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Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2005 > December
December 2005
Farris Hassan’s day off
I can’t resist blogging about this. Have you read about the 16-year-old Florida kid who went to Baghdad to research a high school paper?
This is story is both amazing and insane, but I have to admit part of me admires the kid. He’s probably going to make a great journalist.
Here’s what happened in a nutshell:
Farris Hassan is the American son of Iraqi born parents who was taking high school class in “immersion journalism” and reading the likes of John McPhee, the famed journalist who writes about experiences other parts of the world through his own eyes. Hassan wanted to write about Iraq. So on his own and without telling his parents, he got a flight from Florida to Kuwait City, took a cab to the Iraq border and tried to get a ride from there to Baghdad.
Luckily he failed, because the road from Kuwait to Baghdad is incredibly dangerous. Even so, he ended up flying to Beirut, where he has family, and then on to Baghdad, where got a hotel room and then walked into the Associated Press’ bureau office and began interviewing journalists.
Now, I’m an advocate of studying abroad, but this is taking it to a whole new level.
The cool part of this story is that it shows you how easily anyone can just go and experience the world. With a credit card and enough guts, you could be in Baghdad in just a few days. And part of me likes the fact this Farris had the guts and the passion for the subject to give it a shot. These are great attributes for an aspiring journalist.
The scary part is that a 16-year-old could pull this off without the help or permission of his parents, or anyone else for that matter. His original plan was incredibly dangerous. A cab driver threatened to assault him and a crowd started to gather when he began asking questions using an English-Arabic dictionary. He really could have been killed.
But, the Associated Press says he also learned:
“Dangerous and dramatic, Hassan’s trip has also been educational. He had tea with Kuwaitis under a tent in the middle of a desert. He says he interviewed Christians in south Lebanon. And he said he spoke with U.S. soldiers guarding his Baghdad hotel who told him they are treated better by Sunni Arabs than by the majority Shiites.”
Forget the school paper. I think Farris can get a book deal!
How would you react if your kid tried something like this?
Update: The New York Times has more on this story today.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Foreign Language and Study Abroad
A short bit of great advice
I don’t remember where first I read or heard this.
But somewhere along the line, someone gave me this advice when my oldest daughter was just an infant and I’ve found it to be among the most important things I’ve done to help my kids learn. It’s so simple it’s silly. Here it is:
Talk to them.
No baby talk. Don’t talk down to them. Don’t simplify your language. Use all the big words. If you say a word that confuses them or that you suspect they won’t understand, say it first, then define it. Praise them when they use a difficult word correctly. Sit down with them and look them eye-to-eye when you have a conversation.
Tell them stories. They can be stories of when they were babies. Or stories from you own childhood. Or stories out of children’s books, from newspapers or from history. Or just flat made up stories that you pull out of your hat while you’re sitting on their beds, tucking them in at night.
Answer their questions. Ask them questions. Ask them to predict what is going to happen next in a story you are telling. Have them tell a story you’ve told them back to you. Or nudge them to make up their own stories and tell it to you.
The more you talk to them, the more adept they’ll get at using language. And their vocabularies will grow.
So there it is. Such a simple thing. If you can just train yourself to talk to your kids this way out of habit, it will come quite naturally. And you can sit back and watch the little light bulbs go on over their heads as they learn.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Young Children
Flunked by the Beatles
Imagine this: your fourth grader flunks the state achievement test because she doesn’t know the difference between the Britney and the Beatles.
Ridiculous? It could happen in Florida, where lawmakers are seriously thinking about adding a music test to the state fourth grade assessment that, for now, would be voluntary.
So what kind of far out quack would propose such a wacky idea?
Would you believe music teachers?
If there was ever a subject that was ill suited for measurement with a standardized test, it’s music. And in fact, the proposed test does not measure student talents for singing, dancing or playing instruments. It does not measure if kids can read music.
What does it measure? The Miami Herald says:
“As part of the test, students would listen to music and then answer questions about the instruments, voices and style of music.”
To which I must ask, what will those test results tell us that will be of any value? Not much, I expect.
So why do music teachers want such a test? The simple answer: to maintain relevance.
This is actually very interesting. Having a state test in your specialty is a matter of self preservation. Because if a subject is not tested, guess what? Nobody cares about it. When it’s time to cut, the untested subjects are going to be at the front of the line.
So if music teachers want to assure that music stays in schools (and, by the way, that music teachers keep their jobs) the best way to do that is to make music more relevant and the one way administrators today judge relevance is by asking the question — is it tested?
So if this goes down in Florida, music will stay in school. And music teachers will spend hours of class time training kids to listen for the difference between reggae and funk, a cello and a violin, a baritone and a tenor. That’s time those teachers could have used to teach the kids to sing or play guitar.
But perhaps they’ll know Eleanor Rigby from Christina Aguilera.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Categories: Testing
Who’s responsible for drug use?
I was in high school in New Jersey when the idea of drug testing for athletes gained popularity and I opposed it. But I have to admit, I applauded New Jersey’s recent decision to require random drug tests for athletes to screen for steroid use.
And yet, a column in the Christian Science Monitor says New Jersey’s plan is well meaning, but wrong, and it’s challenging my view.
Back when I was in high school, they were talking about tests for drugs like marijuana and cocaine and the idea was that students who wanted to play sports would be randomly tested to be sure they were clean. This was a pure drug prevention program designed to deter at large segment of high school kids — those who wished to participate in sports — from taking drugs. The argument in favor essentially said that giving high school kids more disincentives to take drugs was good, period.
What bugged me most was that the program singled out athletes, as if there was some evidence that playing sports made you more likely to take drugs. Some student athletes surely did, but I doubt that athletes as a group were any more at risk than anyone else. I don’t think the testing would have bothered me so much if the rule had also applied to the marching band, chess club and student government, too. The presumption of guilt, instead of innocence, seemed unfairly attached to athletes only.
Steroids, on the other hand, is mostly a problem among athletes and I think certainly much less so among non-athletes. And unlike drugs like marijuana and cocaine, taking steroids is also a form of cheating to gain advantage in sports. Like marijuana and cocaine, steroids also are dangerous to your long term health and well-being.
The CSM column argues that steroid testing puts what should be a student and parent responsibility in the state’s hands. And the author points to the small numbers of steroid takers (certainly less than 10 percent of high school athletes, maybe as low as 3 percent) and also argues the program unfairly forces on the 90 plus percent of clean athletes to prove their innocence.
CSM suggests schools employ awareness programs, which it claims do a better job of dissuading drug use among teens than testing rules and let maturing students start making these adult decisions about drug use on their own under the supervision of parents.
New Jersey’s governor says, “This is a growing public health threat, one we can’t leave up to individual parents, coaches, or schools to handle.”
What do you think are the proper roles of the state, student, parent and school in the case of drug testing?
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Sports and Athletics
Rebuilding New Orleans with choice
Hurricane Katrina has taught many lessons, most of them dreadful and difficult, such as reminding us of the legacy of racism as government policy.
But in one way, the disaster provided a rare opportunity.
New Orleans’ public school system has long been among the nation’s very worst performing and most dysfunctional. Katrina effectively closed down the system of 126 schools. All but a couple of dozen schools were destroyed and will need to be rebuilt. Now the question is — how should they be reopened?
Should the old school system, the one that was so hopeless and desperately bad, be recreated? Or should the city and state instead try to rebuild the schools in a way so that they might also be reborn?
The state thinks so. But the manner of rebuilding is controversial.
To start, the state has taken over the city’s schools and allowed a few to open now as charter schools. They’re now pondering whether all the schools should open as charter schools.
While I applaud the leaders there for trying something different, I think making all schools charters would be a mistake.
The biggest obstacle to making this work is the difficulty of finding more than 100 capable school developers to found and operate these new schools. In my experience covering the growth of charter schools in Dayton, it’s almost always been the most passionate and organized school developers who build the best schools. Where the state erred here, it was in approving half-baked charter school ideas without a thorough review of the operators and their plans.
What some of the most fervent backers of charter schools in Dayton found over time was that they really couldn’t reform the city’s education system completely from just outside the system. It’s not easy, and perhaps not advisable, to try to put your public schools out of business.
New Orleans probably will need some balance between traditional public schools and charters. But a smaller, more manageable system is probably a welcome development there.
Still, it would be nice to see some good result from Katrina. The opportunity to wipe the slate clean and rebuild that school system from scratch offers much hope.
Imagine the school system you deal with, whether you are a teacher, parent, student or citizen. Imagine if you could rebuild the system from scratch. What is the one thing you’d most like to change?
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice
The spirit of the season?
I’d forgotten the librarian.
We had gift certificates for my first grade daughter’s classroom teacher, music teacher, gym teacher and art teacher. But she quickly pointed out the lack of an envelope for the librarian. So I went for one more gift certificate and was back at school in early afternoon to drop it off to her.
In the hallway I bumped into the mother of the boy that sat next to her, until they had to be separated for talking too much. She was buried under with boxes and plastic bags for a holiday party. Let’s call her Linda.
She greeted me with her usual wide smile, but seemed a bit harried. The party was due to start in 15 minutes. Did she need some help, I asked? I had to wait for the carol-singing assembly to end anyway to deliver the delinquent gift certificate. She was grateful for the offer and in minutes we were unpacking juice boxes and cookies, plus M&Ms and other supplies to decorate the cookies.
That was one activity she had planned. The other was to have the kids make a snowman refrigerator magnet with their faces in the middle of the big white belly. She had a digital camera and a portable printer to make the pictures but the snowman parts were not all pre-cut. So we set about frantic cutting of the spongy sheets.
Just as we finished, the kids returned and Linda began lining them up one-by-one for photos. A group began decorating their cookies and I supervised the snowman fridge magnet gluing. It turned out the party was only for half an hour, not the usual hour. So the gluing and cookie decorating went into overdrive.
The printer was slow and the school day was almost over, so Linda began printing the pictures of the bus riding kids first. I’d take the print, cut it, help the kids glue the snowman together, bag it, stuff it in a backpack and send them scrambling for the bus. Then we finished up the kids who were being picked up out front and got them out the door with holiday happy wishes.
Finally, we were down to the last few kids as their parents were arriving at the classroom door to pick them up. It looked like everyone was going to get their cookie and their snowman after all. The party had come together just in time.
Linda was finishing up a snowman for a young girl before her grandmother arrived to get her when an adult poked her head through the door and looked around.
“Oh, honey I think your grandmother is here,” Linda said, sliding the snowman in her pack and pulling a jacket over one arm.
“GRANDMOTHER?!?” the woman in the doorway said. “I’m her MOTHER.”
I looked up from the backpack I was stuffing.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Linda said. “She told me her grandmother was coming and didn’t look closely.”
The woman in the doorway looked at another mother standing nearby.
“Did you hear what she called me? GRANDMOTHER! Can you believe that?”
I smiled at her and tried to gauge if this was humor or real anger.
“Just a little case of mistaken identity,” I said.
Ignoring me, she turned again to Linda.
“Do I look like a GRANDMOTHER to you? Ma’am?” she said.
Linda stared back for a moment.
“I’m very sorry but it’s certainly not something worth getting upset about,” she said.
“Oh yes it is, ma’am. Yes it is,” she said, grabbing her daughter by the arm and leading her out the door.
“Have a MERRY Christmas,” she said, stomping out.
“And Merry Christmas to you,” Linda said, mustering a smile.
As I walked to my car a little while later, I thought about what I had witnessed. I had been in that classroom for a little over an hour for a holiday party of all things and met less than half the parents of the kids in that class. And one of them acted like that.
It was quite a “thank you” to Linda, who had left work, bought the party supplies, organized the whole event and improvised to overcome every obstacle to make sure every kids got their holiday keepsakes.
I had to ask myself, how many times a year does a teacher face a parent like this?
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: The Parent-Teacher Divide
High school fades fast
A comment by Hillary under my Five Things I Wish I Knew in High School post got me thinking.
Hillary cautioned that high school fades fast: “the ten people you are closest to in the last weeks of school, you’ll probably only keep in serious contact with 3 of them past the first summer after graduation,” she said.
It’s true that many people move on fast from high school, although not everyone has Hillary’s experience. I did. I am not in touch with any of my high school friends anymore. Not even through a Christmas card. I moved two states away, my family moved and I just lost touch. I don’t think I’ve even been in my hometown in at least five years. Maybe 10 years.
On the other hand, my wife is still close with several of her high school friends. There’s a group of about eight or 10 of them that still talk a lot and we all get together at least a couple of times a year. And we see some of our closest friends from college nearly every week.
But Hillary’s point also fits with another prior post I wrote which argued that your college academic accomplishments won’t matter for long.
It’s really quite amazing how fast things change the day after high school or college graduation. By then, everything you did the prior four years have usually already gotten you to the next step — into college or your first job or grad school, etc. And once you take the next step, no one every really asks what you did before. Nobody ever wants to know your high school GPA.
And I always find it interesting to ask people about what they did in school. Sometimes you’ll discover a close friend was a star athlete, or a debate team captain. More often, and even more interesting, you’ll find a former heavy metal loving burnout, or “band geek,” or computer club nerd. In some ways, having been out of the mainstream in school can make you a more interesting adult.
Those experiences help shape you as you mature, but the “qualifications” you earn in school fade fast. For achievers, that’s probably disappointing. But if you’re in high school now and not part of the “in” crowd, take heart. It’s your personality and work ethic and talent that will matter most when school’s over.
And as Hillary says, appreciate your friends, because those people may be only memories sooner than you’d expect.
Permalink | | Categories: Colleges and Universities
Are you a “helicopter parent?”
A guidance counselor once told me a story about a teacher who was handing back papers when a student who was disappointed in her grade began to argue. The teacher answered a couple of her questions and said if she wanted to talk more they could meet after school. When she got back to the front of the room, the student, still stewing, short her hand in the air and demanded, “I want to see my counselor!”
“What does she think a counselor is, her lawyer?” the counselor told me with a laugh.
But the more I read about how far some students will go to pressure teachers and schools so they can get their way — and how their parents are backing them up on these tactics — the more I think it may just be a matter of time before lawyers begin specializing in negotiating better grades for students.
As an alumni of the University of Dayton, I have the good fortune to receive their well-written and award-winning alumni newspaper, UD Quarterly. The latest issue has a story about “helicopter parents” — those that “hover” over their kids, ready to intervene should anything go wrong.
Amazingly, these parents continue to meddle even after the kids go off to college.
The story cites these examples — a mom who flew from Utah to argue a biology grade for daughter at Harvard, a parent who demanded a college repair faulty plumbing her daughter faced while studying abroad in China and students who call mom and dad via cell phone from the classroom to have the professor explain a low grade.
This also was the subject of a Time Magazine story earlier this year that generated a lot of buzz.
Parents are pushing the envelope, and schools often cave under the pressure. What can schools to arrest this trend?
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: The Parent-Teacher Divide
Check out the carnival
The Carnival of Education, a weekly compilation of the best education blogging, is being hosted this week at Circadiana, a Chapel Hill, N.C.-based blogger. My five things I wish I knew in high school post is featured near the end.
Permalink | | Categories: The Carnival of Education
Intelligent Design ruled unconstitutional
This from the New York Times story just posted on its website this afternoon.
Here’s the lead of the Times story:
A federal judge ruled today that a Pennsylvania school board’s policy of teaching intelligent design in high school biology class is unconstitutional because intelligent design is clearly a religious idea that advances “a particular version of Christianity.”
This is a big, big case out of Dover, Pa., because it’s the first federal case testing the constitutionality of teaching intelligent design. And it’s a big victory for the pro-evolution crowd. But expect an appeal.
Wow, here’s more from the story:
The judge found that intelligent design is not science, and that the only way its proponents can claim it is, is by changing the very definition of science to include supernatural explanations.
Some more:
… the judge said the evidence in the trial strongly proved that intelligent design is “creationism relabeled.”
And it says the judge was most persuaded by testimony that … the authors of an intelligent design textbook, “Of Pandas and People,” merely removed the word “creationism” from an earlier edition and substituted it with “intelligent design” …
What do you think of the judge’s ruling?
Permalink | Comments (14) | Categories: Evolution vs. Intelligent Design
Will vouchers save private schools?
Ohio’s expanded voucher program gets underway after Jan. 1, when private schools can sign up to participate. There will be 14,000 vouchers available statewide. Students can begin to apply in March and those who win vouchers can use them to attend private schools next fall.
This timing of this seems great for Dayton’s private schools which have been absolutely battered by competition from charter schools over the past five years. Five Catholic schools just announced last month they are consolidating into two schools and the rest of the city’s private schools are facing similarly serious enrollment declines.
Vouchers offer an avenue for students to attend those private schools without the tuition burden that scares a lot of interested families away. And a stunning 80 percent of students who will be eligible for vouchers next fall come from three cities — Dayton, Columbus and Cincinnati.
So Dayton’s private schools could get a big enrollment jolt from the state’s new voucher program at just the time they need it, right? Let’s take a look.
The education department lists seven schools where students attending now will be eligible for vouchers next fall — five Dayton school district elementary schools (1,600 kids) and two district high schools (1,800 kids). These schools landed on the voucher list because they have been in academic emergency for three years. (For a list of the schools see my recent story on this in the Dayton Daily News here.)
The first thing to notice is this is who is missing — no charter schools are on the list.
At a meeting for private schools to explain the voucher program, the education department manager in charge of its implementation made it very clear charter school students are not eligible to receive vouchers, because she said the state’s view was that the parents in those schools already have options.
There are four Dayton charter schools that also have been rated in academic emergency for three years, plus one more that was rated in emergency twice and was not rated once. These five schools have a combined enrollment of about 900. Those are kids that could, and some would argue should, be able to get vouchers but won’t be allowed.
The next issue is high schools. Most incoming freshman will not be eligible at Dayton’s two voucher-ready high schools — Belmont and Dunbar. So subtracting (conservatively) one fourth of the 1,800 kids you get 1,350 eligible kids.
But at high school within the city, there are not many options. There are just the two Catholic high schools — Chaminade-Julienne and Carroll. My estimate is that those schools could absorb a maximum of 500 kids between them. So that will leave 850 or so voucher-eligible kids who, even if they sought to use the voucher, likely would not get one.
That brings us to elementary schools, with 1,600 eligible kids. But outgoing eighth graders from all but one of those schools, unless they happen to go to Dunbar or Belmont, will no longer be eligible as soon as they enroll in high school. And incoming kindergarten kids also will not be eligible, the state is saying. When you adjust enrollment for those changes, it leaves roughly 1,470 eligible kids.
There is a lot of capacity in private elementary schools, so for the sake of argument, let’s say there will be seats available for all 1,470 plus the 500 high school kids leaves just under 2,000 eligible kids.
It’s probably a fair guess to say that at most half of those eligible will actually seek to use a voucher. If so, in the end I predict you have about 1,000 Dayton kids who potentially will use vouchers next year.
That’s certainly enough to help private schools, especially the private elementary schools that are hurting the most. But it’s far less than what you might think if you just look at the numbers on the surface.
And the state is making it harder by exempting all kindergarten kids, most eighth graders and all charter school kids. Kindergarten and eighth grade are where many parents make hard choices about where to send their kids to school. Once they pick a school, they tend to stick with it, even if the school’s academic performance is bad. And charter parents, having already exercised choice once, might be more likely to try something new like a voucher.
So those decisions likely will depress the numbers, at least at first.
But one caution — Dayton is a city that likes choice. It’s had magnet schools and districtwide open enrollment for 15 years. It’s a charter school leader. And it has a successful private voucher program. So stay tuned. This should be interesting to watch.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice
The battle for Roosevelt HS
There was supposed to be a meeting tonight to discuss the future of Roosevelt High School, the Titanic monolith that shadows west Third Street. It was suddenly canceled Friday, with plans to reschedule the presentation for next month.
Stay tuned. This is an emotional issue and a battle could be brewing. Here are some of the problems:
—One the school board side, Roosevelt is an old building that is now empty and costing more than $100,000 a year for basic utilities and minimal maintenance. The board currently has no plans to re-use the building in the future and, frankly, wants to be rid of it. But they also don’t want to turn it over to just anyone, as some “save Roosevelt’ advocates have asked, because the board doesn’t want to be blamed if some day Roosevelt is even more of a decaying eyesore than it is today.
And the board has funds from the state to tear Roosevelt down. Rather than risk letting the school become a decaying albatross, the board would rather roll out the wrecking ball. And its poised to do so if another option doesn’t emerge fast.
—A developer has a plan and, apparently, pretty solid financing to rehab the building. There are lots of use possibilities. Senior apartments have been mentioned. The recreation space (swimming pool, gym, running track, meeting space) could be used by a private gym or community group like the Boys and Girls Club or even the city recreation department. Small businesses or community organizations could be housed in the office space.
The board would love to see the school redeveloped in this way and they are holding out hope this group can pull it off. But there is a lot of pressure to get the deal done quick. The board doesn’t want to keep waiting.
—Some in the community that surrounds the school want it saved but aren’t sure about some of the ideas for use the developer is kicking around. These folks are anxious for the public unveiling of the developer’s plans, which was supposed to come today. The delay is only going to make the folks more anxious. And others in the community are less sentimental about saving the school. They want the eyesore gone, whether it is redeveloped or torn down, and don’t want to wait.
—Preservationists are also in the mix, and in the case of Roosevelt they have a strong argument for preserving it as a historic artifact. The school was truly a marvel when it was built — it was one of the largest schools in the country. And it played an important role in the integration of Dayton, bringing black and white children together in some ways, reinforcing racial divisions in others. Plus, many of Dayton’s most important figures went to school there. It’s awfully hard to argue that the school doesn’t still have historical value.
So don’t be surprised if this issue heats up next month, even in the January cold.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Finding your way around
To help you navigate this blog better, I’ve now put all my posts to date in categories and asked our DDN blog guru to list those categories on the main Get on the Bus page.
You can find them down the right rail of this page. Some posts are listed under multiple categories, and I tried to pull together some of my best posts from a variety of categories for the index called “My Favorite Posts.”
Please explore and enjoy!
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Journalism
Applying to college
I have several friends who are guidance counselors and are tearing their hair out right now processing college applications for high school seniors. Many colleges have Dec. 31 deadlines.
And I’ve heard a lot of wild stories. There’s the kid who could go anywhere but will only apply to the local state university. There’s the kid with modest scores and grade who thinks she is going to get into Harvard. And most ridiculously, there is the kid I heard about who is applying to 25 schools! (Which reminds me. She and others applying to college should read my post that tells you how to apply to college for free.)
For the tougher question of how to decide what you want to do in life and where to apply see my post from earlier this week and the excellent comments that accompany it.
Here’s my advice for how to craft a final list of schools to apply to:
You should have no less than three schools — one you’re sure to get into, one you think you’re likely to get into and one you’d love to go to, but think is a long shot for you. Ten schools is the absolute maximum number you should apply to. I think six to eight is ideal. Have a balance of schools you think are good bets and schools that are long shots. Have a balance of schools that are close by and farther away.
And don’t be afraid to think big. Apply anyway, even if you think a school you like might cost too much or be too far away or whatever.
And consider your counselor’s advice. He or she should be able to look at your scores, grades and activities and tell you if you have a chance for a long shot school or if it probably is out of your league. And they often know a lot about college and can tell you more about the ones that interest you.
But ultimately, it’s your call where to apply. Narrow your list. Take some chances. And get those applications out the door!
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Colleges and Universities
Five things I wish I knew in high school
Last month, I had the pleasure of being the career speaker at Dayton’s Chaminade-Julienne High School. It was a very nice event and the students were a great audience.
After yesterday’s post in which I gave career advice to a high school senior I remembered that I wanted to post the last portion of my C-J speech, a section called Five Things I Wish I Knew in High School. So here it is:
No. 1: Math matters
It might surprise you that this is No. 1 on my list since it’s coming from a writer. But it’s true. In high school, I didn’t just dislike math I all but refused to learn it. I was convinced there was no chance I would go into a field where I would need to know any math. How could I, I thought, I’m not any good at math?
Well guess what? I use math everyday. Algebra was the worst for me — dealing with formulas and equations gave me headaches. But today being a reporter means doing lots of data analysis. I literally work with spreadsheets every day. The high school me would be stunned to see me sitting there today at my computer with 400 fields of data on the screen trying to write just the right formula to calculate the numbers so I can find the answers to my reporting questions.
And here’s another thing about math — people who can do it rule the world. The best of them run banks, trade stocks and advise big companies. That’s because math equals money.
About six years ago, I started reading every book, magazine or newspaper article about managing money because I had changed jobs and gotten a big raise and yet somehow never seemed to have any money saved at the end of the month. After six years, I’m a much better money manager now but that took a lot of work.
All the things that impact your financial life the most — negotiating a raise, selling a house, buying a car — can require fairly sophisticated calculating. Learn it now so you’ll be ready.
No. 2: Foreign language is a great skill to learn
If there is one thing you can learn in high school and in college that could help guarantee you will always be able to find a decent job, it’s knowing a second language. If I were in high school today I’d look into studying Chinese, Indian, Arabic and Spanish in that order. Those are the languages that will probably prove most useful over your lifetimes, and most in demand in the coming decades.
I took five years of Spanish in middle and high school and did not become fluent. That is probably the biggest missed opportunity of my life. Last fall I started taking Spanish courses again just because I so badly want that skill now. And I could already have it for free if I had just really tried to learn it in high school. But back then, I just didn’t see how Spanish was relevant in my life. I didn’t know any Spanish speakers and had no expectation that I’d ever travel internationally. Yet, last year journalism took me to Argentina and Turkey.
And technology is making the world a smaller and and more inter-connected place. It’s a good bet that when you are my age, there is going to be some sort of international element to your work.
No. 3: Effort is important
I had a bit of an attitude problem in high school and college. My thinking went sort of like this. If I didn’t care about a class or find it interesting, I didn’t bother to put much work into it. I figured I would learn only what I cared about and skate by everywhere else.
This is a destructive attitude and if you have it, you must change. If you can even start to change now it will save you a lot of headaches in the work world.
Here’s why that view doesn’t work. In every job, there is the stuff you like and want to do and the stuff you hate but have to do anyway. And you must do both the stuff you like and the stuff you hate well.
By not doing the stuff you don’t like, you begin to set a pattern or a habit for yourself and that is very hard to change. For instance, when I didn’t like doing something in school, I got in the habit of putting it off to the last minute and often times, I ended up turning it in late. But in my job, I can’t be late. I have to make my deadlines or else.
And to this day, I have to fight the urge to procrastinate on things that I’d rather not do so I can work on things I want to do. It all has to get done and it all has to be done well. The sooner you can learn to put maximum effort into everything you need to do, whether you love to do it or hate to do it, the better for your career no matter what you end up doing.
No. 4: You can change.
This is an important one. I think there are a lot of high school and college kids who find they have trouble with a subject or a class or a concept and they simply think, “I guess I’m not any good at this.” And at that moment, it may be true. But you can master the things that give you trouble.
For instance, I’ve never liked talking on the phone. But journalists talk on the phone all day. In my first reporting job for a tiny newspaper in a small town, I would get so nervous if I had to call the mayor or the police chief or anyone of stature. I remember sitting at my desk and starting to dial the numbers but then hanging up quick. And mentally I’d have to give my self a little pep talk. “You can do it.” Then I’d try again. That just seems so funny to me now. Today, I don’t think twice about calling the school board president or the mayor or even the governor.
The point is, don’t write yourself off for any career now because you think you’re just not suited for it. Maybe you think you’re too shy or don’t write well enough to be a journalist. Well, you can learn and you can change and someday you’ll surprise yourself by how good you can get at something you never thought you’d be able to do.
No. 5: Try to stay at your first job for three years
When I was in my first newspaper job, I read an article giving advice for people who were just out of school. This was the one really good piece of advice from that column that stuck with me.
The author argued that you’ll need three years to learn any business and for the good work habits that will make you a good employee to really become automatic. I think this is very true. If you’re jumping from job to job early on, you may never get the basic background understanding of how the business you’re in really works and you’ll need to understand that later on.
So there it is. What did I leave out? What do you wish you knew in high school?
Permalink | Comments (8) | Categories: Colleges and Universities, Foreign Language and Study Abroad, My Favorite Posts, Teaching and Learning
Chasing inspiration
For me it comes as a burst of tattering on a keyboard accelerates to a steady, rolling tumble of ideas across a screen. Elite athletes describe a moment where even the fastest action slows and the slightest lean of a opponent or whiff of teammate’s next step provides a roadmap to a score.
I’m reminded of the scene in “Mr. Holland’s Opus” in which he tells the red haired girl to reach beyond the technical steps of playing the notes in sequence, to instead close her eyes and “play the sunset.”
In business school, they call it “flow” — when the rhythm of your work breaks free from the usual fits and starts into a smooth glide that feels so natural time distorts and you are lost in the moment that produces a rare effort. These are the most satisfying moments of any job, when what you produce seems to come from somewhere else. It’s the almost spiritual feel of true inspiration.
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about what to tell my friend Geoff to help him discover what inspires him and find a way to make it his life’s work.
Geoff is a senior at Greenville High School who job shadowed me Monday. He is a bright young man who just made National Honor Society. He was good enough to make an all-star team in soccer and he’s trying hard to learn a new sport — swimming.
And he’s a pretty good writer, as you can see from his blog. But he’s also good at math and science. Geoff has thought about studying engineering in college like his brother. But he’s also wondered about a career in writing, perhaps journalism. He doesn’t know which to pick, and that’s making his college choice more complicated.
Engineering and journalism are so different and it’s rare to find someone with a talent for both. So how should he choose which path to follow? I’ve been thinking about how to advise Geoff and other high school seniors who faces this sort of dilemma. I keep coming back to flow and inspiration.
You want to spend your work life doing something that gives you that breakthrough feeling and charges you with energy. When is that feeling the strongest for you? When you’re writing? When you solve a problem that’s vexed you? Or is it in some completely different part of your life that you’ve never thought could be turned into a career?
Look inside. You’ll find it there. And when you do, the sunset will flow.
Readers, do you have any other advice for Geoff and his senior classmates for choosing careers and colleges?
Permalink | Comments (7) | Categories: Colleges and Universities, Journalism, My Favorite Posts, Teaching and Learning
Don’t get hurt or sick at school
USA Today has a big story today about the school nurse shortage across America. (Thanks to GOTB reader Red Fox Mary for pointing me to it.)
It’s funny because I was just thinking about this problem earlier this week as I walked past the dark, empty office labeled “school nurse” at my daughter’s school.
Nursing seem like such an easy place to cut when times get tight. Districts will often make their few remaining nurses travel from building to building for a couple hours at a time, which leaves empty nurses stations at most schools at most times.
That forces school secretaries, teachers and principals into the unfamiliar, and unfair, role of fill-in nurses. The USA Today story has, as you might expect, some tragic examples of times where things went terribly wrong and no one at the school had enough medical training to help.
But I was even thinking about the simple, day-to-day problems — dealing with sick children, evaluating injuries and especially dispensing medication. More kids are on more types of medication these days for more reasons than ever. When responsibility for monitoring drugs falls to the inexperienced, that can create a dicey situation fast.
And injuries — I am reminded of the time my brother hurt his shoulder playing football. An athletic trainer with at least some background in evaluating injuries took a look, declared it bruised and told him to ice it down. By the time he got off the bus he was in so much pain he could barely walk three blocks home. At the hospital they got it right — broken collar bone.
Teachers and parents, tell us your experiences at school. Have you had to play nurse? Do you worry about your kids?
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Whoops, you didn’t flunk!
Nearly 900 kids who were told they flunked Ohio’s graduation test actually passed, the Ohio Department of Education said Monday.
The students will be notified later this week. This could have been a real disaster, if the OGT were in full force, because all the mis-scored tests were taken during the summer, which means many would have been last chance seniors trying to graduate in time to go to college in the fall. If this happened a year from now the testing company, North Carolina-based Measurement Inc., very well might have cost some kids a semester of college.
These kinds of testing mistakes are happening more frequently, and based on what we’ve learned through our reporting here at the Dayton Daily News, it’s going to continue to happen. Here’s what Mark Fisher and I wrote in our 2004 series about the effect of No Child Left Behind on the testing industry:
“The advent of the federal No Child Left Behind law, and its massive testing requirements, have sparked an explosion of new tests. A study for Congress by the General Accounting Office last year (2003) estimated states will need to create more than 433 new tests to satisfy the NCLB. The heap of new workload on a small niche industry, in which a mere seven companies account for 85 percent of the market, has some observers wondering if it will buckle under the pressure. At the same time demand for new tests is one of several factors that have sent cost estimates for NCLB soaring into the billions.
If the industry can’t take the heat, it likely will mean more errors, like those that forced Georgia to cancel all or some state tests in grades 1 through 9 in 2003.”
Testing company errors and mistakes keep piling up because NCLB has overloaded the testing companies’ capacity. And next time someone could really get hurt.
Just wait until the flawed computer essay scoring system becomes more widely used.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Testing
What educators can learn from football
Texas Tech football coach Mike Leach looks at a football field 100 yards long and 50 yards wide with 22 players bunched together and asked a simple question — why? Why not spread the players out, or maybe put everyone on one side of the field? Why not try to use all that open space in a way that has never been done before?
As I was reading Michael Lewis’ excellent profile of Leach in last week’s New York Times Magazine I couldn’t help think about some of the dramatic innovations in sports over the past 25 years.
It also made me wonder — where are the radical, breakthrough innovations in education? And what can we do to encourage fresh thinking educators to turn their classrooms upside down and find a completely novel approach, one that, like Leach’s approach to football, shakes up the status quo and makes everyone take notice, whether they like the new way or not?
Lewis’ story on Leach was last week in the Times magazine. This week, the magazine did it’s annual year in ideas issue, highlighting their picks for the most innovative and interesting ideas of 2005, everything from ergomorphic footwear to the urine powered battery.
I see a parallel between sports like football and basketball, which strategically were each largely static for decades until the 1990s, and classroom teaching.
My close friends all know about my interest in the basketball innovations of Pete Carril, Princeton University’s coach for 30 years until he retired in 1996. I grew up in Princeton and watched from the stands year after year as Carril took basic basketball concepts and applied them in a new way that, especially over the last decade, has changed the way the game is played.
Even if you’re not a big sports fan, hang with me for a minute.
In the early 1980s, basketball strategy was tilted toward the inside game, with the idea that getting bigger and taller players and crushing all the action in close to the basket would be the best way to score. At Princeton, Carril’s players were not as tall and quick, so he found a different way to look at the game.
Carril spread the players out and created an offense that emphasized precision in passing, shooting and dribbling. In his view, a 15-foot shot by a good shooter who was wide open was just as good a bet as a 2-foot shot by a gigantic tall guy with three defenders banging against him. His approach emphasized smarts, allowing players to “read” their defender’s posture and react to it in the flow of the game, instead of sticking to rigidly scripted plays.
When he retired, Carril got hired on as an NBA assistant with the Sacramento Kings. That team’s success with his spread-out, precision-based offense has led other teams to try it. In the process, it’s made basketball a more wide open game, which is more fun to watch.
Leach is doing something similar with football at Texas Tech. These are big changes that took edgy innovators to think up. And it was only in the small outposts like Texas Tech and Princeton, where an absence of top talent made a strategic advantage especially useful, that this could really fly.
Which brings me back to education. Most mainstream schools don’t reward innovation. On the contrary, it’s often punished. Principals and superintendents generally don’t like to rock the boat. They want to give parents what they are expecting, which is the same classroom routine they remember from when they were kids.
I don’t think there has been a comparably radical idea in teaching that’s gone mainstream in the way Carril and Leach were able to show off their approaches, which led other to adopt them. Do you know of one? Please post a comment and tell us about it.
Charter schools were supposed to be laboratories for innovation, and some are. There are a couple of examples in Dayton of charter that really do look t the world differently. But most of the charters I know really aren’t radically different. They often use the same off-the-shelf curriculum and tried-and-true teaching methods as regular public schools.
We’re entering into an exciting time in which technology and other new tools provide the opportunity for big change. I’d love to see teaching changed and improved the way basketball and football have been. But what will it take to encourage out-of-the-box thinking?
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, Sports and Athletics, Teaching and Learning
Canceling a prom near you?
Back in October, I wrote about how the principal of a Long Island Catholic high school was so fed up with parents providing booze, limos and extravagant after parties that he canceled the prom.
Today’s New York Times has a story that says a second Catholic high school on Long Island has now also canceled its prom, leading some to wonder if a backlash against the prom has begun.
Back in October, the Chicago Tribune editorial board called for a national discussion about prom excess in response to the Long Island controversy. Experts, as you can read in the Times story, are now weighing in as to whether canceling the prom will make a difference. Some say it’s a bold counter-culture stand for reason and morality. Others say it’s a head in the sand approach, reminiscent of the failed “just say no” anti-drug campaign of the 1980s.
The prom is a particularly interesting venue for this discussion, as it is a treasured American tradition for which parents are very sentimental. It’s a right of passage, one that I think moms and dads have a hard time keeping in perspective.
I was a seminar a couple of years ago about high school reform which featured a panel of experts who offered some radical ideas about how high school might look in the future. One speaker proposed ending high school in 10th grade and allowing students to choose how to proceed from several options — work experience, study abroad, go straight to college, community service, etc.
It was actually a very interesting idea, but I jokingly asked the panel how this theoretical high school was going to win football games and hold a prom without seniors?
As the journalists in the audience laughed, I noticed not one panelist cracked a smile. Finally, one leaned into the microphone and said, “Honestly, that is our biggest problem. We can’t get parents to accept the idea that high school should be radically different. So many of the PARENTS can’t let go of their dreams of Suzy in her prom dress and Bobby as captain of the football team.”
Even if a high school in the future could guarantee a better education and better life chances for our kids, how many parents would pick that option if it meant giving up interscholastic sports and the prom?
One expert in the Times story, family studies professor William Doherty of the University of Minnesota, I think has the problem nailed:
“It’s not that a whole generation of parents is crazy,” Dr. Doherty said. “It’s that there is a subset of parents who are crazy - and the rest don’t want their kids to miss out.”
Most parents are sentimental about their own prom experience. They want to share that rite of passage with their children. When a few wacky parents go over the edge, the pressure builds to go along and not let your kid be the one who is left out. This is how the prom has become a $1 billion industry.
Somehow, the prom has to be put back into perspective. I’m not sure if canceling it is the best way. But perhaps the Tribune is right that it may take a couple bold principals to get parents everywhere to think about how far over the edge they’ve gone.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: The Parent-Teacher Divide
Too lazy to kill ogres
Is it really possible that affluent American kids are too lazy to play their own video games?
The New York Times today says yes.
It has a story about how American game players are no longer content to slog their way through the low rounds of online video games, killing all variety of monsters through multiple levels. Now, our lazy game players want to jump right to the highest levels and play only the most interesting parts of the video games.
So, amazingly, they outsource the low rounds to (where else?) China!
In China, they have these gaming factories where, for a price, young Chinese gamers will slay all the early round beasts for you and let you take over when you get to the highest levels. it’s created its own little online economy in the gaming industry.
So in China, this gaming “entertainment” is now factory work, with hundreds of gamers sitting in rows staring into screens to advance our kids to the later rounds for low wages.
Online gaming companies hate this trend and are trying to find ways to crack down on it. But where there is demand, supply will find a way.
You just can’t make this stuff up. What does this say about our kids?
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Online Learning
Dogs teach kids to read?
Talk about bizarre.
About five years ago, a Dayton area charter school tried out this goofy idea of having struggling readers read to specially trained dogs that would sit dutifully still and, apparently, listen.
I’ll be honest. We made a bunch of jokes about it around the newsroom and dismissed the whole nutty notion.
Well, goofy or not, the idea of kids reading to dogs really is catching on. The Associated Press reports on a similar program, and the story says:
The number of dog-and-owner reading teams in schools, libraries and other sites totals more than 750 in 45 states, according to Intermountain Therapy Animals, the Utah-based nonprofit that created the program. That’s up from fewer than 100 registered teams in early 2004.
OK. Come on. They can’t be serious.
I may not be an instructional expert, but nobody can convince me that reading to a dog can be a real, effective intervention for struggling readers.
Have I lost my mind?
This is one of those occassional, wacky stories you read in education, like the story of schools that won’t let teachers use red ink.
Is it just me or sometimes do educators get some pretty wild ideas?
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Revising a classic
Maybe you’ve heard about the latest edition of the wonderful classic children’s book, Goodnight Moon? The book was mentioned in my recent post on great childrens’ books to give as gifts for the holidays.
It seems they have edited a photo of the illustrator in the back of the book to remove a cigarette from his hand. The publisher didn’t want to appear to be endorsing smoking.
This has led to a hilarious column in the New York Times suggesting other edits that are needed to bring the book up to date in our litigious society. I noticed this column, which I don’t think is behind the paywall at the Times site, was the most e-mailed Times story of the week.
But, of course, it uses humor to raise a serious point about how the world has changed. The logical next question is how this world, which is so different from the one I grew up in just 30 years or so ago, will affect our children differently and whether the changes are helpful or harmful.
After you read the column, I’d love to know how you react to it. Post your comments here.
Update: Sorry for the messed up link to the NY Times story. I’ve fixed it now so it should work.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Young Children
Ed bloggers converse
Education blogger The Science Goddess is playing guest host for the Carnival of Education this week at her blog What it’s like on the inside. She imagines a conversation among all of us in the education blogosphere. It’s clever. I wish we could all meet in the flesh some day.
My contribution was this post on parent-teacher discord.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: The Carnival of Education
Are some grad rates phony?
Former Dayton Daily News reporter Angela Townsend wrote an excellent story for the Cleveland Plain Dealer yesterday in which Ohio Department of Education officials declined to stand behind graduation rates on state report cards.
Education department spokesman J.C, Benton says it’s the schools’ job to get the data right, that all the state does is compile and report the information to the public.
Townsend found examples where simple math showed school districts had submitted wrongly inflated graduation rates. The districts say the calculations were just made in error. And she pulled correspondence documents through public records requests from within the department that showeed officials were suspicious of one of the Cleveland-area district’s perfect graduation rate, but that they did not check further to verify everything was legititmate.
Graduation rate has long been one of the fuzziest statistics measured on the state report card. Ohio’s calculation method is overly simple. It just subtracts dropout from the number of graduates. Kids who leave school but are never formally recorded as dropouts or transfers can easily be overlooked and there is no accountability mechanism to make sure districts get it right. The state has decided to just trust their numbers.
This is also true with test data. Two years ago, I wrote a story that showed some charter schools were mistakenly submitting just their spring test results for the report card. They did not realize it was up to them to combine spring and fall test data together for cumulative results. They assumed the state did that, and some schools reported lower test scores than they should have. This system would also make it easy for an unscrupulous school operator to submit false test results and unless someone blew the whistle, the state would likely never catch them.
As No Child Left Behind requires more and more sophisticated data reporting, states are going to need much better systems for collecting and verifying information.
For now, we can only wonder if the data we get is legit.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Testing
Boys: The endangered species?
A therapist argued in a guest column in Sunday’s Washington Post that a generation of boys may be lost if we don’t change the way we teach boys.
The column, while rambling and unfocused in spots, does cite a serious trend — the sinking percentage of men attending college.
Here’s an excerpt:
Of course, not every male has to go to college to succeed, to be a good husband, to be a good and productive man. But a dismal future lies ahead for large numbers of boys in this generation who will not go to college. Statistics show that a young man who doesn’t finish school or go to college in 2005 will likely earn less than half what a college graduate earns. He’ll be three times more likely to be unemployed and more likely to be homeless. He’ll be more likely to get divorced, more likely to engage in violence against women and more likely to engage in crime. He’ll be more likely to develop substance abuse problems and to be a greater burden on the economy, statistically, since men who don’t attend college pay less in Social Security and other taxes, depend more on government welfare, are more likely to father children out of wedlock and are more likely not to pay child support.
It’s a little disturbing that he rattles off so many statistics without citing any sources. But I have to admit I’m concerned about boys. I may have three daughters, but they’re going to need some decent men in their world as co-workers, friends and maybe even mates.
Here’s more:
Now, however, the boys who don’t fit the classrooms are glaringly clear. Many families are barely involved in their children’s education. Girls outperform boys in nearly every academic area. Many of the old principles of education are diminished. In a classroom of 30 kids, about five boys will begin to fail in the first few years of pre-school and elementary school. By fifth grade, they will be diagnosed as learning disabled, ADD/ADHD, behaviorally disordered or “unmotivated.” They will no longer do their homework (though they may say they are doing it), they will disrupt class or withdraw from it, they will find a few islands of competence (like video games or computers) and overemphasize those.
Today, young girls are like blue chip stocks. In many cases, you can pretty quickly figure out what you’ve got and where they’re headed and watch them get there over time. Boys are more like tech stocks — volatile and often wildly over or under valued. Sometimes they soar, sometimes they crash.
The question is how can to get more boys off the NASDAQ and onto the big board?
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Colleges and Universities
A lack of black faculty
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education today says it will take 100 years for the percentage of black faculty at top colleges to equal the percentage of blacks in the overall workforce.
Here’s the lead of the story:
In all but a few cases, the nation’s highest-ranked colleges have made only slight progress in increasing the percentage of blacks on their faculties. At the current rate of improvement, it will be a century or more before the black percentages of the faculties of these institutions mirror the black percentage of the American work force.
Nationwide, just over 5 percent of all full-time faculty members at colleges and universities in the United States are black. This percentage has increased slightly over the past decade.
But the percentage of black faculty at almost all the nation’s high-ranking universities is significantly below the national average.
JBHE recently surveyed the nation’s 30 highest-ranked universities to determine the number and percentage of blacks on their faculties. We received responses from 28 high-ranking universities. Tufts University and the University of Southern California declined to provide statistics to the JBHE research department.
Top five on their list were Columbia, North Carolina, Emory, Michigan and Wake Forest. Bottom Five were Chicago, Notre Dame, Cal-Berkeley, Rice and Cal Tech.
I was talking about this problem with a good friend who is a college professor. He says in many cases it’s not that colleges don’t want black faculty. While some schools are doing a rotten job at hiring diverse faculties, many are desperately looking to hire people of color. He believes the bigger problem is on a supply side. Not enough blacks are getting PhDs and coming out into the job market.
He says you can solve this problem at the bottom, finding ways to send more blacks first to college and then to graduate school. What do you think?
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Colleges and Universities
It’s cheap to study abroad
I’ve taken my own advice this weekend and gone to Harvard to attend the Nieman Narrative Writing Conference.
On Friday, Harvard University President Lawrence Summers spoke, and it was clear we agree about the value of learning a foreign language. Summers after Sept. 11, 2001. the need for Americans to understand the world better was clear. In fact, he said there has been a huge influx of Harvard students taking Arabic. And Harvard’s goal now is to guarantee that every undergraduate has a meaningful study abroad experience.
Recently, I was talking with Dayton Daily News business reporter (and blogger on the Motherhood blog) Shannon Neal about her study abroad experience.
Here’s what she had to say:
“For the vast majority of locations, it’s actually CHEAPER for students to study abroad than it is to stay at home, especially in Europe. Most other countries heavily subsidize their universities, and the tuition is much less. Even when you consider housing, money for travel, etc., most students, especially those at private schools, usually come out ahead.
Also, many schools will transfer student aid to cover a semester or year abroad. When I was in Spain, I met students from all over Europe who had their study abroad expenses paid for by their government as an inducement to take the time to get to know their neighbors. If only the US had this kind of perspective.
If you’re ever looking for someone to sing the praises of study abroad, let me know — I can go on for days. This is how I typically summed it up:
“Most people describe studying abroad in two ways, either as the best part of their college experience or something they always wish they had done.”
I’m in the first category — I walked away from an editing job at the student newspaper to go to Spain and never once regretted my decision. It changed my life and my view on just about everything.”
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Foreign Language and Study Abroad
Catholic schools: Victims of choice
On Thursday, three Dayton Catholic schools announced plans to close. And this is only the beginning. Several other Catholic schools are in talks about merging or consolidating services. Expect more closings in the near future.
Some background that I had written on the reasons why this is happening didn’t make it into the story for space reasons, but this trend is unmistakably the result of the growth of charter schools in Dayton.
Over the past five years, intense competition for students from new charter schools in the city has forced private schools
into the unfamiliar role of competitors and caused a dramatic 20 percent drop in private school enrollment.
Charter schools are tuition-free public school run by private operators and freed from many state regulations in return for the promise of better academic performance and innovation. Dayton has grown into the nation’s No. 1 charter school market since the first school opened here in 1998, even though as a whole their students have performed lower on state tests than most traditional public school students.
Today, Dayton has 33 charter schools and a total charter enrollment of 6,550, or close to 23 percent of the city’s nearly 29,000 schoolchildren. The Dayton school district enrolls about 58 percent (16,552) of all kids and private schools enroll about 19 percent (5,547). That 23 percent is the highest in the nation and private schools have taken a big hit as charters have grown.
The impact of charter schools on private schools started slowly and caught some private schools by surprise. Very few students transferred from private to charter schools in the first few years of charter schools, but a growing number of families began choosing charters for kindergarten. That trend has caught up with private schools the past three years, especially those in the Catholic network.
Private schools, in many cases, did not anticipate they would compete so directly with charters. They believed charters would hurt the poor performing school district’s enrollment, which it did, but thought demand would not diminish for their higher quality product. Yet to parents, the track records of private schools apparently mattered less when they could get a private school atmosphere for free.
I don’t think anybody expected such a direct impact on private schools so quickly. It reached the crisis stage with the decision in 2003 by Dayton Christian Schools to close its two Dayton campuses and relocate to suburban Miami Twp. after more than 30 years in the city. Catholic schools then soon began talks of consolidating.
There are other factors in play. Catholics still continue to move from the city to the suburbs. What you see happening with the schools is also happening with Catholic churches in the city — they are shrinking and consolidating. And fewer Catholics see Catholic school as a must the way their parents did a generation ago.
Even so, when you look at the enrollment data, the connection to charter growth is unmistakable.
Through most of the 1990s, private school enrollment was actually growing in Dayton. For most schools you see the numbers going up, up, up until 1999, the second year of charter schools when eight charters opened. From there, private enrollment had gone down dramatically.
Over the past five years only one of 20 private schools in the city — Chaminade-Julenne High School — saw enrollment rise. Eleven private schools are at 10-year enrollment lows, according to data from the Ohio Department of Education. Nine of 15 Catholic schools had enrollment losses of at least 10 percent in the past two years alone. For school-by-school data, click on the graphic that accompanies today’s story.
This is a big and unexpected side effect of the vibrant charter school movement here. It can be seen as a good thing or a bad thing. For more on those arguments see my debate with myself over the effects of charter schools.
What do you think about the trend toward more charter schools and fewer private school options?
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice
Parents vs. teachers
Who’s fault is it when kids misbehave or fail to achieve at school?
There is a huge divide in the average school, with parents on one side and teachers on the other, both pointing fingers.
I once asked the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s fine education blogger Patti Ghezzi what surprised her most about doing a blog. This was it. The level of anger and distrust parents and teachers have toward each other. You see it often in the comments on Patti’s blog — parents attacking teachers for being unfair or unfit and teachers ripping parents for making excuses and sending their kids to school unprepared.
This undercurrent was evident Tuesday night when the Dayton school board invited parents in, as part of a series of feedback meetings with its constituency groups. Unfortunately, my story had to focus on the big news that Horace Mann Elementary School will be rebuilt, but the parent-teacher tension was on display.
Here are some of the parent complaints:
—Student behavior. Several parents said out-of-control students dominate the attention of teachers and administrators and programs intended to address the problem are not noticeable. Parents said principals and teachers fail to enforce the rules or move aggressively to remove troublesome kids.
—Teachers and staff yelling at children. Parents from several schools said they were uncomfortable with how often school employees yell at students, sometimes using words like “stupid” which parents don’t allow children to use at home.
—Some parents also complained about other parents. One man told the story of how he signed in for the last parent-teacher conference of the day and he was just the fifth name on the list even though appointments were available from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. He was frustrated by how few parents in the district seemed to care, noting also that a large number of kids at his child’s school routinely do not do homework.
In January, elementary school teachers get to vent their frustrations to the school board. Perhaps they’ll fire back at parents.
I’d like to hear from teachers and parents out there. How can this parent-teacher blame game be overcome?
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: The Parent-Teacher Divide
