The Education Blog

The NY Times reports:

A commission convened by some of the country’s most influential college admissions officials is recommending that colleges and universities move away from their reliance on SAT and ACT scores and shift toward admissions exams more closely tied to the high school curriculum and achievement.

USA Today reports on

For more than a decade, “algebra for everyone” has been a high-minded mantra for the idea that virtually all students should take algebra by eighth grade. Since the mid-1990s, schools nationwide have pushed more and more students into challenging middle-school math courses. Last year, 38% of eighth-graders were enrolled in advanced math (Algebra I, Algebra II or Geometry).

But when Brookings Institution researcher Tom Loveless looked at the skills of eighth-graders taking advanced math, he found something startling: Between 2000 and 2005, the percentage of very low-performing students in advanced math classes more than tripled.

Using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, he found that among the lowest-scoring 10% of kids, nearly 29% were taking advanced math, despite having very low skills.

How low? On par with a typical second-grader’s, Loveless says. They lack a solid foundation in multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, rounding or place value. Yet they were tackling fairly sophisticated math.

“It’s hard to teach a real algebra class if you have kids who don’t know arithmetic,” he says.

The full report is due in December, but more information is available from the Brookings Institution Web site.

The AP (via USA Today) reports:

one-third of American college students have to enroll in remedial classes. The bill to colleges and taxpayers for trying to bring them up to speed on material they were supposed to learn in high school comes to between $2.3 billion and $2.9 billion annually.

“That is a very large cost, but there is an additional cost and that’s the cost to the students,” said former Colorado governor Roy Romer, chair of the group Strong American Schools, which is issuing the report “Diploma to Nowhere” on Monday. “These students come out of high school really misled. They think they’re prepared. They got a 3.0 and got through the curriculum they needed to get admitted, but they find what they learned wasn’t adequate.”

Christina Jeronimo was an “A” student in high school English, but was placed in a remedial course when she arrived at Long Beach City College in California. The course was valuable in some ways but frustrating and time-consuming. Now in her third year of community college, she’d hoped to transfer to UCLA by now.

Like many college students, she wishes she’d been worked a little harder in high school.

“There’s a gap,” said Jeronimo, who hopes to study psychology. “The demands of the high school teachers aren’t as great as the demands for college. Sometimes they just baby us.”

The AP (via USA Today) reports:

Students are doing better in elementary and middle school, but key indicators show little progress among high school and college students, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said.

Kids in elementary and middle school have made progress because that is where the focus has been, Spellings told the AP.

The No Child Left Behind education law — an approach that George W. Bush campaigned on when he ran in 2000 and signed as president in 2002 — has a goal of making sure every student can read and do math at their grade level by 2014.

That goal is still a long way off, but fourth- and eighth-graders are doing better. Last year, tests showed 33% could read and do math at grade level, compared with 25% in 2000, according to Education Department data.

Minority students are doing better, too. The percentage of black and Hispanic students who could read and do math at grade level was 35% that of white children last year, the department found. But that has increased from 23% in 2000.

• Last year, the high school graduation rate was 74%, compared with 72% in 2000.

• The share of college-bound students ready for a college course was 42%, the same as in 2000.

• The share of younger workers, age 25-34, with a bachelor’s degree was 31%, compared with from 29% in 2000.

“High school graduation and college readiness are very much linked, and college completion is very much linked to college readiness,” Spellings said. “And we have barely begun to fight on this.”

This story is actually about three weeks old but I just found out about it this week so I’ve decided to post it to this blog.

From the Wall Street Journal:

The Dallas Independent School District’s new policies give students who do poorly more chances to improve their grades. Among the changes: High-school students who fail major tests can retake them within five school days, and only the higher scores count.

School officials say the changes are designed to reduce one of the highest dropout rates in the state. According to the Texas Education Agency, 25.8% of students in the Dallas district who enrolled as ninth-graders in 2003 dropped out before their class’s scheduled 2007 graduation.

But the policies have sparked criticism since the Dallas Morning News reported them last week, with angry parents and teachers contending that the district is watering down educational standards for its more than 160,000 students.

The LA Times reports:

For most high school dropouts, reality sets in sooner or later: Without a high school diploma, their prospects in life are limited at best.

A study released Thursday confirms that many California dropouts give school another try. But the California Dropout Research Project also reports that even dropouts who go back to school appear to stand little chance of success in college. And in an economy that increasingly prizes academic success, the outlook is bleak for those who don’t return to school at all.

“Kids who drop out of school are at risk in general — we know that,” said Russell Rumberger, a professor at UC Santa Barbara who leads the dropout project.

But, he added, he was alarmed by the study’s finding that one in three of the students who dropped out of 10th grade in 2004 were doing nothing four years later — not going to school or working.

“That is a disturbing number for our state,” Rumberger said…

The new report, based on previously published national data, found that roughly one in five California students who dropped out of 10th grade in 2004 returned to school and earned their diploma within four years. A slightly smaller percentage earned a high school equivalency degree, or GED.

In all, 54% received some sort of high school degree or were still in school working toward that goal, the study showed.

But while roughly half of the dropouts were at least making a stab at finishing high school, few were progressing past that. Ninety percent had either never enrolled in college or had enrolled and dropped out. By contrast, 60% of their peers who didn’t drop out of high school in their sophomore year were enrolled in college four years later.

UPDATE 2: I found the Education Brain Trust’s Web site here.

UPDATE 1: I try to avoid making too many editorial comments about news items I post – I want this blog to be a news source, not my personal editorial page.  However, given the attention this post has attracted, I wanted to point out that – as the Iowa Independent piece states – this proposal DOES NOT come from the Des Moines school district or from any other ‘official’ school source.  Rather, it comes form a private ‘third party’ group involved in schooling issues in Des Moines.  I don’t know more about this group, the Education Brain Trust, than is mentioned in the article, but I assume it is some kind of non-profit or public interest group.  It is NOT, as far as I know, an official part of the Des Moines school system.

The Iowa Independent reports:

Paulette Wiley knows she may catch some flak for what’s she’s about to do, but the leader of the Education Brain Trust believes that African-American students in Des Moines are in an academic crisis.

“The bridge between education and incarceration needs to be blown up and that’s what we’re going to do,” said Wiley, director of the group which advocates for black parents and students.

Wiley wants parents to learn how they can help battle the problems affecting black children in the Des Moines School District — even if it means giving them cash as an incentive to attend upcoming parent meetings in May. A community meeting about the initiative is scheduled for next month.

The group is considering paying parents $25 or giving them a gift card to attend parent meeting that will be scheduled at schools around the city in May. The “parent empowerment zone” meetings will include free food, transportation and child care. Wiley said the meetings will be fun and interactive.

“As I look out at the young people today, we can’t go to them where we want them to be,” Wiley said. “We’ve got to go to them where they are. If indeed that is an incentive, then that’s what we’ve got to do.”

It has long been common for foreign teachers to settle and work in major metro areas, like New York or Los Angeles, that are home to large immigrant communities.

Now, the AP reports (via USA Today) that more states (some with few immigrants, like Alabama) are actively recruiting foreign teachers in an attempt to ease chronic teacher shortages.

Those of us who have spent time working at post-secondary institutions are familiar with ‘helicopter parents’ — parents or guardians who constantly hover in the background of a student’s academic life, involving themselves in the minutiae of college life, like choosing courses or managing roommate conflicts, in a way that the parents of those of us from an earlier generation of college student never did.

USA Today has published an article describing research that challanges the intuitive conclusion that such parents retard their children’s ability to develop independent decision-making.

Among findings:

• Seven out of 10 students communicated “very often” with a parent or guardian throughout the academic year.

• There is more electronic contact than face-to-face.

• Moms were the most frequently contacted support person; 86% reporting electronic contact with moms “often” or “very often.”

• 13% of first-year students and 8% of seniors reported frequent intervention by a parent or guardian; another quarter of first-year students and 21% of seniors said a parent sometimes intervened.

• There was no difference in the educational levels of parents who intervened and those who didn’t. That surprised Kuh’s staff, but they don’t know the nature and outcomes of the interventions.

Students who reported frequent parental intervention reported lower grades. While the difference (3.21 vs. 3.31 for other students on a 4.0 scale) was statistically significant, it was still quite small.

NEWSWEEK reports on a strategy being implemented by some schools facing budget constraints: replacing some traditional bus routes with ‘walking schoolbuses’ – groups of students traveling to school on foot, accompanied by an adult chaperone.

The US Department of Transportation has created this Web site offering advice on how to start a walking school bus in your area.