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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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June 2006
Tough choices to tear down schools
Dayton schools Thursday for the first time spelled out which schools will be rebuilt and which will be torn down for all four phases of its school construction program. The board will vote on the plan Wednesday, but few board members seemed to have any concerns about the proposals at Thursday’s meeting.
See the complete list of what schools are in the plan vs. those that will be torn down here.
The board was forced to make tough choices because the state has reduced the size of the program in response to steep enrollment declines. This means some neighborhoods that expected to get new schools won’t get them now.
Some of the bigger surprises that I noticed from the list:
- Patterson-Kennedy Elementary School, a large school on Wyoming Street serving the closeby South Park neighborhood, is out of the plan. P-K is on an awful site. It’s a very small property surrounded by dense commercial and residential areas. But I am not sure where these kids will go now. The next closet schools appear to be Ruskin, Cleveland and Horace Mann. None are all that close.
- Two current high performers — Meadowdale and Franklin elementaries — will be torn down. I think the district wants to use the Meadowdale site to expand Meadowdale High School’s property (they share a site) and Franklin, a 100-year-old school, is landlocked by crowded residential areas much like Patterson-Kennedy.
- There is only one school on the plan in Old North Dayton. It’s Kiser Elementary School on Leo Street, which opens later this year. The district does not plan to rebuild Allen, Van Cleve, McGuffey, Gorman or Webster. Construction chief John Carr said there are just not very many kids who attend the district that live in Old North Dayton. The nearby Parkside Homes housing project has lots of kids, but Carr said the city has told him they will raze Parkside within two years. Carr said the district projects that those families will move north and west rather than stay in Old North Dayton.
- On the other hand, Eastmont Elementary School is in the plan. Eastmont is at the far eastern edge of Dayton, barely within the district. It serves a very nice suburban-style (and nearly all-white) neighborhood, but not that many kids in the surrounding area actually attend the district. (I suspect many of them go to private schools, and there are a lot of homes with no kids in that part of town too.) In early versions of the master plan, the Eastmont site was considered for a Montessori or other magnet school with the idea of drawing kids out to an otherwise fairly sparse area. But some within the district have advocated for putting a new school at Eastmont in hopes of attracting new families back into the district.
- Hickorydale was the last school scratched from the plan. The district was close to starting construction at the site but the state’s enrollment projections were worse than expected, forcing school officials to find one more school to delete. Hickorydale drew the short straw.
- Carr asked the board to decide between the Carlson Elementary School site at 807 S. Gettysburg Ave and the Residence Park site at 833 Elmhurst Road for the last school site to make the plan. Board members told Carr they preferred Residence Park because the nearby streets were less busy and it would be closer to a populated neighborhood. This will be the site of the rebuilt WOW school, the former charter school that now is back under the district’s umbrella.
- The kids at Colonel White high School have long known they were moving to the new Marshall High School, but the expectation was that a new elementary school would be built at its vacant 501 Niagara site, in the middle of an populated residential neighborhood. The tight enrollment projections forced the board to drop that plan.
- Speaking of high schools, the state projects 1,000 fewer high school students by 2010. But the board just flat does not believe those numbers. High school enrollment has held steady at about 5,000 for many years, even during the heavy enrollment losses to mostly elementary-level charter schools over the past five years. The board doesn’t know where the state thinks those 1,000 kids will go. Dayton’s two private high schools — Chaminade-Julienne and Carroll —could not absorb that many kids and most of the charter high schools are focused on dropouts and don’t compete directly with the district’s high schools. As a result, Datyon decided to go ahead and build six high schools. They will be smaller than originally planned, but built to be easily expandable if more classroom.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools, School Construction
New schools in Dayton: The complete list
Here is a complete list of what schools are in and out. Notice that some schools have changed location or address:
Six high schools
- Thurgood Marshall High School
4535 Hoover Ave.
- David Ponitz Career Technology Center
Washington Street and Edwin C. Moses Blvd. site
- Stivers School for the Arts
1313 E. Fifth St.
- Meadowdale High School
4417 Williamson Drive
- Dunbar High School
Same site on Nicholas Road
- Belmont High School
Same site on Wayne Avenue
Twenty-one Pre-K to 8 elementary schools:
- Kiser Elementary School
1401 Leo St.
- Wogaman Elementary School
920 McArthur Street
- Belle Haven Elementary School
4401 Free Pike
- Cleveland Elementary School
1102 S. Purcell Ave.
- Fairport Elementary School
Gettysburg Avenue and Kings Highway site
- Kemp Elementary School
816 Shedbourne Ave.
- McNary Elementary School
To be rebuilt in Westwood Park
- Ruskin Elementary School
275 McClure St.
- E.J. Brown Elementary School
48 E. Parkwood Drive
- Horace Mann Elementary School
715 Krebs Ave.
- Louise Troy Elementary School
Same site on Miami Chapel Road
- Dayton Boys Preparatory Academy (Roosevelt High School site)
2014 W. Third St.
- Unnamed Montessori School
441 River Corridor Drive
- Edison Elementary School
228 N. Broadway
- Fairview Elementary School
Hillcrest Avenue site
- Eastmont Elementary School
1480 Edendale Road
- Unnamed Elementary School (Julienne/Dayton Christian HS site)
325 Homewood Ave.
- World of Wonder Elementary School
833 Elmhurst Road
- Valerie Elementary School
4020 Bradwood Drive
- Wilbur Wright Elementary School
1361 Huffman Ave.
- Charity Adams Earley Academy for Girls
450 Shoup Mill Road
Schools currently in use that will be torn down:
- Colonel White High School (Students move to Marshall High School at the old Roth High School site.)
501 Niagara Ave.
- Webster Elementary School
1115 Kiefer St.
- Fairview Middle School
208 Philadelphia Drive
- Van Cleve at McGuffey Elementary School
1032 Webster St.
- Orville Wright Elementary School (Students move to a new elementary school at Wilbur Wright Middle School site)
200 S. Wright St.
- Gorman School
156 Grant St.
- Loos Elementary School
45 Wampler Ave.
- Franklin Elementary School
2617 E. Fifth St.
- Hickorydale Elementary School
2101 Hickorydale Drive
- Jefferson Elementary School
1223 N. Euclid Ave.
- Lincoln Elementary School (Students move to the new Cleveland Elementary School this fall)
401 Nassau St.
- Meadowdale Elementary School
4448 Thompson Drive
- Allen Elementary School
132 Alaska St.
- Carlson Elementary School (Students move to the new Fairport Elementary School at the Kings Highway site)
807 S. Gettysburg Ave.
- Patterson-Kennedy School
258 Wyoming St.
UPDATE: Click here to see The schedule for when the 15 schools already in the pipeline will open.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools, School Construction
A unversity leader’s shocking death
There is a shocking story in the San Francisco Chronicle today about University of California-Santa Cruz President Denice Denton’s suicide jump from a 42-story building.
This is a horrible tragedy. Denton was known as a real fighter. Just last year, she was one of the first women to confront Harvard’s then-president Larry Summers about his comments that women are not cut out for science. It’s a terrible loss in many ways, and leaves us with one less strong voice for women among university leaders.
Which raises an important question.
Despite being a strong personality, Denton apparently was severely depressed about her personal and professional problems. She had been president of the school just over a year and had been at the center of a couple of controversies about her pay ($600,000 annually) and the hiring of her partner by the school. At one point, someone threw a brick through her window last year.
One observer suggests to me this might be an example of a need for better support for top women administrators in academia. Denton was part of what is still a very small group of women university presidents — this realm still is largely a boys’ club.
Certainly Denton had deep issues that were unique to her situation, but effective mentoring could have helped lower the stress of some heated situations.
It also makes me worry about the way university debates can become inflamed and sometimes get very personal. Criticism is part of the job description, but it’s easy to demonize a university president and forget that she is a real person.
Do you think this story might show that women university professors need more support?
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Colleges and Universities
Not it! Playground games banned!
USA Today reports the trend toward banning simple playground games is expanding as more schools fear kids will get hurt.
This is an insane trend, probably driven by lawsuits much like the removal of high diving boards that I wrote about earlier this week.
When will the pendulum finally begin to swing back away from the rampant over protection and suffocating lawyering that is taking all the fun out of childhood?
Let me make it clear that I am in favor of sensible precautions. We made fun of kids for wearing bicycle helmets when I was a kid and I glad that trend has reversed, just to choose one example. And there are dangers out there, like pedophiles and fast-moving cars, for which kids need to learn some basics about how to protect themselves.
But how far should it go? Do four-year-olds really need self defense classes? Should kids be forbidden from even RUNNING at school?
How can reasonable people help return sensibility to places where fear has taken us over the edge?
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: School Violence
Get off the high dive!
One more thrill, or terror if you were like me, enjoyed by kids in our day is passing to a bygone era.
Lawyers are making community pools say goodbye to the high dive.
Here’s an excerpt from from a column in the Wall Street Journal by Steve Moore:
I’m now an official victim of the trial lawyers. So are my kids and the 800 members of our community pool that opened this summer without a high diving board.
The three-meter board had been a fixture of our pool at Chesterbrook Swim Club in Fairfax County, Va., for as long as anyone can remember. But the county has declared that it can no longer afford to pay the liability insurance for it — and so we’ve been grounded.
Most of the parents and kids share my disappointment at being cheated out of one of the great joys of summertimes past. No high board means no more “atomic” cannonballs, can openers, jack knives and watermelons, the kind of attention-grabbing dives that boys love to perform, sending a quarter of the pool’s water spraying onto unsuspecting sunbathers nearby. And no more graceful teenage girls either, performing double flips with a twist, entering the water with hardly a ripple.
So why can’t we just have a sign that reads: “Jump off this board at your own risk”? Some of our club members, many of whom are lawyers, say the elimination of the high board is for the safety of “the children.”
Moore says there are lots of drownings and injuries in swimming pools across the country each year, but few of them actually involve diving boards.
Which brings us back to the trial lawyers. Diving accidents may be rare, but when they occur, lawyers become relentless in their quest for a jackpot jury verdict. In one famous 1993 case, a 14-year-old boy in Washington state took a “suicide dive” — headfirst with no arms out for protection — off the board of a neighbor’s pool. He was tragically paralyzed from the neck down when he hit his head on the bottom of the pool. Despite the boy’s own unsafe behavior, the parents’ legal team sued every imaginable party—the neighbors, the pool-construction company, the diving-board manufacturer, the pool industry—and the family won a $10 million jury award.
Ever since, it’s been off to the races. Even cases in which there is no negligence on anyone’s part can lead to jury awards of $5 million or more.
Two of my daughters count jumping off the high dive last summer among their greatest acomplishments. And when we joined the pool, having a high dive was one of the pool manager’s big selling points since so few still do.
What can be done to save the high dive?
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Sports and Athletics
In Dayton, whites lag in graduation rate
By Scott Elliott
Dayton Daily News
DAYTON — Like the rest of Ohio, Dayton has a huge gap between the graduation rate of black and white kids.
But here, it’s the white kids who lag behind.
Last week, Education Week magazine published a report that showed Ohio had one of the nation’s worst graduation rate gaps: 80.5 percent of white students graduated compared with 50.7 percent for black students.
But in Dayton, those numbers are nearly reversed. On last year’s state report card, 76.3 percent of the district’s black students graduated, compared with 51.1 percent for white students. And white kids graduated less often here despite outscoring their black classmates on all 21 state achievement tests last year.
“We’ve recognized for some time that we have some issues with high school kids,� school board member Mario Gallin said. “I don’t think we’ve had a specific conversation on this discrepancy, but we are certainly aware there are racial gaps.�
Dayton’s numbers result partly from the size of the district’s black enrollment: Just 21 percent of high school students are white.
But most white students also attend just two schools, and one of those schools — Stivers School for the Arts — is one of the Miami Valley’s highest rated high schools. That helps account for the high test scores for white students.
Of about 1,200 white high school students, 30 percent attend Stivers, where students must audition and show artistic talent to be admitted. Both black and white Stivers students score well on tests and graduate at high rates, which helped 95.5 percent of white students graduate from the school on last year’s report card.
That high-scoring group of white students may be helping to drive up white test scores for the district.
The low graduation rate is another story. Almost half of all white high school students in the district attend Belmont High School, an open-enrollment school that last year was rated in “academic emergency� for low test performance.
At Belmont, 58 percent of the kids are white, and 64 percent of white students graduate. At Meadowdale, the white graduation rate was 54 percent. It was just 23 percent at Colonel White, while at Dunbar — which had 18 white students — the white graduation rate was not reported.
In some ways, there’s never been more attention on keeping kids from quitting school in Dayton.
Over the past five years, the number of Dayton charter schools that target dropouts has grown to 11 and the school board has put in place almost a half-dozen programs designed to make high school a more attractive place.
And school officials say the problem is not specific to any racial group, even if the district’s numbers show far fewer white students graduate than black students.
“Among lower-income family groups, there’s a sense of malaise — a feeling that nothing we do is going to make a difference,� Dayton school board member Mario Gallin said. “I notice with some of the younger kids they have no vision of what they are going to do when they grow up or what the world is like outside their neighborhood.�
Dayton’s overall graduation rate has been on the rise — it’s expected to reach 73 percent on this year’s state report card, due out in August, up from 53 percent two years ago.
And school officials say they are closing the gap between black and white kids when it comes to graduating from high school — two years ago, just 34.7 percent of white students graduated, but Dayton expects its upcoming report card to show 60 percent of white kids earned diplomas.
The district has made gains by focusing new resources toward preventing dropouts. Its “credit recovery� program, for instance, now allows kids to make up classes they failed through online courses before and after school.
This fall, Dayton also will launch an alternative technology high school, partly in hopes of serving kids who don’t do well in traditional schools.
These programs are designed to complement other high school improvements, such as the Dayton Early College Academy on the University of Dayton campus and the academic magnet program at Colonel White High School — two programs designed for kids with high potential.
This year, the district also will begin work on its new career technical high school on the campus of Sinclair Community College.
Board member Clayton Luckie said these alternatives help kids with special challenges.
“It’s unbelievable, for one thing, how many hours some of our kids work,� he said. “A lot of our seniors help support their families. You have to find ways to get kids engaged in the educational process.�
Permalink | | Categories: Dayton Public Schools, My Favorite DDN Stories
Other data on Dayton, race and schools
The first question that arises from my story today is why white kids in Dayton graduate far less often than black kids, a reverse of the national and state trend?
Here are some other questions raised by the data:
—Stivers School for the Arts, once again, is at the center of the delicate question of race. And the question is this: Why does a district that has a high school enrollment that is 80 percent black, and has a top rated high school, only send 11 percent of its black high school students to that school?
—In a related question, while overall the district’s enrollment is 70 percent black, why is high school enrollment is nearly 80 percent black?
—Why do 80 percent of white high school students attend just two schools — Stivers and Belmont? The percentages of white students are amazingly small at the other schools — Dunbar (2.3), Colonel White (4.4), Meadowdale (8.5) and Patterson (8.8).
—My stories talk about several high school improvements the board has made or has planned at Colonel White and Patterson, plus new programs like DECA and the alternative technology high school. But what should the board do to address consistently low performance at Meadowdale, Dunbar and Belmont? Dunbar and Belmont, in particular, have been rated in “academic emergency” by the state for three consecutive years for low test performance.
I welcome you thoughts on why these conditions exist and what the school board can or should do about them.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
In Dayton, white kids lag behind black
Like the rest of Ohio, Dayton has a huge gap between the graduation rate of black and white kids.
But here it’s the white kids who are far behind.
Last week, Education Week magazine published a report that showed Ohio had one of the nation’s worst graduation rate gaps, with 80.5 percent of white students graduating statewide while only 50.7 percent of black kids receive diplomas.
But in Dayton, those numbers are nearly reversed. On last year’s state report card, 76.3 percent of the city’s black students, but only 51.1 percent of white students, graduated.
And white kids graduated less often here despite the fact that they out-scored their black classmates on all 21 state achievement tests on last year’s report card.
“We’ve recognized for some time that we have some issues with high school kids,� school board member Mario Gallin said. “I don’t think we’ve had a specific conversation on this discrepancy, but we are certainly aware there are racial gaps.�
Dayton’s numbers may result partly from what high schools white students attend and the sheer size of the district’s black enrollment compared to white.
Just 21 percent of high school students are white. Of about 1,200 white high school students, 30 percent attend Stivers School for the Arts, one of the Miami Valley’s highest rated high schools. Students must audition and show artistic talent to be selected to attend Stivers.
Both black and white Stivers students score well on tests and graduate at high rates, which helped 95.5 percent of white students graduate from the school on last year’s report card.
That high scoring group of white high school students may be helping to drive up white high school test scores for the district.
But almost half of all white high school students in Dayton attends Belmont High School, an open enrollment school that last year was rated in “academic emergency� for low test performance. At Belmont, 58 percent of the kids are white but just 64 percent of white students graduate.
Gallin said many new graduates in Dayton are the first in their families to receive a high school diploma. “You would think across the board we’d be further down the line than this,� she said. “It’s a combination of societal and educational issues.�
In some ways, there’s never been more attention on keeping kids from quitting school in Dayton.
Over the past five years, the number of Dayton charter schools that target dropouts has grown to 11 and the school board has put in place almost a half-dozen programs designed to make high school a more attractive place.
And school officials say the problem is not specific to any racial group, even if the district’s numbers show far fewer white students graduate than black students.
“Among lower-income family groups, there’s a sense of malaise — a feeling that nothing we do is going to make a difference,� Dayton school board member Mario Gallin said. “I notice with some of the younger kids they have no vision of what they are going to do when they grow up or what the world is like outside their neighborhood.�
Dayton’s overall graduation rate has been on the rise — it’s expected to reach 73 percent on this year’s state report card, due out in August, up from 53 percent two years ago.
And school officials say they are closing the gap between black and white kids when it comes to graduating from high school — two years ago, just 34.7 percent of white students graduated, but Dayton expects its upcoming report card to show 60 percent of white kids earned diplomas.
The district has made gains by focusing new resources toward preventing dropouts. Its “credit recovery� program, for instance, now allows kids to make up classes they failed through online courses before and after school.
This fall, Dayton also will launch an alternative technology high school, partly in hopes of serving kids who don’t do well in traditional schools.
These programs are designed to complement other high school improvements, such as the Dayton Early College Academy on the University of Dayton campus and the academic magnet program at Colonel White High School — two programs designed for kids with high potential.
This year, the district also will begin work on its new career technical high school on the campus of Sinclair Community College.
Board member Clayton Luckie said these alternatives help kids with special challenges.
“It’s unbelievable, for one thing, how many hours some of our kids work,� he said. “A lot of our seniors help support their families. You have to find ways to get kids engaged in the educational process.�
Permalink | Comments (8) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Reasons to love (and fear) Bible school
Why I loved Bible school this week:
For $50, two of my kids are spending four hours a day singing songs, making art projects and talking about the power of love and faith.
That would be good enough for me, but then there was a little extra payoff.
Just after I returned home from work yesterday, seven-year-old Claire taps me on the elbow and says, “Can I talk to you in private?”
Uh-oh. What could this be about? Let me guess — she misses her dead cat, she got into another fight with her best friend (also attending Bible school) or maybe she misses her mom, who is out of town?
Well, we headed to the computer room, shut the door and sat down on a chair. After stopping first to chase away her sister from listening at the door, she tells me softly with a very serious face:
“Dad, I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate all the things you do for me. Even though I don’t tell you often enough, I know you do lots of nice things for me, so I wanted to say thank you and tell you I love you.”
I don’t care if they made her memorize the script for this homework assignment, it was worth every penny of that $50.
Why my best friend didn’t love Bible school this week:
While my kids were coming home after spending all morning holding hands and singing “Kumbaya,” his daughter came home the first day from a different Bible school with … a sword.
Not a real sword, of course, but one they must have spent some time making out of cardboard and construction paper — a pretty fair forgery. Apparently, this was “the sword of faith.” Ok, he thought, seems a little odd for Bible school, but no big deal. The next day, she brought home … a shield. Make that the “the shield of salvation.”
Hmm.
Finally, today there was a wrap-up Mass/performance by the kids. And out they come in full Crusader battle gear — swords or faith, shields of salvation, helmets of who-knows-what — looking like they’re ready to charge off and re-take Jerusalem!
My friend was not entirely amused. This Bible school seemed a little light on love and togetherness and a little heavy on military tactics.
So before you sign your kids up for Bible school this summer, you might first want to ask about the theme for the week.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Teaching and Learning
Quitting teaching in disgust
Just after I mentioned that some of the best teacher blogs are probably not well known, I discovered an interesting one I’d not seen before through the Carnival of Education, hosted this week at the Why Homeschool? blog.
The carnival is a weekly compilation of the best education blogging of the week, usually hosted at The Education Wonks blog. The best post this week is from a first year teacher who has been agonizing about whether she should stick with her new profession in an appropriately-named blog called Should I Stay or Should I Go?
In this post, she makes her decision …
…and she’s decided to quit. The final straw? At the end of the school year she was pressured to pass two kids who should have failed. It’s a sad, discouraging story.
On another note, I’ve also been included for the past two weeks in The Carnival of Ohio Politics. This week, they included my post on Ohio voucher spin vs. reality, a post that also drew a response on the education blog, Edspresso.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: The Carnival of Education
Ohio’s grad rate 13th in nation
By Scott Elliott
Staff Writer
Ohio ranked 13th in the nation with a 76.5 percent graduation rate in 2002-03, says a new report by Education Week.
But Ohio’s black-white achievement gap was one of the worst in the country, with 80.5 percent of whites graduating and 50.7 percent of blacks.
The gap has been a persistent problem in Ohio for several years, with blacks and whites also far apart on state achievement tests. And Ohio’s gap has been growing on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally backed test.
Education department spokeswoman Karla Carruthers said Education Week’s methods don’t account for student mobility, which might alter the results, but Ohio supports the state-by-state comparisons.
“It’s important to note that regardless of the calculation method used, the message for all Ohio’s educators is the same — the rates of all graduating students are too low,� she said.
Most of Ohio’s black students attend one of the state’s eight large, low-performing urban districts, which also serve high-poverty populations.
For its study, Education Week used a formula called “cumulative promotion index,� a more stringent standard that considers the number of kids who move to the next grade each year along with how many receive diplomas.
Education Week found most states’ rates were lower using its method, including Ohio, which officially reported 84 percent graduating in 2003.
Permalink | |
Ohio’s grad rate 13th in nation
By Scott Elliott
Staff Writer
Ohio ranked 13th in the nation with a 76.5 percent graduation rate in 2002-03, says a new report by Education Week.
But Ohio’s black-white achievement gap was one of the worst in the country, with 80.5 percent of whites graduating and 50.7 percent of blacks.
The gap has been a persistent problem in Ohio for several years, with blacks and whites also far apart on state achievement tests. And Ohio’s gap has been growing on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally backed test.
Education department spokeswoman Karla Carruthers said Education Week’s methods don’t account for student mobility, which might alter the results, but Ohio supports the state-by-state comparisons.
“It’s important to note that regardless of the calculation method used, the message for all Ohio’s educators is the same — the rates of all graduating students are too low,� she said.
Most of Ohio’s black students attend one of the state’s eight large, low-performing urban districts, which also serve high-poverty populations.
For its study, Education Week used a formula called “cumulative promotion index,� a more stringent standard that considers the number of kids who move to the next grade each year along with how many receive diplomas.
Education Week found most states’ rates were lower using its method, including Ohio, which officially reported 84 percent graduating in 2003.
Permalink | |
The best teacher blogs
Over at the LA Times’ School Me! Blog, Bob Sipchen and Janine Kahn are announcing their 10 favorite teacher blogs one per day over the next 10 days. (Great idea. Wish I had thought of it.)
The truth is, I’ll be interested to see the final list because there aren’t that many really good teacher blogs, or at least there aren’t that many that are well known in the blogosphere.
Even so, School Me! off to a strong start. Kicking off their list at No. 10 is one of my daily reads — Mrs. Frizzle. Mrs. Friz is a former Teach for America participant who stuck with the profession and still teaches in New York City. She’s about to embark on quite an adventure as she will be living in Istanbul next year as part of a teacher exchange program.
Since School Me! has already beaten me to highlighting one of my favorite teacher blogs, I thought I’d try to upstage them by releasing the rest of my list all at once. Here are my top SEVEN favorite teacher blogs:
No 7. From the TFA Trenches
Mr. AB is teaching at a school in California through Teach for America, a program that places top college students in urban and rural classrooms. He may be done for the summer, since he hasn’t posted in about a month, but this blog give a good flavor for the frustrations of a motivated, idealistic teacher in the face of the obstacles of urban education.
No 6. Polaski3’s View From Here
Ever wondered what your middle school teachers really thought about you and your classmates, the principal, the school, the textbook, etc? Polaski is very authentic voice with sometimes funny, sometimes outraged commentaries on the good, the bad and the insane of teaching in a middle school.
No 5. NYC Educator
This blog is updated daily with news items and commentary, often about New York City and New York state, but sometimes also discusses national or international issues. He tries a lot of different stuff, even the occasional narrative story, which I like. Lots of good photos and graphics, too.
No 4. The Shrewdness of Apes
The Oklahoma-reared “Ms Cornelius” is a thoughtful, versatile writer with interesting comments on a variety of school-related issues. It’s great when she gets fired up about an issue. And if you like movies, you can try to match her quote-for-quote on “Movie Madness Monday.”
No 3. Mrs. Frizzle
See my comments above.
No 2. The Education Wonks
In many ways, the Wonks are the kings of education blogs. The California-based teacher (influenced by his Wife Wonk and Teen Wonk) has an amazing talent for finding the weird, shocking, amazing or outrageous education news before anyone else. The Wonks launched and often host the weekly Carnival of Education, a compilation of the best education blog posts each week.
No 1. Mr. Babylon
OK, he’s posted sparsely for the past six months or so, but I am an absolutely addicted fan of this guy’s blog. Mr. Babylon is an often frustrated and occasionally inspired teacher at a, ahem, “crappy” high school in the Bronx. And the guy can really write. Like all good writing, his posts grab you because he really puts himself out there. He lets you experience what he thinks and feels as it happens, even if later he regrets those thoughts or actions. This blog is a really good window into the reality of inner city schools. Sometimes it’s hilariously bizarre. Sometimes it’s so exasperating you want to hit somebody. Sometimes it’s hard to stomach. But occasionally, good things happen too. For a really good flavor of this blog, check out his own list of “favorite posts.”
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
America’s most banned books
In South Florida, Matt Pinzur of the Miami Herald has been covering the battle over a book called “Vamos A Cuba!” There’s an effort to ban the book, which some say paints an overly rosy picture of Fidel Castro’s regime, from school libraries.
Pinzur and an colleague had a great idea while working on this story — they looked up what books are most banned in the U.S. and checked to see how many of them are available in Miami’s school libraries.
My favorite from the banned book list? Captain Underpants.
Wait until you see what else …
… offends America.
The list, which Pinzur has posted on his blog Miami Gradebook, is interesting both for what’s on it, and what’s not. Check it out and post a comment here telling us what surprised you most about the list.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Schools and Politics
Save Screech’s house!
If you’re under age 35, you probably watched the Saturday morning teen schoolhouse soap “Saved by the Bell” growing up and know the actor Dustin Diamond, who played the character “Screech.”
Well, Screech is all grown up, sporting a scruffy beard and apparently didn’t pay enough attention in math class because his personal finances are a mess. To save his Milwaukee house from forclosure, he’s selling T-shirts at $15 a pop ($20 autographed) to try to raise cash.
If you go to Screech’s website and read his tale of woe, it’s clear he made some very bad decisions. But give him credit for thinking creatively now.
Teacher gifts gone too far?
There’s an interesting discussion going on over at Patti Ghezzi’s Get Schooled blog at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. A Get Schooled reader, who was irked by the persistent requests from her child’s class mother for parent “donations,” asks if a $20 end-of-the-year gift is too much for your child’s teacher.
I’d love to hear what readers here think.
I do each year give a holiday and end-of-the-year gift to my child’s teacher, but since my daughter is in first grade, there are fewer ethical issues (some commenters at Get Schooled likened a teacher gift to a bribe). Not only that, my daughter was horrified at the idea of just giving a gift to her classroom teacher — she wouldn’t let us leave out the gym teacher, music teacher, art teacher, librarian, counselor or principal!
So at the end of the year we gave them all gift cards — $15 for her classroom teacher and $10 for everyone else, I think. And if you do the math, you can see that it cost us about $75 total! That’s a lot, I know. But heck, to me it’s a small token of gratitude to these people who care for and teach my daughter all day for 180 days a year. This year in particular, my daughter really flourished in her classwork and I was most appreciative of the efforts of her teachers.
Even so, I sympathize with the Get Schooled parent who felt like $20 was too much and that the class mother’s repeated reminders were over-the-top. For her, here is my advice:
- First of all, give what you want and what you can afford. So this one mother might think you’re a schmuck if you only send her $10 or $15 instead of $20. So what? Don’t fall victim to the pressure.
- Remember that this is for the teacher, not the pushy parent. It made me quiver a little when the Get Schooled reader said she finally decided not to give anything because of the pestering notes from the class mom. If you don’t want to give because it doesn’t feel right to you, that’s fine. But don’t not give just because the self-appointed collector is annoying.
- Know this — if you do give the teacher a gift you are probably in the minority. Earlier this year my daughter’s teacher had a baby and one of the moms took a collection for a gift. My daughter forgot to give me the solicitation until days later. When I found the note I called the mom to see if we could still get in on the gift. She was very grateful for my call and told me less than five kids in a class of 17 had contributed (she and I kicked in a little extra each so the teacher could get something nice with the gift card). I think this sort of scenario is much more common than the teacher who gets a London Fog coat with her end-of-the-year cash.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: The Parent-Teacher Divide
The back door out of “emergency”
Should a school district that meets none of the state’s 25 “report card” standards be allowed to receive a better grade just because it’s made good standardized test gains?
There’s a chance this could happen in Dayton come August.
In today’s paper, I wrote about how Dayton school officials think they might get out of academic emergency, even though right now it is not a sure thing that Dayton will meet any of the state indicators.
This idea of rewarding school districts for growth is new, and it’s an idea low income urban districts like Dayton very much favor. Dayton and others have long argued that they don’t get enough credit for moving their low-scoring kids forward.
While more affluent districts with already high-scoring kids might make little or no gains, they still earn top ratings from the state. Meanwhile, districts like Dayton argue they don’t get enough credit when the take low scoring kids and make really big gains, even if they don’t meet the high thresholds the state standards require.
So the state ultimately was convinced that it’s fair to consider growth for the report card. Thus the “performance index” was born. It’s a complex calculation that seeks to estimate test score growth across several rating categories.
All the results are not yet in for Dayton and many possibilities remain. Dayton still could meet the standard in a category or two. Or it might miss on performance index after all.
But as of right now, Dayton has met no indicators, but the district’s own numbers show it has made enough gain to earn a bump up out of “academic emergency” to the next category, “academic watch.”
What do you think? Should a district be allowed out of academic emergency for growth even if it goes 0 for 25 on the state standards?
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Engineers vs. math teachers
There were some really good comments under my recent post about mathematics content knowledge vs teaching skills. Several who commented had themselves gone from careers in engineering into teaching, or thought about doing so. There were some really good insights into the challenges of getting those who are well-trained and experienced with mathematics and science — and who might be interested in teaching — into classrooms. If you haven’t looked in a while, check it out.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Charters: Only on the chain gang?
When I first met him back in 1999, Dick Penry was a recently retired and widely beloved 30-year principal in the Dayton school system. And Penry was thrilled with his new retirement project — starting a charter school from scratch.
It was interesting to talk to Penry then and he’s interesting to talk to now. Back then, he was just what the charter school movement said it was about — he was an educator who cared deeply for kids and had new ideas for helping them learn but had spent most of his career doing all he could to protect his small enclaves of quality.
With a charter school, Penry in theory could be freed from the constraints of the school district and could push the envelope, limited only of his ability to think innovatively.
But this week, Penry’s school decided to go back under the district’s umbrella and cease to be a charter school altogether.
And in a recent conversation, Penry was adamant that individual operators like he was — the so called “mom and pop” charter school operator — is ultimately doomed. Penry believes to make a charter school work, every school will have to be affiliated with a strong supervisory partner — either a charter school management company chain like Edison Schools or Heritage Academies or a school district.
Dayton was unique early on in that it’s charter school movement was mostly mom and pop. Of the first six schools that opened here in 1998-99, only one — the Edison Schools-affiliated Dayton Academy — was part of a national chain. The others were Penry’s WOW school; the Richard Allen Academy run by Jeanette Harris; Monica Rhea’s Rhea Academy; ISUS Trade and Tech Prep begun by Ann Higdon; and the City-Day Community School, begun by four teachers.
Amazingly, all these schools are all still operating. Rhea and City-Day have barely hung on through financial difficulties and trouble with the state. But ISUS is a charter school star, training dropouts for industrial and technology jobs, and Richard Allen has grown into a mini-chain of its own with four campuses.
Penry was an early pioneer when it came to partnering, even as some old friends considered him a public school traitor. WOW was the state’s first “conversion” charter. Penry forged a contract that allowed him to use a district school building and hire union teachers.
But even with those advantages, the school was bogged down with costs and operational red tape, whether it be buying curriculum, computers or school lunches, or complying with financial reporting rules.
The advantage of direct affiliation with a larger entity, be it a school district or a management company, is two-fold — expertise and purchasing power. Having a big brother to handle those administrative tasks may be necessary to clear the cobwebs so the school can focus on teaching and learning.
Perhaps this explains the WOW school’s struggles. I visited the school many times over the years and it deserved its reputation as a great school. It was a disciplined, interactive environment with an energized, collaborative staff.
Penry was the dynamic leader he’s always been. Once, he invited me to a routine parent meeting at which the school was to plan an annual spaghetti dinner event. I got there a couple minutes late and they had to bring me a chair because the room already was full of parents. The more the meeting went on, the more chairs they had to find. By the end, I’d bet there were 35 or 40 parents at the meeting.
Contrast that to any PTA meeting you’ve ever been to. Usually, it’s a handful of core volunteers and that’s about it. When I left WOW that night, the highest compliment a school could earn crossed my mind as I pulled out of the lot: “I’d send my kids to this school.”
Even so, WOW underperformed academically. With an enrollment that mirrored the district in terms of poverty and other obstacles, Penry was sure WOW could do better and he was perplexed by test scores that usually didn’t beat the district averages by much.
Finally, in 2004, he decided maybe he was the problem. After more disappointing scores Penry told me he thought it was time for someone else to give it a try and announced his retirement — again — from education.
On Tuesday, new principal Cleaster Jackson told the school board the WOW’s new status as a “contract” school with the district was a good deal for both sides.
For the district, WOW’s rapidly improving test scores will count in the district averages and the school’s enrollment counts for the district too.
For WOW, “we’re going to get the best of both worlds,” Jackson said. “We’ll keep some of our autonomy as a governing board but we won’t have to take some of the steps we used to take as part of a large district. And we’ll get all the benefits of a large district and the excellent services here.”
Still, doesn’t it seem odd to think that the charter school movement some day may not have a place for the little guy?
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, My Favorite Posts
Top charter DuBois saved
Word has it the leadership at the Fordham Foundation was pretty perturbed when one of their favorite charter schools — and a school they sponsor — suddenly decided to close without telling anyone, not even Fordham.
Well, Jen Mrozowski at the Cincinnati Enquirer reports today that the high performing school in the troubled Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati will remain open after all.
But to save the WEB DuBois school, the governing board had to cut its budget significantly, lay off 18 people and demote Wilson Willard, the founder and genius behind the school’s educational program. It will be interesting to see if the school can maintain its high level of performance under these conditions.
And that assumes the school can even survive, with the state auditor now combing through its records and the Cincinnati school district challenging its enrollment figures. The future suddenly looks quite uncertain for this one-time darling of the charter school movement.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice
One less charter in Dayton
I just realized this brief I wrote from Tuesday’s school board meeting never made it into the paper (CORRECTION: Apparently the item did make it into the paper). World of Wonder was one of the the first “mom and pop” style charter schools and an impressive one at that. The school’s decision to become a regular public school is actually quite interesting. I’ll have additional commentary on this later.
WOW joins Dayton school district
The World of Wonder charter school, one of the few “conversion” charter schools in the state, came back under the umbrella of Dayton Public Schools Tuesday.
The school board voted to make the school a “contract school,” which will allow WOW to operate more independently than other district schools but without the complete freedom it enjoyed as a charter school.
Conversion charter schools are schools that move from the direct supervision of a school district to independent management. WOW persuaded the district to allow it to convert the former Residence Park Elementary School to an independent charter school in 1999 under the leadership of former Principal Dick Penry.
The change also allows the district to count WOW’s achievement test scores in its district averages and permits the school to use district services at no extra cost.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice
These schools are safe
In today’s Dayton Daily News, I wrote that seven or eight Dayton elementary schools will not be rebuilt as part of the Dayton Public Schools construction program because of enrollment declines. Wondering if your school is safe? Here is the list of schools that already are in the pipeline for construction and will be part of the master plan the district will submit next month for sure:
The six high schools will be rebuilt
• Thurgood Marshall High School will replace Colonel White at the former Roth High School site on Hoover Ave. Construction is underway.
• David Ponitz Career Technical high school will replace Patterson at a site near Sinclair Community College
• Stivers will be back on its Fifth Street site in 2007
• Meadowdale will return to the same site
• Dunbar will return to the same site
These 12 elementary schools are either underway or already part of the master plan
• Kiser opens on the same site this summer
• Wogaman opens at the same site this fall
• Belle Haven opens at the same site this fall
• Cleveland opens at the same site this winter
• The Charity Adams Earley Academy for Girls will be renovated at the same site
• The Roosevelt School for Boys will be built at the Roosevelt High School site
• A new Montessori school will be located at the Patterson Career Center on River Corridor Drive
• The World of Wonder school will be at the same site (formerly Residence Park Elementary School)
• A new school will replace Cornell Heights on Kings Highway
• Ruskin will be at the same site
• Horace Mann will be at the same site
• Louise Troy will be at the same site
• Kemp will be rebuilt at the same site (Sorry. I accidentally left Kemp off the list initially.)
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools, School Construction
Carnival conversation
This week’s Carnival of Education is done up conversation style by The Science Goddess. The carnival, usually hosted by The Education Wonks, is a weekly round up of the best education blogging posts.
My offering this week is a post about what you need to know to teach math, with some perhaps surprising info about how hard it can be to teach the subject, even if you are a professional mathematician or engineer.
Permalink | | Categories: The Carnival of Education
Ohio’s voucher eligibility rules
I’ve had several calls and e-mails today asking about how to determine if a child is eligible to apply for a voucher, since the state is now planning a second enrollment period from July 21 to Aug. 4.
Changes to the voucher law were passed by the legislature as part of a budget corrections bill in March. Vouchers allow students in consistently low performing schools to use up to $5,000 in state money for private school tuition.
Under the new rules:
• Students attending schools that have been rated in the two lowest state categories — academic watch or academic emergency — would be eligible. This would include Dayton’s Belle Haven, Edison, Fairview, Hickorydale, Cornell Heights and McNary elementary schools, plus Dunbar and Belmont high schools; Jefferson Twp. High School; and Camden Elementary School in Preble County.
• In Dayton, all incoming kindergartners and all students attending charter schools rated in academic watch or emergency also can seek vouchers.
• To seek a voucher, students from low-scoring schools should first gain admission to a private school that accepts vouchers. Then the school must assist them to apply for the voucher.
For more information go to the state’s EdChoice program home page.
UPDATE: 409 students so far have won vouchers to attend private schools in Dayton. Here is the complete list of private schools accepting vouchers and how many voucher students are already planning to attend this fall.
Permalink | | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice
Voucher spin vs. reality
There’s an interesting contrast in today’s the Dayton Daily News between the political spin and the on-the-street reality on the issue of vouchers. And I enjoyed how one genuine parent voice brought some real clarity to the question of whether Ohio’s statewide voucher program is off to a great start or a disappointing start.
My stories in today’s paper focused on the sparse number of applicants for the statewide voucher program, which launches this fall.
Even after House Speaker Jon Husted, R-Kettering, pushed through expanded rules that in March more than doubled the number of eligible kids to 46,000, the final tally was just over 2,500 applicants for 14,000 vouchers.
The first pro-voucher response I got was an email from the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation in Indianapolis. Milton Friedman, the famous economist, first proposed the idea of school vouchers and his foundation is the strongest voice advocating the concept nationwide.
The Friedman folks helpfully sent some talking points out to Ohio’s pro-voucher crowd with a rebuttal to any media suggestion that the 5.5 percent initial participation in the voucher program is a small number. The group ran a list of other programs and showed initial participation was:
- 0.7 percent in Milwaukee
- 0.3 percent for Florida McKay scholarships
- 1.7 percent in Washington, D.C.
- And even smaller in less similar tax credit programs in other states
A short time later, I got an email from The Buckeye Institute in Columbus pointing to an opinion column by its education policy director Matthew Carr, which had taken Friedman’s comparisons and turned Ohio’s low participation into a media conspiracy. Here’s an excerpt:
During the last few weeks, newspapers across the state have been writing up the enrollment tally as “only� or “just� so many takers of the 14,000 vouchers made available by this program. The use of such pejoratives is both misleading and inappropriate.
Still reporting for today’s story, I spoke to Jon Husted, the chief voucher proponent in the legislature. Husted had also clearly read Friedman’s talking points, echoing the same themes. Husted said participation was not bad, although he quickly noted a second enrollment period had been established over the summer. He argued that the program would grow as more parents learned about vouchers and even hinted the program could be HELPED by smaller numbers, saying:
“One of the failures of some charters schools was they grew too fast.”
Finally, though, I reached Jana Moody, a Dayton parent I had talked to over several months who very much wants to apply for a voucher. Moody’s kids already attend private schools. Moody said she made a huge financial sacrifice to send her kids to private schools because she was dissatisfied with the public schools.
Moody helped organize other private school parents who called lawmakers and advocated for expanding the voucher rules so those who already made the tough call to shell out for private schools could also apply. That effort failed despite support from Husted, who said there simply wasn’t support in Columbus for going that far with vouchers.
What was Moody’s view of the 5.5 percent participation in the voucher program?
She said when she heard the news it made her feel sick. She was shocked at how low the number was and was certain all or most of the vouchers would have been used if parents who already made the leap to private schools had been allowed to apply.
Already this morning I’ve received three emails from other local parents echoing her comments.
So is the voucher participation low? As someone who tracked the issue pretty closely for the past year, I thought it would be much higher.
But the program was hampered by several factors:
- First, the rules changed in the middle of the game when lawmakers expanded eligibility in March. So for months, parents had one message about eligibility only to get another message later on.
- Second, the rules are complicated and don’t make it very easy for parents. To apply for a voucher, a student must first apply and be accepted to a private school (which means paying application fees, etc.) and then the SCHOOL must submit the actual voucher application. It’s not a simple process.
- Third, I think Husted and others are probably right that it will take time for people to really understand the program and learn the ropes of applying.
But there’s no doubt 5.5 percent participation and as much as 11,000 unused vouchers has to be a disappointment for those favoring this reform.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, My Favorite Posts
The complete list of OGT results
On Saturday, the DDN reported the results of the March Ohio Graduation Test for schools in the the Miami Valley. For those interested, here is the complete list of every local school district and what percentage of their tenth graders passed the OGT:
Oakwood 95.4
Mason 91.9
Botkins 88.7
Cedar Cliff 88.6
Versallies 88.5
Centerville 87.7
Springboro 87.3
Kings 86.7
Arcanum 85.1
Sugarcreek 85.1
Covington 85
Northmont 84.8
Vandalia-Butler 84.7
Fort Loramie 84.7
Anna 81.3
Tipp City 80.8
Brookville 80.7
Beavercreek 80.2
Bethel 79.4
Tri-County North 79
Troy 78.6
Wayne 78
Franklin-Monroe 77.8
Kettering 77.6
Russia 76.3
Twin Valley South 76.2
Carlisle 76.2
Newton 74.5
Milton-Union 74.1
Valley View 72.6
Lebanon 72.4
Greenview 71.6
Miamisburg 71.4
Yellow Springs 71.2
Fairlawn 70.5
Miami East 70.2
New Lebanon 70.1
National Trail 69.9
Fairborn 68.4
Eaton 68.4
Little Miami 68
Piqua 67.7
Jackson Center 67.6
Xenia 67.5
State Average 66.5
Ansonia 66.1
Hardin-Houston 66.1
Bradford 66
Huber Heights 65
Tri-Village 64.2
West Carrollton 63.3
Mad River 62.9
Preble Shawnee 60
Greenville 57.4
Mississinawa Valley 56.8
Sidney 56.3
Franklin 53.3
Northridge 42.4
Trotwood-Madison 37.9
Dayton 29.9
Jefferson Twp. 27.5
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Testing
Oakwood best on state tests
I’m working on a story for tomorrow on how Miami Valley school districts fared on the Ohio Graduation Test. Here’s some quick results:
- Overall, Oakwood was the top scorer locally, ranking second in Ohio.
- Jefferson Twp., Dayton and Trotwood saw scores improve, but were still the worst scoring local districts. Even so, Jefferson Twp. is no longer worst in the state. That title goes to East Cleveland this year.
- Botkins and Piqua made big gains this year vs. last year.
- Cedar Cliff and Mason earned gold stars for good scores or for solid gains. Cedar Cliff had a perfect score on the OGT writing test — all kids passed. Mason moved up to second best in the area and sixth best in the state.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Testing
Psychiatric drugs for kids exploding
I saw this at Education Week’s website:
The use of antipsychotic drugs to treat children and adolescents increased by more than five times from 1993 to 2002, a study found.
The study, published in the June 2006 issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, estimates that the number of youths in the United States under age 20 who were treated with antipsychotic drugs for problems such as aggression and mood swings jumped from about 201,000 in 1993 to 1,224,000 in 2002.
There’s a lot of ways to look at this. Are doctors and parents too quick to medicate overly energetic or unfocused kids? Or is medicine getting better at targeting drugs that can make a difference for kids?
We’ve all heard horror stories of psychiatric drugs that harmed kids or of psychiatric evaluation gone awry. But I also know a few kids who were dramatically helped by these sorts of drugs with better classroom behavior and more learning at school.
Still, the increase in drug use is quite dramatic. It seems too big to be a good thing overall. What’s your take?
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Student Health and Safety
If you know math, is teaching easy?
Much education research shows that the best teachers have deep “content knowledge” — that is, they really know the subject they are teaching.
And last week, Intel’s chairman Craig Barrett told education reporters gathered in New Orleans that 30 percent of all math and science teachers are not specialists in math and science, but are teaching out of their areas of expertise.
Barrett also criticized teacher certification processes as cumbersome, hinting that they prevent professionals with deep content knowledge from trying teaching. A similar argument caused a blogosphere stir last month when Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times said teacher certification rules were keeping the likes of Meryl Streep and Colin Powell from teaching our kids.
But over at the NCLB blog run by the American Federation of Teachers, they had an interesting post this week about the challenge of teaching math. Citing research from the University of Michigan, they note that:
…math teachers were much better than mathematicians at identifying where students went wrong—an important fact to know to help put students back on track.
The study concluded that:
…there is a body of knowledge math teachers need to be effective.
This would seem to present a challenge to the notions that anyone can teach or that content knowledge is all that matters.
But perhaps there’s a middle ground. Even many educators admit that schools of education do not always require enough courses on the practical aspects of teaching. Could this be an argument for alternative certification programs that focus on teaching methods and strategies, provided the teacher candidate has demonstrated mastery of the subject matter?
Permalink | Comments (11) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Teaching and Learning
My mom made me fat
“Clean your plate or else!” and other authoritarian approaches to parenting can lead to overweight children, a new study finds.
Strict mothers were nearly five times more likely to raise tubby first-graders than mothers who treated their children with flexibility and respect while also setting clear rules.
Although the children of flexible, rule-setting moms mostly avoided obesity, the children of neglectful mothers and permissive mothers were twice as likely to get fat.
Sadly this Boston University study of childhood obesity relates strictly to young children and made no conclusions about how parenting affected weight later in life. So I guess I can’t blame my mom for my belt size.
But here’s my question. The Washington Post story excerpted above does not define what a “flexible but rule-setting” parenting style looks like. Seems a little like an oxymoron to me.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Young Children
Myth vs. reality? High tech jobs and the future
Everybody knows that the jobs of the near future, the jobs our kids will need their schools to prepare them for, will be more high tech and require more advanced skills in math and science than every before. That’s why everybody is going to need a college education.
But what if it wasn’t true?
Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and former New York Times education columnist, told education reporters from around the country Friday that he is not opposed to teaching kids more math and science. But he is afraid education policy-makers are building their case for change, and making decisions about how kids are educated, based on a huge myth.
Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, he first demonstrated where the conventional wisdom has come from — the simple fact is that college-educated Americans make far more than those who don’t go to college. And the gap is growing.
In 1973, a college degree on average translated to 25 percent more pay for men and 38 percent more for women. Today, a man with a college degree makes 41 percent more and a woman with a degree makes 46 percent more than those without. Figures like these are helping fuel the push to try to send everyone to college.
But what do those huge gaps mean in real dollars? In 1973, the average worker with a college degree made $19.77 an hour while a worker with a high school diploma only made $13.56 (in 2003 dollars).
By 2003, the college educated worker’s hourly wage had risen, but not by as much as you might expect — to $23.44. Meanwhile, the wage for a high school educated worker stood nearly still, at $13.57 an hour. (These figures are from a report called “The state of working America 2004-05”)
Perhaps this is because there is less demand for lower skilled jobs? Think again.
Rothstein argued that while jobs requiring higher education are growing rapidly, they are growing from a very small base. Meanwhile, jobs not requiring higher education are not declining — they also are growing, And while the demand for lower-skilled workers is growing more slowly, it is growing from a much larger base.
One of Rothstein’s charts showed (I’ve updated these numbers, which should have been in millions):
- 68,500,000 jobs requiring a high school diploma or less in 2004, or about 47 percent of all jobs in the U.S. economy.
- Far fewer jobs — 35,500,000 or 24 percent of all U.S. jobs — require at least a bachelor’s degree.
Those numbers in 10 years are projected to look like this:
- Jobs requiring a high school graduate or less — 75,400,000 or 46 percent of all jobs at that time
- Jobs requiring a college degree — 46,800,000 or 28 percent
These numbers demonstrate Rothstein’s point. In 10 years, there will be 11,300,000 more high-skilled jobs and 6,900,000 less-skilled jobs. Even so, the nature of the economy really won’t be changing very much or very fast and nearly half of all jobs still will not require a college degree.
More from Rothstein:
- Most of the new jobs being created in the U.S. are in fields like administrative support and sales, not high tech.
- Wages for mathematicians and scientists have actually fallen over 30 years.
- The growing wage gap between college-educated workers and those with high school only has been driven more by the collapse of unions and other labor market supports that held wages up for lower-skilled workers in the past. It’s not a matter of more demand for college-educated workers.
Rothstein says these realities need to be considered in education policy-making. For instance vocational education — a recent target for cuts at the federal level — should perhaps play a bigger, not smaller, role in school systems going forward.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Teaching and Learning
NEA to get in the blog game
A couple of months ago, I cornered Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association and asked him when the NEA was going to start its own blog?
Today I got the answer, and it’s good news for those who have been dying for a venue for conversation about the nation’s largest teachers union.
This has been a much-discussed issue among education bloggers, led by The Education Wonks, who months ago began asking when NEA would follow the lead of the UFT, New York’s teachers’ union which has a very good blog, and the American Federation of Teachers, which runs a blog about No Child Left Behind.
But here at the Education Writers Association conference, I learned NEA Today, the union’s magazine, is working on launching a blog, to be authored by its staff writers. And the plan is for the blog to be comment-enabled, although it may not be at first. So keep an eye on that site over the next month or two.
Permalink | | Categories: Urban School Issues
Intel’s chairman on improving U.S. education
Great examples of quality learning can be found everywhere, no matter how easy or challenging the circumstances — at schools in cities, the suburbs or rural towns and in public, private and charter schools.
What’s the common denominator?
It’s great teaching, said Craig Barrett, the chairman and former CEO of the computer giant Intel. Barrett spoke today at the Education Writers Association annual convention.
These high performing kids do well because of the expectations of their teachers, the close relationships between the staff and students or other factors that relate right back to consistently having a great teacher at the front of the room.
“That’s because the magic in the classroom is the teacher,” he said.
Here’s Barrett’s top three suggestions for improving education in the U.S.:
Improve teaching.
Barrett said 30 percent of math and science teachers in the U.S. are not certified to to teach their subject.
“For a young child to get through 12 years and stay interested in math they probably have to have a good math teacher just about every year,” he said. “But any one year, the chance of having a quality teacher in that subject is only 75 percent. This is part of the reason why our system is so effective at filtering out young children not interested in math by 12th grade.”
What can we do about this?
We need a high focus on teaching content to teachers and training them to teach, with a heavy focus on content, according to Barrett. He argued against today’s certification process, noting that he has a PhD, has taught at Stanford and run a major U.S, company but is not qualified to teach anywhere in the U.S. because of certification rules.
Barrett also believes in pay for performance, saying, “If you pay good teachers the same as bad teachers what happens is good teachers leave and bad teachers stay.” He added later that teachers need to be paid more comparably to other professionals like doctors and lawyers.
Accurately assess student results
Expectations are too low, Barrett said, noting that most state exit exams require only eighth grade math. And he said the U.S. too often compares only to itself — city vs. city and this year vs. last year — rather than comparing to our competition by looking at how our kids do vs. kids around the world, especially the “3 billion new capitalists” in nations who formerly closed their economies to international markets.
Barrett urged reporters to compare internationally, but he didn’t have good ideas about how to do this in places like Dayton. There are not good measures to see how Dayton kids specifically do vs. kids in Singapore, Buenos Aires or Amsterdam. International test score comparisons are usually only on a macro level.
Competition
As a capitalist, Barrett likes competition. “I don’t know of a monopoly that has lasted through time that has served its customers well,” he said. In questions, though, he acknowledged that for education isn’t a perfect setting for market-driven change. But he still maintained that competition should help improve results.
In a last word, Barrett claimed to have a certain cure for the dropout problem in the U.S. — require all kids to show a high school diploma in order to receive a driver’s license in any state.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Getting schooled in New Orleans
To get to New Orleans’ ninth ward, you drive along that infamous canal that breached last September, spilling a torrent of terror, up onto a tall bridge. As you crest over to the other side, the crumbled matchstick scene of hundreds of destroyed homes lumps your throat and raises goosepimples.
What does it look like? Hiroshima? Too much, maybe. But not that far off.
Andy Mollison, the retired education reporter who worked for Cox Newspapers for 40 years, leaned over to me and said, “Xenia tornado.”
Yes, the wake of Hurricane Katrina bore some resemblance to the deadly 1974 Xenia tornado just outside Dayton in the way it disfigured a community. But the scale of Katrina is so huge, it’s as if the Xenia tornado continued on and wiped out Columbus, too.
How in the world does a school district recover from this?
That was the question local officials here tried to answer Thursday for a group of education reporters.
Here’s just a few highlights of what they told us:
- Before Katrina, the district was already in crisis with 70 of 128 schools labeled “failing” by the state and $71 million in federal Title One funds unaccounted for.
- The damage to New Orleans schools is estimated between $850 million and $1 billion. The district was woefully underinsured against flood. Instead of the state-required $500,000 minimum flood insurance on each school, New Orleans had about $165,000 per school. FEMA won’t cover the difference, driving up the local cost for rebuilding.
- The state now controls 107 of the district’s schools and has opened 25 schools since November. They are preparing for 24,000 kids to start school in August and another 3,000 by Jan. 1. These estimates are purely an educated guess based on data on home ownership, insurance and patterns of population growth.
- Things are still so bad that many neighborhoods remain uninhabitable. Some families are sharing temporary trailer homes, sleeping in shifts. At least one school building houses two schools — one that meets in the morning and one in the evening.
- The state has had no contact with 200 private and parochial schools. That is, those schools are empty and the state cannot locate anyone associated with the schools to say what happened to them.
- Many of the fleet of flooded school buses we saw on TV after the storm are still sitting idle in the same lot. Nearly all of the city’s school buses were ruined.
- New Orleans may soon eclipse Dayton as the biggest U.S. charter school experiment. Nineteen of the schools that are open now are charter schools and the state and city want more schools to have charter-like independence and local control as they reopen.
The bottom line message from school officials we spoke to was that the flood is not over here. Not by a long shot. The crisis remains an every-minute-of-every-day obstacle for schools. And until there are decent schools up and running, it will be hard to entice city residents to return home, even when housing availability improves.
I’ll be posting more on New Orleans schools and the EWA conference over the next couple of days.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Urban School Issues
The Big (Not So) Easy
I’m in New Orleans today for the Education Writers Association national conference. On Saturday, I’m on a panel with Patti Ghezzi, Get Schooled blogger for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Alexander Russo, who writes a blog called This Week in Education. We’re going to be talking about education blogging and its role in education reporting.
This afternoon, I get to tour New Orleans schools, which were devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Only 16 of 126 schools in the city remain useable and thousands of kids here are relocated to other cities and states (even some in the Dayton area).
But on the other hand, New Orleans was long known as one of the nation’s most dysfunctional and worst performing school districts. So now months after the storm, as the school district seeks to rise from the ashes, some view it as a one-time opportunity to remake the district into something better. (Read more about this issue at PBS’ Merrow Report by education journalist John Merrow, who is here for the conference.
My early impressions of New Orleans four years after I was last here and nine months after the storm? Well …
the airport — an epicenter of death, despair and destruction after Katrina — is surprisingly clean and functional. But there is a constant hint of cleaning fluid in the air and the floors appear buffed from heavy-duty scrubbing but streaks of old grime are faintly evident.
An incredible number of houses still sport blue tarps where roofs were torn away, and the closer you are to the city’s core the more piles of debris appear on streetcorners. The Superdome carries a huge banner proclaiming “Opens in September — Go Saints!” even as worker hammer away at its gaping scars.
Even my hotel, on the edge of the relatively undamaged French Quarter, is still undergoing flood-induced renovation.
But the people who are here seem as lively as ever. About two minutes after I dropped my bags in my room, a parade passed under my third-story window at 10 a.m. — bright colors and waving feathers bobbed down the sunny street.
More on the schools later.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Urban School Issues
