“This was done by somebody who was barely literate." —Daniel Pinkwater, genius towering super-hero of literature, is profoundly pissed at the mangling of his work that then caused the uproar over the absurd and bizarre NYS reading exam test question about the pineapple in the race with the hare.
Marty Skoble sits in his office surrounded by the words of his students. Recently, one of his charges slipped a note under his door that read simply, "Waves look like white horses." That is not the most advanced of similes, but consider the context: The uncertainty of the pensmanship suggests that the anonymous writer was in his or her first decade.
Skoble started teaching poetry at Brooklyn's Saint Ann's in the 1980s. More than 30 years later, the balding, bearded gentleman who speaks with the thoughtful cadence of a lifelong educator is an institution, meeting with every lower school student once a week and 400 children in total. In [...]
"Though you would never know it from the state of public alarm about education, the numbers show that regular public school performance has skyrocketed in the last two decades to the point that, for example, black elementary school students now have better math skills than whites had only 20 years ago. (There has also been progress for middle schoolers, and in reading; and less, but not insubstantial, progress for high schoolers.) The reason test score gaps have barely narrowed is that white students have also improved, at least at the elementary and middle school levels. The causes of these truly spectacular gains are unknown, but they are probably inconsistent with [...]
Good news for America's money-hungry colleges and universities! Yale: "Class of 2015 admit rate lowest ever." UCLA: "A record-high number of applicants for UCLA results in low admissions." Harvard: "Harvard Accepts Record Low 6.2 Percent of Applicants to the Class of 2015."
So, yes: application rates are through the roof, admission rates are way down, and at the same time, prices are going up! Coupled with the trend of the use of high-priced admissions "consultants," who help eliminate admissions to needy ("poor") students so as to get more paying students, it's going to be a great year for institutions (to sock away some cash and educate [...]
There was a teacher in my high school, Mr. Johnson. I had him for Current Events class my senior year. He would sporadically stop class and call out "Pop quiz: Who's Catholic?" Then, he'd point to each raised hand and say, "Plus five, plus five, plus five…" He was joking about giving out this Catholic extra credit. Sorta kinda. But he'd give the football players exemptions from homework assignments if they played a good game-for real, and let everybody know about it. He had a mustache and wore polo shirts tucked in too tight. He was one of the "cool" teachers in the school and very popular with the [...]
In case you missed it, thousands of students from all over the UC system marched on Sacramento yesterday afternoon to protest California's broken school system, where college tuition has tripled over the last ten years. In the evening, 68 were arrested inside the capitol when they refused to leave.
What’s next for the Occupy Wall Street movement as it regroups after its eviction from Zuccotti Park? A small but energetic group of New York City education activists hope the Occupiers will channel their rage toward Mayor Mike Bloomberg by taking a closer look at his local school reform record.
Last Friday at noon, some two-dozen of these protestors, many of them black and Latino parents with kids in the public schools, crowded the sidewalk on the east side of Zuccotti Park. Pack the book bags of our kids! Not the pockets of the rich!, they chanted. They mostly failed to attract the attention of the hard-core Occupiers—the tent-dwellers—who were [...]
The Chilean student demonstrations are really amazing—at least 527 or possibly 552 or could be 800 people all told were arrested yesterday (often, let's say, not nicely), and students occupied state TV offices to get the message out in a traditional fashion. The higher education system is now predominately a group of for-profit businesses, and the students are organizing on the principle that going permanently into debt for education is not a way a country's education system should be run. How about that. Today, student organizers are turning down a vague proposal from the government that increases some public funding. Good!
I guess this will at least provide more of an incentive to get kids reading: "[A]ds for local ice cream shops or hair salons could soon be appearing on permission slips, class calendars, and school notices sent home with Peabody elementary school students after a unanimous School Committee vote this week. The novel plan to sell ad space on school communications marks the latest twist in how commercialization of schools – from the sale of billboard space to ads on buses – is generating cash in lean times."
A study of 2000 British children aged 9-15 revealed that more than one in 20 "thought Hitler managed Germany's football team rather than the leader of the fascist Nazi Party" while "one in six children believed Auschwitz was a World War Two theme park."
The Times and a host of other publications heralded last week's new study extolling the lifelong money-earning benefits of having a good primary/middle-school teacher. Oh, yay! Let's do what these economists from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggest, right?
Actually, ugh, no. What economists Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard and Jonah Rockoff of Columbia want to do, apparently, is to identify and fire "weaker" teachers, for the sake of a barely perceptible increase in students' "lifetime income." Nobody has actually tried this yet; the report doesn't describe an experiment. It's just the conclusion they draw from their analysis of massive amounts [...]
"When test scores become the goal of education by which students and schools are measured, then students in the bottom half—who will inevitably include disproportionate numbers of children who are poor, children with disabilities, children who barely speak English—will be left far behind, stigmatized by their low scores. If we were to focus on the needs of children, we would make sure that every pregnant woman got good medical care and nutrition, since many children born to women without them tend to have learning disabilities. We would make sure that children in poor communities have high-quality early childhood education so that they arrive in school ready to learn. We would [...]
"The state Education Department is poised to award a $27 million no-bid contract to a company former city Schools Chancellor Joel Klein oversees." —Good. Grief.
A lot of folks are wondering what people in Texas are smoking in light of the state board of education's decision to change its social studies curriculum to reflect a more conservative outlook. A new video from the great Houston rap-crooner Devin the Dude provides some insight.
"President Obama's plan to deliver a speech to public school students on Tuesday has set off a revolt among conservative parents, who have accused the president of trying to indoctrinate their children with socialist ideas and are asking school officials to excuse the children from listening."
Really, I've got nothing else on this one. I mean, what's the point? You cannot argue with crazy because crazy is not willing to be convinced. Hell, it's not even willing to listen to the arguments. What a world.
