My housekeeper’s daughter, now working as a nanny and closing in on her BA in art, plans to become an art teacher. Her bilingual skills should give her an edge in finding a job. She also knows computer graphics. But I wonder if this is a viable plan. Educated, English-speaking nannies make very good money around here. Art teachers are the first to go when school budgets get tight. Teachers, what would you advise?
BASIS Charter School in Arizona is The 21st Century Solution, the title of Bob Compton’s new movie, because it offers a world-class curriculum and it’s affordable, writes the Two Million Minute man.
Our economy simply cannot support massive increases in education spending –we must get creative, entrepreneurial and frugal. BASIS, more than High Tech High, New Tech High or KIPP, meets the test of business scalability and sustainability.
A BASIS school can be started for ~ $150,000, he writes. The school year is a standard 180 days. That keeps the annual cost to $6,500 a student in 5th through 12th grade, well below the national average. Yet the schools offer a strong curriculum taught by “passionate, expert, inspiring teachers” teachers with advanced degrees but typically without certification. All students go on to “top colleges.”
No new curriculum needs to be developed; no major foundation grants are needed to fund start-up; no corporate contributions are required to sustain the school. This model can be scaled quickly across the country and is affordable to any community.
BASIS runs very challenging, very high-scoring schools in Tucson and Scottsdale. Most students are white or Asian and come from educated, middle-class families.
Nine in 10 Hispanic students say college is “necessary” to get ahead, but most don’t plan to go, reports the Pew Hispanic Center. Students cite many reasons for giving up on higher education.
. . . 74% of Hispanic students who drop out of high school or don’t finish college cite the need to support their family. Only 39% say they “don’t need more education.”
And for many Hispanic students, families are both inspirational and problematic: More than three-fourths say their parents believe going to college is “the most important thing for you to do right after high school,” but among Hispanics of all ages, 57% say a “major reason” that Hispanic students aren’t doing better is because parents don’t play an active role in their children’s education.
A third of Americans 18 to 24 years old are enrolled in college compared to one quarter of young Hispanics.
Miriam Kurtzig Freedman of School Law Pro has come out with a new book, Fixing Special Education: 12 Steps to Transform a Broken System.
Ten percent of young male high school dropouts are in prison compared to three percent of high school graduates, estimates a Northeastern University study. reported in the New York Times.
The picture is even bleaker for African-Americans, with nearly one in four young black male dropouts incarcerated or otherwise institutionalized on an average day, the study said. That compares with about one in 14 young, male, white, Asian or Hispanic dropouts.
Each high school dropout costs about $292,000, the report estimated, including “lost tax revenues, since dropouts earn less and therefore pay less in taxes than high school graduates. It also includes the costs of providing food stamps and other aid to dropouts and of incarcerating those who turn to crime.”
Supporters want more money for dropout recovery programs offering GED and job training.
Here’s the problem: Dropping out by itself doesn’t trigger unemployment or criminal behavior. It’s the result of years of failure. Most dropouts haven’t developed the work habits and behaviors required by the working world; they’ve also failed to acquire minimal reading, writing and math skills. Some grow up and wise up when they see they’re unprepared for adult life, but most need a lot more than GED and job classes.
U.S. high school students are taking more advanced math classes and earning higher grades, but math achievement hasn’t improved, writes Mark Schneider, a visiting scholar at AEI and a vice president at American Institutes for Research.
More of our high school students are getting through Algebra II and calculus, while fewer and fewer of them are stopping at general math and Algebra I. And transcript data show that even as they take more difficult courses, they are earning higher grades.
. . . while the math skills of elementary and middle school students entering high schools have improved, what American high school students know and what they can do in math have barely changed over the course of thirty years and not at all over the last fifteen. And when we step outside the United States to compare our high school students to students in other advanced industrial countries that are our peers and our competitors, the picture is also grim.
The new NAEP scores for math achievement will be out next week.
In the second year of the American Diploma Project’s multi-state end-of-course exams for Algebra II, 80 percent of students were judged not prepared for entry-level college math.
In annual report cards, Philadelphia principals will be graded on attendance, math and reading scores — and how many students eat breakfast at school, reports the Inquirer.
Philadelphia’s public schools have made all 165,00 students eligible for a free (tax-funded) breakfast, but only about a third show up to eat it.
Many studies have shown that breakfast boosts student performance and health.
District officials say principals will be held to different breakfast participation rates depending on estimates of how many children in their area eat at home.
In theory, school breakfasts are nutritionally balanced. The Inquirer’s commenters complain the breakfasts are high in fat and sugar. They also don’t want to pay to feed other people’s children or see their own kids pushed into eating a second breakfast at school.
Studies show “more children eat when breakfast is served in the first class of the day,” reports the Inquirer. Most schools serve breakfast in the cafeteria before school to avoid wasting instructional time. But the Pennsylvania Department of Education has opened the door to counting in-class breakfast as instructional time. That means Philadelphia principals will be pressured to order teachers to devote part of the first class period to serving, eating and clearing breakfast.
This will be done in the name of improving student performance.
Update: In other news, cost-cutting Harvard no longer serves hot breakfasts in most dorms.
The Common Core State Standards Initiative gets a grade of B for its proposed English Language Arts and math standards in a new Fordham report, Stars By Which to Navigate? Scanning National and International Education Standards in 2009.
Four expert analysts concluded:
• PISA strikes out. Neither in reading (literacy) nor in math does its content deserve better than a grade of “D.” This is no promising benchmark for American K-12 education.
• NAEP fares better, with a “C” for its math framework and “B” grades in reading and writing. But it ought to be better than it is.
• TIMSS does really well in math, earning an “A.” (Math and science are all that TIMSS touches.)
Common Core drafters “state clearly that these standards need to be accompanied by a rich, content-based curriculum,” but don’t try to specify what that content should be, write Checker Finn and Amber Winkler on Education Gadfly. That avoids bitter fights over reading lists, but makes it essential that states develop content guidelines.
Finn and Winkler warn that the validation panel is not staffed by experts and that it relies on “an unwarranted conceit” that the common-core standards must be “evidence based.”
Most of them are not and cannot be, at least not today, given the state of research into what skills and knowledge are truly necessary to succeed in college and the workplace.
Despite limitations, the draft standards “are pretty good, better in fact than many of us expected,” write Finn and Winkler.
. . . there’s tons of work ahead, including “backward-mapping” them from the end of high school through grades K-8; building aligned assessments that will give them traction; and developing the curricular materials (especially in reading/writing etc.) that will bring them to life in the classroom.
So far, Common Core has avoided the controversy that’s plagued previous efforts to develop national standards, writes the Washington Post.
Educarnival v2 is up at Epic Adventures Are Often Uncomfortable.
In Shaking Your “Groove Thang” A Bit Too Much At School, Darren of Right on the Left endorses a high school editorial on overly stimulating pep rallies.
Submit here before Tuesday for next week’s carnival. The form will be good every week.
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