Girls: Creativity on the Web

The NY Times has an article today that teachers should note: Don't think of the Internet as a guy thing. Here's just a bit of it...click the title link for the complete article (may require registration, but it's free now).

Research shows that among the youngest Internet users, the primary creators of Web content (blogs, graphics, photographs, Web sites) are not misfits resembling the Lone Gunmen of “The X Files.” On the contrary, the cyberpioneers of the moment are digitally effusive teenage girls.

Study for the ACT/SAT and feed the world

We've added a link on our sidebar (that's over on the left side of the page) to FreeRice.com. It's an extremely cool charity-click site, with a twist:

You answer a vocabulary question. For each question you answer correctly, a donation (20 grains of rice) is made to feed the world through the United Nations World Food Program. The program counts how many grains of rice you've donated; it also tracks your vocabulary level. So, it's reinforcing on two dimensions. Megakudos to whoever thought of it!

The clarity of a mother's voice

From the Rutland Herald:

I was presenting standardized test scores to a group of parents when I unconsciously parroted an often-heard phrase, "In order to be economically competitive in the 21st century, we have to have high test scores."A mother's hand shot up, "But I don't want my son to be an international competitor in a 21st century global economy," she declared. "I want him to be a good man."The room fell silent.She went on."I want him to hold a good job, carry his own weight, and give a little bit more to his community than he took. I want him to get along with others. I want him to love and be loved. I want him to be happy."With stunning and simple eloquence, this mother brilliantly defined the purposes of education.

8th-graders practice job skills

From The Hawkeye (Iowa's oldest newspaper):

The lasagna was hot, the lettuce crisp and the cheesecake deliciously creamy Wednesday at the hippest restaurant in Burlington -- the Hip Hop Cafe.From the bus boys to the maitre d', this restaurant is staffed by Oak Street Middle school eighth-graders.Despite the age of the staff, the food was good enough to please even the toughest critics, according to special education teacher Dianna Law. Law had the lasagna and said it was much better than the sandwich she would have otherwise eaten for lunch.

Webcast Update: ACE II Presentation, Mentoring

We have uploaded a new webcast on mentoring programs for students.

On Monday (assuming all the technology works the way it's supposed to), we will upload a presentation from Supt. Rick Martin (Prague). It's a reprise of a presentation that he made to the ACE II Task Force.

Closing ALL the Gaps

Phillips Kovacs posted this on the Education Policy Blog:

Reducing the “achievement gap” to what goes on inside of schools has proven to be an effective way for policy makers to ignore all of the other “gaps” outside of America’s classrooms.

While researcher after researcher has shown that outside influences contribute to student performance and achievement, proponents of high-stakes, standardized reforms continue to press for more “rigor,” as if harder work alone will mitigate every outside factor influencing children’s lives.

Rather than focusing exclusively on the “achievement gap,” policy makers and educational reformers might consider policies that help reduce other “gaps” that exist within our country. Gaps that could be narrowed in order to improve the lives and schooling of all students include but are not limited to:

• The incarceration gap, where six times as many African Americans are behind bars compared to their white counterparts;

• The homeowner gap, where 72.7% of white Americans own their homes compared to 48.2% of African Americans;

• The healthcare gap, where 71.4% of white Americans are insured compared to 53.9% of African Americans;

• The earnings gap, where white Americans average over $20,000 more a year than African Americans;

• The poverty rate gap, where 8.7% of white Americans live at or below the poverty line while 24.7% of African Americans do so;

• The unemployment gap, where 5.7% of white Americans are unemployed while 13.2% of African Americans are without work;

• The happiness gap, where 72% of white youths say they are happy with life in general compared to 56% of their African American counterparts;

• The murder gap, where 49% of murder victims in the United States are African Americans, who make up 13% of the population.

Close one of these and I warrant the "achievement gap" shrinks.

New ETS Report on Families

The report is called The Family: America's Smallest School. Here's the description from the ETS website:

If the United States is to reach our ambitious national education goals, we need to focus as much attention on the starting line as we do on the finish line. While most reform debate centers on improving schools, increasing teaching quality and raising student achievement, success also requires changes within America’s smallest school as well: the family.

In the ETS Policy Information Center’s new report, The Family: America's Smallest School, ETS researchers Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley outline the family and home conditions affecting children’s cognitive development and school achievement and how gaps beginning early persist throughout life. With a preface and endorsement by Marc H. Morial, President of the National Urban League, both organizations call on leaders and policymakers to improve not only schools, but also home and family conditions, to help all students succeed.

Critical factors examined in the report include child care quality, parental involvement in schools, parent/pupil ratio, family finances, literacy development, student absences and physical home environments.

Report findings are available for download:

• Full Report (PDF)
• Report Highlights (PDF)
• Press Conference Video - Kurt Landgraf (Flash, 1:57 / 7.34MB)
• Press Conference Video - Rich Coley (Flash, 1:30 / 5.75MB)
• Press Conference Video - Honorable Marc H Morial (Flash, 2:40 / 10MB)
• Press Conference Video - Isabel Sawhill (Flash, 0:40 / 2.5MB)
• Press Briefing Slide Presentation (PPT)
• Press Release (English)
• Press Release (Spanish) (PDF)
• For a related report, see Parsing the Achievement Gap: Baselines for Tracking Progress
  

A New Majority: Low Income Students in the South's Public Schools

An important report has been released by the Southern Education Foundation. Click the title link to go to the full report (it's in PDF format). Here is the press release:

The Southern Education Foundation (SEF) has released a research report on the growth of low income children in the South’s public schools. The report finds that public schools in the region have enrolled a majority of low income students in each of the last three years (2004-2006) and today the South is the only region in the nation where low income students are 50 percent or more of public school enrollment.

The report also provides some historical background on the presence of low income students in Southern states; reviews trends during the last 50 years; documents patterns of growth in the South and other non-South regions and states during the last two decades; and identifies the primary factors and implications behind the trends.

Middle-school fashion bullies?

Vanessa O'Connell has an interesting article in today's Wall Street Journal Online -- fashion bullying. From interviewing students in our suburban alternative education programs, we know that this type of social pressure is one of the things that causes kids to consider dropping out of school. Students have told us that, when they changed to the alternative program, they felt a huge sense of relief -- they didn't have to deal with being in the out-group anymore.

As O'Connell's article notes, that kind of social pressure isn't limited to the cities and suburbs anymore. It's an important but overlooked factor in students' attention, effort, and motivation to come to school each day.

The marketing people are now targeting kid fashion -- bigtime. It's not going to be pretty....

EdWeek: GAO Studies Abuse in Boot Camp Programs

We recommend heading to Education Week Online to read the entire article, but here are the first few paragraphs:

Residential treatment programs for troubled teenagers have been the subject of thousands of allegations of abuse over the past 17 years, including a number of documented deaths, but much about such facilities remains unknown, the Government Accountability Office reports.

Although it is estimated that hundreds of public and private residential treatment programs exist across the country, there’s no standard definition for such programs, and no way to know precisely how many are operating, the GAO says. The programs serve teenagers with a range of problems, including drug abuse, alcohol abuse, and mental illness. They can include boarding schools; wilderness-therapy programs, which aim to help troubled youths connect with nature; and so-called boot camps, which emphasize strict, military-style discipline.

The GAO examined thousands of cases of alleged abuse, from 1990 to 2007, as reported by state agencies, the federal Department of Health and Human Services, pending and closed criminal and civil cases, and allegations posted on the Internet. In 2005, 33 states reported that 1,619 staff members of residential programs had been involved in alleged abuse at such programs, according to the report.

School Discipline Tougher on African Americans

This discouraging news comes to us via the PEN Weekly Newsblast. We are sad to say that we're not at all surprised by the reporter's findings. Click the title link to go to the original article in the Chicago Tribune.

America’s schools remain as unequal as they have ever been when it comes to disciplinary sanctions (think suspensions and expulsions), according to recent data collected by the U.S. Department of Education for the 2004-05 school year, reports Howard Witt in the Chicago Tribune. On average, African American New Jersey public school students are almost 60 times as likely as white students to be expelled, Minnesota black public school students are suspended six times as often as whites, and in Iowa, black students, who constitute only five percent of public school enrollment, account for 22 percent of suspended students.

In every state except Idaho, black students are suspended in numbers greater than would be expected given their proportion of the student body. In 21 states alone, the percentage of black suspensions is more than double their percentage of the student body.

Unfortunately, this is not purely a socioeconomic issue, as middle- and upper-class black students are being disciplined more often that their white peers as well. Russell Skiba, widely regarded as the foremost authority on school discipline and race, says "we can call it structural inequity or we can call it institutional racism."

The problem goes way beyond being unfair to black youths, as research shows that a history of school suspensions is a strong predictor of future trouble, or the first step on the "school-to-prison pipeline" for black youths. Additionally, few districts across the country have recognized the stark inequity in school discipline.

One district that has done something is the Austin (Texas) Independent School District. When school administrators realized blacks accounted for 37 percent of students sent to punitive alternative schools, yet only 14 percent of the district’s population, they introduced a program aimed at encouraging positive student behaviors rather then punishing negative ones. At one school, disciplinary referrals dropped from 520 in 2001-02 to just 20 last year.

Skiba cautions that "there is no silver bullet for this problem," and it is possible that schools implementing positive behavioral programs are simply reducing white suspensions, while increasing black suspensions.

Watch Out for 6th Graders

From The Care and Feeding of Teenagers blog at the Muskogee Phoenix:

I recently attended the Model Schools Conference in Washington, D.C. The major players in educational research were there, stressing their mantra for today's public schools: RIGOR, RELEVANCE, RELATIONSHIPS. Any teacher worth his/her salt knows that mantra instinctively.

What was new information, however, was something I just touched on in July: failure in school begins to manifest itself in the 6th grade. Sixth grade - who knew?

Prior understanding of potential drop outs said that the ninth grade is when failure begins to set in, after a person is in high school. The 9th grade has always been looked upon as a transitional year. Grades are usually low for freshmen and many a senior has rued their lack of serious approach to school when they find out it takes making 6 straight A's to get a C average out of the 6 straight F's they made in the 9th grade.

It has also been a strongly held assumption that attendance began to lag during the freshman year. This is the year most people attempt to skip school, cut class, run from the truancy officer, and call in sick for themselves.

But current research shows that a person's potential risk for failure at school actually begins in the 6th grade. This is the key transitional year from elementary school to middle school or junior high. Four key indicators of potential danger are:

>Attendance problems
>Behavior problems
>Math failure
>English failure

These are problems that do not normally self-correct. In other words, it takes some strong intervention from the school and on the home front to fix a potentially dangerous problem.

If you don't view this as a problem, statistics show you are wrong. For people trying to work their way up the social ladder, entry into the middle class nowadays is easiest through access to post-secondary education (not just college, but training and vocational programs, too). By not taking the above problems seriously as a parent, you are running the risk of limiting your child's personal and financial success.

The great thing is, when addressed in the 6th grade, there is plenty of time to turn the problem around. Parents are tempted to say, "Oh, it's just a phase and it will run its course." Maybe it will, but maybe it won't. Sixth grade year is no time for parents to go on auto-pilot waiting for little Johnny to grow up. It's time we started watching out for 6th graders to make sure we set them up with the best possible foundation for success.

Two Takes on Ruby Payne

Ruby Payne has a great deal of influence on the way teachers think about many at-risk children, so we're interested in the research behind and the validity of her conclusions. We ran across two articles that provide some perspective:

A Framework for Understanding Ruby Payne (we nominate this for Clever Title of the Year) was published in the Winter 2006 edition of Rethinking Schools. The author's main concerns -- worthy of attention -- are the lack of research behind Payne's Framework for Understanding Poverty and stereotyping embedded in Payne's approach.

This article, The Class Consciousness Raiser, is also available online. The author covered one of Payne's presentations in a school district. It's a less academic, more complimentary look at the Ruby Payne phenomenon.

We'd recommend reading both.

The first webcasts of the year are up!

We've posted the year's first three webcasts over on the OTAC site. You can find them on the Webcast Directory page. (Yes, it's gotten long and we need to rearrange it....that's on our ToDo List.) The first three webcasts are:

• Grants for Art in Education: Aaron Jones, from the Oklahoma Arts Council, did a webcast to help schools (1) find out about available funds and (2) complete their applications for grants.
• K20 Partnership Update: Lisa Pryor and Laura Buxton from that Oklahoma State Department of Education joined us to talk about the new co-teaching project for Alternative Education Academies. We are very excited about this project!!
• Child Abuse Prevention and Intervention: Over the summer, Fran Roberson from the Center for Children and Families in Norman recorded a series of webcasts on this topic. (Thank you, Fran!) There are four parts to the series. Part I is available now; the remaining three parts will be available soon. The link to this series is near the top of the Webcast Directory page, or you can use this direct link.

We are hoping to record about four webcasts a month this year -- two for general education and two that are more directed to working with children at risk (although these topics cross over quite a bit). We have the next couple of months planned, but we are always happy to hear your suggestions. So, keep those cards & letters coming....

Online Resource: Safe Social Networking Workshop

Wes Fryer (Speed of Creativity) has posted the curriculum from his day-long workshop on safe digital social networking. He's also published the recorded audio from the workshop on his blog as well as links to movies that he used during his presentation. Here's the intro to his workshop materials:

Generally, adults help young people learn to drive safely before giving them car keys and turning them loose on the streets of the world. Young people also need guidance and adult assistance to learn how to safely navigate the virtual environments of the 21st Century. Schools must be proactive, rather than merely defensive, in helping students acquire the skills of digital citizenship needed today and in the future. Simply banning read/write web tools on school networks is an inadequate response: Educators must strive to learn alongside students and parents how these technologies can be safely and powerfully used to communicate and collaborate.

Another take on Ruby Payne and the so-called "culture of poverty"

The PEN Weekly Newsletter summarized an article in Teaching Tolerance magazine. It's an important topic for educators, so we're reprinting it here. We encourage educators to read the entire article.

For too long, educators' approach to understanding the relationships between poverty, class and education has been framed by studying the behaviors and cultures of poor students and their families. So says Paul Gorski in "The Question of Class," a provocative article published in Teaching Tolerance magazine.

If only we -- in the middle and upper-middle classes -- can understand their culture, why those people don't value education, why those parents don't attend our functions and meetings, why those kids are so unmotivated, perhaps we can "save" some of our economically disadvantaged students from bleak futures. And so we set about studying what Ruby Payne and others describe as the "culture of poverty," how poor people see and experience the world, how they relate to food, money, relationships, education and other aspects of life. This, despite the fact that research has shown again and again that no such culture of poverty exists. It's all too easy, for even the most well-meaning of us, to help perpetuate classism by buying into that mindset, implementing activities and strategies for "working with parents in poverty" or "teaching students in poverty" that, however subtly, suggest we must fix poor people instead of eliminating the inequities that oppress poor people.

The question, of course, for any educator of privilege committed to educational equity is this: Do we choose to study supposed cultures or mindsets of poverty because doing so doesn't require an examination of our own class-based prejudices? By avoiding that question, we also avoid the messy, painful work of analyzing how classism pervades our classrooms and schools, never moving forward toward an authentic understanding of poverty, class and education.

We should never, under any circumstance, make an assumption about a student or parent -- about their values or culture or mindset -- based on a single dimension of their identity. There is no more a single culture of poverty than there is a single culture of woman-ness or of African American-ness.

Service Learning Alternatives

From IALA:

Numerous studies testify to the power of service learning. Community service brings students into contact with adult activity and all of its complexities--excellent fodder for the brain's development. Everyone understands that much learning occurs outside the classroom in the crucible of life. The National Youth Leadership Council offers a wide variety of excellent materials including examples, reports, conferences, free newsletters, training and links to other organizations to increase knowledge and skills for using community service for learning. Service learning can be incorporated into courses or offered as an alternative learning experience for part or all of the school day or for part or all of the year. Other good sources on info include Learn and Serve America and Campus Compact.

We should not forget that service learning can also occur within the school's walls. One 500 student elementary school gives every student a job in school through an application process. For example, each three-foot section of the library shelves is labeled for a student who keeps it in good order. One student who was habitually tardy now comes early because his job is to raise the flag in front of the school. The school principal said the service program contributes greatly to the school's smooth functioning and to students' sense of well-being and school affiliation. Service powers learning!

MySpace: Good for Your Students!

We are strong advocates of using the real world to enhance classroom learning, so we've been dismayed by schools' blocking access to social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc. (The web IS the real world now.) Education Week's online edition (requires free registration) reports on a study by the National School Boards Association that shows....well, we'll let you read it for yourself. The first few paragraphs are below; click the title to read the entire article. I've put a few things in boldface type, 'cuz I didn't want y'all to miss 'em!

At least half the adolescents who exchange messages for hours with their friends online or by cellphone spend part of the time discussing their schoolwork, a new study shows.

An online survey of 1,277 9- to 17-year-olds found that 50 percent said they talk specifically about their schoolwork when they text-message by cellphone, or use their computers to instant-message, blog, or visit social-connection sites such as Facebook. Nearly six in 10 said they discuss education-related topics, including college or college planning, careers, and jobs.

The survey, commissioned by the Alexandria, Va.-based National School Boards Association and released today, showed that 96 percent of adolescents with access to cellphones and Internet-capable computers use them to build and maintain social networks.

NSBA leaders believe those numbers must point the way for educators. Social-networking technologies are so popular and offer such promise for education that district and school officials would be remiss not to adapt them for the classroom, they said.

“When it’s another generation’s technology, it’s easy to be uncomfortable with it and say we don’t need it,” said Ann Flynn, the NSBA’s director of educational technology. “We want to say to people, explore these things. Figure out what kinds of tools they are. By no means are we saying people shouldn’t be safe. But we also don’t want to see policies that are so restrictive that the unintended consequence is to keep the technology out of the hands of educators.”

The NSBA’s report urges school board members to “find ways to harness the educational value” of social networking, such as setting up chat rooms or online journals that allow students to talk about and collaborate on their classwork. Boards should also do everything possible to ensure that all students have access to the Internet, the group says.

The report also tells school boards to re-evaluate policies that ban or tightly restrict the use of the Internet or social-networking sites. Findings from the survey, NSBA officials said, suggest that parents’ and educators’ perceptions of the dangers of online stalking and bullying—fears that fuel such restrictions—could be overblown.

Seven percent of adolescents responding to the survey said they had been bullied on social-networking sites, and fewer than 3 percent said unwelcome strangers had tried repeatedly to connect with them online. Two percent said that someone they met online had tried to meet them in person, and only .08 percent said they had gotten together with someone they met online without their parents’ permission. An online parent survey on those issues, part of the same study, backs up the adolescents’ accounts.

“The vast majority of students, then, seem to be living by the online-safety behaviors they learn at home and at school,” the report says. “School district leaders seem to believe that negative experiences with social networking are more common than students and parents report.”

Status of Education in Rural America

The National Center for Education Statistics has released a new report on the Status of Education in Rural America. This report uses the new Census Bureau classifications for communities. The full report is available online. Here is the summary of the section on educational outcomes:

• A larger percentage of rural public school students in the 4th-
  and 8th-grades in 2005 scored at or above the Proficient level on the
  National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading,
  mathematics, and science assessments than did public school students in
  cities at these grade levels. However, smaller percentages of rural
  public school students than suburban public school students scored at
  or above the Proficient level in reading and mathematics.
• In 2004, the high school status dropout rate among 16- to 24-year-olds in
  rural areas (11 percent) was higher than in suburban areas (9 percent),
  but lower than in cities (13 percent).
• The averaged freshman graduation rate for public high school students was
  higher during the 2002–03 school year in rural areas (75 percent) than
  in cities (65 percent), but lower than in towns and suburban areas (76
  and 79 percent, respectively).
• A larger percentage of teenagers in rural areas than in suburban areas
  were neither enrolled in school nor employed in 2004 (6 vs. 4 percent).
• College enrollment rates for both 18- to 24-year olds and 25- to 29-year olds
  were generally lower in rural areas than in all other locales in 2004.
• A smaller percentage of rural adults than suburban adults in 2005 took
  work-related courses (24 vs. 30 percent) or courses for personal
  interest (18 vs. 23 percent), and a smaller percentage of rural adults
  than adults in cities and suburban areas participated in part-time
  college or university credential programs (3 vs. 6 percent each).
• The percentage of adults with a bachelor's degree as their highest level of
  educational attainment in 2004 was lower in rural areas (13 percent)
  than the national percentage (17 percent).
• Regardless of educational attainment, persons in rural areas generally had higher
  median earnings in 2004 than those in cities and towns (when adjusted
  to reflect regional cost differences), but lower median earnings than
  those in suburban areas.
• The unemployment rate for adults ages 25 to 34 was lower in rural areas
  (6.7 percent) than in cities (8.0 percent) and towns (8.3 percent), and
  the unemployment rate for adults ages 35 to 64 was lower in rural areas
  (4.5 percent) than in all other locales (4.8–6.4 percent).

EdWeek: NCLB Seen as Curbing Low, High Achievers’ Gains

From today's Education Week online -- a story that should be disturbing to policymakers, administrators, teachers, and parents. I wish we could say that it wasn't true....but we've seen these "bubble kid" strategies being recommended to teachers by consultants and administrators. Here are the opening paragraphs; click the link above to read the whole story.

A new study of Chicago students suggests that the federal No Child Left Behind Act may indeed be leaving behind students at the far ends of the academic ability spectrum—the least able students and those who are gifted.

The study by University of Chicago economists Derek A. Neal and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach lends some empirical support to the common perception that schools are focusing on students in the middle—the so-called “bubble kids”—in order to boost scores on the state exams used to determine whether schools are meeting their proficiency targets.