Saturday, December 25, 2010

State: Evolution joins curriculum

Schools

Evolution joins curriculum

With a 4-3 vote, a state standards board agrees to include the "scientific theory."

By Ron Matus, Times Staff Writer
Published February 20, 2008

T. Willard Fair, chairman of the state Board of Education, presides over Tuesday's meeting in Tallahassee. The board voted 4 to 3, with Fair casting the final tie-breaking vote, in favor of allowing schools to teach that evolution is a scientific theory.
	[AP photo]

Access World News - Document Display

NEW YORK SCHOOLS SCORE LOW IN U.S. RANKING

Syracuse Herald-Journal (NY) - Thursday, May 4, 1989

Author: Jonathan D. Salant Washington Bureau

New York education officials said Wednesday they weren't surprised at the state's low ranking in the U.S. Education Department's sixth annual performance chart.

``Obviously, there are educational problems in New York state,'' said state Education Department spokesman Chris Carpenter. ``What's new?

``The commissioner this year has spent extensive time documenting that there are two school systems in this state, one which is largely suburban, affluent and successful; the other largely urban, poor and unsuccessful.''

The U.S. Education Department's ``wall chart'' found that New York was the only state to report a decline in Scholastic Aptitude Test scores last year. The state had a higher dropout rate than all but four other states.

The average SAT score in New York declined by 7 points, to 889 from 894 on a scale of 400 to 1,600. New York was the only state of the 22 that administer the SAT as a college entrance exam to suffer a drop in test scores.

New York ranked 14th in 1988, a decline from 12th in 1987. Nationally, the SAT average was 904.

The decline in SAT scores reflected the increasing number of graduating high school students taking the test, Carpenter said.

He indicated that 72 percent of the state's graduating high school students took the SAT in 1988. That was up from 70 percent the year before.

``We want kids to take the test,'' Carpenter said. ``It means they want to go to college. If that means the overall scores go down, so be it.''

Jay Goldman, a spokesman for the Council of Chief State School Officers based in Washington, D.C., said the SAT was not an accurate indicator of student performance.

``The SATs are taken only by a portion of the eligible students,'' Goldman said. ``We believe that there's much more sense in using what's called NAEP , National Assessment of Educational Progress, for measuring student performance. Next year, NAEP will be administered by a state-by-state basis.''

While SAT scores went down, the state's dropout rate increased, to 37.1 percent in 1987 from 35.8 percent in 1986. That compares to a national average of 28.9 percent in 1987 and 28.4 percent in 1986. The state's ranking dropped as well, to 46th place from 45th place, ahead of only Georgia, Michigan, Louisiana and Florida .

At the same time, the state's per-pupil expenditures increased to $6,497 from $6,011 between 1986 and 1987. The 8 percent increase was greater than the average 6 percent boost nationally, bringing the U.S. mean to $3,977 in 1987 from $3,756 in 1986.

And the state's average teacher salary of $34,500 in 1988 trailed only Alaska, at $40,424, among the 50 states. New York's average teacher salary was $32,000 in 1987. The national average was $28,008 in 1988 and $26,556 in 1987.

``Money alone is not the answer to our education deficit,'' U.S. Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos said at a news conference Wednesday.

Furthermore, 17.9 percent of children between 5 and 17 in the state live in poverty, a higher poverty level than 37 other states.

The high poverty rate helps explain the state's high dropout rate, Carpenter said. In New York City, where most of the poor students live, the dropout rate is 59 percent. In the rest of the state, the dropout rate is 18 percent.

An 18 percent dropout rate would rank New York 10th among the 50 states, according to the U.S. Education Department's wall chart.

While New York's educational performance went down, the nation's school systems as a whole remained stagnant, Cavazos said.

``The good news is that the schools are not worse; the bad news is that we also are not making progress,'' he said. ``We are standing still, and the problem is that it's been this way for three years in a row.''

Cavazos called for individual school districts to set goals. Among those goals are increasing the number of high school graduates, reducing the number of students unable to move up a grade level each year, and providing vocational education to non-collegebound students.

``Governors, chief state school officers, local school boards, district superintendents, educators, parents and other concerned individuals can begin right now to work together to identify and announce specific goals for improving each school district and state to select the benchmarks for measuring progress toward their goals, and to discuss incentives for student, teacher and school improvement,'' Cavazos said.

But Mary Hatwood Futrell, president of the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union, said much of the blame for lack of improvement in education has to rest in the federal government's lap.

Between the 1982 and 1988 federal fiscal years, federal education spending was $7 billion less than it needed to be just to maintain programs at 1981 levels, according to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

``It is no mystery that after eight years of eroding federal support for education, particularly for essential programs targeting our ever-growing minority and low-income populations, we find little progress in the achievement of our students,'' Futrell said.

Graphic: Report card

The most recent figures on education in New York State
SAT scores (national ranking)

1987 904 (12)

1988 889 (14)
Teacher salaries

1987 $32,000 (2)

1988 $32,500 (2)
Dropout rate

1986 35.8% (45)

1987 37.1% (46)
Expenditures per pupil

1986 $6,011 (2)

1987 $6,497 (2)

Source: U.S. Education Department

Caption: Graphic: Report card. Herald-Journal chart. (Note: For text of graphic see end of story.)

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Education Documents 3

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

YouTube - felctutors's Channel

Thursday, December 16, 2010

The Answer Sheet - Principal seeks to replace student body, improve scores

Posted at 10:00 AM ET, 12/15/2010

Principal seeks to replace student body, improve scores

By Valerie Strauss

Mr. Teachbad's Blog of Teacher Disgruntlement has some very funny posts, including this piece of fake education news. [Some of the language on the blog is raw; because The Post has different standards on this sort of thing, I've taken out some of the more colorful words and replaced them with synonyms in brackets.] As I’ve said before, sometimes you have to laugh through the pain.

(FAKE) EDUCATION NEWS:
KANSAS CITY, KS -- In a bold move sure to spark debate in political and education circles, Karen Herbst, principal of J.C. Harmon High School in Kansas City, KS, is making a most unusual request. Herbst has asked the Kansas State commissioner of education, Dr. Diane DeBacker, to replace the entire student body at J.C. Harmon High School with students from another high school where test scores are higher.

In a letter to the commissioner, Herbst writes:

Standardized test scores at J.C. Harmon have dropped or remained stagnant since No Child Left Behind started. We have fired all the teachers ... three times. We could fill the convention center with a Teach for America reunion from this school. We have fired principals. I am the fifth principal to run this palace of potential in the last eight years. We have increased the number of required meetings and useless documents and documentation of the useless meetings. We have SMART goals and data trackers. We say things like “increase the rigor” and “data-driven” and “authentic assessment” almost constantly. We have computers and smart boards and wireless this and that and smart [stuff] connected to the Interweb all over.... We have...I don’t know...like, 50 non-profit groups running around here doing tutoring, mentoring, arts and crafts, poetry clubs, science clubs, handing out money, taking people camping who hate camping, and who knows what...else.

And, somehow, we [are still lousy].

J.C. Harmon High is ... a school. And we are proud to be a part of the State of Kansas, sort of. (That guy from that weird church who protests at funerals sort of creeps us out. And so does Sam Brownback.)

But the reality is that, as far as schools go, people don’t seem to be learning all that much and we are sort of out of ideas. Having exhausted all other avenues, I hereby request that you immediately replace all students currently enrolled at J.C. Harmon with students from some other school in the state that has historically performed well on standardized tests.

We have changed everything else here. And all it’s done is branded some good people as bad teachers. People have been demoralized and simply left the profession....

Let’s think outside the box. Let’s change the other side of the equation. I challenge you to give me students from the highest performing school in our district and we will see if my [lazy] ineffective teachers can keep the scores at J.C. Harmon down.

If we can bring scores down to regular J.C. Harmon levels in two to three years, the entire teaching and administrative staff will resign. Let us show you how ineffective we can be, no matter who you put in our classrooms.

Follow my blog every day by bookmarkingwashingtonpost.com/answersheet. And for admissions advice, college news and links to campus papers, please check out our Higher Education page at washingtonpost.com/higher-ed Bookmark it!

By Valerie Strauss | December 15, 2010; 10:00 AM ET
Categories: Laugh and cry | Tags: fake news, mr. teachbad, test scores
Save & Share: Previous: Standardized snake oil -- Brady
Next: Joel Klein's business model and the drowning of Nicole Suriel

Comments

When all else fails...laugh!

Posted by: educ8er | December 15, 2010 11:17 AM | Report abuse

This is right on the money! I just went to a meeting yesterday where we talked about SMART goals and data. Sigh. It all sounds so good to people on the outside, but those of us on the inside who work with students every day know how meaningless it really is.

Posted by: TeacherTalk | December 15, 2010 12:27 PM | Report abuse

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Miami's Troubled Race Relations

Miami's Continuing Color Problem

Cubans vs. Haitians, Haitians vs. Cubans, African Americans vs. everybody else. Race relations in Miami have always been a tense affair. But are they getting better? The final chapter in The Root's series exploring black life in the 3-0-5.

By: Marjorie Valbrun | Posted: December 14, 2010 at 12:33 AM

A Miami police officer makes an arrest while patrolling the streets
in August 2010. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

When I left Miami in 1992, headed for a new job in Philadelphia, the wind was figuratively, if not literally, at my back. It was just days after Hurricane Andrew, the fourth-strongest hurricane to strike the U.S., badly pummeled south Florida and left a trail of destruction in its wake.

I was not just fleeing the battered city; I was also fleeing its festering racial tensions that seemed like permanent fixtures back then. The hurricane did little to dismantle this persistent problem that prompted young black professionals -- including me and other black reporters working at the Miami Herald -- to seek opportunities in friendlier, seemingly more progressive cities.

There were too many police shootings of unarmed black men in Miami for my taste, and in the prior decade, one of the most notorious police shootings had led to violent riots. There was not a visible black middle-class community, although middle-class blacks were scattered about, but there were plenty of visibly poor and badly deteriorated black neighborhoods. African Americans were mostly politically marginalized and had even less economic power.

Cuban Americans -- many of them fair-skinned "white" conservative Republicans, uninterested in power sharing -- were politically ascendant. (Afro-Cubans and other Afro-Latinos, for the most part, blended into the African-American community.) Non-Hispanic white residents were fleeing Dade County and heading to whiter suburbs in northern counties.

Newly arrived Haitian refugees were routinely being mistreated by police and scapegoated as the source of many of the city's problems. And the growing Haitian immigrant community was having its own power struggles with the established American-born black community. I'd had enough.

As a former New Yorker, I was accustomed to living in a sophisticated, multicultural city, not one that was multicultural only in tourist brochures. People who had never lived in Miami didn't understand why I left the fun and sun of the city made famous by Crockett and Tubbs. I'd remind them that despite its tropical weather and appearance, Miami was still the Deep South -- and often behaved like it.

What's more, a black economic boycott of the city's tourism industry was in its second year. A group of civic-minded black leaders had called for the boycott after the Miami City Commission rescinded a proclamation welcoming Nelson Mandela to the city during his tour of the U.S. after his historic release from prison in South Africa. The city's Cuban-American mayor and four other Cuban-American mayors from the region had publicly criticized Mandela for not denouncing human rights violations in Cuba.

It was a slap in the face to Mandela and to black Miamians who were thrilled about his visit and wanted him welcomed with open arms. As far as I was concerned, the boycott was long overdue. It lasted three years, cost the city millions, and drew national and international media attention, laying bare Miami's raw racial politics for all to see.

A lot has changed in the 18 years since I left. The 13-member Miami-Dade Board of County Commissionersnow has four black commissioners, including the chairman and a Haitian-American commissioner. (There's just one black member on the six-member Miami City Commission, however.) Haitian immigrants have been elected to local offices and mayoral seats in neighboring cities, as well as to the state legislature. Black political and civic activists say that Cuban-American politicians no longer ignore black communities because they can't afford to ignore motivated black voters.

"I think overall things are better," says Joe Oglesby, the former editorial page editor of the Miami Herald. "Things had been so bad for so long that now that we've reached a relative stasis, it seems far better. There are blacks in very important positions that they weren't in 10, 15 years ago. A lot of this is invisible to most people, but they're here."

Meanwhile, the widely publicized relocations of NBA stars LeBron James and Chris Bosh to Miami created a lot of excitement and buzz about the city's new, high-profile black millionaires and their entourages of famous black friends and beautiful black actresses. However, James and Bosh's status as the Miami Heat's new "Dream Team," along with Dwyane Wade, has little in common with that of ordinary black Miamians.

While Miami is "much more intelligent, sophisticated and cosmopolitan" than it used to be, black residents as a whole are not much more powerful, Oglesby says. Hispanics are now an even larger majority -- they make up 60 percent of the population. (The majority are Cubans, but there are also significant numbers of Nicaraguans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Puerto Ricans, Argentineans, Ecuadoreans, Brazilians and Dominicans.) Hispanics control most of the major government agencies, including the school board, the police department and other institutions. While this may be good for the Latino community, it doesn't necessarily empower the non-Latino black community.

Vanessa Woodard Byers, creator of bloggingblackmiami.com, could not agree more. She says that even as she has watched Haitian Americans gain more political ground, she has also seen "blacks as a whole in Miami lose a lot of power."

"The black communities that we once had are not really the same," she says. "Many of the black professionals have moved out of the area, so that's been a bit devastating to the community. A good bit of the history of the community is being lost as the black areas are gentrifying and historic neighborhoods and buildings are being lost. There's not really a black Miami now."

As for race relations, she says, "There's too much ethnic polarization for me. Sometimes it's about race, but a lot of times it's about economics -- who has money and who doesn't."

Woodard Byers says that Miami's growing reputation as an international hub of wealthy Latin American immigrants and rich American movie stars and basketball players has not helped bring people together. "It has added so much focus on bling and not enough on the development of community itself," she says, adding that this is partly why she started her blog.

Meanwhile, serious social problems remain. Black men are still being killed by police in disproportionate numbers, and black-community members are still demanding to know why.

"Blacks here as a whole still do not have very much political clout or political capital," Oglesby says. "Hispanics are the dominant group in Miami, and they tend not to reach out to blacks, so that diminishes black political power in some respect. You won't find strong black networks here like in Washington, D.C. It's not a great place culturally to raise black kids."

Bill Diggs, president and CEO of the Miami-Dade Chamber of Commerce, which represents 550 black-owned businesses, believes that the city's growing black middle class will change that reality. In addition, he says, the Cuban-American power structure is changing.

"I think the level of influence of the Cuban old guard is beginning to dissipate," he says. "The second and third generations of Cubans are much more Americanized and much more apt to embrace diversity. They are more open to what we can do to help one another. Our chamber has a strong and growing relationship with the Latin chambers out there. There's an embracing of cultures, if you will. We attend their events and they attend ours."

The economic gap is still wide, however. "Our constant fight is getting access to government contracts," Diggs says. "There is still a tremendous disparity with black businesses' ability to do business here."

He cites Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation's fourth-largest school system, as an example. Less than 2 percent of the school system's business goes to black vendors, even though black residents are 22 percent of the city's population. That percentage has not changed in 23 years, Diggs says.

Still, there's no denying that there has been progress.

Eduardo J. Padrón, president of Miami Dade College, said that it took a lot of work and commitment for the city to get where it is. He was part of a committee of community leaders who worked to build bridges after the 1980 riots.

"There was recognition by leading members of all of Miami's ethnic groups that something had to change," he said in an e-mail, adding that the city's relatively new and disparate populations made for a "fragile community."

"One of the keys to the progress over these many years has been the awareness by all concerned that as Hispanics gained greater opportunity and leadership roles, a concerted effort needed to be made to ensure that African Americans also had access to those same economic, educational and civic opportunities," Padrón wrote. "This was and remains a critical aspect of the community's progress."

I now live in Washington, D.C., home of the nation's first black president and other black political and economic powerbrokers. The region has some of the wealthiest, most educated blacks in the country. Needless to say, I haven't started packing my bags for a move back to Miami.

After years of traveling back to south Florida to visit family, however, I've developed a soft spot for the place where I cut my teeth as a reporter chronicling a city in transition and observing the slow, hard work of racial reconciliation. Like other cities across the country, Miami remains a work in progress. I may just yet consider retiring there -- when I'm 90.

Marjorie Valbrun is a regular contributor to The Root.

Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card

http://www.schoolfundingfairness.org/National_Report_Card.pdf

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Jiang Xueqin: The Test Chinese Schools Still Fail - WSJ.com

The Test Chinese Schools Still Fail

High scores for Shanghai's 15-year-olds are actually a sign of weakness.

By JIANG XUEQIN

It's ironic that just as the world is appreciating the strengths of China's education system, Chinese are waking up to its weaknesses. These are two sides of the same coin: Chinese schools are very good at preparing their students for standardized tests. For that reason, they fail to prepare them for higher education and the knowledge economy.

On Tuesday, Shanghai's 15-year-olds topped the global league tables in reading, science and math in the Program for International Student Assessment, a test run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This comes as no surprise to anyone working in Chinese schools.

With its demanding parents, ambitious students, and test-obsessed culture, China's K-9 schooling is probably the most rigorous in the world. And Shanghai, an open and cosmopolitan city that is boundlessly ambitious and fiercely competitive, has always been China's K-9 education leader.

View Full Image

AFP/Getty Images

So China has no problem producing mid-level accountants, computer programmers and technocrats. But what about the entrepreneurs and innovators needed to run a 21st century global economy? China's most promising students still must go abroad to develop their managerial drive and creativity, and there they have to unlearn the test-centric approach to knowledge that was drilled into them.

The failings of a rote-memorization system are well-known: lack of social and practical skills, absence of self-discipline and imagination, loss of curiosity and passion for learning. Chinese students burn themselves out testing into university, where many of them spend their time playing World of Warcraft.

Both multinationals and Chinese companies have the same complaints about China's university graduates: They cannot work independently, lack the social skills to work in a team and are too arrogant to learn new skills. In 2005, the consulting firm McKinsey released a report saying that China's current education system will hinder its economic development.

But don't the PISA results at least show that China's K-9 education is the best in the world, and that standardized testing, as U.S. President Barack Obama seems to believe, is necessary to improve American schools?

Not really. According to research on education, using tests to structure schooling is a mistake. Students lose their innate inquisitiveness and imagination, and become insecure and amoral in the pursuit of high scores.

Even Shanghai educators admit they're merely producing competent mediocrity. The OECD report states, "[T]he dictates of the examinations have left students with little time and room for learning on their own. 'There is an opportunity cost in terms of time and space,' said [one experienced Shanghai educator]. 'Students grow with narrow margins' and are not fully prepared for their lives and work in the future. This is seen as a deep crisis, exacerbated by the reality of single-child families."

A consensus is growing that instead of vaulting the country past the West, China's schools are holding it back. They equip everybody with the basic knowledge to be functional in a socialist economy. But now that China is a market economy hoping to compete globally, it's jealous of America's ability to turn its brightest students into the world's best scientists and businesspeople.

Reform is on the horizon. This year the Chinese government released a 10-year plan including greater experimentation. China Central Television's main evening news program recently reported on Peking University High School's curricular reforms to promote individuality and diversity.

As director of Peking University High School's government-approved International Division, an experimental program to prepare students for study in America, I've attended meetings where Beijing's top education officials endorsed importing Western curricula. Nevertheless, it's safe to say China won't challenge America's leadership in education anytime soon.

Shanghai's stellar results on PISA are a symptom of the problem. Tests are less relevant to concrete life and work skills than the ability to write a coherent essay, which requires being able to identify a problem, break it down to its constituent parts, analyze it from multiple angles and assemble a solution in a succinct manner to communicate across cultures and time. These "critical thinking" skills are what Chinese students need to learn if they are to become globally competitive.

So the first step of education reform is trying to teach students who are good test takers to be good essay writers. To write well in English, students need to understand concepts such as thesis and argument, structure and support, coherence and flow, tone and audience, diction and syntax—concepts that are barely introduced in Chinese schools. One way we'll know we're succeeding in changing China's schools is when those PISA scores come down.

Mr. Jiang is deputy principal of Peking University High School, and director of its International Division.