Archive for September 09, 2007 - September 15, 2007

 In honor of International Literacy Day on September 8, Rotary International and the International Reading Association developed Every School a Star, a Web-based resource designed to help Rotary clubs and IRA reading councils carry out literacy projects.

With formal education systems crumbling in much of sub-Saharan Africa, educators are looking more to informal systems of education taught in local languages. “Every child and adult should be able learn in their own language, especially in the face of staggering failure rates from the French education system,” said Sonja Diallo, director of Associates in Research and Education for Development (ARED), a nonprofit group based in Senegal that promotes learning in African languages. About 75% of children fail the seventh grade entrance exam and are forced out of the system, she said, and learning in a foreign language is a big part of the problem. Read about the problem at IRIN News.

Performance pay for teachers could create disharmony between colleagues and damage teaching quality, a federal parliamentary committee in Australia says. The Senate standing committee report Quality of School Education, published September 13, highlights problems associated with rewarding individual teachers and said such a scheme should not be used to substitute real increases in base salaries. “The committee considers that concerns raised about the effect of performance pay on secondary school departmental work teams, which operate on the basis of strong collegiality, are matters that need to be treated seriously,” the report says. Read the article at The Sydney Morning Herald website.

 A majority of the nation’s private schools do not use federally funded services they are entitled to receive under the No Child Left Behind Act or the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, a study released this week shows. Just 44% of private schools have a student, teacher, or parent participating in programs financed under the No Child Left Behind law, even though 12 major federal programs covered by that law require public school districts to offer services to private schools, according to the report. Similarly, only 43% of private schools had any students receiving services under the IDEA, according to the study, issued September 11 by the U.S. Department of Education. Read about the study at edweek.org.

Three years ago, teachers and other employees at Meadowcliff Elementary in southwest Little Rock, Arkansas, were offered pay bonuses for boosting test scores. Shortly after that, principal Karen Carter noticed some unusual events. Increasingly, cafeteria workers sat with students to chat about school work. Even more startling, the janitor began taking his breaks in the cafeteria reading a book, just to serve as a role model. And when test scores at the end of the year showed improvement, teachers whooped for joy: The better each of their students did, the bigger their bonuses. The janitor and other support staff also were rewarded for the school’s overall gains. Such is the power of “merit pay,” long opposed by teachers and their unions. Read the opinion piece at usatoday.com.

To address the growing problem of low health literacy levels and to help consumers access usable health information, The Humana Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Humana Inc., and Libraries for the Future, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing innovation and investment in our nation’s libraries, have launched the Wellness Information Zone, a new consumer health information project in Atlanta. The program aims to bring together expertise and resources from the two partner organizations to help the 90 million Americans who have difficulty obtaining, understanding and acting on basic health information and services. Read more of this article from CNNMoney.com

School strategies to boost boys’ attainment and close the gender divide with girls are “divisive and counterproductive,” according to a report to be published this week by the British government’s Equal Opportunities Commission. The underachievement of boys relative to girls at school has become a recurring theme of educational debate. Although there has been a slight narrowing of the gender gap in this year’s exam results, girls still outperform boys across the board. But in a highly provocative assertion, the Equal Opportunities Commission suggests that “playing up the difference will exacerbate such difference.” Read the article at TimesOnline.com.

Maryland plans to eliminate written–response questions from its high school exit exams to address long–standing complaints about how slowly test results are processed, state education officials said September 12, 2007. Beginning in May 2009, the Maryland school system will phase out “brief constructed responses” and “extended constructed responses”— questions requiring a short or long written answer—from its four tests covering algebra, English, biology and government, said Ronald A. Peiffer, the state's deputy superintendent for academic policy. Eliminating those questions will allow the state to process test results up to four weeks faster than before, Peiffer said. Read the article at washingtonpost.com.

India’s President Pratibha Devisingh Patil said women’s literacy and education should be treated as a “priority,” at the International Literacy Day Celebration in the capital on Septermber 8. “India is home to the world’s largest number of illiterates and this is a matter of great concern. India accounts for 20% of the world’s out–of–school children and 35% of adult illiterates. When such a large number of the population remains outside the pale of literacy and education, it makes the task of development more complex and daunting. She added that “Women’s literacy and education has to be made a priority. If we make women literate, they will be self–reliant and the beneficial impact on society will be manifold.” Read the article at Gulfnews.com.

Family literacy programs around the country have found their bottom lines snipped this year, leaving a vast competition for other funding. According to the U.S. Department of Education, funding for parent/child literacy programs—called Even Start—were at about $225 million in 2005, at $99 million in 2006 and about $82 million in 2007. For 2008, President Bush has recommended eliminating funding for Even Start. The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee has also recommended cutting funding, though that has not gone before the full Senate. Read more of this article, and see how the funding cuts are affecting local reading programs, in this article from The News-Gazette of east central Illinois.

A draft provision for the No Child Left Behind Act that would provide more money to schools with the least experienced teachers at the expense of schools with more senior ones is likely to face stiff opposition if the proposed change becomes part of the bill that goes before Congress. Organizations representing teachers, state legislatures, and district administrators have already voiced opposition, saying such a policy would be a poor way to address the so-called teacher gap. Read more of this article from Education Week.

  Latino advocates told a House panel that the No Child Left Behind law has produced significant gains for school-age English-language learners and warned not to undermine that progress. Before the law was passed five years ago, students learning English were ignored by many schools, Delia Pompa of the National Council of La Raza told the House Committee on Education and Labor. With the law, she said, the debate has changed to: “How can schools improve the academic achievement and attainment of English-language learners?” Read more of this article from the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Life in southern Sudan was good before the region was enveloped in conflict, John Bul Dau told the audience at an International Literacy Day event co-hosted by the International Reading Asssociation and the National Geographic Society in Washington, DC, on September 11. Dau, one of the “Lost Boys of Sudan” featured in an award-winning film, God Grew Tired of Us, said he and his family lived an “ordinary life” there, raising cattle and farming. One day in 1987 the village was attacked by government soldiers. His family was scattered and he and thousands of other young boys and girls fled Sudan. After enduring untold hardships, he eventually ended in a United Nations camp, where he learned to read and write. The “gift of literacy” opened the world to him and he enjoined the audience to share that gift with others. Look for his story in the next issue of Reading Today.

Nadine Gordimer, N. Scott Momaday, Philippe Claudel, Fatou Diome, Gisèle Pineau and Abdourahman Waberi are some of the writers who have joined the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in its fight against illiteracy. In this issue of The Courier published on the occasion of International Literacy Day, their texts appear side by side with stories on the five laureates of the 2007 UNESCO Literacy Prizes. Read the The UNESCO Courier.

When it comes to the racial achievement gap, principals or teachers can have a bigger impact on achievement in one year than whether a child is poor or from a single-parent home, according to a study by a Carnegie Mellon University professor. The study looked at 89 principals, 236 English teachers and 199 math teachers of students taking the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests in reading and math in March 2005. The study found that 62 principals had an effect on math results—ranging from scores 17.5 percent higher to those 37.2 percent lower. And 33 principals had an effect on reading—ranging from scores 15.66 percent higher to 35.65 percent lower. Among teachers, 148 had a significant impact in math scores and 90 did so in reading, both also by a wide range, positive and negative. Read more of this article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

  The head of the nation’s largest teacher’s union and a top House Democrat had a testy exchange Monday over the inclusion of merit pay in an updated version of the No Child Left Behind education law. California Rep. George Miller, chairman of the House education committee, criticized National Education Association President Reg Weaver for rejecting the merit-pay proposal. Read more about their exchange in this article from Education Week.

  America’s business community was an early advocate of reform and a prime mover in the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, which required the states to improve public schooling for all students. In an editorial, The New York Times supports efforts by the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives from the nation’s largest companies, to make sure Congress maintains a “transparent accountability system” in the NCLB law.

Once again this year, World Teachers' Day will be celebrated on October 5. The overarching theme for the event is "Quality Teachers for Quality Education," and this year's subtheme is "Better Working Conditions for Teachers Mean Better Learning Conditions for Learners." To learn more about World Teachers' Day, visit the TESOL website.

For the first few years of school, struggling readers can usually get by. The material is simple, the lessons are repeated often, and intensive remedial help is common. But for some of those pupils, reading ability starts a dramatic downhill slide right around 4th grade. While good readers are sponges for new words and grammar rules, slower readers are left further and further behind. Some never catch up. The National Institutes of Health has awarded $30 million over the next five years to research centers devoted to studying the issue, along with other questions related to reading disabilities. Read more about the study in this article from Education Week.

 The draft House bill to renew the federal No Child Left Behind law came under sharp attack on Monday from civil rights groups and the nation’s largest teachers unions, the latest sign of how difficult it may be for Congress to pass the law this fall. At a marathon hearing of the House Education Committee, legislators heard from an array of civil rights groups, including the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, the National Urban League, the Center for American Progress and Achieve Inc., a group that works with states to raise academic standards. Read more of this article from The New York Times.

As students of all ages return to the classroom this fall, the wireless world is changing the nature and possibilities of their education. Teachers who are using blogs, social-networking sites, and video-sharing sites in school settings are giving young people the opportunity to tune their thinking and writing to a larger audience. When students know that anyone in the school with an Internet connection—or around the world, for that matter—can read what they have written or created, it is remarkable how quickly their thinking improves, not to mention the final product. Read more of this column from The Christian Science Monitor.

Chris Saltalamacchio had all female teachers at his Long Island, New York, elementary school until he reached the fifth grade. “I was kind of freaked out about the idea of having a male teacher,” he remembers. So Saltalamacchio could understand why one of the first–graders he now teaches at Cecil Manor Elementary School in Elkton, Md., had her mom call the school office this summer after she saw his name on her class assignment. Nationally, only about 16% of public elementary school teachers are men, according to 2004 figures from the National Center for Education Statistics. Read about the shortage of male teachers at The News Journal's website.

Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries. The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups. Read more of this article from The New York Times.

The mystery of how we read a sentence has been unlocked by scientists. Previously, researchers thought that, when reading, both eyes focused on the same letter of a word. But a UK team has found this is not always the case. In fact, almost 50% of the time, each of our eyes locks on to different letters simultaneously. Read more about this research in this article from the BBC News.

At an occasion to mark United Nations’ International Literacy Day, Dayo Olagunju, executive secretary of the National Commission for Mass-literacy, Adult and Non–Formal Education (NCLAE), said more than 64 million Nigerians are illiterate, about 46% of the population, and over 60% of them are women. The event was held over the weekend and hosted by Family Re-orientation, Education and Empowerment (FREE), at Opukuma, in Bayelsa State. The founder of FREE, Alaire Alaibe, said the strength of the literacy and education organization lies in its ability to work with women leaders in the various communities and states it operates in. FREE operates 28 centers with 5,000 students, the majority of whom are women. The organization was given a UNESCO award recently, the first Nigerian NGO to be so honored in 18 years. Read the article from This Day.

An eight–year–old boy has been left as the only pupil at a closure–threatened school near Barnsley. Worsbrough St. Mary’s Church of England school was put in special measures in March after a critical Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) report and the head teacher resigned in May. Ofsted is the official body for inspecting schools in England. Pupil numbers fell from 90 in January to 11 at the end of the school year and only one boy has returned this term. His mother said she felt the school was her son’s best option, but education chiefs fear he will be isolated. An Ofsted report in April said St. Mary’s was “failing to give its pupils an acceptable standard of education.” Read about the lonely pupil at BBC News.

  With House hearings on the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act beginning today, The Washington Post asked educators, lawmakers and others for their views of the legislation and what might improve it. Read the responses from U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, NEA President Reg Weaver, and others.

Madeline L’Engle, award-winning author of more than 60 books, including fantasies, poetry, and memoirs, died September 6 at the age of 88. L’Engle was best known for her novel A Wrinkle in Time, for which she received the Newbery Medal in 1963. Her book A Ring of Endless Light was a Newbery Honor Book in 1981. L’Engle’s 1978 book, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, earned an American Book Award. In 2004, President George W. Bush presented her with a National Humanities Award. Read about L’Engle’s life in this article from The New York Times, and read an appreciation from The Washington Post.

Technology evangelists have predicted the emergence of electronic books for as long as they have envisioned flying cars and video phones. It is an idea that has never caught on with mainstream book buyers. Two new offerings this fall are set to test whether consumers really want to replace a technology that has reliably served humankind for hundreds of years: the paper book. Read more of this article from The New York Times.