Archive for January 20, 2008 - January 26, 2008

Education was the prime focus in many sessions on the second day of the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland. In a session chaired by Princess Lolwah Al-Faisal, general supervisor of the Jeddah-based Effat College, panelists were of the view that education must address both the basic skills—the skills required for a better life—and the skills needed for dialogue with others.

During the sessions, it was revealed that about 93 million children remain out of school at primary age and almost 800 million adults cannot read or write. Panelists said defining what it means to have a better kind of life makes it possible to define what education is about. “But there is a common problem: We are all suffering from insecurity,” said former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami. “The media has replaced the classroom as the main delivery channel for education. Cyberspace has become the learning space.” Read more in Arab News online.

A homeschooling father and mother from Germany have fled to Iran with their son in search of educational freedom and apparently are being sought by authorities for child kidnapping, according to World Net Daily sources. Meanwhile, a new campaign has been launched by German lawmakers to approve a provision that would allow authorities to simply take legal custody of children whose parents are trying to avoid problems associated with the public school system. The two situations are the latest developments as parental rights in Germany are under attack, especially regarding the right to direct the education of their own children, homeschool advocates say. Read more at World Net Daily.

RaceBridges, a nonprofit initiative that offers free lesson plans to promote interracial understanding, has created a new lesson just in time for Black History Month. Based on a story by La'Ron Williams, the lesson, which is titled "From Flint, MI to Your Front Door: Tracing the Roots of Racism in America," includes audio excerpts of the author telling his story.

There are now six free lesson plans available from the Race Bridges website, including another unit that is particularly relevant for Black History Month: "Black History: We All Have Race." Designed for students in middle school and high school, the lessons are self-contained; all the materials that teachers and counselors need to conduct the lessons are included on the RaceBridges website.

For further information, visit the RaceBridges website.

In his annual State of Education address, California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell laid out an ambitious proposal for a series of new programs aimed at closing the gap in test scores between black and Hispanics students and their white and Asian peers. O'Connell said the new programs would not cost taxpayers any more money, an important point at a time when California faces a large budget deficit.

For further information, read the full article by Associated Press writer Juliet Williams, appearing on SFGate.com.

Hoping to make dramatic gains in standardized test scores for elementary schoolchildren, the Hartford, Connecticut, city school district is embarking on an ambitious plan to overhaul the way young children are taught. Under the plan Superintendent Doris Kurtz is pushing, the district will enter into a contract with an educational institute based in Florida.

Instead of having a single teacher provide instruction in reading, math, writing and other core subjects, students learn from a teacher who specializes in reading at a reading station, then move on to a different teacher who specializes in math at a math station, and so on. The Institute for Social Innovation's Project CHILD program was founded and is directed by Florida State University Professor Sarah Butzin. Read about the plan in The Hartford Courant online.

 About 2,900 public-school teachers in Hawaii are not considered qualified by the federal government, according to a private consultant. That means about 22% of the state’s 13,000 public-school teachers do not qualify under the No Child Left Behind law. The law defines highly qualified teachers as those with a bachelor’s degree, a state license, and proven competency in every subject they teach.

Oregon-based School Synergy has a $250,000 contract with the state Department of Education to identify unqualified teachers and help them improve their credentials. Under the NCLB law, states were supposed to have all teachers highly qualified by the 2005-06 school year. None made it, so the federal Education Department demanded new state plans. School Synergy says Hawaii needs to graduate more teachers from universities, encourage high school students to become teachers, and develop incentives for teachers to become highly qualified. Read about the situation in The Honolulu Star Bulletin online.

Thousands of Kenyan students have still not started the new school year since the 27 December poll results plunged parts of the country into chaos, raising concerns about the effect massive displacement and continued instability could have on education. “Many of the teachers in the region are from ethnic communities that have left the Rift Valley in their thousands,” Bishop Jackson ole Sapit, who covers eight districts in Kenya’s western Rift Valley Province, told IRIN. “Many of those who left told us they would seek transfers to areas where they felt safer, which is likely to cause us great problems in the long term.”

Parents of children in camps in Narok North district said they were too scared to send their children to local schools in case they were attacked by rival communities or unruly youths. One camp, in the compound of the district commissioner, has more than 1,800 residents—who said none of the displaced children was in school. Read about the disruption in Kenya at IRIN News.

Roughly 16 percent of Ohio's public school students are classified as gifted, but only 26 percent of those students received services during the last school year, according to an article by Jennifer Gonzalez in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. While federal law mandates that children with disabilities receive special education services, no such mandate covers gifted students. Only 31 states require districts to provide services to gifted students, and Ohio is not among them.

"These are the kids that are going to make our country competitive," said Kimberly Allen, gifted program coordinator for the Euclid School District. "We should be spending money on them." For further information, read the full article.

Winter, however cold and snowy, has its sweet compensations. What better time to throw logs on the fire, hole up with a book, and be transported to the realms of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or drama?

For most people, reading is a solitary, silent act. But some couples also turn it into a joint venture by reading aloud. Their literary equation is: 2 people + 1 book = shared pleasure. Whatever the season, whatever the subject, it’s their personal version of an audiobook.

No one pretends this is a widespread pastime. But talk to couples who do it and their enthusiasm is obvious. In addition to broadening their reading, they find it creates a bond that doesn’t happen when they sit passively in front of the TV. Read about this lovely way of connecting in The Christian Science Monitor online.

New York City public school students have taken English tests for years. Math tests, too. This year, 10 “diagnostic” tests have been added to the menu in the hope that they will improve results on the real thing. But when parents at two Manhattan elementary schools discovered that their children had been selected to participate in “field tests,” or tests to help the state’s testing company try out questions for future tests, they decided to draw the line.

At a news conference in front of City Hall on Tuesday, January 22, the parents said they were organizing a boycott of the field tests to be given at their children’s schools—Public Schools 40 and 116—later this week. Because of requirements under the federal No Child Left Behind Law coupled with the City Education Department’s decision to raise the number of diagnostic tests given to third through eighth graders—last year there as many as six—New York City’s public school students are taking more standardized tests than ever. And so the boycotters seized on the field tests, saying the testing company should figure out another way to conduct its research. Read about the controversy in The New York Times online.

Microsoft will spend $235 million over the next five years to expand its educational program that includes getting more computers into classrooms to help bridge the digital divide, the company said January 22. The world’s biggest software company said it aimed to reach 270 million people with the second stage of its Partners in Learning program, three times as many as it reached with a similar investment over the last five years.

Microsoft works with governments and non-governmental organizations around the world to help put computers such as Intel’s “Classmate” laptop into schools, train teachers and influence education policy. The company says it hopes to achieve its first major milestone—reaching the next billion of the 5 billion who still have little or no access to technology—by 2015. Read more of the Reuters article.

New York City has embarked on an ambitious experiment, yet to be announced, in which some 2,500 teachers are being measured on how much their students improve on annual standardized tests. The move is so contentious that principals in some of the 140 schools participating have not told their teachers that they are being scrutinized based on student performance and improvement.

While officials say it is too early to determine how they will use the data, which is already being collected, they say it could eventually be used to help make decisions on teacher tenure or as a significant element in performance evaluations and bonuses. And they hold out the possibility that the ratings for individual teachers could be made public.

The effort comes as educators nationwide are struggling to figure out how to find, train and measure good teachers. Many education experts say that until teacher quality improves in urban schools, student performance is likely to stagnate and the achievement gap between white and minority students will never be closed. Read more in The New York Times online.

Beginning next school year, all public schools in Arizona will be required to teach four hours of English a day to English-language learners (ELLs)—students who aren’t proficient in the language. But the state mandate concerns officials in some districts, who wonder where they’re going going to find the money, space and teachers to support the program. According to Patti Lopez, deputy superintendent of the Tucson Unified School District, “[The students] will be taken out of the regular classroom and grouped with students of the same proficiency level.” Read more in The Arizona Daily Star online.

 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 March.

March 1: Begins National Women's History Month.
March 3: Read Across America Day celebrates Dr. Seuss.
March 4: Teen Tech Week begins.
March 6: Author Gabriel García Márquez was born.
March 22: Randolph Caldecott was born in 1846.

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.

Helen Eldridge never thought she’d be able to afford a house—at least not in Palm Beach County, Florida. Like many beginning educators, the Highland Elementary teacher makes less than $40,000, not enough money to save for a down payment on a house. But Eldridge soon will move into a new one-bedroom condo minutes from the beach with a mortgage that is several hundred dollars less than her current rent.

That’s because of a new program that provides teachers and other middle-income workers with reduced-price homes in the MerryPlace development. Eldridge also is getting $10,000 for a down payment from the Palm Beach County School District because she teaches at a low-income school and has promised to stay there for five years. Read more about the program in The Palm Beach Post online.

A Perry Meridian High School teacher’s attempt to follow the lessons in the popular movie “Freedom Writers” has ended with her saying she was censored and the district trying to fire her for insubordination. Connie Heermann, a 27-year teacher, attended training last summer with Erin Gruwell, the California teacher who inspired the movie. Gruwell has earned fame for sparking excitement in her apathetic students through writing. Heermann hoped to have the same impact at Perry Meridian High School near Indianapolis, Indiana. The “Freedom Writers” approach encourages students to write about their own experiences, to reach out to other students of different backgrounds and to work toward a future that includes attending college and taking an active role in their communities. Read more about the controversy at indystar.com.

Cellphone novels, composed on phone keypads by young women, have become a hot item in Japan, according to an article by Norimitsu Onishi appearing in The New York Times. Of last year's 10 best-selling novels in Japan, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in abbreviated text messaging style with little plotting or character development.

The new genre is so successful that some are questioning whether it will hasten the decline of traditional Japanese literature. To learn more, read the full article.