Archive for August 05, 2007 - August 11, 2007

Space shuttle Endeavour safely carried teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan into orbit August 8, 2007, fulfilling her long–deferred dream and overcoming one of the agency’s greatest failures. NASA last tried to send a teacher into space on shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986. The ship exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, killing social studies instructor Christa McAuliffe and six crewmates. Morgan, McAuliffe’s backup, was on hand to see her friend’s mission end in tragedy. This time, no cloud of smoke or fireball marred the clear blue Florida sky as Endeavour soared into space. After the shuttle’s 8½-minute ride into orbit, Mission Control commentator Rob Navias proclaimed: “For Barbara Morgan and her crewmates, class is in session.” Read the article at USA TODAY.

  U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told state legislators Congress would seek a major overhaul of the No Child Left Behind Act, which states have protested as an unfunded mandate and unprecedented federal intrusion into schools. “So different will this bill be from the original No Child Left Behind, that we're thinking of changing it’s name,” Pelosi said Wednesday (Aug. 8) addressing the annual meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). Read more about Pelosi’s speech in this article from Stateline.org.

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.

 Since 2002, when No Child Left Behind became law, states have spent millions of dollars giving standardized reading and math tests; one estimate puts the total cost above $5 billion through 2008. Linda Perlstein, a former Washington Post reporter, wanted to see the effects firsthand, so she spent an academic year inside a high-poverty elementary school in Annapolis, Md. The result is Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade. Read an interview with Perstein, and an excerpt from her book, in USA Today.

First lady Laura Bush and daughter Jenna Bush are writing a children’s book about a boy who doesn’t like to read. It is based on their experiences as teachers. HarperCollins plans to announce today that it will publish the as-yet-untitled picture book next spring. It will be illustrated by Denise Brunkus, who’s best known for her drawings in the popular Junie B. Jones series. Read more about the book in this article from USA Today.

Black boys need positive role models from within their own communities to tackle underachievement, according to a report issued in Great Britain. The panel of experts, from fields including education and business, says too often role models for young black men include rappers who glamorize guns. The report, commissioned by the Department for Communities and Local Government, says this could cost the United Kingdom £24 billion over the next 50 years through taxes and criminal justice costs. The report also calls for stronger relationships between schools and the parents of black boys and urges the school inspection body Ofsted to make sure all schools strive to close the academic gap between black and white pupils. Read the article at BBC News.

The Reading Assocation of the Philippines will hold its Midyear Demofest with the theme “Comprehension: Beyond the World of Words” on October 19 and 20, 2007, in Bacolod City. There will be more than fifteen panel presentations and demonstration teaching of the best practices in the country for teaching comprehension and related issues. For more information, please e-mail the association at rap.org@gmail.com.

Teachers looking for some back-to-school ideas to help transform their classrooms into cohesive learning communities can check out the following lesson plans on ReadWriteThink.org. These lessons are peer reviewed by literacy experts and classroom teachers, and feature measurable objectives and assessments, a step-by-step instructional plan, and a resource list.

It’s Too Loud in Here! Teamwork in the Classroom by Jennifer Reed (K–2)
Building a Learning Community: Crafting Words for the Classroom by Midge Bernhardt (3–5)
Building Classroom Community Through the Exploration of Acrostic Poetry by Sarah Dennis-Shaw (3–5)
Getting to Know You: Developing Short Biographies to Build Community by Erika Griffin (3–5)
Using Children’s Literature to Develop Classroom Community by Elvira DiGesu (6–8)

ReadWriteThink.org is a nonprofit website maintained by IRA and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) , with support from the Verizon Foundation, and in association with the Thinkfinity consortium. Visit ReadWriteThink.org for more information.

Precious summer minutes spent poring over Shakespeare or Nathaniel Hawthorne may seem less than appealing to teens, but some experts say there is a slowly growing trend to infuse more modern literature into required summer reading. As a result, the revered literary canon, which includes such classics as Hamlet, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Scarlet Letter, may be due for a shake-up. Glance at high school summer reading lists across the United States and you are likely to find more recent authors such as Alice Sebold, Walter Dean Myers, and even Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong, alongside Dickens and the Brontë sisters. Read the article in The Christian Science Monitor that quotes Alleen Pace Nilsen, the International Reading Association’s 2005 winner of the Arbuthnot Award, which honors an outstanding college or university teacher of children’s and young adults’ literature.

August 9, International Day of the World’s Indigenous People, is an opportunity to celebrate the more than 370 million indigenous men, women, and children worldwide, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). There are more than 5,000 different groups living in more than 70 countries. The cultures of many indigenous peoples are in danger of dying out and many live on the fringes of society. UNESCO’s education sector works to alleviate the plight of indigenous people through the promotion of rights and values in education. For more, visit the UNESCO website.

Barbara Morgan, longtime member of the International Reading Association, is set to take off on the 22nd flight to the International Space Station in orbit around Earth. STS-118, as the mission is called, will be the first flight for Endeavour since 2002. Launch remains on target for Wednesday, August 8, 2007, at 6:36 p.m. (EDT), according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration website. Morgan served as the “Teacher in Space” alternate to Christa McAuliffe for the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger mission. After the Challenger tragedy, Morgan continued her ties with NASA and eventually left her job as an elementary school teacher in Idaho to become a full-time astronaut in 1998. For updates and more about the mission, including links to educational activities, visit the NASA space shuttle website.

More than 20 years later, educational attainment is higher and felony arrests are lower for the alumni of a Chicago early intervention program for low-income children. The enrollees, now in their late 20s, are also more likely to have health insurance, according to a follow-up study released this week. Chicago’s Child-Parent Center program was—and is—more intense than Head Start, the main federal assistance program for low-income children and their families. Read more about the study in this article from The Kansas City Star.

Should cash be used to spur children to do better on reading and math tests? New York City’s Department of Education is implementing a pilot program that will reward fourth and seventh graders with $100 to $500, depending on how well they perform on 10 tests in the next year. Read more about the program in this article from The New York Times.

A university in Venezuela is using a novel method to take books into remote communities and encourage people to read: bibliomulas (book mules). They are helping to spread the benefits of reading to people who are isolated from much of the world around them. The idea of loading mules with books and taking them into the mountain villages was started by the University of Momboy, a small institution that prides itself on its community-based initiatives and on doing far more than universities in Venezuela are required to do by law. Read about the book mules’ travels at BBC News.

 After nearly a year of debate, the education committee of the National Conference of State Legislatures failed to reach a unanimous decision on where the panel stands on national standards—setting up a debate and likely vote by the national group’s entire legislative body. The more-than-100-member education committee had been poised to endorse a policy taking a firm stand against any national standards, mirroring the group’s opposition to some parts of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. But not all states participating in the committee meeting agreed with such a stance. Read more about the debate in this article from Education Week.

Educational DVDs and videos which claim to enhance the cognitive development of infants may hinder rather than help their language skills, according to a study published August 7, 2007 by the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute. The DVDs, widely available in stores, often claim to aid the development of babies’ speech and vocabulary, but parents have been warned that if they want to improve their infant’s ability to learn, they should limit the amount of time they spend using such products. The study highlights products such as the Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby DVDs, and suggests overexposing children aged eight to 16 months to them may slow their ability to acquire a vocabulary. Read the article at scotsman.com.

 Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker has been named to speak at the Thursday General Session during the International Reading Association's 53rd Annual Convention, which is scheduled for May 4-8, 2008, in Atlanta, Georgia. Walker's works include The Color Purple and other literary fiction, many volumes of poetry, powerful nonfiction collections, and several children's books, including the forthcoming title Why War Is Never a Good Idea.

Walker joins an already strong lineup of General Session speakers: actress and children's book author Jamie Lee Curtis (Monday); Andreas Schleicher, expert on international assessments (Tuesday); and Rafe Esquith, celebrated educator and author (Wednesday). For further information about the 2008 IRA Annual Convention, visit the IRA website.

 Proponents of educational technology for years have been saying that schools need to focus more on teaching so-called “21st-century skills,” such as problem solving, critical thinking, and collaboration. Now, it appears that momentum is finally building on Capitol Hill to encourage just such reforms: The chairman of the House education committee says he hopes to push legislation renewing the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) through Congress this fall, and one of the key changes to the law he plans to propose is incentives for states to develop more rigorous standards that reflect the needs of 21st-century learners. Read more about the proposed changes in this article from eSchool News.

 The International Reading Association recently created the Status of Reading Instruction Institute to provide accurate and detailed descriptions of effective reading practices in the United States and around the world. The objective of the Institute is to support increased literacy skills for all students by providing objective, reliable information about effective reading instruction for parents, teachers, other professional educators, and policymakers. The Institute is guided in this mission by a strong advisory board of recognized and experienced reading and research experts and directed by Karen Douglas (kdouglas@reading.org).

The first step in improving reading instruction is to provide rigorous and accurate descriptions of how reading is being taught in the classroom. Toward that end, the Institute is soliciting proposals for a study of reading instruction in a nationally representative sample of first- and fourth-grade classrooms in the United States. This description will form the foundation for further study of what constitutes effective reading instruction. The Request For Proposals outlines the study goals and contractor requirements. Proposals are due by noon (EST) October 2, 2007.

For further information about the Institute and the RFP, visit the Institute's webpage.

Ministers are overestimating the number of exceptionally bright pupils in Britain’s schools, the World Council for Gifted and Talented Children will be told this week. Research shows that teachers charged with picking out the top pupils feel that far too many are labeled as “gifted and talented” and that the government was wrong to recommend that 10% should be picked out in each school, a total of 800,000 across the country. Instead, between 2% and 5% of children should be classified as “gifted learners,” cutting hundreds of thousands of pupils already placed in the top group. Read why at the Guardian Unlimited.

Thirty years ago, Seqinbilig was a 12-year-old son of a herdsman living on the vast Xilingol Grassland in north Chinaa’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Every day, he looked forward to his “horseback teacher” coming to tell stories. “My teacher was a kind old man. He taught us how to read and write, and told us folk stories. He opened a window for us, a window to the outside world,” Seqinbilig recalled. Now, as the principal of a primary school in Xilinhot, capital of Xilingol Bund, Seqinbilig’s dream is to enroll many more herdsmen’s children in his urban school to give them better education than he received as a child. Read more here.

Comedian Paula Poundstone was recently named national spokesperson for Friends of Libraries USA, and she says her own intellectual oddity, quickness and curiosity can be traced to a book read to her by her kindergarten teacher. The book was The Five Chinese Brothers by Claire Huchet Bishop and Kurt Wiese. Poundstone knows books both as a reader and a writer, the author of a comedy collection and several funny math textbooks for elementary school children, The Math with a Laugh series. Read more about Poundstone in this article from The Leaf-Chronicle of Clarksville, Tenenssee.

Education in Africa will come under the spotlight as education ministers from African Union countries meet for a five-day conference this week in Johannesburg, South Africa. Issues relating to the Second Decade of Education for Africa will be discussed at the Third Ordinary Session of the Conference of the Ministers of Education, set to begin Monday, August 6, 2007. The initiative was launched by the African Union in 2006 and is aimed at moving the continent closer to attaining the international target of primary education for all by 2015. Read about the conference at allAfrica.com.

  Dozens of states accept any improvement in high school graduation rates as adequate progress, and several set a goal of graduating fewer than 60 percent of their students, according to a study by the Education Trust in Washington. While the No Child Left Behind law has created a national focus on reading and math proficiencies, it has done little to raise expectations for the number of students graduating from high school, the report said. Read more about the report in this article from The Washington Post.