Custom Calendars that I wrote about last week. Astronomy buffs will want to remember the Geminids meteor shower that peaks on December 13 and in the wee morning hours of the 14th. Odds 'n' Ends Valerie Strauss has a good blog posting today in Telling teens not to drink isn't enough: One story. She tells of a teenager whose parents had effectively coached him on what to do when someone is dangerously intoxicated. His actions may have saved a friend's life.
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Short Month I wrote a few words during Thanksgiving week about how tough short weeks can be in education. Short months such as December are more of the same. Kids often back off a bit Thanksgiving week and then come back to school with Christmas vacation clearly in sight. It's a tough time to get things done in the classroom. I once had a principal who said that teachers earn their money the month before Christmas and the last weeks of school. I thought that was pretty apt, until I heard him relate the same thing later to someone else, changing the time to fit the current situation. And maybe that's true. Every day and every month is critical, but the winter holidays do make it tough to keep the kids focused. Class Size Sharon Otterman has an interesting article in the New York Times about increases in New York City class sizes in Class Sizes Rise, Mostly Due to Budget Cuts. The increases don't seem dramatic, but as we all know, just one more student can really change the dynamic of a classroom. Class size also seems to be the whipping boy of many reformers, as there's not a lot of data that supports increased learning due to lower class size. Classroom teachers almost universally contend that class size matters, but they aren't being listened to much these days in our rush to performance pay tied to test scores. Of course, the other side of the coin can be illustrated with an instance from years ago. In my first teaching assignment, we had a fourth grade teacher who was simply horrible. She was a nice, middle aged lady, but simply couldn't teach or relate to kids. To help her, my first principal had shifted kids and given her just fourteen students one year. Despite the lower class size and much help from a talented assistant principal, the teacher barely got through the year. The next year due to budget cuts, she had twenty-eight students. I asked the principal how she was going to survive. He just grimaced and said, "Steve, she can teach twenty-eight as well as she taught fourteen!" DOE Official Sent to Help on Hawaii Furlough Days Eloise Aguiar reports in the Honolulu Advertiser that a Department of Education official has been dispatched to Hawaii. In Education is wrong place to seek cuts, official warns she relates that Peter Cunningham, assistant secretary for communications and outreach for the U.S. Department of Education, will "meet with the governor, union leaders and legislators and his message to them will be to keep kids in school." Odds 'n' Ends
I'm working from my usual upstairs office with the smell of baking potting soil wafting upstairs. I'll be getting the first of my seed geraniums started today or tomorrow and needed more sterile potting soil. I generally try to sterilize the soil early in the morning while my wife is at work, as the bouquet given off by 400o F potting soil is something only a dedicated gardener can appreciate (or tolerate)! I'll be planting seed from Thompson & Morgan Seeds, their World's Top Six Mix of geranium. I'm not totally thrilled with their idea of the world's top six varieties, but theirs was the first garden seed catalog of the year to come in. Getting five (or more) geranium seeds of six varieties for just $11.95 didn't hurt. I also have to redo my Growing Geraniums from Seed article on Senior Gardening, as it turned out to be a real disaster last year. If you're into gardening, our Senior Gardening list of recommended seedsmen appears in the October blog archive. Duncan on ESEA Reauthorization An Education Week interview with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on Monday produced some interesting comments about the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Alyson Klein writes in Duncan Aims to Make Incentives Key Element of ESEA that Duncan sees the current version of ESEA (No Child Left Behind - NCLB) as having "no incentives." He stated, "There are 50 ways to fail, and if you succeeded there was nothing there for you.” Duncan would like to add incentives, "additional resources, whether it’s greater flexibility on additional resources, whether it’s shining a spotlight on them, … there’s a whole package of things” to the next version of the law to reward excellence. Class Size Valerie Strauss gave over her The Answer Sheet blog one day this week to educator Larry Cuban. Cuban's "The Leave No Pound Untouched" Act and how NOT to reform schools who looks at "what might policymakers do if they were dead-set in reducing the number of fat kids?" Cuban concludes his interesting essay:
A timely, related column appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday, State's students getting a little fitter. Oh, my! An article by Alex Bahr from Leesburg Today, Special Education Stimulus Funds Converted To $1.7M In Whiteboards, caught my eye this morning. It appears that the Loudoun County (VA) school board authorized "the expenditure of $1.7 million...in federal economic stimulus funds designated for improving special education programs to install interactive whiteboards in kindergarten and first-grade classrooms throughout the county!" An assistant superintendent for the school district said that the school system had already used part of the money to hire all necessary special education teachers and assistants needed for FY10, and was using the money this way so it wouldn't revert to the federal government. I wonder what the special education teachers and parents in the district think of this move. Odds 'n' Ends
I took a bit of time yesterday to do a quick tally of the news outlets I had linked to on Educators' News over the last year. Where one gets their news does make a difference, as the emergence of Fox News and The Washington Times as the Pravdas of the previous administration so ably demonstrated. As I note on our About page, "I really do try to present a balanced look at the daily educational news...from a Mac-toting, bleeding-heart liberal, Christian educator's point of view." Even with my acknowledged bias, I do regularly visit some fairly conservative education sites ( 1, 2 ).
As I did the tally, some history came back to me. The Tribune syndicate, which includes The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune went into bankruptcy this year. Shortly afterward, they cut off their RSS education feeds for the papers (recently resumed by the LA Times), and their output of education articles of national interest also dropped off. Several years ago CNN cut back its education coverage in what proved to be a harbinger for other news outlets, relying instead on wire service reports. The San Francisco Chronicle's education writers shifted most of their focus to local or state education articles. The downsizing goes on and on. With major newspapers cutting back their education writers, Education Week, eSchool News (and eCampus News), and a variety of smaller newspapers and blogs have somewhat filled the vacuum left by major news outlets abdicating the educational forum. Only the Washington Post seems to have a full group of columnists (bloggers) left. The New York Times never really replaced their last education opinion writer, Richard Rothstein, although they maintain some excellent education news writers. Truman
I ordered a used copy of the book ($5.95 shipped!) while we were still watching Seabiscuit and eagerly jumped into reading the large volume a few days later when it arrived. At times while reading the book, I could hear the rich tones of David McCullough's voice narrating the book in my head! With other projects and my slow reading, it took several enjoyable weeks to complete reading the volume. By the time I got done, my used copy fell apart. It now has rubber bands around it to hold it together. I was struck as I read with the similarity of the vicious and often spurious attacks on Truman by the opposition to the current all out assault on health care reform by the right. Interestingly, Truman had proposed a form of national health care, as did Nixon and others. We live in a time where unfounded attacks seem to be the primary tool of the opposition. That defeats progress, whether it's in health care or in education reform. Jason Science
Still being a kid at heart, I jumped into the Storm Tracker Lab to sample the site. Lots of basic information (great explanation of latitude and longitude, etc.) was presented in an engaging manner. "My storm" nipped the Yucatan Peninsula before turning and wreaking havoc on the Florida coast. And as you can see at left, I blew the prediction. The simulation went on to explain that the storm I tracked was actually Hurricane Wilma that did significant damage in 2005. My reaction was what I think many students' reaction might be: Can I try it again? Scaling Up Charters An Education Week article, Study Casts Doubt on Strength of Charter Managers, talks about a report from Education Sector that "raises questions about the ability of charter schools and charter-management organizations to scale up as dramatically as their supporters might hope." The article also notes that the final version of Growing Pains: Scaling Up the Nation's Best Charter Schools may have been "watered down" to downplay the difficulties involved with growing charter schools. Education Week reports that Thomas Toch, a co-founder of Education Sector, "asked to have his name removed from the final product." Toch stated, "The CMO movement has created only a few hundred schools in a decade, and even with more funding it would be difficult for CMOs to expand much faster without compromising the quality of their schools.” With so much emphasis being placed on charter schools in the Obama Administration's school improvement plans, the report and article are really disturbing. Finding frustration instead of a home tells of D.C. charters' difficulties in obtaining old D.C. schools. On Monday, I linked to a somewhat similar article about charters using New York City school buildings. Finding appropriate housing for a charter at an affordable price is one of the challenges mentioned in the article and study above. Title I Grants Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced yesterday the final requirements for $3.5 billion in Title I School Improvement grants. The grants are intended to spur improvement in "the nation's lowest performing schools." School districts applying for the funds must choose a federally mandated "model" which "is most appropriate" for a targeted school. The models include:
Also see Libby Quaid's AP article: Obama pushes to turn around failing schools. Have a great weekend! Saturday! Doing Saturday postings is something that ranks right up there with Saturday school. But enough "stuff" came down since I finished the Friday posting around noon yesterday that I'm going to go ahead and go for it. Reform or Else Paul Krugman's Reform or Else is what really got me going today. It's not an education article. It's about the necessity for health care reform now. And the provocative title should resonate with educators. As more and more is heaped on the shoulders of classroom teachers, little seems to have been done to address some of the root causes of education failure. Obviously, it's far easier to rant about lazy or bad teachers, teachers' unions, etc., than to fix the real problems. But before any education reform produces the kind of gains necessary to close the achievement gap and give all students a solid 21st century education, things such as health care reform must be addressed. It's only a start, as our inner cities and rural poor are a breeding ground for many of the problems that beset education today. But again, who wants to address problems that seem to defy solution. Health care is a good place to start. I'll now get down from my soapbox before I fall off and hurt myself.
When I hit the line in my RSS reader for NASA, I uttered an "Oh, my gosh!" NASA had releases of interest for engineering students in Moon Work Design Contest Offers NASA Internships to Winners, and for middle and high school students in NASA Challenges 350 Rocketeers Nationwide to Aim a Mile High. Beyond an opportunity to work at NASA as a paid intern or participate in the Student Launch Initiative for middle school and high school teams and the University Student Launch Initiative for colleges and universities, there's also a free, printable 2010 ISS Calendar download link (10.2 MB PDF document) tucked into the International Space Station home page. Now I'm going to have to decide whether to print and hang the gorgeous ISS calendar or my usual Ansel Adams calendar 21st Century Skills Stuff Stephen Sawchuk's Motives of 21st-Century-Skills Group Questioned was something I might have passed on, until I saw another education blogger dissing it! I think it's definitely worth exploring whether the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) organization's efforts are "a veiled attempt by technology companies—which make up the bulk of the group’s membership—to gain more influence over the classroom." P21 claims that such criticisms amount to a “'cheap shot' by those who don’t believe that the education system should be more responsive to business needs." Sawchuck gives a good summary of P21's history and goals. Jay Mathews writes in his Class Struggle blog, Finally some sense about 21st century skills--part one, the Jerald report. Harvard to Offer Free Doctorate in Education Leadership A column by Bob Herbert, In Search of Education Leaders, told me of and led me to Harvard's new, free Doctor of Education Leadership (Ed.L.D.) page. The three-year, free doctoral program was made possible in large part by a grant from the Wallace Foundation. Herbert writes:
New degree aims to transform American education by Colleen Walsh adds that the "practice-based advanced degree" program will develop "a corps of education leaders: men and women trained to lead school districts, nonprofit organizations, mission-based for-profit organizations, government agencies, and philanthropic organizations" and "will foster a network of education professionals and organizations who are working to transform education." It sounds like a good start, other than the "Ed.L.D." designation of the degree. Can anyone involved with education possibly think of something else in education associated with the letters "LD"?
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The results of the tally with an approximate number of times linked to appears at right. Note that this was a really quick and dirty count. I purposely omitted links to some outlets such as NASA and Science@NASA, which I often use to fill out postings. (Hey, there's nothing like a great picture to grab interest. NASA excels in getting its stuff out to the public and educators.) 
. My wife and I were watching one of her favorite films, 
, and I looked up the film on Wikipedia to find the name of the narrator. I often miss much of films we watch at home, as I spend a lot of time reading about the film on my laptop while we watch. I clicked on the 
that I'd "watched," and that he also had received a Pulitzer Prize for the book. 
. Maybe I'll go with two calendars in the office this year. 
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