Education News
Instant messaging slows students’ reading, study indicates.
Education Week (8/15, Viadero) reported, “Students who send and receive instant messages while completing a reading assignment take longer to get through their texts but apparently still manage to understand what they’re reading, according to one of the first studies to explore how the practice affects academic learning.” For the study, the researchers “randomly assigned” students “to take part in one of three groups:” one that read a psychology textbook on a computer “with no interruptions,” one that “answered instant messages first and then did their reading,” and one group that “multitasked, fielding instant messages as they read.” The researchers found that, “[e]ven after taking into account the time students spent on the instant messaging,…the third group took about 15 minutes longer than the other two groups to complete the reading –roughly 50 percent more time than the other two groups took.” However, the groups “fared about the same on a test given later on to check their understanding of the text.”
In the Classroom
Essay considers evolving role of technology in the classroom.
In an essay for the New York Times (8/17, BU4), Steve Lohr wrote that “the time may have come to reconsider how large a role technology can play in changing education.” In particular, “[t]he new Web education networks can open the door to broader changes,” as parents can “become more engaged because they can monitor their children’s attendance, punctuality, homework and performance.” Additionally, “[t]eachers can share methods, lesson plans and online curriculum materials.” And, “[i]n the classroom, the emphasis can shift to project-based learning,” which “some educators say encourages active learning and produces better performance in class and on standardized tests.” According to Lohr, “The educational bottom line…is that while computer technology has matured and become more affordable, the most significant development has been a deeper understanding of how to use the technology.” Lohr also described the efforts of the New Technology Foundation, a nonprofit that “has developed a model for project-based teaching and is at the forefront of the drive for technology-enabled reform of education.”
Program seeks to foster hands-on science education in California district.
California’s San Mateo County Times (8/18, Gonzales) reports, “Organizers of” the Gene Connection program, “a long-running science-education program, hope to infuse new excitement among San Mateo County high school teachers and their students” by “provid[ing] high schools 18 new Apple laptops and other equipment for use in lab projects.” The program’s “renewed effort should boost project-based biotechnology and chemistry instruction in a time when hands-on science education is being challenged by school budget cuts and an increased focus on curriculum standards set by the state.” Further, “the program is developing new curriculum as part of a National Science Foundation grant to help students pursue a career in the field and offering new lab projects in biotechnology and chemistry.” According to Gene Connection officials, the program helps educators reach state standards “in a different way, while keeping up the kids’ interest.”
Theater program combines art, finance, and marketing lessons.
The New York Times (8/17, NJ9, La Gorce) reported on “students in ArtWorks, the South Orange Performing Arts Center’s first summer arts education program.” The program, “which celebrated the culmination of its first three-week term with a July 25 performance of ‘Beat,’ an original musical, never intended to coddle its inaugural class with an onstage-all-the-time curriculum.” The program included not only “scripting, casting, choreographing and writing upward of five original songs” for the play, but also required “crunching numbers to arrive at a ticket price,…designing fliers, [and] coming up with a text-message marketing campaign.” Ondine Landa Abramson, ArtWorks’s executive director, explained, “A lot of people think if you want to work in the arts you have to be an artist. But some kids came in and learned, hey, I really enjoy working in development.” Abramson added, “It’s important in the time and age we live in that kids understand there’s a thriving industry around the performing arts.”
Iowa school considers linking students’ performance to college funding.
Iowa’s Des Moines Register (8/17, Hawkins) reported that Scavo Alternative High School, “Des Moines’ only alternative high school, hopes to boost graduation rates with an idea that has triggered controversy nationwide: Pay students to perform.” Through the “learn and earn” program, “students would be paid, for example, $1 a day for attendance, $10 for timely completion of a class, $20 to enroll in an advanced course and more at graduation.” However, “[s]tudents would only cash in when they enroll in college or another secondary education program. The money would be sent to their colleges of choice and be spread out over the time it takes them to graduate.” Currently, “no money is in the district budget for the program,” and the educator backing the program “said she will rely on grants and community donations.” The Register noted that while “[a] handful of U.S. school districts have experimented with similar incentive programs,…experts say the idea is too new to be accurately assessed.”
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Utah program offers bicycles to encourage reading.
The Salt Lake Tribune (8/16) reported, “This year, 220 Utah schools in 13 school districts will participate in” a program that “challenges students in grades K-6 to read at least 20 minutes a day throughout the school year.” Under the program, “[f]or each 100 minutes a student spends reading, the student can enter his or her name into a drawing to win a bicycle. … Each school will get four bikes to give away.” The Tribune noted, “This is the program’s second year. Last year, 50 Utah schools participated.”
Wisconsin district develops plans to lower dropout rates.
Wisconsin’s Post-Crescent (8/17, Nufer) reported, “With its dropout rate creeping upward, the Appleton Area School District has developed a district plan detailing programs and services for students at risk of not graduating.” The district’s “plan also lays out goals for closing the achievement gap for at-risk students, from identifying children in grades 5-12 who are performing a year or more behind their peers to monitoring test data and making sure parents know their child is at-risk and the services available to them.” According to Katherine Crowley, who oversees the district’s alternative schools, “the district at-risk committee looked at ‘pages’ of interventions the district offers, including reading specialists and after-school tutoring, police-school liaisons and homeless parent programs.” The district also heard from schools that have lowered teacher-student ratios “in the early grades” and “boost[ed] skills such as reading and math support and literacy coaching, and after-school tutoring.”
Texas project teaches educators how to feature nature in science instruction.
Texas’s Star-Telegram (8/16, Smith) reported that Mark Bloom, professor of science education at Texas Christian University (TCU), “has been helping area teachers use outdoor spaces to teach science.” The goal of the program is to “inspire students to question their own impact on nature.” TCU’s Andrews Institute of Mathematics, Science & Technology Education hosts the program, which is “funded through two federal Teacher Quality Enhancement Grants.” The Star-Telegram pointed out that “[t]this summer, teachers participated in a two-week academy that included lessons on exotic species, insect collecting, guided hikes, and a biology scavenger hunt.” In addition, the group “stayed overnight at the Fort Worth district’s Outdoor Learning Center in Azle.”
Law & Policy
Some parents, education advocates critical of D.C. school choice program.
On the front page of its Metro section, the Washington Post (8/18, B1, Turque) reports, “Earlier this month, parents of students in 81 low-performing D.C. public schools — almost two-thirds of the District system — got a packet in the mail announcing that federal law entitles them to transfer their children to a stronger school.” However, only “34 applications for transfer” have been received, which educators and parents attribute, in part, to “[t]he eight other mainstream high schools” in the District “also [being] under federal mandate to restructure and improve.” And while the district has “five ‘specialty’ high schools,” these schools “[a]ll have admission requirements.” Additionally, some “parents and school activists” have complained that “[t]he notification packets were mailed Aug. 5, giving families less than three weeks to make decisions and apply for transfers before classes begin.” However, school officials say “the information could not have gone out earlier because results of the District’s annual standardized test…needed to be ‘crunched, analyzed and verified’ to determine which schools were failing.”
Safety & Security
Poverty, language barriers, and autism case may play role in Florida’s high vaccine noncompliance rate.
The Miami Herald (8/15, Tasker) reported that, by law, and “[i]n theory, the immunization rate” in Florida “should be nearly 100 percent.” But according to Florida Department of Health records, “[m]ore than 10,000 students sought exemptions from required vaccinations last year in Miami-Dade, Broward, and Monroe county schools, giving South Florida some of the highest noncompliance rates in the state.” While the “records count only kindergartners and seventh graders,” health officials suspect that the percentage of unvaccinated children is higher, and growing. Many “[d]octors say childhood vaccinations are a crucial underpinning of public health, protecting against such serious diseases as mumps, measles, polio, and meningitis.” But “[l]ocal health officials say” that children are foregoing immunizations because of “a high-profile court case that seemed to link vaccines to autism.” Moreover, “high poverty rates,” a “transient population,” and language barriers make vaccination compliance difficult. Yet, “[w]ith public concern growing, Florida’s legislators are taking steps” to alleviate the problem by examining the vaccine-autism link, and creating new measures regulating adherence and “opt out” clauses.
Experts say bullying becoming more extreme, public.
The San Francisco Chronicle (8/17, McMahon) reported, “It is unclear whether bullying is on the rise, whether new technology has caused an increase, or whether, like sex abuse, it is simply being reported more often these days.” Regardless, Berkeley psychotherapist Elayne Savage says, “The coloration of it is changing — it’s more extreme, more humiliating and more public.” The Chronicle noted examples of different types of bullying, steps educators and lawmakers have taken to prevent it, and includes a list of anti-bullying resources. The article also quoted experts explaining why some schools are “slow to respond to cyber-bulling.” According to Nancy Willard of the Center for Safe and Responsible Use of the Internet, there are “[t]hree reasons. … Lack of clarity on the legal parameters; the incidents can be very difficult to unravel and find out who is the real victim; and many school officials and safe-schools personnel understandably do not fully understand youth culture online.”
Facilities
New Orleans to spend $685 million renovating, constructing schools.
New Orleans’s Times-Picayune (8/17, Carr, Simon) reported, “Armed with $685 million in recovery cash, New Orleans public school leaders aim to radically remake the city’s bloated portfolio of aged school buildings, most of them rotted as badly from neglect and plummeting enrollment as from the” effects of the flooding after Hurricane Katrina. Much of the funding will come “from Federal Emergency Management Agency rebuilding programs.” The schools’ “master plan…calls for the construction or complete renovation of 28 schools in about five years, including eight new high schools.” Additionally, “the plan would close or liquidate dozens of buildings…to create a more efficient system housed in state-of-the-art environments,” and “recommend[s] the establishment of a separate construction authority to manage the projects of all entities, and to bring continuity as work proceeds in the future.” The Times-Picayune noted, “The proposed master plan ignores the newly balkanized school governance landscape” by “focus[ing] only on matching building capacity with anticipated enrollment.”
School Finance
Schools, parents taking steps to deal with rising costs.
The AP (8/18, Quaid) reported, “Harder times and higher fuel prices are following kids back to school this fall.” The rising prices “present a tricky math problem: Where can schools subtract to keep costs under control?” Some schools, such as one in Minnesota, are “skipping classes every Monday to save a day’s worth of fuel,” and extending the school day Tuesday through Friday to compensate. “The other option for the district…was to start cutting electives.” Some districts have also altered their supplies lists that they send home; one district’s “supply lists include copy paper,” while another has held “a toilet paper drive.” Further, “[n]early half of the schools” that were polled “in [a] school administrators’ survey said they are curtailing field trips,” and many are charging more for lunch. The article also notes measures parents are taking to save money on back-to-school costs, such as reusing supplies and clothing.
Research suggests mathematical ability may be innate.
The AP (8/19, Schmid) reports that “people whose languages don’t include words for more than one or two…are still able to compare quantities,” according to a recent study. The researchers “compared the numerical skills of children from two indigenous Australian groups whose languages don’t contain many number words with similar children who speak English,” and found that “[a]ll the groups performed equally well.” The researchers concluded that “[b]asic number and arithmetic skills are built on a specialized innate system,” and that “[u]sing words for exact numbers is ‘useful but not necessary.’” Some experts, however, contend that the study “doesn’t support the conclusion that the understanding of exact numbers does not depend on language.”
Participants “were asked to ‘copy’ the number of objects the researchers placed on a mat,” the BBC (8/19) explains. “They then had to repeat the exercise when objects were added under a cover — so they could not see how many objects were now there but had to work it out.” Finally, “the children had to match the right number of counters to the number of times the researcher banged two sticks together.” The study’s leader, Brian Butterworth, said the results “may help explain why children in numerate cultures with developmental dyscalculia find it so difficult to learn arithmetic.” Butterworth explained, “Although they have plenty of formal and informal opportunities to learn to count with words and do arithmetic, the innate mechanism on which skilled arithmetic is based may have developed atypically.”
The U.K.’s Telegraph (8/19, Highfield) quoted the study’s co-author Dr. Bob Reeve, who “says that the study has implications for the way numeracy is taught.” Reeve said, “We need to investigate ways in which we can add on to these building blocks to develop ways of teaching numeracy that are relevant to Indigenous students’ culture.” He added, “We also need to redefine the way we think about numeracy across the board — moving away from the view that we need words to describe numbers and basic computations.”
The Australian (8/19, Trounson) notes that the study’s findings “contradict earlier results that found that some indigenous communities in the Amazon with similarly few number words in their language had difficulty with some basic mathematical tasks.”
In the Classroom
Three Pennsylvania high schools to add engineering programs.
Pennsylvania’s Intelligencer Journal (8/18) reported that three schools in Lancaster County, Pa., “are adding college-caliber engineering programs to their curricula to spur students’ interest in science, mathematics, technology and engineering.” The Journal explained that “[a]ll three schools will offer an introductory engineering course as part of a multiyear pre-engineering program.” In the future, the schools are expected to “add courses in digital electronics, civil engineering and architecture, computer-integrated manufacturing, biotechnology, and aerospace engineering.” Students who successfully complete the program will “be able to earn up to 11 college credits.” The Journal pointed out the “courses were developed by Project Lead the Way, a nonprofit that” that was formed to “develop a pre-engineering curriculum to bridge America’s ‘engineering gap.’”
Alabama district experiments with low-cost laptops.
eSchool News (8/18, Van Dusen) reported on “One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative’s first foray into the United States” through a pilot program in Birmingham, Alabama. The program “began with 1,000 of the group’s $200 laptops for students in Glen Iris Elementary School’s first through fifth grades,” and later expanded with “the city’s purchase of 14,000 more…, with plans to eventually include all 15,000 students in the school system’s first through eighth grades.” However, “concerns remain.” In particular, “critics wonder whether a computer initially designed for children in poor, rural parts of the world — and primarily using its own non-Windows operating system — is the right learning tool for students who eventually will seek to join the general computing population in the U.S.” There are also concerns “that it could be difficult to track progress and achievement on machines that promote a constructivist approach to learning,” especially “in today’s educational climate of high-stakes testing and accountability.”
Kansas school designed to educate problem students.
Kansas’s Lawrence Journal World (8/18, parker) reported on “the Day School, a joint educational effort between the Lawrence school district and Douglas County” where students are sent “either for committing crimes or behavior problems.” The school has “no classes, no group projects, [and] no extracurricular activities,” and the “[s]tudents are frisked to ensure no contraband, iPods or cell phones enter the classroom.” Further, “[s]tudents are subject to at-home supervision checks and take home a daily report card, which charts behavior and academics.” In the classroom, “[t]hree teachers, assisted by three teacher aides, give students tips as they work to complete [individualized] assignments each week” at their own pace. Day School educators admitted that students are “missing out on the social structure and the activities of their regular schools,” but pointed out that “[t]here’s no getting left behind” because of the level of individualized attention.
More Ohio schools offering Chinese programs.
The AP (8/18) reported that there is a growing demand for Chinese language classes in Ohio schools, but many of the schools struggle with “finding someone qualified to teach the language.” According to the Ohio Department of Education, “[t]he number of Ohio schools offering Mandarin Chinese tripled last year from 777 to 2,287.” In order to meet their demand for teachers, “[t]wenty school districts…this year will turn to a Chinese-government-sponsored program that offers American schools a native Chinese teacher for three years,” with the schools needing “only…to provide housing and transportation.” The AP added that, last year, the Ohio Foreign Language Advisory Council “released two reports…that said schools should offer long, uninterrupted stretches of instruction as early as kindergarten.” The council “also said the state must increase instruction in languages such as Chinese and Arabic.”
The Toledo Blade (8/18, Schmitt) added, “Government incentives are helping signal the conversion. Last year, the National Security Language Initiative provided $24 million in support to primary and secondary schools to provide instruction in Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean.”
Pittsburgh program teaches educators about job opportunities for high school students.
Pennsylvania’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (8/18, Sostek) reported that in the last two months, 13 teachers “have fanned out across the region, participating in the ‘Educator in the Workplace’ program run by the Career Dynamics office of the Allegheny [Pa.] Intermediate Unit.” The program seeks to “improve the career prospects of high school students by facilitating connections between teachers and employers.” The program also “helps businesses recruit new employees and gives them a chance to tell teachers what skills prospective employees might be missing.” The teachers are then “required to complete two lesson plans about the experiences.” Educator Norma McGinnis of Northgate High School in Pittsburgh visited a construction site, where she was informed that “construction offers more of a career path than many other industries.” She was also told “that it’s important for high school students to have basic math skills, a strong work ethic and good communication skills, but that most everything else can be taught on the job.”
On the Job
Alabama school district seeks more minority teachers.
Alabama’s Eufaua Tribune (8/18, Woo) reported, “Eufaula City Schools board president Otis Hill and board member Louise Connor are concerned about the racial gap of teachers in core classes.” Hill “also asked administrators to look at options for hiring minorities whenever possible.” Last year, the high school “lost 32 people and rehired 17. … Demographically, the school lost 13 white and three black teachers during the change and gained one Hispanic teacher.” School board member Dr. Jimmy Lockwood said, “If you look at these numbers, we’re losing a lot of our minority teachers because they aren’t getting recertified. We’ve got to keep our minorities certified.” He added, “A lot of times, [minority] teachers have already taken jobs by the time we are ready to hire. So, I think that policy that was supposed to help us attract minorities by posting longer actually hinders us in some cases.” The Tribune noted that the school board plans to look into the matter.
Safety & Security
Test-preparatory firm accidentally exposes students’ personal data on website.
The New York Times (8/18, Stone) reported, “The Princeton Review, the test-preparatory firm, accidentally published the personal data and standardized test scores of tens of thousands of Florida students on its website, where they were available for seven weeks.” The scores of “about 34,000 students in the public schools in Sarasota, Fla.” were discovered by “[a]nother test-preparatory company…while doing competitive research.” According to the Times, the “file included the students’ birthdays and ethnicities, whether they had learning disabilities, whether English was their second language, and their level of performance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. … Another folder contained dozens of files with names and birth dates for 74,000 students in the school system of Fairfax County, Va.” Both districts hired the Princeton review to help them “measure students’ academic progress.”
Facilities
Kentucky district offers boxed lunches as menu item.
Kentucky’s Courier-Journal (8/18, Konz) reported that Jefferson County Public School officials have added a new item to the lunch menu — a lunchbox “filled with either a sandwich or salad.” Every day “this month, elementary school students will have the option of choosing either the” Pyramid Power Pack “meal or one of the regular menu items for lunch.” The Power Pack “lunch box contains a different sandwich or entr