Charter schools continue to grow

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has published this report on the state of public charter schools in the U.S. Among the reports findings:

• There are fourteen communities where more than 20% of public school students are enrolled in charters (versus six in 2005-06)
• Seventy-two communities have at least 10% of public school students enrolled in charter schools
• The ten districts with the largest number of students in public charter schools represent 22% of the total U.S.  charter school population (approximately 304,494 students out of 1.4 million)

School desegregation: income vs. race

USA Today reports:

Struggling to improve schools that have large populations of poor and minority students and under legal pressure to avoid racial busing, a small but growing group of school districts are integrating schools by income.

More than 60 school systems now use socioeconomic status as a factor in school assignments, says Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, which studies income inequality. Students in Champaign, Ill.; Kalamazoo, Mich.; and Louisville have returned this year to income-based assignments.

Chicago’s experience suggests school turnarounds may not help students

Education Week reports:

A majority of Chicago students affected by school closings were sent to schools that were low-performing, just like those they left behind—moves that had no significant impact on performance for most students, a study released today…

“Certainly, when schools were closed for academic reasons, the idea was to try to change their educational prospects and what they might obtain. Unfortunately, we didn’t find that,” said Julia Gwynne, a senior research analyst with the consortium and the report’s co-author. “The main reason why that seems not to have occurred was because most students did not attend schools that were substantially better than the ones that were closed.”

 

US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has expressed strong support of school turnarounds – see this post from June 2009.

SAT scores still vary by race, gender and economic class

USA Today reports:

Average national SAT scores for the high school class of 2009 dropped two points compared with last year, a report out today says. And while the population of test takers was the most diverse ever, average scores vary widely by race and ethnicity.

On one end, students who identified themselves as Asian, Asian-American or Pacific Islander posted a 13-point gain. On the other end, students who identified themselves as Puerto Rican posted a 9-point drop in average scores.

The SAT’s owner, the nonprofit College Board, highlighted the 40% minority participation rate among test-takers this year, up from 38% last year and 29.2% in 1999. Also up from previous years: More than a third of students say they are first-generation college students whose parents never went to college, and more than a quarter said English is not their first language.

“We are tremendously encouraged by the increasing diversity,” said College Board president Gaston Caperton. “More than ever, the SAT reflects the diversity of students in our nation’s classrooms.”

Additional information is available from the College Board here.

Texas: U.S. history classes join biology as battleground for ‘culture war’

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Texas Board of Education, which recently approved new science standards that made room for creationist critiques of evolution, is revising the state’s social studies curriculum. In early recommendations from outside experts appointed by the board, a divide has opened over how central religious theology should be to the teaching of history.

Three reviewers, appointed by social conservatives, have recommended revamping the K-12 curriculum to emphasize the roles of the Bible, the Christian faith and the civic virtue of religion in the study of American history. Two of them want to remove or de-emphasize references to several historical figures who have become liberal icons, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall.

“We’re in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it,” said Rev. Peter Marshall, a Christian minister and one of the reviewers appointed by the conservative camp.

Three other reviewers, all selected by politically moderate or liberal members of the board, recommended less-sweeping changes to the existing curriculum. But one suggested including more diverse role models, especially Latinos, in teaching materials. “We have tended to exclude or marginalize the role of Hispanic and Native American participants in the state’s history,” said Jesús F. de la Teja, chairman of the history department at Texas State University.

In related news – Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) has appointed Gail Lowe, described by critics as a creationism supporter, to head the Texas Board of Education (link to story from The Examiner [of Texas]). Perry describes Lowe as an ‘exemplary leader’ (link to story from the Houston Chronicle).

NJ high school, focused on learning communities, achieves 100% graduation rate

The AP, via MSNBC, reports:

MetEast [High School in Camden, NJ] graduated its first class of seniors on Friday.

It opened in 2005 as a laboratory for education in a city where the schools are part of an entanglement of problems.

It’s one of about 60 schools nationwide established with the help of Big Picture Learning, a nonprofit with offices in San Diego and Providence, R.I. Three Big Picture schools are scheduled to open in Newark this fall.

The schools are small and very different from traditional schools. MetEast has just over 100 students — less than one-tenth the enrollment at each of the city’s comprehensive high schools. The educators are called “advisers,” not teachers, and they advise the same group of students all four years.

Classes are built around the idea that students will learn by following their passions. Students do internships. Graduation requirements include a senior project with the aim of doing some good for the community.

“Our students have the same issues, dilemmas and challenges as students at the larger high schools,” says principal Timothy Jenkins. The graduating class includes students who became pregnant or homeless but still made it through school.

All 30 students who began as freshman at MetEast four years ago have graduated from high school somewhere, including a handful that have moved or transferred, Jenkins says.

Fighting social stereotypes with the aid of video games

Note: this is cross-posted with my Cognitive Science Blog

Science Daily reports:

Social problems like bullying and stereotyping involve thoughts, feelings and reactions that resist change. New research shows that when students play active roles in virtual dramas their attitudes and behaviour can change.

In 2006, a group of European educators, psychologists and IT specialists realised that emotionally driven problems, such as bullying, stereotyping and scapegoating demanded emotionally compelling interventions.

The researchers set out to create virtual worlds with characters that children could interact and empathise with powerfully enough to change their own attitudes and behaviour.

The EU-funded research project eCIRCUS (Education through Characters with emotional-Intelligence and Role-playing Capabilities that Understand Social interaction) has now produced two programs – FearNot! and ORIENT – that give students helpful roles in interactive virtual worlds, where they can learn to change their thoughts, feelings and actions.

Finding new ways to resolve such problems is important, says eCIRCUS coordinator Ruth Aylett, because they are pervasive, hurtful, and can cause lasting psychological damage.

“Knowledge-based interventions don’t necessarily succeed,” says Aylett. “If we’re able to reduce victimisation, we’re giving people a way to get out of a very painful situation and improve the quality of their lives.”

FearNot! – help for bullied children

The eCIRCUS researchers first focused on primary school children who were the victims of bullying. They drew on recent psychological theories that highlight the importance of feelings for changing how people treat each other.

“Emotion is an essential part of human interaction,” says Aylett, “so education about human social interaction must include feelings.”

The theories led them to expect that if they could get children to empathise with and try to help victims of bullying in a virtual world, the children could try out different strategies, experience the results, and develop better ways to deal with bullying in their own lives.

The researchers used a computer program, called FearNot! (Fun with Empathic Agents to Achieve Novel Outcomes in Teaching), that had been developed as an initial small prototype by an earlier European research effort called VICTEC.

The eCIRCUS team made FearNot! much richer in content and more open-ended. For example, they provided virtual bullying victims with the ability to remember strategies that they have tried. Those memories allow the virtual characters to reject approaches that have failed and ask the children who are helping them in the simulation to come up with better ideas.

“We are the first people to produce software for dealing with bullying that is not pre-scripted,” says Aylett. “We’ve produced something that is genuinely interactive to the individual responses of each child.”

To test the effectiveness of FearNot!, the eCIRCUS team tried it out with close to 1000 students in 30 primary schools across Germany and the UK.

The researchers tested FearNot! by comparing a group of users and a control group of non-users, similar to the method used for testing medical treatments.

Students in selected classes spent a total of 1.5 hours playing FearNot! over the course of three weeks.

The results were encouraging. “It definitely reduces victimisation in the short term,” says Aylett. “It has a significant positive effect even at this low exposure.”

Although further work is needed to demonstrate long-term effects, Aylett is confident that if all the children in a school experienced FearNot! over a longer term, and as part of a social learning curriculum, bullying and victimisation would be reduced.

“FearNot! has achieved its objectives very well,” says Aylett. “You’d need a games or educational software company to take it further.”

ORIENT – empathising with newcomers

While FearNot! has younger children interacting with cartoon-like characters in a simple world, ORIENT immerses older students in a much more vivid and complex virtual world, where they learn to empathise with and accept newcomers from other cultures.

In ORIENT, three students are equipped with various handheld control devices and “beamed down” as a team to save the planet Orient.

Planet Orient is populated by aliens called Sprytes, who look rather like large bipedal tree frogs and who have their own language and customs. Students have to learn a lot about the Sprytes and empathise with them in order to help them.

“We wanted users to feel adrift in this alien culture,” says Aylett. “How can you empathise with new people in your own culture if you’ve never experienced being adrift yourself?”

The software that shapes what happens as students interact with the Sprytes acts like the director of an improvisational drama. The software starts and ends scenes, chooses which characters appear, and can impose challenges such as a storm.

Each Spryte has its own goals, feelings and memories that control what it does and that can change based on experience. The interaction between the Sprytes and the students produces an unpredictable “emergent narrative”.

“There’s no fixed plot,” says Aylett. “Our characters are acting autonomously, making up their minds as they go.”

According to Aylett, students standing in front of a large screen and interacting with these psychologically believable aliens soon respond as if they were real. “ORIENT produces the feeling of really being there,” she says.

Although ORIENT needs further development and testing, Aylett believes it has the potential to help solve a major social problem by spurring students to change their attitudes toward students from other cultures.

“It’s the attitudes of the host community that can either make new students welcome or make their lives miserable,” she says.

Social problems like bullying and stereotyping involve thoughts, feelings and reactions that resist change. New research shows that when students play active roles in virtual dramas their attitudes and behaviour can change.

In 2006, a group of European educators, psychologists and IT specialists realised that emotionally driven problems, such as bullying, stereotyping and scapegoating demanded emotionally compelling interventions.

The EU-funded research project eCIRCUS (Education through Characters with emotional-Intelligence and Role-playing Capabilities that Understand Social interaction) has now produced two programs – FearNot! and ORIENT – that give students helpful roles in interactive virtual worlds, where they can learn to change their thoughts, feelings and actions.

The eCircus Web site is here.

Phoenix-area district faces elimination of its ethnic studies curriculum

The Arizona Daily Star reports:

A Tucson lawmaker and the state’s schools chief are moving to make ethnic studies in the Tucson Unified School District illegal.

If a bill set for a hearing in the state Legislature next week is approved, the city’s largest school district would have to get rid of the ethnic-based programs in four of its high schools or risk losing 10 percent of their state funding each month.

If the classes were eliminated, the money would be returned.

“Ethnic studies programs … are designed to promote ethnic chauvinism,” state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said in a news release Friday. “I have tried for two years, using publicity and persuasion, to attempt to convince the Tucson Unified School District to put a stop to this dysfunctional program. They have refuse

Closure of Denver’s Manual High School offers lessons, warnings for districts and families

Under NCLB, the ultimate sanction faced by a school that fails to make adequate yearly progress is closure. The Denver Post reports on the aftermath of one such closure – that of Denver’s Manual High School, a predominatly minority high school, in 2006.

[In] 2006 [Denver Public Schools] district officials announced [Manual High] school would close at the end of the school year because of lagging test scores and plummeting enrollment — forcing 558 students to find a new school.

Nearly a third of those students are now classified by the district as withdrawn. They are either dropouts, have moved to a different state or their whereabouts are unknown. One student has died, and 94 transferred out of Denver Public Schools. Their progress is no longer tracked.

Of those who remain in DPS, 70 will graduate this month, joining 175 other former Manual students who went on to get diplomas from other schools. Another 11 are on track to graduate later this year, and 40 more are still in DPS, but not yet ready to graduate.

President Barack Obama recently said he would like to see the nation’s 5,000 lowest-performing schools close and reopen as robust institutions of learning over the next five years.

Ben Kirshner, assistant professor of education at CU who led the Manual study, said districts must be careful.

“I don’t think the message is never close a school,” Kirshner said. “The message is slow down. Think about what happens to these students when they close. Our data suggests students on the whole did not benefit, and many experienced setbacks.”

Disclosure: Dr. Ben Kirshner, primary investigator on the study referenced in the article, is my graduate advisor and co-chair of my dissertation committee.

Afghan girls struggle to attend school

I typically don’t post ‘foreign affairs’ items on this blog but I found this story too powerful not to post.

NPR reports:

Public education is among the many casualties of the growing war in Afghanistan, and the threat of violence is especially acute for Afghan girls. Parents, who in the past did not allow their daughters to go to school because of societal taboos, are once again keeping them at home because of the threat of attacks by militants wielding acid or worse.

But many girls are refusing to give up their schooling — no matter what the cost.