Archive for February 10, 2008 - February 16, 2008

Parents and students in some states aren’t getting their money’s worth from their public school system and their state legislature, a new report has found. The Center for Education Reform (CER), a Washington-based education reform advocacy group, ranked each state based on the strength of its charter school laws and found significant disparities. For example, Minnesota had the strongest charter laws in the nation, while Mississippi had the weakest. The group’s report was issued February 13, 2008. For state-by-state law rankings, visit the CER website.

Educators spend most of their money on students, but three King County elementary schools in Washington state recently won $600,000 to spend on teaching parents as well as their children. On February 13, 2008, White Center Heights, Beverly Park, and Mount View elementary schools—all in the Highline School District—were the latest U.S. schools to formally win money and support from the Toyota Family Literacy Program, a nationally led initiative designed to develop an entire family’s English-language skills.

As part of the effort, the program brings parents into elementary classrooms with their children and into separate classes to work on their own. The program’s obvious goal is improving literacy for parents and students, but it also focuses on arguably the most important factor in a student’s success: parental involvement. Read more in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) has issued its second list of books a lot of very well-read people hope you will read. Initially called the “most recommended” list, the NBCC has decided on a seasonal theme for this quarterly offering, namely “Good Reads: Winter List.” Five hundred critics and authors voted.

Here’s the winter fiction list:

1. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
2. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (Riverhead)
3. Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee (Viking)
4. People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)
5. Zeroville by Steve Erickson (Europa Editions)

For more information, visit the NBCC website.

The majority of young people in the United Kingdom (58%) enjoy reading either very much or quite a lot and rate themselves as proficient readers, according to results of a survey of more than 1,600 pupils published by the National Literacy Trust. Most young people read on at least a weekly basis, either every day or once/twice a week.

According to "Young People's Self-Perceptions as Readers: An Investigation Including Family, Peer, and School Influences," a great majority (71%) of young people defined themselves as readers. More girls than boys saw themselves as readers, and more girls reported that they enjoyed reading than boys.

For further information, read the full report.

 Today marks the deadline for submitting program proposals for the International Reading Association's 54th Annual Convention, West, scheduled for February 21-25, 2009, in Phoenix, Arizona. 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, 2008.

Further information about submitting program proposals can be found on the IRA website.

President George W. Bush has nominated six individuals to serve on the National Institute for Literacy Advisory Board. The board provides leadership on literacy issues, including the improvement of reading instruction for children, youth and adults. Timothy Shanahan of Illinois, former president of the Board of Directors of the International Reading Association (2006-2007), is one of the six. He will serve until November 25, 2010. All of the nominees require Senate confirmation.

The others named are:
•Perri Klass, of New York, for the remainder of a three-year term ending November 25, 2009
•Katherine Mitchell, of Alabama, for the remainder of a three-year term ending November 25, 2010
•Eduardo J. Padron, of Florida, for the remainder of a three-year term ending 11/25/09
•Alexa E. Posny, of Kansas, for the remainder of a three-year term ending 11/25/08
•Richard Kenneth Wagner, of Florida, for the remainder of a three-year term ending 11/25/09

The National Institute for Literacy Advisory Board is authorized under the No Child Left Behind act to help children, youth and adults learn to read by supporting and disseminating scientifically-based reading research. In consultation with the Departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services, the institute serves as a national resource on current, comprehensive literacy research, practice, and policy.

See the news release on the United States Department of Education website.

Losing personal computer files can be upsetting. But failing to protect academic, government, or corporate data could erase irreplaceable pieces of history, says Francine Berman. She co-chairs a newly formed panel of experts tasked to ask how the world can protect its digital past, and answer a more nagging question: Who's going to pay for it?

“It’s hard to read the information on floppy disks these days,” says Berman, who is director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. “Very few people still have the drives. It’s hard to play LPs. They were everywhere only a decade ago. But now many people can’t read them.” And if diskettes or vinyl aren’t kept in the right environment, it won’t matter if people have the right drives. The disks will decay. The records will warp.

“It’s the great challenge of the Informa­tion Age,” she says, and a problem that her Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation will explore over the next two years. Read more in The Christian Science Monitor online.

A federal appeals court has turned away a lawsuit by two Illinois school districts and four families that said the No Child Left Behind Act was in conflict with requirements of the main federal special education law.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, in Chicago, ruled unanimously on Monday, Feb. 11 that even if the NCLB law was at odds with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the special education law “must give way” because NCLB is the newer statute. Read more about the lawsuit in Education Week online.

Taking a cue from the music business, a major publisher has begun selling the individual chapters of a popular book to gauge reader demand for bite-size portions of digital texts. Random House Publishing Group’s experiment, started February 11, 2008, appears to be the first time a major consumer publisher has offered a title on a chapter-by-chapter basis. It will sell the six chapters and epilogue of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die for $2.99 each.

The move comes at a time when retailers and publishers are looking for clues into how readers want to access digital content. Read more about the novel idea in The Wall Street Journal online.

The year 2008 has been proclaimed International Year of Languages by the United Nations General Assembly. As language issues are central to UNESCO's mandate in education, science, social and human sciences, culture, and communication and information, the organization has been named the lead agency for this event.

To celebrate the International Year of Languages, UNESCO invites governments, United Nations organizations, civil society organizations, educational institutions, professional associations and all other stakeholders to increase their own activities to promote and protect all languages, particularly endangered languages, in all individual and collective contexts. Read more about how you can participate in the International Year of Languages on the UNESCO website.

America’s children aren’t reading very much or very well these days, so the nation’s finest minds have come up with a Big Idea: Find an author who can tap into the richness of children's literature and persuade kids to drop their idle pursuits—their Facebooks, Nanos and Wiis—for the thrill of a good book.

Last month, the Library of Congress and the Children’s Book Council, a trade group, announced the appointment of the USA’s first “ambassador for young people's literature,” a sort of poet laureate for the Harry Potter set. As the inaugural ambassador, they named renowned author Jon Scieszka. For Scieszka, the appointment comes as “a great vote for the importance of humor” to win converts to reading. Read more about how Scieszka keeps kids reading at USA Today online.

The number of students in elementary classes throughout Seattle varies from 14 to 32, and some of the largest class sizes can be found at some of the district's most sought-after elementary schools. Given that, does class size really matter? An article by Jessica Blanchard in the February 11 issue of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer examines this issue.

Many parents take class size into account as they shop around for public schools, and the Washington Education Association has made lobbying for lower class sizes its top priority for this legislative session. Still, Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson maintains that "the bottom line is quality of teaching in the classroom."

Blanchard quotes several teachers and gives an example of how one school in Seattle uses PTA fundraisers to keep class sizes low. For further information, read the full article.

Employees of the Burnsville-Eagan-Savage school district south of Minneapolis, Minnesota, have long touted the gifts of its 600 teachers. They’re experienced, they care about students, and they strive to improve, they say. In fact, almost every teacher last year got a $2,000 bonus.

Last month the district released the results of its first full year of a merit pay system, part of Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s “Q Comp” program, meant to reward quality teaching. Teachers can get up to $2,000 annually for meeting personal, classroom, and school goals.

In the last round of evaluations in the 2006-07 year, 603 teachers “exceeded standards,” six “met standards” and not a single one fell below standards. Even considering their good reputation, is it really possible that not a single teacher is falling behind? Read more about the system in The Star Tribune online.

Does motivating students to study harder with the promise of cash sound like innovation—or bribery?

That’s a question educators and researchers have been debating, amid concerns that money-for-achievement programs actually decrease students’ intrinsic motivation to learn and send mixed messages about studying.

But the idea is catching on, with new cash-incentive programs planning to give money to students this school year in the Baltimore school district and some schools in an Atlanta suburb. Last school year, the 1.1 million-student New York City school system began a program to evaluate the effect of paying students for academic performance, joining a growing list of those testing the idea. Read more about the pros and cons of the proposal in Education Week online.

Government-funded schools in Jordan are accommodating 24,000 Iraqi students, causing massive pressure on the education system, according to Minister of Education Taysir Nueimi. Nueimi said the high number of Iraqi students had created financial and logistical difficulties for the education sector, and urged the international community to provide more assistance to Jordan. Read more about the huge influx of Iraqi students at IRIN News online.

All teachers in Wales should have one year off out of every seven on full pay, as part of continuing professional development, union leaders said yesterday.

The National Union of Teachers Cymru (Wales) said that the option of a sabbatical year every seven years would allow the 36,000 teachers in maintained schools to share experience, study, and bring best practice to classrooms.

Business people and independent schools last night warned the scheme would cost millions of pounds and may be perceived as “greedy,” despite conceding it could be beneficial. But union secretary David Evans said, “Continuing professional development should be seen as a right not a privilege.” Read more about the idea at icWales.co.uk.

A public school on Vancouver’s east side regularly scores poorly on standardized tests, but a report released February 11, 2008, by the C.D. Howe Institute says that school serves its students just as well as an elite private west-side school with a pass rate of 90%.

The report, by Professor David Johnson of Ontario’s Wilfrid Laurier University, offers the first comparison of British Columbia elementary schools based not only on scores from standardized tests—being written this month around the province in Grades 4 and 7—but also on the socio-economic characteristics that affect student performance.

Johnson, an economist, says students’ backgrounds are slightly more important than classroom lessons in determining how well they learn. Read more in The Vancouver Sun online.

First lady Laura Bush read Goodnight Moon by video hookup at last year’s awards gala for Reading Is Fundamental, a $25 million federal program that distributes books to low-income children. Five months later, President Bush wants to say good night to the program.

Since 1966, the program has distributed 325 million new books to more than 30 million mostly low-income children. Testimonials have come from entertainers and sports figures, such as Houston Rockets basketball star Juwan Howard, who was given books as a child. More than 140 publishers participate.

The White House doesn’t quarrel with the program’s goals. But it says the funds should be awarded under a competitive, merit-based process rather than automatically given to one non-profit group. Read more in USA Today online.

Each year, the National Education Association (NEA) and Youth Service America (YSA) join forces to award Youth Leaders for Literacy grants to encourage community service through innovative, youth-designed programs that benefit others in their communities. This year, 30 grants of $500 were awarded.

The winning programs exhibit a variety of interesting and innovative ways of promoting reading. The initiatives are launched on NEA's Read Across America Day, celebrated this year on March 3, and culminate during Global Youth Service Days, scheduled for April 25-27, 2008.

For further information, visit either the Read Across America section of the NEA website or the YSA website.

In Australia, it was the time of the Beatles, the Mavis Bramston Show, the EH Holden and prime minister Robert Menzies. We have seen a lot of changes since 1964, but there are new suggestions that there has been little or no improvement in children’s literacy and numeracy skills since then.

Researchers claim little has changed despite the millions of dollars pumped into the education system. The researchers from the Australian National University (ANU) looked at literacy and numeracy tests between 1964 and 2003 in which successive groups of students were asked the same questions.

One of the study’s authors, Andrew Leigh, says a typical young teenager in 2003 was about a quarter of a grade level behind his or her counterpart in 1964. “The test scores have flat-lined over this period. In fact, there’s even a little bit of evidence suggesting they may have fallen a smidgin,” he said. Read more at ABC News online.

In an attempt to increase book sales, HarperCollins Publishers will begin offering free electronic editions of some of its books on its website, including a novel by Paulo Coelho and a cookbook by the Food Network star Robert Irvine. The idea is to give readers the opportunity to sample the books online in the same way that prospective buyers can flip through books in a bookstore. For more, visit The New York Times online.

 Friday, February 15, marks the deadline for submitting program proposals for the International Reading Association's 54th Annual Convention, West, scheduled for February 21-25, 2009, in Phoenix, Arizona. 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, 2008.

Further information about submitting program proposals can be found on the IRA website.

As a child growing up in Ghana, Kwabena Darko was very poor. He received a small loan (a "microloan"), and what he did with that money changed the lives of his entire community. A new children's book, One Hen: How One Small Loan Made a Big Difference, written by Katie Smith Milway, illustrated by Eugenie Fernandes, and published by Kids Can Press, tells the heartwarming story.

One Hen encourages children to think about the power we each have to initiate positive changes in the world. In addition, children can play online games to experience the impact a small loan has on a virtual village. For further information, visit the One Hen.org website or the new books section of the Kids Can Press website.