Archive for Curriculum

The school district of Eagle County, Colorado, is changing the way it teaches reading to elementary students this year. For the first time, every elementary school will be using a standardized, districtwide program to teach reading instead of their own, home-grown programs as they have for years.

This new set of textbooks, workbooks, assignments and training seminars for teachers might seem like routine business, but school leaders see it as a major improvement in how schools will teach reading. The program, called Literacy By Design, will bring some much needed consistency to reading lessons and help teachers with the difficult but important task of customizing lessons for every student, said Heather Eberts, director of elementary education. Read more about the new program in The Vail Daily online.

As the saying goes, reading is fundamental.

Center Grove Community School Corporation officials in Indidana are taking that to heart with a renewed emphasis on literacy. When school resumes August 13, students will find literacy and vocabulary lessons woven into virtually every subject.

"We really believe literacy is the touchstone for everything that follows in their lives," said Lisa Plank, West Grove Elementary principal. In addition to boosting reading comprehension and fluency, Plank said she hopes students learn that "reading is an enjoyable pastime." Read more in The Indianapolis Star online.

Twenty-two pairs of eyes followed third-grade teacher Paul Herlofsky as he used an interactive white board to project a worksheet a student had completed during a recent field trip to a regional park.

Field trips and white boards may not be that special, but Herlofsky's class at Jenny Lind Elementary in north Minneapolis, Minnesota, represents an investment in summer school that sets the city apart.

As other school districts scale back or eliminate summer programs, the Minneapolis School District is expanding. Last week, more than 9,000 students—roughly 25% of the district's students—were enrolled in summer classes. Read more in The Minneapolis Star Tribune online.

School districts across the country are adopting early intervention programs in hopes of steering some children away from expensive special education classes. While it's a cost savings to the system, the payoff comes mainly for the student who, through intervention from the school, won't be among those identified as in need of special education.

The adoption of such programs, known as Response to Intervention, is catching on across the country as school districts are trying to cut down on over-identification—too many children being shunted off to special education who don't need to be there. This year, there were 84,772 special education students in Alabama schools. The cost to educate a student through a special education program can be twice as much as a general education student, up to $12,000 a year. Read more about what Alabama is doing at TimesDaily.com.

As a young boy in the 1950s, Terry Bond remembers those tedious spelling lessons where students hunched over their desks memorizing word lists they would forget a week later. Kids in Springfield, Missouri, were pretty much doing the same thing two years ago until Bond, in charge of the district's writing curriculum, opted for a new approach.

"It's focused on spelling strategies rather than working on a list," Bond says of the program Springfield adopted. "Simply performing drills is not an effective way of teaching grammar usage and mechanics, including spelling." With states increasingly testing students on their writing skills, spelling has gained importance again. Rather than relying on word lists, some school districts are taking a different, more holistic method to spelling instruction.

The one Springfield and several schools in at least eight other states use "Spelling for Writers"—emphasizes word patterns, roots and meanings rather than relying on word lists experts say often don't carry over to writing. America's best spellers will need those word deconstruction skills May 29 and 30 as they congregate for the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington to confront words many of them have never seen before. Read more in USA Today online.

 The goal of the No Child Left Behind Act is that every child attain proficiency in reading and math by 2014. At most of the 1,455 public schools in Maryland, teachers and principals regard that scenario as improbable, even laughable. At one school, the target has been met.

Last spring, all 184 students in the third and fourth grades at Ocean City Elementary School passed the Maryland School Assessment, or MSA, a battery of tests given by the state every year since 2003 to satisfy the law. The school was the first in the state, apart from a few tiny special-education centers, to meet the goal that has defined public education this decade. Read about the school's innovative approach to learning in The Washington Post online.

After more than two years of behind-the-scenes cajoling, public bickering, charges and countercharges, the bitterly divided Texas State Board of Education settled Friday, May 23, 2008, on new English and reading curriculum standards for the state's 4.6 million schoolchildren.

The result is a patchwork document, with pieces pulled from a plan adopted by the board Thursday, plus segments submitted by teacher work groups. The final vote was 9-6, with Democrats and some moderate Republicans joining in opposition. "I'm very disappointed. What it boils down to is the teachers were not respected enough to have their opinions count," said board member Pat Hardy, a Republican from Weatherford who voted against the new standards.

Changes included adding a section in the appendix on reading comprehension. The board also voted to align grammar instruction more closely with writing instruction. The board rejected an attempt by social conservatives to add a recommended reading list. Instead, the board agreed to create a reading-resource Web site. Read more about the controversy in The Fort Worth Star-Telegram online.

A simple edict that Aboriginal children read and write for two hours every morning is finally reducing appalling levels of literacy in remote parts of Australia.

The literacy of children at Kiwirrkurra in the Gibson Desert, 700 km west of Alice Springs, was so poor four years ago that only a handful had the reading and writing skills to attempt the West Australian Government’s annual written literacy exam for all students in Years 3, 5 and 7. Of those who sat the test, not one met the national benchmarks. In the remote township of 150 people, only 15 adults can read and write English.

But the students are now making small but significant gains after the West Australian Government’s Aboriginal literacy strategy, rolled out to 42 remote schools in 2006, made it compulsory for teachers to devote the first two hours of every school day to guided reading, guided writing and word games. Read the article in The Australian online.

The inability of many Texas students to write and speak good English is like a dreadful disease requiring aggressive treatment, say some education advocates who want to use different teaching approaches. Social conservatives on the State Board of Education, influenced in part by a retired teacher, are backing a new curriculum that increases the focus on basics, including grammar.

They’ve met fierce resistance from teachers and educators who warn this emphasis will prepare students for the 1950s, not the 21st century, and embarrass Texas in the process. They fear the state’s proposed new standards for reading and English language arts contradict established research and will only make things worse. Read about the controversy in The Houston Chronicle online.

Kids—and their parents—who feel bogged down by school homework may have lighter loads in sight. Ontario’s education minister said yesterday (Wednesday, April 2, 2008) school boards should review their homework policy to ensure kids aren’t overloaded. Kathleen Wynne, Ontario’s education minister, also said reducing the load for kindergarten kids, not assigning holiday homework and killing penalties for late assignments seem like “reasonable” ideas.

Her comments came as Toronto’s public school board looks at setting stricter rules to reduce homework in the wake of a study suggesting Ontario kids spend more time than others in Canada on homework, leaving them stressed out and even sparking spats between their parents. Read more about homework heartache in The London Free Press, The Globe and Mail, and The Hamilton Spectator.

It doesn’t take much to bring Mary Helen Berlanga, the senior member of the Texas State Board of Education, back to her own school days. Sometimes the memories are tough, but it helps drive the daughter of immigrants to fight for what she thinks minority children need to succeed. Berlanga fears many of the state’s children are headed for failure—dropping out and disabling the state from developing a strong work force necessary to keep good-paying jobs.

Berlanga, who as a child learned English from seven older siblings, has pushed her colleagues to develop a new English language arts and reading curriculum that takes into consideration the growing ranks of minority children who struggle with the language barrier. Nearly half of the state’s 4.7 million public schoolchildren are Hispanic.

Her opponents among the board’s 15 members finally agreed last week to invite two Hispanic experts to work on a final version of a new English language arts and reading plan for Texas public schools. Read about the controversy in The Houston Chronicle online.

They’re in Grade 1 and 2, but they sound like literacy professors. “Hey. You dropped your rubric!” calls one 6-year-old, pointing to one of the small yellow checklists the teacher gives to each child that outline the points they should cover in their answers. Another boasts he’s made an important “connection” in his reading. A third brags: "I’m almost writing at level 4!"

“Rubric” charts and connections and levels are part of a push to bolster reading and writing at Toronto’s Claireville Junior Public School, with the help of the Ontario Focused Intervention Partnership (OFIP), a program funded by Queen’s Park. With $25 million, moral support and the latest teaching tips, Ontario’s four-year-old Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat, a wing of the Ministry of Education, is using OFIP to help 1,181 struggling schools rethink how they teach the 3 Rs and get kids thinking more deeply and personally. Read more about the program in The Toronto Star online.

Australia has fallen behind in reading because there is too much focus on lifting the results of struggling students, rather than also making our top students perform even better, says the man spearheading the federal government’s first national school curriculum.

Melbourne University professor Barry McGaw said yesterday that Australia’s international ranking had dropped in recent years because too much emphasis had been placed on boosting the results of students at the bottom end of the performance scale, and not enough on improving the skills of those at the top. Educators and governments should “behave like women and multi-task,” he said, by working to lift the game of all students. Read more in The Age online.

Katie Hern was surprised in fall of 2005 when only 55% of her remedial English students passed the course. Not that it was a surprising figure. “In fact,” she says, “it was pretty typical.” But the students had been part of a “learning community”—in other words, their courses were linked and students stuck together in one cohort across their classes, the goal being to maximize student success and retention—and so Hern had expected atypicality.

“Then I looked back over the data from my students and how they had done over the semester and I found there was a good reason to be surprised— because about half of those who got a [withdrawal] or no credit had shown they could do the work,” says Hern, an English instructor at Chabot College, a community college in California’s East Bay area. “The issue is not so much about ability but sustainability,” she says, defining the “sustainability gap” as such: “The gap between students’ ability to perform and the performance they actually sustain over the semester.”

Across California, community college leaders are writing action plans for improving so-called “basic skills” (otherwise known as remedial or developmental) and English as a Second Language education as part of a system-wide initiative, with the goal of creating models for other instructors operating in solitude behind their classrooms’ closed doors. Read more in Inside Higher Ed online.

Hoping to make dramatic gains in standardized test scores for elementary schoolchildren, the Hartford, Connecticut, city school district is embarking on an ambitious plan to overhaul the way young children are taught. Under the plan Superintendent Doris Kurtz is pushing, the district will enter into a contract with an educational institute based in Florida.

Instead of having a single teacher provide instruction in reading, math, writing and other core subjects, students learn from a teacher who specializes in reading at a reading station, then move on to a different teacher who specializes in math at a math station, and so on. The Institute for Social Innovation's Project CHILD program was founded and is directed by Florida State University Professor Sarah Butzin. Read about the plan in The Hartford Courant online.

A Perry Meridian High School teacher’s attempt to follow the lessons in the popular movie “Freedom Writers” has ended with her saying she was censored and the district trying to fire her for insubordination. Connie Heermann, a 27-year teacher, attended training last summer with Erin Gruwell, the California teacher who inspired the movie. Gruwell has earned fame for sparking excitement in her apathetic students through writing. Heermann hoped to have the same impact at Perry Meridian High School near Indianapolis, Indiana. The “Freedom Writers” approach encourages students to write about their own experiences, to reach out to other students of different backgrounds and to work toward a future that includes attending college and taking an active role in their communities. Read more about the controversy at indystar.com.

 They are bored—so much so that they may not pay attention in class or will act out in frustration. Some make poor grades, either because they no longer care or because they have spent so many of their younger years unchallenged that when they suddenly face a rigorous course in middle or high school, they don’t know how to study.

They are the nation’s gifted children, those with abilities beyond other children their age. Too many of their abilities, advocates argue, remain untapped by U.S. schools that don’t serve them as they focus instead on lifting low-achieving students to meet the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind law. Read about the problem in Delaware, one of six states that neither mandates gifted instruction nor provides gifted education funding. Go to delawareonline.com.

If you have children attending elementary school in the Eugene or Springfield school districts in Oregon, you should know that their educational experiences may be compromised this year because of recent textbook adoptions in the area of literacy education.

Our local public schools are trying a new approach to literacy: All elementary teachers will teach from a published curriculum that was adopted districtwide for all schools and grade levels. The publisher’s approach will be implemented districtwide to create consistency between schools and among grade levels. Consistency can mean that everyone is on the same page, or that all students—whether they are struggling, mainstream or gifted readers—are receiving the same core instruction.

But what are the effects of a one-type-fits-all curriculum on the children? And what are the implications for teachers who have developed and fine-tuned innovative approaches to reading, writing and social studies? Consider this opinion piece in The Register-Guard by Paul Bodin, who taught for 25 years in the Eugene School District and currently is an adjunct instructor in the colleges of education at Oregon State University and the University of Oregon.

Maryland’s attempts to turn around its worst schools in the past several years have largely failed, according to a report by a Washington-based nonprofit education research group. Of the 76 schools labeled failing for at least five years, only 12, or 16% have improved significantly since 2004, the Center on Education Policy found. “Even in an advanced state like Maryland, that has tried to deal with these problems for a decade ... we just don't know what to do,” said Jack Jennings, president of CEP.

The most commonly tried solution—bringing in a turnaround specialist—usually doesn’t work, the report said. And a newer option, replacing the teaching staff, has caused disruption but hasn’t gotten results. Maryland is to be commended, Jennings said, for learning from what doesn’t work. The lesson for other states around the nation, he said, is “that we ought to be humble ... that it is a long, hard slog to bring about change, and it is something we just have to keep working at.” Read the article in The Baltimore Sun.

Every Monday, Ian Mackenzie, a 17-year-old student at Greenwood College, heads to Moss Park arena with a team of fellow students to help run a hockey program for kids in Grades 4 to 6 who attend inner city schools. His fellow student J.C. O’Connell, a 13-year-old in Grade 8, travels to Dundas Junior Public School every Wednesday to help teach reading to two children who have just emigrated from China. Their efforts are part of an innovative approach to education at Greenwood College, a Toronto private school for Grades 7 to 12 started in 2002. It combines community service, outdoor education, academic studies and a co-op program. The idea behind these initiatives, school leaders say, is to build strong and independent young men and women. Read the article in The Toronto Star.

Since March, Dixon Deutsch and his students have been quietly experimenting with a little website that could one day rock the foundation of how schools do business. A K-2 teacher at Achievement First Bushwick Elementary Charter School in Brooklyn, New York, Deutsch, 28, has been using Free-Reading.net, a reading instruction program that allows him to download, copy and share lessons with colleagues. Colleges for years have tapped open-source materials, with instructors designing and giving away material such as lecture notes and exams. But the idea has been slow to make a mark in the less technologically savvy K-12 world. That may soon change. Websites such as hippocampus.org offer free materials tied to high school textbooks, and several college-level open-source projects are trickling down to K-12 schools. Read more at USA Today.com.

As the new school year progresses, a growing number of schools across the United States are trying new approaches to move students from feeling like anonymous drones with an ambiguous destiny to focused learners. In some schools students are in broad topical clusters, while in others, such as Sarasota High School in Florida, students must think about what specific job they aim to achieve, and choose a relevant major. Even as more states and individual schools adopt this “major” approach, critics say high school should be a place for gaining general knowledge and communication skills. Students aren’t ready to narrow their career options yet, they say. Read more of this article from The Christian Science Monitor.

A former senior Labor policy adviser has attacked the vision for school education unveiled by Australian state and territory governments as “dangerous drivel” and a “retrograde step that will dumb down school curriculum across Australia.” Ken Wiltshire, professor of public policy at the University of Queensland, told The Australian that the Future of Schooling report showed Labor education policy was still driven by the teachers’ unions. According to the report released this week, “the judgment of teachers is paramount,” with external state exams and national tests supplementing the teachers’ assessment. “External assessment should be what drives the whole national school curriculum. School-based assessment is subsidiary,” he said. Read about the controversy.

English teaching in Australia’s schools is in danger of losing its richness and emphasis on literature in its growing obsession with improving student test results, a group of education leaders believes. Early this month, a group of education leaders, some of whom helped shape the English teaching syllabus during the past 50 years, met to address what they see as an attack on the quality of the curriculum. Jacqueline Manuel, senior lecturer in English education at the University of Sydney, said the meeting was held to address concerns that the quality of the English curriculum was being compromised, with a growing emphasis on basic literacy test skills. Read more at The Sydney Morning Herald's website.

  More Americans say they are knowledgeable about the No Child Left Behind Act than just last year, but familiarity appears to breed dislike, according to a poll set for release this week by Phi Delta Kappa International and the Gallup Organization. In addition, Americans remain concerned that the federal education law’s focus on testing students for their proficiency in reading and mathematics is leading to a narrowing of the curriculum, at the expense of subjects such as social studies, science, and the arts, the survey found. Read more about the poll in this article from Education Week.

One of New York City’s newest public schools is named for a Lebanese poet who promoted peace and published his most famous work while living in the city, but there has been little peace for the Khalil Gibran International Academy. With a little more than a week remaining until the academic year starts, the school—announced in February as New York City’s first school to offer instruction in Arabic and on Arab culture—already has had to move once and has its second principal, both because of protests. Critics have attacked the school, named for the Lebanese Christian poet Khalil Gibran, as a potential radical Islam training ground. Supporters have been taken aback by the controversy. Read about it at the online news website News24.com.

One by one, Texas school districts are abandoning the bilingual education model that has been used to teach English to Spanish-speaking kids for the past 35 years. School administrators and teachers, backed by education researchers, have decided there is a better way. They call it dual language. Read more about the dual language approach in this article from The Dallas Morning News.

Ninth graders often have trouble selecting what clothes to wear to school each morning or what to have for lunch. But starting this fall, freshmen at Dwight Morrow High School in Bergen County, New Jersey, must declare a major that will determine what electives they take for four years and be noted on their diplomas. Some parents have welcomed the requirement, noting that a magnet school in the district already allowed some students to specialize. But other parents and some educators have criticized it as preprofessionalism run amok or a marketing gimmick. Read more about the program in this article from The New York Times.

Heard the one about the cow inseminated by seamen? The plants sewn together or the rouge genetic elements? You will soon. Grammatically challenged undergraduates from Imperial College London, England, are about to be publicly shamed. Their tutor, Bernard Lamb, was so unimpressed by their poor spelling, punctuation, and choice of words that he started to keep a diary of every mistake. Lamb—unfortunately for his students, a member of the Queen’s English Society—was shocked, and occasionally amused, and he decided to take the experiment one step further and publish it. Read some of the bloopers at Guardian Unlimited.

The chairman of the National Technical Committee on Civic Education in Nigeria has announced that civic education would be re-introduced in primary schools in September. Lanre Adebayo said the re-introduction is aimed at instilling discipline and promoting core Nigerian values in children. The committee was formed in 2006 to promote the government campaign PRIDE, an acronym for Patriotism, Resourcefulness, Integrity, Diligence and Enterprise. Adebayo said the committee would collaborate with publishers to produce books and educational materials, and teachers would be trained in the curriculum. Read the article at allAfrica.com.

Education groups have convinced the State Board of Education to slow down a plan to revamp the way schools teach English and writing to the state’s 4.6 million public school children. Most experts agree that the current English language arts curriculum isn’t getting the job done. Nearly one-third of all Texas 8th graders scored “below basic” on the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress for reading, with 44 percent of African-American students, 41 percent of Hispanic students and 18 percent of white students not able to read well enough for high school course work. Read more of this article from the Houston Chronicle.

A religious education teacher at Deptford Green school in London recently asked his class of 14- and 15-year-olds whether they would go to war for Great Britain. The question has captivated the students ever since. Amber Donohoe says: “It was a conflict for some people.” Ben Efrat, who has dual British-Israeli nationality, was sure of his answer. “I'd give my life for Israel and for Britain,” he says. “This country has looked after me.” Education Guardian published the early results of the first study on teachers’ and pupils’ views about whether patriotism should be encouraged, discouraged, or passively tolerated in British schools on July 17. The findings show most teachers are confused about what line, if any, the government expects them to take. Read the article at Guardian Unlimited.

Going to school is a daily grind for Umm Kareem’s children. Not only do they have to hit the books but they also have to hit the road—across the King Fahd Causeway all the way to Bahrain. With a limited range of options in Saudi Arabia, many Saudi parents are looking for schools with an emphasis on English in a strong curriculum, and a progressive attitude and environment. Vancouver Offshore Groups (VOSG), a Canadian educational service provider and consulting company registered in British Columbia, is proposing to integrate a tailor-made curriculum into Saudi schools. Read more at Arab News online.

The list of great literature in English lessons is being expanded as part of a reform of the national curriculum in England. Curriculum chief Ken Boston is today (July 12) launching the biggest shake-up of the secondary school curriculum in years. A new slimmed-down national curriculum for 11- to 16-year-olds will be adopted that puts more emphasis on teaching topics. This will enable students to research subjects in much greater depth and make learning more relevant to big issues of the day, such as global warming, Boston says. There will also still be a list of Western authors that pupils ages 14 to 16 should study, in addition to those from non-English cultures. "For should, read must," says Boston. Read the rest of the article and see what authors are on the list at The Independent online.

Angie Lebron clicks rapidly through the brightly illustrated passage on her computer screen to learn about an archaeologist’s study of the mummified remains of the Chachapoya people, who lived in South America more than five centuries ago. When a difficult term or phrase trips her up, she simply points her mouse to highlight it and bring up a definition or detailed description. Earlier in the school year, Ms. Lebron would have been frustrated by the complicated language and historical content in the reading assignment. But with the help of a reading-intervention program that includes computer-based lessons that adapt to her reading skills and specific instructional needs, Ms. Lebron is now on grade level and learning to enjoy reading in school and at home. Read more about the many ways that computer software is helping students learn in this article from Education Week.

John Hancock wouldn’t recognize the handwriting taught in many schools today. And his loopy slanted script might as well be a foreign language to 21st century students. Time and technology have largely done away with traditional penmanship, leaving schools with a challenge that mirrors today’s fast pace: how to teach a cursive style that’s faster to write than older, ornate methods and easily readable. Read more of this article from the Vail Daily.

Despite a 5-year-old federal requirement that they create English-language proficiency standards for children who are new to the language, most states—including some with the largest numbers of English-language learners—have yet to give local school districts assistance in how to translate those standards into a curriculum. The lack of detailed guidance and workshops on how to create a curriculum for English-language learners means that districts often are on their own in figuring out how to use the new standards in the classroom. Read more of this article from Education Week.

A curriculum under which children are not taught to read and write until they are 7 years old is being reviewed amid debate over whether it should be offered in public schools in Australia. Steiner education has flourished in the private sector across Australia and is being offered at government primary and secondary schools. But the move into at least 10 public schools in Victoria, South Australia, and Queensland has divided parents. Critics say Steiner does not belong in public schools because it is too religious and does not pay enough attention to reading and writing in the early years, while supporters argue that it provides a more holistic approach to learning. Read the article in The Australian.

The seven-year-olds sit cross-legged on the carpet scratching their chins philosophically. These bright, young pupils have been asked to consider whether it is possible to step in the same river twice. Posing philosophical questions like these encourages the children to think in a different way than the one they are used to, says Peter Worley, philosophy teacher at Eliot Bank Primary School in Forest Hill, southeast London. “In philosophy instead of working out how to do a sum, we think about what math actually is.” A recent study suggested that children’s IQs are boosted by learning philosophy at an early age. Read more about it at BBC NEWS online.

In Glasgow, Scotland, schools are to adopt a zero tolerance approach towards pupils who fail to attain appropriate levels of literacy and numeracy. Disaffected youngsters creating problems may be sent away for a few weeks to new intensive support centers to help them get back on track. Headteachers could also be sent back to the classroom to improve their skills. Every teacher and member of support staff in every school will be expected to take responsibility for developing basic reading, writing and numerical skills of every young person. Read the article at BBC NEWS.

Among the activities employed to improve the vocabulary of students at St. Joseph's College School is a word of the day, broadcast in each morning's announcements, defined and used in a sentence. Yesterday's word could have been estimable—praiseworthy or commendable—as in: The Grade 10s posted estimable test scores. In Ontario-wide Grade 10 literacy test results, 90% of students at the Catholic high school on Wellesley Street in downtown Toronto passed. That was six percentage points higher than the provincial average of 84%. "It's a priority for the school," said principal Maxine Bilyk, noting the school has a high percentage of students who speak a language other than English at home. Read the article at TheStar.com.

Primary schools in England are being sent DVDs and booklets on how best to teach children to read. The Letters and Sounds packs—also available online—follow a report by former director of inspection Jim Rose that advocated "synthetic phonics." The packs explain how to teach children listening skills and the 44 sounds of letters and combinations of letters before moving on to make words. Many schools in England already use phonics combined with other methods to help children learn to read, but proponents of synthetic phonics argue it should be followed strictly and not be mixed with other approaches. Read more at BBC News.

Claims by parents around China that the planned introduction of dance lessons to senior high schools would encourage young love and distract their children from study have been rejected by a Ministry of Education (MOE) official. Earlier this month, the MOE announced that the waltz, together with six other group dances, would be introduced to China's primary and middle schools this September. Parents with traditional values are alarmed at the prospect of boys and girls dancing hand in hand, believing the risk of their children falling in love and losing track of exam results would increase. Read the article at the China Economic Net website.

Prettygate Junior School near Colchester in Essex, England, has been chosen to take part in a government pilot project aimed at ensuring no child falls behind or gets stuck in an educational rut. Prettygate and the other 483 schools in the project will be challenged to make sure that all children move forward and progress at acceptable rates, said head teacher Barry Hawes. Under the pilot, the Department for Education and Skills will pay for outside tutors to come into the school. The school also has looked at how its teachers assess pupils and is making more use of teacher-based assessments to evaluate children's progress. Read more about England's attempt to leave no child behind at BBC News.

The Preuss School UCSD, located on the campus of the Univesity of California-San Diego, is the only public school in America that admits only the children of low-income parents who have not graduated from college and requires all of those students to take several Advanced Placement courses before they can get their diplomas. In its latest list of America’s Best High Schools, Newsweek ranks Preuss No. 9. Columnist Jay Mathews looks at the factors that make this school a success in this article from The Washington Post.

Under federal pressure to increase scores on English and math tests, many low-achieving schools in California and across the country are loading up students with two or even three periods of math and English and abandoning electives such as art, music and shop. Those schools doing away with electives believe that spending more time on the basics, particularly English, represents a pathway to higher achievement overall. To excel in all subjects, students must know how to read and write. Read more of this article from the Contra Costa Times.

Spelling bees are hot. Broadway plays host to one nearly every night with an award-winning musical about six overachieving spellers in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Hollywood has embraced them too: “Akeelah” would be nothing without her “Bee,” not to mention Bee Season. And the Scripps National Spelling Bee, set for May 30 and 31, is popular enough for the finals to be televised in prime time for a second year. Still, don’t expect to find a spelling bee in Sue Ann Gleason’s first-grade classroom at Cedar Grove Elementary School in Loudoun County. She doesn’t think much of them. Read more about the debate over the value of spelling bees in this article from The Washington Post.

While some western Colorado elementary schools have reading programs that use a series of standard reading textbooks, schools such as Orchard Avenue and the New Emerson School use a textbook-free workshop model that allows students to choose their own grade-appropriate books from a classroom library and encourages them to engage in discussion about the books with their teachers and peers. Teachers says this approach is paying off. Results of the Colorado Student Assessment Program tests appear to support that claim. This year, 33 percent of Orchard Avenue’s third-graders were considered advanced readers. New Emerson’s third-graders ranked second in the district at 19 percent. In comparison, unofficial CSAP results for 11 of the district’s 25 elementary schools showed less than 5 percent of their third-graders were considered advanced readers. Read more of this article from The Daily Sentinel of Grand Junction.

On a recent Friday afternoon the students in Sandra Palazolla’s cooking class baked pretzels and made old-fashioned root beer floats. But at Branciforte Middle School in Santa Cruz, there’s no such thing as a free snack. Before they started rolling dough, the kids had to write a short essay, and they got another writing assignment for homework. The next week, they were writing about the history of pretzels. Read more about this school’s effort to improve English scores in this article from the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

State learning standards may help high school teachers focus their coursework, but college faculty say they’re focusing on the wrong things, according to a report that finds a “significant gap” between what high school instructors teach and what college faculty think entering freshmen ought to know. “States tend to have too many standards attempting to tackle too many content topics,” the report says. The report examines science, math, reading and English. Read more of this article from USA Today.

Experts say technology—e-mail, text messaging, electronic banking—and standardized testing are making cursive writing unnecessary. Although cursive is taught in third-grade classrooms in Texas, educators say it’s taking a back seat to core disciplines such as math and reading. But many teachers and experts say students who don’t learn cursive are missing out on valuable lessons. Read more of this article from The Dallas Morning News.

Educational software, a $2 billion-a-year industry that has become the darling of school systems across the country, has no significant impact on student performance, according to a study by the U.S. Department of Education. The study, mandated by Congress when it passed No Child Left Behind in 2002, evaluated 15 reading and math products used by 9,424 students in 132 schools across the country during the 2004–05 school year. It is the largest study that has compared students who received the technology with those who did not, as measured by their scores on standardized tests. There were no statistically significant differences between students who used software and those who did not. Read more about the study in this article from The Washington Post.

Teachers at Evanston High School in suburban Chicago, like educators elsewhere, have been supplementing the traditional classic texts like The Odyssey, The Scarlet Letter and other standards with recently published books to provide a more varied, and palatable, literary menu for students. Such decisions, some experts say, can add the kind of engaging and relevant content that high school reform advocates have been calling for. Nevertheless, the use of popular literature has run up against traditionalists, who fear it will dumb down the curriculum, and parents who object to the controversial themes that characterize many of the selections. Read more about this debate in this article from Education Week.

 U.S. Education Department officials and their contractors appear to have improperly backed certain types of instruction in administering a $1 billion–a–year reading program, congressional investigators found. The Government Accountability Office report supports assertions by the inspector general of the Education Department, who has released several reports in recent months about the Reading First program, a key part of the 2002 No Child Left Behind law. Reading First offers intensive reading help for low-income and struggling schools. Read the article at The Houston Chronicle website. To see the entire report, click here.

Music classes, art, gym and nature studies will get a $35 million boost to give children a more well–rounded education, announced Education Minister Kathleen Wynne yesterday at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School in downtown Toronto. The new grant is part of a $781 million hike in funding Wynne unveiled for Ontario schools, which also includes $10 million to help aboriginal students and $10.5 million for 177 schools that are small or very remote. Wynne said she was not handing out financial goodies to prepare for October’s provincial election. “Students in Grade 1 and 2 don’t know that there is an election coming and they really don’t care. What they care about is that their teacher has the resources that she needs and that their school has good, clean classrooms.” Read the article at TheStar.com.

England’s Secretary of State for Education and Skills Alan Johnson announced March 19 that 10 local school authorities have been selected to take part in a pilot program designed to improve the annual rate of educational progress children make. The pilot will run for two years from September 2007, trying several approaches:
• changes to assessment, allowing children to take national tests as soon as they are ready;
• one-to-one tutoring for children in English and mathematics;
• new progress targets to measure the school’s success;
• a premium payable to schools in the pilot that make excellent progress.
“I want a relentless focus on the progress of each individual, maximizing the chances for every child to learn, achieve, and fulfill their potential,” Johnson said. “New approaches to assessment will help parents, pupils and teachers to track progress better, so that no child gets left behind.”
Read more in the news release.

A training program will be launched in Saudi Arabia to prepare teachers for a course in media education that eventually will form part of the curriculum in Saudi schools. This was one of the major recommendations of the First International Conference on Media Education that concluded March 7. The four-day conference, which brought together academic and media specialists from the Kingdom and the Gulf, recommended various measures to teach schoolchildren about the media so they can earn to distinguish between what is harmful in the cultural and moral context and what is not, according to the article in Arab News

For the first time, Rhode Island has a statewide curriculum in reading, writing and math—a consistent, uniform learning plan for students in kindergarten through the 12th grade. Rhode Island’s governor and state education officials unveiled the Web-based guide at Woonsocket High School, calling it the missing piece in Rhode Island’s education puzzle. Read more of this article from The Providence Journal.

An updated secondary school curriculum for students in England is being proposed that encourages languages such as Mandarin and topics such as global warming, the slave trade, cooking skills, nutrition and even financial literacy. The proposals, published February 5 by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority are also designed to give schools more choice in how they cover subjects. If approved, the new curriculum for 11 to 14–year–olds would go into effect between 2008 and 2010. The National Union of Teachers warned that the key issue was not to add further complications to an already overloaded curriculum. Read more at the BBC News website.

A major push toward a national curriculum for schools is causing controversy in Australia. Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop on February 1 promoted unifying the system and said she would push the national agenda at a key meeting in April. “I am concerned that students, teachers and parents are being let down as many aspects of school education get hijacked by teachers unions and state education bureacrats,” she said. “The problem is the growing number of students at the tail end who don’t have the fundamental skills to even hold down a job.” Read the article on The Australian website.

An advisory panel on educational reform in Japan has submitted its first report to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe amid criticism its proposals are flawed, represent a double standard and won't be backed by teachers. The Education Rebuilding Council, comprising 17 experts from business, academia and government, compiled the report to address education problems mainly at public elementary and junior high schools. Some of the proposals:

•Increase the number of class hours for students by 10%.
•Remove students who bully from classrooms.
•Introduce a licensing system for teachers, making it easier to remove incompetent teachers.
•Have third-party organizations evaluate schools and boards of education.
•Ensure boards of education follow government policy.
•Hire 20% of new teachers over the next five years and more principals from nonteaching sectors.
•Make community service mandatory for high school students.

Read more about the report at The Japan Times online.

Students who learn English in elementary school score better on English tests than those who began studying the language later, the South Korean Ministry of Education and Human Resource Development said January 10. The ministry asked Prof. Kwon O-ryang of Seoul National University to study the effectiveness of early English education because it has been 10 years since English was introduced in primary schools. Read the article in The Korean Times.

The ranks of low-rated public schools swelled again this year under Texas’ education choice law, giving hundreds of thousands of students at the state’s worst campuses the right to transfer to a better school. State education officials attributed the large increase to tougher performance standards used to rate schools in recent years, particularly in science and math. Officials did not say exactly how many students will have the transfer option, but as many as 600,000 students may be affected at 924 campuses. Read about it in the Dallas Morning News website.

In Seaford, Delaware, school officials noticed that very few average students took the most challenging courses in the town’s secondary schools. Secondary Education Director James VanSciver and other Seaford educators became convinced that many more students could do advanced work if they received a little extra attention. Four years ago, the schools began offering special tutoring, summer classes and Saturday classes. The number of Advanced Placement classes at Seaford High increased from four to 14 and minority enrollment in the most challenging classes also rose. The district has about 3,400 students, 40% black and slightly more than half white. Through the initiative, administrators found more black students doing well and going on to college. Read the full article at the Washington Post website.

Latin is being used in a Bronx, New York, school to help students struggling with literacy to read and do math at grade level or better. The premise of the three-year-old school is that teaching Latin will help poor and working-class students better understand English grammar while enriching their English vocabulary with Latin roots. It seems to be working, some say. On this year’s state English test, 50.9% of Bronx Latin’s seventh graders read at grade level or better while only 31.8% of seventh graders in the surrounding South Bronx region performed that well. Read the article at the New York Times website.

The Japanese education ministry was informed four years ago that many university students had not completed their required high school curriculum, but it failed to respond, ministry officials admitted Thursday. The public learned last month that many high schools do not teach such mandatory subjects as world history, opting instead to focus on subjects needed for university entrance exams. Find details in The Asahi Shimbun (Japan).

“Almost from the inception of Reading First, critics raised red flags about the potential of the initiative to blur the lines between commerce and policy.”

In an essay posted at the Title I Online website, authors Andrew Brownstein and Travis Hicks provide a summary of events leading to last September’s report by the Office of the Inspector General that prompted charges of corruption and conflict of interest against the Department of Education and the professionals it appointed to implement the program.

Grammar lessons all but vanished from public schools in the 1970s, supplanted by a more holistic view of English instruction. But several factors — most notably, the addition of a writing section to the SAT college entrance exam in 2005 — have reawakened interest in direct grammar instruction. This article appears in The Washington Post.

New Zealand’s education curriculum is heading back to basics with a sharp focus on reading, writing, and mathematics and a keen interest in developing the practical skills that young people will need to thrive in the world that awaits them. The Education Ministry’s acting manager of curriculum, Mary Chamberlain, said the focus of the curriculum was “unapologetically” on developing skills that met employers’ demands and promised economic productivity, creating democratic citizens who had the capacity to form opinions about issues of importance, and nurturing the personal skills which would enable young people to live “rich” lives. Find this story in The Press (New Zealand).