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.
Equity
Blog Entries
Tomorrow is the inaugural Digital Learning Day, a nationwide celebration of innovative teaching and learning through digital media and technology. New technologies are the future of learning, and it is inspiring to see how some teachers and schools are transforming the educational experience.
While celebrating these accomplishments, we must not forget that there are still a number of children who lack access to the promise that digital learning offers. Often, these children are also disadvantaged by virtue of their socioeconomic status.
Nick Pandolfo’s recent piece for The Hechinger Report really drives this point home. He highlights Bronzeville Scholastic Institute, a school that (according to the article) shares a homework lab with two others at Chicago’s DuSable High School campus – 24 computers for nearly a thousand students. Many of the school’s students (93% of whom receive free or reduced price lunch) cannot afford computers at home, and they do not have much access to them at school. Pandolfo writes that “Bronzeville Scholastic students born into a digital era struggle with basic skills, such as saving work to a flash drive and ...
On January 14 and 15, "CNN Presents" aired coverage of Dr. Sanjay Gupta's visit to Southern Middle School in Reading, Pennsylvania. The episode looked at districts in several states, but Reading stood out as a district in dire straits. The video footage from Reading showed mold and mildew, leaking buildings, and rain pouring into a classroom.
The poor indoor environmental quality of this school and many more around the country has a devastating impact on the health and performance of the student and staff who study and work in these buildings every day. Poor indoor environmental quality is linked to asthma, respiratory illness, headaches, and other short and long term health problems. Asthma alone is one of the leading causes of absenteeism in the United States, causing many children to miss school or be tardy each day.
While schools in all communities are in need of some repair, as with many concerns in public education, it is students who live in low-income and minority communities who often suffer the most from ...
Earlier today a press release for a study in the January 2012 issue of Sociology of Education caught my eye: Study Suggests Junk Food in Schools Doesn’t Cause Weight Gain Among Children.
According to the press release (I’m not a subscriber of the journal, so I didn’t have access to the full text of the study), “While the percentage of obese children in the United States tripled between the early 1970s and the late 2000s, a new study suggests that—at least for middle school students—weight gain has nothing to do with the candy, soda, chips, and other junk food they can purchase at school.”
To me, this makes a lot of sense. As one of the study’s authors, Pennsylvania State University Professor Jennifer Van Hook, points out, “Schools only represent a small portion of children’s food environment.”
But something in the release disturbed me: Van Hook’s comments that, in light of the focus in the media on the money that ...
1/19/12 Update: NEA Today has the latest on the situation in Chester Upland.
Educators in Pennsylvania’s Chester Upland School District were forced to make that very difficult decision recently, when the district announced that without an infusion of new cash from the state, it would not be able to make payroll starting January 18.
But members of the Chester Upland Education Association and the Chester Upland Education Support Personnel Association are doing all they can to keep schools running as long as possible. These educators and education support personnel have passed a resolution vowing to stay on the job for as long as they are individually able, even if the district fails to pay them in the near future.
Why? Commitment to students. As elementary school teacher Sara Feguson said in The Philadelphia Inquirer, ...
Making international comparisons about education systems was all the rage in 2011. Rhetoric suggested that America’s education system is performing so poorly that we as a nation have lost our competitive edge, and that the world’s emerging economies are out-educating us, which will result in the further decline of our nation.
I’m not sure if that rhetoric will stop in 2012, but it is time we move beyond it. How can we do that?
First off, in talking about our education system, we need to acknowledge that, as Dan Domenech (executive director of the American Association of School Administrators and chair of the Learning First Alliance Board of Directors) points out, it is actually the best that it has ever been. Graduation rates, college attendance rates and performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are at their highest levels ever. Domenech also points out that when educators and education leaders travel internationally, they find that “overseas colleagues refer to our school system as the gold standard” and “parents in every corner of the world want to send their children to American schools.” ...
Have you checked out our collection of public school success stories lately?
Since December 2007, we at the Learning First Alliance have posted more than 150 stories about what is working in our public schools. Some come from our member and partner organizations. Others have been submitted by educators, parents and other community members proud of what is going on in their local public school.
Criteria for inclusion are relatively simple: A story must show that a public school or district (or even state) recognized a challenge, addressed it, and had some results. Often those results come in the form of standardized test scores, reduced dropout rates or increased graduation rates. Other times they recognize positive changes to student behavior, classroom grades, student health, or parental engagement.
In the spirit of the “best of” lists that tend to circulate this time of year, here are the top five of these stories from 2011*, as determined by you, our audience (as indicated by our trusty Google Analytics tracking system). Enjoy!
5. Cleveland Program to Close Achievement Gap Shows Proof of Success
A Cleveland Metropolitan School District program provides personal attention and assistance to low-achieving black eighth grade males who are deemed most likely to drop out of school.
4. Alabama’s Graduation Coaches
Thanks in part to an initiative showing the success of school-level “graduation coaches," Alabama is ...
Yesterday I wrote about Mark Schneider’s belief that to significantly raise student achievement in this nation, we need to “shock” the system. Today, I learned about a partnership aiming to do just that in a rural West Virginia district.
West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin, State Board of Education Vice President Gayle Manchin and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have announced Reconnecting McDowell, a public-private partnership with more than 40 partners aimed at enhancing educational opportunity for children in McDowell County, a district that has ranked lowest in the state in academic performance for most of the past decade.
As a community, McDowell County faces a number of challenges in addition to a low-performing educational system. According to the Washington Post, while historically the area has produced the most coal in the state, with the collapse of the coal and steel industries in the 1960s, the unemployment rate has risen dramatically. Nearly 80% of children in the school district live in poverty; 72% live in a household without gainful employment. The area has a high incarceration rate. It also has a large number of residents struggling with addition, and it leads the nation in ...
Brookings Institution recently unveiled the Education Choice and Competition Index (ECCI). Its goal is to provide an “informative and consumer-relevant measure of the degree of choice and competition within the geographical boundaries of large school districts.”
This index considers this choice and competition a positive – the nation’s 25 largest school districts are given a letter grade, with an “A” representing the highest “quality” of choice, as determined by the developers’ framework of 13 categories, including the proportion of students enrolled in nontraditional public schools, the mechanism used to assign students to schools, and information available on-line regarding school performance and how to use the choice process.
As far as I can tell, only one of these 13 categories is a measure of quality – and it’s a reflection of the average public (traditional/charter/magnet) school within a district, weighted by the number of students enrolled at the school. While the developers do express concern over the quality of options available to parents, this measure did not appear to greatly impact rankings. For example, Chicago ranked second in the choice index. Yet it was tied for 23 out of 25 when it came to school quality.
It’s a common frustration I have in arguments over school choice policy. Often, it seems the ultimate goal is ensuring choice, with quality concerns to be resolved by market forces. My view: If the options parents have aren’t high quality, how much does choice really matter?
Take New York City, which was the highest-ranked district in this index, in part because of its mechanism for assigning students to ...
Hong Kong has one of the world’s richest economies. It also has a high level of income disparity between the rich and the poor – according to the Gini coefficient, higher than that of the United States [and we have been hearing a lot about the disparity of wealth in our country lately]. As a result, it faces one of the same challenges we do in educating students – a gap between the haves and the have-nots.
This week I had the opportunity to attend the Microsoft Partners in Learning Global Forum, which celebrates teachers and schools that effectively use technology. There I met Andy Li, a teacher at Hong Kong’s Salesian School, which is a Catholic school run with government funding.*
The school's goal is to give young, lower-class students an equal chance to learn. And according to Li, one big aspect of that is technology. While rich children in Hong Kong have iPads, Androids and any other technology that they may want, many of his school’s students (age six to twelve) do not have personal computers at home. And in ...
In the Metro DC area, the Higher Achievement Program works to increase the educational opportunities for low-income middle school students who are eager for more rigor and support in their academic programming. And it cannot keep up with demand, which says two things to me. First, the program is making a difference. And second, some children and parents in low-income areas are eager to engage with this type of learning opportunity. In an era of budget cuts, public schools are being undermined in their mission to provide this opportunity to all children. This reality paints a troubling picture: a lack of resources holding back ambitious and dedicated young students who crave such support is quite simply, undermining our nation’s future one budget slash at a time. ...
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A VISION FOR GREAT SCHOOLS
On this website, educators, parents and policymakers from coast to coast are sharing what's already working in public schools--and sparking a national conversation about how to make it work for children in every school. Join the conversation!
