Comic Book Science in the Classroom

From this morning's Morning Edition. Have a listen...and have a great weekend.

A new experiment in Maryland has students and teachers using comic books as learning tools. The program illustrates an ongoing debate: do teachers give students a challenge, or offer less difficult material that is more likely to spark their interest?

Other NPR stories at the link:

1. Feb. 17, 2005: Geeksta Rap Brings Education to Music
2. Jan. 28, 2005: Mel Levine: Teaching All Kinds of Minds
3. Jan. 4, 2005: 'Far Side' Entomology Class Has Students Abuzz

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Data-Driven School Districts: Four Different Approaches

Take a look at the article and then I urge you to visit SchoolMatters, the tool I mentioned in an earlier post--a public source for information and analysis about our nation's public schools.

“Right or wrong, external accountability is coming to everyone,” says Katherine Gemberling, an educational consultant and former deputy superintendent in Montgomery County, Md. “You can’t simply mandate educational quality and order up tests to make sure it happens. But the fact is, external accountability models exist because educators did not step up themselves and establish definable measurements of quality. … Educators feel compelled—they are compelled—to look at anything that will help them show they’re getting good results.”

In other words, like good businesspeople and well run companies, educators and school districts are being asked, if not expected, to prove their bottom line with hard, solid data. With passage of No Child Left Behind, school districts large and small have taken up the banner of data-driven decision making.

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Carlos Garcia: Challenges of a Superintendent

I thought this might be particularly relevant as we've just entered into contract negotiations with our choice for superintendent, James A. Williams.

Carlos Garcia is the superintendent of the Clark County School District, the nation's fastest growing school district. Here, he talks about the challenges of building 12 schools, hiring 2,000 teachers, and accommodating 12,000 new students a year.

A great interview. Listen to it at your computer or on your iPod. It comes from the Edutopia Radio Show Archive. Edutopia is a weekly Internet radio talk show from The George Lucas Educational Foundation. The one-hour talk show features key educators and students, as well as business, government, and community leaders, discussing educational innovation.

Check it out.
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Pupils Make More Progress in 3Rs 'Without Aid of Computers'

Clearly, I'm a big fan of technology and think it should serve a role in the education of our children. However, the study this article references makes one step back and think about how to best deploy technology in the educational theater.

Mr Brown said: "The teaching and educational revolution is no longer blackboards and chalk, it is computers and electronic whiteboards."

However, the study, published by the Royal Economic Society, said: "Despite numerous claims by politicians and software vendors to the contrary, the evidence so far suggests that computer use in schools does not seem to contribute substantially to students' learning of basic skills such as maths or reading."

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Reporters need to look inside the classroom

"Forget the ‘reformers’ and statistics that clutter today’s education beat. Reporters need to look inside the classroom."

That's the call from LynNell Hancock in the latest issue of The Columbia Journalism Review. She begins with the story of the scam behind the "Texas Miracle" and holds The Houston Chronicle's toes to the fire for missing it. More importantly, she writes in depth about why they missed the story--what's wrong with how reporters cover the education beat.

The tricks and truths were buried by the numbers, and all but ignored for years by The Houston Chronicle. The city’s only remaining daily paper should have owned the story, and years earlier, but its coverage habits were cemented in a model that kept reporters out of classrooms. Education reporters were conditioned to cover “schools” instead of “education,” to come at the beat from the top down by reporting on district policies without comparing them to real-life results or assessing their classroom relevance. So the Chronicle’s initial dropout stories simply repeated the district’s 1.5 percent rate, and gave critics the token, brush-off-for-balance treatment at a story’s end.

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Why Are Textbooks So Bad?

Confessions of a textbook editor. Great, great article.

Every time a friend with kids in school tells me textbooks are too generic, I think back to that moment. "Who writes these things?" people ask me. I have to tell them, without a hint of irony, "No one." It's symptomatic of the whole muddled mess that is the $4.3 billion textbook business.

Textbooks are a core part of the curriculum, as crucial to the teacher as a blueprint is to a carpenter, so one might assume they are conceived, researched, written, and published as unique contributions to advancing knowledge. In fact, most of these books fall far short of their important role in the educational scheme of things. They are processed into existence using the pulp of what already exists, rising like swamp things from the compost of the past. The mulch is turned and tended by many layers of editors who scrub it of anything possibly objectionable before it is fed into a government-run "adoption" system that provides mediocre material to students of all ages.

Welcome to the Machine

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Names, Expectations and the Black-White Test Score Gap

From The National Bureau of Economic Research: This is the most facinating study I've read in a while. It's findings are shocking and their implications are broad.

---- Abstract -----

This paper investigates the question of whether teachers treat children differentially on the basis of factors other than observed ability, and whether this differential treatment in turn translates into differences in student outcomes. I suggest that teachers may use a child's name as a signal of unobserved parental contributions to that child's education, and expect less from children with names that "sound" like they were given by uneducated parents...

These names, empirically, are given most frequently by Blacks, but they are also given by White and Hispanic parents as well. I utilize a detailed dataset from a large Florida school district to directly test the hypothesis that teachers and school administrators expect less on average of children with names associated with low socio-economic status, and these diminished expectations in turn lead to reduced student cognitive performance. Comparing pairs of siblings, I find that teachers tend to treat children differently depending on their names, and that these same patterns apparently translate into large differences in test scores.

I haven't had a chance to read the design and methadology of the study. Once I do, I'll post my findings here in an update.
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GREATEST ONLINE RESOURCE EVER: SchoolMatters

SchoolMatters is an online tool that provides rich information and powerful search and comparison tools to help uncover the stories behind the numbers, and further the discussion about how to improve student performance.

As is not always the case with press releases, do believe the hype:

SchoolMatters.com is a revolutionary service that elevates the way student achievement and financial data can be used in guiding education policy work at the state and local levels, through providing a framework of sophisticated analysis and multiple indicators. Perhaps even more significantly, this project provides easy access to data and analyses to help guide informed decisions on behalf of our school systems and children.

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PS 105: A Study in Dilligence, Commitment and Steady Improvement

Situated among tenements and vacant lots in a neighborhood that parents and faculty describe as dangerous after dark, PS 105 has worked hard to become an orderly oasis where kids can learn.

Principal Laurie Shapiro has been at the helm of the school since 1997, when 90 percent of its students were unable to perform at grade-level in English and math. By spring, 2004, however, more than 60 percent of the school's 4th graders were meeting standards on math tests. PS 105 still has much ground to gain in reading and writing -- only 30 percent of the children meet literacy standards on state exams -- but is striving to do just that.

"Parents thought I wouldn't last," said Shapiro, who says she has missed five days of work -- three at the insistence of her doctor -- since she became principal. In her first year, Shapiro re-interviewed the faculty and replaced several teachers. She also set out to establish order and a new "tone and climate" in the school. Today, children walk quietly and calmly through hallways and raise hands before speaking in class.

PS 105's steady progress has come largely from a uniformity of teaching styles in all grades. All blackboards display current lessons and objectives. All walls burst with student art and creative writing. The push towards literacy is apparent even in the gym, where a "word wall" lists vocabulary like "catch," "leap," and "kick."

Read the story in NYT.

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A Reminder of the Severity of the Crisis

1. The United States is 49th in the world in literacy (The New York Times, Dec. 12, 2004).


2. The United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in mathematical literacy (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).


3. One-third of our science teachers and one-half of our math teachers did not major in those subjects (Frederick Hess, Common Sense School Reform).


4. Twenty percent of Americans think the sun orbits the Earth. Seventeen percent believe the Earth revolves around the sun once a day (The Week, Jan. 7, 2005).


5. "The International Adult Literacy Survey ... found that Americans with less than nine years of education 'score worse than virtually all of the other countries'" (Jeremy Rifkin's The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, p.78).


6. Our workers lack so many basic skills, that American businesses spend $30 billion a year on remedial training (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).


7. "The European Union leads the U.S. in ... the number of science and engineering graduates; public research and development (R&D) expenditures; and new capital raised" (The European Dream, p.70).


8. "U.S. childhood poverty now ranks 22nd, or second to last, among the developed nations. Only Mexico scores lower" (The European Dream, p.81).


9. One-third of all U.S. children are born out of wedlock. One-half of all U.S. children will live in a one-parent house (CNN, Dec. 10, 2004).


10. The United States has lost 1.3 million jobs to China in the last decade (CNN, Jan. 12, 2005), not just because of price, but because corporations can often get better-skilled and more productive people (Friedman in yesterday's NYT).

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HBO's "The Wire" To Take On Public Education

The most popular hour of tv in my household, and in my opinion one of the best urban drama's ever produced, has been renewed for another season. And the new season's theme is urban public education.

After three months in limbo, HBO's urban drama The Wire was renewed yesterday for a fourth season - one that promises a hard-hitting look inside Baltimore's troubled school system.

"This is basically going to be the beginning of a new arc," executive producer David Simon said yesterday. "The thing that we tried to convince HBO was that there was more to be said about the American city. It's gratifying to have the opportunity to continue to explore this urban universe that we created."

Considering how well Simon dealt previously with the themes the drug war, unionized labor and local politics, I can't wait to see his take on urban public education. The fourth season begins production late this year and is set to air in 2006.

Until then, there are always the first and second seasons on DVD.
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NEW STUDY: Half of High School Dropouts Can Be Identified as Early as Sixth Grade

This Dropout Prevention Study by Philadelphia Education Fund and Johns Hopkins University could hold the key to increasing Graduation Rates.

Conducted by the Philadelphia Education Fund in conjunction with Johns Hopkins University, the research and subsequent recommendations could hold the key to keeping students on track for graduation. The findings show that in the School District of Philadelphia, almost half of the students that will ultimately drop out of high school can be identified as early as the sixth grade.

Four variables predict early on in a child’s academic career whether the student will graduate on-time or at all: low attendance; poor behavior; failing math and failing English grades. Students displaying any one of these risk factors have only a 10% chance of graduating from high school on time.

Here's the Powerpoint presentation of the study's findings.
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