Archive for August 12, 2007 - August 18, 2007

Outside Santa Rita jail in California on a recent Saturday morning, it was business as usual. Bored adult visitors were standing, some sitting, talking or listening to music, waiting for their names to be called. But this Saturday morning there was a little more life than usual. Visiting kids, who normally would be standing with the adults, or maybe splayed on the ground playing video games, were checking out kid-friendly books like Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Ferdinand the Bull. Read more about a program that puts books in the hands of kids in this article from the website InsideBayArea.com.

 Each month, the ReadWriteThink.org Calendar offers quick classroom activities, lesson plans, Web links, and texts pertaining to various reading–related and general interest events. Here is a sampling of the links for September:

September 1: National Library Card Month begins.
September 8: International Literacy Day
September 9: National Grandparents Day
September 10: National No-Bully Week
September 15: Hispanic Heritage Month begins.
September 23: Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, was integrated in 1957.
September 30: Elie Wiesel, author, humanitarian, Nobel Peace Prize winner was born in 1928.

There also are links relating to other noted authors and events, and more. For further information, visit the website. The ReadWriteThink.org is a nonprofit website maintained by the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English with support from the Verizon Foundation, and in association with the Thinkfinity consortium. The site provides free lesson plans, interactive student materials, Web resources, and standards for K-12 classroom teachers of reading and the English language arts. Visit the main site.

Whether they are poor or rich, white students are scoring higher than their African American and Latino classmates on California’s standardized tests, results released Wednesday show. And in some cases, the poorest white students are doing better than Latino and black students who come from middle class or wealthy families. This year’s test scores show that the difference in academic achievement between ethnic groups is more than an issue of poverty vs. wealth. Read more of this article from The Sacremento Bee.

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.

  A number of failing schools in the San Diego area are adjusting their practices to meet standards under the No Child Left Behind law. In the second of a three-part series, the PBS program NewHour conitinues its look at the law and how it is affecting U.S. education. Read a transcript of the report by NewsHour’s special correspondent for education, John Merrow.

Four years after the successful launch in Wilmington, Delaware, of a private school to help disadvantaged boys reach their academic potential, a group from Ursuline Academy is trying to launch a similar program for middle-school girls. Members of a steering committee at the mostly girls Catholic school said they are driven by social conscience because girls often have fewer opportunities to better themselves through education. The school would be similar to the all-boys Nativity Preparatory School of Wilmington, which threw a lifeline to low-income, at-risk boys when it opened in 2003. The proposed girls' school would be modeled after Nativity Prep and the nationwide NativityMiguel Schools Network that focuses on urban students, providing discipline and individual attention. Read about the school at delawareonline.com.

Vision 2015 in Delaware has selected four school districts and two charter schools to take part in a program to pilot educational reforms that group leaders hope will ripple throughout the state. Each district picked two of its schools to participate, for 10 total schools involved in the program sponsored by Vision 2015, a coalition of education, community and business leaders that is looking to make the state's school system one of the best in the world by 2015. This school year will focus solely on training; next year on implementation. Read about the program at delawareonline.com.

After days of anxiety about a gouge in the belly of the shuttle Endeavour, NASA got some good news: Tests suggested repairs may not be needed. Meanwhile, the agency fulfilled a longstanding dream of a teacher talking to students from space. Teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan took questions and spoke to hundreds of youngsters packed into the Discovery Center of Idaho in Boise, less than 100 miles from the elementary school where Morgan taught before joining the astronaut corps. One child wanted to know about exercising in space. In response, Morgan lifted the two large men floating alongside her, one in each hand, and pretended to be straining. Read more about the mission at nytimes.com.

Muhammad Abdallah, 12, lost his only brother in a shooting incident, and since then his parents are not taking any chances and do not let him out of their house in Baghdad. “My parents don’t allow me to go out, most of my friends have gone abroad, and I was forced to leave school for security reasons,” he said. A Sunni from Baghdad’s Yarmouk District, he is just another victim of the violence, displacement, school closures and poor diet that are taking their toll on children’s physical and mental health— something that could affect the country’s future. “Children have become prisoners of their own families,” said Fua’ad Azize, a psychologist in Baghdad. Read about the situation at IRIN News.

Business leaders in England feel educational standards have not improved since 1997, despite official data showing record exam and test results, a report says. More than half of those surveyed thought education and skills had not improved, the Institute of Directors (IoD), a business lobby, found in a survey of 500 members. The IoD report also claimed record investment had not led to exam results improving any faster than before. The government said record investment had improved standards in schools. Read about the debate at BBC News.

At least half the adolescents who exchange messages for hours with their friends online or by cellphone spend part of the time discussing their schoolwork, a new study shows. The survey, commissioned by the Alexandria, Va.-based National School Boards Association, showed that 96 percent of adolescents with access to cellphones and Internet-capable computers use them to build and maintain social networks. NSBA leaders believe those numbers must point the way for educators. Social-networking technologies are so popular and offer such promise for education that district and school officials would be remiss not to adapt them for the classroom, they said. Read more of this article from Education Week.

  A majority of states won’t be able to put aside enough federal Title I funding to help schools struggling to meet the goals of the No Child Left Behind Act in the 2007–08 school year, according to a report released today by the Center on Education Policy, a Washington-based research and advocacy group. Read more about Title I funding in this article from Education Week.

 The PBS program NewsHour has begun a three-part series on the impact of the federal No child Left Behind law. In the first part, correspondent for education John Merrow examined how some schools are dealing with, and trying to avoid, requirements of the law. Read the transcript from Merrow’s report on the NewsHour website.

 Since the day that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2005 reading results were released, they have been used in a plethora of flawed attempts to confirm the results of state reading tests required by the No Child Left Behind Act, says Idaho NAEP state coordinator Bert Stoneberg. With that in mind, Stoneberg wrote a short paper about four principles that contribute to a valid use of NAEP scores to confirm state test results. The paper appeared in the electronic journal Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation 12(5). For further information, read the full text of "Using NAEP to Confirm State Test Results in the No Child Left Behind Act."

New teachers are being blamed for the decline in reading scores in Connecticut. Elaine Zimmerman, executive director of the state Commission on Children, says new teachers either don’t know or haven’t followed proven techniques for teaching reading. Doris J. Kurtz, New Britain superintendent of schools, decries new teachers’ lack of preparedness in literacy skills as “disgraceful.” A quick glance at third–grade reading scores, however, shows that higher scores come from wealthy towns and lower ones from poor cities. Poverty has long been associated with low scores across academic disciplines. Leaders ignore greater societal ills as they point their fingers at those who lack the protection of tenure. Read more of this opinion piece at courant.com.

After conducting high–tech 3-D scans of the 32,000 heat tiles on the Space Shuttle Endeavour, officials now seem far more optimistic about the condition of the shuttle and the safety of the crew. The shuttle crew has a 68–day food supply on board and the space station now is generating so much solar power that the astronauts easily could stay in space if it became necessary to send a rescue shuttle in October. The news has reassured family members, including Clay Morgan, the husband of teacher–turned–astronaut Barbara Morgan. Clay said he was able to speak to his wife Sunday night and she said she was enjoying her time in space. He said his wife and the crew are working a lot. “There’s no rest for the weightless up there,”Clay said. “They are working so hard.” See a picture of Barbara Morgan and read the article at ABC News.

The video–game industry won a minor battle this week when a California judge shot down a state act prohibiting the sale of violent video games to children, ruling that the proposed law was too broad and that, in any case, there was insufficient evidence showing such games have a negative effect on kids. In fact, more and more studies are emerging that show video games may be good for you. A study released earlier this year by researchers at the University of Rochester, New York, showed gamers achieved higher scores in vision tests than a control group who played the simpler, puzzle–based video game Tetris. Another study published by researchers at Toronto’s York University last year showed evidence that video–game players—not unlike bilingual speakers—tend to score higher in various, relatively difficult, mental tests than do non–players. Read more at globeandmail.com.

A century ago it was saws and sewing machines, now it’s computers, but teaching low–income people to improve their lot through technology is a constant at Erie Neighborhood House on Chicago’s Near West Side. With 60 computers, the long-established social service agency is on the front line fighting to close the digital divide that separates poor and minority families from the middle class. Perhaps surprisingly, that includes learning how to play computer games. Promoting computer games as the path to a new literacy has become a central concern among educators and librarians. Last month, the American Library Association sponsored a national forum in Chicago to examine the growing role of gaming in libraries. Read more at chicagotribune.com.

In an earlier life, Xin Meng chased stories as a reporter for a Chinese-language newspaper in New York. Now he spends his days figuring out how to translate mysterious phrases like “empowerment school” and “English language learner” into Chinese. Read more about Meng and other linguists employed by the New York City Department of Education in this article from The New York Times.

The Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy has announced its 2008
national grant competition. The foundation’s grantmaking program seeks to develop or expand projects that are designed to support the development of literacy skills for adult primary care givers and their children. A total of approximately $650,000 will be awarded; no grant request should exceed $65,000.

Obese elementary schoolchildren miss a couple more school days on average than their normal-weight classmates, according to a study that says being fat is a better predictor for absenteeism than any other factor. Researchers said their results suggest that childhood obesity, in addition to serious medical issues, can lead to a plethora of additional problems down the road. Of 180 school days, researchers found that on average the normal–weight students missed 10.1 days, overweight kids missed 10.9 days and obese children missed 12.2 days. For reasons that aren’t clear, underweight children had the fewest absences—7.5 on average. Read the Associated Press story at knoxnews.com.

New images of the space shuttle Endeavour confirmed that the shuttle’s protective thermal shield has been breached, prompting an intensive flurry of tests to establish whether it could be at risk during its return to Earth. NASA officials said the entire thickness of a heat-resistant tile has been pierced, raising the possibility that hot gases could seep in and overheat the vehicle during re–entry later this month. They stressed, however, that it was still unclear whether such a risk exists—and even if it does, the crew is equipped to carry out simple repairs while in orbit to make it safe. Read the story and see a picture of Barbara Morgan, educator, astronaut, and longtime member of the International Reading Association at the London Times online.

  Since 2002, Congress has provided about $16 billion under the No Child Left Behind law to help states and school systems improve the caliber of the teaching workforce, the biggest federal investment ever in teacher quality. But some education experts argue that funding across the country has been frittered away on programs that are not specially tailored to closing achievement gaps between rich and poor students or ensuring that teachers are prepared to help students meet ever-tightening academic standards. Read more about this debate in this article from The Washington Post.

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.

Every year at Sesame Street, producers gather before the start of the new season to gauge educational needs of their primary audience, toddlers. Starting today, as Sesame Street begins its 38th season on PBS, 26 new episodes will focus on early literacy and language skills. Read more about how literacy came to be chosen in this article from USA Today.