Archive for August 19, 2007 - August 25, 2007

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children are failing to get an education in Syria after fleeing the violence back home. While Syria has given all Iraqis access to its education and health services, the sheer number of refugees seeking help mean most don’t get what they need. The Syrian government estimates there are 1.7 million Iraqis within its borders. The UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, puts the total at 1.4 million. UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF believes about half of all Iraqi refugees in Syria are of school age. Most are unable to attend classes because their families fled without the documents they need to enter the Syrian education system—and because of poverty. Read more at BBC News.

Sixty bicycles have been given to teachers in deprived areas of the Asante Akim North District in Ghana. District Director of Education N. T. Donkor stressed the importance of giving bicycles to teachers in such districts. He said some teachers in the Afram Plains are suffering a great deal; therefore, it is necessary to give them bicycles in order to motivate them to work harder to ensure progress toward national development. Read the article at allAfrica.com.

  If Congress would do what we did at a recent brain and learning conference in Boston—ask 50 teachers from 25 states if the No Child Left Behind Act is working—it would not reauthorize the act in its current form. More than two–thirds of those 50 teachers, with an average of 23 years experience among them teaching in rural and urban communities and in rich and poor schools, said the legislation has only acted to hinder educational achievement. “Children are not being supported to advance,” said one, “they’re being dragged along or held back.” What is the problem? Actually, there are five. Read what veteran teachers Kathy Hirsh–Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff have to say at projo.com, The Providence Journal’s website.

  A 5 ½-year-old federal requirement that calls for staffing most classrooms with “highly qualified” teachers doesn’t appear to be doing much to improve student achievement or make teachers more effective, according to a recent survey by the Center on Education Policy. While administrators in 83 percent of the districts said their school systems fully complied with the law, states appeared to be facing more of a challenge. At the time of the survey—late fall of last year and early winter of this one—only three states could boast that “highly qualified” teachers staffed 100 percent of the classrooms that the law targets, most likely because states have so many more schools than any given district does. Read more about the survey in this article from Education Week.

  IRA honors educators, authors, and others involved in reading and literacy efforts through nearly 40 awards and grants. Several of those awards have application deadlines that are fast approaching. Review the awards with approaching application deadlines on IRA’s website.

Adapting to weightlessness was hard. Readapting to gravity was even tougher for teacher–astronaut Barbara Morgan. Morgan passed up the opportunity to check out space shuttle Endeavour with her six crewmates after landing Tuesday, August 21. She was too weak and wobbly and hinted that she was nauseous, as well. “The room still spins a little bit, but that’s OK,”she said. As for her 13–day flight, it was “absolutely wonderful.” Morgan said she can’t wait to see what schoolchildren and teachers do with the 10 million basil seeds she carried into space. The plan is for students to devise mini–greenhouses like the two she left behind at the international space station. Read more at CNN.com.

A teacher-to-teacher training project sponsored by Ethiopia Reads to share effective literacy techniques with 10 fledgling libraries in schools in and around Addis Ababa, the capital city, took place this summer. U.S. teachers learned about Ethiopian traditions and together with Ethiopian teacher/librarians, collaborated on ways to connect children with reading, using story-telling, music, acting, and art. Ethiopia Reads is a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization that advances the cause of literacy. Two of the leaders of this summer’s expedition to Ethiopia, Jane Kurtz of Hesston, Kansas, and Chris Kurtz of Portland, Oregon, Jane’s brother, have been involved with Ethiopia Reads for many years. Both are IRA members. To see a video about the efforts to encourage literacy and girls’ education in Ethiopia, visit this myspace.com website.

 When Maribel Heredia’s son told her that his first-grade teacher was “going to college” and that there would be a substitute in the classroom two days a week, she started asking questions. Only then did she learn that the teacher the Hayward Unified School District labeled “highly qualified” was still a student herself. Calling the teacher highly qualified allows the district to meet the provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind education law, which requires that all students be taught by skilled teachers in core subjects such as English and math. The district’s classification is legal. Heredia said she believes such classifications are misleading and allow districts to place unqualified teachers in classrooms. On Tuesday, August 21, she was among a group of parents and education advocates who sued the U.S. Department of Education over its interpretation of what makes a highly qualified teacher. Read more of this article from The Boston Globe.

One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released August 21. Of those who did read, women and older people were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices. The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year—half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn't read any, the usual number read was seven. If you choose to, you can read more of this article from The Washington Post.

For 18 years, White Plains, NY—a city of 55,000—has maintained racially balanced schools without the white flight that has followed integration plans in places like Boston and Canarsie, Brooklyn. But in June, the Supreme Court rejected school assignment plans in Louisville and Seattle that, like the one in White Plains, are also based explicitly on race. And there are fears that should a court turn down White Plains’s plan in the future, white families may abandon some of the neighborhood schools. That is not a fear restricted to White Plains, as dozens of other cities are having to reconsider similar plans. Read more of this article from The New York Times.

Space Shuttle Endeavour rolled to a stop today (Tuesday, August 21) at the Shuttle Landing Facility after a perfect landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Commander Scott Kelly guided the spacecraft through its complicated glide back to Earth at 12:32 EDT, completing a mission that added a new piece to the International Space Station, delivered almost three tons of supplies to the laboratory and proved a new power transfer system works. The landing also marked the completion of teacher–turned–astronaut Barbara Morgan’s first spaceflight. Read more and find other media resources at the NASA Space Shuttle website.

The National Book Festival on Saturday, September 29, 2007, will feature more than 70 award-winning authors and attract tens of thousands of book lovers of all ages to the National Mall in Washington, DC, to celebrate the joys of reading and lifelong literacy. The event will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and is scheduled to go on rain or shine. Authors, illustrators, and poets will interact with festival–goers at seven themed pavilions where participating authors will sign books and give readings from their works. Additionally, children can meet beloved storybook and television characters throughout the festival grounds. For more details and how to participate online, visit the festival website.

University of California Santa Barbara cultural studies professor Constance Penley says that when it comes to literacy among youth, there’s entirely too much hand-wringing going on. “They’re reading; they’re writing,” she said, “just not in the ways we think of it.” According to Penley, we need to see video images and text messages as an evolution rather than a devolution of literacy. Read more of this article from the Ventura County Star.

The STS–118 crew is making final preparations for its return to Earth aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour to complete a successful assembly mission to the International Space Station. Landing is scheduled for 12:32 p.m. EDT today (Tuesday, August 21), at Kennedy Space Center, Fla. Endeavour’s payload bay doors are now closed. If flight controllers decide to press ahead with landing, Commander Scott Kelly and Pilot Charles Hobaugh will fire Endeavour’s engines at 11:25 a.m. to begin the descent to Kennedy. Landing will bring to an end the first flight for Mission Specialist Barbara Morgan, an educator who was selected to become a mission specialist astronaut. She was first selected by NASA in 1985 as the backup to Teacher in Space Christa McAuliffe. For news of the landing, visit the NASA website.

For 10–year–old Yasmin and her eight–year–old brother Rabbi, nothing will keep them from their studies—not even this year’s worse than average monsoon rains. Each day they make the perilous 20–minute journey to their newly relocated school in Holan, a bustling community of 2,000 inhabitants northeast of Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital. “I’ve never missed a day,” Yasmin said. But many of her classmates at the Holan government primary school are not so lucky. “There has been a 20 percent drop in attendance,”said Nasir Uddin, one of four teachers at the school. According to the government’s latest estimates, over 10 million people were affected and 447 were killed as of August 20. And while Bangladesh, a flood–prone nation of over 150 million inhabitants, emerges from some of the worst flooding in recent years, its impact on the country’s primary school sector has yet to be fully assessed. Read more at IRIN News.

A long-awaited review of beginning-reading programs by the federal What Works Clearinghouse found few comprehensive or supplemental programs that have evidence of effectiveness in raising student achievement. But what is missing from the review may be even more telling: None of the most popular commercial reading programs on the market had sufficiently rigorous studies to be included in the review by the Clearinghouse. Get details in Katherine Kennedy Manzo’s article in Education Week.

Teachers in the United States spend an average of $475 of their own money on classroom supplies and materials each year, according to a study prepared by Quality Education Data Inc. for the last school year. The biggest portion of that spending comes to prepare for the first day of class—which is today at Academy of Dover, Thomas Edison and Marion T. Academy charter schools, and later this week for about half of Delaware’s public–school students. When school districts go through tough financial times, teachers sometimes have to spend a little more. But veteran educators look for summer sales to spruce up their classrooms and motivate children, and hoarding supplies during good years to make things last during bad ones. Read about the practice at delawareonline.com.

More than half of employers in England say high school graduates often cannot function in the workplace due to a lack of basic math and literacy skills, a survey sponsored by a business lobbying firm suggests. But the poll of 507 firms also said youngsters’ IT skills can give them the edge over their bosses in this area. The CBI survey found many employers were having to retrain recent grads in the basics they should have learned in class. But CBI director general Richard Lambert said, “Their fluency with iPods, mobiles and MySpace has translated well into the workplace.... The challenge ahead is for schools to channel that same enthusiasm into numeracy and literacy skills, where far too many young people are struggling.” Read more at BBC News.

A new questionnaire designed to assess levels of student engagement at school is being developed to give schools a clearer picture of how their students feel. The survey, designed by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER), asks students a range of questions such as how safe they feel at school, whether they respect the teachers, and whether they look forward to going to school. Senior researcher Charles Darr said the questionnaire was designed to look more deeply at the reasons students became disaffected at school, rather than focusing on statistics like truancy rates and student attainment. See the article at stuff.com.nz.

To connect young people with the excitement of a real page-turner, the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) celebrates Teen Read Week from October 14–20, 2007. Celebrated in hundreds of libraries, Teen Read Week uses interactive gaming, poetry slams, book clubs, and library social networking events to encourage teens to read. For more information about Teen Read Week, visit the American Library Association’s Teen Read Week website. In addition, this page contains many ideas on how you can help publicize the event.

Their mission cut short by Hurricane Dean, astronauts aboard the shuttle Endeavour are wrapping up their work in orbit and preparing to come home Tuesday, August 21. Dean no longer posed much of a threat to the Houston home of Mission Control, but managers did not want to take any chances. NASA said the preliminary weather forecast looked good for Tuesday’s planned early afternoon touchdown at Kennedy Space Center. Teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan, Christa McAuliffe’s backup for the doomed Challenger flight, was scheduled to join Endeavour commander Scott Kelly and Canadian astronaut Dave Williams for a chat with students in Saskatchewan Monday. Read more at bostonherald.com.

Thousands of community events will be held Nov. 1 to mark National Family Literacy Day. But this year, families won’t even have to leave the comfort of their own home to celebrate the importance of reading. The National Center for Family Literacy will unveil Raising a Reader, which provides activities for parents to support their child’s literacy, language and reading skills. This free magazine will be especially helpful to low-income families, whose children hear 30 million fewer words by age 3 than their counterparts who live in households led by professionals. Read more about the magazine’s launch in this article from Newswise.com. Learn more about National Family Literacy Day from the National Center for Family Literacy.

In the spirit of celebration of February as Black History Month, the International Reading Association has endorsed the Nineteenth National African American Read-In Chain, sponsored by the Black Caucus of the National Council of Teachers of English. This endorsement asks the state and/or local councils of IRA to join the NCTE in serving as hosts to create a chain of readers on Sunday, February 3, 2008, or Monday, February 4, 2008. The chain involves reading works authored by African American writers at community sites on Sunday and in school buildings on Monday. Read the press release and invitation.

While the words “merit pay” drew hisses and boos at a recent teachers’ union convention, educators are endorsing contracts that pay bonuses for boosting students’ test scores. The 2002 No Child Left Behind law has placed a greater emphasis on using objective data in schools. The law requires annual math and reading tests. The scores of students in certain grades are compared year to year. Some lawmakers want to change the law, which is up for renewal, to encourage schools to measure individual student progress over time instead of using snapshot comparisons of certain grade levels. Once schools track that, they could look at which teachers consistently are moving students along. Read more of this article from USA Today.

  In the third and final installment of NewsHour’s series on No Child Left Behind, education special correspondent John Merrow looks at how some of the country’s best teachers are dealing with the law. Read the transcript from Merrow’s report and visit NewsHour’s NCLB website, with links to education blogs, forums, interactive maps, and podcasts.

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.