Archive for January 27, 2008 - February 02, 2008

Children of the U.S.A., the 18th in an award-winning series of books published by Charlesbridge Publishing and The Global Fund for Children (GFC), reveals the diversity of American youth through portraits of 51 U.S. cities--one in each state, as well as Washington, DC.

A portion of the proceeds from the sales of Children of the U.S.A. and all Global Fund for Children books support community-based organizations funded by GFC. These organizations serve the world's most vulnerable children. For further information, visit the Global Fund for Children website.

Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) CEO Arne Duncan joined the Chicago-based Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL) to announce an investment of $10.3 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support the turnaround of chronically underperforming district schools. AUSL will use the funds to transform three CPS-selected high schools over the next several years and expand its teacher residency program.

AUSL is the only national program of its kind to combine a teacher training residency with a school turnaround strategy to dramatically improve academic achievement. Read more at News Blaze online.

Whether it’s the story of people risking their lives to free slaves through the Underground Railroad, the dynamic message of Dr. Martin Luther King or the historic Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education, Black History Month presents a tremendous opportunity for teachers to share these valuable stories with their students.

To assist educators in finding unique and engaging lesson plans and educational resources reflective of Black History Month, which is observed in February, Thinkfinity.org has created a special section on its home page that provides dozens of resources that bring those lessons to life.

Thinkfinity.org is the Verizon Foundation’s free comprehensive program and online portal to more than 55,000 educational resources, including grade-specific, K-12 lesson plans, and other student interactives provided in partnership with 11 of the nation's leading educational organizations including the International Reading Association. Visit Thinkfinity.org.

 The International Reading Association’s Board of Directors recently approved reincorporation of IRA in Delaware under a revised set of Bylaws. (The Association is currently incorporated in Pennsylvania.) In order to ratify the Board’s recommendation, the Association will need the approval of a majority of all members in a special ballot to be conducted between April 2 and June 30, 2008. This is an important issue for IRA, and we respectfully ask each and every member to participate in the process. The Board of Directors recommends your approval of reincorporation in the State of Delaware and approval of the revised set of Bylaws.

The current Bylaws and proposed Bylaws have been posted on the IRA website. There is also a link to provide feedback. If you are an IRA member, please read this information carefully and prepare to cast your vote. Voting will take place between April 2 and June 30, 2008.

 The deadline is fast approaching to submit program proposals for the International Reading Association's 54th Annual Convention, West, scheduled for February 21-25, 2009, in Phoenix, Arizona. Proposals must be submitted by February 15, 2008. IRA seeks proposals for institutes, sessions, symposia, workshops, special interest group meetings, exhibitor sessions/technology labs, and research poster sessions.

Proposals are also invited for IRA's 54th Annual Convention, North Central, scheduled for May 3-7, 2009, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The submission deadline for that conference is June 1, 200

In addition, IRA seeks program proposal reviewers for both co-conventions. For details or to sign up, contact Carolyn Harris in IRA's Conferences Division by February 11, 2008.

Further information about submitting program proposals or serving as a program proposal reviewer can be found on the IRA website.

Australia has fallen behind in reading because there is too much focus on lifting the results of struggling students, rather than also making our top students perform even better, says the man spearheading the federal government’s first national school curriculum.

Melbourne University professor Barry McGaw said yesterday that Australia’s international ranking had dropped in recent years because too much emphasis had been placed on boosting the results of students at the bottom end of the performance scale, and not enough on improving the skills of those at the top. Educators and governments should “behave like women and multi-task,” he said, by working to lift the game of all students. Read more in The Age online.

Calling school library media specialists “an endangered species,” Washington State Senator Tracey J. Eide (D-Federal Way) introduced a bill January 22 that codifies through a per-pupil formula how many credentialed school library media specialists should be employed by each district and offers some $55 million to fund the initiative. The bill also allots $12 per student in state funding for library materials--a first in Washington State, which has relied exclusively on local levies for school libraries.

For further information, read the full news release in the American Libraries section of the American Library Association website.

Less than 24 hours after Toronto’s public school trustees narrowly approved the creation of a black-focused school in 2009, a top board official opened the door to establishing multiple Afrocentric alternative schools—if there is sufficient demand. But questions arose about how the cash-strapped board will fund even one such school, especially with the proposal garnering little support from the provincial government.

“There’s no intention for extra funding to flow for this alternative school,” Education Minister Kathleen Wynne said in an interview Wednesday, January 30, 2008. “Alternative schools are funded in the same way that mainstream schools are. There’s no enriched funding for alternative programs.” Tuesday night’s 11-9 vote to establish a black-focused public school, in order to address a staggering dropout rate among black students in Canada’s largest school board, came after months of impassioned pleas from parents both for and against the idea. Read more in The Globe and Mail or The Toronto Star.

After musing on religion, pride, and the vagaries of old age, radio host Garrison Keillor continues:

... And then there is the grief that old righteous people inflict on the young, such as our public schools. I'm looking at U.S. Department of Education statistics on reading achievement and see that here in Minnesota—proud, progressive Minnesota—on a 500-point test (average score: 225), 27% of 4th graders score below basic proficiency, and black and Hispanic kids score 30-some points lower than whites on average, and the 30%of public school kids who come from households in poverty (who qualify for reduced-price school lunches) score 27 points lower than those who don’t come from poverty.

Reading is the key to everything. Teaching children to read is a fundamental moral obligation of the society. That 27% are at serious risk of crippling illiteracy is an outrageous scandal. Read more of Keillor's opinions on phonics and Reading First in The Chicago Tribune online.

Entries are now being accepted for the first annual International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Special Interest Group Media Specialist Technology Innovation Award, sponsored by Linworth Publishing, Inc./Library Media Connection and Follett Software Company. The award will be presented to two teams, consisting of a school librarian and collaborating teacher, who have conducted an exemplary technology program extending beyond the library to meet the needs of classroom students and teachers.

The deadline for entries is March 15, 2008. For details, visit the Awards and Recognition page of the ISTE website.

Why is it that so many elementary students are avid readers and so few adolescents? In an article in the January 27 issue of The Oregonian, Betsy Hammond attempts to answer that question, using recent studies as well as interviews with students and educators. For further information, read the full article.

Two weeks into the new term Tatenda Marimire, 13, has spent more time as an unpaid errand boy for his school in Harare, Zimbabwe, than getting to grips with algebra, because there are no teachers. Like most civil servants, educators have increasingly stayed away from work to seek other sources of income to survive hyperinflation.

“We are spending most of the time cutting grass, cleaning dormitories and running errands for members of staff that have reported for duty, and this makes us feel like young workers without salaries,” Tatenda complained. “We don’t know where the teachers are and if we will manage to learn at all.”

The Zimbabwean government has been struggling to pay its employees inflation-related salaries and the education sector has been one of the worst affected by the eight-year economic crisis. Read more at IRIN News online.

Every year, when the entries start pouring in to The Christian Science Monitor’s Young Poets Contest, the editors are as excited as the young people who’ve entered their work. The editors thank everyone who entered, and congratulate the seven top winners chosen by poet Elizabeth Lund. One of the poems follows. Read more online.

Notebook

Two butterfly wings
White
With gentle streaks of blue
Spreading out.
Dark metal body
Glittering
In the morning sun
Let her fly
With the imprint
The memory of words
Written on the thin
Delicate white
With veins of blue
Soaring
Through the infinite space of thought
Riding the breezes
Of imagination,
Drifting
From flower
To bright-colored flower
Of budding words,
Ideas
Speckling the white
Blue-streaked wings
With dust
Of a lead pencil
Marking the paths
Of its travels

Michal Goderez
Amherst, Massachusetts
8th grade

Katie Hern was surprised in fall of 2005 when only 55% of her remedial English students passed the course. Not that it was a surprising figure. “In fact,” she says, “it was pretty typical.” But the students had been part of a “learning community”—in other words, their courses were linked and students stuck together in one cohort across their classes, the goal being to maximize student success and retention—and so Hern had expected atypicality.

“Then I looked back over the data from my students and how they had done over the semester and I found there was a good reason to be surprised— because about half of those who got a [withdrawal] or no credit had shown they could do the work,” says Hern, an English instructor at Chabot College, a community college in California’s East Bay area. “The issue is not so much about ability but sustainability,” she says, defining the “sustainability gap” as such: “The gap between students’ ability to perform and the performance they actually sustain over the semester.”

Across California, community college leaders are writing action plans for improving so-called “basic skills” (otherwise known as remedial or developmental) and English as a Second Language education as part of a system-wide initiative, with the goal of creating models for other instructors operating in solitude behind their classrooms’ closed doors. Read more in Inside Higher Ed online.

President Bush’s call for a $300 million program called Pell Grants for Kids is the latest effort by his administration to channel tax dollars to low-income parents to help them send their children to private or religious schools.

His proposal, in his State of the Union address Monday, January 28, 2008, was denounced by some top Democratic lawmakers and teachers’ union officials as a national “voucher” program that would only drain resources from urban public schools that in many cases are in need of money.

And some critics said that the president’s call for yet another education initiative only underscored the failure of the No Child Left Behind Act, the federal law that Bush considers a landmark achievement of his first term. Read more about his proposal in The New York Times online.

 When President Bush steps to the podium today in Washington, DC, for his last State of the Union address, he is expected to call on Congress to reauthorize his landmark education law, but Hawai’i’s lawmakers will be a tough sell. During the six years No Child Left Behind has been in effect, the state’s schools have languished in the bottom quarter nationally, despite slight gains. The law ended Oct. 1, but its programs have continued under an automatic one-year extension.

“At its core, the act promised higher standards for educators and schools, achievement testing to measure success and funding to support both the increased standards and the testing,” said Senator Daniel K. Inouye, D-Hawai’i. But, Inouye said, the law’s standards have been applied “inflexibly” to punish schools and educators, testing has been unfair and expensive, and federal funding has been less than required. Read more in The Honolulu Advertiser online.

About 30 professionals and tradespeople will enter the classroom as qualified teachers this week, as the Victorian State Government in Australia tries to plug the growing teacher shortage. While some critics have dismissed the scheme—which targets professionals working in math and science-related fields to teach in hard-to-staff state schools—as a temporary solution, many of the former scientists, plumbers, chefs, and builders argue that teaching has been the perfect career change.

Among them is 47-year-old Ken Johnsen, a former electrical fitter, who will begin his second career today at St. Alban’s Brimbank College as an electrical technology teacher. He was among a group of 30 professionals who completed a two-year course last year and are undertaking full-time teaching at schools across the state. Read about the innovative project in The Age.

Once again this year, the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation is offering $500 minigrants to public schools and public libraries in the Unites States for innovative programs that promote the love of reading among children. Examples of funded programs include the following: ongoing pen-pal projects; multicultural portrait projects; art projects culminating in art shows, murals, or quilts; bookmaking; creation and performance of puppet shows; and intergenerational journals.

For further information, visit the Programs section of the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation website. The deadline for submitting minigrant proposals is September 15.