February 3, 2010
The Associated Press (via the Washington Post) reports:
[South Philadelphia High School] erupted in violence last month – off-campus and lunchroom attacks on about 50 Asian students, injuring 30, primarily at the hands of blacks. The Asian students, who boycotted classes for more than a week afterward, say they’ve endured relentless bullying by black students while school officials turned a blind eye to their complaints…
Philadelphia school officials suspended 10 students, increased police patrols and installed dozens of new security cameras to watch the halls, where 70 percent of the students are black and 18 percent Asian. The Vietnamese embassy complained to the U.S. State Department about the attacks and numerous groups are investigating, including the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission.
The New York-based Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund joined the fray this week with a civil rights complaint to the U.S. Justice Department.
February 1, 2010
The New York Times reports:
The Obama administration is proposing a sweeping overhaul of President Bush’s signature education law, No Child Left Behind, and will call for broad changes in how schools are judged to be succeeding or failing, as well as for the elimination of the law’s 2014 deadline for bringing every American child to academic proficiency…
[The] administration is not planning to abandon the law’s commitments to closing the achievement gap between minority and white students and to encouraging teacher quality…
[The] White House wants to change federal financing formulas so that a portion of the money is awarded based on academic progress, rather than by formulas that apportion money to districts according to their numbers of students, especially poor students. The well-worn formulas for distributing tens of billions of dollars in federal aid have, for decades, been a mainstay of the annual budgeting process in the nation’s 14,000 school districts…
The changes would have to be approved by Congress, which has been at a stalemate for years over how to change the policy.
January 31, 2010
The Wall Street Journal reports:
This Dallas suburb [Plano, Texas], a wealthy enclave known for its top-notch schools, is struggling to integrate a flood of poor, minority students.
In a battle mirrored in other districts across the U.S., parents here have been fighting for months over which public high school their kids will attend: one under construction in an affluent corner of the Plano Independent School District, or an older school several miles away in the city’s more diverse downtown…
Plano’s situation evokes the fights decades ago in cities around the nation, when school integration often resulted in the flight of whites to suburbs.
This time, the disputes often are set in the suburbs themselves, driven by a flood of new arrivals—many from Latin America—who have rapidly reshaped school populations in districts across the country. The influx is making the country more diverse, with white children expected to be a minority by the next decade. That has meant more such conflicts in the most exclusive public-school districts.
“It’s going to be harder and harder to find a community that’s all white,” said Matthew Hall, a doctoral student at Pennsylvania State University who studies diversity in the suburbs. “The tensions that are happening in places like Plano are going to play out across all communities eventually.”
January 27, 2010
The Fordham Institute announces a new study by Tom Loveless:
What are the implications of “tracking,” or grouping students into separate classes based on their achievement? Many schools have moved away from this practice and reduced the number of subject-area courses offered in a given grade. In this new Thomas B. Fordham Institute report, Brookings scholar Tom Loveless examines tracking and detracking in Massachusetts middle schools, with particular focus on changes that have occurred over time and their implications for high-achieving students. Among the report’s key findings: detracked schools have fewer advanced students in mathematics than tracked schools. The report also finds that detracking is more popular in schools serving disadvantaged populations.
The report is available online here (PDF).
UPDATE: Dr. Kevin Welner, a professor at the U. of Colorado at Boulder, has published this critique (PDF) of Loveless’s detracking study in the journal Teachers College Record. Welner’s piece states:
A new report authored by Tom Loveless and published by the Fordham Institute misleads in an attempt to convince policymakers to maintain tracking policies. The report combines weak data with questionable analyses to manufacture a flawed argument against detracking.
Full disclosure: I’m a Ph.D. candidate at the U. of Colorado, where Dr. Welner is a Professor of Education.
January 27, 2010
Education Week reports:
In Chicago, principals were given the ability to dismiss the probationary teachers—those with five years of experience or less—without completing elaborate documentation or attending a dismissal hearing, under a 2004 collective bargaining agreement between the 409,000-student school district and the Chicago Teachers Union.
In return for the flexibility, the district expanded the pool of teachers who were placed on a tenure track. The policy change went into effect for the 2004-05 school year.
The study [Prof. Brian Jacob of U. of Michigan] examines the effects of the policy from that year through the 2006-07 school year, and compares teacher-absence rates from before and after the policy was implemented for probationary vs. tenured teachers. Mr. Jacob used payroll records to review the teacher-absence data, and the academic years 2001-02 through 2003-04 were used as the pre-policy period for comparison purposes.
In the two years before the policy change, the study found, the average teacher was absent about eight times a year, a figure that declined starting in 2005, especially among nontenured teachers. By 2007, that number for probationary teachers was just above six times a year.
Prof. Jacob’s report is available online here (subscription required).
January 26, 2010
The NY Times reports:
The teaching of basic academic skills, until now largely the realm of tradition and guesswork, is giving way to approaches based on cognitive science. In several cities, including Boston, Washington and Nashville, schools have been experimenting with new curriculums to improve math skills in preschoolers. In others, teachers have used techniques developed by brain scientists to help children overcome dyslexia.
And schools in about a dozen states have begun to use a program intended to accelerate the development of young students’ frontal lobes, improving self-control in class.
“Teaching is an ancient craft, and yet we really have had no idea how it affected the developing brain,” said Kurt Fischer, director of the Mind, Brain and Education program at Harvard. “Well, that is beginning to change, and for the first time we are seeing the fields of brain science and education work together.”
This relationship is new and still awkward, experts say, and there is more hyperbole than evidence surrounding many “brain-based” commercial products on the market. But there are others, like an early math program taught in Buffalo schools, that have a track record. If these and similar efforts find traction in schools, experts say, they could transform teaching from the bottom up — giving the ancient craft a modern scientific compass.
(Cross-posted with my Cognitive Science Blog.)
January 26, 2010
The Atlantic Monthly reports:
One outfit in America has been systematically pursuing this mystery [What makes a teacher effective?] for more than a decade—tracking hundreds of thousands of kids, and analyzing why some teachers can move those kids three grade levels ahead in one year and others can’t. That organization, interestingly, is not a school district.
Teach for America, a nonprofit that recruits college graduates to spend two years teaching in low-income schools, began outside the educational establishment and has largely remained there. For years, it has been whittling away at its own assumptions, testing its hypotheses, and refining its hiring and training. Over time, it has built an unusual laboratory: almost half a million American children are being taught by Teach for America teachers this year, and the organization tracks test-score data, linked to each teacher, for 85 percent to 90 percent of those kids. Almost all of those students are poor and African American or Latino. And Teach for America keeps an unusual amount of data about its 7,300 teachers—a pool almost twice the size of the D.C. system’s teacher corps.
Until now, Teach for America has kept its investigation largely to itself. But for this story, the organization allowed me access to 20 years of experimentation, studded by trial and error. The results are specific and surprising. Things that you might think would help a new teacher achieve success in a poor school—like prior experience working in a low-income neighborhood—don’t seem to matter. Other things that may sound trifling—like a teacher’s extracurricular accomplishments in college—tend to predict greatness.
January 26, 2010
The Chicago Tribune reports:
Women teachers’ anxiety about math may undermine girls’ confidence in learning the subject and decrease their performance in fields that depend on a grasp of math fundamentals, such as science and engineering, research at the University of Chicago shows.
The findings are the product of a year-long study of 17 first- and second-grade teachers and 65 girls and 52 boys who were their students. The researchers found that boys’ math performance was not related to their teacher’s math anxiety while girls’ math achievement was affected.
The study can be viewed at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Web site here.
January 22, 2010
Recently, I launched a new feature on my Cognitive Science Blog – periodically, I will post a publicly-available research article that I consider to be a classic in the field. I’ve decided to do the same with the Education Blog.
Education in the U. S., both K-12 and post-secondary, faces many challenges (as, indeed, it always has). As an educational psychologist, I naturally gravitate towards issues of learning and instruction to help me untangle the complex web that is contemporary schooling. “Taking learning seriously” by Lee Shulman provides a compelling take on both learning and teaching:
I have argued in this article that if we are to take learning seriously, we must profess teaching, and take our profession as teachers seriously. At the heart of the concept of a profession is a public and moral commitment to learning from pedagogical experience and exchanging that learning in acts of scholarship that contribute to the wisdom of practice across the profession.
A contradiction lies at the very heart of the notion of profession. Once appreciated, the contradiction helps us further understand the educational challenge we face. As I said earlier, when we take something seriously, we profess it–our faith, our love, our understanding. But notice how fundamentally different those kinds of professing are from one another.
When I profess my understanding, I am urged by my teachers to use critical reasoning, to demand evidence, and to make my arguments clear–to always ask, How do you really know? Skepticism, questioning, the demand for proof are at the heart of professing one’s understanding.
The full article is available here.
About Lee Shulman:
Lee Shulman was born and raised in Chicago… Educated at a yeshiva high school, Shulman won a scholarship to the University of Chicago, where he studied philosophy and psychology. He entered the department of education and studied with Benjamin Bloom and Joseph Schwab, among others..
He is best known for his work on the knowledge base of teaching, including the construct of pedagogical content knowledge, for his efforts to promote the scholarship of teaching in higher education, and for his studies of professional education.
January 22, 2010
The Center for Public Education has released a report entitled “Chasing the college acceptance letter: Is it harder to get into college?” The report’s major findings are:
- It is no more difficult for most students to get into college today than it was a decade ago.
- Taking more rigorous courses, especially in math and science, gives an applicant a better chance of getting into a competitive college than does raising his or her GPA.
- Well-prepared minority applicants have just as good of a chance of getting into a competitive college as well-prepared white students.
- However, a much smaller percentage of minority applicants earn the necessary credentials.
- Well-prepared low-income applicants are less likely to get into a competitive college as well-prepared high-income applicants: 67 percent vs. 80 percent.
- Few low-income applicants earn the necessary credentials.
The report is posted online here.
