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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2005 > September
September 2005
The Dayton edition of Sports Illustrated
This week’s Sports Illustrated prominently features two local kids.
Uber Columnist Rick Reilly writes about legless Colonel White football player Bobby Martin. (Note: to read the story online you must have a subscription to the magazine.)
Reilly skewers the Cincinnati officials who preposterously refused to let Martin play because he wasn’t wearing the required shoes and leg pads. Sheesh.
Also, if you haven’t noticed, former Chaminade-Julienne High School superstar Javon Ringer, is emerging as a breakout star for Michigan State. He’s featured in three photos, including one of the feature shots that leads off the magazine each week on the opening pages.
Ringer has four touchdowns and last week ran for almost 200 yards. He’s a big reason why Michigan State is a surprising 4-0 and a sudden contender for the Big Ten Title. That’s pretty good considering they don’t even have his photo up on his player page at the Michigan State football website!
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Colleges and Universities, Sports and Athletics, Sports and Athletics
Bullet points and red ink forbidden!
A blogger named NY Teacher says his school district now forbids teachers from calling those little dots used for a printed list “bullet points.” The district feels “bullet” has too many negative connotations.
This put me in mind of a story I read this summer about a school district that banned red ink. They said it was too demoralizing for kids if teachers marked their errors in red. I thought this was hilarious until I mentioned it to a few teachers — several said they, too, had been asked to switch from red ink to purple, green or whatever.
Political correctness tends to run amok in schools. Sometimes that’s a not a bad thing. A lot of different kinds of people have to live with each other everyday in a school, and careless comments or actions can easily offend others, sometimes innocently. Ground rules help everyone understand what’s OK and what isn’t.
And schools love to rename stuff. “Juvenile delinquents” become “severely behaviorally handicapped” and then become “emotionally disturbed.” They do this all the time. Whenever a label is associated with anything negative, it tends to get renamed.
But take away red ink and bullet points? I think this is going overboard. What do you think? Are red marks and bullet points bad for kids?
Permalink | Comments (20) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Teaching and Learning
Circus peanuts rock
This week’s Carnival of Education is up at the Education Wonks blog. The Wonks compile a great collection of the best education blog entries of the week.
Besides skee-ball, my other carnival addiction was those orange, sugary circus peanuts. Mmmmmm.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: The Carnival of Education
How to check out preschools and childcare centers
I spent a good portion of the summer trying to find the right pre-school for my 3 and 5 year olds. Its an arduous process. You want a place you’re sure is safe. That’s No. 1. You also want a place that’s enriching, where your sure the kids are challenged to grow and learn, not just spend the day watching television. And, a big one, you need a place you can afford.
It’s difficult to even get started. I began with the Yellow Pages.
But I recently discovered helpful resource. On the Internet, you can find a list of all the day cares and preschools in your zip code and read the last few year’s worth of inspection reports.
Bizarrely, its not the Ohio Department of Education that compiles this information. You’ll find it at the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services website. Family Services is charged with licensing day cares and pre schools, and they inspect them for compliance.
It’s a statement in itself that Ohio views early childhood care not as an educational process for children, but as a service for working parents. But on the plus side, the Family Services website is much easier to use than the nearly indecipherable education department site.
You can find out, for instance, about health violations, like lunches placed on a changing table, or safety concerns, like broken playground equipment. Usually, the centers take care of these small problems quickly. But if you see the same problems over and over in their inspection reports, or if the center you are looking at was cited for any big problems, those are red flags.
The department also has begun a pilot program in eight counties (none in the Miami Valley) through which it sends evaluation teams out to day cares and preschools and the teams rate them with one, two or three starts.
That rating system is a good idea. I hope they expand it to other counties.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Young Children
Maybe integration busing helps after all
Nearly everyone has decided busing white and minority students around to create racial balance in schools was a bad idea. American courts have spent most of the last 30 years dismantling programs meant to destroy seperate, unequal dual school systems where black schools were routinely given fewer resources.
But what if integration busing actually helps?
Well in Raleigh, N.C., they’ve busing kids all over the county, and minority test scores just keep going up.
Actually, the Harvard Civil Rights Project, a highly respected research group led by Gary Orfield has been arguing for years that integration works. Orfield says integrated schools narrow the apalling achievement gap between the test scores of white students and those of minority kids.
Interestingly, in Raleigh they are busing not for racial balance, but to balance the schools economically. They try to keep low income enrollment at no higher than 40 percent in any school. In North Carolina, most school districts are countywide, which means they include both city and suburbs.
There is a lot of political resistence to busing. Parents don’t like it. Almost nobody likes the idea of their kids being on a school bus longer than they have to
But if, as some believe, the achievement gap is America’s biggest educational problem, and if integration busing really does help, should more cities be trying it instead of dismantling their busing systems?
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Urban School Issues
The resurrection of Chris Barron and the Spin Doctors
Talk about life lessons.
There’s a good story in the New York Times today about Chris Barron and the Spin Doctors, the 90’s band that made the huge hit song “Two Princes.”
It’s, I suppose, not that unfamiliar a story for a rock band — hard working, talented kids fight their way to the top, dissolve with infighting and bad decisions, lose their record contract, hit bottom and then seek a latter-day comeback. It’s ready-made for VH1’s Behind the Music.
But as someone who sat across the classroom from a then-7th grade Chris Barron, the story holds a special interest for me. Back then, he was Chris Gross (you can see why he changed the name) and a recent move-in to my hometown of Princeton, N.J.
Chris was a gregarious kid, quick with a smile and funny story (usually a tall tale). He used to tell everyone his father helped Ray Kroc found his restaurant chain, and that they picked the name “McDonalds” because “Gross Hamburgers” just didn’t work.
He was one of those new kids you really wanted to hate because he got so popular so fast. The girl I had a crush on immediately stopped flirting with me to hang out with him. But no matter how hard you knocked Chris down in a pickup football game at recess, he’d get up grinning and have you laughing with him in no time. I mean, this is the guy who at the height of his fame asked Sesame Street if he could come on the show and sing with the muppets!
The Times story tells of how Chris, literally and figuratively, lost and regained his voice during a decade of wandering in the wilderness.
I haven’t talked to him in decades, and I have to admit I was only a lukewarm fan of Spin Doctors music in the 90’s. But I might just pick up the new album.
Permalink | | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Missing out on prime language learning years
Let me tell you about my young friend Moritz. When I met him about this time last year, he was five years old and didn’t speak a word of English.
He did speak German, Russian and Chinese.
My oldest daughter, Claire, adored Moritz and they were fast friends. After the first time they played together, I asked Claire how she talked to Mortiz since he didn’t speak English. She looked at me like I was from Mars. “We talk to each other,” she said.
Mortiz’s father, Matthias, was in the Knight Wallace fellowship program at the University of Michigan with me for eight months. By the time they moved to Germany at the program’s end, Moritz spoke perfect English. If you didn’t know, you’d have not guessed he was not a native speaker.
This was a real life lesson for me, illuminating what a lot of brain researchers believe: that young children with developing brains have particular aptitude for language learning.
There’s probably nothing Claire could be doing now at age six that has more potential to benefit her in adult life than starting language lessons. It’s more valuable than soccer, basketball, ballet, swimming lessons, chess club or any of the other activities she’s tried.
So why can’t I find language instruction for her?
Her school (Kettering public) certainly doesn’t offer it. Kettering’s Rosewood Arts Center offers French, Spanish and Italian, but not until age 16. I suppose a private tutor is an option. But even a tutor might be hard to find, too costly and not as much fun as a class with other kids her age.
In the emerging global economy, language going to be an increasingly valuable skill.
Matthias, Mortiz’s father, speaks six languages. He told me that ever since he was young, he has loved language. Part of the reason, is when you grow up in Germany it’s easy to see the practical application of knowing other tongues — the country is surrounded by other nations that speak different languages. It would be equivalent to growing up in Ohio if they spoke other languages in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana and Kentucky. Learning languages would pratically be a necessity.
I took Spanish in high school and I hated it. I couldn’t see the practical value of learning Spanish then. I didn’t know any Spanish speakers and never expected to use foreign language. Now I wish I could have those lessons back.
Another of my friends in the Michigan program was Mi-Seok from South Korea. Mi-Seok was a little shy and lacked confidence in her language skills when we first met. But she wanted very much to learn English, so she put her life on hold and moved halfway across the globe to put herself in an uncomfortable situation — interacting with native English speakers every day. She understood the value of language skills too. Mi-Seok was speaking English fluently by the program’s end.
Mi-Seok, Moritz and Matthias taught me important lessons about the value of language. Now if only our community had the resources to benefit my kids now while language learning would still come easy.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Foreign Language and Study Abroad
Wow! Gas shortage closes schools
The governor of Georgia today asked all public schools in the state to close Monday and Tuesday to save fuel. And according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s education blogger Patti Ghezzi, most districts are doing it.
Can anyone recall anything like this since the gas shortages of the 1970s?
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Oakwood teachers ready to fight
Last night, Oakwood teachers overwhelmingly voted down a contract offer, setting the stage for a stunning battle. The teachers will meet Tuesday, and they probably will vote to allow their negotiating committee to call for a strike if the upcoming talks don’t make progress.
Can you imagine Oakwood teachers even thinking about striking?
Well, the school board is playing hardball and this story could get a lot more interesting.
I’d like hear who you think is right in this conflict?
Should Oakwood’s already highly paid teachers accept low raises the next two or three years to help the board build a sufficient cash reserves to protect against bad economic times? Or do the teachers in a system that consistently rates at the top for test scores deserve better?
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Do they have skee-ball?
The latest Carnival of Education. is up at the Education Wonks blog. This is an excellent weekly collection of the best education blog posts of the week. Check it out.
Did anyone else play skee-ball as a kid? It’s a carnival game. I played it at the Jersey shore.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: The Carnival of Education
Oakwood, Centerville called great high schools
Newsweek/The Washington Post has posted its annual list of the nation’s top 1,000 high schools. Just two local schools are on it — Oakwood (#405) and Centerville (#874).
(This is more ammo for Oakwood teachers to use in their contract dispute with the school board).
The methodology used to rank the schools is controversial. The rating is based entirely on how many Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate tests kids take. Many critics think that is not the best way to measure what makes a great high school.
The top Ohio high school was Wyoming at No. 55. A total of 23 Ohio schools made the top 1,000, with Oakwood ranking 9th in the state and Centerville 21st.
I’m not surprised to see Oakwood and Centerville on this list. But I am a little surprised not to see any of our other top suburban high schools there (Northmont, Miamisburg, Vandalia-Butler, Beavercreek, Springboro, Kettering).
Of course, AP and IB tests is going to exclude a lot of smaller schools. Any list of the best high schools in Dayton would surely have to include Stivers, Chaminade-Julienne and Dayton Christian high schools, plus small rural schools like Fort Loramie, Russia and Cedarville.
Did I leave anybody out?
Update: I should make clear that the Newsweek/Post list is public schools only. Which, of course, is one of the problems with it. As I said above, my list of the best local high schools would certainly include some private schools. One comment points out that the Miami Valley School certainly belongs on the list, and another suggested Carroll High School.
Jay Mathews, the author of Newsweek/Post list, defends his methodology here.
Permalink | Comments (18) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Oakwood, teachers tiff not over
Oakwood teachers have agreed to vote on the latest contract offer from the school board. But stay tuned because I hear teachers may vote this offer down.
If they do, these contract talks could get nasty.
The last official contract offer was a three-year deal with no raise the first year, then 1 percent and 2 percent in the following years.
I’m told the deal the teachers will vote on is for two years. For the first year, it offers a 1 percent “bonus.” Teachers at top scale would get a 1 percent raise. Those below top scale would get only their step increases In the second year, everybody gets just 1 percent.
Oakwood schools offer a very expensive “Cadillac” education program so sought after that families pony up for expensive homes in this exclusive suburb just so their kids can attend the schools. Oakwood voters reliably approve tax levies almost every time.
And academically, the district is tops in the Miami Valley and one of the best in the state, as judged by test scores and report card rating. So some are asking why the board wants to reward teachers with no raise, or at best a small raise. Must be some sort of crisis, right?
Well, the board says it’s top priority is a bigger cash reserve. Critics say that hardly seems like a good reason to stiff the teachers.
This story from our Neighbors section last week says the board wants the reserve raised from 2 to 4 percent of the $21 million budget to 6 to 8 percent. Using the higher numbers, that’s a difference of $860,000. Again, the teachers feel like that’s hardly worth a big fight.
But let’s look at the board’s side of the argument.
Oakwood’s average teacher pay is already No. 1 in Montgomery County, according to the state report card:
Oakwood:$55,299 Centerville: $54,257 Northridge: $53,258 Kettering: $52,552 Brookville: $51,069 Huber Heights: $49,827 Valley View: $48,933 Northmont: $48,630 West Carrollton: $47,914 Miamisburg: $47,695 Dayton: $46,929 Mad River: $46,742 Trotwood-Madison: $44,513 Vandalia-Butler: $43,998 New Lebanon: $43,181 Jefferson Township: $39,641
When you look at the spread between top and bottom, maybe Oakwood teachers should count their blessings. Plus, the last contract gave teachers raises of 5 percent, 5 percent and 4.5 percent over three years. That’s good money, if you can get it. And a strong cash reserve does make good financial sense in unsteady economic times.
But is it worth a war with your teachers?
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
… and then there’s the cost
Stebbins High School is, without question, a spectacular building. But I know Bryan, who commented under my post yesterday, isn’t the only one with the question:
Do we really need all this?
As architect Mike Dingeldein said in my story Sunday about new schools, the new Stebbins absolutely achieves the goal of creating a community anchor and a showcase for the district.
But it just happened that last week I met with J.C. Huizenga, president of National Heritage Academies — a company that runs 51 charter schools in five states. Huizenga told me that NHA, in partnership with a construction company, builds the same elementary school over and over again at a cost of about $6 million each.
By comparison, Dayton is building elementary schools at a cost of $9 million to $11 million each. And its not that school districts are just wasteful. Dayton and Mad River see their costs driven up by the Ohio School Facilities Commission’s design manual.
The manual’s goal was state-of-the-art schools, with the hope that these schools would last. But some of the bells and whistles may be a bit more than is needed. “Uniqueness” and creating “community anchors” will drive up the cost. NHA builds a pretty simple, functional school.
But maybe, as Alice commented, its worth the extra money to send the message to kids that we care about their education?
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: School Construction
Tommorow’s schools today
By Scott Elliott
Dayton Daily News
Two student leaders stood at the center of the Rotunda, a spacious circle of scarlet and grey, staring up two soaring stories to the skylight’s gleam. In the new Stebbins High School, just opened last month, the library is a balcony that overlooks this central space and the sun rays illuminate a giant “S� splashed across the floor.
Senior Caitlyn Taulbee, student body president, and her vice president, junior P.J. Durant, tried to put the new atmosphere into words.
“In school, sometimes you feel like you’re in a penitentiary,� Taulbee said. “But with the sun coming through, it’s like a little speck of freedom.�
Durant nodded. “To me, this feels more like college,� he said. Today’s 21st century schools are different. And it’s not just Stebbins.
Across the Miami Valley, the shiny bricks and gleaming white concrete of new schools are everywhere. But the schools don’t only look good. They feature larger classrooms with the latest audio technology and sound systems that make it easier for teachers and students to understand and communicate with each other. Security cameras allow principals to quickly spot trouble and new ventilation systems mean staff and students are breathing cleaner, healthier air.
The construction boom is driven by population changes, a state effort to renew schools and in some cases, the simple cycle of time.
But in place of the cracks and crumble of the buildings that have passed into memory, these new buildings are returning schools to a treasured place as community anchors with bold architecture, cutting-edge technology and creative, functional designs that teachers of the past could only dream about.
You can’t cross Harshman Drive in Riverside, where Stebbins is king, and not see the difference.
“If you remember driving on Route 4, you hardly knew the school was even there,� said Steed Hammond Paul architect Mike Dingeldein, who designed Stebbins. “They wanted to change that.�
In place of the low, long, square design of the old school, Dingeldein envisioned three-story brick walls adorned with Roman columns, vertical concrete lines and a glass-encased staircase at the building’s corner, all visible from the highway.
“They wanted a grand statement — a building with a very big civic feel,� he said. “It’s a flagship of the school district.�
Drawing on advice from community forums, Dingeldein created the Rotunda, a connecting point unifying upstairs and down and creating a gateway from classrooms to the gym, auditorium, cafeteria, office and bus pickup.
“It gives us a lot of spirit and pride in our school,� Taulbee said.
Dramatic connections between “academic� space and other parts of the school — administration, meals, music, art and athletics — has become a signature of this new era.
In Fort Recovery’s Elementary/ Middle School, Celina’s Fanning Howey architects built a “Main Street� in its central hall space invoking the design of real buildings from the town.
The wide hallway has a cobblestone tile floor, antique-style street lamps and benches, and even the facade of the old Royal Theatre.
“We have parades down Main Street with bands, the VFW and up to 800 spectators,� middle school Principal Ted Shuttleworth said.
When it opened six years ago the school was a trailblazer, a model for others to follow. One of its trademarks is adaptable space.
The school features an “auditeria,� a combined auditorium and cafeteria. The room has a stage, modern sound system and acoustical panels. For a nighttime concert, it’s unmistakably a theatre.
But at lunchtime, the kitchen doors are opened and the dining tables are pulled out. The room is carpeted, but with high a tech carpet that is vinyl-backed and water- and stain-resistant.
“Carpet has come a long way,� Faning Howey architect Randy Spurger said. “If you wanted to, you could hose it down and squeegee it off and it won’t get mildew or anything.�
At Stevenson Elementary School, which opened last year in Riverside, the “Main Street� hallway boasts distinctive curves done up in school colors and a glass wall at the library.
With the help of an artist-inresidence, student work is plastered everywhere. Paper birds hang from ceiling on strings and art project fish adorn the library glass.
“See, it’s like a fish bowl,� Principal Debby Root said. “We’ve sort of turned this into an art gallery. It makes it more personal for the children.�
Stevenson and Stebbins are part of a $86 million program to rebuild all seven of the Mad River district’s schools. The district was poor enough to qualify for the state to pay 80 percent of the cost.
Ohio is partnering with districts across the state to rebuild schools using $10 billion from its share of the national tobacco settlement. The state is involved in dozens of Miami Valley projects.
Ohio has given schools an inches-thick guide for building the new schools, with an eye on making teaching easier.
It starts with a larger classroom — 900 square feet minimum, compared to 600 square feet in many old schools.
“That additional size allows for so many things to happen,� Dingeldein said.
Rooms can have computers, lockers and the space to break the class into groups.
Root remembers the difficulty of teaching children to read when kids in the back of the room had trouble hearing her voice. For those who really struggled, she bought a karaoke machine so they could read into the microphone and hear themselves pronounce the words.
Now teachers can wear headsets and their voices are pumped through a classroom sound system. When the children read, they can use a hand-held microphone.
“It allows them to key in on what the teacher is saying,� Root says.
At Springboro High School, Sprunger worked with science teachers to design classrooms with a mini-lab for experiments between moveable walls. This allows teachers go from discussion to experiments without changing rooms and cut back on the need for large labs.
“It saved money and gave them flexible space,� he said.
Perhaps just as important as these new tools is an invisible amenity — clean, fresh air. For second-grade teacher Jorga Steiner, her enduring memory of the old Stevenson might be the miserable days she spent home in bed.
The chalk dust and germs often sent her home sick during her 20 years in the old school. Those congested times seem far away now.
“In the old days I’d get bronchitis, walking pneumonia,� she said. “I was routinely sick at least a half-dozen times a year.�
But in the new Stevenson last year, Steiner used a marker and a white board. No more breathing chalk dust. And when an illness went around the community in the wintertime, she didn’t catch it.
“It was the first year of my career I wasn’t sick,� she said.
Old schools, especially those built during the energy crisis of the 1970s, sought efficiency above all else — keeping warm air in and cold air out. That turned out to be a huge mistake.
Old carpets, glues and upholstery emitted gasses that irritated some students and teachers. And the school’s trapped air recirculated germs and carbon dioxide, which could make kids sleepy late in the day.
“All that is now being flushed out of the building,� Dingeldein said.
Modern ventilation will recirculate the entire building with fresh air five times a day, he said, keeping illness down and energy levels up. So new schools can keep kids healthier.
But can the building alone cause a child to confess a misdeed? Root has seen it happen.
Cameras placed strategically throughout the school discourage troublemakers, she said. When someone wrote on the boy’s bathroom door last year, she made a quick announcement that solved the crime: “Don’t make me go to the videotape.�
A few minutes later, a young boy came to the office and confessed. One camera is placed directly in front of the bathroom doors. Inside, the students have privacy. But Root has a record of who went in and out and when.
“Most of the time, they ’fess right up,� she said.
Permalink | | Categories: My Favorite DDN Stories, School Construction
Today’s genius, tomorrow’s lemon?
In this morning’s Dayton Daily News, I wrote about today’s high tech schools and how these new designs have ushered in a whole new era of comfort and functionality. New buildings like Stebbins High School and Fort Recovery’s Elementary/Middle School are truly spectacular. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder:
Some day are our children, or grandchildren, going to look at these buildings and ask, “what were they thinking?”
Here’s what I mean. This is from a story I wrote last year:
“The gym on stilts at Van Cleve Elementary School - just the second of its kind in the nation - was hailed in 1963 as an innovative “space architecture” answer for crowded urban schools.
Excited schoolchildren huddled for recess beneath the huge, peg-legged concrete square that stood 13 feet above the ground, playing outdoor games even on a rainy day.
Today’s engineers concede the stilted gym wasn’t one of the better ideas in a city known for ingenuity and innovation. They were costly to heat and factories for mold.”
If you’re from Dayton, you probably know these bizarre “stilt gyms” they built here in the 1960s. There were four of them, and they were hailed as genius at the time, attracting visitors from school districts in Milwaukee, Baltimore and New Jersey who were considering copying them.
But while these gyms created usable space underneath in the crowded urban center, for playgrounds or parking, they were incredibly costly to heat without the natural insulation of the ground beneath them. And the dew point fell in the center of the building, a recipe for mold. Is short, the stilt gyms were a disaster.
And think of the schools we built in the 1970s, influenced by the energy crisis. Everything was designed for efficiency. Air was recirculated (outside air was costly to heat) and windows were few (to avoid leaking heat). The result was awful, prison-style buildings that were stifling hot in spring and early fall and depressing all year long.
So with today’s schools, we’ve allegedly learned our lessons and solved all these problems. But with everything these architects are trying, there certainly are going to be some new features that, like the stilt gym, won’t work. Anybody out there (especially teachers) have any guesses as to what those things will be?
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: School Construction
The Hurricane Voucher
President Bush’s proposal that children displaced by Hurricane Katrina be given vouchers to attend private school has instantly touched off a controversy. This is another church-state nexis, where opponents say tax money spent for Catholic, Christian or other religious schools amounts to the state sponsoring religion.
The question is how big a deal this proposal is. Will it be limited to just this year? Or become a new front in the voucher war? The Eduwonk blog has a thoughtful commentary.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice
Let the kids sing!
Kids standing in rows, hands over hearts, facing the flag every morning as the teacher leads them in …
A rousing rendition of the Star Spangled Banner!
Tell John Roberts he’s off the hook. The Pledge won’t have to go to the Supreme Court. I have a plan.
You see, the pledge of allegiance was begun little more than a century ago as a patriotic expression for a simple flag raising ceremony. (And written by a man who was both a minister and a socialist!) It was much shorter then:
“I pledge allegiance to my flag and the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Over the last 100 years or so its been incorporated into the school day, had the wording changed a few times and been thrust into the church-state controversy.
But what is the real purpose of such a pledge of loyalty to our country? Well, as the U.S. was growing up as a nation of immigrants and recovering from the Civil War, I can see the value of the pledge. Those were times when building common, unifying experiences — even a loyalty oath — reaffirming the oneness of the nation was probably quite practical.
In fact, public schooling itself spread from its roots in the States and western Europe around the globe not because rulers and governments, in a sudden burst of benevolence, saw the value in providing educational opportunity to all.
No, what other countries saw in pubilc schooling was an opportunity for nation building — a chance to train the young in their versions of history, to imbue children with patriotic fervor and to enhance skills to build national economic might.
In America, I’d say it succeeded nicely. We’re an overtly patriotic nation. Despite our diversity, we tend to stand together in national pride. We’re probably past the point of needing a daily promise of loyalty to the state.
But there’s no reason to stifle patriotism. That’s why I saw sing the Star Spangled Banner to start the school day. It’s a stirring song, and singing it can be an active, passionate moment of patriotism for children to begin the day, rather than the mindless recitation that is the pledge in most classrooms.
And there’s no need to kill the pledge. Let’s say it, too. Let those who wish gather at the flag pole five minutes before the bell rings and recite it together as they raise the Stars and Stripes for the day. And let those who wish to keep “under God” do so. And those who don’t can say the patriotic oath it the way they please.
Return the pledge to its roots — as a statement of faith in our nation as we raise the flag for all to see.
What do you think?
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, The Pledge of Allegiance
What Katrina victims need most — tests!
I know they mean well, but I got a press release today with this headline:
“College Board Responds to Hurricane Katrina with Free SAT and PSAT”
I’m sure they’re breathing a sigh of relief at this news across the Gulf Coast.
Now, come on folks. Maybe instead the College Board should take up a collection of cash, or fill a truck with food and water?
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Testing
God and the pledge
TV news networks are reporting a federal judge has again ruled that schools cannot force kids to recite “under God” as part of the pledge of allegiance.
This is the same case in which a California federal appeals court ruled against “under God.” In that case, the plaintiff was a divorced parent and court ultimately ruled that he did not have standing to bring the claim, I think because his children did not live with him, if I remember right.
This is the same case, but other parents joined the suit, so there was not problem with standing. MSNBC reported the judge said he had no choice but to uphold the appeals court’s prior ruling that requiring kids to say “under God’ was compelling a religious act and therefore unconstitutional.
This issue now seems likely to be headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
What do you think about “under God’ in the pledge?
Permalink | Comments (38) | Categories: The Pledge of Allegiance
Political advocacy arms race
Here’s an excerpt from a press release were got at the Dayton Daily News today:
“Worried that conservative points of view are not being adequately presented in college classrooms, officials at a Minnesota think tank unveiled a Web site on Tuesday that aims to expose students to more ideas from the political right and to bolster their presence in campus debates.
The Center of the American Experiment, a nonprofit Minneapolis-based group devoted to conservative and free-market ideas, started the site, Intellectual Takeout, as part of a broader campaign to help conservative college students in Minnesota.”
So now are we going to see any group with a viewpoint — liberal, conservative or otherwise — seeking to “arm” kids with ideological arguments for campus debates? Will this push down to high schools next?
Any thoughts on whether this is a good idea?
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Colleges and Universities
The First Day of School
This week’s Carnival of Education is being hosted by Mrs. Frizzlea teacher who’s blog daily offers great insights into teaching.
Mrs. Frizzle asked education bloggers to send her their first-day-of-school posts and the result is a really interesting look at the first day of school from a bunch of perspectives. It’s really worth checking out.
Permalink | | Categories: The Carnival of Education
Get on the Bus at LiveJournal
The good website people here at the Dayton Daily News just made it easier to get an RSS feed for Get on the Bus through the LiveJournal blogging site. Just click here to set it up.
Also, go here for an RSS feed of Get on the Bus for other readers.
Permalink | | Categories: Journalism
Amazing journalism
This is a little off topic, but if you are at all interested in what is happening in Afganistan, check out what they’re doing today at BBCNews.com.
Following up on their “Day in Iraq” effort from a couple months ago, the BBC today is producing a “Day in Afganistan.” BBCNews deployed tons of reporters, photographers, and technology throughout the country, using blogs, webcams and traditional journalism to try to document as much as possible what a typical day in Afganistan is like.
BBCNews.com is by a mile the best news website in the world and when they marshal their incredible resources like this it makes for fascinating reading.
Permalink | | Categories: Journalism
Testing little kids
Here’s another nugget from the early childhood education seminar I went to in Chicago over the weekend.
There’s a huge national push underway to open preschool to more kids. States are spending a lot more money, with Georgia and Okahoma leading the way by instituting “universal” preschool for 4-year-olds. That means the state will pay for your four-year-old to attend preschool.
This could quickly become a sticky situation. If states fund preschool on a large scale, how long before it becomes required, much as kindergarten has? In a few years, will school just start at age 4? Already we’ve seen kindergarten transformed into a much more academic environment thanks to the pressure on schools to produce good test scores. Could this effort push testing and pressure for academic instruction down to these tiny kids? It’s a good bet.
At the seminar, Sam Meisels of the Erikson Institute, a child development graduate school in Chicago, showed test questions from a national test meant to provide data about four- and five-year-olds. Meisels showed how very flawed these questions were — that they were developmentally inappropriate, asking kids to do things they simply are unprepared to do, or just poorly worded and designed.
For one question, teachers are instructed to ask kids which of four pictures is a vase. The teacher is explicitly told to pronounce the word “vaze” so it rhymes with Oz. But many kids know the word as “vace” so it rhymes with ace. And the four pictures include a wine decanter, a trophy, a canister and a vase that looks like an urn, all drawn in black ink with no color.
Meisels thinks this is asking a lot of a four year old. He pointed out that he has probably used each of those objects as a vase in his life.
There’s another question where kids are supposed to point out which of four faces is “horrified.” Two of the faces seemed to be recoiling in distress. If a kid even knew the word “horrified,” they’d likely have a hard time choosing.
Meisels is on the “technical committee” for this test. That means he and others are supposed to be consulted in the test making process. But instead, Meisel said they were essentially handed a finished test and asked to sign off. His warnings about some of the questions went unheeded. This is another common problem in test creation. Test makers say they consult experts while building the tests, but many times those experts are mostly left out of the process.
The test was so bad, that its results were discounted by the federal government’s General Accounting Office as not “valid measures of the learning that takes place in head start.”
Bad test with poor and misleading questions are a problem up and down the standardized testing spectrum, as Mark Fisher and I reported last year in our series “Flunking the Test.” In particular, Meisel’s critique called to mind this story we wrote about overly tricky test questions on Ohio tests. (If you look at the series, be sure to check out this fun story too.)
When you look at actual standardized test questions, you can’t help but wonder if we can really trust the data we get from them — data we use to make all sorts of judgments about kids, schools and learning.
And soon, we could be pushing this system down on preschoolers.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Testing, Young Children
A difference of 20 million words
This weekend I’m in Chicago for a seminar on early childhood education put on by the Hechinger Institute for Education and the Media, at Columbia University. Early childhood is a white hot issue in education, with research showing more and more how important learning in ages 0 to 5 is to a child’s future success in school.
Best stat so far — Debra Pacchiano, a Chicago-based researcher, said one study showed children from families in poverty (on welfare) had heard 10 million words by age three, compared to 30 million words that middle class kids had heard by that age.
Ohio’s public policy involvement with early childhood education pretty much begins and ends with the federal Head Start program. Meanwhile, a few states are experimenting with with “universal” state-paid pre-school for all four year olds and many others are talking about trying that or other bold programs.
I’ll post more about this later.
Permalink | | Categories: Teaching and Learning, Young Children
Raising self confident girls
My friend Jason had a revelation last spring, and as the father of three daughters, it has worried me ever since.
Jason and I spent a school year at the University of Michigan with 16 other journalists thanks to the Knight Wallace program, a wondrous opportunity for mid-career journalists to spend a year away from the daily grind, studying and exploring their interests.
Together, we took a senior creative writing class at Michigan, one of the nation’s most elite universities. I’ll call her Julie, the 21-year-old senior, less than a month away from graduating from the “Harvard of the Midwest.” These kids wouldn’t even be at a place like UM if they weren’t smart, driven and confident. Or so I thought.
Julie’s memoir started in elementary school, with the boy down the street whom she had a crush on. It passed on to high school, with her first true love. Then it ended with the uncertainly of her latest relationship. It was a modified life story, told through the experiences of her love life.
Jason and I went for a beer after class and we talked about Julie’s story and her view of her own life. There was something that bothered me about her story, and Jason knew what it was.
“Isn’t it scary how these girls define themselves through guys they’re with?” Jason asked.
He was right. We talked about the memoirs written by the other girls in the class. A remarkable number were built around a guy — a current boyfriend, an old boyfriend, the one that got away.
This troubles me.
My girls are just heading into elementary school. After a week in first grade, my oldest already has learned that boys play with boys and girls play with girls at recess, not all together like in kindergarten. My job has been easy to this point compared with what’s ahead.
I want my daughters to grow up self-assured and smart. I hope they’ll become independent and define themselves by their own interests, hopes and dreams.
To accomplish this, a woman friend says my job as a a father is to tell my daughters they are beautiful and I love them as much as possible. Beyond that, my plan is to improvise.
Any advice?
Permalink | Comments (9) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Behind the classroom door
There’s a secret reason for all this testing.
Yes, the state wants to know how kids are doing compared to other kids. And they want to create minimum standards, to make sure kids can demonstrate some level of proficiency before they receive a diploma.
That’s what they say testing is all about. But there’s something else going on.
The creation of standards and tests and the collection of data by school and now by classroom gives state leaders an avenue to create pressure for something else they really want — for teachers to teach only the things the state cares about. Do your own thing, and you risk being exposed as “deficient” by the students’ low scores.
Because the bottom line is that once the classroom door closes, we have to largely trust the teacher to do the right thing. And most do. But in rare cases, they don’t. It may be because they are incompetent or because they are misguided. Let me give you a couple of examples.
About five years ago, I was in a middle school social studies class in Dayton when Nelson Mandela’s name came up in discussion. The teacher launched into a tirade, calling Mandela a “terrorist” and suggesting he should have been executed for his fighting against the apartheid government of South Africa. I was speechless.
Then mre recently, I was enjoying a dinner party (not in Dayton) at the home of a friend who invited her neighbors to join us. They were very nice people and we were having a good time. One of them mentioned he was a high school science teacher at a public school. Then the conversation turned to Intelligent Design.
The science teacher told me he resented the fact that he was forced to teach evolution, a theory he did not believe. He did as he was told, the teacher said, but if the kids asked him what he thought, he told them.
I couldn’t help but ask. Did he really believe all the scientific evidence for evolution was somehow all wrong? Yes, he told me. And he proceeded to rattle off some of the most far-fetched explanations for how. It was a little scary to think that he might be telling kids these fictions when they asked for his opinion.
But once the classroom door closes, we really just have to trust them.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Evolution vs. Intelligent Design, Teaching and Learning, Testing, Testing
Money battle may go to court
You can read two editorials from the Dayton Daily News here and here about a potential legal battle brewing if charter schools demand a share of local tax money. If Checker Finn is right and charters sue Ohio for more money, it will open a new front in a pretty nasty war over charters here. Stay tuned.
Permalink | | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice
Easy on the cotton candy
This week’s Carnival of Education, a collection of the week’s best blog posts about education, is up. It’s being hosted this week by a teacher blogger at her site What It’s Like on the Inside. Check it out.
Permalink | | Categories: The Carnival of Education
How New Orleans (and every other city) got that way
Why does every city have a black ghetto?
That question was posed to me last year, when I was working on stories in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education court decision that ended segregation in public schools. I was talking to Craig Stevens Wilder, a bright Dartmouth historian who teaches a course called “the history of the black ghetto.”
All the questions in the media about New Orleans brought it back to me this week. As someone who covers urban schools, it didn’t seem the slightest bit odd that nearly everyone left in New Orleans by the time Hurricane Katrina hit was poor and black.
Just look at Dayton. The city is 43 percent black and has 18 percent of its population living in poverty, according to the 2000 Census. But the school district is better than 70 percent black and at least that many come from families that are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced price lunch, the most common school poverty indicator.
In almost any city, the closer you are to the urban core, the more likely you are to be black and poor, unable to afford to move to the suburbs when you children are school age, or choose private school. Or in a case like this, without the means to flee a natural disaster.
The question is why?
Wilder, a Brooklyn native, was studying the history of his hometown for his doctoral dissertation when he visited the National Archives in search of information about the activities of a federal agency called the Home Owners Loan Corporation.
“I expected to find a few papers,” he told me. “But they brought me back to this huge crate full of documents. As I worked, I began to realize there were stacks and stacks of these crates for cities across America. It stunned me.”
Wilder’s research became a book called “A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn,” which outlines how federal and local authorities helped hasten the transformation of thriving, diverse Brooklyn into a black ghetto beginning in the 1930s.
“This process was the same for virtually every big city and most medium sized cities,” Wilder said.
In fact, I followed Wilder’s study with my own visit to the Archives to look at the Home Owners Loan Corporation’s files for Dayton. And they are just as stunning.
I have a copy of an HOLC map that was created by government officials in concert with local realtors to guide banks for making government-backed loans. What is now Oakwood and Kettering is colored green, or eligible for the best loans. Mostly black west Dayton is colored red, or unworthy of bank loans. All areas bordering black neighborhoods are coded as risky, for only expensive loans. This, by the way, is where the term “redlining” comes from.
And the HOLC reports are very explicit about why. They talk openly of “undesireable” races — especially blacks but also some European immigrants — and warn of “changing neighborhoods” that should be downgraded in the future if demographic trends continue.
The HOLC wanted to encourage the construction of the suburbs to help the U.S. economy. But it’s no coincidence that few blacks shared in the migration to greener pastures. They were trapped in sometimes squalid inner cities, prevented by federal policy from getting home loans where they lived and sparking real fear that home values would crash when they tried to move into traditionally white neighborhoods.
These trends are also documented in the well-known book Crabgrass Frontier by Kenneth Jackson and Thomas Sugrue’s Origins of the Urban Crisis, a great history of Detroit that won the prestigious Bancroft Prize.
What we see in New Orleans is the legacy of HOLC — an inner city of mostly poor blacks. A huge natural disaster in the urban center of nearly any American city of any size would yield disturbingly similar results. I don’t know why we’re all so surprised.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Urban School Issues
This is depressing
I’m a professional reporter, right? My byline appears regularly in a top 100 newspaper and our stories are on the Internet. And now I’m writing this blog. So surely, if I punch my own name into Google I’d find something. Right?
Sure, I found something — 45,700 web sites mention my name, Google says. So my name is out there. But I’m still MIA.
I mean, hey, I know I’m not Oprah Winfrey, Ben Affleck, Brittney Spears or Emily Rose. But Sheesh!
The web address scottelliott.com used to be a technology company but now appears to be the domain of my evil twin blogger. Also on the first page of Google results is this Scott Elliott, an engineer and inventor who used to work for Ninetendo.
There’s Scott Elliott, the Broadway director. There’s the Scott Elliott mystery novels, written by Terence Faherty (I met his brother recently. He took my business card with great glee.). This Scott Elliott actually writes novels.
Scott Elliott ran (and lost) for congress in Michigan. Scott Elliott was an actor in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Most creepy, you can find the Scott Elliott Columbine flower on this list and now there’s also the Mrs. Scott Elliott Columbine.
Scott Elliott even died recently, according to one website. The Scott Elliott who owned the GIS company Wessex and editor of Directionsmag.com, that is.
It took 14 pages and 130 results to find a reference to the real Scott Elliott on Google.
Ouch. That hurts. Why do the Google gods hate me?
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Journalism
God’s weather forecast
It’s been a rough week, filled with bad news of Hurrricane Katrina, the gas shortage, completely insane gas prices and crazy images of looting in the streets of New Orleans. Not to mention the chaos at the Louisiana Super Dome and the Houston Astrodome.
I thought I’d try to lighten the mood a little today.
All this weather news put me in mind of this funny story from my ktchen table recently. My oldest daughter, 6-year-old Claire, gets the paper each morning off the doorstep, pulls out the local section, folds it over backward and intensely reads the weather page. She does not like storms, so she wants to know when storms are expected in order to prepare.
Abby, who’s 3, was looking over her shoulder one morning and asked a puzzling question. She pointed to WHIO-TV’s chief meteorologist Jamie Simpson’s picture and asked, “Is that God?”
I had to admit I was a bit stunned.
“Uh, no. That’s Jamie Simpson, the T.V. weather guy,” I stammered.
She nodded and went back to reading the page.
“Abby,” I asked. “Why did you think that was God?”
“I thought he was in charge of the weather,” she said, sensibly.
I mean after all, his picture is on the page with all the weather info. Boy, just imagine how our circulation numbers might climb if we could get God’s weather forecast in the paper everyday!
Permalink | | Categories: Young Children
The best teacher ever
With the start of the school year, I’ve been thinking a lot about great teachers. I got to follow one around for a few hours on the first day of school in Dayton. And I’ve been trading e-mails with another blogger about the challenge of writing more interesting news stories about teaching.
Great teachers are all different, which makes modeling their success tough. There’s no one formula for great teaching. And in fact, even the greatest teachers don’t connect with every student. I suppose the man who was my favorite teacher, who inspired me to become a writer, is long forgotten to many of my classmates from seventh grade English.
But for me, his style and the content and message of his class were just right. I suppose some of my middle school classmates may remember our math teachers fondly, too. I can’t even recall any of their names.
So I thought I’d tell you the story of my favorite teacher with the next two posts.
After you read them, I hope you’ll tell the story of your favorite teacher, too, by posting under the comments.
Maybe we can get a sense for what these great teachers have in common.
The Story of Mr. D starts here.
And here’s the rest of the story of Mr. D
Permalink | Comments (8) | Categories: My Favorite Posts
Mr. D and the island whisperer
This is part two of three posts on my most inspiring teacher.
In darkness and mud, the young Marine, face dripping in the humidity, brushed back branches and leaves and hurried to keep up with the rest of the men. Under a green helmet bringing up the rear of the patrol, he knew better than to fall behind on one of these islands.
So with skin rubbed raw by the crease of his worn boots and a cotton tongue yearning for a canteen swig, Gene Doherty slogged on.
Chugging along quietly through the black and green of the midnight brush, there was a sound. A whisper, he thought it was, but then again maybe just the wind through the trees. He listened and heard it again calling softly.
“Eugene!”
Gene slowed his pace and turned to the bushes and trees. The Japanese could be anywhere. Stories the other guys told were terrifying. The enemy, they said, would hide along the trails and whisper American names. “Johnny!” they’d call out, in hushed tones from the dark, or “Bobby!”
An unsuspecting soldier at the back of the line might hesitate, take a step off the trail. It’s just what the enemy wanted. Those guys were never heard from again.
So Gene kept going. But then again that voice.
“Eugene!”
He stopped, for just a second. There was something familiar about the voice. A buddy? Lost, perhaps injured?
Or was it the enemy? Calling out an American name, trying to lure him, like the Johnnys and Bobbys before.
But Eugene?
It hardly seemed like a name they’d choose. Gene, maybe. Everyone called him Gene, except his mother and father.
The Marine in front had gotten a few steps ahead. Gene turned away from the bush, and quick-stepped back into line. He kept listening, but the voice was gone.
A week later, on a different Pacific island, the word reached him. His father had died. Gene took the cable from his sergeant to his pack and retrieved his journal and looked for the date for the entry he had written about the voice from the darkness. He checked the date and time of his father’s death and counted the time zones.
Same night, same time as when he heard the whisper in the darkness:
“Eugene!”
The story continues here.
Permalink | | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Teaching and Learning
“I hate lefties!”
This is part three of three posts on my most inspiring teacher.
As I looked around a classroom full of unfamiliar faces, the burly man in the brown suit with ruddy cheeks and a shock of white hair placed a blank sheet in my clammy right hand and offered me a pencil. I took it in my left hand and wrote my name in the top right corner of the sheet.
“You’re a lefty?” he bellowed. “I HATE lefties!”
He kept passing paper and turned back as he reached the front of the room, catching my squinty stare. He stepped close and I slid back in my chair as he raised his right arm. The cuff of the brown jacket flopped over the stump at mid forearm.
“;You see?” he said with a wiry grin. “I’m a lefty, too.”
As he gazed out over the rest of the class, the students sitting closest straightened up.
“Welcome to seventh grade English,” he said. “I’m Mr. Doherty. And we’re going to learn to write great stories.”
Storytelling was Eugene Doherty’s gift. Sure, he knew the language well enough. The corrections to grammar on our papers were certainly helpful. And he had a talent for holding the attention of 12- and 13-year-old kids prone to daydreaming. You didn’t dare zone out while he was talking. You never knew what he’d do.
He once asked a question twice with no response from us on a hot, lazy afternoon just after the start of school. He stopped, put down his chalk, cranked open a window, removed the screen, stood on a chair and threatened to swan-dive head first to the pavement if someone didn’t immediately volunteer an answer. At first, stunts like this were a little jarring, but over the school year, we learned to love his antics.
It was the days he’d assign us essays that I lived for. Mr. Doherty never asked us to write a book report or analyze a poem. His assignments were always to write about one word - fear, joy, anger, triumph, sorrow, love, pity, friendship, courage. Words like that.
And then he’d show us the way.
He’d sit on the corner of his wooden desk and tell us a story from his life that fit the essay topic - about the bully he feared but felled with one lucky punch in the schoolyard of his gritty hometown, or the fishing trip in the wilderness where lifelong bonds were forged with his best pals, or the anguish of the army hospital tent where he lost his right hand.
Or that muddy night he thought he heard his father’s voice in the island brush of the South Pacific.
Those stories made me want to be a writer. And that’s why I remember Eugene Doherty, an inspired, worldly and sometimes scary old soldier, as the best teacher I ever had.
Permalink | | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Teaching and Learning
