A new report by LFA and Grunwald Associates, with support from AT&T, examines how parents perceive the value of mobile devices, how they see their children using mobiles, and what they think of the possibilities for mobile learning.
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author extraordinaire Larry Ferlazzo recently published a gem of a little article on teacher home visits. He writes about the impact of his own efforts to visit students’ families and calls for much more extensive home visit programs. One story he recounts jumps out at me:
Immigrant parents whom I visited developed the idea of having our school provide computers and home Internet access so that entire families could have more opportunities to study English. I was not only able to learn what these parents thought would help their children and themselves; down the line, I was also able to help other parents who had the same interest connect with each other and help us develop a plan of action.
As a result, the Luther Burbank High School Family Literacy Project has produced dramatic English-assessment gains for students and was the Grand Prize winner of the International Reading Association Presidential Award For Reading and Technology.
I like this story, because it turns a common assumption on its head. Teachers are not coming to parents as missionaries converting the unenlightened. Instead, they are forging strong partnerships with parents, discovering shared aspirations ...
When Daniel P. King came to the Pharr-San Juan-Alamo school district in 2007, the district’s dropout rate was double the Texas state average. Now, it is half the state average.
How did the district do it? Dr. King and his colleagues created a College, Career and Technology Academy to steer dropouts--some as old as 25--back onto a path towards graduation. Not only do those students gain the skills and course credits they need to graduate, they also gain college credit along the way. (See a story about the Academy in our success stories section).
King recently spoke with us about the district’s remarkable success.
Public School Insights: What prompted you to create the College, Career & Technology Academy in the first place?
King: I was entering new into the district. I was moving from a small district to a large district, and I was overwhelmed when I saw that the district had a dropout rate that was twice the state average. The prior year had seen approximately 500 dropouts.
When I asked for an analysis of the 500 dropouts from the previous year I found that not only was there the typical freshman bubble (where students don't make it past the ninth grade, get stuck there and ultimately drop out), but there was [also] a relatively new phenomenon that I call the “twelfth grade bubble, ” [caused by] exit testing and rising standards.
In a small district I had dealt with [the dropout problem] very successfully, simply through ...
A recent piece in The Economist reminds us, yet again, that lay journalists are not necessarily contributing to the national discussion of school reform.
The piece describes “a movement that is improving education across America: the rise of ‘charter’ schools”:
These are paid for by state governments and free for the students, open to anyone and, crucially, independent of often badly-run school boards. [Principals] have wide discretion in the hiring and firing of teachers and are free to pay by results as they think fit. Charter schools are a mixed bag, but the best of them are achieving results most board-run schools can only dream of and are heavily oversubscribed.
Ok, several problems here. First, it’s not clear that the charter movement is “improving education across America”—at least not yet. The recent Stanford review of charter school performance nation-wide certainly disappointed charter supporters. The Economist faintly acknowledges this point by calling charters a “mixed bag” but neglects to note that there are still more bad charters than ...
While the national debate rages over the benefits of early childhood education, an innovative, district-wide early childhood education initiative is bearing fruit in Bremerton, Washington. Since the initiative's founding, the percentage of Bremerton children entering Kindergarten knowing their letters has shot from 4% to over 50%. The percentage of Kindergarteners needing specialized education services has plummeted from 12% to 2%. And the share of first graders reading on grade level has risen from 52% to 73%.
Last week, I spoke with a woman at the center of the program: Linda Sullivan-Dudzic, the district's Director of Special programs. She described some keys to the program's success. The district:
- Aligns existing school and community resources
- Raises the quality of existing preschools rather than creating new ones
- Focuses on literacy and numeracy
- Heeds the research, and
- Holds all providers to high standards of quality
Read extensive highlights from our interview with Sullivan-Dudzic:
PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: What are the major goals of Early Childhood Care and Education Group, and what do you believe you've accomplished in striving towards those goals?
SULLIVAN-DUDZIC: We have two goals. [The first is] to increase the number of children entering kindergarten with early literacy skills--and now we've added early math foundation skills. And the second goal is to decrease the number of children, students, with learning disabilities or learning differences associated with reading.
PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: And do you feel like you've made headway in reaching your goals?
SULLIVAN-DUDZIC: Yes. In literacy definitely. We're just starting in math. We have decreasing numbers of kids qualifying as learning disabled, and we have increasing numbers of kids entering kindergarten with early reading foundation skills.
PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: So you have all kinds of community partners?
SULLIVAN-DUDZIC: Sure. I started 29 years ago with Head Start, as a ...
Eli Broad is counting his chickens before they're hatched. In a Detroit Free Press op-ed, he counts Washington, DC among urban school districts that "have successfully turned around after producing abysmal student outcomes."
Seems a bit premature to declare victory in DC schools, doesn't it? Apparently, Broad is confusing the implementation of his favored reforms with their success:
In every one of these cities, real changes for students happened only after mayors or governors took over and put in place strong leaders who had a serious desire to rebuild.
It's true that DC's test scores rose significantly a scant ten months after Mayor Fenty took over the schools and Michelle Rhee became superintendent. But those gains could just as well have resulted from her predecessor's efforts to upgrade and align standards, curriculum and assessments. Before those gains became news, Rhee herself argued quite reasonably that it would take a few years for her reforms to show results.
Broad's op-ed illustrates a common, though worrying, tendency. We celebrate a short-term improvement as proof positive of our favorite reform's success--And then we campaign to multiply that reform in every city across the land.
The benefits of mayoral control are of course hardly beyond dispute. But to those who believe they have found the magic beans in mayoral ...
Mary Anne Schmitt-Carey believes we can make the college graduation prospects of inner city children every bit as strong as those of their suburban peers. As president of Say Yes to Education, she has the data to back up her claims. Schmitt-Carey recently spoke with us about her model and its astonishing impact in several U.S. cities.
Say Yes topples barriers to college by offering disadvantaged youth comprehensive supports ranging from health care to college scholarships. The results of this work are stunning. In communities where it is active, Say Yes has dramatically narrowed the high school and college graduation gaps between inner-city students and their suburban peers.
Schmitt-Carey emphasizes the need to rally many community partners around common goals. In Syracuse, for example, Say Yes has built a strong a coalition including the school district, mayor, city council, school board, teachers unions, higher education community, business organizations and community-service organizations. Rather than pointing fingers of blame, Schmitt-Carey says, these partners share responsibility for children's long-term success.
Hear highlights from our interview (6 minutes). [A transcript of these highlights appears below]
Or listen to the following excerpts from ...
Fatalist and pseudo-scientist Charles Murray believes that IQ is immutable, that efforts to close achievement gaps are wasted, and that programs to level the social and economic playing fields drain life of meaning.
He would do well to examine the achievements of Say Yes to Education, a remarkable program that has dramatically changed the odds for disadvantaged urban students in several U.S. cities:
The Say Yes promise and supports begin when a child enters kindergarten and continue through high school and beyond. The range of services Say Yes offers across its Chapters include everything from after-school and summer programming, mentoring, tutoring, and school-day academic support to family outreach, scholarships, and social work/ psychological services. Additionally, Say Yes partners provide high-quality health care and legal assistance.
Students in Say Yes communities have high school graduation, college-going and college completion rates similar to those of suburban students.
Not that any of this would change Charles Murray's mind. He's a slow learner. ...
Just in time to help education leaders who must decide how to spend the stimulus money, the Century Foundation is publishing a book on the impact of extra funding on student achievement in poor school districts. The book focuses on New Jersey's Abbott School Districts, which benefited from court-mandated efforts to close funding gaps between poor and wealthy communities.
The book's findings are, by the author's own admission, unsurprising. Citing "fairly dramatic" improvements in New Jersey test scores, the book concludes: ...
A sobering article in Saturday's Wall Street Journal details the Harlem Children's Zone's financial worries as foundations and and private investors cut back or bail out altogether. The deepening recession and Madoff mess have apparently taken a toll on Geoffrey Canada's groundbreaking effort to break the cycle of poverty in Harlem.
The WSJ article offers a bracing reminder of what can happen when efforts to serve the public good must rely overwhelmingly on private grants and ...
For the past several weeks, Public School Insights has used the presidential inauguration as an occasion or interviewing leading educators, community members and others about the status and future of civics education in American schools. In our final interview, South Carolina Superintendent Steve Hefner offers his thoughts on U.S. civics education in the wake of an historic presidential election and inauguration.
Hefner, whose Richland 2 school district has won broad acclaim for its civic education focus, is a bit less glum than most about the current state of civics. While he certainly presses for more civics in schools, he also believes that the surge of youth interest in the recent election and inauguration offers schools an extraordinary opportunity to promote greater civic knowledge and engagement.
Listen to about five minutes of highlights from our interview:
Or read the transcript of these highlights below:
PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: Are American students, in your view, getting enough civics education?
HEFNER: I think they're getting more today than maybe at the time that I first began in the profession, about four decades ago. Do I think they're getting enough? I think that there is still a need for a greater emphasis on civics education, but ...
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