Archive for October 07, 2007 - October 13, 2007

Primary school children and their parents suffer from “deep anxiety“ about modern life, according to a study of education in England. The Cambridge–based Primary Review’s report said the pressure of standardized government tests dominated the last two primary years. Researchers ran 87 discussions with groups of children, parents, teachers and others; 750 people took part. The government said most children lived in better conditions than 10 years ago and rejected criticism of testing. Study director Robin Alexander said “What people wanted to talk about was the stress of government tests, then life outside school, road safety, physical dangers, the sense young children are having to grow up too soon.” He also talked about the values children are subjected to, such as consumerism, individualism and materialism. Read more at BBC NEWS.

Last spring, town officials in Milton, Massachusetts, an affluent Boston suburb changed the elementary–school assignments for 38 streets—and sparked outrage. Some white students had been reassigned to Tucker, a mostly black school which has historically had Milton’s lowest test scores. Kevin Keating, a white parent of a reassigned student, is talking to lawyers about going to court to reverse the plan. I “just don’t feel good putting [my son] in an inferior school,” he says. His ammunition: the U.S. Supreme Court’s June ruling that consideration of race in school assignments is unconstitutional. Without the backing of the Supreme Court, Keating says his effort wouldn't have “much of a standing.” Read the article in The Wall Street Journal.

Low–income students who attend urban public high schools generally do just as well as private–school students with similar backgrounds, according to a study released this week. Students at independent private schools and most parochial schools scored the same on 12th–grade achievement tests in core academic subjects as those in traditional public high schools when income and other family characteristics were taken into account, according to the study by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy. The new study also looked at a range of other family characteristics, such as whether a parent participates in school life. “When these were taken into account, the private–school advantage went away,” the report states. Read more here.

A primary school in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou held an online parent–teacher meeting on Wednesday, October 10, 2007, providing a novel and instant way to foster communication between the two sides. At 4:30 p.m., after students were released from school, Li Yujuan, head teacher of Grade 5 at Yong’an Street Primary School, opened her laptop to commence the online conference. “Was not yesterday's homework too much? My kid did it until 11 p.m. at night,” a father said on the class forum. “My son did his homework until 10:30,” complained another parent. Read more about the new conferencing method at China Economic Net.

Doris Lessing, author of dozens of works from short stories to science fiction, including the classic “The Golden Notebook,” won the Nobel Prize for literature today (Thursday, October 11, 2007). She was praised by the judges for her “skepticism, fire and visionary power.” Lessing, 11 days short of her 88th birthday, is the oldest choice ever for a prize that usually goes to authors in their 50s and 60s. Although she is widely celebrated for “The Golden Notebook” and other works, she has received little attention in recent years and has been criticized as strident and eccentric. Read more about her at CNN News.

The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of the American Library Association, invites schools and libraries to join the celebration of Teen Read Week October 14-20. This year's celebration revolves around the theme "LOL @ your library." For further information and resources such as recommended booklists and a "Teens' Top Ten" list, visit the Teen Read Week webpage.

Lawyers for Literacy, a nonprofit based in Tampa Bay, Florida, has signed up nearly 40 lawyers, judges, and law students as well as eight schools for this year’s Read to Succeed tutoring program. The program is dedicated to keeping kids in school and out of the juvenile system by helping third–graders with below–average reading skills prepare for the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test and pass the third grade. It is scheduled to run from Nov. 28, 2007, to March 5, 2008. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 85% of children and teens in the juvenile system have below–average reading and comprehension skills, indicating a direct correlation between illiteracy and crime. For more information, visit this website.

Throughout October, the International Reading Association is joining other leading education, literacy, and publishing organizations in marking the sixth anniversary of Children’s Magazine Month. This year’s observance involves mobilizing teachers, librarians, and school children worldwide to organize KinderHarvest magazine recycling projects to collect millions of magazines for new readers.

“The KinderHarvest program collects wonderful magazines and puts them into the hands, homes, and hearts of children and families who want to learn and love to read,” notes John Mennell, founding director of MagazineLiteracy.org and co-manager of Children’s Magazine Month. “It’s like food gleaning, where humanitarians gather crops in the field to feed the hungry. Except, this harvest gleans magazines to feed children and families hungry to read and succeed, recycling the magazines we all love to meet local literacy needs.”

Find out more in a press release issued by the supporting organizations.

Terming education, particularly of females, as a panacea to all the problems in Pakistan, Anne W. Stone, an American entrepreneur and activist, has said that everyone in the country should push the government for promotion of education. “If you have education, you would have a stable democracy and sustainable economy,” she said while delivering a lecture on Women’s Perspective in Political Mobilization to students of the University of Peshawar in Pakistan. Read more at The International News website.

 Under pressure from the right and the left, President Bush said Tuesday, October 9, that he is open to reformulating his signature No Child Left Behind education law but stressed that he remains unwilling to surrender on its core elements of testing and accountability. “As we move forward, we will continue to welcome new ideas,” Bush said in the Rose Garden after meeting with civil rights leaders. “And I appreciate the ideas I heard today. Yet there can be no compromise on the basic principle: Every child must learn to read and do math at, or above, grade level. And there can be no compromise on the need to hold schools accountable to making sure we achieve that goal.” Read the article at washingtonpost.com.

Public Agenda and the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality (NCCTQ) today released research indicating that new high school and middle school teachers, challenged by their teenaged students, are much more concerned about administrative support, more frustrated by student motivation and behavior, less likely to see teaching as a lifelong career choice, and less likely to believe that all students can achieve in school than new teachers in elementary schools.

The series, "Lessons Learned: New Teachers Talk About Their Jobs, Challenges and Long-Term Plans," is based on a nationwide survey of first-year teachers and aims to help leaders in education and government understand more about the quality of current teacher education and on-the-job support and mentoring for new teachers. "Issue No. 1: The Special Challenges of New Teachers in High Schools and Middle Schools" provides ample evidence that new teachers in middle and high school feel most vulnerable to challenging teaching conditions.

The full report and complete questionnaire are available online at the following page on the Public Agenda website.

The research will be discussed on a live webcast organized by NCCTQ on Thursday, October 11, 2007, from 3:00 to 4:30 p.m. (Eastern Time). Registration and more information about the Web discussion is available at this link.

Rise Up Reading! is the theme for the 88th celebration of Children's Book Week, scheduled for November 12-18, 2007. Communities and schools throughout the United States will create their own unique celebrations, including storytelling, parties, author and illustrator appearances, and other book-related events. There are also Children's Book Week materials available from the Children's Book Council, which sponsors the event, including a poster by Edward Koren and a bookmark poem by Pam Munoz Ryan.

Further information about Children's Book Week can be found at your local library or bookstore, as well as on the CBC website.

 The controversial idea of paying teachers based on how much their students learn got a boost when a key congressman recently proposed adding pay–for–performance money for teachers in high–poverty schools to the next version of the federal No Child Left Behind education law. Proponents say merit pay would give teachers incentives to raise the quality of students’ work and could help the NCLB program, which requires schools to show yearly improvement on standardized tests or face penalties. Proposed last month by U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, the merit plan has support from Republicans and U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. Read more at Stateline.org.

A South African recruitment drive for teachers, combined with an exodus of education professionals escaping Zimbabwe’s seven–year recession, is creating staff shortages so severe that some schools are closing. At least four schools have closed and several more are facing the same situation. Teacher salaries have not kept pace with Zimbabwe’s official inflation rate of more than 6,000%, while neighboring South Africa has embarked on a recruitment drive for teachers to bolster their own teacher numbers. The Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ) said this week that 15,200 teachers had migrated to nearby states since the beginning of 2007. Read about the teacher shortage at IRIN News.

"It's time to rein in the test zealots who have gotten such a stranglehold on the public schools in the U.S.," writes Op-Ed columnist Bob Herbert in the October 9 edition of The New York Times. He quotes Daniel Koretz of Harvard's Graduate School of Education, who recently said, "We've now had four or five different waves of educational reform that were based on the idea that if we can just get a good test in place and beat people up to raise scores, kids will learn more. That's really what No Child Left Behind is."

Herbert's column notes that many schools and states may be tempted to take shortcuts in attempts to ensure that test scores rise. He also quotes a new study released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Northwest Evaluation Association as saying that "improvements in passing rates on state tests can largely be explained by declines in the difficulty of these tests."

For further information, read the full article.

Teachers and the general public alike have been inspired by the story of teacher Erin Gruwell and her Freedom Writers, the subject of a bestselling book and then a major motion picture. Now Erin Gruwell and the Freedom Writers Foundation have issued The Freedom Writers Diary Teacher's Guide, which is designed to encourage teachers and students to expand the walls of their classrooms and think outside the box. For further information, visit the Freedom Writers Foundation website.

Danielle Chappell had no reason to doubt she was a solid student. She earned decent grades, even scoring some A’s in English and math, while balancing schoolwork with basketball, track and a spot on the dance team. Then she graduated from Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C. and arrived at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, where she bombed the placement tests so badly that she had to take remedial English and math. Low grades overall put her on academic probation. Finally, mid–sophomore year, she was forced to withdraw. To examine the fate of one graduating class of D.C. high school students is to find multiple stories like Chappell’s—stories that illustrate how a struggling urban school system often fails to shepherd its students and set them on a promising path to adulthood. Read the article at washingtonpost.com.

More than 30,000 pupils who attended schools in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan last year have been absent in 2007, the provincial department of education told IRIN News. About 102,700 students attended school in 2006. This year there are 70,000 students in 90 functioning schools in the province, an education official said. Though schooling started September 10 in southern Afghanistan, education facilities have remained closed in several districts in Helmand, which has been severely affected by the insurgency. For the past 15 months, gunmen associated with Taliban insurgents and other armed radical groups have torched more than 20 schools and killed 17 students, teachers and staff. Read about the turmoil in education in Afghanistan at IRIN News.

Scholastic News Edition 4, the award-winning classroom news magazine for fourth-graders, is commemorating its 50th anniversary in the October 8 issue with a special cover story looking back at what fourth graders' lives were like in 1957. Students who love to play video games and surf the Web might be surprised to learn that in 1957 the most popular hobby for kids was stamp collecting. Over the years, Scholastic News Edition 4 (originally called Explorer), has covered many historic events, such as the first moon walk (1969), the fall of the Berlin Wall (1990), and the September 11 terrorist attacks (2001).

Three other Scholastic classroom magazines also are marking anniversaries: DynaMath is 25, Scholastic Action is 30, and Junior Scholastic is 70. For more about information, visit the Scholastic website.